A high-performing customer success team is critical for any company’s success. Not only are they responsible for proactively addressing customer needs and helping them reach their goals, but they also contribute to increased customer loyalty and revenue growth. However, building a successful customer success team requires more than just hiring the right people. It also requires ongoing development and management practices that foster a culture of collaboration, accountability, and goal-setting. In this article, we will explore the skills, traits, and best practices for hiring and developing a high-performing customer success team.
Defining Customer Success
Before diving into the specifics of building a high-performing customer success team, it’s essential to understand what customer success means. Customer success is the process of helping customers continually see value in your product by helping them discover new features, teaching them how to use your product to their maximum benefit, and addressing any issues they may encounter. A customer success team plays a crucial role in achieving customer success by serving as the voice of the customer and bringing user experience feedback to the product team. It’s important to note that customer success is different from customer service. While customer service is reactive and focuses on resolving customer issues, customer success is proactive and focuses on helping customers achieve their goals.
Hiring a High-Performing Customer Success Team
Identifying the right people with the necessary skills and traits is critical for building a high-performing customer success team. The top traits to look for in a customer success manager include empathy, interpersonal skills, relationship management, coaching and training, persuasion skills, problem-solving, critical thinking, decision-making skills, initiative, time management, teamwork, management ability, and technical skills. Soft skills such as communication, empathy, patience, persuasion, problem-solving, critical thinking, decision-making, initiative, time management, teamwork, and management ability are crucial for CSMs. CSMs also need hard skill proficiency with the tools and platforms used by customers and the team.
Best practices for hiring a customer success manager include creating a customized job description, promoting the position in the right places, developing meaningful interview questions, conducting meetings with multiple team members, and testing customer success skills. To create a customized job description, identify the qualities you seek in a CSM and rank them in terms of priority, research competitors’ job descriptions, and consider both soft and hard skills. To promote the position in the right places, start within your own company and referral network, use online recruiting platforms, post on informal job boards, or hire a recruiting company. To develop meaningful interview questions, research current customer issues, ask candidates to share examples of how they’ve handled similar situations in the past, and avoid generic questions. To conduct meetings with multiple team members, consider including a panel interview or multiple meetings if the CSM will frequently interact with other teams or areas of the company. To test customer success skills, have candidates perform a trial exercise to gauge their capability.
Developing a High-Performing Customer Success Team
Once you’ve hired the right people for your customer success team, ongoing development and management practices are essential for fostering a culture of collaboration, accountability, and goal-setting. Best practices for developing a high-performing customer success team include providing ongoing training and coaching, setting clear goals and expectations, fostering a culture of collaboration and accountability, and recognizing and rewarding success. It’s also recommended to involve the customer success team in the pre-sales cycle to make the handover and transition to customer success smoother for customers.
Skills and traits of a high-performing customer success team include communication, relationship-building, empathy, problem-solving, data analysis, and a customer-centric mindset. Best practices for hiring and developing a high-performing customer success team include defining clear roles, ongoing training, fostering collaboration, and measuring key metrics. Customer success teams should also share customer insights with the rest of the company to develop a deeper understanding of product features and customer needs.
Best Practices for Managing a High-Performing Customer Success Team
Effective management practices are critical for ensuring the ongoing success of a customer success team. Best practices for managing a high-performing customer success team include effective communication strategies, aligning the team’s goals with the company’s goals, balancing workload and managing priorities, and regularly evaluating team performance and making necessary adjustments. Regular evaluations are critical for identifying areas for improvement and recognizing top performers.
Conclusion
Building a high-performing customer success team requires hiring the right people with the necessary skills and traits and developing ongoing development and management practices. By fostering a culture of collaboration, accountability, and goal-setting, companies can create a successful customer success team that drives customer loyalty and revenue growth.
Don’t forget to measure the performance of your customer success team. Check out our article on what are three key measurements of the performance of a business to learn more about metrics you should track.
To learn more about managing employees and increasing productivity, read our article on what can I do to better manage my employees to increase productivity.
For tips on improving time management skills, check out our article on how can I improve time management skills.
There is some debate about the effectiveness of KPIs. To learn more, read our article on are KPIs outdated.
Unstructured data can hold valuable insights. Check out our article on the gold is in the unstructured data to learn more.
For advice on handling conflicts or difficult situations with employees, read our article on how can I handle conflicts or difficult situations with employees.
If you’re considering implementing OKRs, you may be wondering if they should be monthly, quarterly, or yearly. Check out our article on should OKRs be monthly, quarterly, or yearly to learn more.
To learn about effective communication techniques for leading a team, read our article on what are some effective communication techniques for leading a team.
If you’re looking for a quick overview of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), check out our article on the TLDR of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).
For recommendations on OKR software for small businesses, read our article on OKR software for small business.