You might be staring at this chapter title with skepticism. In fact, if you're like us, you may immediately be thinking of your least favorite support experience with your least favorite consumer brand. And you probably would come up with a number of words to describe that scenario before you suggested the term proactive. Historically, that poor perception of customer support has been appropriate.
In the age before recurring revenue business models, Support teams were often the only ones thinking about the client after the purchase. The client would be sold a multimillion-dollar contract and an implementation package, only later to escalate to the Support team because they weren't getting value. That escalation would be leveraged as an opportunity to sell the client a lucrative support maintenance contract, which was essentially a way for the vendor to get the client to pay for when they escalated.
In the new Age of the Customer, as we've discussed, vendors have become much more proactive in ensuring that clients get value. Many of the people who grew up in those reactive Support organizations are now excited to build and lead Customer Success teams in order to solve the root causes behind the flurry of escalations that once defined their working lives. The question becomes, What happens to the Support team in a world where proactivity is paramount?
The first CSM teams were often Support teams that were reconfigured in two ways: (1) the reps were assigned to specific clients, instead of giving each client to whichever Support person was available or had the requisite product expertise, and (2) the reps were assigned in perpetuity, instead of for the duration of the ticket. The result was “firefighting in perpetuity.” The teams continued to be reactive to client needs—except now, they didn't have the queue and clear conclusion of an issue to help them streamline their work. Many of these folks burned out, and their clients often burned out, too.
As CSM teams realized the need to be more proactive in guiding clients in the right direction, to preclude a crisis, they realized that their old friends in Support could be helpful partners to them. Support would continue to operate in “reactive” mode, handling inbound technical issues, and CSMs would free up time to be more proactive.
This division of labor sounds easier than it is, however. Marlene Lee Summers is the VP of Global Product Support at Vlocity and previously was VP Customer Support Services & Community at Zuora, so she has first-hand experience in creating collaborative relationships and processes between Support and CSM teams, in both a startup environment and a publicly traded company. Here's how she explains the challenge:
Moreover, how do you get the CSM to trust Support enough to feel comfortable sending their clients to Support when they have an issue? Summers recommends limiting the number of times a client is rerouted within Support. You can do this by creating specialized Subject Matter Expert teams, so that “you're not going to go through five different people to just to be able to get to the one person who could actually answer your issue.” Summers adds, “Highly tiered Support models are the equivalent of the dreaded phone tree hell in my mind. No one wants to deal with a phone tree—you want to be in touch with one person who will solve your problem.”
When you can quickly connect the client with someone who can help and thereby avoid delays in ticket resolution, the client won't feel compelled to go back to their CSM. “The typical bad scenario is the client says, ‘You told me to file a ticket. Now it's been sitting for ten days and nothing has happened.’ Then the CSM is the one that has to drive the escalation and poke to get the ticket resolved. But now you've created this bad cycle of behavior where the client feels the only way to get help is to escalate to the CSM.” Escalation is equivalent to dialing 0 on a phone tree, or yelling “Operator!” To avoid and break this cycle, the Support team must roll out their own escalation process so that clients know that raising their hand for more help will result in an action plan, driven by Support, not the CSM. The CSM can simply keep abreast of the escalation for context. (This also ensures that Support can work 24/7 on the escalation as needed, across multiple geographic shifts, which a CSM would not be able to do.)
The second thing you have to do to sustain this division of labor—with CSM being proactive and Support managing reactive cases—is to ensure the Support team has visibility into the client's context.
It used to be that Support teams would resolve tickets with blinders on. They'd be completely unaware of any other aspect of the client's context: Is the client's renewal due this month? Is the sales team working on a major expansion with them? Is this a generally happy client that ran into an issue, or is this support ticket the latest in a series of crises they've experienced? What Outcome was the client trying to achieve when they ran into this technical issue? Does this issue relate to a project that the Services team was working on with the client?
Without fully understanding the context, a Support rep might not prioritize the client's issue appropriately in their queue. They also might not resolve the root cause of the problem, proposing a Band-Aid solution instead, without realizing it. They may not talk to the other people at their company who could help them resolve the issue in a way that results in the best experience for the client and accelerates their path toward achieving their desired outcome.
Nowadays, the best-run Support teams ensure they have a 360-degree view of the client's context when resolving a ticket. Andrea Lagan, the former COO at professional services automation company FinancialForce and current chief customer officer at HR software company BetterWorks, made it a priority to ensure that her support team had the visibility they needed. “If I'm a support analyst working on a case, the first thing I see for that customer is whether they have a red health score. And, oh, by the way, their renewal is coming up in 45 days, and they've had five other high-priority tickets opened in the last ten days or so.” In general, you'll want to make sure that your support team can see data on customer health, adoption, renewals, notes from recent conversations with the client, documented desired outcomes, and other information.
The most customer-centric organizations create processes so that CSM, Professional Services, and Sales can work closely with the Support team during a sensitive client situation. For example, if a ticket arises with a client that has had a high volume of support cases recently, or if the ticket has been open for a while, or if it's especially urgent to resolve it, Support tickets trigger a Risk Escalation that keeps the CSM, Project Manager, and Sales rep in the loop and recommends a certain playbook of actions. These risky situations are often reviewed in a weekly executive team meeting.
Summers explains what happens when this visibility isn't given to other client-facing teams.
Many of us know that feeling of dread. Integrating the Support ticketing system with the Customer Success solution and CRM can help ensure that escalations are visible to everyone without much effort from the Support rep.
Summers has found that besides helping to mitigate the impact of negative situations, Support reps can proactively help a portfolio of clients, beyond the client that submitted the ticket. Perhaps the Support rep found a creative way to solve a problem and also realized that multiple clients may be experiencing the same problem. They can give the CSM team a heads-up about the set of clients that could benefit from the solution, and the CSMs can then reach out to the clients about it. Specialized Support SME teams are especially in a good position to suggest solutions for specific groupings of customers that have experienced a similar challenge.
Support teams are also helping to accelerate the flywheel of the Helix. They're finding opportunities to sell services when the client could benefit from education or additional help on a regular basis, as we discussed in the last chapter. Support reps are also figuring out when a client is trying to solve a problem that their current contract doesn't allow them to solve, but that they could tackle if they bought an additional product or upgraded to a new level of partnership.
Indeed, the world of Support is evolving just like the domain of CSM. Bill Patterson is the executive vice president and general manager CRM Applications at Salesforce. He's seeing a marked change:
Patterson sees another opportunity to turn formerly transactional communications into more valuable interactions, in that the Support rep can help the CSM become more proactive. “The CSM can take the transactional case and say, ‘How can I help you get the most from the service?’”
He further sees an opportunity to leverage support data to predict churn. “If I have a question about my cable bill, I'm not threatening to leave every time I call, I'm just trying to unblock my problem. But if you didn't take care of me, my propensity to leave is higher. If I've had this experience many times, I enter the interaction with a negative attitude. And a CSM with a CSM platform can identify patterns leading toward churn. The customer is thinking ‘I've been trying forever to make this work but I just can't and now I'm giving up.’ The CSM can correlate the flurry of cases with the drop in product usage and take the necessary steps to retain that customer.”
The end result of this isn't just reduced churn, it's a change in the way we think about service. “Today, for many service interactions, the customer is thinking, ‘Do you even know who I am?’ Now, I can start making them feel like we are authentically caring about the customer and their problem. Overall, we can take service from a transactional model to a human-centric one.”
Support teams often become frustrated when clients encounter bugs in the product, and even more frustrated when there's a high volume of bugs, and even more frustrated when they can't share with the client a timeline for fixing the bugs. That frustration is understandable; it also echoes the client's frustration, which of course must be addressed in order to achieve the kind of renewal, expansion, and advocacy rates that we discussed in Part I of this book. Customer-centric organizations define processes for Support to work with Engineering to identify bugs, prioritize the resolution of bugs, and communicate timelines back to the client.
Besides helping to include bug resolution in the product roadmap, Support teams can help Product Management teams identify more holistic ways to improve the product. For example, analysis of tickets—as well as qualitative feedback from Support reps—can show areas of the product where clients are investing the most effort; perhaps that effort could be reduced with changes to the user interface or even larger-scale architectural improvements. This sort of analysis can also reveal the areas of the product that clients find the most valuable; after all, they wouldn't be struggling to use the product if they didn't believe in its potential. To aid in this analysis, Summers recommends tracking a Customer Effort Score through a survey that asks the question, “On a scale of ‘very easy’ to ‘very difficult,’ how easy was it to interact with [company name]?” Support teams are even getting involved in the Product team's design reviews to offer their input early in the development cycle. In general, advising the Product team on improving the product—which is the most scalable asset at the company—is a terrific way to deflect tickets. This way, Support teams are helping to resolve problems at their root cause, preventing tickets from occurring in the first place.
Support teams can deflect tickets in other ways, too. Ticket deflection—ensuring that issues don't come up in the first place—has been a priority for our own VP of Global Support at Gainsight, Emily McDaniel. She notes that Support teams can assist Documentation teams in identifying technical articles that require an update (due to a recent feature release) or another modification, which can help clients better resolve issues on their own rather than submitting a ticket to Support. Likewise, Support teams can recommend improvements to training materials (perhaps owned by the Education team) that will help ensure clients don't run into issues in the first place. Communicating with customers en masse through the online community by sharing tips or a heads-up about issues can also help clients become more self-sufficient. Finally, sometimes Premier Support offerings (that the client pays for) include regular “support reviews,” in which vendor and client can align on how to improve the way they work together on technical challenges.
Because of the rise of the customer-centricity, Support reps now have more career paths than they've ever had before, says Summers.
Even as reactive Support models are described in contrast with the more proactive CSM model, the new focus on customer-centricity has elevated Support teams as well.
In this chapter we discussed how Support teams gave rise to CSM teams and also supported them in their quest to become more proactive. At the same time, Support teams have become more proactive, too—updating other client-facing teams on escalations, identifying ways to help clients avoid the fates of ones with escalations, finding upsell opportunities, and educating the Engineering and Product teams on how to improve the quality and value of the product. These trends have helped the Support team become more valuable in the eyes of CEOs and helped Support members achieve new heights in their careers.
In the next chapter, we'll cover another team that has had to evolve along with the rise of the subscription model: Finance.