Customer Success and Cross-Functional Alignment??

Customer success function as we all know is a People’s function with an ultimate goal to help customers achieve their business objectives and ensure customer satisfaction/delight. A Customer Success Manager/ Team needs to collaborate or align with multiple internal teams on a regular basis. It’s not a 1 man job but a combined effort of multiple teams. The best way to collaborate is Regular Communication amongst all the internal teams that someway or the other have an impact on the Customer.

I’ve personally observed that there are teams who reach out to the other internal teams when the need arises, which is equivalent to a firefighting situation. You’ll spend major time to share context and explain the scenario which actually could be saved if there were regular cadences/ communications in place.

The best part of the cross-functional alignment is that every concerned team in the organization is on the same page in terms of progress on respective accounts.

?I’ll list out the important teams with whom a regular cadence or alignment is necessary:

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Sales Team

The relationship between customer success and sales is that?of a positive feedback loop that yields more and more value as time goes on. There has to be regular interaction between the Sales and CS to ensure the expectations have been set up correctly with the customer. The initial interaction kickstarts when a Prospect turns into a customer and has to be handed over to the CS team. In order to ensure a smooth handover, a detailed process should be in place to take over the customer which involves the answer to the following questions:

1. Complete Business use case and Quantifiable Business KPI's

2. Why have they bought us in the first place

3. Have they earlier used any similar product? If yes, what were the limitations?

4. Stakeholders involved and the SPOC from the customer’s end

5. Order form/ Invoice which has the details of plan opted for

6. MRR/ARR

7. Potential Upsell opportunity that needs to be taken care of

As soon as the Handover is complete, now the CS team needs to ensure that the assigned Salesperson is updated on the following points on a regular basis:

1. Account Health

2. Any shortcoming/Red Flag which might hamper renewals

3. Upsell opportunity

4. Mismatch in the expectations

5. Account Audit/ MBR/ QBR calls

6. CSQR: Customer success qualified reference

7. Churn Analysis

8. Change in SPOC or the Decision Maker

There need to be regular meetings with the sales team to understand any shortcomings in the existing deals or discuss any upcoming deals, so that the team is already prepared.

This collaboration ensures that the work done for the customers is highlighted on different platforms so that it can also help in getting new customers.

Marketing Team

The marketing team is responsible to promote the offerings/product via multiple platforms to ensure they generate a considerable amount of Leads that will help add revenue. While they work on campaigns, the real use cases of existing customers can definitely add more credibility to the campaigns which as a result will generate Quality Leads as well as help reduce Custome acquisition costs.

Customer Success can very well help the marketing team in the above exercise as they are already working closely with the customers to achieve their respective business goals. The Customer Success team can provide CSQAs, i.e. Customer success qualified advocacy by the following means:

1. Product/ Services Testimonials (Video/ written)
2. Case Studies reflecting on successful KPI achievement (Video/ written)
3. Webinars/ Fireside Chats with Industry experts in the existing customer base
4. Customers acting as promoters/advocates of the product in their respective circles
5. Organizing industry-specific events where our customers can act as Brand advocates

Product Team

This collaboration is very critical in terms of improving or enhancing the product as per the customer demands. It also helps ensure that the product roadmap is in sync with the requests of the end customers.

CS team can help the product team in the following scenarios:

1. Regular Product feedback
2. Feature requests (Generic/ Industry-specific)
3. New feature acceptance/feedback
4. Getting a small group of heavy users for Beta testing a new feature and gather feedback
5. Regular customer calls to discuss use cases
6. NPS
7. Most loved features of the product and most hated/unused/not so useful features as per the customer
8. Recurring Bugs/ Issues in the product or platform

Also, the product team needs to ensure that the CS is updated on the following points on regular basis:

1. Product Enhancements

2. Product Roadmap

3. Timelines of New Feature Development

4. Status of product feature Requests

5. Demo on new features

There need to be regular meetings with the product team to have an understanding of the above-mentioned points. The best part is to have all the tasks documented in a tracker (Google sheets, Jira, etc.), and in every meeting, the respective document should be updated with comments in terms of Timelines/ next actionable.

Customer Support Team

The customer support team is the one that resolves technical queries for the customer. The Customer Success can get valuable information from the support to understand the experience of the customer:

1. Number of tickets raised by a customer on a daily/weekly/monthly basis

2. Number of P1(High Priority issues) raised.

3. SLAs on the tickets

4. Number of Resolved and Pending tickets

5. Recurring bugs on the platform

These tickets can be broken down into Industry, Revenue, Plan type, and Region to understand segment-specific information and accordingly, focus on the red zones which have high impact.

This needs a?weekly meeting?(depending on bandwidth)so that timely actions are taken.

These are the major teams with whom the CS team should definitely be in sync/ aligned to ensure smooth customer experience as well as achievement of SUCCESS KPIs.

At last, I'll leave you with one of the best quotes by Henry Ford:

"Coming together is the beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is SUCCESS."