Your Customer Success Team Is Really Support: From Recognition to Remediation

There are several customer-facing functions in SaaS companies, such as:

• Sales
• Professional Services
• Customer Success 
• Customer Support 

While it can be easy to differentiate customer success from sales, differentiating CS from support can be more difficult. 

Why is it such a big deal for Customer Success to not be Support?

A common question of Customer Success is “Why do I need to differentiate CS and support?”

There are a few problems with Customer Success being support for customers. The first is that customers will not demand the value they need to use your product and be sticky customers.

Customers almost always let you know if they are not getting the support they need, but won’t always complain if they aren’t getting good adoption or value realization. Instead they will simply let you know they are planning to churn. As a Customer Success leader, you HAVE to force your customer success team away from support to value – because the customer will not sound this alarm for you. 

The 2nd major problem is crippling your Support team. When your Customer Success team provides pseudo support, you hurt your support team’s ability to build support documentation, community, and feedback for product teams.

How Do I Know if My CS Team is Really Support?

There are 4 primary give-aways that your Customer Success team is actually support:

• Break/Fix and How-to dominate conversations

If customers spend the majority of their time with you talking about features, support escalations, and technical needs, or enabling a specific feature – you are a support team. 

• Ad Hoc Meetings

If they call you when they need you to fix a problem or if most meetings with customers are ad-hoc – they view you as support.

• Lack of Time Mapping

If your Customer Success team takes work as it comes, they are reactive and won’t have the ability to define where they spend their time or where customers get value. 

• Level of Customer Contacts

If you don’t ever engage with a senior-level decision-maker, you are not advisory, and you are not a strategic partner.

If my CS Team is Really Support, What Do I Do About It?

If your Customer Success team is really doing support work, there are two areas to address: Internal and External changes.

External

• Set clear expectations as early as possible

Create a clear one-page artifact to share with customers that details the post-sale motion for customers. 

• Get proactive

CSMs should be monitoring their instance and understanding where opportunities exist for the client to improve their business. 

• Enhance customer value by:

1. Build an Operating Rhythm
2. Create value plans with clear KPIs
3. Make internal evangelism easy 

Internal

• Create graduation criteria for accounts in professional services

If you have accounts that have gone through professional services and have not graduated, they need to be remediated before they come to Customer Success. 

• Ensure support is able to handle product functionality

Share customer ‘asks’ and make sure support knows the volume and why the customer came to you instead of support. 

• Have a clearly defined categorization system

Define with support your categories of ‘asks’ and be clear of what belongs in support and what belongs in CS.

• Negotiate escalation path with support

The CSM needs to have an escalation path within support if a customer comes to them; without this path, they will either try to fix the issue on their own or lose credibility with the client. 

 About Luke Ferrel

Luke Ferrel is the senior director of customer success at Outreach.

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