OK, who ruined my renewal?
I had one of my regular conversations with a Customer Success Manager (CSM) recently. For the uninitiated, CSMs are the new breed of customer account managers tasked with increasing renewal rates and contract sizes at SaaS businesses.
She was responsible for 50+ accounts but had no Customer Success specific software to help her manage and analyze the customer data. As you can imagine, this made her work very challenging as the work involved building a 360-degree view of her accounts and understanding which of these accounts are ripe for an upsell or were at serious risk of churn.
There was another problem, she wasn’t the only one communicating with the client. There were at least 4 other channels of communication open between her company and the client: business development, account management, tech support, and finance. In fact, almost anyone in the company could have an interaction with the client. Would they say the right things to the client? Would they increase the chances of renewal or completely undermine the task at hand?
The account could churn because of a simple miscommunication, and she would never know!
When I asked her how she communicated to her colleagues which accounts were at risk, I was surprised. “I go downstairs to the different teams and tell them to be careful.” My jaw dropped a little, but actually, subsequent conversations with CSMs in other companies bears this out, it’s quite common practice.
To be honest, it was music to my ears, this is why we built the Akita Customer Success solution the way we did. With our clients, everyone dealing with customers has full visibility of account health, in real-time, in their browser. They know, as they deal with a client, if they need to modify their behavior based on an ‘at risk’ alert or a health score.
You can see just what I mean with this 2-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAVlZWdVhPU.
So now, everyone in the business is working with and not against CSMs to retain and grow the company’s accounts!
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