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

• CMX Community (community for community managers) - https://cmxhub.com/
• The Business of Belonging: How to Make Community Your Competitive Advantage