5 Reasons Why Support and Customer Success are not Playing Well Together

Continuing our 5 Reasons series, this month we turn to the painful topic of the common hostility between the Support and Customer Success organizations, which is so painful both to internal players and, indirectly, to customers. There’s hope! Read on.

1. Roles and responsibilities are not well defined

With both organizations closely involved with customers, it’s easy to step on the other’s toes–or let things slip between the two. To complicate matters, smaller customers often lack a designated customer success manager (CSM) entirely, while strategic customers may have small armies of relationship managers. Clarity will help.

• Define customer tiers, each with a particular combination of support options and customer success deliverables. Lower tiers may get very lax response SLAs and digital success solutions only while high-end customers get dedicated everything. Make sure that you define a unified set of tiers rather than disconnected arrangements for Support and CS. (This is a great test of whether the leadership teams can work together!)
• Define customer journeys for each tier, delineating what support engineers do and what CSMs do. Think about how the two teams will exchange information over the lifecycle of the customer.
• Clearly label customers with their tiers in all tracking systems. I’m astounded that most support engineers have no idea when they are working with a strategic customers, through no fault of their own: the CRM tool simply does not display this important information. And make sure that support staff can easily determine who the CSM is for any customer.

Lesson: Spell out what each team must and must not do.

2. CSMs forget who signs their paycheck

CSMs must advocate for their customers, of course, but sometimes they go too far and forget that their customers’ interests do not trump every other customer’s. We’ve all experienced CSMs who think that every case from their customers should get immediate attention from the Support team, that every bug from their customers requires an immediate fix, that every enhancement request from their customers must be implemented tout de suite. This is nuts, of course.

The fix here is for the CS leadership to balance the interests of all customers. An excellent strategy is to ask the CS team to consolidate and prioritize support requests instead of addressing them piecemeal.

Lesson: Balance the interests of the company against the demands of any one customer.

3. Support is a black box

On the other hand, some Support leaders seem pathologically worried about sharing information about support cases. This can be disguised with an excuse about the cost of CRM licenses, but it’s really a fear that the CSMs will misinterpret case notes and escalate too much. This is completely backwards: knowing nothing leads to more questioning, not less.

And while it’s true that CSMs are less technically knowledgeable than support engineers and may misunderstand what’s happening on a particular case, I see the transparency as an opportunity to ratchet up the ability of support engineers to write clear case notes and case summaries.

Lesson: Be completely open on what’s happening inside support. Trust the CSMs to do the right thing.

4. CSMs harass support engineers

Some CSMs will literally harass support engineers to get very frequent updates on case progress, or to demand more attention on their customers’ cases. This is obviously unproductive and hurtful, but relatively easy to fix.

• As mentioned above, open up the CRM so CSMs can always have the latest info.
• For high-profile issues, provide business-level updates on a schedule. This helps the CSMs but also the leaders on the customer side, the sales reps, the executives, etc.
• Absolutely, positively prohibit CSMs from reaching out directly to the support engineers, which only adds to their workload and stress. If they must talk to someone, they can contact a support manager.
• Address issues with the CS leaders. They know that harassment is not a good technique long-term.

Lesson: Provide proactive updates on high-profile issues and route issues through the support managers.

5. The only interaction is around escalations

Too often, the only times Support and CS interact are around customer escalations, when no one is at their best. That’s sad! Instead, CSMs could make a point of passing on customers’ thanks to specific support engineers, and support engineers can relay customers’ plans to expand their product usage. Make it easy to exchange information by having channels in place for that purpose.

Lesson: Foster small interactions between the team, especially positive ones.

What are you doing to foster good relationships between Support and CS? (And if you need help, just ask.)