Defining What You Need From Your Customer Platform
Defining What You Need From Your Customer Platform
Defining What You Need From Your Customer Platform
Defining What You Need From Your Customer Platform
Choosing your customer success platform is one of the most important long-term decisions you'll make as a CS leader. Get the requirements wrong, and you'll almost certainly end up with less than you bargained for. Get them right, and your team is almost certainly set for success.
Share
Choosing your customer success platform is one of the most important long-term decisions you'll make as a CS leader. Get the requirements wrong, and you'll almost certainly end up with less than you bargained for. Get them right, and your team is almost certainly set for success.
Share
Choosing your customer success platform is one of the most important long-term decisions you'll make as a CS leader. Get the requirements wrong, and you'll almost certainly end up with less than you bargained for. Get them right, and your team is almost certainly set for success.
As a newly minted Director of Customer Success two years ago, I found no lack of data in our data lake, but I certainly lacked the ship needed to navigate it. In an over ninety-year-old, family-owned solutions provider with deep roots in construction, how could I build a new, well-rounded Customer Success (CS) practice through a delivery model built primarily for program management?
I didn’t have a ship. I didn’t have a dinghy. I didn’t even have the proverbial paddle for that proverbial creek. I barely had water wings. Perhaps you resonate with that feeling as well?
Thankfully, I joined a fabulous team of seasoned customer advocates with a multi-year track record of driving successful client experiences within the business. However, I knew we could make our company better by creating better outcomes for our clients and clearly needed to empower them to execute on this at scale. Determined not to add more administrative tasks to their plates by asking them to fill in the blanks of a legacy tool—and not to have them spend hours every week pouring through data exports to gauge client health by hand—I asked myself what they needed from me. In effect:
How could I give them a fabulous speedboat built on frontier technology and not build a barge that would be hard to steer, slow to react, and stuck in a bygone era?
“CSaaS vendor sites, Reddit posts, Gartner reports, CS trade publications, YouTube videos, and on and on and on scrolled page after page. I was going nowhere and not even very fast to boot.”
As a newly minted Director of Customer Success two years ago, I found no lack of data in our data lake, but I certainly lacked the ship needed to navigate it. In an over ninety-year-old, family-owned solutions provider with deep roots in construction, how could I build a new, well-rounded Customer Success (CS) practice through a delivery model built primarily for program management?
I didn’t have a ship. I didn’t have a dinghy. I didn’t even have the proverbial paddle for that proverbial creek. I barely had water wings. Perhaps you resonate with that feeling as well?
Thankfully, I joined a fabulous team of seasoned customer advocates with a multi-year track record of driving successful client experiences within the business. However, I knew we could make our company better by creating better outcomes for our clients and clearly needed to empower them to execute on this at scale. Determined not to add more administrative tasks to their plates by asking them to fill in the blanks of a legacy tool—and not to have them spend hours every week pouring through data exports to gauge client health by hand—I asked myself what they needed from me. In effect:
How could I give them a fabulous speedboat built on frontier technology and not build a barge that would be hard to steer, slow to react, and stuck in a bygone era?
“CSaaS vendor sites, Reddit posts, Gartner reports, CS trade publications, YouTube videos, and on and on and on scrolled page after page. I was going nowhere and not even very fast to boot.”
As a newly minted Director of Customer Success two years ago, I found no lack of data in our data lake, but I certainly lacked the ship needed to navigate it. In an over ninety-year-old, family-owned solutions provider with deep roots in construction, how could I build a new, well-rounded Customer Success (CS) practice through a delivery model built primarily for program management?
I didn’t have a ship. I didn’t have a dinghy. I didn’t even have the proverbial paddle for that proverbial creek. I barely had water wings. Perhaps you resonate with that feeling as well?
Thankfully, I joined a fabulous team of seasoned customer advocates with a multi-year track record of driving successful client experiences within the business. However, I knew we could make our company better by creating better outcomes for our clients and clearly needed to empower them to execute on this at scale. Determined not to add more administrative tasks to their plates by asking them to fill in the blanks of a legacy tool—and not to have them spend hours every week pouring through data exports to gauge client health by hand—I asked myself what they needed from me. In effect:
How could I give them a fabulous speedboat built on frontier technology and not build a barge that would be hard to steer, slow to react, and stuck in a bygone era?
“CSaaS vendor sites, Reddit posts, Gartner reports, CS trade publications, YouTube videos, and on and on and on scrolled page after page. I was going nowhere and not even very fast to boot.”
Do you feel that your team is empowered and energized by your data and your tools, or do they create drag, slowing their productivity and raising frustration?
So, like many of you (at least pre ChatGPT), I turned to our modern-day Wizard of Oz and Googled it. “Oh great and powerful Google, what customer success tool should I get for my team?”
And like an online Magic 8-ball, the answer came back: “Reply hazy. Try again.”
Ok, it didn’t really say that. But, it might as well have. CSaaS vendor sites, Reddit posts, Gartner reports, CS trade publications, YouTube videos, and on and on and on scrolled page after page. I was going nowhere and not even very fast to boot.
Do you feel that your team is empowered and energized by your data and your tools, or do they create drag, slowing their productivity and raising frustration?
So, like many of you (at least pre ChatGPT), I turned to our modern-day Wizard of Oz and Googled it. “Oh great and powerful Google, what customer success tool should I get for my team?”
And like an online Magic 8-ball, the answer came back: “Reply hazy. Try again.”
Ok, it didn’t really say that. But, it might as well have. CSaaS vendor sites, Reddit posts, Gartner reports, CS trade publications, YouTube videos, and on and on and on scrolled page after page. I was going nowhere and not even very fast to boot.
Do you feel that your team is empowered and energized by your data and your tools, or do they create drag, slowing their productivity and raising frustration?
So, like many of you (at least pre ChatGPT), I turned to our modern-day Wizard of Oz and Googled it. “Oh great and powerful Google, what customer success tool should I get for my team?”
And like an online Magic 8-ball, the answer came back: “Reply hazy. Try again.”
Ok, it didn’t really say that. But, it might as well have. CSaaS vendor sites, Reddit posts, Gartner reports, CS trade publications, YouTube videos, and on and on and on scrolled page after page. I was going nowhere and not even very fast to boot.
I. Choosing an Approach
My wonderful wife Katy is a public school librarian with a master’s degree in library science. What would she do? She would find a reputable source or two and dive into each. She would validate their assumptions, check their research, and seek the common findings.
So, I rolled up my sleeves and searched deeper. I found several good studies that gave me a shorter list of true contenders and examples of how they were used. So, finally I was gaining ground!
But I still seemed to be a little out of my depth. While serving customers and creating positive outcomes was not new to me, this whole world of structured customer success as a practice was new. Churn, MRR, ARR, etc. were terms I understood viscerally, but how would we actually measure our success? We aren’t a SaaS company, so the standard rules didn’t seem to apply. I soon realized that I needed to stop trying to be like every other CS team, and had to figure out what our CS practice would look like—and that meant interrogating what's actually valuable to my company and my team.
I. Choosing an Approach
My wonderful wife Katy is a public school librarian with a master’s degree in library science. What would she do? She would find a reputable source or two and dive into each. She would validate their assumptions, check their research, and seek the common findings.
So, I rolled up my sleeves and searched deeper. I found several good studies that gave me a shorter list of true contenders and examples of how they were used. So, finally I was gaining ground!
But I still seemed to be a little out of my depth. While serving customers and creating positive outcomes was not new to me, this whole world of structured customer success as a practice was new. Churn, MRR, ARR, etc. were terms I understood viscerally, but how would we actually measure our success? We aren’t a SaaS company, so the standard rules didn’t seem to apply. I soon realized that I needed to stop trying to be like every other CS team, and had to figure out what our CS practice would look like—and that meant interrogating what's actually valuable to my company and my team.
I. Choosing an Approach
My wonderful wife Katy is a public school librarian with a master’s degree in library science. What would she do? She would find a reputable source or two and dive into each. She would validate their assumptions, check their research, and seek the common findings.
So, I rolled up my sleeves and searched deeper. I found several good studies that gave me a shorter list of true contenders and examples of how they were used. So, finally I was gaining ground!
But I still seemed to be a little out of my depth. While serving customers and creating positive outcomes was not new to me, this whole world of structured customer success as a practice was new. Churn, MRR, ARR, etc. were terms I understood viscerally, but how would we actually measure our success? We aren’t a SaaS company, so the standard rules didn’t seem to apply. I soon realized that I needed to stop trying to be like every other CS team, and had to figure out what our CS practice would look like—and that meant interrogating what's actually valuable to my company and my team.
II. Defining Success
If you were asked by someone outside your industry to define success for your client and for your company, could you do so in a handful of sentences? Most of us can try—but few will settle on something clear and actionable first time around.
I found addressing the following questions to be an invaluable forcing function for me to define success clearly and concretely for my team:
What are our core values?
What are our metrics that we need to measure?
What should our workflows look like to be the most effective?
What makes our product/service valuable in the marketplace?
How is our team measuring the impact that it has with our customer base?
With this in place, I now knew what we needed to deliver on—and got to translating these outcomes into requirements any platform would have to meet for us to have any chance of success in the field.
II. Defining Success
If you were asked by someone outside your industry to define success for your client and for your company, could you do so in a handful of sentences? Most of us can try—but few will settle on something clear and actionable first time around.
I found addressing the following questions to be an invaluable forcing function for me to define success clearly and concretely for my team:
What are our core values?
What are our metrics that we need to measure?
What should our workflows look like to be the most effective?
What makes our product/service valuable in the marketplace?
How is our team measuring the impact that it has with our customer base?
With this in place, I now knew what we needed to deliver on—and got to translating these outcomes into requirements any platform would have to meet for us to have any chance of success in the field.
II. Defining Success
If you were asked by someone outside your industry to define success for your client and for your company, could you do so in a handful of sentences? Most of us can try—but few will settle on something clear and actionable first time around.
I found addressing the following questions to be an invaluable forcing function for me to define success clearly and concretely for my team:
What are our core values?
What are our metrics that we need to measure?
What should our workflows look like to be the most effective?
What makes our product/service valuable in the marketplace?
How is our team measuring the impact that it has with our customer base?
With this in place, I now knew what we needed to deliver on—and got to translating these outcomes into requirements any platform would have to meet for us to have any chance of success in the field.
III. Translating Requirements
Commercial ships need solid structures and reliable propulsion, well designed cargo or passenger compartments, and solid navigation systems. For our CS ship, I knew that our vessel similarly required Governance, Expansion, and Measurement of Success (GEM). So, I needed a structure that could support those mission objectives. Like any shipbuilder, I needed a plan to start. Perhaps your list would look similar or perhaps not—what's important here is both that:
the key elements you identify are tied closely to your definition of success; and
they reflect the reality of your business priorities
From Idea to Reality
Once established, these requirements should be clearly defined again—as core pillars clearly describing both the essential need and as many tangible, day-to-day examples as you can. See mine below:
I. Governance
For Governance, we need strong insight abilities. We need to be able to bubble up financial and project data into actionable intelligence. We need to see problems approaching instead of problems in hindsight. For problems that get missed, we need the ability to record the challenge, find the predictors that got missed, and iterate that knowledge back into the process to create continuous improvement. We need to automate as much as possible so that governance motions allow us to focus on the big ideas and not get caught in daily minutia.
II. Expansion
For Expansion, we need to grasp not just what business that we have with a portfolio client yesterday and today but also what services and offerings that are missing from the mix for tomorrow. We need tools to partner with our co-workers in account management to find areas that we can add value to the client. We need to quickly dissect client spend and engagement to find downward trends to reverse and upward trends to capitalize. And almost more importantly, we need to catch stagnate trends that could very easily be an indicator of lack of engagement by the client that our competitors could leverage to their advantage when we least expect it.
III. Measurement
And for Measurement of Success, the very heart of our job titles, we need to get real and timely measurements on customer sentiment. We need tools that are easy to use and take in both internal and external sentiment. Does the client love working with us, like working with us, tolerate working with us, or despise working with us? Are these clients becoming fans and advocates for our people and our service offerings? And, in collaboration with our partners in service delivery, how does our company feel about working with our portfolios? Are we meshing well in the Service Provider and Service Consumer relationship? Is the financial health, level of effort, and engagement processes required for that client relationship worth our investment? How do we measure and maintain a mutually beneficial relationship?
III. Translating Requirements
Commercial ships need solid structures and reliable propulsion, well designed cargo or passenger compartments, and solid navigation systems. For our CS ship, I knew that our vessel similarly required Governance, Expansion, and Measurement of Success (GEM). So, I needed a structure that could support those mission objectives. Like any shipbuilder, I needed a plan to start. Perhaps your list would look similar or perhaps not—what's important here is both that:
the key elements you identify are tied closely to your definition of success; and
they reflect the reality of your business priorities
From Idea to Reality
Once established, these requirements should be clearly defined again—as core pillars clearly describing both the essential need and as many tangible, day-to-day examples as you can. See mine below:
I. Governance
For Governance, we need strong insight abilities. We need to be able to bubble up financial and project data into actionable intelligence. We need to see problems approaching instead of problems in hindsight. For problems that get missed, we need the ability to record the challenge, find the predictors that got missed, and iterate that knowledge back into the process to create continuous improvement. We need to automate as much as possible so that governance motions allow us to focus on the big ideas and not get caught in daily minutia.
II. Expansion
For Expansion, we need to grasp not just what business that we have with a portfolio client yesterday and today but also what services and offerings that are missing from the mix for tomorrow. We need tools to partner with our co-workers in account management to find areas that we can add value to the client. We need to quickly dissect client spend and engagement to find downward trends to reverse and upward trends to capitalize. And almost more importantly, we need to catch stagnate trends that could very easily be an indicator of lack of engagement by the client that our competitors could leverage to their advantage when we least expect it.
III. Measurement
And for Measurement of Success, the very heart of our job titles, we need to get real and timely measurements on customer sentiment. We need tools that are easy to use and take in both internal and external sentiment. Does the client love working with us, like working with us, tolerate working with us, or despise working with us? Are these clients becoming fans and advocates for our people and our service offerings? And, in collaboration with our partners in service delivery, how does our company feel about working with our portfolios? Are we meshing well in the Service Provider and Service Consumer relationship? Is the financial health, level of effort, and engagement processes required for that client relationship worth our investment? How do we measure and maintain a mutually beneficial relationship?
III. Translating Requirements
Commercial ships need solid structures and reliable propulsion, well designed cargo or passenger compartments, and solid navigation systems. For our CS ship, I knew that our vessel similarly required Governance, Expansion, and Measurement of Success (GEM). So, I needed a structure that could support those mission objectives. Like any shipbuilder, I needed a plan to start. Perhaps your list would look similar or perhaps not—what's important here is both that:
the key elements you identify are tied closely to your definition of success; and
they reflect the reality of your business priorities
From Idea to Reality
Once established, these requirements should be clearly defined again—as core pillars clearly describing both the essential need and as many tangible, day-to-day examples as you can. See mine below:
I. Governance
For Governance, we need strong insight abilities. We need to be able to bubble up financial and project data into actionable intelligence. We need to see problems approaching instead of problems in hindsight. For problems that get missed, we need the ability to record the challenge, find the predictors that got missed, and iterate that knowledge back into the process to create continuous improvement. We need to automate as much as possible so that governance motions allow us to focus on the big ideas and not get caught in daily minutia.
II. Expansion
For Expansion, we need to grasp not just what business that we have with a portfolio client yesterday and today but also what services and offerings that are missing from the mix for tomorrow. We need tools to partner with our co-workers in account management to find areas that we can add value to the client. We need to quickly dissect client spend and engagement to find downward trends to reverse and upward trends to capitalize. And almost more importantly, we need to catch stagnate trends that could very easily be an indicator of lack of engagement by the client that our competitors could leverage to their advantage when we least expect it.
III. Measurement
And for Measurement of Success, the very heart of our job titles, we need to get real and timely measurements on customer sentiment. We need tools that are easy to use and take in both internal and external sentiment. Does the client love working with us, like working with us, tolerate working with us, or despise working with us? Are these clients becoming fans and advocates for our people and our service offerings? And, in collaboration with our partners in service delivery, how does our company feel about working with our portfolios? Are we meshing well in the Service Provider and Service Consumer relationship? Is the financial health, level of effort, and engagement processes required for that client relationship worth our investment? How do we measure and maintain a mutually beneficial relationship?
IV. Above All—Build For You
If you were staring at a blank spreadsheet or piece of paper, what would your list of “must haves”, “nice to haves”, and “must not haves” be for your customer platform? How important is each of those on a numerical scale? Do you think that list would be similar to the top performers on your team? To your company leadership? To your customers? Put simply—no.
That's why endless Googling for "best customer platform" will never yield the results you're looking for: you don't want to grab something generic off the shelf—you need to build your ship from the ground up.
Define your core values and map them out in written form. Understand that your needs and the needs of your customer base are preeminent in finding tools. Don’t settle for a dinghy when you need a racing scull. And also, don’t go overboard with an aircraft carrier when a solid battleship will meet the need.
Find the solution that meets the most of your needs regardless of what others may be using.
Making this decision right the first time is worth a considerable amount of thought and introspection. But I promise that your time and efforts will be rewarded. I know that mine have been.
IV. Above All—Build For You
If you were staring at a blank spreadsheet or piece of paper, what would your list of “must haves”, “nice to haves”, and “must not haves” be for your customer platform? How important is each of those on a numerical scale? Do you think that list would be similar to the top performers on your team? To your company leadership? To your customers? Put simply—no.
That's why endless Googling for "best customer platform" will never yield the results you're looking for: you don't want to grab something generic off the shelf—you need to build your ship from the ground up.
Define your core values and map them out in written form. Understand that your needs and the needs of your customer base are preeminent in finding tools. Don’t settle for a dinghy when you need a racing scull. And also, don’t go overboard with an aircraft carrier when a solid battleship will meet the need.
Find the solution that meets the most of your needs regardless of what others may be using.
Making this decision right the first time is worth a considerable amount of thought and introspection. But I promise that your time and efforts will be rewarded. I know that mine have been.
IV. Above All—Build For You
If you were staring at a blank spreadsheet or piece of paper, what would your list of “must haves”, “nice to haves”, and “must not haves” be for your customer platform? How important is each of those on a numerical scale? Do you think that list would be similar to the top performers on your team? To your company leadership? To your customers? Put simply—no.
That's why endless Googling for "best customer platform" will never yield the results you're looking for: you don't want to grab something generic off the shelf—you need to build your ship from the ground up.
Define your core values and map them out in written form. Understand that your needs and the needs of your customer base are preeminent in finding tools. Don’t settle for a dinghy when you need a racing scull. And also, don’t go overboard with an aircraft carrier when a solid battleship will meet the need.
Find the solution that meets the most of your needs regardless of what others may be using.
Making this decision right the first time is worth a considerable amount of thought and introspection. But I promise that your time and efforts will be rewarded. I know that mine have been.
The Journey Continues...
For those of you wondering where my journey ended, it soon became clear that I had to find a tool that was easy to use and could be the single “pane of glass” for our world-class CS practice.
But if there's anything this process showed me, it was that I wouldn't find it on instinct alone. I needed some sort of measurement to rate and rank potential solutions. I needed metrics, a scorecard, a sieve to separate the real contenders from the pretenders. So, like every other business leader, I opened Excel and started a spreadsheet…and what followed changed the way I approached the problem yet again.
Since I now understood what I was looking for, I used my Requirement Pillars (III above) to list out the specific features and requirements that we were needing. I then grouped them by the GEM goals and assigned weights and a scoring system. The result was a data-driven framework that I could use to compare and contrast the various CSaaS solution leaders and find the one that was right for us.
But that journey's for next time—stay tuned for Part 2: A Masterclass in Customer Success Vendor Selection.
The Journey Continues...
For those of you wondering where my journey ended, it soon became clear that I had to find a tool that was easy to use and could be the single “pane of glass” for our world-class CS practice.
But if there's anything this process showed me, it was that I wouldn't find it on instinct alone. I needed some sort of measurement to rate and rank potential solutions. I needed metrics, a scorecard, a sieve to separate the real contenders from the pretenders. So, like every other business leader, I opened Excel and started a spreadsheet…and what followed changed the way I approached the problem yet again.
Since I now understood what I was looking for, I used my Requirement Pillars (III above) to list out the specific features and requirements that we were needing. I then grouped them by the GEM goals and assigned weights and a scoring system. The result was a data-driven framework that I could use to compare and contrast the various CSaaS solution leaders and find the one that was right for us.
But that journey's for next time—stay tuned for Part 2: A Masterclass in Customer Success Vendor Selection.
The Journey Continues...
For those of you wondering where my journey ended, it soon became clear that I had to find a tool that was easy to use and could be the single “pane of glass” for our world-class CS practice.
But if there's anything this process showed me, it was that I wouldn't find it on instinct alone. I needed some sort of measurement to rate and rank potential solutions. I needed metrics, a scorecard, a sieve to separate the real contenders from the pretenders. So, like every other business leader, I opened Excel and started a spreadsheet…and what followed changed the way I approached the problem yet again.
Since I now understood what I was looking for, I used my Requirement Pillars (III above) to list out the specific features and requirements that we were needing. I then grouped them by the GEM goals and assigned weights and a scoring system. The result was a data-driven framework that I could use to compare and contrast the various CSaaS solution leaders and find the one that was right for us.
But that journey's for next time—stay tuned for Part 2: A Masterclass in Customer Success Vendor Selection.
Customer Success
Customer Success
Customer Success
Recognized as a world-leader by
Recognized as a world-leader by
Recognized as a world-leader by
Recognized as a world-leader by