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    • Owning customer communications

    User: "Renee Murphy"
    Renee Murphy
    Thought Leader
    Updated by Heather Wendt
    In a world where CS owns adoption and AM's own upsell& renewals, how do you manage the who owns the customer relationship communication?   I have seen the tug of war between the AM and CS for a long time and wondered if anyone ever cracked the code.   With aggressive upsell and annual renewals there is no way an AM can take a back seat and CS being responsible for adoption cannot always be managed by the AM without friction.  Ideally you have good strong teaming and would love to hear if anyone figured out how to build that without confusing the customer and creating internal friction?

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      User: "Russell Bourne"
      Russell Bourne
      Expert
      Updated by unknown
      @Renee Bochman I'd like to start by saying it's on leadership to communicate what the company's goals are and how each team and person fits into hitting the goals.  If you have AM and CS (either at the rep or management level) jockeying for account ownership, then somewhere above them the communication chain broke down.

      I had a lot of success running a team where we paired AM and CS in teams and they owned the accounts together.  They shared the same goals so they were invested in their joint success and could never undermine each other, and there was no advantage to encroaching on each other's work.  Typically they would run account reviews together - we actually had a lot of them develop comedy routines that let them show their personalities to customers, who would inevitably get pulled into the schtick.  It really had an amazing affect on customer relationships; better, faster, realer.

       I've found that customers can handle having 2 co-primary points of contact, but not 3.  So, if you're running any kind of pod, I would stick with CS+AM as the primaries, and they can pull in others like AE, SE, Channel, etc. on an as-needed basis.  And, of course, those parties come in having a good understanding about where they fit in from their leadership.
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