Best Practices for Flows

Flows are designed to categorize team activities and customer interactions into the business workflows they are part of. We highly recommend that you use this article to define the right Flows for your organization and get started with this feature immediately with best practices in mind.

 First, we have laid the groundwork for you by creating five default Flows: Onboarding, Renewal, Escalations, Support and TBD. TBD is the “to be defined” category created as the initial default but we recommend that you define and replace the “TBD” Flow with a new default.

All new tasks, touchpoints, SuccessPlays, and Customer Success Campaigns will be marked as “TBD” until you begin selecting a Flow or create a new default.

Second, there are two 'best practice' approaches to setting up Flows for your customer success organization. We recommend choosing an approach that fits your customer success engagement model.

Option 1 - Categorize activities and interactions by Lifecycle Stage

Categorizing Flows by lifecycle stage is the simplest approach. There are 5 customer lifecycle stages: Onboarding, Nurture, Renewal, Upsell, and Escalations. Below are the categories, suggested icons, and example activities you would mark as these Flow categories.> 

Flow	Icon	Example Activities
Onboarding		Onboarding kick off call, scheduling data review, technical integration, launch, sending onboarding survey
Nurture		Training, business reviews, product release announcements
Renewal		Renewal discussion, pricing and negotiation activities
Upsell		Identifying potential upsell options, pricing discussion, ROI
Escalations		Escalation meeting, creating a get well plan

PLEASE NOTE:

In this approach, there is no “TBD” Flow. We recommend using “Nurture” to be your new default because the majority of customer interactions and activities occur within this lifecycle stage. To get started with this best practice approach, you need to do two things:

1. Edit the “TBD” Flow to be Nurture
2. Create a new Flow called Upsell

Option 2 - Categorize by more detailed Business Processes (Recommended)

Taking a more detailed approach to categorizing Flows is recommended for customers that want to view, track, and filter activities at a more granular level. Going beyond lifecycle stages, the recommended Flows listed below adds key business processes that you and your team care about. We have created the “Support” workflow for you, and we also propose breaking the longer, more general “Nurture” lifecycle stage into multiple Flow categories.

Flow	Icon	Example Activities
Onboarding		Onboarding kick off call, scheduling data review, technical integration, launch, sending onboarding survey
Training		Feature training, methodology training, executive coaching
Business Review		QBRs, executive reviews, OKR reviews
Adoption		New feature Introduction, webinar
Executive Relationship		Executive Discussion summary
Renewal		Renewal discussion, pricing and negotiation activities
Upsell		Identifying potential upsell options, pricing discussion, ROI
Support		High ticket open by customer, Call customer if 10+ open tickets (task)
Escalations		Escalation meeting, creating a get-well plan
Professional Services		PS meeting
Billing		Customer paid, customer late in paying

PLEASE NOTE:

In this approach, there is also no “TBD” Flow. We recommend editing and replacing the “TBD” category with a new Flow listed above. Please also define and select which Flow will be your new default.

Other Recommendations

If your team wants to document internal notes or use tasks to log non-customer activities like emails and calls, we recommend using an additional Flow like “Internal Notes.” This will allow you to view only the meaningful interactions and engagements pertaining to the key Flows categories listed in the table above.  

Flow	Icon	Example Activities
Internal Notes		Schedule a QBR call (task)

For additional information about Flows, here are 2 articles:

• Introduction article
• Advanced article