The Foundation of Customer Success is Collaboration

Is there anything more important to achieving customer success than collaboration? Collaboration is the heartbeat of the supplier/customer relationship. In SaaS, alignment of customer requirements to a product solution must occur to ensure a customer achieves their desired business outcomes. The customer needs a clear understanding of how a product solution will help them get from A to B. We support customers in many ways across the functional teams and the complementing product, collateral, best practices and assets, but without collaboration relationships breakdown.

Customer Collaboration

We must find ways to scale, of course, but we cannot forget what it takes to develop a strong customer relationship…the blocking and tackling that is necessary to make a connection with our customers. It is critical that all stakeholders are considered and aligned, communication is consistent across all parties and transparency exists in order to facilitate a strong working dialogue over time. This dialogue, or lack thereof, can be the root cause of success or failure. In a self-service model, a different flavor of collaboration occurs and we must be mindful of how we are guiding customers to achieve their goals…context is everything but collaboration is still required. If we aren’t actively collaborating with all of our customers in some capacity, then churn will happen.

Internal Collaboration

The role of internal collaboration cannot be underestimated either. Working alongside colleagues to devise strategies, implement plans and work through issues is absolutely required to ensure that the entire company is aligned to make customer successful. A key focus for customer success leaders and managers should be to invest the time and energy into developing internal relationships.

A key focus for customer success leaders and managers should be to invest the time and energy into developing internal relationships.

The benefits for doing this will quickly surface and you will not only deploy a better experience to your customers but you will strengthen your role in the organization and personal brand. Go out of your way to develop strong relationships with your peers and colleagues, it will take you far.

We must always be evaluating the ways in which collaboration can impact our customers. The more focus we have on the value and impact of internal and external collaboration the clearer the path we have to creating a foundation for customer success.