Your Customer Success Managers Are Not Superheroes
Is it just me, or does it seem that Customer Success Managers are commonly associated with superheroes, Jedis, ninjas or some other mythical beings that are supposed to swoop in to save you from churn and fix all of your customer problems? Does your company think of the CSM team as “heroes”? If so, it’s a symptom of a problem that lays elsewhere. Here are four things to look for.
Clean and Green sales
Success starts with the sales process and the discipline to acquire customers who are well-suited to your product.
- Ensure there is a good fit between the customer’s use cases and your product. Bad product fit will lead to your CSM’s spending way too much time with those customers later.
- Don’t undersell the customer’s commitment. Help a customer understand the investment of their time and resources in order to be successful.
Hint: If you’re working a complex deal, invite your CSM into the deal early to help educate and qualify.
Nail your time to value
Churn that happens in the first 6 months can usually be attributed back to your onboarding process.
- Decrease the time to (first) value as much as possible
- Manage expectations, have a project plan and stick to it
Hint: If you’re not sure how to get started, build a timeline of your customer journey and focus on improving the longest or hardest steps in the journey.
Check your product
Look for signs of product quality and usability issues.
In the case of product quality:
- Define your bug triage process and how quickly issues will get resolved when a CSM brings one forward.
- CSM’s can contribute to your test strategy. They know the core features that customers truly use and value. Focus your testing there.
In the case of usability:
- Make sure the product is well supported with tool tips, walkthroughs and documentation
- Use CSM’s to connect your users to your product team
Hint: If you’re not sure where to start, check out UserVoice. They have a great service that you can use to learn exactly how people are using your product and what they think.
Clean up your data
CSM productivity depends on data. And we all know the saying, “garbage in garbage out.” CSM’s systems, reports, and tools are only as good as the data that is in them.
- What are the essential pieces of data that a CSM must know about every customer? Contract date? Go-live date? Renewal data? Usage growth? Invest in the quality and accessibility of this data first.
Hint: consider creating workflows in your CRM that will auto populate certain fields to cut down on typos, info mismatch, and null data as a quick way to get started with data clean up.
While much easier said than done, tightening up your sales, onboarding, and product release processes will definitely help your Customer Success team to do what they are designed to do…retain and grow your revenue. Taking on just one of the items in my list is a huge undertaking.
Start small. Good Customer Success doesn’t require magic horns, stealthy jumpy moves, or the Force… GREAT Customer Success can be boiled down to a series of little things that your company does each day that then translates into goodness with your customers, and it doesn’t always have to revolve directly around your Customer Success team.
