I learned a lot about the importance of Customer Experience at my last start-up. I also learned that Customer Experience Management is not the same thing as Customer Success Management.
It’s quite a bit more.
More than Customer Success
In my first 90 days as the new VP of Customer Success, I spent a considerable amount of time talking with our customers. I asked them what they loved and loathed about our company. As is often the case, I was brought in at a time when the volume of customer issues exceeded the capacity the sales or services teams to solve.
Our customers were not only upset for just one big issue, but the variety of small to medium issues that popped up at every stage of their journey working with us:
When they first started using our technology, they found that the knowledge base was out of date
When they contacted support, the first set of answers differed from the next-level answers when more advanced help arrived to solve their problem
The release notes were being sent to the wrong person or to people who were no longer at the company
When we sent them marketing material that explained new or advanced areas of the product, it was either too soon or too late
When they gave us ideas on how we could improve the product, we never followed up
When we sent them their invoice, it was wrong
A sales rep would ping them for a reference at the wrong moment (ie: while an account is escalated).
But they loved their Customer Success Managers.
While the CSM team was the glue and the buffer to the bad experience, it was also causing us to kick the can down the road and not solve root cause problems. CSMs were not the answer…Customer Experience Management was. And that involved getting outside my own organization and working cross-functionally to solve the problem.
A New Role Emerging
Gartner recently surveyed senior executives on this very topic. Of those who responded, 89% said Customer Experience would be their main point of differentiation in terms of how they will compete in the marketplace. But to solely compete on an exceptional customer experience, every single stakeholder must be aligned with this vision. All teams must “act as one” for this to work.
Who should lead the charge…Customer Success? Marketing? Discussing this topic with other leaders has led to an aha moment: for a company to adopt a Customer Success mindset, which includes delivering an amazing Customer Experience, the buck stops at the top. Your CEO must be the one to align the company and hold everyone accountable to the cause.
To help the CEO with this effort, the role of Chief Customer Officer has emerged. According to Jeanne Bliss (who wrote the book on this position), the CCO is the individual who “proactively and deliberately orchestrates the end-to-end journey between a customer and a company.”
As Jeanne also explains, this work is “not for the mild-mannered or for the quarterly included.” A CEO must insist on corporate patience and set the right expectations with the company. The journey to an exceptional customer experience is at least a 3-year endeavor. And once the journey is mapped and change is implemented, it should be an “always on” initiative.
Acting as One
I certainly found all of this to be true at my previous start-up. In order to drive the needed changes, I had to enlist the help of my executive staff counterparts and sponsorship of my CEO. I had to expand my vantage point as a Customer Success executive and work much more broadly to implement true Customer Experience Management.
We reviewed all of the issues our customers experienced and put programs and initiatives in place to drive this change. This included:
Restructuring how we managed content, adding resources to help us stay on top of product changes
Improving our product release process and communication of new features
Improving communication of issues, including the development of a “Trust” site for maximum transparency
Improving our customer lists and overall data governance
Launching a community so that customers could give us feedback and we post our responses to their ideas
Improving our quote-to-cash process so that invoices were accurate
Implementing a customer reference program, providing Sales with transparency of at-risk vs. healthy customers….and who is open to be a reference
Investing in technology to help us stay on top of where our customers were in their lifecycle and send the right message to the right individual at the right time
To help us measure our improvements, we also implemented and leveraged numerous listening channels – such as NPS, survey data, community, support cases and feedback from CSMs. Combined with our Escalations process, this data helped us hold each other accountable and drive the changes needed to not only improve our customers’ experience in working with us…but open the door to deeper levels of advocacy and growth.
The Modern Success Leader
As leaders of Customer Success, we need to evolve beyond escalation and renewal management. Pulling the root cause thread on red-accounts or even churn will reveal that there is work to be done outside your department. We have an important opportunity to expand our charter and consider the entire customer journey as work should either own or at least influence. Customer Success Management is not Customer Experience Management. The former can certainly be the relationship glue, but the latter is the work that must be done to truly secure customers for life.