CS Leadership Office Hours Topics

• Tying CS to direct outcomes and results - This is probably my biggest challenge for 2021.

Hey Jeff!
As we have embarked this year on building Customer Success at Zerto, I am trying to determine how to best serve our large customer base (7000+) and deliver on outcomes when we have a very small team of CSMs.

We've started by focusing the majority of our attention on the segment of accounts that bring in the most revenue and still have plenty of upside (land and expand sales model), but I don't want to forget about the vast majority of other customers we have!

I know there have been discussions and podcasts in the past about tech/digital touch, but I would l love to hear more from the wider audience discussion around this topic 

Thanks again for all that you do for this community!

Regards,
Daryl

• How organizations are identifying and documenting the organizational structure of their clients as well as how they are identifying and documenting key personas they are working with in order to drive adoption
• How we can or should incorporate reselling partners into our Customer Success strategies - what part of Customer Success do they ideally own?

• Customer Journey.  They were such a huge topic last year and now I barely see them mentioned, replaced by success plans.  In retrospect, are customer journeys not delivering value to CS orgs?  Should we stop mapping them, or if not, should we think about how to integrate success plan management into them?
• Change management within your own company.  As CS practices change, so do our communications and asks to other departments.  Would love to have volunteers share stories of what was or wasn't successful in their change management with other departments.

• Change Management Training for CSMs
• Project Management Training for CSMs
• Removing NVA Work via Automation (Support)
• Improved Communication Planning for Product Launches
• Success Plans and Outcomes
• Customer Advisory Council

Hi Jeff,
Adding something a bit different to the mix - I'd love to hear about the very first stages of setting up a CS team - not just in terms of processes (onboarding plans, KPIs), but also CS's cross functional impact (on product, sales, partnerships) before being able to set up "voice of the customer" programs. For example:
- CS/BD collaboration (because your best customers are also your best referrals, and sometimes will bring you the right partners as well)
- Getting early customer's product feedback (yes we all know it's important - but what are the right milestones? when do you actively bring in product, etc.)
- Building out CS when expanding to new markets
- Separating support from CS - at what stage? what are the metrics you look at for this decision?

Thanks!

Gali. 

Some great stuff shared here! Here's what we're focused on:

• Balancing CS work versus business projects/changes: +1  on this from Anna. Business is in high growth mode, but CSM's are over-bandwidth managing clients. How do we keep moving on the bigger picture when everyone is near burn out? 
• Success plans/outcomes- Consistently showing ROI to customers throughout the lifecycle and year when our product is not based in data
• Building out NPS automation playbook in 3 tiers: promoting advocacy for promoters, product feedback for detractors, and CSM gameplan for moving the needle on passive users
• Building customer engagement in PLG model and moving customers from free to paid
• Building an active and engaging user community
• Adoption of a module that requires a high amount of (limited) technical resources while still making traction in cross sell opportunity
• Effectively moving into a team based/"pod" model for tech touch with a shared inbox without losing service and personalization

• Change Management - how have other leaders trained or helped their teams to manage the challenges of change management with customers (IE. your service/product requires a complete change in how they have done things in the past)
• Sales/CS/Support - (adding to @Anna Alley's) how to align these three so that communication and actions are consistent vs. working against each other

Hey Jeff -

Like @Shari Srebnick mentioned, I'd also love to hear about Success Plans and Outcomes.  We have an initiative underway where we are working on measuring the effectiveness of Success Plans. 

Thanks! 
Haley 

Thanks for tagging me!  I echo many of the items Anna mentioned - particularly her 3rd and 5th bullets. 

• We're maturing into more specialized roles within our CS team and this means we need to better define those roles.  Our team also includes our support team, and the lines between what is support vs what is not support are not well defined.  
• We're discovering that prospects know us and our brand well enough to buy faster than they have in the past.  This our CS team is handling more objections post-sale.  To retain as many clients as possible, I'm thinking the answer to this is both creating a better tech-touch onboarding experience and/or conducting formal discovery meetings to generate success plans based on their specific needs and goals.  I'm curious to hear what others have done in this scenario.

• Support Team "upskill" - we still have a lot of challenges with issues in support that create additional work for our CS teams when ideally it should be able to be taken care of in support. We're trying to figure out how we can partner with that team to help, but would be curious if anyone has done something similar (we're talking potential shadowing of CSMs, etc.) especially within time constraints - they can only be away from case handling for so long.
• We're actively working on Success Plans and Success Outcomes so those conversations are always great.
• We've also talked about scalability, etc. before but one thing that I think for me is slightly different is we had an established team for 2ish years, the company decided it grew too fast, we essentially cut the team in half, and now are having to figure out tech touch strategies and scalability initiatives (while lowering unit cost). I think it would be much easier if we were starting from scratch, but are now having to reset a lot of expectations across the business, for our customers, etc.
• Balancing CS work versus business projects/changes. Has anyone thought about a capacity/intake type process for Customer Success? We only have so much bandwidth, but unlike an engineering team are not able to say "no" if there's a customer impacting change that's being introduced. Curious if anyone has managed that successfully.
• Tying CS to direct outcomes and results - This is probably my biggest challenge for 2021.