Resetting Legacy Customer Expectations
Contributor 
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!
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!