Customer Success & Relationship Marketing

On this weeks episode we continue our discussion about Customer Success and Marketing by diving deeper into relationship marketing — the discipline of fostering a long term relationships through mass and more targeted communications by marketing and/or product. Or simplified by Mike as “How to do stuff with lots of customers at once.” 

Listen to the full episode iTunes or Soundcloud. Read on for a synopsis by Steve Nguyen, Mike Grafham, Drew Gilbert and Kathleen Rouse.

You can also read all the summaries on Medium.

Relationship management can scale engagement and decrease costs

In previous episodes we discussed disciplines of Customer Success engagement as a pyramid.

Interaction from the top is the most expensive and least scalable, but it can be extremely insightful. The opportunity is to identify trends from 1 to 1 engagements that could be turned into mass or targeted communications. Driving engagement down the pyramid lowers costs, scales customer communications and frees up CSM time. Mike summarizes this point with a great question: 

How do you make what you are doing repeatable so you can spend more time creating value, and eventually driving those repeatable actions into product or marketing.

Creating repeatable and scalable actions require more than just CSMs

Customer Success disciplines are fulfilled by more than Customer Success Managers. While CSMs can identify insights, it takes collaboration between teams to execute and drive those actions down the pyramid. 

Here’s an example Drew shared of how to create alignment by working with many teams to take lesson learned from 1 to 1 engagements and drive it down the pyramid to productized.

In a call center, we identified the average hold time before a customer hangs up — let’s call it 30 seconds for this example — and hang ups correlated with unhappy customers. I wanted to test if sharing this insight with administrators would drive a decrease in hold times. 

• Identify accounts where avg hold time was longer than 30 seconds and send what appeared to be an automated email. 
• Share the metrics of decreased hold times from those targeted companies with marketing. Together we identified customers with hold times longer than 30 seconds and sent a weekly email.
• We pulled data showing increased engagement from sending emails with marketing and shared those insights with product. This insight led product to implement automation without Marketing or CS engagement. 

Execution is driven by shared priorities

It is difficult to create effective partnerships when departments don’t clearly see how their priorities overlap or it appears priorities conflict with one another. Departments will pursue priorities independently in absence of a shared strategy.

 Trying to force others to work with you on your agenda also doesn’t work. An example of this is if you have ever had the problem where there is commitment in the room and no follow up.

The key is to identify areas where the venn diagrams of departments overlap to create priorities. Approach other teams with insights that help achieve their goals. In the example above, each department was able to contribute to the shared goal of increasing customer adoption without overlapping execution responsibilities. 

Data identifies and justifies shared priorities

It is extremely important to have underlying data to back up any point that you make to another team. Otherwise, a conversation about priorities becomes about feelings. With many stakeholders, it’s impossible to move priorities forward without data — meetings will digress into opinions and disagreements.

The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it. - Neil deGrasse Tyson

Customer Success is moving in the direction of using the Lean Startup method to create priorities using data. Steve points out it can sometimes be hard to work in a lean startup mode when executive or product priorities are influential in determining strategy to move forward. While this will always happen, it’s important to use data as the underlying foundation when discussion priorities. 

Summary

• Relationship management can scale engagement and decrease costs
• Creating repeatable and scalable actions require more than just CSMs
• Execution is driven by shared priorities
• Data identifies and justifies shared priorities

Have another topic you want us to discuss or a topic you want to contribute to in the future? Tweet us at CSMSuccessCast on Twitter