Interacting and collaborating with customers can take a significant toll on the CSM’s effectiveness, as well as work-life balance. Arranging meetings, planning, collecting data, preparing, executing, handling customer complaints and escalations can be a challenge. Effectiveness and efficiency in the execution of these tasks can minimize both customer’s and customer success manager’s time and improve the customer experience factor as well. Ideas shared in this chapter will help managers do more with less.
Knowledge Repository
Big four consulting companies historically took the lead in establishing knowledge repositories for internal use first and then to share information and training selectively with external parties. The knowledge repository concept has caught on and is pursued by most large vendors now. It allows sharing among colleagues of best practices and lessons learned by senior vendor personnel. Customers appreciate this emerging, constantly updated stream of information, and expect their vendor contacts to share relevant information timely and contextually.
Vendors should disseminate this information with care. As lessons are learned, relevant vendor resources should publish this information on knowledge-sharing forums, discuss with peers to agree on a consistent external communication update, then train all relevant staff to use this formalized information for communicating with clients. Establishing and driving a consistent message outside the organization is important for minimizing confusion among both internal and external audiences.
Knowledge repositories are also a good place to host technical and business development training materials. Questions and topics such as “how are the vendor’s products useful for customers’ needs,” “how is the vendor product configured and implemented,” “what messaging should I use to engage with prospects,” should be answerable with the training content in these repositories. New recruits will find this business and technical knowledge useful in interacting with customers.
Customer Success Technology Solution
A technology platform underpins a significant part of the efficiency and effectiveness playbook, drawing from American football terminology. It helps automate, driving a consistent experience and success approach among all CSM professionals at a given vendor. (Complete value proposition of such solutions can be obtained from technology providers’ websites. I cover only the salient points in the context of the messages outlined in this book.) Key performance and risk indicators, customer satisfaction scores, product goals, action items, assigned customer and vendor resource details, notifications, collaterals, feedback tools and surveys, dashboards, reporting, analysis, and integration with third-party systems, collectively become a monumental undertaking that can only be managed through a technology platform for large vendors. Sharing guidance and collaboration become much easier with such a solution.
Providing information as and when needed also helps engage the customer. Given the challenges inherent with cloud-based solutions outlined in previous chapters, out of sight, out of mind is a significant risk and shouldn’t be taken lightly. Customers should constantly be apprised of the value provided by a vendor’s solutions. A technology-based solution cost-effectively provides continuous visibility and always keeps the vendor’s brand at the forefront.
Customers should be encouraged to bookmark the link to the platform to access implementation notes, training materials, corporate documentation such as product vision and roadmap, company updates, business development presentations, and product brochures. Even if other solutions exist that house this documentation, it is okay to provide redundancy. Duplication will not hurt if the information is kept updated. From my standpoint, a customer success technology platform is the ideal location for customers to access such vendor information.
This technology solution can also be used to insert meaningful updates to the customer’s daily communication platforms such as email, corporate chat, and mobile interfaces. In addition to project-specific updates, daily or periodic tips and tricks techniques can be pursued to stay uppermost in the customer’s mind.
