SMB resources for tech touch & making transitions

Clint Kelson

Hello everyone, I just wanted to follow up with some of the resources I shared during the SMB breakout as part of the CS Leadership call today. Below you will find the resources I referenced, specifically the Monthly newsletter we send out using Tiled and our slidedeck presentation that we used in our 1:1 calls when accounts transitioned as well as our webinar we hosted for all accounts that didn't get the 1:1 transition. 

Bridge Success Newsletter (references product updates, upcoming/past webinars, best practices)

Bridge Success Team for Customers (see notes for talking points)

Please feel free to reach out with any questions.

Jenny Leman

Thanks alot for sharing this!   How successful were you in training customers when to go to success vs support?   How did you handle when they didn't land in the right queue?  

Did you pool your success communication inbox also?  If so, how?

Thanks for addl details!  :)

Clint Kelson

Hey @Jenny Leman we implemented this team back in the fall of 2019 and to be honest we are still training customers from time to time on who to reach out to and when as well as on our resources that we provide. If customers email us something that is support related, we have a canned response we send looping in support via their email so that it gets in their queue ASAP but also explains to the customer that these types of questions will likely be answered more quickly by support (24/7/365) or if they need troubleshooting they are the team dedicated to that. 

We have one team gmail account that we then integrated with FRONT and the team works together out of FRONT to respond to our customers. It's a pretty solid process and some great things we can do with that inbox. 

Sara Bochino

Clint I was not able to join the office hours next week but came into the community today with this very question in mind, "how do you transition existing customers to a tech touch model without upsetting the apple cart?" thank you for sharing, this is extremely helpful!

Clint Kelson

Hi @Sara Bochino , in our particular situation, we really did do an overhaul of our CS org. We have one CSM (1:1) team that works with the LMS portion of our product and another CSM (1:1) team that works with the LMS + Performance portion of the product, and then we created the Bridge Success Team (currently comprised of a Team Lead and two CSMs) that would work with all customers 50K ARR and below that had just the LMS product. 

In our transition, we acknowledge the change in our CS org to allow for a more specialized approach to the product. We also pointed out the benefits of our team approach like our newsletter to keep them up to speed on upcoming feature enhancements and online conferences, we also host two webinars a month which has been beneficial to customers and quicker turnaround time from the CSM team approach.

I have had to join a couple calls with customers who wanted further information or were upset about the change. I had to let them know that as a growing business, it wasn't scaleable to have a 1:1 approach for all of our customers. I then went into details on how the decisions were made and data behind it and most all customers were understanding. I then offered that we'd love to continue to improve this team and our approach and would value their feedback on things they feel we could do better and to ensure they are getting the help they need to be successful with the product.

Honestly, part of that was also reminding people of Support - what they specifically can help with and that they are always available verse what our CSM's are for. Many customers have the wrong interpretation of CSM's and use them as glorified support for a more personal approach or to get things done quicker. CSM's themselves can do better to draw that line and not get overwhelmed by doing Supports job, that's one of the most common things I've seen at times with CSM's - they get into doing support work and that is not what we want them to be focusing on, even though it can make the customer happy, they should be adding value to the customer in very different ways. 

Andrew Harris

hey @Jenny Leman it's been a struggle for sure -- we're also working with global WL partners with Outsourced PS, so it's been an interesting challenge.  In both branded and WL campaigns (from altitude, as personalization/cultural differences need separate campaigns), we include a snippet in every message containing support contact info with the line "Please contact support if any part of your database isn't working -- for tips on optimizing and strategy, please check out our Weekly Webinars here: [LP Link].  We also dedicate a template to the difference, especially as we're automating Nurture/Targeting after onboarding. We've found that saturating comms with support at each step reduces client contacting CS for PS, but with thousands of onboards every month, there's some leakage, though rare.  Most of the time, folks are able to contact the right people for the right issue.  

It's an enormous challenge with no clear answer, but I suspect the solution is more of an org-wide issue vs a CS Team-specific issue.  If Sales is talking about CS as an asset for choosing your org, the difference between PS and is defined, and client expectation is set from the start. 

Follow that with an over-communication of support function and contact, and data shows that most folks won't hit CS for PS issues