What does a customer success team do?

Customer success (CS) is the proactive approach businesses take to ensuring their customers are successful in achieving their desired outcomes with a product or service.

The customer success team is responsible for managing the relationships between a company and its customers post-sale. Rather than expecting customers to learn and adapt to your product, the team takes over and offers help, support, and success strategies that are specific to what the customer needs.

Building a customer success team is crucial to ensure that customers are satisfied with their purchase, adopt the product or service, and continue to renew their subscriptions.

A CS team focuses on customer goals and makes sure to build mutually-beneficial relationships. They are responsible for customer satisfaction, retention, and NPS scores.

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What customer success teams are responsible for?

Needless to say, customers' success is the most important goal of a customer success team. However, a lot of responsibilities are hiding behind this broad term that go beyond mere customer support.

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1. Onboarding new customers

The customer success team is in charge of ensuring a smooth onboarding experience for new customers. They need to make sure that the customer understands how to use the product, what their goals are, and how to achieve them.

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2. Customer success management

Companies that adopt a customer success program aim to become a strategic partner for their customers and not just a vendor.

By building relationships and trust, a customer success team helps boost retention rates, manage churn, and provide personalized solutions for support requests.

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3. Proactive training and education

A lot of times, customers are not aware of the full potential of a product.

It is the responsibility of the customer success team to educate them and make sure they are using all the features that can help them achieve their desired outcomes.

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4. Measuring customer health and satisfaction

The customer success team needs to continuously monitor customer health and satisfaction. Identifying risks early on and taking measures to prevent them can not only influence your current customers but also those in the pre-sales cycle.

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5. Professional services

Sometimes your client's needs will need a more specialized solution that goes beyond the scope of your product. In these cases, it’s the responsibility of the customer success team to provide or outsource professional services that can help resolve any issues.

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6. Customer support

Even if your organizational structure already has a support team, the customer success team needs to be prepared to offer assistance. While most customers will go through the established support channels, some will reach out to their customer success manager instead for a more personalized solution to their problem.

7. Renewals and upsells

As your customer success team builds relationships with customers, they will have a better understanding of their needs throughout their customer lifecycle. Based on this information, they can proactively offer products that complement the ones they are already using or suggest upgrades when it’s time to renew their subscription.

8. Reporting

The customer success team needs to generate reports on customer health, churn, renewal rates, upsells, and other relevant data. This information is vital to help the company make decisions that can improve the customer experience.

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Customer success team vs sales team

Some might mistake a customer success team for customer support or sales team. But there are key differences between the two.

A customer success team is focused on proactive measures to keep customers happy and engaged in the post-sale part of the customer journey. By taking a deep dive into the customer lifecycle and identifying areas of improvement, a customer success team can prevent customer churn before it happens.

Sales teams, on the other hand, are focused on making new sales and growing the business. While a customer success team might be involved in upselling and cross-selling to existing customers, their primary goal is to provide proactive support and keep customers satisfied so they continue doing business with the company.

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Customer success team structure

A customer success team can be as small as a single person or large enough to fill an entire floor of a building. The size of the team depends on the size of the company and its customer base.

Larger companies might have a wider customer success management team, made up of multiple customer success managers (CSMs), each responsible for a specific customer segment or product. A chief customer officer (CCO) is also a relatively new role that is responsible for the overall strategy and direction of the customer success team.

In smaller companies, it's not uncommon for the customer success manager to also wear many other hats, such as sales, marketing, or product management.

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How remote work changed the workflow for customer success teams

A successful customer success team relies on seamless communication, knowledge sharing, and collaboration in order to come up with new ways to retain valuable customers.

However, remote work fundamentally changed the workflow for customer success teams by posing new communication challenges, such as:

• Managing remote employees operating in different time zones
• Working in silos and not communicating with other teams
• Having difficulty establishing trust between remote team members
• Lacking face-to-face interactions and knowledge sharing

With these obstacles at hand, launching a new customer success team or making an existing one remote-friendly can be a daunting task.

However, challenges also bring opportunities. Namely, customer success teams now have access to a wealth of new tools such as Kosy that can help them overcome the obstacles of remote work.‍

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What kind of virtual meetings can benefit customer success teams?

Since customer success teams are in close contact with the users of products and services, they’re primarily responsible for informing and educating people. 

To do that, customer success team members must understand every aspect of the company they’re part of, understand customer narrative, as well as improve customer's experience.

For a remote customer success team, this means organizing and conducting various types of meetings virtually.

Some of the most valuable meetings for a remote customer success team include:

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Coworking session

Customer success teams sometimes need a breezy coworking meeting to go over ideas, suggestions and analyze every customer success report card.

However, no team exists in a vacuum, and building a customer success team that delivers real results involves the work of various departments.

In coworking virtual spaces, a customer success team can exchange valuable customer insights with marketing teams, sales reps, support reps, and other teams in order to successfully handle every aspect of a customer's journey.

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Project meetings

Meetings that revolve around a specific project are excellent to narrow the focus of customer success teams.

In project room meetings, the entire team can have a more in-depth discussion about progress, brainstorm new ideas for moving the project forward, and collaborate on improving customer experience.

One of the best things about project room meetings is their versatility and how a customer success team can use them for a variety of purposes such as:

• Onboarding new team members
• Training sessions
• Cross-team collaboration
• Customer success strategy planning

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Strategic review meeting 

A strategic review meeting gives a customer success manager an opportunity to assess the achievements of their team and review their current strategy.

These types of meetings also allow for a more open discussion about the challenges teams are facing and gain a deeper understanding of the successes and failures of various customer success initiatives.

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Team meetings

Team meetings are usually conducted on a weekly basis and their primary purpose is to ensure that everyone is on the same page, identify any potential issues, and come up with new ideas for improvement.

In remote customer success teams, team meetings give managers an opportunity to:

• Get an update on every aspect of the customer's journey
• Go over KPIs, such as customer success ROI, team process updates, NPS, etc.
• Give/receive feedback
• Set new goals for the company's success
• Discuss any blockers or challenges

Team meetings can also include representatives of the marketing team, sales reps, and other departments in order to get a more holistic view of the customer's journey.

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One-on-one meetings

In order to build a customer success team that brings results, it is important to work closely with your customers directly. Some customers also require a more hands-on approach in the onboarding process and regular one-on-one meetings are the best way to ensure their satisfaction.

One-on-one virtual meeting rooms are great for working with your customers directly in a setting in order to boost retention, build rapport and trust.

Apart from building relationships and customer training, one-on-one rooms can also be used for interviewing new remote employees and strategic partners.

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Virtual happy hour

As your team works to improve customer experience it is important to ensure they also have the best experience working in the company.

A virtual happy hour is a great team-building opportunity that allows everyone to let their hair down, have some fun, and get to know each other on a personal level.

Spending time together during the off-hours not only allows you to build a dedicated team but can also lead to some great ideas for moving the company forward.

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How Kosy helps facilitate virtual meetings for customer success teams

If you’re on the lookout for a tool that’ll facilitate all the virtual meetings for your customer success team, Kosy is equipped with all the features you can think of.

With a user-friendly interface, customizable rooms, project board file-sharing and spontaneous interactions, Kosy is the perfect tool to keep your customer success team organized and on track.

From the moment you build a customer success team and start carefully curating customer experience to when you are ready for a virtual happy hour –- Kosy has you covered.