Making Money On-line: Customer Success Leaders: Think & Act, Then Think & Act

As a customer success leader, how many times have you been in a meeting where the VP of sales asks what you’re doing to get strategic customer, ACME123, out of the ditch so that her salespeople can more smoothly pursue and close a growth deal? Once? Twice? Dozens of times?

From an industry perspective, product problems are often cited as a primary reason customers find themselves in that ditch. That’s followed closely by poor responsiveness of support and a perception that the installed solution is rife with complexity. Aggressive competitors pounce on these situations to create FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) in the marketplace with marketing campaigns that attempt to woo away your customers.

So, what’s your normal response to the VP in those meetings? Do you try to deflect responsibility or do you assertively take ownership of the situation? After all, the VP looked around the room and communicated to all the other leaders what she knows the customer success mission to be. The words were familiar to you because you wrote them as your organization’s mission statement:

Ensure customers understand and adopt the solution.
Marshal all required resources to resolve situations that are inhibiting a customer’s ability to realize their expected value from their investment.
Be the customer’s advocate.
Create the right environment so the customer continues to renew the commercial relationship.

See what I did there? I used industry jargon to depict a common scene where someone outside customer success uses the jargon in an attempt to trap (maybe innocently) the customer success team into fulfilling a broad set of responsibilities it is believed belong to them.

What this power play scene boils down to is an argument about which side of a fine-edged sword the leadership team will choose. On one side is the clear language of that list. It’s tough to dispute those worthy goals. They’re clearly good for customers, and from the vendor’s point of view, they are abstract enough to not offend or overly inspire. It’s also too easy, though, to say that just because those items are on a list means that one organization can control everything required to achieve each goal.

Modern business dictates a new view of customer management, one based on the entire customer lifecycle. And that means we must acknowledge that while customer success is indeed responsible for those things, they do not control the results of the efforts made by other organizations all along the way. This team must be seen as the organization that will coordinate and guide; they should definitely be seen as the vanguard for driving value, but the reality is that they inherit the customer. In a sense, customer success is in the odd position of being charged with making the customer whole while simultaneously exposing what needs to change within the vendor’s own walls. That’s essentially a case to call customer success a transformational change agent.

Back to that scenario, here’s what customer success should do.

Manage the Rescue, But Only If All Agree to an Autopsy

I know in this scenario the customer isn’t deceased. But having experienced those meetings countless times in a number of companies, I feel it’s safe to say that if they aren’t dead the first or second time they end up in the ditch, by the third time around, they’ll almost assuredly be dead. So, thinking radically, conduct an autopsy on something that still has a chance to live, instead of waiting for it to die.

For the good of the customer and vendor, customer success should agree to manage the rescue of the customer (really, who else will?) only when each involved executive leader of that customer’s lifecycle agrees to determine what caused the customer to veer off course in the first place. An autopsy would examine if the customer was in the ditch because of:

Inappropriate solutions sold at the outset.
Poorly designed/architected/developed/tested product.
Poor documentation in the CRM by the sales team of customer goals, skills, influencer information, expectations of ROI, impact to long-term business, etc.
Or, all of the above was documented but the post-sales teams had no visibility into the account records.
Poorly scoped and/or poorly delivered services engagement.
A real product flaw that’s reproducible and will take some time to repair.
Cloud provisioning was flawed in some small, obscure way.
Customer onboarding was non-existent, rushed, too high-level, or lacked oversight.
Customer support’s processes reward rapid service request closures – even if root cause is not identified. As long as a workaround is devised, that is seen as sufficient.
Customer success missed all the clues that signal a struggling customer.

To all the naysayers out there who argue that autopsies take too much time and most companies wouldn’t be able to cobble together leaders from each organization to participate in such recurring exercises, I say this. Good luck keeping up with companies that aren’t thinking that way and are beginning to exploit machine learning and artificial intelligence. Still, think it would be impossible to conduct this type of exercise for all your at-risk customers? Then allow me to pull another word from the jargon bin.

Proactive.

To execute proactively in anything, one has to be thoughtful. Knowledge about what to do to avoid or forestall a negative thing from happening requires one to consider the problem that should be avoided and put in place methods for preventing it from happening. Or as the Cambridge Dictionary defines it, “taking action by causing change and not only reacting to change when it happens.”

Own the Shame, But Learn from It

There’s a whole lot of shame that can be cast around when customers end up in the ditch. Some of it has to go toward the customers for their own shortfalls in process and talent, but much of it has to be worn by the vendor. Vendors are the ones who are the product experts, who know why the product even exists, who know how it can be fixed when broken, and who know what it takes for a customer to extract value from it.

Own it, but whatever you do, don’t let your go-to reactive response (rescue) dictate how similar scenarios should be handled in the future. That’s a recipe for more rescues and more support for those opinions in the market about the complexity of your solutions. Understand that many customer problems have common causes, typical patterns that result in outcomes they didn’t expect. Apply a scientific approach to the data associated with the customer’s experience and identify those patterns. Study what should change in your processes, your products, the skills of your people. Customer success should be the organization that leads that effort, but they can’t do it alone.

I’ll close with a story. I once worked for a large enterprise software company whose SVP of customer support was renowned as a great customer advocate, as someone who would do what it took to get the customer over the product bumps they were experiencing. I’d only worked with the company for a few months, but I became skeptical. I began to investigate those experiences with my portfolio of clients (I was in customer success at the time), and it quickly became clear why that SVP had the reputation he had. It turns out it was a completely internal reputation, not an external opinion that customers shared.

Here’s how things worked. Customers knew enough to game the system to the extent that they opened every single service request with a severity one. There they sat, even the most critical ones, until the customer raised hell with their sales rep. If it was important enough to the sales rep (meaning, there was revenue on the horizon) they would contact the EVP who would then triage that severity one against all the others he’d been alerted about. He would then direct the effort of the support organization accordingly.

We lived then in a world like the madness of Madness of King George (though he wasn’t named George for all you sleuths out there). What was he then, besides an impressive and logic-challenged human robot? He was a bad habit enabler. He was controlled by the sales organization. He was a culture and productivity killer. And ultimately, because of his 100 percent reactive style, he was also a very poor advocate for customers.

It wasn’t all his fault, but the company’s NPS never budged, and its reputation drifted aimlessly. He was canned after I left that company when customer experience became an industry focus and rose in importance to finally register at the board level.

Reactive doesn’t work. Think and act. Think and act.