Why No One Responds to Your Customer Success Managers
hackernoon.com
hackernoon.com
Nowadays, every time I subscribe to a new SaaS service I get some emails from their "customer success manager".
Not sure what they are supposed to be. It looks like "customer support" but sometimes I get email from support AND from customer success managers. Go figure.
Of course, it's also a shinier, happier job title for people doing traditional respond-to-tickets customer support or account managers tasked with renewing licences on an annual cycle (or both in some companies). But SaaS companies often have big enough margins, complex/varied enough products and use cases and need to understand their customer bases for it to be worth having a dedicated team sitting in between sales and tech/admin support trying to make sure that people that don't report problems and aren't regularly renegotiating contracts don't get ignored until they cancel. There are also a lot of industries where being contacted periodically to discuss how they might optimise the app for their current workflow or objectives is a source of value rather than irritation, and helps convince companies they're getting a service rather than a cookie-cutter CRUD app for their 50k per annum.
> worth having a dedicated team sitting in between sales
> and tech/admin support
Of course, it's generally better the more technical the company is - since if all customers are developers then there's no point in going through a charade of "Hmm, sorry about that! Have you tried turning it off and on again?" type support.
When it's worst is when I'm not actually having any problem myself, I'm just trying to be helpful - like "by the way, if you follow this link you get a 404, correct link is blah".
In this case, I don't want "Sorry about this - we'll look into it for you!", I just want the message to get to the dev that can fix it in seconds, and a "Cheers!" response is more than sufficient.
If they're doing it properly, it should be much easier to reach someone technical, because the dedicated technical support contact still exists and doesn't have to divide their time between dealing with technical issues and sending out "you don't seem to have logged in yet/recently. How can I help you?" messages because a dedicated person is performing the latter function.
And there's no reason why someone holding a "Customer Success Manager" title shouldn't be technical: indeed if the product is something like an API, the Customer Support Manager probably should be an engineer, and a better engineer than the Sales Engineer too. The linked article is basically an argument that Customer Success Managers in adtech really ought to be people with a strong understanding of how to optimise a marketing campaign and not just people that ask how you're doing and tell you where the filters are
Yes. All these things are part of sales. Especially in B2B context.
From the perspective of the business, by improving the experience the customer has with the product, CS folks maximize the odds that the customer will be happy with the product, and therefore stay subscribed to it, increase their subscription tier, and recommend it to others.
The experiences described in this writeup are pretty terrible and I'm not sure that organizing those particular CSMs any differently would have produced better results. Organizing CSMs by location also has the benefit that the customer tends to be able to get ahold of the same people on short notice because they're working in the same timezone. And there are a lot more industries than there are timezones. While it does seem plausible to me that if you could pull off CSMs-by-industry it would be more successful, it would be a lot harder and more expensive to do so. I personally don't know whether it's worth the tradeoff.
What is a "customer success manager" in the
first place?
Whereas "customer success" sucks because they're judged by customer retention and revenue increases, and they're largely powerless to increase customer retention (which depends on product features and competitors' offerings, neither of which they have any leverage over), incentivising them to focus on getting the customer to spend more.
At most SaaS companies, customer success is designed as a slightly-better support function, rather than a value-added consultative function. This is actually an evolution from the old model, where you'd have a more expensive professional services function that accompanied enterprise software purchases, usually because the implementation itself required a great deal of technical sophistication that the cloud has made obsolete.
Customer success managers tend to be lower paid than consultants who have domain expertise and strategic thinking skills. They also typically handle a much larger client load, which makes it hard to invest time in relationships, and have automated their work to the point of annoyance, which makes it hard for them to individualize.
On the other hand, it's not always such a great idea for a company, especially a SaaS company looking to make an exit, to have their own professional services function, let alone a paid services function. Consultants are expensive and have much lower margins than software. They also add headcount and bring down valuations when it's time to sell the business. That's why most software companies a partner ecosystem around their software, rather than trying to do it in house.
Based on my experience, there are a handful of customer success organizations that get this right. But as a discipline, customer success is still meandering around trying to figure out what it really is. At most companies, the legacy is in a customer support function, not a professional services, consultative sales, or account management function. So that's the level of service you get. I'll be interested to see if they'll respond to feedback like the posters and evolve towards a more consultative model.
Our teams are still small, so this person has been essential in helping out in places where the product isn't as refined as we'd like: training, setup + onboarding, UX roughness, etc.
They've also been helpful in understanding our customer's pain points, so we can best direct our modest resources. We regularly learn more about what our product should be from these interactions.
Our users are also very non-technical, so they've been a helping hand getting slow-moving organizations on board. That that end, they regularly receive positive feedback from our users, and are essential at reducing churn.
I can understand why the author had an issue with Hubspot and Google- these are well established companies with refined products and larger teams. Certainly seems like you could end up as a salesman.