Helping Customers Succeed

Transforming Customer Success into a client engagement power house.

For the better part of a year and a half my team and I have been building the Customer Success function at PeopleMatter. We have iterated over the responsibilities of the Customer Success Manager several times. Through this process we arrived at a simple definition of the role:

CSMs help customers solve their business problems.

It’s about them, not you

We have to come to grips with the fact that the balance of power is tipping toward the buyer and customer in all industries. Prospects and customers can find positive and negative references through social media channels. Buyers want to engage vendors on their own terms and are less open to outbound marketing efforts.

Thought-leading companies share their expertise with the world, free of charge. They become go-to sources of domain knowledge, and reap the benefit of inbound leads and customer loyalty.

Take a look at the blogs of Hubspot, Gainsight, and Zendesk. They are filled with detailed guidance related to day-to-day pain points of their target customers. With these resources one can learn cutting edge marketing, account management and support techniques and find solutions to current problems they face.

This leads to deep engagement with individuals who are not even customers yet! We must use the same techniques to deepen engagement with our customers after they’ve signed up. Higher engagement & product adoption = increased customer retention.

Here are three ways to maximize your customer engagement efforts within Customer Success:

1. Build industry-specific expertise

Develop a deep understanding of the expertise of your customers’ jobs and pain points. Do you have anyone in house with this expertise? If not, maybe it’s time to hire it in. Identify CSM candidates who have done the job your customers do.

You can also build a training program that puts CSMs in the shoes of your customers. In The Sales Acceleration Formula, Mark Roberge outlines Hubspot’s new hire training program. New sales reps learn how to build a website, market it, optimize and test it before they begin selling. They walk a mile in a marketer’s shoes before engaging them in a consultative sales process.

Do your CSMs have enough experience in your customers’ domain? If not it’s time to get creative and find a way to develop it.

2. Communication frequently

We try to reach each customer every week with an informative piece of information. Could be a product tip, a key industry trend, or a relevant usage metric. We target end users, administrators, key stakeholders and executive sponsors with this information.

Surprisingly, we get more frequent feedback from executives than many of the other contacts. They are usually thankful for the brief insights we provide.

Using tools such as Pardot and Outreach.io we track responsiveness and engagement levels. Most marketing automation tools can work for this purposes. We also plan to incorporate engagement data from these communications into our automated health scoring algorithm.

Build an editorial calendar and have experts from your company contribute. Product Managers, executives and especially customers are a great source of expertise to tap for these efforts.

3. Prune other responsibilities

Increasing focus on customer engagement may involve reducing other activities. Here are two suggestions:

CSMs can quickly get pulled into issue resolution, a.k.a. product support. Customers will often reply to a proactive communications with problems or issues that need attention. This is a good thing! Proactive outreach reminds customers to engage on issues they might otherwise let linger. That said it’s critical that these requests are diligently managed by Support once received.

One hack is to ensure replies to customer success emails go to (or get copied to) support@yourcompany.com. Assuming you have a ticketing system all responses will be tracked, cases created and followed up on by Support, and nothing slips through the cracks.

To further address this, clearly define the role of Support and train customers to use it. You may need to reinforce proper behavior over time — including that of your CSMs!

Clearly defining metrics of a CSM (customer sat + engagement) versus Support (ticket close rates, response times, etc.) will ensure your team exhibits proper behaviors.

Note: Some companies serving small or very small businesses have a different philosophies on division of these duties. More on this in a future blog post.

Another responsibility we’ve recently carved off the CSM is renewal transactions. CSMs should be familiar with the commercial aspects of the customer relationship. Yet it is awkward for them to move between contract negotiation and business consultation activities. Furthermore, contract renewal negotiations can be time consuming and unpredictable.

To solve for this, we added a Renewal Manager who proactively handles all renewal and transaction-related items. Upsell opportunities are transitioned to Sales and managed through the sales funnel.

What works for your business may be different from mine. I’d love to hear what you are doing to increase engagement with your customers. Please leave a comment or let’s talk on twitter @jaynathan.