Customer Success Tech, Are we sleepwalking into Complexity?

Emmanuel Malanda

All- Being on the pulse and knowing when to provide value to customers on time and just when they need it, is what keeps me awake and it is what gives the shivers down my spine.  I think we all strive for it as Customer Success practitioners. However, Having designed few solutions from scratch and having extensively utilised some of the tools/ CSM solutions out there , I have often found myself arriving sooner or later at the same spot...

Feeling like my teams are not fully equipped to be proactive, I've spent and continuing to spend inordinate amounts of time and frankly speaking money tweaking the health score parameters so they are just right even though I continue to hear from my teams "hey boss, good job but to be honest we are still skeptical about the health scores…", I keep "streamlining" i think the appropriate word is probably "experimenting" with workflows, I have to resort to hiring someone or few people just to keep systems running and my CSMs are turning into "mini" trend spotters rather than spending time with their customer! 

I am not looking for recommendations for a particular system as I believe I have utilised a number of solutions out there, I keep my eyes peeled to see what's new in the market place and besides, I am using one solution at the moment which is doing the job just fine but for how long until I get right back to the same spot? That is the question… 

I am interested to hear about your experiences.

Emmanuel

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Emmanuel Malanda
Global Head-Customer Success
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Jarren Pinchuck

Hi @Emmanuel Malanda 

I'd be happy to suggest an excellent CS platform that would assist with much of what you're mentioning but it doesn't seem like the software is the problem. As the head of CS, the strategy (health scoring, touchpoints, QBR templates etc) should be decided by you. You should be the one looking at the data, watching the trends and tweaking accordingly. I am all for democracy but if you consistently get your team involved in making those decisions they'll never be happy. Emphasise that owning the customer and the customers' success is what they own, you'll help them tailor the systems and process to be more proactive rather than reactive.

As you correctly mention, there is no exact winning formula for things like health scores. They will need to be tweaked all the time as your business grows, the product develops and customers evolve. In my experience with health scoring specifically, I simplified ours as much as possible. Often the team asked for more metrics to be included but they always understood what the score meant and what action was required. That is the key piece if you can't answer why you have a metric in your health score and what action to take accordingly then it's vanity and shouldn't be there, in my opinion.

If you keep your process simple, then the system you use will be less important and really shouldn't be the focus.
Hit me up though if you need a few suggestions for software, I am a bit of a product geek also.

Jarren

Emmanuel Malanda

Hey Jarren,

Simplicity has always been my approach and my challenge at the same time so much like you have said above. I am very much of the mindset that systems/ tools utilised are less important however what they must help you do is allow you to detect things you wouldn't have detected otherwise i.e. the tools should augment your capabilities to be the Trusted advisor.

Emmanuel