By Ejieme Eromosele
CSM: “That customer is so demanding! She emails me support and training questions all the time. She thinks that she’s my only customer.”
We’ve all been here: having to work with a customer who pushes you and your team to do more and to give more. We've all encountered demanding customers who expect us to go the extra mile.
As CSMs we’re often pulled in many directions and faced with competing demands. We’re also tasked with “protecting” internal resources (including ourselves!) so that our teams can deliver on all of our commitments. Managing customer expectations is an essential soft skill that every CSM should master to ensure success and protect our resources.
Expectations management is challenging as expectations are often implicit, and we need to reset and re-articulate them regularly. To set the right expectations early, reset them often, and establish appropriate boundaries, we can use the "G&G approach" - Guidelines and Guardrails.
Guidelines
Guidelines help establish clear expectations, communicate how we envision working together, and proactively set working boundaries. They are meant to “guide” how your teams will help the customer achieve their desired outcomes. Guides can be soft or hard (i.e., rules) help to set the tone and drive alignment from the start. And they can range from informal ways of working to detailed SOPs (standard operating procedures), SLAs (Service-level agreements) and RACIs (accountability and responsibility frameworks). It's crucial to communicate and document these guidelines for easy reference in the future.
Here are two examples of often implicit guidelines that can help kick off a relationship with clearer expectations:
Communications approach - Establish how, when, and with whom your customer and internal teams should be communicating.
Team or company values - Share your internal team and company values upfront to extend how you work internally to how you intend to work with your customer.
Guardrails
Guardrails help us stay aligned and keep on track when we're steering into "dangerous" territory. We can think of guardrails as physical and figurative boundaries. In the car example, it’s the physical guardrail that prevents you from veering off track, and we can use the same concept for staying aligned with customers in potentially challenging turns.
We should anticipate creating guardrails ahead of time to prevent disasters. A guardrail can only work to prevent a disaster if it’s there in the first place. It’s less effective to be building the guardrail as you’re already trying to navigate a tight turn.
Here are some examples of when you may need guardrails, aligned to a typical customer journey:
During the sales to customer success "handoff" - Goals and expectations may not be aligned.
Right after implementation - Misaligned expectations on ongoing training, support, and enablement can arise.
When a customer is not seeing value - Value may not be what's expected.
We can use both guidelines and guardrails to anticipate and prevent veering off the desired course. One way to trigger a guardrail eloquently is to be transparent, such as communicating team capacity constraints.
Here are three ways to get started with the G&G approach:
Take inventory of the explicit or implicit rules and/or guidelines that already exist. Mentioned above were things like support SLAs that are usually already documented.
Map the customer journey and identify where there may be tension points or gaps. This will help you proactively identify where and when to develop guardrails to prevent veering off track.
Develop and document new guidelines and guardrails and communicate them at the appropriate times and places in your customer journey. Once you’ve taken inventory of your “current state” and identified the gaps, get to work on closing them by developing new guidelines and guardrails.
By mastering customer expectations management through the G&G approach, we can set clear expectations, establish appropriate boundaries, and prevent veering off the desired course. Remember: you set guidelines first to map out the course you want to take, and put guardrails in second to make sure you stay on track. This helps ensure customer success and protects our team's resources.
The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that a CSM Certification program which includes such classes as Cross-Functional Leadership and Customer Advocacy. Please visit our website for a listing of our full offerings, including Leadership Coaching.
Ejieme Eromosele - 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.