Can Support and Customer Success thrive together?

Last month, I gave a presentation at the ASP conference focused on bringing Support and Customer Success closer together, and this is a quick view into what I said.

Support and Success both cater to customers, so they should work well together, but tensions are common:

Support organizations often complain that Customer Success Managers (CSMs) adds a lot of pressure to their teams and push individual issues for individual customers without seeing the larger picture.
On the other hand, Customer Success organizations lament that support engineers, while technically competent, don’t know how to talk to customers and do not understand the business impact of issues.

Can we bridge the gap? Yes! Here are 4 strategic and 4 tactical fixes to help.

On the strategic side:

Define the customer journey. Mapping out the customer’s experience and how each team interacts with the customer at each step prevents many potential sources of conflict.
Create wholistic deliverables by customer segment. I’m always surprised when customer segments do not match on the support and customer success side. Customers hate silos: erase them.
Align metrics. Organizations with incompatible metrics are bound to clash. Adopt similar or at least compatible targets.
Bring the teams together. I mean literally. Teams that have similar goals belong in the same organization.

And on the tactical side:

Set clear communication lines. If a customer contact is talking with multiple contacts in Support and in Customer Success, confusion is likely. Map out clear lines and stick to them.
Add customer information to the case-tracking system. Customer Success often bemoans the fact that support engineers don’t know that a particular customer is important. Tell them, in the case-tracking system.
Cross-pollinate. Arrange days in Support for the CSMs, and days in Customer Success for the support engineers. Cross-train. It’s easier to collaborate once everyone understands the other person’s job.
Use scorecards to give feedback to customers. Customer Success is a conduit for the voice of the customer, but it can go the other way too: be a conduit for what we want customers to do.

What are you doing to work better with the other side? Add a comment with your experience.

(And if you’d like a copy of the presentation, please ask.)