“What actionable steps can we take to improve communication between Customer Success team and Product team?” Answer by @NikkiElizDemere

Image source: Image created by Yasmine Sedky (@yazsedky) for Nichole.

Improving communication between customer success and product teams involves more than creating a Slack channel, or implementing any number of systems that – on the surface – facilitate communication.

You have to give them reasons to want to communicate.

Teams tend to be insular. Data tends to get siloed. And to really bridge those gaps, there needs to be an understanding of what other teams have to offer.

Customer Success’ purpose is to ensure customers reach their ideal outcomes with the product. To do their jobs, they track a tremendous amount of user data, setting up alerts when user actions indicate the potential for churn, observing where customers fall off of onboarding or use, collecting voice of customer data on what they want and what they may not be getting.

Basically, they have all the information Product needs to do their work better.

The challenge for Customer Success is to show Product managers how their information can help Product reach their goals faster and better – and do so in language Product folks can understand. Because there is a language gap. Customer Success tends to be more touchy-feely; they’re all about creating “delight.” Product teams are all about creating… the product.

I’m not saying there aren’t wildly creative verbally-inclined Product managers with crystals on their desks, I’m just saying that bullet points with metrics are generally appreciated.

Actionable steps to improve communication between Customer Success and Product Management:

1. Tell Product what you have to offer. You can create a customer-centric priority list of what changes are likely to have the most impact (Dev teams typically like to do the biggest impact, easiest-to-implement fixes first).You can work together to find metrics to measure the success of proposed product improvements, changes and additions.
2. Give’m a break. When customer support tickets reach Product Dev, it takes away valuable time from the work they’re doing to make products better. As Customer Success, if you can proactively predict the most common issues your customers have, and address them through DIY and FAQ content, it will lighten the load of support tickets that make it to the Dev desk.
3. Pre-organize and think through feature requests. Dev can become a dumping ground for everyone’s “bright” ideas, and it seems like all problems become feature requests. Customer Success can help prioritize features according to which will solve pain points and bridge success gaps for their target audience. This isn’t to say that Product should take its marching orders from Customer Success – not at all. Rather that it should be a collaborative effort to prioritize projects based on user impact, effort required, and company priorities.

Essentially, we’re all working towards the same goal: Delivering the outcome that is the reason the customer bought your product in the first place. Customer Success can help Product Dev bridge that gap by sharing their understanding of what the customer wants – and sharing the successes experienced by delighted customers.

Related, detailed articles that I’ve written:

• Product Managers: Why You Should Include Customer Success Milestones In Your User Flows
• A Product Manager Communication Survival Guide
• How to Get Product Managers Excited to Work with Customer Success
• 5 Steps for Product Managers to Ditch the Jargon and Communicate Better
• Make better products with your team’s input: using NPS-style internal polls
• Why the Customer Success Manager is the Product Manager’s New BFF
• How to Create Customer-Centric (Not Product-Centric) User Onboarding Flows

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