GGR Blog - Customer Success has some growing up to do - fast

Heather Wendt

This week Parul Bhandari takes a look at some of the issues Customer Success teams still face and gives some practical tips on moving into a more strategic space within your organization.

Starting with a current status assessment, she then helps focus on three goals that can begin to move the needle:

1. Defining CS for your team and your organization
2. Determine metrics that should consistently be tracked
3. Ensuring your team is prepared to be data-driven

Read the blog here

What are some ways you are positioning your team for impact?

KimberlyReneeKnowles

Excellent post @Heather Wendt and @Parul Bhandari - I agree that you can't just focus on relationships and "feel good" activities.

I work in HIgher Education at the moment (working on transitioning to customer success this summer), and when I went to update my resume, it was an interesting exercise trying to qualify the results of my work - not just the broader end-year retention numbers buth the day to day building blocks (leading and lagging indicators) to get there. I find in our organizations, we survey students initially but we do a bad job or looping back in later to see how they are doing now and how we (hopefully) improved their outcomes.

So, yes, I completely agree with point 3 - you need to make sure you have good CS Ops / Data people - and you need to create a culture where CSMs are regularly entering in clean data - because your reporting is only as good at the data that goes into it!

kmulhalljr

Very good piece. #1 was (and continues to be) a big deal for our team. Despite our small size communicating what we've been trying to accomplish and get buy-in across other departments has been surprisingly difficult. To #3, my recommendation would be, if possible, onboard someone to your team, sooner than later, that has a strong understanding of building, managing and visualizing data. If your organization has a lean data department (which we do) getting on their radar can be extremely challenging and will delay your ability to begin quantifying your impact on KPI's

Marc Phillips

A useful exercise can be to start with the opposite - "Our current CS organization is not providing measurable value toward either short term or long term SaaS revenue." Then think through and document all the reasons why that is not a true statement. Once you've nailed down a few key items, make sure your assertions are agreed upon across the company and leadership teams. After that, consider what would have to be true for those items to become even more valuable to the company. If you get stuck at any point along this exercise, be sure to address those issues before moving on to next steps.