Customer success requires a lot of attention. It is a company-wide effort and needs every team to be a part of it. You need a bunch of good teams to ensure that customer success is assured. It is known that customers hold stronger power over businesses. It is not enough to just offer the products. Customers expect their pain points to be resolved and hence choose the right products to get outcomes. B2B SaaS companies must keep in mind that a new customer needs to be onboarded well to ensure they realize the product’s value.

While the onus of ensuring customer success falls on customer success teams, it is important to notice that all teams play an important part. Customer success teams are responsible for successful onboarding of the customers, reducing churn, increasing customer advocacy, and ensuring customer lifetime value increases.

But is the customer success team alone responsible for customer success? No, right. This is why customer success is a team sport. Since customer-centric organizations believe in team play, It is not to be played as a single team.

Customer Success is a Team Sport, Not the Responsibility of a Single Team

Customer success is the responsibility of all teams, such as marketing, sales, product, technology, and even the leadership team. Every team is responsible for customer success. Here is a guide on how various teams can align around customer success.

Marketing Team

The marketing team is responsible for spreading awareness and knowledge about the product’s abilities. The marketing team needs to take care of customer success through positioning. Marketing teams need to ensure the product aligns with the customer’s needs. Marketing teams need to create case studies that show customers how they can gain success. Marketing collateral helps customers handle difficult situations.

Another aspect of marketing is customer marketing. Customer marketing connects with customers to engage regarding new product features, webinars, product usage help, and more.

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Sales Team

Sales teams need to take customer success seriously. There needs to be alignment between sales and CSMs to ensure long-term customer growth. CSMs need to understand the challenges of the sales team, and the sales team needs to understand customer pain points and expectations. Sales teams also need to understand the retention and churn component of customer success. Sales teams need to ensure the customers are the best fit and will not churn so easily.

The sales team must not set high expectations for customers and give them false hopes. Instead, the sales team needs to ensure that the customer meets the best product that will give them value.

Sales professionals need to be trained well to ensure positive returns.

Product

Your product is going to be your biggest brand ambassador. Your product needs to be the hero of your company and ensure that customers are getting the value they signed up for. Your CS team must not draw the line for product teams to complete work. Instead, you need to ensure the product team has its own product roadmap. Product teams need to keep customer success team communication open. They need to know customer feedback to improve the product, usability, user experience, and value.

Product goals such as product adoption rate need to be related to customer success metrics. This will ensure that there is sufficient alignment between the two. It is also important for the customer success team to dedicate one member who will collect all the information about the product. The concerned person is also responsible for obtaining customer feedback and delivering it to the product team.

Technology

The technology team also is responsible for customer success. The tech team needs to ensure that technology is able to deliver the value they want and is aligned to the business. Your tech team needs to create user-friendly technology to ensure maximum success. The technology must be high on the usability index to ensure that customers do not churn. It must be simple. Customers will churn to simpler alternatives If the technology is too complex or not usable.

Senior Management or C-Suite

The C-Suite is where everything about customer success needs to start. The founders and executives of the company need to keep the vision of customer success at the core of every activity. Top-level managers like the CEO, CFO, and CMO are responsible for how you are planning to reach the goal of customer success. They can do that by holding various teams accountable for certain goals- usage of the product, feedback, quality, longevity, and more.

C-Suite leaders lead the campaign against reducing churn and tensions between various teams. As a C-Suite executive, it is also important to promote those whose goal is customer satisfaction over anything else. This shows that the company is customer-centric.

A customer-centric company is essential for customer success

A customer-centric company focuses  on creating a stellar customer experience as core to its belief system. Customers expect companies to offer them rounded solutions keeping technology, innovation, and needs in mind. The cultural mindset needs to change for all teams to ensure customer success. In fact, a study by Deloitte mentioned that customer-centric companies are nearly 60% more profitable than others.

This means that all teams need to-

• Listen to customers
• Adapt to customer requirements in real-time
• Proactively follow up on customer needs
• Ensure customers are getting value
• Follow up to receive customer feedback
• Sharing knowledge on customers internally
• Share accountability for customer experience improvements

Bottom Line

Customer success is a shared responsibility between various teams. Customer centricity must be something teams internalize for maximum customer success. It starts with the C-suite charting plans directed at customer success to the CS team finally moving on those plans with adequate support from the product, sales, marketing, and technology.

The whole company needs to take customer success seriously and be passionate about customer value and satisfaction. Even customer feedback needs to be shared with the team responsible for changes in that space. Customer success needs to be the core of your business strategy.

WRITTEN BYStanley Deepak

Stanley Deepak is an accomplished sales and marketing professional with 15+ years of experience. He loves tech products and book reading. He writes on philosophy and culture on LinkedIn.

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