Editorial
The Gist
- Cross-team learning. Effective collaboration between tech and customer success teams is essential for scaling organizations, enhancing product relevance and customer satisfaction.
- Customer-first engineering. Allocating resources to address customer feedback and innovate keeps products competitive and relevant, ensuring sustained customer satisfaction.
- Data-enhanced strategies. Tracking diverse customer metrics allows teams to adapt strategies effectively, fostering growth and maintaining strong customer relationships.
It’s easy to nail collaboration between customer success and tech teams when you’re a startup organization with a handful of employees and customers. But as the organization scales, collaboration gets tougher.
Teams get busy, problems flare up, and communication is siloed as teams look to their own leaders for direction. But it’s up to the leaders to set the stage for cross-team learning to tear down those silos.
As a CTO and head of CX working together in a martech organization for almost a decade, we’ve learned how to avoid friction and partner to deliver the best product and customer success outcomes for everyone.
Here are four lessons our teams have learned from each other in that pursuit.
What Tech Teams Can Learn: How to Advocate for the Customer
When Greg and I (Nishant) have our bi-weekly meetings, phrases like “Customer X needs” or “Customer Y is struggling with” are not uncommon to hear from him. Because his teams constantly talk to customers, it’s easy to go to bat for them when discussing product strategy and roadmap. We want to see that passion and advocacy in our tech teams, too.
Part of customer advocacy in tech means maintaining the balance between the product we already have and launching new features or products that push the envelope.
What we hear from our customers is that they care most about stability, scalability, predictability and performance. But if we only focused on upkeeping our products, they wouldn’t stay relevant with their audiences. Customers also need a product with features that allow them to unlock a creative edge to outpace their competition.
That’s why we allocate 20% of every engineering sprint to addressing queries and bugs flagged by customers. The other 80% is spent on figuring out how our product can give them an edge; we’re pushing our product forward while not forgetting our end user.
We employ other strategies to ensure our tech teams stay close to our customers…
Related Article: How Cross-Department Collaboration Fuels a Customer Experience Model
What Tech Teams Can Learn: The Power of Hearing Directly From a Customer
When a customer requests a feature, the tech team isn’t getting a face-to-face explanation from the customer about what they need and why. Instead, our engineers receive a product requirements document that details the request for the engineer to develop and deliver.
It can be an efficient process, which all scale-up organizations need. However, the customer doesn’t always know exactly what they need to start. The engineer might perfectly execute the ask, but customers still feel the outcome didn’t hit the mark. It’s not the engineer’s fault; it would have been better for them to hear from the customer firsthand.
It also boosts the morale of your engineers to hear that what they build makes a difference in someone's daily life. And when you find the right time to loop in the engineer, customers appreciate the direct line to the product builders.
It doesn’t mean an engineer needs to attend every intake call; it’s up to customer success to listen and determine when to pull their tech counterparts into the process.
Related Article: How Customer Success Teams Can Drive Retention
What Customer Success Teams Can Learn: How to Scale Customer Care
As the organization grows beyond your first 200 customers, it’s difficult to give white-glove service. Of course, we (Greg here!) want to ensure our customers are receiving the best care and product possible, so this is when segmentation becomes helpful.
We categorize our customers into groups, like:
- Nurture (Mid-Market and Commercial) – These are typically smaller organizations that may grow organically, but are unlikely to ever become a large account.
- Grow (Strategic and Enterprise) – These are typically larger organizations with low levels of spend currently, but could expand significantly with focused effort. Touchpoints with this group might happen often and require a bigger resource commitment from us.
- Maintain (Strategic Retain) – These are large organizations that currently have high levels of spend, and, therefore, limited further growth potential. Even so, they are (hopefully) willing to provide continuous feedback and even become beta-testers of new products.
We use our segmentation to optimize our self-service and product-led growth options. For example, it isn’t a good use of our resources to deliver a product 101 course when this could be hosted in an online, self-service “Academy.” We use our subject matter experts' time to go deep with customers and tackle any highly-specialized cases.
Segmenting our audiences doesn’t mean we care less about any given customer. It’s a tool to determine how and where our resources can deliver the greatest impact.
Related Article: Cross-Departmental Collaboration Is Key to Customer Experience
What Customer Success Teams Can Learn: Track More Than Retention
Customer retention is the top metric customer success teams track, but don’t stop there. As the company scales, customer success should have systems in place to track metrics like:
- Health (Net Promoter Score, CSM Sentiment, Relationship Status, Product Adoption) – How satisfied (or unhappy) is this customer? If they’re high-risk, we might need to invest more time and attention into this organization.
- Growth – Are your customers approaching their limits? If so, it might be time for a discussion regarding expanded scope.
- Time Spend – How much time have our teams been spending with this customer? Is it too much, or too little? What repeatable tasks can we automate?
- Issues and Escalation – What issues flare up and how often? If the same issue is repeatedly escalated to senior leadership, there might be an opportunity to solve something meaningful.
Tracking customer behavior keeps us informed on signs of risk and potential growth. When our tech teams both have that data, we can figure out if customers are extracting the value they need so we can all grow forward, together.
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Tech and customer success leaders must demonstrate collaboration by example. When it happens, team members and customers will notice the results. And when customers take notice, the market will, too.
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