How do you train/improve upon the skills of your Customer Success team? Certifications?
This question has come up in a lot of conversations. Organizations are wondering what others have done when putting together an onboarding program for CSMs. Also what well-known certification programs are there if an organization would like to improve upon the skills of their CSMs? I personally have been through the SuccessHacker program, but what other Customer Success certification programs should also be considered?
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@Jasmine Pilar When developing skills for customer success I have seen two useful design strategies.
- Use your customer journey map, organize the skills around the touchpoints. Doing this makes it easier to align the skills with the actual customer support process and diagnose problems or skill gaps so that you can target investments.
- Look at the skills your customer needs at each step of the customer journey. Investing in your customer's skills is a powerful way to drive engagement and to make sure they get the value your solution is capable of delivering.
I am using skill for what you might call KSAs (Knowledge, Skills, Attitudes).
It is often useful to tie these together into a competency model that includes roles, behaviors and depending on your company things like values.
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There are others who can comment better on the best training for CSMs I assume, but around certification and upskilling I have interesting facts for you. We have numbers, that the introduction of Credentials (Badges or Certification) in general is driving more than two times the participation in any training. This means to answer your question: Yes to Credentials for the program, and yes to credentials to drive updates/additional skills. If you would start the program without credentials you'll see after introduction a huge increase in completions and general attending of the training.
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@Alexander Ziegler Makes interesting points on micro credentials and badges. We recently did an integration with one of the major badge management systems and I can attest to the power of this approach. You will want to develop your own badges for your own business solutions and culture, but you may also want to leverage some external badges. I am reviewing our Open Competency Model for Design Thinking and one of the things I am doing is connecting skills to some of the design thinking badge providers.
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