Understanding High Touch and White Glove Customer Success Approaches
It's a customer-driven marketplace, and businesses must go beyond delivering great products and/or services —they must ensure that their customers are successful in utilising those products. Customer Success (CS) has become a critical function that enables businesses to proactively manage relationships with customers, drive their success, and ensure long-term loyalty.
Two common approaches to customer success are High Touch and White Glove services.
While both models are centered on providing personalized support, they cater to different levels of customer engagement and value. Understanding the distinctions between these approaches, the skills required to execute them effectively, when to transition between them, and how to fund them is key to building a robust customer success organisation.
High Touch vs. White Glove: What’s the Difference?
Both high touch and white glove customer success models prioritise customer engagement, but they do so at different levels of intensity and customisation.
High Touch Customer Success
High touch customer success focuses on frequent, personalised engagement with customers, typically those with high-value contracts, complex use cases, or unique needs. The aim is to ensure that customers achieve their goals with the product/service and continue to derive ongoing value from it.
Characteristics of High Touch:
Frequent and Proactive Engagement: High touch CSMs (Customer Success Managers) maintain regular contact with customers through scheduled check-ins, quarterly business reviews (QBRs), and proactive outreach based on customer health data and usage patterns.
Tailored but Scalable: High touch services are personalised but designed to scale across a portfolio of clients. The CSM engages deeply with each customer but uses standard processes like onboarding frameworks, training programs, and best practices that can be applied across multiple accounts.
Relationship-Driven: The emphasis is on building strong relationships, understanding the customer's business goals, and ensuring that the product or service aligns with those goals.
Risk Management: CSMs in high touch roles often focus on monitoring customer health, identifying potential risks early, and working to mitigate them before they lead to churn.
White Glove Customer Success
White glove service takes customer success to an entirely different level, offering VIP-like, hyper-personalised service that is highly tailored to the individual needs of a customer. White glove is typically reserved for top-tier accounts with high strategic importance or revenue potential.
Characteristics of White Glove:
Highly Personalised: White glove service is bespoke, often going beyond the standard offering to deliver customised solutions, workflows, or even product modifications specific to the customer’s unique requirements.
Concierge-Level Service: Customers have access to dedicated resources, including senior-level CSMs, technical experts, and support teams. The level of attention is often 24/7, with immediate responses and fast-tracked issue resolution.
Strategic Partnership: The relationship often extends beyond a traditional vendor-customer dynamic into more of a strategic partnership, where the CSM acts as an advisor, guiding the customer’s long-term business decisions and product utilisation.
Executive Engagement: White glove service often involves executive-level relationships and collaboration, with regular communication between the customer’s leadership team and your company’s executives.
Why You Need Both Approaches
Offering both high touch and white glove services allows you to tailor your customer success strategies to meet the diverse needs of your customer base. Different customers will require different levels of attention based on their value, complexity, and strategic importance. By leveraging both models, you can ensure that each customer gets the right amount of support to help them achieve their goals.
Advantages of High Touch:
Scalability: High touch customer success is more scalable than white glove service because it leverages standardised processes that can be adapted to fit multiple customers. It enables you to engage deeply with a larger number of accounts without exhausting resources.
Customer Health Monitoring: With proactive monitoring and frequent touchpoints, high touch CSMs can identify risks and opportunities early, helping to drive renewals, reduce churn, and increase customer satisfaction.
Advantages of White Glove:
Customer Retention and Loyalty: The extra level of attention given in white glove service can lead to increased customer loyalty, particularly for high-value or strategic accounts that require a more hands-on approach.
Revenue Maximisation: White glove service is particularly valuable for driving growth with enterprise-level customers. The personalised attention often leads to expansion opportunities, cross-selling, and upselling.
Strategic Influence: White glove service allows you to establish a strong strategic partnership with your customer’s leadership team, aligning your product’s value with their broader business objectives and solidifying your position as a trusted partner.
Skills and Experiences Needed to Execute High Touch and White Glove Services
While both high touch and white glove models require strong customer success management, the level of skill, expertise, and approach varies between the two.
Here are the key skills needed to succeed in each model:
Core Skills for High Touch Customer Success
Relationship Management: Building strong relationships through regular check-ins, understanding customer goals, and aligning your product with those goals.
Communication: Clear, concise, and tailored communication is key, especially when delivering insights, recommendations, and updates.
Problem-Solving: Proactive problem-solving, risk identification, and troubleshooting are crucial for maintaining customer health.
Product Knowledge: Deep understanding of the product and its features, enabling CSMs to guide customers through optimal usage.
Data Analysis: Ability to track customer health, usage patterns, and engagement metrics to make informed recommendations.
Core Skills for White Glove Customer Success
Executive Presence: Comfort and confidence in interacting with C-level executives and senior leadership, as white glove customers often expect direct engagement with your company’s decision-makers.
Strategic Thinking: Ability to provide strategic guidance that aligns with the customer’s long-term business goals, often requiring deep industry knowledge and an understanding of broader business trends.
Customisation and Creativity: Tailoring solutions to meet unique customer needs, including custom integrations, workflows, and even product modifications.
Crisis Management: White glove CSMs must be skilled in managing high-stakes situations and responding quickly to issues that could impact the customer’s operations.
Concierge-Level Service: Delivering fast, responsive, and meticulous service that goes above and beyond customer expectations.
When to Transition Between High Touch and White Glove (and Vice Versa)
Transitioning customers between high touch and white glove models is a strategic decision that depends on several factors, including the customer’s evolving needs, value to your business, and service expectations.
Transition from High Touch to White Glove
Increased Strategic Importance: If the customer becomes a key account with substantial revenue potential or a strategic partnership opportunity (e.g., co-development or expansion), they may require more dedicated, white glove service.
Higher Complexity or Customisation Needs: When a customer’s needs evolve to require more bespoke solutions, integrations, or intensive technical support, a move to white glove service ensures they get the tailored attention they need.
C-Suite Involvement: As the customer’s executive team gets more involved in the relationship, they may expect more direct and senior-level engagement, necessitating a transition to white glove service.
Transition from White Glove to High Touch
Simplified or Stabilised Needs: If the customer’s usage and processes have become more standardised and their need for customisation diminishes, transitioning them to high touch ensures that they continue to receive support without over-allocating resources.
Changes in Strategic Importance: If the customer’s strategic value decreases or their engagement and expansion potential slows, transitioning them to a high touch model can help maintain the relationship while optimising resource allocation.
Cost Efficiency: White glove service is resource-intensive and costly. If a customer no longer justifies the investment in white glove service due to reduced contract value or complexity, a move to high touch can help reduce costs without sacrificing service quality.
Funding Both Approaches
Funding high touch and white glove customer success programs requires a thoughtful approach to budgeting and resource allocation. Each model involves different levels of investment, and you’ll need to ensure that your funding strategy aligns with the value these programs provide to your business.
Funding High Touch Customer Success
Scalability: High touch customer success is more scalable and less resource-intensive than white glove service. As a result, it can be funded through a combination of operational budgets and customer success tools like CRM systems and customer health monitoring platforms. The goal is to balance the cost of engagement with the value each customer brings in terms of revenue and renewals.
Resource Allocation: High touch teams can typically handle a larger volume of accounts, allowing you to fund the program based on the number of accounts each CSM manages. The cost per customer is lower, and the focus is on leveraging standardized processes to maximize efficiency.
Funding White Glove Customer Success
Premium Pricing: White glove service is resource-intensive, so it’s typically reserved for the highest-value or most strategic accounts. You may fund this program through premium pricing, where customers pay more for the added level of service, or through tiered service models that include white glove service as part of a premium offering.
Dedicated Resources: Funding for white glove programs often requires dedicated resources, including senior CSMs, technical experts, and premium support teams. The cost per customer is higher, so it’s essential to ensure that the revenue and potential growth from these customers justify the investment.
Strategic Partnerships: In some cases, white glove services may be co-funded through strategic partnerships or joint ventures with customers, particularly when there’s mutual benefit in product co-development or innovation.
Both high touch and white glove customer success models are essential components of a comprehensive customer success strategy.
High touch allows for personalised, scalable engagement that helps drive retention and growth across a wide range of customers. White glove service, on the other hand, offers VIP-level attention to your most important and complex customers, ensuring that they receive the customised support and strategic guidance needed for long-term success.
By understanding when to deploy each model, what skills are required to execute them effectively, and how to transition customers between them, you can create a customer success program that not only meets but exceeds the expectations of your customers.
Funding both approaches requires balancing resources with customer value, ensuring that you invest appropriately in the relationships that matter most to your business.
Ultimately, having both high touch and white glove services allows you to offer a tailored approach that ensures every customer achieves success, driving growth and loyalty for your company.