To Do âRemote Workâ Right, Your Team Needs A Customer Success Platform
To do remote customer success right, your team needs a platform: deliver consistent experiences, enable transparency, collaborate, and stay notified on changes.
TL;DR
- To run customer success well remotely, teams need detailed, documented, and clearly communicated processes so every CSM knows what to do without in-office oversight.
- A customer success platform provides a central place where all customer conversations, notes, and actions live, giving the whole company transparency into an account without tracking down the CSM.
- Real-time health updates, cross-team collaboration (such as a Slack integration), and notifications at key lifecycle moments keep remote teams aligned and prevent important changes from slipping through the cracks.
These are unprecedented times we are living through right now. In what seemed to be an overnight development, the entire SaaS industry (along with basically every other industry) was forced out of their offices and into remote work. This change has exposed a lot of challenges for teams that werenât quite ready.
That said, weâve been hearing a lot of questions about this at ClientSuccess and we thought we should share some best practices to help everyone get through this phase and set themselves up for better times to come.
Deliver a Consistent Customer Experience
One of the key elements of a great brand is consistency. Whether it is McDonalds, Nike, Google, Apple, or Ritz Carlton, one of the most important pieces of their model is their ability to deliver consistent customer experiences.
This is no different in SaaS. When everyone is in the office together you have leaders overhearing or listening in on customer calls, so itâs much easier to correct problems and ensure customers are getting consistent treatment.
In a remote environment you need to ensure your customer success processes are detailed, documented, and communicated clearly so everyone on the team knows what to do.
ClientSuccess customers use the SuccessCycle⢠application to make sure all CSMs know what steps to take to ensure a consistent customer experience.
Enable Customer Transparency
When everyone is in the office, itâs easy for anyone to walk over to a CSM and ask what is going on with a specific customer. Typically all of the latest information about the customer is either in the CSMâs head, their inbox, or their Evernote.
However in a remote environment, this becomes harder to do. Now you have to find the CSM on Slack, ping them, make sure theyâre free to talk, then figure out what technology youâre going to use to talk, e.g. Slack call/chat, Zoom, Phone, Skype, WhatsApp, etc.
To solve this, you need to make sure your team has a central holding place where all customer conversations and interactions reside (emails, meeting notes, shared docs, etc).
ClientSuccess Engagements⢠gives your entire company transparency into whatâs happening with an account. So rather than having to track down the CSM, you can simply log in and see all the latest emails, notes, and actions. Youâre up to speed quickly without having to track down the CSM.
Ensure Cross-Team Collaboration
A lot of you right now are seeing customers move from a âhealthyâ stage to an unhealthy one.
When that happens, it's important to be able to share real-time updates with your team so that everyone knows whatâs going on so you can rally the troops.
Use our new Slack integration to ensure that all customer health can be communicated/collaborated on in real time, regardless of team location.
Have a look at this example below.
Make Sure Nothing Important Slips Through the Cracks with Notifications
Working remotely potentially brings up all kinds of distraction, so you need to make sure that your team has a clear system to ensure they get notified when important things take place. Whether that is a customerâs health score changing, or whether they havenât logged into your platform recently, or anything else thatâs important to see.
You want to make sure that your team gets notified at these key moments in the customer lifecycle so that your CSMs can take the right action at the right time.
If any of these points resonate with you and youâd like to have a chat, feel free to request a demo below and weâll arrange a time to discuss whether we could help you.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Why do remote customer success teams need a platform?
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