4 ms·

What are Customer Success teams? Phone support? Cold sales?

borisjabes 6y ago
That’s a great question. I think of them as teams that a) help proactively onboard customers (ie ensure they get what they paid for) and b) monitor accounts to determine how to help them get the most from your product + upsell new features. So it’s not quite customer support and it’s not quite cold sales. There’s healthy debate about the scope of the team though!
klysm 6y ago
The team that aims to make sure that people who are currently giving you money, keep giving you money.
twunde 6y ago
Depending on the company you'll see it defined a few ways. These may include activities like user training, a level 2ish enterprise support where they'll do some investigation/triage of bugs and can enable some feature flags for you or escalate to an engineer. Sometimes you will see phone support or account manager called customer success
NortySpock 6y ago
The other responses are also good but it can also take the form of a client advocate: taking the client's needs and making sure they get visibility to the developers and product teams.
jacques_chester 6y ago
You have software. You sell it to HyperGloboMegaCo. Someone at HGMC needs to install it. Someone needs to connect it to the fascinating LDAP proxy that a previous Enterprise Architect banged out one Sunday evening. Someone needs to add it to the SSO. Someone needs to get to the point where a first user does a first thing. Now you have a user. Often they struggle too. Now you need someone to show the user how to get best value from your tool. Not unreasonable for complex tools which are, after all, complex. I have mixed feelings about it as a practice. To me it seems like an organisational smell, a trailing indicator of product flaws. Compare old cars with newer cars. You used to need a lot of car servicing and that was seen as normal and acceptable. Then one day Toyota showed up and made it obvious that it needn't be normal and it wasn't acceptable at all.

That’s a great question. I think of them as teams that a) help proactively onboard customers (ie ensure they get what they paid for) and b) monitor accounts to determine how to help them get the most from your product + upsell new features. So it’s not quite customer support and it’s not quite cold sales. There’s healthy debate about the scope of the team though!

klysm 6y ago

The team that aims to make sure that people who are currently giving you money, keep giving you money.

twunde 6y ago

Depending on the company you'll see it defined a few ways. These may include activities like user training, a level 2ish enterprise support where they'll do some investigation/triage of bugs and can enable some feature flags for you or escalate to an engineer. Sometimes you will see phone support or account manager called customer success

NortySpock 6y ago

The other responses are also good but it can also take the form of a client advocate: taking the client's needs and making sure they get visibility to the developers and product teams.

jacques_chester 6y ago

You have software. You sell it to HyperGloboMegaCo. Someone at HGMC needs to install it. Someone needs to connect it to the fascinating LDAP proxy that a previous Enterprise Architect banged out one Sunday evening. Someone needs to add it to the SSO. Someone needs to get to the point where a first user does a first thing. Now you have a user. Often they struggle too. Now you need someone to show the user how to get best value from your tool. Not unreasonable for complex tools which are, after all, complex. I have mixed feelings about it as a practice. To me it seems like an organisational smell, a trailing indicator of product flaws. Compare old cars with newer cars. You used to need a lot of car servicing and that was seen as normal and acceptable. Then one day Toyota showed up and made it obvious that it needn't be normal and it wasn't acceptable at all.