What should we do if the customer success department becomes customer service again?

Why has the work of the customer success department become customer service? How can the customer success department change its current status of only being a customer service department? This article is based on the author's research, objectively analyzes the factors that lead to the failure of customer success work, and explains how companies should thoroughly reform customer success. I recommend this article to people who are interested in the direction of reforming the customer success department, and hope it will be helpful to everyone.

Customer success has become active in the SaaS field. Everyone feels familiar and unfamiliar with this term. In actual business, two views have been formed. One view is that customer success has practical significance for customer processes, additional purchases and repeat purchases of enterprises. The other view is that customer success is a rational point of view and there is no such module as customer success in business.

Customer success is not a new term. It can be traced back to customer service and service marketing. It is just that a new term was created in the SaaS field: customer success.

Many domestic SaaS companies have established customer success departments and purchased customer success systems, but customer success has not been implemented. The customer success team that companies have spent a lot of money to establish has become a customer service team that can only answer customer questions. This has led many people to be pessimistic about customer success work.

I recently surveyed some corporate executives, some of the information came from real feedback from front-line employees, and some of it was related information I saw in published journals. Of course, the journals have not yet published articles on customer success, but that does not affect my summary of the relevant information. By combining the views and information of the three, I can understand in more detail the important factors of customer success and why most customer success has been reduced to customer service.

1. Factors that determine customer success or failure

It’s too easy for companies to define building customer success as adding a department, without clearly explaining what this department should do, how it should coordinate with sales, how it should collaborate directly with R&D, what kind of employees the customer success department should recruit, and what the salary packages for these employees should be.

1. Customer Success is not a department

Many companies have made customer success a department, set up relevant departments, and recruited relevant employees, and the customer success department is officially established.

Some companies have purchased information software for customer success and moved the work of the customer success department from offline to online, but the results have not been satisfactory.

If you still view customer success as a department, then the work of this department cannot be carried out at all.

Adding a department to an enterprise will inevitably involve changes in the work content of other departments, innovation in work methods and reorganization of business processes.

The biggest resistance to business change comes from old employees within the company. Their interests, mentality and security awareness will instinctively reject the establishment of new departments, especially sales teams.

The establishment of a customer success department is equivalent to separating the revenue from customer renewals from sales, affecting their performance, and is most hostile to the customer success department.

Even in front-line work, some sales colleagues define their colleagues in the customer success department as follows: You are customer service staff who serve customers, and customer renewals and additional purchases have nothing to do with you.

If a company simply adds a department without making any changes to the company's organizational structure, personnel, and work arrangements, it will be very difficult for colleagues in the Customer Success department to carry out their work.

2. Customer Success Department Investment

Building a customer success department requires a lot of investment from recruitment, digital systems and other aspects. The establishment of a department costs at least hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Companies are also quite cautious about their investments in customer success departments. After all, it will take about three months for the customer success department to see real benefits, so for now it can only be considered an investment.

Since it involves investment, companies give priority to the lowest cost method, and the salary is not high. As a result, it is difficult to recruit customer success personnel with industry experience in the customer success department. Even those with customer operation experience who transfer there feel that the salary is a bit low.

In addition, the customer success industry is still an emerging position, and companies do not have a unified standard for personnel selection, which leads to companies relaxing recruitment standards and making it more difficult to recruit employees who have made achievements in the field of customer success.

In order to save employee training costs, they rely more on letting employees explore on their own. Due to salary constraints when recruiting, these employees can only cross the river by feeling the stones and constantly iterate their methods and concepts at work.

Employees working by trial and error will lead to the customer success department seeing results slowly, which will affect the company leaders’ judgment of the customer success team, causing the customer success team to be gradually neglected, with their work content gradually replaced by sales staff, and eventually they will become customer service personnel supporting the sales team.

2. A radical transformation of customer success

If you want to solve the above problems and build a successful customer success team, you must reform the corporate organization, form a high-quality customer success team, formulate employee work content and assessment standards, and thoroughly reform the company's customer success team. This matter can be divided into three stages, but most companies have reversed these three stages.

1. Organizational change

If an enterprise is determined to form a customer success team, it must first divide the rights and interests of the sales team and separate the maintenance of old customers from the hands of sales.

This requires a change in the organizational structure, dividing the sales rights between new and old customers, and gradually adjusting the work content of the sales team in a soft way over a long period of time, and forming a sales support team to help sales customers manage and serve customers. Gradually increase the sales team's new contract amount and reduce the commission for renewal of old customers.

In this process, a customer service support team was smoothly formed, which gradually allowed sales colleagues to accept the company's changes, increased the customer support team's help to sales staff, and reduced the hostility of sales staff.

This type of change is the most difficult and has the greatest resistance . It is very likely to be opposed by all sales colleagues. Imagine that if a company assigns a task that all sales people oppose to a subordinate director, the sales director will criticize them to pieces. Therefore, it is difficult to accomplish this task by only recruiting customer success directors in the company.

Even if the CEO is the first person in charge to do this, it is still very difficult. On the one hand, there is opposition from the sales team, which may affect the company's profits for a period of time. On the other hand, building customer success is conducive to the long-term development of the company, which inevitably requires the company to achieve a balance in a dynamic manner.

2. Changes in working patterns

Most companies still rely on word of mouth and social software to work. This type of work model can solve small, urgent problems and is not suitable for the field of customer success. Because customer matters are no small matter, and everything deserves the attention of team members.

In order to improve the team's work efficiency, companies need to build SOP processes in the area of ​​customer support. I have seen companies sort out nearly 40 SOPs in order to implement customer success work. In my previous work, I sorted out 23 SOP processes.

This model of transforming grassroots work into regular work will still be opposed by many colleagues within the company. Except for the CIO who must build enterprise informatization, almost no employees are willing to take the lead in reforming the work model.

Employees think that improving the work model is a thankless task. If you do it well, you will not get any credit, but if you do it badly, you will easily be blamed. Therefore, when improving the work model, external experts should be hired as much as possible, and the heads of various departments within the organization should support it, so as to complete the implementation and effect of the final work model change.

In the work model transformation, it is still based on the customer support department. Once the department's SOP is implemented and can operate well in the company, the sales team will have a certain degree of dependence on the customer support department, and the time is ripe to formally form a customer success team.

3. Customer Success

Why do customers want to set up customer success teams? Is it just because customer success can increase customer demand? Not entirely. The most important point is to reduce customers' dependence on sales staff and make customers become customers of the company rather than customers of sales staff .

To transform a customer support team into a customer success team, first, improve the awareness of customer support team members and change their decision-making from a pure support department to a department driven by business indicators. This can be done by training employees and recruiting people with relevant experience to improve team awareness. Secondly, enable team members to master skills that can be put into practice. This can be done through practical internal training to enable team members to master skills that can be put into practice and improve the team's practical ability to implement work. Finally, optimize the work model, supplement the work processes in the support field that have not yet met business needs, and continuously optimize these processes to make them more in line with current business models and team cooperation.

The customer success team also needs to analyze customer data, segment and refine customer operations, deliver product value and service value to customers, and maintain customer relationships.

Each link requires practical skills, which can be solved by recruiting employees with relevant work experience or through in-house training.

In short, if an enterprise really wants to achieve customer success, it is not something that can be achieved overnight. In the face of the pressure of organizational change and standardized working methods, are the company's leaders mentally prepared? To really implement customer success work, from the beginning of preparation to the implementation of the work, it may take half a year, or it may take a year, and it is more likely to take 2-3 years. For such a long period of planning, is the enterprise ready and has the leadership controlled expectations?

Enterprises build customer success departments, so that the value of products, enterprises and services are integrated into the aspects of customer service, customer maintenance and customer renewal. This will improve the company's customer renewal and additional purchases to varying degrees. For companies with annual revenue of over 100 million yuan, even if there is only a 5% increase, the benefits will be very considerable.

Author: Zhang Mu

Source: WeChat public account " Operation Officer Zhang Mu (ID: coozhangmu)"