What are the "vital behaviors" of a CSM?
Does your company have a prescriptive approach to Customer Success? I'm curious to know if your org has defined a road map of key activities for CSMs to complete on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual basis that create successful customer relationships (example: cadence of customer calls, QBRs, relationship building activities, account planning, etc.).
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Hi @Kelsey Hunsinger Are you more interested in Behaviors or Activities here? I think there are important differences here. Behaviors are, I think. predispositions to do work in a certain way. Some people are very good at conforming understanding. Others at making commitments and sticking to them. These transcend activities. Activities are the things one does day to day to support work. We are doing some work on an Open Competency Model for Customer Success. The current structure we have designed for this model is as follows.
Jobs
Roles (roles are reusable parts of jobs)
Behaviors
Skills
Credentials
Learning Resources
Why not include Activities? This is a general model and we think activities will be very organization specific. You could map the activities to a process. As @David Perrault suggests, one needs a process in order for things to be repeatable, scalable and open to continuous improvement.
What behaviors matter? That will depend in part on your approach and the customer success culture you want to build. Some things I am looking for from our customer success team.
Works to understand the customer's business
Communicates value of our solution
Conforms that we are delivering value
Collaborates internally and with customers to design solutions
Validates customer experience using qualitative and quantitative data
... and so on,
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All of the above. You want to have a process-driven approach that is repetitive in nature so that your customers get a consistent experience regardless of who their assigned CSM is. It will also allow you to scale better.
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@Steven Forth Thank you for this! I realized that I wrote "activities" but what I'm actually interested in is more the behaviors of a successful CS team and whether those can be prescriptive, at least to a degree. The list of behaviors you provided is helpful - agreed with both you and @David Perrault that activities should be consistent and prescriptive, but it's really the behavior of the CSM that will drive success. Thank you both for your input!
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