Repeat After Me: “Customer Success Managers are not Support”

“The response time was quick and the resolution helpful.”

“Superb response to an urgent and time-sensitive request! Outstanding!”

“The solution that was supplied solved all the issues I was having!”

This isn’t fake news. These are real customers and actual quotes we received from the follow up survey we send to people when our Support team closes out tickets. It wasn’t that long ago when I started at Bluecore where things weren’t as rosy.

Back in April of 2016, I spoke to a number of customers and reviewed the feedback surveys — it was obvious we had a problem. While our Customer Success team was doing everything possible to make our customers successful and we have an amazing product, we were misfiring in terms of the service we were delivering. How did we change the game and achieve an average 98% customer satisfaction rating? It’s about the right people and the right structure. We needed to separate out Support from Customer Success Managers.

Repeat after me: “Customer Success Managers are not Support”

Like any growing startup, we have limited resources. In our early stages we wanted to simplify the experience for our customers and have one person for them to speak to — sometimes called the single throat to choke. This meant that we would leverage our Customer Success Manager (CSM) for everything: technical questions, troubleshooting, best…