I recently joined a Success Hacker roundtable on Educating Your Organization About the CS Mission. Below I am sharing some key takeaways and some examples of my experience on communicating the value of Customer Success (CS).
For many organizations the first challenge is to differentiate between customer success and customer support. I like Michael Redbord's approach to look at the unit of work. Customer support is measured by the number of tickets/cases that are open and closed. The customer success unit of work is the account itself and it is business value driven. It doesn’t have an open/close status. The focus is ultimately to extend the lifetime value of the customer as Audrey Vandenbroeck mentioned.
However it is quite common that in a startup the CS team starts by also taking over customer support. Actually customer support can be a large part of the CS Manager (CSM) activities at the beginning of a startup journey. So how to communicate the value of CS while the organization evolves?
Start by communicating that it is a journey. As your organization will grow, CS will mature too. Jackie Golden created an excellent CS Maturity Framework . You can use it as a reference to check where you stand in your journey and what your next steps will be.
Be specific about what your CSM role is and be clear on what challenges you are solving. Especially when you communicate with your colleagues and customers.
3. Make it fun and visual. In my former team we created a multiple-choice quiz about our CS organization. In each cross-department meeting we asked one question e.g. how many tickets one CS answers per day or how many languages people speak in the team, what is the most impactful stage in a customer journey etc…. It is a fun way for people to learn about what value you bring to the organization and about your challenges. It is also a great way for the team itself to start analyzing data and creating awareness on their added value.
By taking these simple steps you create alignment, improve collaboration and you ensure a better customer experience.
Need support with your CS organization? Get in touch!
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