What Should Delivering Customer Success Across Your Company Look Like?

Over the past few decades, customer success has become synonymous with ongoing success for SaaS organizations. Customer satisfaction, account growth, and renewals have become some of the foundational elements of any long-term success strategy, right alongside a robust sales program. While customer success departments have grown to encompass most responsibilities associated with implementing and driving customer success daily, every department can contribute to customer satisfaction in some way. 

Here are some different ways your team can deliver incredibly customer success experiences across every single level and department of your organization:

Customer Success

CSMs serve as the day-to-day touchpoints for customers and any vendor organization. They manage implementation and onboarding timelines, deliver on project goals, help uncover platform value, and drive customer satisfaction. CSMs are also responsible for pulling in other departments to manage issues and/or questions. CSMs act as the main point of contact for a customer and project manage other contacts throughout an organization as needed. 

In addition to the CSM role, customer success leaders are also an integral part of this department. Customer success managers, team leads, and department heads are mainly responsible for serving as a bridge between CSMs and executive teams. They also help develop and implement scalable customer success processes and mitigate any issues with customer accounts. 

Executives

At an executive level, VPs, SVPs, and even c-level contacts can be great ways to connect and engage with customer accounts, especially during the sales process. Once accounts are handed off to customer success, executives can be pulled in to meet with points of contact, spearhead potential renewal or upsell conversations, and more. As a proven leader in their space, most CEOs are also looked to for feedback, coaching, and action items for CSMs and board members. 

Other Departments 

CSMs will pull in team members from other departments for support within their daily engagement with customers, including sales, marketing, product, support, and administration. Each of these departments can deliver a unique angle of input for CSMs, but they should all have in common a clear goal to drive customer satisfaction and help support any issues that may be present with the account. While a product team may be pulled in to help fix a problem or bug, for example, a sales rep may be asked to help draft an amendment to a contract or set a new one up for renewal. 

The Bottom Line

Customer success isn’t just the responsibility of one department. No matter your industry, every person has a duty to drive customer satisfaction forward as much as they can. For customer success leaders and executives, one main goal should be driving and sharing customer success initiatives across your organization so that every team is equipped to deliver customer satisfaction. 

You can learn more about implementing a company-wide customer satisfaction initiative in your organization with these additional resources:

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