GGR Office Hours Topic: CS Team Supporting Multiple Product Lines

Anna Alley

Would love to hear from companies that have a single CS team supporting multiple product lines and how you define engagement model across areas of the product.

Adam Pierce

@Anna Alley - did you ever get much insight into this? I have recently been posed a similar question and not seen much on this topic of one CS team managing multiple products.

Jay Nathan

We have recently moved toward specializing CSMs by product line. There’s an interesting GGR podcast episode with Jeetu Mahtani, EVP of Customer Success at Hubspot where we talked about this specifically. They have 5 different “hubs” which equate to separate but integrated products. Might be worth a listen: https://podcast.gaingrowretain.com/e/enabling-customer-first-experience-jeetu-mahtani/

Adam Pierce

Thanks @Jay Nathan , much appreciated.

Anna Alley

So sorry @Adam Pierce was out on maternity leave so have been away for a bit! I didn't get much but can say that in our business we also specialize by product. I do think it depends on how complex your products are and what the expectations are of your CSMs. For us, the product expertise was more important than industry expertise but for others the opposite may be true (or you may have a separate group that focuses on the technical expertise and thus no need to segment CSMs accordingly).

We also don't see a lot of overlap between the groups of products we specialized CSMs by, in terms of a customer likely to have multiple products across the different groupings.