6 bad habits that cost CSMs a Fortune.
As a Customer Success Manager, time is your most scarce resource.
It’s one of the toughest challenges to spend it wisely.
Here are 6 things you need to stop doing:
1. Resolving customer support tickets
I get it, as a CSM you are wired to help people.
And on the surface, it looks like a great gesture to take care of customer support tickets.
But once you start doing it, you will be considered the customers’ single point of contact.
It’s much more convenient to come to a single person with everything.
It also looks great from the leadership perspective.
After all, delivering outstanding customer service is a competitive advantage.
But what none talks about are the costs.
As a CSM you are also not a “more advanced” version of your colleagues in support.
Your performance in resolving customer tickets is - logically - subpar compared to your colleagues from support.
That means you are terribly inefficient and you may even figure out that you don’t know how to solve the customer’s problem after wasting hours trying.
The ONLY exception is if you’ve been working in customer support before.
But even then it does not make sense outside of emergency situations.
Because the more time you spend with support the less you spend on educating and training your customers.
Negatively affecting the probability of customers finding success worth renewing their contracts.
2. Skipping discoveries
You are getting a hand-off from your sales colleagues that contains everything you need to know about your customer.
Really everything? A rhetorical question of course.
Despite their best efforts sales reps are rarely qualified to determine your customers’ needs.
Sure, they need to discover the customers' goals and check for compatibility with your product.
They should also have a thorough understanding of the problems customers need to solve.
But do they know how to solve these problems and the education and training customers require therefore?
That rather seems to be the responsibility of someone who is working with a lot of customers daily over months and years.
The hand-off, however, should make it easier to continue the discovery by asking follow-up questions.
If you skip doing that kind of advanced discovery, you’ll set yourself up for spending 3x as much time on firefighting, quick-fixing, and band-aiding.
A smart move is to join your colleagues from sales in the later stages of the acquisition process (Sales Qualified Opportunity stage) - this way you could even check for red flags.
3. Avoiding customer conversations
9 out of 10 CSMs/CS leaders I’m asking don’t know whether their customers are successful.
Because talking to them about their results “does not scale”.
That’s symptomatic of the over-dependence on automation and the over-boarding focus on efficiency.
Your customers likely get dozens of surveys and even if they are not - who cares?
What’s in for them if they take it?
How much faith do they have that their feedback gets heard?
(Short) surveys have their place e.g. for asking yes/no or identifying preferences out of x options.
But meaningful customer feedback requires context and the best way to understand the “what” and the “why” is to ask open questions.
And guess what - there are a lot of customers who’d love to have good old-fashioned conversations.
Not all conversations are meant to be easy.
You should not avoid the hard ones because they will only become harder the longer you wait.
If you have to break up with a bad-fit customer you should rather do it sooner or later.
Because you’ll both only continue becoming more frustrated and waste more time and money.
4. Not tracking customer outcomes
NPS, health scores, CSAT, and product usage are NOT customer success metrics.
They are internal statistics and your customers don’t care about any of them.
If you are talking to the customer’s CFO - are you really going to sell them on these metrics?
Customers buy your product to achieve their desired outcome.
That’s what you need to deliver and what you need to measure.
Because said CFO cares about one thing: What’s the ROI of your product and is it worth continue paying for?
It’s a simple formula:
Understand your customers’ goals
Understand how they measure success
Know their actual outcomes
Achieved/overachieved → renewal
Underachieved → at risk (at least)
Ask your customers to share their results on a regular basis. They are reluctant?
Your best argument is that you want to ensure that they achieve their desired outcomes.
As the old saying goes - you can’t manage what you can’t measure.
5. Re-engaging non-responsive customers
This might sound controversial at first.
Because of course, you should try to re-engage customers that have gone dark.
But it should never be something you are doing regularly on a large scale.
Because it means you are treating the symptoms over and over.
You should do it as a one-time project to “clean up” and identify the reasons why they go dark.
From that point, you should understand and apply mechanisms to prevent it from happening in the first place.
If you are ghosting your customers for a month until your playbook says you should reach out because their usage is dropping it’s not a surprise that they become non-responsive.
If you are reaching out to “check in” without delivering anything of value you are making things worse.
In the end, you are likely spending twice as much time to get them back on track than you would have spent to build a relationship in the first place.
6. Fighting inevitable churn
Giving up on customers is not an easy thing to do and I’ve experienced it myself.
But sometimes it’s simply not meant to be.
That does not mean you should retreat every time you meet a challenging customer.
It means realizing when you’ve tried everything in your power but all of your efforts were fruitless.
As a CSM you can make all the difference but you can’t work magic and fix a bad-fit customer.
Keep trying beyond a certain point is likely where you are taking the heaviest losses.
Because you are spending with bad-fit customers that the costs outweigh the revenue only for these customers to churn anyway.
But that’s nothing compared to the growth opportunities you are missing.
Because unless you are working double shifts you can’t spend enough time with your top-tier customers.
And that means saying goodbye to expansions, upsells, and referrals.
It’s a tough time to be a customer success manager.
But at the same time, it’s a golden opportunity to prove your value once and for all.
Start by eliminating all the time-wasting activities in your everyday work.