Product SMEs for Customer Success
If you offer very complex products, CSMs will have the same issue as sales reps: keeping up with the technical side. And it’s worse if you happen to have a wide range of products. Sales teams have long ago come …
Author: Françoise Tourniaire
Summer Reading: Difficult Conversations
Another summer reading installment! Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most is a wonderful business book that masquerades as a self-help book. I find it particularly helpful for conversations with escalated customers, and conversations between managers and direct reports. The …
Trainers don’t matter (and other surprising facts about training)
Misconception #1: The trainer/facilitator is the most important factor for successful training Maybe not. It turns out that the most critical actor for success is the learner’s manager. Why? Because the manager provides: motivation (by positioning the training as an …
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Working with the Support Team — A CSM Basic Skill
Following last month’s post on working with the Sales team, I’m now tackling the related topic of working with Support. CSMs often work with the Support team, usually because they need to follow up on an issue that’s not progressing …
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Summer Reading: Customer Experience 3.0
Another summer reading installment! Customer Experience 3.0: High-Profit Strategies in the Age of Techno Service contains many ideas on improving customer experience, but one sticks with me: making sure that there are no unpleasant surprises. John Goodman, the author, believes that …
Working with the Sales Team — A CSM Basic Skill
Sales and Customer Success can be invincible allies–or deadly enemies. Here are 5 tips to foster the former. Clarify As with any other collaboration, clarity helps. Since customer success is a new field, its boundaries are fluid, making for lots …
Summer Reading: The Trusted Advisor
This summer, I’m re-reading some customer experience classics and sharing the highlights here. My favorite book on the topic is probably The Trusted Advisor by Charles Green and Robert Galford. Near the end of the book, the authors make this comment about relationship …
6 Things I Learned at the TSIA Conference
As has become my tradition after the May TSIA conference, I gathered 6 ideas I hope will be useful to you. 1. Work on a unified service portfolio Customers really don’t want to have separate and apparently contradictory portfolios for …
“How professional was your support rep?” and other useless survey methods
Many thanks to Haim Toeg for suggesting this topic. Are you still stuck with the 80s-style “Please rate your support engineer’s level of professionalism and courtesy” question in your customer survey? This post is for you, with 3 simple questions, …
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CSMs and the C Level
When I speak with heads of customer success teams, I often hear the concern that their CSMs are not having conversations with their customers’ C-level executives — and the CSMs themselves agree. Here are three reasons why those conversations are …
