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IT: The New Mission for the CIO

The main thing that I always tell people is—early and often.

That's Karl Mosgofian, our own CIO at Gainsight, responding to the question of how Customer Success teams should engage with IT teams. Given that he has been a CIO across several large and small companies, Mosgofian has seen CS-IT collaboration succeed and also fail. “I think one of the mistakes that a lot of business leaders make is, they want to move quickly, but sometimes they don't bring in IT early enough. At some point, IT gets involved and says, well gee, why did you choose this product? Now you've got to go backwards and defend yourself.”

But Karl also sees positive value from engaging with IT.

In this chapter, we'll discuss how we arrived at the point where the most successful companies aren't even questioning the value of CS-IT collaboration—especially when it comes to rolling out an insightful 360-degree view of your customers.

IT: An Essential Partner to Customer Success

Business, as with much of life, moves like a pendulum from one extreme to the other.

In the 1990s and 2000s, large corporate IT organizations emerged. Nothing got done without IT being involved. CIOs were on the fast track to becoming some of the most important leaders in the company. Then in the last five years, things feel like they reversed all of a sudden. With the “consumerization” of IT, technologies can now be purchased by line-of-business leaders—or even individual employees. We read many a quote from CEOs questioning whether they needed an IT department whatsoever. In fact, books were even written about the “End of IT.”

More recently, we're seeing a new emerging trend. Companies—big and small—are suffering from technology indigestion. With SaaS and cloud, applications are so easy to buy that companies now own a ridiculous number of products. One friend who was CIO of an at-the-time 400-person company said his business had purchased 100 separate SaaS apps. Another CIO more recently told us his 700-employee firm had hundreds of cloud-based products. Both were brought in to rationalize the mess because:

  • Multiple products were purchased to do the same thing.
  • The technologies didn't work with each other.
  • Much of the vendor functionality wasn't being utilized.
  • Some of the services were over-purchased and over-provisioned.
  • No one was sure of the security standards for each.

This isn't a one-way street. Some IT departments have earned reputations as “progress-blockers.” This leads cloud application providers to circumvent IT because they may understand technology but not the core business. Instead of taking it personally, IT professionals should examine why the business does not view them as trusted advisors.

We see this situation from two vantage points:

  1. As a growing company suffering many of the above challenges. Needless to say, Nick went from thinking “we'll never need IT” to staffing up a couple of years ago.
  2. As a vendor selling a platform into this new world.

On the second point: Early on, our application was sold like the ones above—to “line of business” (in this case the Customer Success team)—and was often purchased without heavy IT involvement. But our business has evolved a great deal:

  • Clients now view Customer Success platforms as technology to be rolled out across the entire company—CSM, Sales, Services, Support, Product, Marketing, Finance, etc.
  • Clients realize that CSM platforms depend on data—the more data, the more value.
  • Clients woke up to the fact that CSM platforms often house some of the most sensitive data in the business—data about their customers.

As such, we're seeing more and more companies looking at their CSM platform decision as an “enterprise” decision. And being an enterprise decision, they're involving their IT counterparts to:

To some extent, the customers that are the most savvy about involving IT are the ones that didn't involve IT enough in previous SaaS platform rollouts. Most frequently, we've seen these companies cite poor planning around early software rollouts as their “learning experience.” The business departments may have driven the rollout for expediency, but years later the aftermath is a configuration that is hard to maintain, not up-to-speed with the latest-and-greatest functionality, and poorly adopted. In fact, many of these same companies are in parallel going through a “reimplementation” of existing systems, and they don't want to make the same mistake in the CSM world.

So if you're a CS leader looking at a platform decision, our advice to you is to involve your IT partners early on. They'll be great assets in the decision-making process and more importantly, they'll make sure you're set up for getting maximum value over time.

Here's how Eric Johnson, SVP and CIO at SurveyMonkey, thinks about partnering with CS teams on their technology needs.

That's the dream!

As partners to you in thinking through your business goals even before your technology needs, CIOs can help you roll out that 360-degree-view of the customer that you've always dreamed of but that never made it to fruition.

Three Reasons Your Customer 360 Is Stuck in the 1990s

Let's all just agree: The 1990s were awesome. Tamagotchis, Birkenstocks, Vanilla Ice—what more could you ask for? And even though Birkenstocks and fanny-packs are (incredibly) back in fashion, some things are probably better left in our memories. Let's take 1990s tech, for example: Dial-up modem tones and brightly colored iMacs may give rise to warm feelings of nostalgia, but waiting 30 minutes to download an email? We're super-glad we've moved on from that.

But how much have we really moved on? In some aspects of B2B IT, things haven't changed a ton in the last 20 years. Plenty of companies are tracking essentially the same data using similar systems funneled to the same teams—and those teams make use of that data the same way they did in 1998. Like, does anyone outside of Marketing know what content customers are engaging with? Does anyone outside of Product have any clue what daily active use looks like? Could anyone besides Sales even find a customer's basic contact info? And even if those pain points have been solved, they probably haven't been solved evenly across the company.

Around the turn of the century, pioneers like Tom Siebel, founder of pioneering CRM software company Siebel Systems, were talking about the need to bring all customer data together in one view—a “360-degree view of the customer.” In this utopia, every employee in a company would fully understand what's happening with a client. Obviously, if we graphed the amount of customer data we're collecting and analyzing since the 1990s, it would look like the letter J. But have we really achieved the mythic 360-degree view?

Let's travel back in time to the 1990s to understand the original need for a Customer 360. The macro business trend of the 1980s and 1990s was consolidation. Private equity and debt markets opened up a world of megamergers from telecom consolidation to AOL-Time Warner. In this sea of conglomerates, customer experience suffered as employees struggled to get a full picture of what was happening with a client.

So IT departments embarked on consolidation projects—just smash together every disparate system with an acronym for a name: ERP systems, HR products, and CRM implementations. And the Customer 360 stood like an oasis, just beyond reach across a desert of multiyear IT projects. After all, just because you can route different data sources into one window doesn't make the information meaningful or even necessarily more accessible!

Fast-forward two decades and where are we? In some sense we still strive for the elusive Customer 360, with employees hunting and pecking across many systems to understand what's happening with a client. At the same time, a senior exec at one of our large Fortune 500 clients recently said, “Our problem isn't that we don't have a Customer 360. It's that we have 48 of them!” Another client recently asked us, “What use is giving employees data if they don't know what to do with it?” A third told us, “Beautiful dashboards become beautiful parking lots.”

What if our premise around a Customer 360 is wrong? Or perhaps just stuck in time? We think there are three key ways customer data infrastructure is still sporting parachute pants and bucket hats—in other words, stuck in the 1990s:

  1. Data: Customer data is no longer about static, manually entered information (e.g. customer contact information). It's about real-time, dynamic data sources like product usage and telemetry from IoT sensors.
  2. Structure: Business changes are no longer one-way. Sure, there are a number of megamergers (hello AT&T!), but divestitures, spinouts, and take-privates are just as much en vogue.
  3. Pace: The pace of updates has increased radically. New products are launched and revised continuously, and client sponsors change seemingly all the time.

Instead, the new Customer 360 has dramatically different requirements:

  • Personalized: A Customer 360 needs to show us the products and businesses relevant to me, as an individual employee. And it needs to show us the information relevant to the person at the client org with whom we're speaking—not just at the company level.
  • Insightful: And please don't make us interpret all of this data. Give us a simple red/yellow/green view of how this client is doing.
  • Action-oriented: Tell us what we should do next based upon proven best practices.
  • Automated: And as much as possible, do those actions for us at scale.

The new Customer 360 is no longer a dashboard or a report. It's an orchestration system to drive the client experience end-to-end. In other words, it's far more strategic than a workflow hack or an incremental time-saver.

If you're a CEO or IT leader and your Customer 360 is stuck in the 1990s, it's time to get really strategic and proactive with your processes and systems. We're seeing agile companies with 21st-century levels of sophistication in this area turning CX into a massive competitive advantage. In short, you really don't want to be caught wearing your Generra Hypercolor T-shirt in 2019 and beyond. It's time to update your Customer 360 to something a bit more current. (Full disclosure: We still think Hypercolor is cool!)

Summary

In this chapter we discussed why CS leaders have been most successful in scaling their teams through technology when they work closely with their CIOs. CIOs have become indispensable partners to their CS peers in translating business goals into technology requirements and evaluating CS platform decisions. As a result, companies have become savvier about how to purchase and configure a best-in-class Customer 360 that's personalized, insightful, action-oriented, and automated.

CS leaders seem to have more departments interested in partnering with them than ever before. Human Resources departments, too, have become allies to CS, as they have realized that making clients successful produces happier employees—and also that the stress of the Customer Success job can create unusual burdens on teammates. In the next chapter we'll discuss how HR departments are evolving in the Customer Success economy.