Hello all!
Its my first time posting, so please correct me and guide me as needed in case I make any errors here. I definitely dont have enough time or space to give the full context of the situation but I am being tasked with building a small CS team at my company. I am the one and only employee in CS and now I have been approved to hire two people - one started July 17th- one in onboarding and training and the other in Digital CS (also keep in mind we have account managers which is why I didnt opt for CSM as my first hires, I am hoping this will come later). After the proposal being accepted, my direct report tells me that he wants my team (Digital CS hasnt started yet) to create two paid certification courses for two different customer groups (we have 3 verticals and two are relatively new). This caught me totally off guard for a variety of reasons including the fact that the Onboarding Specialist is supposed to help customers for free as his full time job, as well as the fact that he has asked for the Digital CS person to own this project underneath me and subsequently continue to manage it on an ongoing basis. This changes the concept of both of the new roles that I had approval to move forward with and essentially is making me re-think the whole plan.
Some history/back story: we have no renewals or subscriptions; we have done really really well with our first vertical and we were perfectly positioned to take advantage of covid with our hardware and software (its usage based); our second new vertical started last year, third new vertical this year and my proposal was for Onboarding to focus only on the two new verticals to ensure their success.
Questions: do you think a paid LMS certification program makes the technology harder to sell as easy if we are asking people to pay for a course in order to use it? Does LMS administration and management seem like a Digital CS job description? Where would that fall if not on CS? Any general advice on how to handle this conversation with the senior leadership team who made this decision without consulting any customer facing teams? Thank you so much in advance!