Resetting Legacy Customer Expectations

Parker Chase-Corwin

Hello CS friends - 

I'm three weeks into a new role building out a CS and Support organization for a company that has a long history of providing exceptions and "doing whatever it takes" to make the customer happy.  This has resulted in high retention, high NPS, and generally happy customers, but the demands on my team to go outside the scope of their role as very high.  We seem to have more "non-standard" customers than standard customers.

The company has also recently turned the corner into growth mode - Y/Y 39% growth in 2019 has dramatically increased the volume of accounts, a timely acquisition has helped us bring a new technology to market which is highly in demand, and COVID has reduced our budget and resources.  All these things add up to the simple fact - my team can't meet the current demands of customers in a scalable way.

I need to work with a very young team (many hired directly out of school) and our customer base to reset their long-standing expectations about the types of activities that we will perform for them - and what they will now be expected to do themselves.  The team tells me that they've tried many times to reset expectations - only to have the customers leverage their relationships, escalate over their heads, and have our executives overrule the boundaries and perpetuate the problem.

I have to safely pull back the team's scope without damaging the customer's satisfaction or we will start to miss our SLAs and degrade the service level across all accounts.

Would love any suggestions or feedback from folks who have been through something like this before. Thanks!

Russell Bourne

@Parker Chase-Corwin I have to say my alarms went off when you said "customers leverage their relationships, escalate over their heads, and have our executives overrule the boundaries and perpetuate the problem".

I suspect there's a communication problem within the exec team.  Either each executive doesn't know where they fit into the company's scaling plan, or perhaps the company doesn't have a scaling plan yet.  Either way, in my opinion only the CEO can fix the problem, which is why it's so important to have a CEO who's customer-centric.  Is there a way the CEO can act as an exec sponsor for whatever scaling plan you have, since that's presumably what you were brought in to do?

Tangentially, if roles and expectations aren't clearly communicated and cascaded within leadership, you have an environment ripe for political turf wars and credit-grabs (or conversely, finger-points).  Your company probably has enough competition from the outside, and if you're too busy competing internally, you don't stand much of a chance in the marketplace.  On the other hand, your competitors might have the same issues at their companies, which means if your company gets its teamwork together, you have every chance for wild success.

Back on topic, can you shed any more light on the types of non-standard things the legacy customers are asking for?  Can you move any of it to self-service and spin it as "now you don't have to wait for me to get what you need"?  

Another idea is around success plans.  A few folks here in other threads have offered templates for these, where you can fit custom requests into standard category boxes.  In turn, that means you can have standard reporting about how well your customers are progressing on their success plans.  That will help you identify and prioritize which custom requests matter the most - giving you the balance between what you can scale versus what's at risk.

Hope this helps.  It's a tough challenge for sure.