Customer Success and Support collaboration deserve more attention as the potential synergies between the teams positively impact customers.
Let’s start from the opposite - there are fundamental differences between a CSM and a Support engineer:
Reactive vs. Proactive
Transactional vs. Relationship
KPIs vs. metrics
Revenue generating vs. cost center
Let’s ask a simple question: Do customers care much about the roles and responsibilities of the different teams they interact with, whether it is a support or success team?
As consumers, we don’t care. We want the product (HW/SW) to operate as expected and avoid any interaction with the vendor.
With an emphasis on dissimilarities, we tend to overlook the essential aspects of cooperation between the two teams. Their partnership significantly enhances internal processes, creates efficiencies, and improves customer experience.
The similarities
There are common aspects shared by the Support and CS teams, which they can leverage and establish future partnership.
➡️ In many cases, the teams report to the same senior manager
➡️ Both teams interact with customers during the post-sales lifecycle and address their needs.
➡️ Many CSMs started their career in support and were able to leverage their skills and knowledge to become successful CSMs.
➡️ The two teams are well-positioned to provide internal feedback about customer challenges and propose product improvements.
Given the above, let’s explore a few domains where the team can cooperate.
Internal Knowledge sharing
On one hand, the Support team handles more technical (“lower level”) inquiries within a pre-defined SLA. On the other hand, CSMs equip users with best practices and drive the practical use of the product.
While these differences are apparent, the teams share a standard skill set. Both are expected to have a solid understanding of the product’s capabilities and “know-how.” They also impact the user’s journey and customers' efforts.
With knowledge management processes and tools, the groups can accumulate the “mileage” gained in the field and maintain an up-to-date internal knowledge repository.
I used to run a monthly team meeting with Support engineers and CSMs (sometimes accompanied by technical pre-sales) to share highlights and lessons learned. This meeting surfaced valuable insights and tips. We also logged them in our internal knowledge management tool, and they became resources for future reference. In addition, it was an effective process for team members to engage with their peers and exchange ideas and knowledge.
The impact of SLA and support team performance on the Customer Health score
SLA violation is usually reported to the customer and often requires an additional explanation of the root cause for the breach. In that regard, CSMs are expected to understand the details, address customers’ concerns, and help to stabilize the relationship if needed.
It is a classic example where support and CS should not operate in silos and instead maintain a close handshake. Having one source of truth that both teams rely on is mandatory for the smooth and fast resolution of SLA violations.
In addition, customers expect their main focal points (The CSM) to be knowledgeable in all service aspects and be proactive regardless of challenging or unfavorable circumstances.
Customer Health score. Many organizations incorporate ticket statistics into their customer health model. The support team's performance and ability to resolve technical issues have a positive impact on customer satisfaction. CSM then evaluates the overall health status, considering other measurements mixed with qualitative aspects such as sentiment and the “heartbeat” of their customers.
This is primarily applicable to enterprise customers who are familiar with support practices. These customers have high demands from their vendors’ respective support functions, and their lack of satisfaction will likely trigger escalations and complaints.
In the low-touch model, CSM does not know the stakeholders intimately, and support tickets may provide insights into customers’ challenges that would not be visible otherwise. Understanding the issues that customers raise via support tickets may reveal potential reasons for churn or new growth opportunities.
Customer escalations. CSMs should involve themselves in resolving escalations. A CSM stepping into the “fire” must understand the incident timeline and the associated activities to rectify it. While support team members and managers are naturally involved, the CS team will orchestrate the inbound and outbound communication.
Enterprise customers expect the vendor teams to be synchronized, knowledgeable, and proactively pursue appropriate solutions. This sensitive situation can be successfully resolved with support and CS teams closely engaging with each other.
Support contribution to Customer knowledge base and FAQs
I mentioned earlier the benefits of maintaining an internal knowledge base. The same applies to the external resources guiding the customers to operate the product.
In many companies, the support team works closely with the technical writers (usually part of the Product team) to build and improve the customer’s knowledge base. Articles, user guides, FAQs, and videos are created based on customer inquiries and challenges.
Having managed both teams in parallel, I can say that support engineers and CMSs can massively contribute to the documentation shared with customers. They have extensive knowledge of the use cases and end-user needs. Their collective wisdom and experience will positively influence the quality of the collateral shared with the end users.
Joined effort during Onboarding
Mature vendors have a separate onboarding team (under CS) taking care of the deployment and fixing technical issues that CMSs may be unable to resolve.
The situation is different in smaller (less mature) start-ups that have not scaled yet. Then, CS/support boundaries are less distinctive.
In such circumstances, I recruited CSEs – Customer success engineers. They had a solid technical background in managing customer deployments. In practice, we had one team where CSEs were responsible for onboarding and acting as part-time support engineers.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this model. The positive aspects are the efficiencies and cost savings, as well as the ability to handle parallel onboarding and ongoing support issues. On the other hand, it is not a sustainable model for the long run and is likely to change with scale and growth.
Valuable Customer experience
Responsibility for the customer experience extends beyond the remit of Customer Success teams, as other teams must rise to the occasion. As such, support teams significantly contribute to their customers' achieving their desired outcomes.
💡 They act as a Professional counterpart to depend on
💡 They provide a timely response to inquiries and technical issues
💡 They are enablers for the BAU (Business-as-Usual)
💡 They are the partner assisting in Business resiliency
Customer Success drives value and complements the actions taken by their support counterparts.
🔦 CSMs help the business achieve their expected business outcome.
🔦 CSMs demonstrate measurable value such as additional revenue, cost reduction, time-to-market, compliance, branding, innovation, etc.
🔦 CSMs assist stakeholders in being successful in their jobs.
🔦 CSM share best practices based on industry knowledge and professional expertise.
The combination of the above should simplify and enhance the customer experience. Solid ongoing support and issue resolution will allow customers to be attentive and receptive to added-value discussions.
When they encounter continuous challenges with your product, customers will not attend status calls or QBRs. Instead, they will ask you to sort out the burning issues before presenting value and suggesting new initiatives.
The overall value is gradually built through the different journey stages, from onboarding into the BAU, where both teams complement each other to create the perfect customer experience.
The natural flow of information
Constant communication between the teams may reveal previously unknown information to the Customer Success teams. I thanked my support counterparts numerous times as they shared Important updates, which proved helpful in identifying new growth opportunities and renewal discussions. A few examples are listed below:
💰 The support team heard comments made about the declining level of satisfaction. Knowing the root cause (revealed by the support team) helped to promote product fixes, which eventually helped secure the renewal.
💰 The support team heard about implementing a new SaaS-based application that was complementary to our product. We convinced the customer to perform an out-of-the-box integration. The customer highly regarded this initiative, which led to new opportunities and increased our product footprint.
The flow of information works both ways. CSMs can provide more “coloring” and context on specific challenges, allowing the support team to be better tuned and alerted to customer needs. Notable examples:
🔎 Knowing in advance about the customers’ plan to deploy a new ticketing software
🔎 Data migration with a potential impact on other vendors
🔎 Important marketing campaign
🔎 Preparation for the holiday seasons and major sales campaigns (Black Friday, for example)
Three components of the partnership
The “PPT” framework—people, processes, and Technology—is deeply rooted in team synergies. When they join forces, each one reveals additional value.
People. Support experts inherently have good customer communication skills and product knowledge. With solid soft skills, they are naturally good candidates to become the new CSM in the team.
Processes. Knowledge sharing and internal /external knowledge management systems assist the teams in addressing customer inquiries and unifying the customer experience.
Tools. The teams use different tools. However, integrating a ticketing system into a customer management solution provides a consolidated view of customers and one reliable source of truth.
Summary:
Customer Success is renowned for driving internal collaboration across the organization. We often mention the interfaces with Sales, marketing, and product as the key to the success of our customers.
A seamless customer journey also relies on joining forces with the support team, as both handle customers’ requirements and issues. The joined experience, knowledge, and best practices should be leveraged internally and externally regardless of the “organizational affiliation” of the teams. This is even easier to achieve with the same manager responsible for the two groups.
The CS–support partnership is a core asset for any organization. We only need to leverage it wisely.
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