Things change in a hurry – and I’ve seen that firsthand.
Back when I first started in customer success, I dealt with technology that wasn’t designed for startups; now, in 2022, there are plenty of new CS technologies that are low-cost and flexible. The options available have expanded rapidly – from tech that focuses solely on making your sales handoff smoothly to full startup-friendly CS platforms.
I know it can be daunting to implement new tech at first – especially when you’re at a small startup – even when it’ll help supercharge your team. There’s always a hesitation when you’re moving from the old to the new. However, it’s important to stay alert, especially as leaders, on how you can help your teams and customers – so don’t sleep on thinking about and trying new things!
When it comes to choosing your customer success tech stack, there are three important things that I consider – let’s dive a bit more into those questions right now.
1. What Is Your Current Process?
First off, it’s important to understand and feel comfortable with your process – and, more than anything, to know that it works. It’s too often the case that I see folks conforming to technology instead of having the technology help them. A clear example of this is when you start hearing people – including people outside the customer success industry – say “Oh, I can’t do that for you because my system doesn’t allow me to.” That’s not what we’re looking for. We want our technology to empower us to help our customers as much as we can!
Another reason why it’s so important to feel comfortable with your processes is because if you don’t know if your process is working, then making it more efficient probably won’t help you build your organization. Remember, an efficient but ineffective process is ultimately useless.
For smaller customer success organizations – we’re talking five people or less – you are probably still getting to know your customer, what resonates with them and what doesn’t. Your focus at that point should be on figuring out and strategizing what you need out of your tech and not implementing tech – essentially, remembering to not put the cart before the horse!
2. What Does Your Team Need?
Here’s a problem we’ve all run into before: having too many apps on your phone, to the point where you end up either underutilizing or simply forgetting them altogether! That’s not a huge deal on our personal devices, but we don’t want that problem to hit our work team – and that’s especially true when each new tech item adds additional research time and impacts our budgets. On top of that, each new tech item adds additional training and implementation time, too.
Also, before you start diving into the research, understand what are the biggest levers to help your team succeed. For example, is it having more accessible data? Or is it preparing for kick-off calls? Whatever it may be, be sure that the tech you are adding addresses a major need for your team. Don’t just add technology for the sake of adding technology.
3. What Does Your Customer Value?
So we talked about processes and what your team needs, but it is just as important to keep this in mind: what does your customer value? In CS, you always want to put yourself in the customer’s shoes.
You can have all of the data visualization tools in the world, for example, but if the customer just wants to understand how to reset their password, perhaps you are better off investing in a tool that can serve as a help center. Or if your customer values timely responses to urgent matters, you might be better off finding a tool that can help CSMs manage playbooks at scale – allowing CSMs to be more proactive. Whatever it is that your customer is looking for –while keeping in mind our Framework for Customer Success – make sure that it’s reflected in your tech so that you know that you are pushing customer objectives forward at all times.
—-
Jennifer Chiang is the author of the Amazon Bestseller, The Startup’s Guide to Customer Success, and the Head of Customer Success at Seso. Get in touch with her on LinkedIn