How does Customer Success as an organizational function make a positive impact on customer experience?
The field of Customer Success has become a critical linchpin for both product and service-based tech organizations across the last decade, establishing itself not only as a powerful enabler for business retention and growth, but most importantly, as a significant value creator for customers.
In this blog we’ll cover 5 key principles that a Customer Success professional can implement and leverage to ensure a positive customer experience.
Jump to a specific section:
- Alignment: Confidence that we are on the same page
- Planning: Visibility of what we are doing when and how it helps meet my business goals
- Communication: A trusted advisor that I can be in regular contact with and who can arm me with the information I need
- Collaboration: A partner in this initiative that can help me deliver for my business
- Customization: Not a one size fits all approach to all things
5 key principles for customer experience success
1. Alignment
As professionals in a product or service, it can be tempting to jump straight in to delivering for our customer, with the intention to “wow” them with the speed at which we can get things off the ground and underway.
However, during the sales to delivery handover, it is possible that expectations can become misaligned or that the customer’s business goals that led to the purchase of the product or service have gone uncommunicated.
This is why alignment is so important. It allows all parties involved to confirm the scope of work, ensure expectations are aligned, or identifies where expectations need to be managed.
Alignment is not only important at the beginning, continued alignment throughout the course of the project or service ensures that the scope of work is still meeting the customers business goals. Where necessary, it provides the opportunity to re-scope as those business goals evolve. It’s important that Customer Success is constantly evaluating the value being provided to the customer and is prepared to pivot to alternative solutions when necessary and feasible.
2. Planning
As the saying goes “fail to plan, and you plan to fail.” It isn’t an often-repeated phrase for no reason!
Planning the execution of a product rollout or service delivery is fundamental to delivering success for customers.
Planning should take into account;
- key or compelling event dates that the customer is using your product or service to facilitate
- potential disruptions to day-to-day operations that might hinder activity (change freeze anyone?)
- Collaboration with the customer to ensure buy-in and commitment of resource to make the plan happen
Ok great, so you have your plan all set up and off you go! This will all go to plan, right?!
Sadly, not always! With the best will in the world and attention to detail in the planning phase, priorities change, directives change, and the plan must adapt accordingly.
Continually reviewing the plan with your customer, ensuring that it is still fit-for-purpose, delivering the right activities at the right time and meeting the appropriate milestones builds on the principle of alignment by putting that alignment into action and making it visible.
When delivering services, I constantly leverage and refer back to the plan to help guide and aid discussions. It helps to keep stakeholders focused and informed, and it means issues or blockers can be proactively managed before they become showstoppers.
3. Communication
Communication is among the most important skills required when working in Customer Success. You’ll be communicating cross-functionally internally within your organisation, and with a range of stakeholders within your customers organisation, from the C-Suite, through to Procurement and Technical Specialists.
The ability to convey the right messaging to the right audience is a critical capability that can help to gain buy-in and support from important stakeholders.
And it’s not only the type of information shared that is important. The frequency and format of communication can have just as much of a positive or negative impact.
Customers without regular communication often drift and can in worst case scenarios, assume you are reneging on your contract. This results in disengagement, dissatisfaction and in extreme cases, the customer feeling the need to micro-manage their supplier. Not ideal and unlikely to yield a renewal!
On the flip side, customers with regular communication organically develop trust and confidence in their suppliers. They feel empowered by your service which helps to cultivate a partnership that can lead to long term relationships. These customers can often become our biggest advocates and will champion your service.
As to the debate around under and over-communicating… I used to be an advocate for over-communicating. However, this should be treated with caution, and may differ depending on the stakeholder in question.
C-Level Executives are often thinly stretched. Over-communicating via email is likely to unnecessarily fill their inbox and lessen the impact of what you are trying to tell them. Choose what updates you provide carefully, otherwise you risk diluting your key messages in amongst daily “noise”. C-Level stakeholders are likely to join service review meetings, and act as the top level of escalation for any issues or blockers.
Your daily contact, however, will likely need to have a higher level of visibility. They may well need to be on copy for all communications so that they can step in as an initial point of escalation or help direct any queries to an appropriate stakeholder.
Quality and quantity of communication are equally important, so first ask yourself what you are trying to achieve by adding that name to an email or including that stakeholder in a meeting request.
4. Collaboration
Many services require significant collaboration, whether it’s to collect data, provision systems or secure Executive Sponsorship, the list really can be endless.
The expectation that collaboration will be required should be communicated early on, ideally during the sales process, but at a minimum, when first aligning on the service as sold.
Customers can rightly become frustrated when significant effort on their part comes as an unwelcome surprise, and without this information up front, they are unable to resource the initiative effectively. Another example of the importance of both alignment and communication!
Formal tools such as RACI’s can be used if a documented approach is required, however for many customers, a simple discussion covering the roles and responsibilities of all stakeholders required during the first alignment meeting can be enough.
Establishing effective collaboration can have several benefits:
- Reduce blockers during delivery by ensuring engagement
- Secures senior stakeholder support for remediating blockers
- Embeds the customer as part of the “extended team”. We are all working towards the same goal after all!
Effective collaboration is the manifestation of the supplier and customers agreement to work together to achieve the customers business goals.
I like to think of services as a team effort, with each constituent part playing their role and doing their part. True collaboration makes the service less “transactional” and contributes to the development of partnership between the two parties.
5. Customization
While I am undoubtedly and unashamedly a proponent of Standardised service delivery, it would be remiss of me to not acknowledge the need to customize certain aspects of a customer’s service, and as such their resulting experience.
Whether it’s agreeing and measuring specific KPIs that matter to the client, reporting specific data points during business reviews or the ability to adjust deliverables to arm the customer with critical information, it’s important to recognise that not all customers are the same and their needs will differ.
But this doesn’t mean that all aspects of a service must be completely custom. In fact, the administrative effort during the sales cycle and the resulting service delivery resourcing challenges would quickly make a completely custom approach unsustainable.
So, what’s the solution? Establishing a delivery framework with key milestones and deliverables.
By establishing a delivery framework that is designed to deliver specific deliverables and outcomes, but with the flexibility to customize aspects of those deliverables to provide the customer with the information they need to make their business decisions, we have the ability to deliver agreed outcomes combined with the customer specific consultancy the client requires.
Customers truly value when their suppliers can adapt to meet their needs. It demonstrates an understanding of the client’s business and a willingness to help drive their success.
In closing
While it’s true that many of the key principles discussed are relatively simple behaviours and activities, the fundamentals if you will, are so often the casualties of maintaining large or complex client portfolios, managing multiple deadlines and ensuring progress on escalations. They can simply, “drop off the radar”, intentionally or not.
I am reminded of an experience when taking over a client account as a new Customer Success Director at Livingstone and thinking to myself, “what would I want and expect if I was the customer?”.
I narrowed it down to 5 things;
- Alignment – Confidence that we are on the same page
- Planning – Visibility of what we are doing when and how it helps meet my business goals
- Communication – A trusted advisor that I can be in regular contact with and who can arm me with the information I need
- Collaboration – A partner in this initiative that can help me deliver for my business
- Customisation – Not a one size fits all approach to all things
The impact of implementing and maintaining these 5 key principles resulted in the development of a strong partnership with our client, with excellent customer feedback received across Livingstone’s Customer Success and Service Delivery teams.
And did we secure a renewal, you may ask? We sure did. And may the partnership continue!
About the author:
Lianne Murphy
Customer Success Director
Customer Success Director at Livingstone, Lianne looks after a broad portfolio of clients and ensures successful delivery of Software Asset Management services alongside a team of skilled SAM Consultants.
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