Practical strategies for tech leaders

Customer Success isn’t a department...

To be successful, it has to be central in your company to everyone and everything that they do

Your customers buy from you because you are helping them address a pain, unlock an opportunity, or just get a job done. You want your customers to be successful using your product and services. Then they stay longer, refer more people to you, and you get the delight of helping people do more.

So you’ve probably got your Customer Success team in place and now everything is going to be great! But it isn’t the job of one department to make those customers successful, it is a company-wide mantra that is central to what every team and every person does.

Helping your customers is fundamental to what you do but whether you make it central to what everyone does will determine whether you are successful or not. You can not leave it to one team to juggle this all on their own!

The Customer Success department is NOT the answer. It is a critical piece. But what if everyone focused on the customers' success?

Let’s look at this by each team…

Product and Development

Determining the roadmap and building the solutions that your company needs, this department is surely focused on customer success… or are they overwhelmed by competing and conflicting requirements, assessing the ROI for every feature, and all too frequently rejecting them because it is too much effort?

The ideas and requests from customers are often looked at in isolation. So the benefit looks small, the number of customers who would probably want it is limited, and the effort looks large. So, of course, they reject it. But this team has to ask themselves…

WHY is this customer asking for this? What larger problem are they trying to solve and how many others would benefit from that? Or, how else can the customer solve that need?

Breaking this down, every time this department rejects a request, they need to answer these questions:

1. What larger need does this request stem from? If solving that is aligned with what you do then assess priority and add to roadmap!
2. How else can the customer address their larger need? Often it can be solved, just in a different way to the way their customer is asking and it may be solved either within or outside your product!

Ensuring the team cares about the success of the client is fundamental to them focusing on the customers’ success.

Sales and Marketing

These teams know your customers. They REALLY know them. They’ve identified them and chased them, then wined and dined them, either online, through extensive calls, or followup emails, and got them to pay you to solve their needs. But the reality is, these teams are motivated solely on new revenue through signing up new customers as fast as possible then moving onto the next prospect.

What if they were responsible for how well the prospect is converted from a non-user into a highly successful customer? What if they were accountable for how long the customer stays with you?

Marketing needs to be responsible for articulating within the company what the desired customer profile is, why they want to make a change and partner with your company, and how you are uniquely positioned to help them. And then iterate and share as everyone in the company can provide feedback based on their experiences to refine the message and understand who really values what you offer.

Marketing needs to create a feedback loop with all teams so they can refine the desired customer profile based on which customers actually benefit the most from what you do

For more thoughts on this Hubspot has a summary of Customer Success and Marketing. While this is focused more on Marketing to customers, creating a feedback loop between teams that work with customers and Marketing is critical.

Sales is in the front line and have the best ability to understand what actually motivates a prospect to part with their money in the belief you will help them the best.

Sales needs to share with the onboarding teams and customer services teams what the customer’s strategic goals are so those teams can ensure they deliver on them

Failure to do so means the other teams are not set up for success and neither is the customer.

Again Hubspot has an article on aligning sales and customer success, but while it does a great job explaining how to sell to customers using marketing tools, it misses the fact that strategic sales people are the most effective, but need to share those customer strategies with all the teams in your company.

Customer Service and Customer Success

Ok, now we are at the teams that are PAID to help your customers… but are they compensated based on the customer’s success, or how quickly they onboard the customer and how quickly they can close their trouble tickets?

All too frequently, a customer service or support team is renamed Customer Success with no change in their mandate or vision of how they will bring success to their customers. Worst yet, there is no idea how to measure Custer Success, so the old cost savings metrics are used and the team is rewarded on them instead of against Custer success ones.

Your customer success team needs to have clear metrics that are based on the customer’s success, not how long they are a customer of yours

I’ll be writing more about this in the coming week so stay tuned…

And finally… your customers

We all know that awesome customer who is strategic and ‘just gets it’. They come up with the best ideas and influence the company heavily. But more often than not, it is simply because they can explain it in a way that makes sense to you. They are explaining the larger problem and often in the same terms that your company uses internally so it is easy for everyone to understand. But all the other customers have something to share but you are not heading them.

But what if you really listened to all customers and helped them communicate their ideas in ways that your teams could understand. I bet more of your customers ideas would make more sense and help you help your customers.

There are many techniques for understanding your customers, but in a conversation with my neighbour, who turns out to be a retired CEO of a highly successful company, asking that one tough question is the best way. More on that, later.

Wrap up

Customer Success is not the sole responsibility of one team. Instead, it needs to be at the centre of every department and the people in these departments need to work together to provide a comprehensive and coordinated Consumer Success approach.

Your turn

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