3 Customer Success Operations Considerations
For many in the SaaS world, operations roles are not a new concept. High-performance sales and marketing teams have relied on operations resources for years to streamline operations, optimize workflows, and ensure efficient processes.
While some customer success departments may not have dedicated operations resources like sales and marketing departments have, more and more teams are realizing the importance of operations and investing in the solutions and resources needed for long-term success.
Here are three considerations to take into account when it comes to investing in customer success operations:
1. Operations can help identify inefficiencies – and then close these gaps.
Operations resources are highly trained professionals who look for every way to improve processes and allow teams to operate on a higher level. Customer success operations roles will often look at how CSMs manage their workloads, how data is being gathered and analyzed, and how customer success is working with other departments – such as product or sales – to ensure a seamless crossover experience for both internal teams and customers.
2. The right solutions allow CSMs to do more with less.
For many modern customer success operations resources, streamlining inefficiencies and building a more strategically positioned team comes down to solutions and technology. For example, an operations resource on a sales team will often be the go-to person for building workflows and creating processes within a CRM.
The same can be said for a customer success operations resource, except they will often work in their customer-specific platform. By investing the time and strategic focus into a customer success platform, operations resources can create manageable workloads for CSMs, deliver customer support where it’s needed most, and do more on a day-to-day basis with technology as a supporting player.
3. Data is the driving force of any successful operations strategy.
The foundational pillar of any successful operations strategy is data. With numbers and metrics guiding strategic decision-making, operations resources can help CSMs identify red flags, create targeted action plans for customers, and even predict issues before they occur. With the help of technology, customer success operations resources can build robust reports and dashboards for individual CSMs, showing exactly where they need to focus their time and where more support is required.
The proper operations strategy frees up CSM time to focus on what matters – the customers
There is a reason successful sales and marketing teams – and now successful customer success departments – have turned to operations resources to take their processes to the next level. By passing off the data, process, and, well, operational aspects of a team to a resource who is 100% focused on this part of the business, CSMs can free up their time to focus on what matters most: customers. The best part is that this focused support doesn’t come at the cost of behind-the-scenes work. Instead, an operations resource works in tandem with your CSMs to ensure things are running smoothly.
You can learn more about investing in a customer success operations resource here.
Check out these related resources: