Future of Customer Success Manager | Innovate for Success - Trending topics and information

Future of Customer Success Manager

Customer Success Manager

Hi...Success and innovation customer success specifically right because if you see some success used to be an early kid on the block but not anymore it is such an award organization that many companies start investing in customer success early on and when an organization walls there is room for innovation so if I have to ask you what are your top pointers for innovating in customer success thanks Angie first of all for having me on this show and I think as you rightly mentioned customer success is not a new function anymore it's very evolved and a lot of companies have started to invest in it much early on as you say and gone are the days where you you are not just calling customers checking through your regular QPR you know all these are what we spoke about a while ago and as you rightly mentioned I think it's time for all of us to innovate in customer success so I will talk about you know three pointers that I feel you know our pace to innovate in customer success the first one being rethinking your only channel experience so yes I know the minute we hear the word only channel it's you know highly overrated everybody's been talking about it over the last few years and you know we've all heard about customer experience and customer success if you think about it is the part of the overall overarching customer experience that you provide to your customers but what I only want to stress upon your and where we need to equate is really rethinking the channels in your national experience specifically when it comes to customer success so we all do know that you know CSM's reach out through email they have reach out to customers or to phone calls and emails I'm you know for a lot of larger customers maybe have in-person meetings but then if we really try to understand you know where customers are today and if you want CSM's to be there everywhere where your customers are we need to rethink the channels a little bit so you look at it you and I ask customers are always on whatsapp so there are a lot of new age or messaging channels whatsapp you have up will discharge you have modern messaging platforms so one way to sort of look at is you know are your see essence there in these channels where customers are spending most of their time in play and we've sort of piloted or this in certain regions specifically Middle East where we saw an early huge success you know it helped CSM slowly build this quick connect have friendly relationships and you know very quickly provide solutions to customers you know for smaller problems that they have and it goes a long way in building lasting relationships so that's a you know one channel that we need to rethink and of course offline is a channel I don't think will ever lose its importance even after you have a scalable base of customers you know you will really need to see how you have that in-person connect with every customer that you have and I think couple of ways to do this is you know happy so meet your CSM days or openoffice days where you invite your customers over or have a common place where all your customers get to meet their customer success managers it is once in person which again goes a long way in building lasting relationships with the customer so yes the first way of you know which I think we should you know we could innovate a customer success is by rethinking the only channel experience moving on to the second point I think this is mostly spoken about in all customer success forums these days it's all about product driven customer success now when you think about it your customers are spending maximum amount of time inside your product even before they reach out to a customer success manager or so a be really ensuring that you know we're giving these like when you have feature and code features and functionality are you going out into real also adding functionality is every ensure that the customer success will using your product so let me maybe give you a quick example let's say you have a feature or module in your product which impacts the business metric for customer rate so do you have features and functionalities that will actually check how a customer has been performing on that metric or you know if the customer is not been doing great on that metric I'll really be emptying and proactively providing help to the customer to check in on what really is not working out and how we can how he or she can actually you know get through the desired outcome that he or she signed up for so that's one way and if you know customers are showing signs of risk I am really providing an easy way for them to reach out to the CSM for help rather than waiting on them to draft a long email and set up your may of your P so these are a couple of ways in which you know you can think about product driven customer success which I feel is very critical and last but not the least studying my favorite of all and it's a dream project of my in a pilot project that I would love to work on is the what I call the CSM assist what now what I mean by this is think of it this way right if you really look at the life of a CSM every CSM handle is about anywhere between 50 to 200 300 odd customers in the book and if you look at it there are always certain customers who are at risk there are always certain customers where you know they're really happy and it's time for the CSM to take the next step and reach out for advocacy then there are certain customers waiting on updates on feature requests where you have to collaborate internally as a CSM you know to your customers so there are multiple you know pockets or groups of customers with different actions that the CSM has to take and imagine this right when I coming into work and I just open my laptop has you you know using all the AI and watch that we have if a bot could really tell me hey here are the 10 things that you need to do today first we talk to customer again we see because you know he or she is really getting off into the and then reach out to this customer today because he's due for a case study of who-ville so I think if you know if the entire priority priorities are taken into order you have certain business rules in place and if what could really tell me how to plan my day out and prioritize my work keeping the end goal in mind that it is not just one customer or few customers that have to be successful but my entire customer base that I manage as the CSM has to be successful you know as a company so I think having a CSM assist what maybe you know could be awesome so that is really inside and also actionable so I think that makes it easy to consume for anyone read this article right so for all the customer success managers watching so to quickly summarize rethink your omni-channel experience and don't ignore offline methods there is still some merit in going to your customers and meeting them face to face and product driven customer success it doesn't get the attention that it should and do a show she's favorite project I would you know I hope she gets to work on is an a assisted bot that can help customer success managers prioritize their work and you know focus on things that matter the most so that is really helpful...