The Importance of Sharing Customer Data

By Kristen Hayer

Bob (not his real name) was hired to lead a new customer success team. He immediately experienced friction between his brand, new team, and both the product and sales teams in his organization. In order to shelter his team from this friction, he placed himself between his team and all other teams in the organization. Everything had to flow through him. Of course, this quickly became overwhelming, and he missed out on proactive opportunities to build relationships with other leaders in the organization. Instead, he started to take a defensive stance toward his peers, and limit the amount of data that his CSMs shared with other teams. His thinking was, “If nobody knows what we’re doing, they can’t complain and my team will be safe.” Unfortunately, this meant he had no leverage to ask for data he needed from other teams, so his team ended up doing a lot of extra monitoring and work outside of the scope of customer success. Their performance as a team plummeted, and Bob was fired within his first year.

While this is a real example, it is an extreme one. That said, I see smaller instances of data hoarding inside almost every organization we work with. Sometimes this happens inadvertently: the leader isn’t enforcing data hygiene or they haven’t focused on building reports. Often, however, there is a level of data hoarding going on. The reality is that data is power, and people often want power or are afraid of losing it. Here are some of the ways that data hoarding can surface on your team:

HOARDING INFORMATION

Funneling - Leaders who want a high level of control will often funnel all information through themselves (like Bob). This gives them a sense of power over their coworkers and a feeling of control over their own situation and team.

Single Points of Failure – Team members might not be willing to be transparent with data because they see it as job protection. If everyone has to go to Sue to ask for a particular kind of information, Sue sees her job as safe.

Avoidance of Admin Work – Every job has a little bit of admin work to it. Team members who don’t understand that keeping their customer data in their email and calendar rather than in their customer management tools, and blame it on the difficulty of logging activities.

 At its root, data hoarding is often about fear. It can be a fear of losing power or control, a fear of not getting credit for the work you’re doing, a fear of losing your job or losing headcount on your team. In customer success specifically, it may also come from a fear of losing the primary customer relationship to another team.

While all of these are understandable fears, the result of these fears is processes that won’t scale, team members who feel undervalued and micromanaged, and strategic decisions that are being made without key data points. There is a way to approach data from a place of power, instead of a position of fear.

SHARING CUSTOMER DATA

Be a Resource – CS teams have their fingers on the pulse of customer data. That can be packaged in different ways for different teams. If you can create transparent reports that provide other teams with exactly the information they need, you become invaluable.

Understand Other Teams – Once you start sharing key information with other teams, they will start to see CS as a resource. This could result in a feeling like, “Hey, we just handed you a list of our priorities along with data to support them, why aren’t you jumping on this?” By understanding the competing priorities of other teams, CS leaders can report back to their teams on how the data is being used, even when it may not be visible on the surface.

Create a Success Culture – When you live and breathe customer success, it can be easy to think that everyone in your company hears customer success stories and understand how customers are using your solution. However, they don’t. By sharing success stories, value propositions, customer requests and challenges with other teams, CS leaders can help other parts of the organization to be more customer-focused, which benefits the entire organization.

When leaders overcome their fears, they can start to view the data that their team collects as a source of power that, when shared, improves their position and that of their team. Sharing data allows you to be seen by other leaders in the company as an important resource and a trusted internal advisor. Being transparent with your data allows you to clearly demonstrate the value of your success team. It also makes your company more scalable, empowers your team, and allows your leadership and board to make strategic decisions that are data-driven.

The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers online training for, both Leaders and CSMs, as well as consulting engagements. Please visit TheSuccessLeague.io for information on our full offerings.