You know you need some killer Problem Solving Skills to succeed in Customer Success. But how do you develop them without first working in Customer Success?
I’m attempting to solve this chicken and egg problem. I want to equip you with different exercises and strategies to help you feel confident walking into a new job in Customer Success.
What are Customer Success Problem Solving Skills?
Working in Customer Success is essentially all creative problem solving. You have specific targets to meet, and infinite ways to meet them. There isn’t always a right answer — two people can reach the same target with completely different strategies. That’s what’s so interesting about Customer Success.
I’ve coached Customer Success professionals for years, and what I like to emphasize is finding the root cause, the real problem. Customers are rarely correct or forthright about what they really need, and it’s up to you to figure it out. I’ve created two exercises to help you do that.
How it works
For each exercise, there’s a quick explanation, some additional information, and then a prompt.
I would recommend you open a fresh Google Doc and use it to take notes, to parse your ideas, and then ultimately to write out your answer.
To meet you where you are at, you can attempt the prompt cold, or you can utilize hints. Each hint decreases the difficulty of the exercise, so try to take one hint at a time and see if that can guide you.
Once you’ve answered the exercise, compare your answer to mine. As I’ll emphasize over and over again, there is not necessarily a correct answer, only the best answer. I’ll do by best to explain what I was specifically looking for, and why it’s important.
If you’d like to share your answer, or have any questions, you can do so in the comments.
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Exercise
You are the CSM for an email marketing platform.
Your customer is a fast-growing ecommerce business that has been using your platform for 2 years.
They are on your second largest plan, and they’ve been generally happy with the platform, even doing a case study in the past.
Last week, one of your competitors released a really valuable feature for ecommerce: AI-powered personalized product recommendations.
After the announcement, your CEO said in an All Hands that this is not a feature that’s a priority for your company right now, because ecommerce is only a small segment of your customers and the company’s priority is content creators and newsrooms.
Today, your customer emailed you to ask you about this feature.
Additional information:
You do have a simple product recommendation engine feature, but it is not powered by AI. It is however heavily used by this customer, and specifically generated them over $100,000 in Q1.
This customer is one of your favorites in your book of business. You’ve been their CSM since the beginning, they are always easy to work with, kind and respectful.
There are 10 other CSMs at your company, and you estimate that all of them have at least one ecommerce customer in their book.
The next big feature your company is launching is AI-powered email campaigns. It’s been teased but not officially marketed to customers yet.
How do you respond?
Exercise Hints
Not sure where to start? There are 3 hints that build on each other, and decrease the difficulty. Start with Hint 1, and if you’re still stuck, go to Hint 2.
Hint 1:
The surface level question your customer is asking is “are you going to build this feature.” But what are they really asking? What’s the deeper question?
Hint 2:
Feature requests are often half-baked ideas or generic “if they do this, you should too.” What is the business need behind this request? How much more value would it truly drive?
Hint 3:
The simple, factual answer to their question is that you won’t be building it any time soon. But without nuance, this could leave the customer feeling unwelcome on your platform, with their needs unmet and unheard. You care about this customer, you don’t want that to happen.
What I’m looking for is an answer that addresses them honestly, but also reframes this feature within the needs of their business. Your response should make them feel cared about, and address the “why” behind the feature request.
Exercise 2 Answer
While there is no singular correct answer, I am going to go over the answer that best addresses the skill of determining the real question and business need, and developing a workable solution for the customer.
The answer to “are you going to build this feature” is no — or at least, not anytime soon.
But if you were to communicate “nope, we’re not building this feature because ecommerce customers aren’t important to us,” you will probably lose this customer. You want to set realistic expectations, but diplomacy is key.
Why this feature?
First, you want to understand what it is about this feature that they are attracted to.
Are they interested in AI, and want to see more AI in your product?
If so, you can emphasize that you are committed to AI, speaking to the upcoming AI-powered email campaigns.
Or, are they feeling like something is lacking about the current product recommendations feature?
If so, you want to focus on product feedback and getting more specifics about why they think this feature needs AI. In this case, you would want to set up a call and really dig into the current product recommendations feature and what they specifically think could be improved.
Focus on value
Next, what we do know is that your platform’s version of this feature is valuable to them as is. You can use their results — $100k of revenue from this feature alone in Q2 — to make some projections for the rest of the year, reminding them of the value you are currently bringing them.
An industry insight aside: most ecommerce businesses see the majority of their revenue in Q4, because of holiday spending. When you are working with an ecommerce business who is doing well in Q2, you can usually use that to speak to how well they’ll do in Q4.
Advocate Internally
And last, while external communication is a huge part of the job, don’t forget that you are the voice of the customer. It is your job to gather as much feedback from your customer, and other ecommerce customers, and share that with leadership.
In the All Hands, your CEO was speaking to a broader overall strategy, not a prescription for working with individual ecommerce customers. He likely does not want to cut loose all ecommerce customers just because they aren’t the most ideal fit. And maybe he is missing the information you have, or is underestimating how quickly customers like yours could leave for competitors.
Or, maybe losing ecommerce customers is acceptable to leadership over the long term, in which case you need to protect yourself and demonstrate that you did everything you could, but them leaving was out of your control.
How did you do? Was your answer close to mine? Is there something you included that I did not? Do you have questions? Please share in the comments!