By Colleen St. John
In Part 1 of my start-up journey, I focused on Support. For Part 2 of the start-up journey, my focus as a Customer Success Leader has been on the Onboarding and Implementation of new customers. The question ‘Should Customer Success be involved from the start?’ has come up a number of times throughout my years in Customer Success. I’ve tried different variations of this, but ultimately in my experience, the more transitions a customer must go through the worse the experience. When given the opportunity to build a Client Services team from the beginning again, I have chosen to incorporate Customer Success as the main point of contact from day one.
What does this actually look like when put into action?
First, let’s define the role of the Implementation team, which is made up of implementation specialists who are part project manager and part platform expert. The Implementation team advises and guides a new customer through their early days of learning the product through a successful launch. The metric we primarily focus on is Time to Value. This team is a critical component of a successful customer experience, especially since first impressions are everything. They successfully communicate timelines, due dates, and technical issues. They also escalate issues to the appropriate internal teams, mostly Product and Engineering. They train customers on the platform, answer questions, and advise on best practices. They manage the day to day tactical side of getting a customer off the ground. As a team, we have built implementation phases as necessary overarching steps to ensure each customer feels guided and supported.
To begin, the discovery phase starts with internal meetings between Sales and Customer Success, including Implementation. The purpose of these meetings is to ensure we have all of the necessary information that was discussed in the sales process. Here we want to make sure we’re not asking customers questions they’ve already answered and that we’re walking into our first meeting prepared. We also include our kickoff meeting with customers as a part of this discovery phase as we gain clarity on some of the information that was passed along to us by the sales team and we often gather new information when speaking directly with the customer.
We then have the implementation specialist take the lead on the implementation journey - initial setup, training and support, and testing phase - through the launch of the platform with end users. Once the platform is live with end users, there will be some time where the Implementation team is monitoring all is well. The training and support phase is also critical to ensure customers know how to find information and support should any issues pop up once they are out of the implementation stage of the relationship. Once the platform is set up and being used successfully, Implementation steps back and Customer Success takes over the communication and meeting cadence as the ongoing relationship manager.
I would love to hear how others have structured their implementation process through the lens of Customer Success as we’re always looking to improve. The biggest challenge I’ve run into in the past with this approach is making sure internal teams are clear on the various roles and responsibilities. For those who have had the implementation team own the relationship and then transition to Customer Success Managers, how have you made this work to ensure customers have a smooth onboarding experience?
Stay tuned for Part 3 - building Customer Success from the beginning.
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Colleen St. John - As Director of Client Services, Colleen leads the implementation, support, and customer success teams at Littera Education. Colleen is an experienced customer success and professional services leader. She relies on her extensive corporate background in customer success and project management as well as her academic Masters in education, to design effective strategies for clients to follow from initial rollout to long-term adoption and expansion. A licensed teacher, Colleen holds an MA in Education Administration from Notre Dame de Namur University and a BA in Liberal Studies from San Diego State University. Originally from California, Colleen now lives in New Jersey with her husband and three children.