The Role of Coaching in Customer Management
If I wasn’t working in the software industry odds are pretty good that I would be spending my days in a high school gymnasium coaching basketball in some small Indiana town. I grew up loving the game and my beloved Indiana Hoosiers, and as I have grown older I have come to truly appreciate all that the game has taught me. There are many parallels to sports and customer success and I believe coaching is at the heart of the synergies between the two. It has become one of the main reasons my career path has taken me down the road of customer management and experience.
As you manage customers and the teams that manage customer relationships, you quickly learn that coaching skills are required to ensure customers are set up for success. It starts with the internal teams that own all of the customer engagement touch points. From sales and services to support, customer success, marketing, product and billing, each team has its set of interactions with the customer and is in a position to coach. A manager’s key objective is to build strong teams with the right people in order to be well positioned to deliver maximum value to the market and stakeholders. So what does it mean to coach customers? Let’s dive in…
Coaching in Customer Management
Why call it coaching within customer management? It starts with the responsibility to enable internal teams with the tools and strategies that are necessary to do great work alongside customers, while delivering a great customer experience. Enablement programs are designed to prepare everyone to deliver value and build strong and long-standing relationships with our customers…this is coaching.
The work then transitions out of the office walls as we begin to work with customers. As we work with our customers we are on a quest to do what is necessary to ensure they are getting the most of the relationship. The importance of this is exaggerated in the subscription economy because of the power that has shifted to the customer. Customer success teams are on the clock every day and tasked with building and maintaining strong relationships with the goal of extending and growing the relationship year after year. Coaching customers to success in the customer/supplier relationship has become required to create a healthy customer base and business. If we aren’t constantly making an effort to advise, educate, challenge and support, then the relationship can deteriorate very quickly. It is a never ending game of relationship building and showing value grounded in maneuvering the various levers that will create a bond over time.
Playing The Role Of Psychologist
The role of Customer Success is dynamic. Customer Success Managers (CSMs) are centered in between the other business functions and after the initial sales cycle they become the focal point of the customer relationship. They own the vast majority of the communication, they understand the needs of the customer more than most and they see first-hand how the other functions of the business impact the customer. They have the best view.
They own the vast majority of the communication, they understand the needs of the customer more than most and they see first hand how the other functions of the business impact the customer. They have the best view.
With this view comes a tremendous responsibility to manage the customer. No two customers are the same and no two people within the customer’s organization are the same. Customer Success Managers often play the role of psychologist and this too presents opportunities to coach customers throughout the lifecycle. CSMs are navigating a complex book of business and the personalities of each customer across stakeholders and this presents opportunity to determine the best ways to manage each unique relationship. If a customer is struggling to adopt a solution and/or is not able to align the value to the software to tell the ROI story then the CSM must interject and coach the customer to getting back on track. Customers have good days and they have bad days and regardless of the mood, a CSM has to figure out the best way to manage their contacts. This can be very difficult at times when you layer on the dynamics of a product and the continuous need to defend an investment. The stronger a CSM is at managing the emotions of a customer, the greater the chance that a strong relationship will be built and aide through the tough times. This mirrors the job of a coach while managing a team.
Getting Better Through Recommendations
Customer Success Managers are constantly in a position to make recommendations to customers, it’s the nature of the job. The goal of every CSM is to help a customer maximize their investment and achieve their desired business outcomes. While living in this territory, the CSM must find ways to make their customers think differently about what is possible and then recommend the best ways to implement change. Like a coach in sports, they must be thinking about the best ways to set their customers up for success in the short and long term. The must think about the consequences of their recommendations and work hard to ensure they are sharing accurate and valuable information.
Coaches are in the same boat within the player/coach relationship. The coach is constantly making recommendations and the manner in which they deliver the information can have a profound impact on the player. Miscues can be risky and the consequences of poor recommendations can have wide ranging impact on the entire team. This is the same for the CSM. The most successful CSMs are continuously learning, looking for ways to grow personally and professionally while also looking for ways that their customers can improve. Becoming a trusted advisor can only occur through a CSM making an investment in best interests of the customer.
The Future of Coaching Customers
There is an emerging trend in SaaS centered around coaching with the latest technology affording new opportunities to assist workers with training and real-time situational decision making. You see it in Sales with the advent of apps like Chorus.ai and Costello, in recruiting and HR with a solution like Textio and in marketing with a start-up like Pattern 89. All of these applications are either helping end users make decisions in real time and/or the technology is making the decision for the user based of the intelligence available within the solution. It is making the worker more productive and it is decreasing the amount of time and money being spent on trial and error exercises.
What does this mean for customers? I believe it goes well beyond what we are seeing today with internal search, chat and recommended knowledge base articles. I predict that in the next few years technology will allow us to better help customers navigate the offerings of the SaaS suppliers to more easily achieve their desired business outcomes. Systems will be more tightly integrated and more fully aligned to the specific goals of the customer. There will be a clearer articulation of how a particular set of software features and functionality aligns to a given strategy and the best practices needed to achieve the ultimate desired outcome.
Analytics will give a new view into the progress of the actual work it takes to achieve an outcome and the customer will have better tools to understand the value being extracted from the supplier relationship. On the supplier side, customer success and sales teams will be able to leverage technology to not only better position the outcomes they deliver to the market, but, like the customer, they will have an easier path to showcasing the amount of value that they have delivered to the customer over a period of time.
Technology will also provide new ways for making recommendations to B2B customers like we often see now in B2C. We will be better positioned to understand the people behind the customer logos and through this we will leverage new strategies and tactics for documenting customer goals, activities and interactions. This will present new opportunities to make recommendations based on these data points and these recommendations will be specific to an individual customer. We will use technology to better guide the customer through their journey with the supplier so they have a clear view into what it is going to take to extract full value from the relationship.
As we work to scale our Customer Success organizations we must take all of these dynamics into consideration and work tirelessly to prepare our CSMs to manage customers and all of the internal stakeholders that influence the customer relationship. There is much work to be done to advance the ways in which we coach our customer facing teams and customers so they can be in the best possible position to realize their full potential. The future is bright and technology is going to be the catalyst for the next wave of customer coaching.
