Handling customer interactions can be a very frustrating experience. Lack of timely response, misunderstandings, and a slow pace can enervate the most enthusiastic and experienced customer success managers. Partial attentiveness, by customer contacts, to vendor requests, failed configurations undertook by inexperienced customer staff, reassignment of project staff, and project sponsor exit can result in rework and or project delays.
If the customer is motivated and is collaborating proactively, the rest of this section may not apply. If not, then there are ways to remediate this situation.
Customer contacts typically have numerous tasks on their plate, each seemingly more important than the other. Daily prioritization is always a struggle. It becomes the responsibility of customer success lead to raise his or her project’s priority in the customer’s mindset. Most naïve resources or newcomers to this role resort to excessive emailing, calls, or requests for onsite visits, which tend to have an opposite effect and end up annoying the customer.
A more effective strategy is to gradually raise awareness through a persistent sharing of newer information and a show-and-tell approach. If you ask the customer to gather all the information and then expect to start configuration, the likelihood of getting started soon automatically goes down. Alternately, minimize requests sent to the customer, go with what you have, make assumptions, note them, enable configurations to change them later, demonstrate a prototype or proof of concept, and validate assumptions with the customer. As the customer contacts see and interact with the emerging solution, you will trigger their imagination, excitement, and passionate collaboration with the solution.
Your customer points of contact need to make a business case internally to collect critical information from their colleagues. They will likely struggle to get that information, since the talk tracks you provided may not be as clear to them as to you. Follow up your talk-tracks in writing so that they can refer to it and forward it as appropriate. Try to anticipate and reduce resistance they might face internally.
Large customer organizations have a command structure with multiple layers of communication. The manager reports to the director, who reports to the vice president, and so on. Every decision may require various approvals and could take longer. Customer service managers need to tailor their talk tracks accordingly, plan to work with, explain, and get buy-in from multiple customer executive levels.
Be patient with newer customer recruits and, if appropriate consulting partner resources. If it takes extra effort to train them, make that extra effort. While you live and breathe your software solution every day, they do not. Don’t get frustrated and, worse, show that frustration in front of the customer resource. If the skill set required of the customer or partner resource is not adequate, mention that privately to the project sponsor.
Lastly, while the vendor is motivated in anticipation of the financial windfall, the customer is looking for value from the implementation and resulting recognition from driving that value within their organization. Make the customer contact heroes in the eyes of their peers within their organization. Strive to get the awards and recognition for their work on the project.
All these methods will help you get the required attention from the customer and help tide through project management challenges within the customer organization. You will end up making friends who will remain your strong supporters, not only while they are with the customer but also at their future employers.
Superior customer success skills become super crucial in such situations. Your sales and project management skills outlined earlier in this chapter will enable you to get the required resources from both the vendor and customer end and be successful in your projects.
Key Takeaways:
The vendor is expected to do more always
Minimize asks of the customer—they are always stretched thin