Working for a B2B SaaS product company enriches you in numerous ways! Most of the time, your head is brimmed with ideas, insights, and inspirations, and every day starts with a fresh outlook at existing challenges and the hunger to excel keeps you going!
As a manager of the customer success team, I organize periodic growth review meetings with my team members to ensure that our goals are aligned with those of the company’s objectives. Now, these meetings are more than those typical closed-door boring sessions…as a team, we love to open up about our challenges, even crack jokes and discuss our funny customer-handling experiences. After all, humor keeps us engaged.
Here, I would like to talk about one of my experiences while conducting one such meeting for Customer Success. The points that we discussed were not only amusing but also described how Customer Success as a department function and excel!
The MAFIA of customer success!
In this specific meeting, we started to talk about the game Mafia and we found it pretty relevant to the way the Customer Success team can operate. The core of the game is about a conflict between these two groups: the mafia and the innocents. At the start of the game, each player is secretly assigned a role associated with one of these 2 groups, and the motive is to WIN the game by trying different methods or strategies.
Now you might wonder how is this related to Customer Success? Here’s how – the customer success team is expected to work hard and smart – (we would like to consider us the MAFIA here 😉 to make sure that they WIN at the end of the game. The key objective is to seize as many customers as possible.
But, we know that winning is sheer teamwork!
Nevertheless, we are aware that we need to work in tandem with other parties involved in this game – and they are our way forward to reach our final destination. Together, they can make WINNING a breeze for the customer success team. So, customer success executives depend on these teams to WIN over their rivals (read competitors).
1 – Sales Team
2 – Support Team
3 – Tech Team
How Sales helps Customer Success: If the customer onboarding and hands-off is taken properly from the Sales team, the task of a customer success executive becomes way easier.
How Support helps Customer Success: If the support team is aligned with the targets of the ‘success team’ and helps them pass on the right information to the customers while they live-chat with them, their task becomes a cakewalk.
How the Tech team helps Customer Success: If the tech team is aware of the expectations of the existing customers and utilizes metrics for customer success, they can quickly customize the feature request. This not only streamlines the development process but also makes it easy for the customer success guy to sell the product easily. Understanding and measuring key metrics for customer success ensures that the customized features align with the overall satisfaction and success of the customer base.
I believe, winning customers is not a difficult task to accomplish as long as we have the right zeal, attitude, resources, ideas and unique ways to handle different customers.
The right collaboration and communication with other teams, blended with the enthusiasm to WIN can help a customer success team upsell and retain happy customers…in short, be a successful MAFIA:)
As a team, we too face some low-lying moments. But despite the crests and troughs, falling back to the basics, sticking to our strengths and taking each day at a time is what helps us excel at what we do.
The best part is, in my organization we believe in keeping the workplace fun and people with the loudest laughter (for example me ) is forever appreciated :). This amalgamation of observations, experiences, and aspirations inspires and pushes us to try something new and crazy every day and teaches us how to Carpe our Diem!!
