What is the biggest challenge your working on over the next 30 days?

Let's develop a dialogue among leaders as to the biggest challenge that we're facing in the next 30 days. If you see comments that you can help with, let's start to create a thread and keep the discussion moving forward.

My biggest challenge: Launching an online community that can be valuable, actionable and impactful for customer success leaders.

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Comments

Kristen Lishman

Get a job!

Matt Myszkowski

I like differentiating direct manager and senior leadership. I think some of the scores are "protest" scores and that is very harsh on some leaders.

Anna Alley

My biggest challenges over the next 30 days:

Finalizing V1 of our Health Score and evaluating it's accuracy against a subset of customers, then actually updating process to actually leverage it proactively (and reactively).
Overhauling our Customer Success Interactions (which we track in Salesforce).
Updating our Segmentation Strategy.
We're getting an Executive Engagement program off the ground. Right now, it's primarily focused on escalation assistance and renewals, but love all the conversations in the office hours about Executive Sponsorship. Really need to get a handle on what that could look like and for how many customers.
Capturing Customer Outcomes (what they deem as success) and tracking our success against that. Historically, we've only looked at customer transactions through our own definition of success. We have to shift that mentality within the business.

Anna Alley

This is something we've done a lot with and it's definitely a challenge! We use Salesforce to capture Customer Enhancement Requests. This allows us to easily pull where we have overlapping requests across different customers and can connect to their MRR value and account information. We then have a very close partnership with Product around "owning" existing customer VOC prioritization from both an enhancement and bug fix/defect prioritization. The main challenge for us in a very quickly growing company is getting the bandwidth to address those existing customer requests while still moving forward with work needed for growth via partners and acquisitions.

Anna Alley

We have a similar question in our Employee engagement surveys. We ask both about direct leaders as well as Senior leadership. However, it can be tricky to have any kind of direct action - the surveys are run by HR, and while you can see departmental scores, you aren't able to see scores for individual managers as the number of responders would be too small (and the survey is supposed to be anonymous). Thus, we try to address at a department level across the board if we see collective negative feedback. I also try to get to that type of feedback directly through skip levels with teammates, but that requires a level of trust with myself that they can talk openly about any frustrations or challenges. Some initial company level initiatives that occurred based on the feedback is better enforcement of regular 1:1s across all departments. We track these in MyCareer, and also capture drivers, developmental goals, etc.

Chrissy Hines

My biggest challenge is scoping out Customer Success in a standardized way for Post Merger Integration workstreams. We are in the process of acquiring several small firms and each deal is different, so the CS model needs to be flexible and sometimes tailored to the incoming new company's expectations.

Stephen Shieh

My biggest challenge: We have some big changes coming to our team in the next 30 days. A key part of those changes involves developing and elevating members of our support team to become CSM's and shift to a proactive focused mindset. I am looking for great ways to train and coach some of our support reps to become more consultative than reactive. I have thought about setting up time with each of them weekly to role play negotiation scenarios like cancellations or upsell opportunities. Does anyone have any training methods or ways they have been able to coach a support rep into the CSM role?

SimonSaysSuccess

@Anita Toth Trying to connect out team to the purpose has been a big part of it, but ultimately I've been pushing a solution-mindset on myself to figure out how to make this as painless as possible - it's has been a good opportunity to streamline processes and get rid of some "Why is this rule even a thing?" policies.

The second big thing I've been trying to focus on is being transparent on how long this may last, and keeping the team updated as we look for alternative solutions.

I hope that gives you a little insight

Anita Toth

@Simon Cundall That's a challenge for sure. What are you doing to keep morale up?

Matt Kitch

Mainly going back through our large enterprise clients that got neglected over the last month and trying to reconnect and re-engage them,

Some have gone quiet due to COVID and ensuring they are re-engaging after a break is a real challenge!

Sonia

In the next 30 days I'm going to:
Have a big push on purchasing a Customer Success tool. Its a big investment for us so I'm a bit nervous about it as I want to ensure we get the value we expect.
Also we launched our online community in Dec and have around 45% of our clients on it, but the threads aren't active enough. This is a real challenge and I need to dedicate some time into planning next steps.
Lastly I'll be getting ready for our next big NPS survey...

Nathan Petersen

As a CSM I've identified a few operational gaps (documentation/internal and external guides/CSS team processes) in our company that are only going to get larger and cause loss of production the more we scale. The next 30 day challenge is getting buy-in from CS management and outlining a game plan for how we present a solution to the executive team on something they might deem a "small issue".

Nick Maugeri

Great question Jeff and really interesting to see what other folks are working on!

There are a number of things I'm trying to wrap up but the biggest initiative is adding a variable component to my teams comp structure. Rhino is a B2B2C company - so we can't use some of the more traditional components (like ARR/upsell).

Right now, I'm trying to decide which behavior I want to incentivize, volume or spread. For example, do we want to have significant usage, regardless of which partners it comes from in their portfolios, or do we want base-level usage at as many partners as possible. Currently leaning towards the latter but will need to look at more data before making a final decision.

Yasasree Nerayanuri

A little late to the thread.. Incedentally we've been working on building and launching a Customer Community ourselves. Great to be a part of this community and love the engagement

Scott Smith

Hi @Rragavan , happy to connect and compare notes. My email address and LinkedIn info are listed on my profile if you want to reach out we can lock down a time to connect?

Matt Myszkowski

Thank you for your response David.

Can I ask the state of the Leadership Trust element, and what actions you put on place to address the feedback?

Jason McDonald

I'm only a month in and so I'm looking at creating a customer health score, defining the customer journey and looking at the on-boarding process... More than 30 days worth of work for sure but I'm focused on the health score first. The challenge I'm facing with that is deciding how many data points do I want/need vs. how much time do I need to spend to manually collate the data from various sources.

Alex Tran

I'll be aiming to create the processes and customer lifecycle of a tech touch / 1:Many segment.

This includes:

Journey mapping
1. Deciding on different moments of truth or touch points
Automating a risk process
Building advocates
Renewal process

Gabriel Fallas

Yes. It really is a game changer.

All "essential" phases is the key word there:) We're definitely just starting to tap into all the benefits of SFDC, but I at least want to have the foundation completed by the end of the month!

Ramya Ragavan

We just recently revised our EBR. Happy to share what we did, why we did, and our plan to pilot. I have a template for success plan that I would love to get some feedback on - open to connecting on a call late next week or after.

Osha Kondori

Resonating very much with the challenges everyone is facing over the coming months!

In addition to continuing to wrap my arms around how COVID impacts our customers and the business, my biggest challenge on the horizon is a regionalization/re-organization of customer success. My company was acquired last year, and now we are finally taking the steps to merge the CSM teams and split into regions (East, West,International). This entails taking on teams and customers from the parent company, which is also primarily on-premise.

With this the main challenges are, re-segmentation of customers to align to the broader organization, redefining customer journeys, learning how to lead a CS org for on-premise (I have been raised entirely on SaaS in my career so far), and managing a new team fully remote. Would love to hear from anyone who has gone through similar transitions of merging teams post acquisition!

Jared Scoubes

I'll be crafting a couple of new "follow up" emails to send directly after the onboarding training and at the 30 day mark to serve as more effective touch points. I'm also hoping to put together a more defined customer journey so I can get other departments to "buy in" to the customer experience a bit more!

Scotty

@Simon Cundall that's hard because it's a different mindset and morale lowering I know some people can be very happy when unleashed from the burden of support. A very tough goal to keep both sides of the equation functioning as well as before.

Kate Current

Tough challenge!

Kate Current

Our high ARR Enterprise customers are mostly decentralized with 75-100 locations each. Some of the locations can buy outside of the corporate agreement, others have influence on the tech stack through pre-renewal surveys. We are experimenting with ways to categorize these customers and devise service strategies in lieu of a corporate one. Will share my findings and hope to network with other CS leaders experienced in high touch models.

[Deleted User]

That seems like a big task! CRM is so valuable.

Gabriel Fallas

Great stuff everyone.

@Cameron Marijosius Yes, I am dealing with data that isn't readily available in the format that it would be needed in. Meaning, we do have the data either Salesforce or Tableau but it would require work from our team's to get it to fit our health score. Our context is a bit unique in that we're Saas company that works as the broker for NEMT services in the State of CT; so we're in this gray area between Saas, public benefits, and marketplace even. We're B2b2C and our clients are "Medicaid members, Healthcare organizations, DSS, and Legislators." My focus is primarily with the healthcare organizations - they're the one's that engage daily with our b2c sector and have incredible potential to be champions for us. Now that you have a small intro, here's the metrics I chose:

- Product Health: which is broken down into bugs, usage, and adoption; 25 points.
- Relationship Health: Support tickets (lives in CS and we're just measuring it from a quantitative stand-point right now) & qualitative CS score of the relationship; 30 points.
- Ops: Grievance rate (complaint submission) & OTP (on-time performance of our drivers); 45 points.

Though this still might change in the coming weeks, prior to finalizing the decision on the scores I met with all relevant teams to get their input on what metrics should be included and what value they should have in the overall health score.

I can't quit spot the conversation because it was also on a thread but @Jung Kim has great insights when it comes to early stage CS building, and she shared this gem with me about a month ago: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1e5czbWQAL_Y631h8cqm9P9xZijG8vxJzhYvUu7k6EDI/edit#gid=429454996

Going back to the question about including data that isn't quite available, I'm trying to make our V1 (manual) health-score as robust as possible so I can get leadership buy-in come early to mid July, so that we can pursue an automated ($$) solution via Salesforce.

Do you all have buy-in from leadership already? Are they involved in any way in the development of the score?

James Fisher

My key focus area for the next 30 days with my team is figuring out how to best approach Q3 renewals whilst understanding the impact of COVID-19 after the initial shockwaves felt in March/April.

How do we forecast churns/downgrades for impacted customers? Best ways to stay on top of customers that said they were fine now but might decline in the coming months. Would love to learn more about what people are doing with renewals that are impacted by COVID-19.

James Fisher

@Krista Roberts I hired 3 new CSMs in November of last year and had 1 start in April. What are you anticipating your biggest challenges will be with 4(+1) CSMs onboarding at one time?

Gabriel Dizon

Some great initiatives from everyone! Next 30 days:

Continuing to operate the team as lean as possible with given hiring freezes
Temporarily restructuring account distribution where my APAC team can support West Coast clients in NOAM
Identify and move SMB clients to an automated support framework