You're given free reign to change anything in your company. What would it be and why?

David Ellin

If there were one thing you could change in your company regardless of money, resources or executive support, what would it be? Why would you change that that one thing?

Kevin Mitchell Leonor

Support. I find myself speaking with tech support managers and supervisors more than I talk to customers. My support agents do a single call to the customer and leaves a VM. While it is fair to suggest that this satisfies initial contact, the wait and see approach has led to some issues lingering.

Alex Farmer

Double product and engineering to be able to properly embed CS principles into the product:

1. Automatic messaging/nudges that there are areas they should be using to get more value
2. Custom interface linked to customer outcome - ie: the UI is different per outcome
3. AI that looks at usage and suggests other areas to use and then automatically configures and enables those features.
4. Value/ROI dashboard that shows impact vs benchmarked customer data.

Anyone got a magic wand?!

David Ellin

Do you find that the Support leadership is not bought in to total customer success?

David Ellin

Sorry...I gave mine to Harry Potter. Worked well for him.

is there an opportunity to chip away at one challenge at a time?

Kevin Mitchell Leonor

I feel leadership is aligned, but I also feel that the actions of the agents doesn't align with their leadership. There is pressure to close tickets. However, they are enabled to close tickets due to customer response.

So they have a "ball in your court" responsibility mentality. As long as the latest communication can be labeled as "waiting on customer response", they do not have to actively work on the ticket. I get that many clarifying questions avoid any unnecessary troubleshooting paths that may not be effective without key pieces of information, but there are many situations where this mentality is becoming abusive.

Gabriel Fallas

So many things...

Selfishly I wanted to jump out with growing my team so I can have 3 - 4 CSM's and get tools like churn zero, mix max, calendly pro... Etc! 

 

But if I elevate myself 3000 ft and look at the whole company I think i would restructure the team's. Our company just had new team's get absorbed into original departments that were set up and now that they've grown it's definitely caused issues.

 There would be a company wide CS organization that would have an Executive level leader. I would have our Call Center be an extension of this larger CS organization. I would have a centralized training department so that each market (CS team) would have more time for other tasks.

Support would be aligned (not necessarily under) with CS. 

I would also break up other teams but I won't mention them since they're very specific to our industry (NEMT).

The right set-up and vision from the top down well allow all the other missing pieces to fall into place.

Jeremy Donaldson

Employee / Leadership development - We need to be giving people more opportunity to develop within their teams or within the company in general. 

Sidd

I resonate with @Kevin Mitchell Leonor  , 

• I would advocate for Support <> CS Leadership Alignment biweekly to clearly define scope and also help Support understand that they are also equally invested in Customer Success ( reactively) and are first technical point of contact most of the times, so focus should be on resolving rather than mere reacting. 
• I would also foster continuous CS and Product Team alignment sessions to brainstorm the roadmap, gauge customer sentiment, action on customer feedback and plan joint sessions to let our client base know that we are invested in their success and they are key influencers in the product roadmap.