I’ve long been an advocate for including the Customer Support group as a component of the Customer Success organization, as it makes sense to keep the two groups that do the most talking to the customers together and in proper alignment. Both roles require knowledge of the product and of the customers. Both develop in-depth data about specific customers. (And both have the regrettable habit of sitting on that data instead of marketing it to the rest of the company!) Each has things to contribute to the other, and grouping them together can enable and encourage that sharing to take place. The ultimate goal of that partnership is increased customer retention.
What can Support Contribute to Success?
From my own experience running a Support group and later as a consultant in Support operations, technology, and strategy for many years, support reps often have unique insights as to how customers are actually using the product, and that can include ways that the product designers never anticipated. That knowledge can be vital for CSMs to know as they work to assist the customers to achieve their productivity and profitability goals.
Support will also often have insight into the customers’ organizations — who is a champion, influencer, or a detractor, and their relative strengths. Customers talking to Support can be very informative about what’s going on at their end politically. They will also often talk about desired new features and functionality, and/or about what else their company is buying. Support is a great place for gathering customer intelligence.
What can Success Contribute to Support?
To begin with, an awareness of the need to keep retention in mind in all interactions, and a greater field of vision. Support is understandably focused on fixing whatever was broken as their primary objective. But beyond the immediate, what can be learned about the health of this customer relationship? What other customers might be affected by this issue?
Next, a sensitivity to expansion opportunities in the customer relationships, and a sharp ear for customer intelligence and market information. Success needs to give good questions to Support that can be casually worked into the conversations — and then listen and take action on the data they receive from the agents.
Partnership behavior: When CSMs get involved in processing Support issues or dealing with escalations, they need to be careful not to cause later problems by doing or promising things that are not within Support’s scope. Care also needs to be taken to ensure that the Support case management system is updated with everything the CSM has done or said to the customer so that the agents can see the whole picture.
Learning About Each Other
Both Support agents and CSMs need to have a clear knowledge of what each role includes and how it works so that they can see the intersections of the partnership. One method for approaching this is to assign new CSMs to Support as they are onboarded, and have new Support agents spend time with the CSMs as part of their training. Joint meetings should also be held as a regular activity to discuss what both teams are hearing from the customers.
What has worked in your company to establish and further the partnership? Join us in The Customer Success Forum on LinkedIn for the discussion.
Are you getting the maximum value from your Customer Support group? If you’re at all uncertain about the answer, see the Consulting Services page for links to Customer Support Operations resources. There are links to two Case Studies there as well.
