A Customer Success team is only as good as its information. After all, if they waited until the customers told them what’s wrong — they’d be Customer Service. In order to take a proactive role in helping customers achieve their desired outcomes, Customer Success has to know:
- Their customers — what they want, what they need, and how to bridge the gap between what your product does and this desired outcome.
- The onboarding process — where new customers tend to get stuck, where they drop out, and what can help them get over those hurdles instead of churning.
- Usage — how well is the product working for the customers? Where they stop using it. What they’re hoping to find — and don’t.
- Growth opportunities — when the customer will benefit from using more of the product, or an additional feature. Basically, when it would serve their interests to upgrade.
Customer Success is Who covers the What, Where, How and When — but my question is:
Why aren’t other departments clamoring at their door for these insights too?
These are insights that can benefit the entire company, reducing churn, raising revenue, and giving the business every piece of information it needs to become an integral part of its customers’ lives.
But, most of us come from a tradition of strict departments. You do your thing; I’ll do mine. Which, along with a combination of territorialism and downright inefficiency, leads to data silos.
These are MY numbers and nobody else can have’m!
And I’m sure some companies have good reasons for keeping everything compartmentalized — but when you have a Customer Success department which, naturally and necessarily, has its finger in every pie, it’s absurd not to use them as the resource they are.
But I’m preaching to the choir.
Most of you reading this are Customer Success. So you don’t need me to tell you how important your insights are or how much good they could do.
You need a way to get your insights heard.
Because you can’t give your customers what they need by yourself.
You need Product Dev.
This is about how to form that partnership in such a way that Product Managers become more interested in what’s going on with the customer and want to get involved — instead of staying one step removed.
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