How Product and Customer Success Teams Can Work Together!

CS & PED working together a luxury?

For most organizations, Customer Success teams working closely with the product team can be a grandeur.

It's also an opportunity to enhance the customer experience and ensure their success with the product.

Although both teams share similar roles and goals, occasional misalignments can occur in customer communications or product priorities for many reasons.

And these misalignments may arise due to various reasons, which we will explore and work together. However, it is crucial to prioritize realigning customer success and product teams to avoid negative impacts on customer experiences and unnecessary friction in customer experience, engagement, cross-selling, or upselling opportunities.

Are Customer Success and Product Issues Similar?

As organizations scale and the number of customers grows or their needs change, it becomes increasingly challenging for customer success managers (CSMs) to manage customer expectations and effectively convey their requirements to the product team which forfeits the objective of collaboration.

Here are some common issues that often arise:

1. Lack of communication and understanding between the product and CS teams, leading to difficulties in finding creative solutions and eroding confidence in the product.
2. Inadequate discussions about the product roadmap between CS and Product, which are crucial for addressing feature requests or changes, addressing customer complaints, incorporating valuable customer feedback, and more.
3. Misalignment between CS and Product regarding the customer experience. Since product teams may not have as much direct interaction with customers as CS, there can be a disconnect in understanding customer needs.

How Customer Success and Product Team Can Work Together to Overcome these challenges!

Embrace Product Feedback

• All customer feedback, positive or negative, holds value. It is important to incorporate customer feedback into the product development process to eliminate the need for CSMs to constantly check in with the Product team or for Product to wait for feedback on new feature launches.
• Both CS and Product teams should prioritize delivering an exceptional customer experience at every stage of the customer journey. Creating a channel where CS can directly share customer feedback with the Product can facilitate prompt issue resolution.
• During the review of customer feedback, Product team should focus on developing features that address customer challenges, ensuring they work effectively, and continuously improving them. Simultaneously, CS should diligently follow up with customers on their suggestions or requests.
• Most importantly, honesty and transparent communication about future plans will instill trust in customers, letting them know what to expect and when to expect it.

As rightly said "Remember, without customers, there would be no product."

Holding Regular Customer Success & Product Meetings

Regular meetings between CS and Product teams can help avoid customer-related issues and ensure effective communication of product features to customers. Collaboration and coordination are essential in areas such as:

• Finding marquee users for feedback and testing
• Communicating product features prior to release
• Ensuring routing, resolving, and communicating support tickets are aligned to gather feedback
• Product Marketing to cover before and after fit and awareness

Additionally, collaboration should extend to areas like:

• Prioritizing features and bug fixes
• Facilitating user groups across the community
• Enhancing Customer Retention and Loyalty

Whether these meetings involve one-on-one discussions or include other stakeholders, leaders from both CS and Product must encourage successful collaboration. Helping each other to achieve this by clearly defining their commitments to each other, identifying any gaps, and most importantly, sharing responsibility for outcomes that maximize long-term value for customers.

Track Relevant Metrics, Together

To ensure customer success and product teams establish mutual metrics to track, such as product usage, and outcomes by new products/features.

We the CS team can collect, analyze, and leverage customer data to help the product team create tools and features that cater to customer needs and drive engagement.

Customer and Product health scores can be useful in this regard helping product with the right decisions from time to time. These scores provide insights into upsell opportunities, product usage, customer satisfaction, and churn risk, among other indicators.

While all scores are not equally created, we should choose the metrics that best align with our business goals and use them to refine our CS strategy and simplify team collaboration. We may consider tracking metrics such as the number of support tickets, customer product usage, growth of customer accounts, and product feedback metrics, etc. Using which we can improve the seamless customer experience and gain actionable insights to enhance our product as a business as and when customers evolve.

Understand That CS Can't Function Without Product & vice versa

CSMs excel at understanding and nurturing the customer experience, drawing insights from qualitative feedback through direct interactions. Conversely, the product team may not have the same level of one-on-one customer interaction but can gain quantitative insights through user analytics, understanding where and how customers engage with the product.

By combining qualitative user feedback with quantitative analytics, we can comprehend the complete story behind the ultimate customer experience and create a unified foundation of knowledge for both CS and Product teams.

As CS relies on Product to develop tools and features that customers will love, Product relies on CS to drive adoption and ensure customer satisfaction with the same set of products/features built.

To understand the entire story, transparency and trust must be established with customers by aligning how CS and Product collect, use, and communicate feedback to inform decision-making. We should focus on the following:

• Centralize all feedback data to identify themes and trends, reducing overwhelm and enabling effective use of collected feedback. This central repository can also capture "one-off" requests, allowing us to identify recurring patterns.
• Establish a collaborative process between CS and Product teams. CS can work with Product to prioritize the product roadmap by determining what data is interesting or useful. Based on feedback, CS can help the product team differentiate between nice-to-have features and urgent requests that may put accounts at risk. Regular check-ins, even for just 30 minutes each week or biweekly, can foster collaboration.
• Consider the context of feedback. While customer input is important, product decisions are influenced by other factors, such as internal feedback, market trends, and product strategy. It is impossible to act on every single request, but effective communication with customers regarding which requests Product is actively working on can manage expectations.

Better Collaboration Build Better Products

The collaboration between CS and Product teams to achieve customer success should be a priority, rather than an afterthought. While CS focuses on the customer experience, but without the right tools and features developed by the product team, that experience may fall short. It is essential for these teams to address challenges together and work towards solutions.

To make informed decisions that deliver value, analyze every customer interaction and provide timely solutions tailored to their needs. By maintaining top-of-mind awareness and addressing issues before they lead to churn, we can create long-term value for our customers.

Building products that customers want and need requires the coordinated efforts and collaboration of both CS and Product. Starting to align these teams as soon as possible to proactively address user needs, encourage growth, and foster innovation and helps business in becoming the best of all!

#customersuccess #product #business