Hi Folks,
I'm considering some changes to how our CSMs operate and would love some feedback. I've tried to summarize things succinctly below, but if anything is unclear please just ask!
History
I'm new to my company. We've had CSMs for a couple years, but from what I've learned their roles were never particularly well-defined and I think we've struggled to figure out how to get them to proactively drive success for customers. Instead, I think they've often functioned more as a support escalation role (certain topics will get punted from support to the account's CSM, such as a customer who wants to cancel).
Current State
We have two main products: a marketplace (connecting patients to dentists; ~600 dental practices) and an insurance verification service product (brand new, ~15 practices). COVID has made growth on our marketplace challenging, so I'm not expecting much growth there in the next six months. I also don't think we'll be able to help most practices because patient volume is low (and if a practice isn't getting patients, we're not solving the core problem we're supposed to solve).
Rather than divvying up the 600 accounts between our two CSMs, I'm considering pivoting them to only work with customers of our new product (insurance verification). We're anticipating significant growth (10-20x) this year, and I see onboarding and adoption for this product as our biggest opportunity. This would mean a change for customers of our other product; rather than having a CSM to reach out to at-will, they'd only get inbound support.
Question
Has anyone significantly changed the scope of their CSMs? Any tips or suggestions on how to navigate this decision well, or on what's worked well to communicate changes like this to customers?
Thanks much!