{"id":22805,"date":"2020-01-15T00:00:55","date_gmt":"2020-01-15T00:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/?p=22805"},"modified":"2024-07-25T11:53:12","modified_gmt":"2024-07-25T10:53:12","slug":"building-customer-success-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/building-customer-success-team\/","title":{"rendered":"Not just support on steroids: How to build a Customer Success team"},"content":{"rendered":"

Customer Success teams arise out of the need to provide high-touch guidance to your most valuable customers \u2013 without<\/em> disrupting your Sales and Support teams.<\/p>\n

In Intercom’s early years, it wasn\u2019t uncommon to find a support rep looped into a deal or asked to assist with onboarding. With only our Support team available as product experts, our sales reps relied heavily on them, and whatever product knowledge the reps already had, to troubleshoot customers\u2019 problems.<\/p>\n

“Our customers needed a dedicated team \u2013 one that could jump on calls, assist with implementation, and spend time on complex problems”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But as we continued to bring on more and larger customers, we strained our sales and support reps\u2019 ability to keep up with the demand for their time and expertise. Our enterprise customers expected white-glove onboarding<\/a> and ongoing training which, while crucial to their success and our business\u2019s, took teammates out of their core jobs.<\/p>\n

What we and our customer base needed was a dedicated team \u2013 one that could jump on calls, assist with implementation, and spend time on complex problems. In the last few years, we\u2019ve scaled this initial group to more than 10 people globally and along the way, I\u2019ve learned a lot about what it takes to build a high-performing Customer Success team.<\/p>\n

From support on steroids to strategic partners<\/h2>\n

When we first formed our Customer Success team, we reported into the customer support<\/a> organization. In many ways, this was a natural evolution of the critical role that our support reps had played in our early sales deals. It also reflected the initial motivation behind creating customer success \u2013 to offload support requests.<\/p>\n

\"Customer
\nBut as we quickly learned, there were downsides to being seen as \u201csupport on steroids.\u201d We had a very transactional relationship with the Sales team where reps would come to us with one-off requests. A common one went like this: \u201cA customer has questions about this feature. Can you help?\u201d We were working through a queue of questions without an overarching plan in place.<\/p>\n

This led to a situation where we weren\u2019t fully trusted by customers and couldn\u2019t meaningfully impact their success, which led to churn and a diminished customer experience. Instead of answering a few questions here and there, we needed to be helping customers develop their long-term strategy for using Intercom. Put simply, we weren\u2019t living up to the promise of our team, and our customer retention was damaged as a result. To fulfill that promise, we needed to rethink how we worked.<\/p>\n

Getting closer to our most important customers<\/h3>\n

We realized we had to get closer to our customers and in our case, closer to our Sales team. Our Sales team are responsible for both winning new customers and growing them over time<\/a>. If we wanted to maximize value to our customers, then we needed to be there every step of the way.<\/p>\n

“How could customers truly trust us to unlock value for them if there\u2019s a quota hanging over our heads?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We ultimately decided to join the sales organization, positioning ourselves as strategic partners to our account managers and relationship managers. Today we work hand-in-hand with our sales reps to help our most important customers implement Intercom in ways that meaningfully solve their business problems. We oversee onboarding, conduct account reviews, hold product training, and deploy long-term strategies for customer success.<\/p>\n

\"Customer
\nThe key differentiator between us and our sales counterparts is that we don\u2019t carry quotas. While we believe our work is revenue-generating in the long term, we also believe that with customer success, it should do exactly what it says on the tin. After all, how could customers truly trust us to unlock value for them if there\u2019s a quota hanging over our heads?<\/p>\n

While joining the Sales organization was a crucial first step, we still had plenty more work to do \u2013 from defining our mission and building trust to identifying our most impactful work.<\/p>\n

3 lessons on building a Customer Success team<\/h2>\n

1. Define your team\u2019s mission early<\/h3>\n

For our quota-carrying counterparts, their mission is clear: close deals. But for our Customer Success team, there\u2019s far more gray area. If customer success managers (CSM) don\u2019t drive revenue and improve KPIs, then how do we add value to a sales organization? More to the point: why do we even exist?<\/p>\n

When defining our team\u2019s mission, I started with leadership expert Simon Sinek\u2019s Golden Circle<\/a>. It\u2019s a simple but powerful tool for peeling back the layers on our everyday work \u2013 what we do and how \u2013 and narrowing in on the \u201cwhy\u201d behind it all. Just as companies need purpose<\/a>, so do the individual teams that comprise them.<\/p>\n

\"Simon<\/p>\n

The mission we came up with takes inspiration directly from our company mission \u2013 to make internet business personal. As a Customer Success team, we strive to ensure Intercom\u2019s most important customers see faster growth through better relationships, specifically with their own customers. Better customer relationships and higher customer satisfaction translates into longer relationships and more opportunities to upsell throughout the customer lifecycle. When we\u2019ve achieved that, then we can be confident we\u2019ve done our job.<\/p>\n

\"Customer
\nBut it isn\u2019t enough to just write your mission down and hope others agree. In order for your team to be seen as mission critical, as invaluable to the larger organization, you need buy-in at every level. In our case, we needed to both get buy-in and shake our reputation as support on steroids.<\/p>\n

After we drafted our mission, I spoke with our sales leaders, sales reps, customers, and our partners across the company. By soliciting their feedback, we\u2019ve been able to deepen their investment in our team and our purpose. As we now scale<\/a> the team, we\u2019re continuing to socialize our mission, seek input, and garner buy-in.<\/p>\n

Books that inspired me:<\/strong><\/p>\n