Account transitions among CSMs

Tanya Strauss

Hi Everyone!

We've had some CSM attrition lately and are struggling to keep the wheels on the cart with CSM account coverage. Posting here because I'm curious how other teams are handling this challenge. What creative solutions have you come up with when you're short staffed but customers keep coming? As interim steps while we continue hiring, we're hesitant to assign a full CSM, knowing that person will change once we've found a new CSM.

One thing we're considering for this phase is a pod model where the CSM Manager is the name given to the customer but the responses to inbound queries come from a group of possible CSMs. Similarly we're also considering creating an email account for a super CSM (aka fake CSM) to send emails to and then have them answered by others. I'm not excited about any of these ideas and we really don't want our customers to have a bad experience "waiting" for a new CSM. 

How do you manage interim account transitions in such circumstances?

Thanks,

Tanya

Tine Van Dyck

Hi Tanya, 

We are in a similar situation with the difference that we have a model where we want to assign named CSMs to our largest/most complex customers or customers with the most potential; and work through a CSM mailbox for the smaller, less complex customers (which is the majority of our customers).

This is a change that has happened very recently, so I can't say anything yet on the success of it. But the idea is that all our CSMs have access to the mailbox and we have a rotation system defining who treats and follows up on the mails. I'm expecting that after a while, if a customer sends messages regularly, the same person will pick up those questions. We are signing our responses with our own name, by the way, I want to give the customers the feeling that they are communicating with an actual person.

I don't want to assign somebody fixed to each account as we don't have the manpower and we also don't know how much effort we will have to spend on each of those customers. It could be that at one point, we decide to assign a CSM to a part of those customers, but that depends on our learnings.

We also have an account management team focussing on selling to existing customers. Today they have both small and large customers in their portfolio, but the smaller ones with little growth potential will come to our team. This transition has already been done for the accounts of one account manager that recently left the company. He informed his customers that they would need to reach out to us via that generic email address.

I know that not all customers are happy with this, they prefer to have somebody dedicated to them. The only thing we can do about it is to be very responsive, even if it's through a generic mailbox, and make sure they feel heard and supported. We now see that some of those customers are contacting one of their previous contacts from our sales team (who should be focussing on new business sales). I have asked that sales person to keep our mailbox in the loop so that we can take over the operational questions. I'm hoping that this will allow for a more gradual transition and that step by step those customers will start to trust our services through the mailbox.  It's a lot about change management, building trust and also educating them on how we are working...

Hope this helps,
Tine

Tanya Strauss

Tine,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful response! I really like how you're handling this challenge and will consider something similar. 

Question - how do the CSMs know it's their turn to pick up an email? How do you keep the rotation working?

Thanks again,

Tanya

Tine Van Dyck

Hi Tanya,

As we're in the early stages, I'm currently managing the mailbox to get a view on the volume & type of questions coming in and on how much effort it will require. Once we start with the rotation, I plan to do this in a very pragmatic way: a weekly rotation based on an Excel sheet that lists whose turn it is. And I'll probably put reminders in people's agendas to check the mailbox everyday :-)

Hope this helps,
Tine

James Stuart

Hi @Tanya Strauss

I hope you are well. I have had a couple of suggestions below to help

• Open Office hours, You could create a set time each week whereby you can invite customers to whereby they can gain advice or top tips from a CSM. 
• Marketing support, You could create content with marketing that reaches a wide range of customers. This could be market trends, yop tips etc
• Webinars- You could invite your customers to topic specific webinars hosted by your CSM's

My main objective would be to think at scale for a short period of time until everything settles. 

Hope this helps
James