Leadership Skills Related to Customer Success
Hello Customer Success Managers,
I want to let you know that you are one of the most skilled people in the market. And that is because you are dealing with everyone in the business lifecycle, service providers, operations, supply chain, product management, sales, procurement and customers. And this gives you the ability to improve from different perspectives.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS MANAGERS ARE THE MOST SKILLED PEOPLE IN THE MARKET!
Although this is great, but there is always opportunity to improve. And here in this article I am coming to you with a piece of knowledge where we will highlight some leadership skills that will definitely improve your productivity and efficiency more and more. But you have never think about them as a skills!
Remote work culture:
Many organizations have started adopting a remote work culture. This has been a significant cost-saver for many. It saves on various overhead costs such as air conditioning, electricity, water, cleaning, coffee service, workspace, and many others. However, the usage of Internet and phone communication was rising. But even taking that into consideration, it is still a significantly cheaper option for organizations when the costs are compared.
However, it has some downsides too. Many employers believe that productivity rates are going down. Further, employees seemingly have less focuses they tend to get distracted with home chores and family.
Remote work can only be successful if the employees have a positive outlook toward it and tend to be ethical in their work habits.
While some organizations have tools and technologies to track people’s time on their PCs, it has come to feel like micromanagement. Giving your entire focus to work has to come as a discipline and not simply because the organization tracks what you do. On the other hand, even in physical work, there are situations where employees spend their time talking to their colleagues or taking coffee or smoking breaks. Even when employees are physically presented the office, they may still not be always productive.
A better approach to measuring the success of remote work is by ensuring the outcomes are met on time and reviewing if productivity levels are within the acceptable range. If not, quick actions need to be taken for the relevant employees in making them aware that they are not up to the mark from a productivity standpoint. Unless this is corrected, it will lead to a situation where the overall organizational productivity levels are low. You must ensure the overall organizational productivity levels are maintained throughout for the organization to get their desired outputs.
Identifying true costs:
Identifying the actual cost is very important in making any business decisions with cost-effectiveness. The true cost refers to the real cost required in getting the basics right to meet the business requirement. When it comes to cost optimization, actual cost plays a significant role. This is because any optimization needed can only be made up to the point of the true cost of a product or service you sell. While businesses can have many buffers and risk factors factored in for a cost, there is al- ways a bare minimum cost involved in any product or service. Unless this cost is incurred, the business will not have a way to sustain itself. Let us take a salary as an example. While employees are given various allowances and bonuses, there is always a mandatory base salary. Nevertheless, there is always a situation where a business can not go down further to a certain level. This may vary from business to business of any optimization. On the other hand, if it’s a product company, there will be a base cost required to make the product, and no optimization can go further.
It is essential to identify the actual cost because you only know how far you have a scope for optimization.
The scope of optimization may vary very much from one case to the other. Gradual cost optimization is always recommended for the simple reason that it takes some time for people to adapt to any cost change that is rolled out. If it is a premature optimization, employees may feel its impact drastically and could potentially lead to situations of dissatisfaction and even potential job exits too.
Process bottlenecks:
Business process plays a vital role in any organization irrespective of its size or scale.
Organizations with mature, proven processes operate more methodically than the rest. Process bottlenecks are pretty familiar to any business process. These are the aspects that slow down the business process and its desired outcomes. The more process bottlenecks exist, the more inefficient the process outcomes. As a leader or manager, you need to have an exceptionally good awareness of the typical process bottlenecks that your organization faces. They could be periodic or relevant to specific individuals or businesses. They can be internal or external.
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It is always recommended that you do a quick audit or a random analysis of a business process to identify if it is delivering the outcomes in the most optimum way. In the event if you identify any inefficiencies, you need to do a deep dive to understand the possible causes.
In your deep dive, you may identify challenges pertinent to people business processes or even external factors. Any identified bottlenecks should be a high priority. The prioritization for fixing them depends entirely on how significant the business impact could be. However, any process bottlenecks should be fixed as soon as possible whether the impact is large or small.
Stabilize challenges:
The stabilization of challenges is an indication that an organization is achieving maturity. While challenges are unavoidable, stabilizing them means taking measures to ensure that they do not create a major impact on the business process or outcomes. While all challenges are unique, one might seem to have a similarity to a previous challenge or something that a competitor has faced before. Organizational maturity is when the company establishes guidelines for actions to correct or mitigate some of the challenges they may encounter. They can be used as a guideline to take the first step toward a solution.
One such example could be guidelines for handling an emergency. In this case, the organization will have established emergency contacts for the employees to reach out to. The people in charge of the emergency handling will be trained to cover most emergencies, from employees becoming sick to a sudden building evacuation.
When organizations mature, they will generally have guidelines to address the majority of the issues that could potentially affect the organization’s overall productivity.
As a leader, it is recommended that you focus on identifying ways to minimize the impacts of any potential destabilizing problems and work on a long-term plan to address them successfully.
I am sure you find those four subjects are interesting! And I will leave it for you to read about each one of them in the Leadership handbook: Crafting Captains
You will find step-by-step approach of how to improve each one of them.
Share your thoughts in the comments about what other skill is essential for Customer Success Managers..?
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