The role of a Customer Success Manager (CSM) is always important but it is especially critical during an economic downturn. As a CSM, you know your customers better than anyone. It’s your responsibility to know their goals, to understand how they use your product, and to know what they value most. So, during periods of economic uncertainty when your company’s current customer base is your greatest (or only) source of revenue growth, your knowledge and expertise becomes critical. This is your opportunity to shine and show off your skills. Let’s take a look at how you, as a CSM, can make an impact right now.
3 Ways CSMs Impact Revenue and Growth
1. Monitoring and Optimizing Customer Health
A CSM works one-on-one with customers, guiding them through the customer journey and building a positive relationship. To do this effectively, you need deep insight and understanding into the health of your customers. You need real-time updates on how your customers are using and engaging with your product, if they are getting the value they want and need, if they are fully utilizing the services they’ve signed up for, if they are satisfied with your products and services, and if they have any outstanding or unresolved support issues. By monitoring this information, you are able to build out an early warning system that alerts you to customer signals and critical events, so you can detect risks and proactively engage with customers to intercept and resolve problems quickly.
Customer health is a critical component of your overall customer success program. It goes beyond measuring customer satisfaction; it also measures the value that customers are experiencing from your solution, enabling you to make any necessary adjustments to your overall journey. By staying on top of your customers’ health and proactively responding to issues or growth opportunities, you can make a huge impact on the success of your customers’ overall journey, which can result in driving adoption, retention and expansion.
2. Solidifying Customer Relationships
Any good relationship is built on a strong foundation over time. In order to retain and grow relationships with your customers, it’s important to focus on nurturing customers through consistent and positive experiences at every stage of the journey. By investing in the long-term success of customers, you’re driving growth for both your customers and your own organization . While customer satisfaction is the responsibility of every member of your business , it starts with you, the CSM. And your efforts to create and maintain meaningful and valuable customer relationships will benefit both you company and your customers, regardless of any economic circumstances.
3. Delivering Consistent Value
Central to supporting your customers’ successes is delivering value that they experience quickly and consistently through your offering. Your customers rely on your product as a solution to a challenge and a path to growth. Your ability to deliver on that promise, from the outset, is key to ensuring they stay satisfied and continue growing their relationship with you through repeated renewals and upsells. If you fail to deliver value at any stage of the relationship, customer confidence (and retention) may begin to decline.
As a CSM, your role in the organization is unique in that you have the most acute understanding of your customers’ needs and expectations and can communicate these across your organization to ensure the entire company works together to continue to deliver value to your customers at each stage of the journey – from evaluation and purchasing to onboarding, adoption, renewal and beyond.
Bonus: Using the Right Customer Success Tool
To truly understand your customers’ needs and goals, you need a composable customer success platform that can gather and share critical customer data company-wide, automate workflows, and help you design and run your entire customer journey at scale all from one place. Totango is the industry’s only composable customer success platform, and features all of the pre-built tools and templates you need to optimize and deliver value at every stage of the customer journey. Totango is dedicated to supporting CSMs across the entire customer lifecycle by giving you access to key insights into the health of your client, helping you to nurture your customer throughout their journey, and enabling you to proactively deliver the value they want and need from your products and services. Start making an impact today by signing up for Totango for free!
