This is one of the most intriguing questions that a lot of leaders have and they fail to understand and answer what is the core differentiator between two teams. Some says, its the extended support team, and some says CSM teams are there to keep the customer happy and engaged, does that mean support teams are not to make the customer happy or engaged?The core differentiator between the teams are motivation.
A classic example: Support teams are behind the wheel and are driving to the destination, which is customer delight. But who's giving direction, the co-driver, which should be our CSM teams.They are sitting in one car, does mean they are part of the same team, and have similar destinations, but they have different roles and responsibilities and to understand what is different, we all need to know how it is different. A lot of times, I was told, CSMs are proactive and customer support are reactive. CSM are involved in upselling and renewal where as customer support is involved in resolving customer queries. CSM are known to show value to the customer about the product, where in customer support teams are only the experts on the product.
Trust me, these are in head and practically it only degrades the experience of the customers if we follow this approach.
CSMs are strategic leaders, work for a CSM shouldn't involve resolving issues and answering queries. Their work should be involved in questioning the processes why does this customer has issues and why they are asking these questions.
This doesn't mean they don't have to product experts, they absolutely should have similar knowledge and step in as product experts or consultant when the customer needs.
If a customer has an issue, expectations are - it should go to customer support. But most of the times, the customer tends to send email and expect a CSM would do that on their behalf. Customer education and confidence in support teams needs to be built by CSMs, without it, CSMs would be involved in so many activities that they shouldn't.CSM should never be point of contact of the escalations and there has to be defined processes for customer escalations.
Zendesk is a lovely tool, make it easy for your customer to log issues, and make it strategically possible to enable the escalations for the customers. Your customer support team should be trained and made super efficient that the customer only feels the need to log an issue and not route the queries to CSM. If this happens, customer needs to be educated.
Hello Brett,
We don't have a clear delineation. That said, for our more important clients, their dedicated CSM handles most questions. We also have someone who is dedicated to answering support tickets, issuing release notes, and updating the help section of the platform. We also have CS team members in place to answer more support-type questions from end users and/or basic training when the CS Leads are overloaded (these CSMs have a book of business, but far less demanding ones). Finally, if there are technical issues such as bugs, our team interfaces with the tech team instead of the client doing that directly.
I'm not sure if the above helps, but it is the structure we currently have in place. I would love to hear how others are doing things.