3 questions to ask yourself to see if your company is championing the customer

I talk a lot about championing the customer. After all, it’s the subtitle of my book! However, how do you know who is the customer champion? Why is it important to have someone as the customer champion within your company?

To help answer this question, I wanted to share this excerpt from my book — The Startup’s Guide to Customer Success — from the “When to start customer success” chapter that dives into this more.

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A customer success team is like a conductor making sure the internal teams are in sync and harmonizing with the customers’ needs.

To quote, Sam Brennand, Enterprise Customer Success Manager at InVision,

“Successfully leading a customer success organization requires leaders to recognize that the ultimate success or failure of customers is more than just the responsibility of the customer success team.

It’s the customer success leader’s responsibility to ensure that the marketing team is producing content that drives the right sort of conversations, that the engineering team is building a product or platform that meets every need of your ideal customers, and that the sales team is setting the right expectations with prospects before they ever become customers.”

To understand whether you have a customer champion within the company, break down how your team views the customer:
1. Is your company’s culture truly customer-centric, or will internal teams need regular reminders about the customers’ needs and goals?
2. Which vertical is the customer champion within the company?
3. Most critically, who will fight the tough battles on behalf of the customer within the company when decisions get dicey?

Reflect on your answers to the three questions above to better understand whether your company already has a customer champion. Remember, you don’t need to have the title of customer success to champion the customer!

As the customer base grows and the product and user experience becomes more complex, your company will need someone who works with customers and understands their pain points and what their goals are. Someone must go out and talk with the customers to learn this. In the early days, this may be someone from marketing, a salesperson, or even the CEO.

Remember, determining customer pain points is much more than just saying, “The customer wants x,” but rather “The customer is experiencing x problem which is making them feel y.” These pain points can encompass both those that stem outside the product and those within.

For example, “I am always anxious about whether or not I locked my door” is a customer pain point that stems from external factors; but “I fear that I will lock myself out because I keep forgetting the code to my newly install door lock” is a customer pain point which stems from the product.

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Championing the customer starts by having someone within — a customer champion — to orchestrate it all; reflecting on whether your company already has this or not can help you determine whether you need to create a customer success function at your company.

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The above was an excerpt from my book The Startup’s Guide to Customer Success, available now on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Startups-Guide-Customer-Success-Champion/dp/1641371889

I hope to help push the conversation around what customer centricity means for our businesses. No more talk — we need action!

If you’d like to get in contact with me, feel free to message me on LinkedIn. Always down to nerd out about customer success :)