By Evan Rich
In a restaurant, the chef is tasked with designing a menu that will satisfy the target customers and whet their appetite to keep them coming back for more. How does the chef design the menu for our fictitious restaurant? She might ask the servers what customers seem to be enjoying most or ask the customers directly which dishes are their favorites. If our restaurant has embraced modern technology, then the chef should have some data to help her figure out which dishes are selling well and how likely customers are to return and order them again or return and order a different dish (and if so, which ones). I don’t know, I’ve never worked in a restaurant, but I’d imagine this is roughly how it should work.
This is the analogy we have been using recently to think about how our Customer Success, Product and Marketing teams should work together to drive expansion in our customer base. To elaborate a bit, the Product Manager is the chef, who designs the menu of products and features she believes will appeal most to the ideal customer profile. The PM builds the menu based on a combination of market intelligence and customer conversations. Product Marketing and Customer Marketing are the kitchen staff, who team up to design and prepare the food by selecting the freshest ingredients and plating the meal in a way that will appeal to customers. Marketing “plates” its messaging for customers in the form of blog posts, emails, paid ads, organic search, webinars, in-person events, etc. The chef and kitchen staff need to know what the customers are looking for in order to consistently deliver an outstanding experience that will keep them returning to the restaurant.
This is where Customer Success, the servers and waitstaff in our restaurant analogy, enter the equation. These are the people who know the customer best. In your typical local restaurant, the waitstaff may generate most of their customer “data” from memory. This information can often be valuable to the chef and kitchen staff, though it is difficult to scale and likely that findings will be skewed toward some regular customers with very specific tastes. Conversely, in a modern chain restaurant, the servers have little to no influence over the menu or food preparation. Corporate analyzes market trends and troves of customer data to optimize the menu and preparation to appeal toward their desired demographic. Many restaurants, however, fall somewhere in between these two extremes. For these restaurants, there is tremendous value in collecting data, applying it to design a dining experience for segments of similar customers and then supplementing these data with one-off data points collected in the field. The former is essential for identifying macro trends and implementing at scale, while the latter helps the team stay responsive to the needs of the most valuable, repeat customers.
This is the balance we are trying to strike, though our menu features enterprise software and services rather than the delicious meal you were imagining (sorry to disappoint). When we first started out, we exclusively employed a “high touch” model much like the local restaurant. This can be quite effective when your CSMs know their enterprise customers intimately. CSMs can coordinate business reviews that yield valuable insight into a customer’s business objectives and then work with Product and Sales counterparts to support an expansion opportunity. Our CSMs will continue to do this with our enterprise customers (our “regulars”). So how do we scale this to the rest of the client base? While our CSMs don’t have enough time to reach every single customer and ask them the types of questions that yield deep insights, we do have data that can help segment the rest of the base into groups that share traits with the enterprises we know so well. With this in mind, we have created a new role tasked with developing a “tech touch” program to deliver a steady stream of content to all customers, including the enterprises blanketed by the high touch model. This program will put a much-needed focus on customers who have been under-serviced and know little about our product capabilities beyond the basic functionality they are currently using. Returning to the restaurant analogy, we will leverage data to turn the casual customer into a regular diner. The tech touch program will also provide air cover for the CSM team, reinforcing the message they are delivering directly to their customer. This is something we have been working to implement for quite some time, and now that we have the data, expertise and players in place, we’re ready to get started. Let’s eat!
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Evan Rich - Evan formed the Customer Success team at NS1, an infrastructure technology company that is changing how internet applications are delivered. As VP of Global Services, he is responsible for account management, support and professional services. Evan holds a BS from Cornell University and resides in New York City.