Lessons that I learned by being a client

As Customer Success leaders, we are used to delivering value to clients, but it is very rare that we are put in the client seat. I had the opportunity to lead a project for the company with the aim to embed a 3rd?party technology whose purpose is to improve our clients’ journey.

As part of this project, I led the selection process, the negotiation, and also the actual onboarding.

It is expected that following a “honeymoon” sales cycle, real engagement life starts and hiccups are to be expected. My onboarding experience with the selected vendor was sub-optimal, to say the least. Yet, it was a priceless opportunity to reinforce what we, people who are responsible to deliver software to clients, should and should not do.

So, here is what I learned to do and what not to do as a CS leader while being a client implementing a new SaaS platform:

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Do's

·?Let your?client's champion kickoff the joint engagement.?It's much easier when the client’s main contact is a true champion! It helps with getting buy-in from other people in the client’s organization and creates a cohesive team that is committed to implementing the product. As a practice, it is recommended to set a pre-kickoff call with the client’s project lead and enable him to drive the kickoff meeting.

·?Before implementing, learn about the client. Sounds obvious, right? In our recent case, the use case of why we bought was thoroughly discussed with the vendor’s sales team. It happens to be that the use case is not the normal bread and butter for the vendor and the implementation team never stopped to understand what the client really wanted to implement. It resulted in the vendor implementing their mainstream workflow and afterward having to redo the whole thing since they realized that they had not delivered the right functionality.

·?Document in a few lines the proposed solution from the customer experience point of view and share it with your client.?Proper documentation could have saved the double work reviewing the above bullet. Describing the client experience is the best way to nail it down.

·?Don’t?rely on?the client to manage the implementation, this is the vendor’s job. Remember the first bullet in the list about letting the client’s champion run the kickoff and help with internal buy-in? That cannot replace proper project management or at least tasks management done by the vendor. If the implementation fails, the vendor has more to lose. This is why managing an effective and frictionless onboarding process is so important.?

·?Joint Slack channels for vendor and client work!?Tech companies live and breathe Slack as an internal communication platform. When two tech companies join forces, there is nothing more natural than hopping on a joint Slack channel.

·?When your client escalates an issue, you better treat it with urgency.?The client is not always right, however, the client is always the client. An escalation usually happens when the client expects the vendor to fix a problem, but there is also the aspect of fixing the person. An escalation should be treated as a trigger that requires all your attention to be devoted towards the person who escalated it. You better treat it with the top sense of urgency.

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Don’ts

·?Don’t let your implementation team deliver bad commercial news. I heard an implementation specialist telling me, “You did not buy this”. Aside from the fact that she was wrong, why wouldn’t such a dispute be escalated back to the salesperson who sold the deal?

·?COVID, kids, and video. We all got used over the past 18 months to have our kids join work-related video calls. I personally enjoy it very much getting to know my employees’ and colleagues’ families. Yet it's very different to mix business and family when on the other end there's the client.

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In essence, this exercise reinforced what I already knew about the purpose of our existence as Customer Success professionals:

·?We are here to shorten the path to value and to provide the best-in-class onboarding experience.

·?We are here to become trusted advisors by actively learning the client’s pains, designing a technological remedy to these pains, and eventually have the right tools to measure the value that we provide.

·?If we do all the above right, then we are on the path to get the reward of an expanded business with that same client.