Customer success is the business of making sure a customer gets the thing they wanted out of what they bought off you, which is a different job to answering them when they write in, and a different job again to ringing them when the renewal is due. Nobody fails at it in a meeting. There is no morning where a customer sits down with a cup of tea and decides they have had enough of you, that is not how it goes at all. It goes the quiet way instead, over months, a question half answered here and a screen never switched on there, and then one Tuesday the renewal does not happen and everybody stands around the whole of it wondering what went wrong.
Eimear found hers while she was out looking for a compliment. She runs a software crowd in Athlone, twelve people, rota and shift cover for care homes, a bit over two hundred customers paying for it. She wanted a testimonial for the website and went into the mail hunting a happy one, and she started with the account she would have sworn blind was her happiest customer going. What she found in there was a thread from February. The deputy manager had asked how to get the agency hours showing separately on the monthly report, and one of Eimear’s own people had answered her inside the hour, correctly, two lines and a link to the setting. The woman never wrote back. She never wrote in again at all, about anything, and when Eimear went and looked properly that home had stopped opening the reports at all by March and had gone back to doing the agency hours on paper the way they did before they ever heard of her.
They were still paying, mind you. Which is worse in its way, on account of a customer who pays and has stopped using the thing being only a cancellation that has not got round to happening yet.
And nobody in the whole of it did a single thing wrong. The answer was right. It went out inside the hour.
What the phrase means, before anybody goes and sells you a platform for it
The words get used loosely and they are not all the one animal, and the plainest way I know to tell them apart is to ask who moved first. If the customer knocked, that is support, and somebody had better be behind the door when they do. If it was the calendar that moved, a renewal coming up or an invoice going out, that is account management and it belongs to whoever minds the contract. Customer success is the awkward third one, on account of nothing at all setting it going. No customer asks you for it and no date reminds you of it. It is you going out and finding out whether the thing is working for them, before they have thought to go and tell you it is not.
Bríd, who does this for a living at a bigger crowd in Dublin, put it to Eimear over a coffee in a way that stuck. Her people answer whatever gets asked of them, same as anybody’s, and then she spends the rest of her week on the ones who asked her nothing at all, since that is the crowd she reckons does the leaving. Truth be told most small companies do the first well enough and never get near the second, and it is not laziness. The first has a queue attached to it and the queue shouts at you all day long. The second has nothing attached to it whatsoever. There is no inbox anywhere for a customer who is quietly getting no good out of your software, and that is the difficulty of it.
So how does an account go and leave without ever complaining
Watch it happen at Eimear’s scale, since it happens the very same way at every scale, only slower where there is more money in it.
Somebody buys the thing for one reason. There was a specific bother, agency hours in this case, taking a manager two evenings a month with a calculator, and she saw a demo and thought that would sort that. Good so far. Then the setup call happens and the deputy manager sits through it and she is sharp and she gets the whole of it her own self, and everything from that day on lives in that one woman’s head and nowhere else at all.
Then the autumn comes and she goes off to another home for better money. Nobody did anything wrong there either, people move. Her replacement gets shown the software by the staff who use it, and the staff use two screens out of nine, the rota and the swaps, so that is what he learns, that is the whole of what the thing is to him now. The reports the place was actually bought for are not in the handover, on account of nobody remembering the software was bought for that.
The renewal comes round the following spring and gets signed by a man in an office who has never once opened it, since the price is small and the staff have not complained. And then a year after that somebody in that office goes and looks for savings, and finds a line item that nobody can explain the value of, and the line item goes. That is the day it looks like they churned. The day they actually left was the Tuesday in February when the report question got answered and no one went and checked whether the answer landed.
Why the accounts you watch are never the accounts that go
Everybody watches by size, and it feels like the correct way to be choosing. The biggest customer gets the call. Then whoever shouted loudest last week gets a look as well, and so does anybody with a renewal date inside the next six weeks, and between the three of them there is not much attention left over for anyone else. And the loud ones are usually grand, that is the awkward part of it. A customer complaining at you every fortnight is a customer who is still bothering, still expecting the thing to work, and still typing your name into the address bar of a morning. It is the polite quiet middle that goes, the ones who never gave anybody a moment’s trouble.
Health scores are supposed to catch that and mostly they catch a habit instead. Nearly every score out there is logins wearing a coat, and a woman being in there every morning of the week tells you she has got into a routine, no more than that, and she could be getting nothing at all out of it. Meanwhile there is another one in twice a month who gets the single thing she came for and renews forever. Eimear had a dashboard with green dots on it. The home she lost was a green dot.
The numbers, and hers first before anybody names them
She had two hundred and ten customers at the start of last year and eighteen were gone by the end of it. That is the sort of figure a person can look at for a good long while and take nothing at all from, so she did the thing that actually told her something. She went back through the mail for those eighteen and read what each of them had written in the three months before they went.
Eleven of the eighteen had written in. Not one of them wrote in to complain, which is the finding, and it took her a while to see it as a finding. They asked how to do a thing. Nine of the eleven got a correct answer, quickly, from somebody doing a decent job. Only two of the eleven were ever asked afterwards whether the thing they were trying to do got done, and there are no two ways about it, that is the whole of the story in one number.
The metrics come into it about there, and they are worth having, mind you, once you know what you are already sitting on your own self. The one people mean when they say your retention rate is the plain count of who stayed, and the money version of it, net revenue retention, adds in whether the ones who stayed grew or shrank, so a crowd can be losing customers and still look grand on it if the survivors keep buying more. Then there is time to first value, which is a clumsy phrase for a fair question, how many days between them paying you and them getting the first useful thing out of it. In Eimear’s shop that came out at thirty one days on the ones that stayed. On the ones that left there was no number to be had at all, on account of the useful thing never arriving in the first place, which is a different complaint entirely to it arriving slow.
What a customer success manager does all day, since the title tells you nothing
Bríd’s day is the answer to that and it is duller than the title suggests. She is on a call at half nine with a customer who has asked her for nothing whatsoever. Nobody put her up to it. She keeps a list of accounts that have gone quiet and she works down it, and quiet on her list means no mail in sixty days, which is a signal most companies read as everything being fine. She is the one who spots that the person who championed the buy has changed job, on account of her being the one who goes and looks. And she reads support threads that were closed and answered, looking for the ones where the answer was right and the outcome never landed.
None of which Eimear can hire for, and that is worth saying plainly instead of pretending otherwise. Twelve people, and eleven of them are building the software or selling it. So the job does not go away, it just has to live somewhere else, and the only place it can live in a company that size is the mail that is already arriving.
The first fortnight decides more of it than the first year does
Ask her which of her customers are solid and Eimear will tell you it is the ones where somebody got a real thing working in the first two weeks. Not trained. Working. There is a home in Roscommon that had the agency hours coming out right on the monthly report by the Friday of the first week, and they have renewed three times and they will renew again, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with loyalty. That report goes to their board every month now and it would be missed the week it stopped.
The setup call is not the onboarding, and confusing the two is the commonest mistake of the lot. A call is a demonstration with a nice feeling at the end of it and everybody nodding along on the screen. What actually decides the thing is the fortnight after everybody hangs up, when it has to prove its self on their own real data, on a bad week, with a member of staff off sick. Either it works for them then or the old way quietly comes back out of the drawer. And the old way is always still there in the drawer, waiting.
Where a tool like Maxdesk fits, said without the sales voice
I would sooner say straight out that this is the sort of company we built Maxdesk for than let the piece pretend it wandered onto the subject by accident. The point of it here is a small one and I will not dress it up. If the mail is the early warning, then the mail has to be somewhere a person can actually read back through, and in most small companies it is not, it is scattered across four inboxes and half of it is in the sent folder of whoever answered.
Over here we would say that proper help desk software puts the whole of that in one place, and it is no great thing to put on a small company any more. Every message about a customer sits under that customer where anybody can go back over it, so the exercise Eimear did with her eighteen leavers takes a morning rather than being impossible. It runs on the address you already use, as a shared inbox. The customer writing in notices nothing. Each thread carries an owner and a state on it, which means answered and done stop being the same word, and that gap is exactly where the February thread got lost. It ships a knowledge base for the questions that come round with every new manager, the handover ones, and you can have it mind the clock on your own reply times without anybody watching a queue.
It runs on a free plan and there is nothing charged per head on it, which matters when the number of people answering mail goes up and down with the month. Fair is fair though, there is a trade in the free plan and you may as well hear it from me. The free workspace carries some supporting ads, puts a small Maxdesk line at the foot of the mail going out, and keeps three months of history rather than the whole of forever, and the longer archive is the thing the paid plans are for.
The part this does not fix its self
Maxdesk is not a customer success platform and I am not going to stand here and tell you it is one. There is no health score in it, no product usage coming in from your own software, no renewal calendar, no account owner ringing anybody in October. If you want that machinery you will have to go and buy it somewhere else, and at two hundred customers you very likely do not need it yet, truth be told.
There is a harder limit than that one and it goes to the heart of the whole argument. Reading your mail properly finds you the customer who asked for something and did not get sorted. What it will not do is tell you a solitary thing about the ones who never wrote in. The woman in February at least wrote in the once, which is the only reason Eimear had a thread to go and find, and there are homes on that list who have not sent a word in two years, and no mail tool ever built is going to raise a hand about them. That part is a phone call from a person and it stays that way. No software fixes it.
And then the plain one I should have led with, we do email and nothing else. There is no phone line sitting behind it. Your website gets no chat bubble out of us either, and there is no separate portal for customers to be logging into. If the bulk of your customer work happens by voice then a thing built around email is not your answer and I would be doing you no favour saying otherwise.
Where to start, if this sounds familiar
Take the last ten customers who left you. Not the estate, ten, and go back through every message each of them sent in the ninety days before they went, and read the answers as well as the questions. What you are looking for is not complaints, you will find hardly any, and that is the point of the exercise. You are looking for a question that got a correct answer and no follow up, and for the customers who sent nothing at all in that whole stretch.
Most people doing that for the first time find something inside the hour, and it is rarely the thing they went in expecting. Then pick the three quietest accounts you have and write to them your own self, this week, with a plain question about whether the thing they bought it for is actually happening. That costs nothing and it is the whole job in miniature. And if it turns out the mail you need to read back through is scattered across four inboxes and a leaver’s account, that is roughly the point where Maxdesk earns its place, and you can put it on the address you already have and see it against your own messages in a few minutes, which is a more honest test than reading another page about it.