By Ejieme Eromosole
It was Monday afternoon and the Slack notification went off. “knock knock”
It was a message from a CSM on my team: “Do you have a few minutes to chat real quick?”
Sounds innocuous, right? But to those of us in people management positions in the past few months, it tingles our spidey senses. We all know the simple request to “catch up” could be a general, “hey, there’s new risk on this major account” or “hey, our new customer is asking for some benchmarks” but it can also be a team member giving notice.
And that Monday afternoon, the latter happened. A great CSM decided to leave our team. My heart sank a bit. This was now the 3rd time in a few months. As always, I tried to understand why they were leaving, see if we could still save them and what lessons were to be learned. People transition to new jobs all the time but there’s always a bit of heartache to say goodbye to a great colleague and for me, always a question of “what could I have done to keep them happy here?” But as my colleague Brian Hartley wrote in his blog post in February, “Like most organizations, we’re prepared to lose employees. It is going to happen, and that is ok. In 2021, many people left their jobs and even the biggest companies were impacted.”
This puts things in perspective. Yes, there are always things we can do to try to keep our teams happy and growing in their careers but sometimes growth comes from someplace new. And this is ok. My next thought was to how to transition the work of the departing team member so remaining team members didn’t have to inherit a greater workload (burnout is real, especially when the remaining team has to deal with so many transitioning co-workers) and so we could still deliver a great experience to our customers.
Ah, yes, our customers.
This was now the 3rd person on their account team to be transitioning in the last 3 months. What were they going to think? We have quite a few customer commitments and promises we’d made and we had ambitious goals to deliver against. We’re a small company and moving quickly is one of our selling points. How were we going to do that with a smaller team and fewer resources? All these thoughts raced through my mind but it was at that point I chose to be open, transparent and vulnerable with our customers. Here’s why and what I learned.
Why to choose transparency
When CSMs and other customer-facing team members leave, we need to communicate this transition to our customers. We build valuable professional and sometimes even personal relationships with them and they buy outcomes our product and people deliver against. It’s obvious we need to communicate. The way in which we communicate and the context we provide is equally as important as the message itself. I could have said: Person x is leaving the team to pursue a new adventure and you’ll now work with Person y. You’ll continue to be in great hands.
That would have been sufficient and accurate but it would not have been a complete story. Instead I chose to contextualize the change and to shed light on why within the past few months so many team members had been transitioning. A key distinction in customer success is the proactive nature of our work. We try to anticipate our customers' questions and try to stay ahead of new areas of value for them. This was one way for me to proactively address the questions going on for them around why the transitioning team members had increased so much and so frequently.
So when I shared the news, I framed it around the Great Reshuffling but also humanized each individual's departure. With all there is and has been going on in the world, people are re-evaluating their careers and taking advantage of new opportunities. This isn’t new to us and it isn’t new to our customers either. We’re not immune from the bigger influences driving market shifts and neither are our customers. This led to the second learning in this process.
Being transparent builds openness and trust
Opening up team changes like this creates a sense of trust and sharing that can encourage your customers to share as well. I shared the recent team transitions we were experiencing, how they personally affected me and the team and how we were trying to learn from them, as we continued to support other team members and customers. Without me asking for validation, many customers volunteered their own people challenges around retention and hiring.
In fact, we as service providers have been on the receiving end of the Great Reshuffling as well. Some of our customer teams have turned over entire departments twice during the past 2 years. And even when one or two critical people leave, that often results in delayed or repurposed projects or time spent training and onboarding their new team members.
My customers shared how they were dealing with their internal transitions - from hiring to retaining and further developing other team members. Being open meant my customers could also share a bit about their changing landscape as well.
Being transparent opens up more strategic conversations
Ultimately, sharing allowed me to have a more strategic conversation with our customers. This wasn’t my intention but it was a nice benefit to these conversations. Talent and resources are a critical business capability. Without talented people our business can be negatively impacted (even if for the short term) and our customers experience this as well. And the same applies to our customers. Without people to buy-in, use, and adopt a solution, the business goals they are trying to achieve will not be realized.
This was a surprising but appreciated angle I discussed with one customer. They were on the business team but their IT counterparts had seen tremendous turnover in the past several months. Our project was already a few weeks delayed and was going to see even more delays due to the resourcing gap and the time it was taking to hire new team members. We spent the rest of the conversation discussing what other parts of the project we could be working on while hiring happened.
Being transparent positions you as a strategic thought-partner
As part of these discussions it was rewarding to be a strategic thought-partner with my customers. With one customer, we discussed some of the reasons retention was particularly challenging, given our remote teams and shared some tactics we were using to boost employee morale. I shared our weekly “Peaks and Valleys” my team does over Slack, where we share 2 professional and personal highlights and lowlights of the week (as people feel comfortable sharing, of course). And he shared how team changes have heightened conversations about what’s next for individuals in their careers and a more defined career progression plan.
This conversation had mostly nothing to do with the software we sell. Instead it was centered around the people using our software to achieve a goal, which was also valuable.
What did I learn?
Context matters. Why a change happened is just as important as what changed. We don’t want to air our problems to our customers for many reasons. Their time is limited, we do not want to shake their confidence in our ability to deliver, or they don’t care. However, when it comes to certain topics like people transitions and macro-economic forces impacting our business, these are the moments worth spending time on.
Ultimately our job in customer success is to help our customers achieve their goals. We’re in a people business and that affords us opportunities to shift the conversation and focus on things that affect us personally and professionally. Sometimes that means going outside of the scope of our tool, solution, or domain of expertise and providing another perspective. I was reminded to lead with openness and a genuine sense of trying to achieve a better outcome even as we face business and personal challenges alike.
The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers customer success evaluations that are a great way to see what is working well and what needs improvement. For more information on our consulting services and training classes, please see TheSuccessLeague.io
Ejieme Eromosole - Ejieme is a career customer advocate and advises companies on customer-led growth. As VP of Customer Success & Account Management at Quiq, she helps the world’s best brands grow awareness, increase sales and lower customer support costs through conversational AI and messaging. Prior to Quiq, she was Managing Director of Customer Experience at The New York Times and spent over 8 years in management consulting at PwC and Accenture. She has a BA in Economics and an MBA from NYU.