It’s Monday.
Coffee in hand, you click open your ticket system. Brimming. Email inbox: 54 emails and counting. Something about a bug in the product? Later in the day, the stress forces your consciousness into an out of body experience. You've been ported to the 1950s. You find yourself struggling to wrap an unending line of chocolates hurtling towards you down a conveyor belt at light speed.
Sound familiar? Well, while you’re probably not the victim of a Golden Age sitcom plot, office life can just seem that way when you’re fielding sundry support requests as a Customer Success Manager.
From the early days of Vantive, to the present-day ascendance of Salesforce, the nature of customer oriented marketing strategy has hit a stride in its evolution. There’s a distinct flavor of mental athleticism required to provide the white-glove service and encyclopedic knowledge needed to maintain the quality relationships that today’s customers expect from a CSM.
Naturally, this comes with its own suite of pain points and sore spots, all of which are remediable with the right awareness and some practical tune-ups.
Preparedness = Better Prioritization.
There are only so many people in a team and so many hours in a day. Things happen. Whether it’s a recent product update breaking functionality for end users, or sudden shifts in the financial sector, any number of situations can stress relationships between a company and its customers. Ad hoc solutions and reactive work are inevitable from time to time, but shouldn’t be the norm. Maintaining a save whoever you can approach will only cause further hemorrhages in growth potential in the long run.
What’s the fix? Prep work!
Anticipatory measures are your friend. Lack of preparedness is an exceedingly common point of frustration across customer focused teams, usually swelling up around unexpected or unfamiliar situations, information shortages, and incongruous workflow issues which can occur when a CS team is not a priority, or where CS function is being misapplied within an organization.
While one can’t predict the future, laying down appropriate groundwork and workflow integrations is crucial in fueling a CS team’s groove. Providing holistic and up-to-the-minute updates on shifts in product, first-aid customer support, and improving cross-cultural communication between teams allows each CSM to ensure that the rapport they have with customers leaves the impression of total proficiency and care.
Untapped Potential?
As innovations in data analysis continue to illuminate more and more details of customer behavior and needs, Customer Success has evolved into a job classification with many hats. In its most modern incarnation, it serves prominently throughout modern enterprise as a unifying, cross-departmental force that surfs a constantly morphing customer experience. Yet voices and historical data can come off as muffled, many CS teams are presented with only the post-sale domain as their sole area of influence.
The brunt of a customer’s life cycle is spent with a CSM, who’s uniquely equipped with knowledge and insight from all branches within the company at nearly every touchpoint in a customer relationship. Decked out with the details on everything from installation to product development and imbued with the tact and instinct to reduce churn and increase CSAT scores, the informational expertise retained by a CSM makes them by nature a primary resource for developing a product that puts the customer first.
(Or, so you would think.)
Large scale surveys of tech-industry CS professionals conducted by Deloitte and Feedier demonstrate that in 2019, comprehensive CS integration is on the rise, even in the mainstream. 63% of polled Customer Success professionals assert that this mentality of constant customer focus is woven into the company fabric at all points of contact and value creation, and yet, only 30% of enterprises describe CS as a priority by C-Suite Execs and the boardroom. There seems to be a disconnect here.
Most enterprise-level companies are fully onboard with this trend, over two-thirds of those polled have been operating CS teams for 2 years or more, presumably due to the emphatic improvement CS function has on various forms of revenue and overall customer satisfaction ratings across the globe.
While this is all fine and good, it’s possible that those benefits are simply the low hanging fruit! 35% of CS leaders maintain that reactive short term stratagem focused on decreasing churn and increasing retention are the largest priority, with only 10% prioritizing proactive long-term growth strategies centered around product development and innovation.
Companies which consider CS as a strategic priority see higher improvement in metrics, and double digit improvement in renewal rates. Because product issues and successes, insight into fluctuations in operational workflow and communication, and trends in customer behavior and needs are intuitive to a CS professional, it makes them some of the most capable if not crucial contributors in the evolution of both product and organization alike, and need to be nurtured as such to allow an enterprise to go head to head with competitors.
Do they even know what we Do?
Internal, interdepartmental views on Customer Success can veer towards anachronistic, perceived simply an extension of older iterations of customer support infrastructure. Again, the CS boom is still young, germinating rapidly within the last 5-6 years, and thusly this ideology may be extremely difficult to permeate into the framework and culture of an organization with more hard-set tendencies, even within an integrated team setting.
This is true however of any division in the workplace whether from operations to design however. Every responsibility within the company has its own language and goals and can cause siloing between departments that stifles innovation and understanding, prime enemies of resource efficiency and time management. It’s clear that robust, flexible communication and knowledge transferal are two of the most important concepts to be woven across a through the most base form of a company’s ethos.
From an executive standpoint, the mere thought of this restructuring from head to toe in this manner can approach something of a herculean feat. But it’s impossible to ignore the inspiration, ingenuity, and breakthroughs potentially hiding in the thoughts of an isolated employee, maybe even a CSM who’s waiting for a platform to make a change for the future.
Stay integrated. Stay upFront.