Now everyone in your company is involved in Customer Success. That's perfection, right? Watch out or it could turn into chaos.
Coming out of the pre–Customer Success era, when B2B companies largely ignored their customers post-sale, we have a risk of swinging the pendulum too far the other way. Today, many companies have:
And for the vast majority of companies, the proverbial “left hand” and “right hand” don't talk to each other.
A customer can tell a CSM that a given new feature isn't a fit. Nonetheless, the next time the customer logs into the product, they get a “pop up” guide for that new feature. And then an email for a marketing webinar about the new feature might show up in their inbox the next day.
In this way, you might be simultaneously over-engaging with your customers and still missing engagement opportunities. So what's the answer? We need to stop thinking about CSM, in-product, and Marketing emails as separate strategies. We need to destroy those silos. Instead, we need a target customer journey for a given goal (e.g. adopting a new feature, onboarding) and a coordinated usage of channels (CSM, in-app, email) to help the customer get to the next best action.
As a former Product Manager, Nick can attest that a big part of the joy of the job is “shipping” new features. But that term itself is anachronistic, dating back to a time when we “shipped” physical things like floppy disks (Google it!) and CDs to customers. With SaaS, “shipping” is instant and in many cases continuous.
But the same isn't true for adoption. Customers have their own cycles of quarters, cadences, meetings, change management, and the like. And sometimes getting your release cycle to align with their adoption cycle can be a challenge.
Most companies will do the basics to drive adoption—release notes, documentation, screenshots. If they're really good, they'll create videos or even GIFs! But recently, with the excitement around Customer Success, things have snowballed. Marketing might take the mantle and “blast” the clients with information about a new feature. Product might get excited and put in an in-app notification. And CSMs might eagerly reach out to clients to get them to “adopt.”
What does that look like for the client? We've seen clients with the following experience:
That's not a recipe for a good client experience. Coordinated Customer Success strategies take a different approach:
It's one thing to have a bad experience and then receive a survey. It's another when the survey itself is a bad experience. It can leave a bitter taste in the mouth. In fact, based on what we know about memory, the last moments of an experience are often the most indelible and can redefine a person's point of view on the entirety of the experience.
The psychologist Daniel Kahneman referred to this concept as the “Peak-End Rule,” but it just underscores the need to execute surveys with the same level of care and coordination as you do with the entirety of your customer journey.
Let's play this out using a Net Promoter Score survey as an example:
I've just deleted a bunch of annoying, out-of-context emails. And the vendor doesn't learn anything about how to make my experience better.
A coordinated survey experience would look like this:
Customer Success isn't just a department, it's a company-wide mindset. But if every department in your company is trying to help in Customer Success without coordinating, you can make the situation worse. Your clients can get overwhelmed, confused, and frustrated. True enterprise-wide Customer Success requires an integrated approach aligned to your desired customer journey.