By Will Lopez
When do you create a Customer Support team? How do you show your board, leadership, or colleagues that the added cost of a Customer Support team member can help your company achieve its retention goals? These are questions many of us go through once your company scales from early-stage startup to a growth-stage company. Here are two approaches by which to answer these questions.
Is it time for a Customer Support team?
Scaling a Customer Success department through rapid growth means change is constant; the go-to-market strategy is constantly changing, client needs are evolving, and the team doesn’t look the same year-over-year. One thing stays consistent: the need to support clients. In the early days of your organization, it’s easy and efficient for Customer Success Managers to provide client support. Five minutes here and there with a handful of clients only amounts to a small time commitment, but as your company scales, those few minutes your Customer Success Manager spends on supporting clients, can add up to several hours.
Measuring where your Customer Success Managers are spending their time is critical to creating a support team. If your organization utilizes a Customer Success platform like ChurnZero or Gainsight, and if your team uses a ticketing system, those can be used to track what Customer Success Managers are spending their time on. Create a report that reflects how much time the team is spending on creating, tracking, and closing tickets, along with which customers they are spending that time on. Take that time and add it to the time they need to spend on the value-added activities (Executive Business Reviews, Renewals, etc.) and determine if they have enough time in a month to complete these activities.
Time spent on tickets + Time spent on value-added activities = Total time spent (on average there are 160 working hours a month)
As a rule of thumb, the amount of time the Customer Success Manager spends on the value-added activities should always be higher than the Customer Support activities. If this is inverse or equal, then it’s time to advocate for a Customer Support team.
How Does a Support Team Help to Achieve Retention goals?
Now that you are armed with data and have a clear understanding where and on who the Customer Success Managers are spending time, it’s time to advocate for the creation of a Support team. A few ways a Customer Support team helps retention:
· Customer Success Managers can focus on value-added activities:
At an early-stage company, a Customer Success Manager can handle multiple specializations since the client base and ARR of that client base are typically a lot smaller. As your organization grows, so do the requirements for each of those specializations, especially Support, making it difficult to manage multiple priorities.
When a Customer Success Manager manages both success and support, the manager can mistake supporting a client as a value-added activity. Not only does owning the creation, resolution, and closing of a ticket take time, it can distract from value-added activities that drive toward the client achieving their goals with your product, and finding value from that achievement. Having a dedicated Customer Support team focus on support-related activities frees up time for the Customer Success Managers to show value to the client. They can focus on client goals, tracking against those goals, and identifying opportunities for growth. This helps increase retention.
· A Dedicated Support Team Helps Improve the Product:
Another way the Support team benefits retention, is by improving the product. A dedicated Support team is constantly working on solving problems clients face using your product. The leader of this team should track the number of support requests and identify any trends specific to certain features on the product. The Support team is a bridge to the product team and can share those trends they notice on support requests. This feedback loop is critical to the renewal of the client, especially where clients experience a problem on the platform, and the product team is able to resolve the problem with a platform update.
Use data to drive your decision to create a Customer Support team, and continuously measure to confirm that you are heading in the right direction. Separating Support and Success is critical to increasing better support and increasing retention.
Are you a customer success leader who needs ideas on creating roles, structuring your team, and hiring the best? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers a CS Leadership Program designed to give you the models and tools you need to create a top performing customer success team. For more information visit the Leadership page at TheSuccessLeague.io
Will Lopez - Will brings 10 years of experience to Phone2Action. His focus on delivering customers' goals and outcomes has created relationships with senior executives from organizations, such as American Heart Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to Fortune-500 companies, such as Walmart and JP Morgan Chase. Will’s dedication to the customer experience has led to improved retention and revenue growth.