How Embracing Customer Success Can Transform Your Business Processes

“Can you just document the new CS (Customer Success) processes?” was how it started – sparked by quite reasonable feedback from our Sales team trying to formalize where their part of the process ended and my team’s began since we started maturing our organization.

Inwardly, I groaned. Outwardly, my response was, “of course, let me get right on that!”

Why Customer Success is Everyone’s Responsibility

Building a Customer-Centric Culture

Why the groan? Well, rightly or wrongly, I’ve been spending time with all our teams – Product, Support, Professional Services, Sales, Marketing, Legal, and Operations – gaining buy-in to a philosophy that “Customer Success” doesn’t start and end with my team (even though it’s called the Customer Success team!). Actually, it is a facet of every process in our company – which is fine as a philosophical principle, but try documenting it… you have to get into every process and rework an element of it!

Why Customer Success is More Than Just a Team

So my reasoning was this: let’s work on the culture to include Customer Success at every turn; let’s offer some mentoring (and in turn be mentored myself) to every function, and let’s evolve the behavior from the ground up before documenting the processes. After all, it’s not the documentation that adds the value; it’s the behavior that it documents.

So why am I blogging about my own woes?

I had a lightbulb moment. I realized that my challenges weren’t unique to my industry and that pulling together that combination of culture, tooling, and processes were common factors to pretty much every customer challenge that I come across, despite the wide variety of use cases that these represent (such as legal case management, customer relationship management, procurement and supply chain processes, sports club management, HR policy management to name a few – I’m sure you’ll agree, pretty diverse!)
In all these scenarios, the stimulus that begins the set of related business flows is either directly or indirectly influenced by the result of those same business flows.

It sounds counter-intuitive, right? Surely most organizations work on a set of linear flows that feed from one to the next, mapping across the teams in that organization, to achieve the appropriate business outcomes, don’t they?

The Infinity Loop: A Framework for Connected Processes

So, here’s a challenge for you – think about your teams’ inputs and outputs and consider the ways that your outputs could influence the inputs – even if you’re fed by, and feed into, other teams along the way. What are the metrics? Are they volume or speed-related? Revenue-related? Quality-related? Feedback score-related? Maybe they’re a combination, like efficiency or effectiveness? Think laterally if it’s not obvious – maybe take the time to think about it away from work – I’m betting that you’ll find the link!

“Hardly an original thought,” I hear you cry, and of course, you’re right, this ‘infinity loop’ concept has been written about before, and I’m sure that many of you involved in Customer Success, sales, or marketing have an image of that loop in your minds.

In my case, when thinking about documenting Customer Success processes, I’ve got some parallel threads. One is: let’s document our ‘internal’ processes – at least that helps everyone understand what we do directly. The other is: let’s identify the ways in which my team influences the other parts of the business and find ways to have their documentation updated.

Here’s an example.

In many ‘customer journey’ infinity loops, there’s always the concept of an ‘untouched/unaware’ marketplace – those prospective customers that we could serve with our solutions, but they probably don’t know about us. It’s usually the job of marketing to turn the ‘unaware’ into ‘aware’ so that when those prospects have a problem that we could address, they know that we exist.

Practical Steps to Embed Customer Success Company-Wide

Does my CS team play a part here, given that its primary role is nothing to do with marketing? I would argue that the answer is an emphatic ‘yes.’

We can feed insights on what we have done for customers (rather than what we could do) so that the marketing messages stay pertinent and topical. By ‘pre-conditioning’ the message, we can maximize the generation of qualified leads.

Through the ‘sales’ stages in that customer journey (most loops show these as the steps from evaluation to purchasing decision) my team builds the demonstration assets, informative materials, and brings the domain expertise that materially increases our rapport, reputation, and win rate.

In staying engaged with these customers throughout their adoption experience, my team feeds into the product lifecycle to help prioritize developments in line with market and customer needs.

If we do this right, our customers stay loyal and drive continuous value to the level that they renew and even expand the footprint of our offerings in their environments.

OK, now I write it down, I’ve realized that documenting this might not be such a mountain to climb after all…maybe I was just feeling a bit grumpy.

The Need for Tool Integration in Customer Success

The Challenge of Tool Silos

Anyway, I got to thinking about not just the inter-connectedness of the processes, but also of the tooling supporting them. Most companies I’ve worked in have grown at such a pace that they have selected different tools to handle different parts of the process in isolation. For example, a CRM might have been chosen for centralizing customer data, but it’s likely that the marketing department has different tooling for their campaign management, the support team probably has different tooling for ticket management, and the product teams have different tools for prioritizing their development…and so on.

Aiming for ‘Process Harmony’

But if the challenge is to drive ‘process harmony’ (new phrase…think I’ll keep it!) then we need these tools to talk to each other.

If we were lucky, we managed to integrate them – usually through APIs, customizations, or with external business intelligence tools to give us the insights needed. If we were fortunate enough to have selected ‘open’ tools and have good enterprise architects and data scientists, it’s even worked pretty well!

If you’re one of these lucky few, hats off. In my experience though, this is the exception rather than the rule – and extends well beyond sales and marketing – it’s a challenge that impacts every process in the business (back to that infinity loop concept).

As a result of this, many of the businesses I speak with find themselves ‘stuck’ when trying to gain incremental improvements – often because an efficiency initiative in one department inevitably highlights a dependency on the tooling or process choices in another (sound familiar?).

Conclusion: Procrastination or Process Clarity?

How are you supposed to get unstuck? You’re unlikely to be able to get other teams to change their tooling choices, since the budget and value is primarily justified within that team’s spend. You could try putting manual methods in place (e.g., externalize the data from the system, put it through some business intelligence, and make it available to upstream or downstream teams) – the popular choice for many, but ultimately ‘information’ doesn’t equate to ‘action’ – unless processes are actually triggered, this is just ‘reporting.’
Ideally, we would find a solution that could fit alongside existing tools, model out the data relationships, drive the workflows, or provide the insights needed across teams and track metrics that can show us how systemic improvement is being achieved.

And AI? Can you write a blog without mentioning it? How about using AI to categorize, enrich, or assist those workflows to generate a step-change in how you operate? Imagine what an army of analysts and consultants might achieve if they looked over every business flow – that’s where AI would play its part.

Talk about procrastination…in the time taken to write this blog, I could have documented something… ah well, back to the keyboard!