For the past year or so I have been building a high performing team at OpenBlend. It’s been the most challenging of my experiences yet for many reasons but what has made it exceptionally easy for me is to revert to tried and tested methods of best practice. It comes so easily to me now which has led me reflect on the journey I’ve been on and how I might navigate the future.
For me Customer Success is a Culture, a Department, a Science, an Art and a Discipline. For each I have a post that explains in more detail but to summarise:
A culture because putting the customer at the heart of the business is the first important step in being successful with a customer strategy.
A department delivers on the execution of the customer strategy. The keyholders and trusted advisors to ensure maximum success is achieved for the business and customer.
A science because data and research can be drawn from marketing and sales practices to maximise the impact on retention.
An art because relationship building is so reliant on the individual CSM building rapport along the customer lifecycle.
A discipline because it has repeatable processes, rules, codes and is a development of knowledge, behaviours and practices that can be taught.
Due to the the breadth and depth of a profession I am so passionate about, it’s led me to document what it is that I do, that comes so naturally to me now, so that perhaps one day I can apply this at scale.
So I have developed a framework which has been the result of years of exposure to a variety of experiences, testing of different methodology and my extreme interest in finding maximum efficiency for outrageously successful outcomes.
The need to learn fast and roll out scale to thousands of customers, whilst managing the day to day with a very small team of CSM’s, has led to many tried and tested approaches through the use of creative thinking and data analysis.
The framework has since evolved following the last two foundational Customer Success building projects within two start-ups, both needing results fast and with limited budget and resources available.
The application of the framework allows the audit and implementation period to be minimal, identifying low hanging fruit for quick wins and helping to prioritise first projects to tackle by identifying their weight of impact.
The framework spans internal and external factors, people, technology, process and metrics, identifying strengths, weaknesses for opportunities. It is a thorough approach to appraisal, deep and broad in evaluation, in a repeatable way that leaves no stone unturned.
If you would be keen to discuss more about this framework I’d be very happy to chat in more – message me on LinkedIn or leave a comment below. If anyone else has their own documented framework I’d be really keen to learn more and compare notes.
Questions I’m now contemplating…
How can others benefit from this experience?
What options are ahead that I should be considering?
How does the Customer Success function evolve and innovate?