Leveraging the Expertise of CSMs
The role of a customer success manager (CSM) by design implies that most working hours are spent on direct communication with clients. The conversations CSMs are having with customers are not (or at least should not be) focused on features but on the value their organizations are getting from the product. CSMs ask a lot of questions and through them get a great understanding of the common challenges clients struggle with, how the product can help in addressing these challenges, industry-based best practices, and more. The expertise CSMs get is unique and many findings that are discovered during these calls and email conversations can be very valuable to other teams and departments. Today, we’ll discuss several examples of how other teams in SaaS-(subscription as a service)based companies could benefit from leveraging the expertise of CSMs.
Sales
Let’s start with the most obvious example: the sales team. Unless in your organization the role of a customer success manager is combined with the role of an account manager, usually these two employees work in pairs. CSMs are responsible for bringing value to their client’s organization, which leads to an increased chance of renewal.
At the same time, account managers (AMs) focus on the commercial side of communication and grow the client’s account and spendings on the product. Given that AMs are responsible for hitting their monthly/quarterly sales target, their work can often be about jumping from one account to another in constant search of new opportunities to grow the pipeline and close more deals.
CSMs on the other hand, spend more time with each account and get to know their business better. They may discover some additional opportunities that were very far from the surface when the account manager was asking discovery questions.
So, relying on CSM’s deep understanding of the customer’s business objectives, challenges, and pain points creates additional opportunities for expansion. Sometimes it means getting additional teams on the clients’ side to use the product — in other cases, the potential to upgrade the customer to a higher subscription tier. I have highlighted in detail the various aspects of collaboration between CSMs and AMs in a separate article here.
Product
There’s probably no team that would be as interested in what customers are thinking and struggling with as the product team. With the market becoming more competitive and the best ideas being quickly replicated, flexibility and speed are becoming the main success factors. Those who can address the market’s demands faster and provide better solutions can gain the upper hand in grabbing the market share.
That said, a continuous communication channel needs to be established between the customer success team and the product team, so information can arrive to the R&D folks first hand, and they would be able to leverage the findings and update the roadmap.
Insights from CSMs can be extremely valuable when building vertical solutions for specific customer segments since they have a great deal of understanding of the key personas making the decisions and their common requirements.
What’s important to highlight here, though, is that there needs to be a clear mechanism set in place to properly process the incoming feedback from the CS team. You need a process to aggregate the feedback and group it by various parameters (e.g. client industry, spendings on the product, etc.) so the decisions on the product are truly data-driven — not based on a collection of random, unrelated sentiments.
Support
Usually, the customer support team has the deepest understanding of the product, since it’s their job to help the clients with any sort of technical issues that might emerge. For example, here at Wrike, the duration of onboarding in the customer support team is significantly longer than in any other customer-facing team.
The fact that customer support agents work on the front line with the customers every single day means that they receive all sorts of requests. And some of these requests may not fall into the support’s scope.
For example, the customer may be interested in how other clients in the same industry are using the product, or the best practices of increasing adoption of the product. Obviously, wherever possible, these questions need to be redirected to CSMs. But in case it’s not possible at a specific moment, it’s a good idea for the members of the support team to be able to provide at least general answers to these questions and share additional resources on the topic.
At Wrike, we have had several knowledge-sharing sessions where a member of the customer success team provided several examples of value-based conversations. He shared the best practices of positioning the business value of certain functionalities, highlighted the difference from this positioning, and answered technical questions on the features.
Customer education
In different companies, different teams are responsible for creation of customer-facing educational content, so I added a general title of “customer education” here.
There’s always a large group of customers who, for various reasons, choose to self-onboard with the product and not interact much with the account team on the vendor’s side. They usually leverage the resources available online, such as help center, webinars, community forums, various eBooks, etc. Once CSMs do manage to get in touch with these customers, they get the opportunity to collect some very valuable feedback on how good, clear, and straightforward the online resources were to self-onboard the team.
If it becomes clear that certain materials lead to more confusion than clarity, that certain definitions and examples in help resources do not provide the answers on how to use the product, the earlier the education team can get that information from CSMs, the sooner the materials can be updated accordingly.
I have an example to illustrate this issue. Over the course of dozens of calls with customers that used certain education materials to onboard their teams, CSMs on my team kept noticing that one specific feature (that was quite an important one) hadn’t been used by the client properly or at all.
We started digging and asking the clients why they did such an awesome job learning the majority of the features but seemed to miss this one. The answer was simple — it was never highlighted in the help resources how powerful the feature was, how much business value it could bring, and how easy it was to use. The resources basically only covered how to set it up. We immediately made a request to update the resources to add the missing part.
Being on the front line with customers provides the luxury of getting quick and clear answers to important questions. The more teams leverage the experience of those who talk to the clients every day, the higher the probability of offering the best product and service to the customers and growing the business can be.
