Organizing Roles in Scaled Customer Success
January 19, 2023
The ability to scale a program can make a difference in the quality of your one-to-one interactions. This week the Gain Grow Retain Leadership Office Hours took a look at how teams are setting up roles to allow effective scaling.
Questions to Consider
- What are the discreet functions you have built your scaled CS programs (aka content, community, tech, ops, analytics, program manager, etc.)?
- How have you organized your teams to maximize your scaled CS?
Key Insights
Much of our conversation with leaders has centered on the ‘what’ - trying to understand the type of activities that need to get done in order to build a scaled customer success experience.
Here are 5 key activities from a high-level that need to be covered:
- Program Strategy - making these individual activities feel like a cohesive unit that can get mapped along the customer journey
- Marketing Distribution - need to have access to your customers to get their attention and drive their attendance towards your key programs
- Content Creation - using a subject matter expert to build content that can help push the experience and show authority in the domain
- Actionable Insights - analytics that can tie together the program activities with key personas to see if it's driving the intended impact
- Peer-Driven Experiences - customers are always looking for ways to be connected to your brand, to your team and to their fellow colleagues
Here’s a simplified RACI matrix that you could use to showcase these main activities of the program to generate the right people doing the right work.
Team
Every organization has a different subset of roles and a different way that they are organized, but we kept hearing about similar roles amongst scaled customer teams during the discussion:
- Program Manager
- reduces friction
- streamlines the customer journey
- coordinates closely with marketing, sales, cs and engineering
- Scaled CSM
- driving engagement with a subset of the customers who raise their hand
- using data to drive specific engagements with customers who are growing
- maybe subject matter expert for scaled content
- Customer Marketing
- helping to build distribution plans for customers
- shaping formats of content and messaging
- CS Ops
- Orchestrating the technical aspects
- Pulling together data and insights
Other roles to consider:
- Community Manager - leading the community experience
- Content Creator - a dedicated role to creating content (maybe not subject matter expert)
Here are some other musings that we heard while in the room with these leaders:
- Build a ‘Digital Foundation” of communications and touchpoints
- More email communications ties to product education
- Build strong email campaigns
- Strengthen the role of your feedback tools and make sure they are asking the right questions
- Identify the data necessary to scale effectively and have your Ops team help make sure you are able to collect it
- Community experiences that you should be thinking about:
- Tech touch campaigns with support from Marketing team to increase adoption
- Release Notes
- Information begets engagement
- Engagement begets successful Community
- Get to the point where Community is self-policed for content
- In-app messages and tutorials
- Leverage during renewal time
- Identify and launch at key milestones or change events
- Prompt engagements when risk factors start showing on account
- Results in stronger click rates than email
- Help to get your teams to think more deeply about frameworks - a repeatable way to help think about a potential problem and solution
- Create workshops that guide customers through processes with a framework to make it easier
Watch For
- Churn impact
- Are you scaling too aggressively? (look at churning customers to see if there are patterns)
- Should rarely if ever be ‘digital only’
- Monitor NPS for customers who are in the scale process to catch concerns before they become problems
- Smaller book of business
- Focus on what data you currently have and what do you need?
- Where are customers in their health cycle?
- On fire? Build content to support them at scale
- On their way - gather customer stories to share
Additional Information
