Customer Success Team Accountability Gets You Closer to Your Goals

Customer Success team accountability isn’t something you just worry about figuring out later once your CS team is up and running. As a manager, when your organizational best practices and your customer’s goals align with your employee’s actions and responsibilities, you have the perfect conditions for growth.

In order to nurture this growth, customer success teams must have improved visibility to monitor progress and review customer insights. This makes CS team accountability easier and 1:1s more productive to ensure the team is meeting customer and company-wide goals.

Here are three data-driven steps managers can take to inspire their team to be more productive, effective, and accountable:

Leverage employee visibility
Optimize one-on-ones
Improve internal communication

1. Leverage Employee Visibility

The key to driving team accountability and productivity is employee visibility—you need a comprehensive view of your employee’s communications, tasks, and actions to make sure that everyone is on the same page and working towards success. Use a customer success platform to monitor employee’s progress on tasks, so you can ensure employees are:

Focused on the highest priority tasks
Aligned on organizational goals and action items
Taking the right steps to drive business results
Progressing through tasks in a timely manner
Achieving client goals through meaningful engagements and digitally documenting their strategy

Clear visibility, especially across digital and remote relationships, encourages accountability, awareness of organizational ideals, and a continued focus on engaging with customers in a data-driven, goal-based way.

2. Optimize One-on-Ones

The best way to reaffirm the connection between best practices and subjective experience is to hold regular one-on-one meetings between CS team members and their managers. Managers should use this time to inspire accountability and productivity in their employees by:

Asking employees “Are we focusing on the right things?”
Building rapport and showing care for employees
Collaborating on strategy and problem solving
Ensuring the entire team is aligned on big-picture goals

How Do You Maximize the One-on-One Structure?

With so little time, it is critical that you maximize the one-on-one time you have with employees by:

Blocking out regular times to meet
Creating an agenda
Using a customer success platform to review employee performance before the meeting
Celebrating successes to reinforce positive actions
Asking for employee input and letting them share their good work
Showing gratitude and making employees feel valued

3. Improve Internal Communication

Creating a seamless customer experience requires excellent internal communication between teams. To foster convenient and efficient communication, leverage a customer success platform to do the following:

Maintain consistent touchpoints—carve out time to meet to discuss roadblocks, successes, and future strategies
Have team members complete all tasks in one place to ensure anyone involved in a project is up to speed by simply checking on a task
Link tasks to one another and keep them up to date to ensure a consistent customer journey

By leveraging employee visibility, optimizing one-on-ones, and improving internal communication, managers can empower their employees to do their best work—leading to satisfied customers and increased retention.

It is an approach that has worked effectively at one of the world’s leading SaaS companies.

Sonar Improves Customer Success Team Accountability with a Customer Success Platform

Sonar, an international SaaS company, is one of the world’s leading software platforms for internet service providers. Their increasingly remote workforce has expanded in size over recent years, in line with their rapidly growing customer base.

This welcome success led to some major challenges—the sheer breadth of their enterprise meant it was difficult to get an at-a-glance view of their customers, maintain consistency in communications, and monitor employee workflow and bandwidth.

Sonar found their solution by adopting a customer-centric, CS platform. Through the use of this platform, Sonar’s customer success teams are now able to streamline and unify communications, manage individual and team tasks in one place, and get a holistic view of employees and their daily actions via real-time dashboards.

For an in-depth look at how Sonar improved their team’s accountability with a customer success platform, check out this video.

The most essential tool to improve your customer success team’s accountability is a quality digital platform to help you communicate effectively with your employees and make sure everyone on your team is aligned and on the same page. Check out Totango’s Customer Success software to see if our digital platform is right for your team’s needs.

Totango’s easy to use platform gives you the power to improve your customer success team’s accountability. In these challenging times, you can’t afford to buy before you try. Get started for free today.