Professional Services versus Customer Success

The debate goes on; who owns what in the customer journey. Many software companies in the startup and high growth phases do not understanding the difference between the professional services and Customer Success.

Working with many startup and high growth software companies, I have discovered that most start out building their Customer Success Management (CSM) team first and ask them to handle all aspects of the customer engagement.

How do you know what roles to hire without defining the services, guidance, training, and support that is required to deliver customer value with any solution? It’s logical that the first process to get in place is showing the customer how to use the software. However, without designing a customer roadmap plan and methodology that is architected to ensure customers can understand how to integrate and operationalize the solution into their daily operations, the customer gets stuck with a vendor team that can only answer basic questions about how the software works. Thus the customer has to figure out for themselves how best to use the software to deliver on the expected ROI and business impact. This is usually a risky strategy.

As a software company it is best to control the customer’s destination to ensure future expansion and the realization of the potential Customer Lifetime value. It’s a bit of a Russian roulette to let the customer figure it out, because it will surely lead to a high customer churn rate instead of a growing customer base that is steadfast and realizing the value and ROI and continuing their investment in the technology.

So, how do you determine the right types of services and roles required to execute quality services that will drive customer results?

The top software companies have two types of services with a set of roles under each type that are designed to plan and deliver a customer’s roadmap plan to operationalize the software and deliver a set of high value outcomes:

• Professional Services: Consulting, Education and Support

• Customer Management: Customer Success Manager, Strategic Account Manager and/or Technical Account Manager

Depending on the product and target markets, these roles should be defined to best serve the industry and types of customers and compliment any automated or self-guided processes and support.

It’s important to clarify these types of services and roles to understand how to design the right customer experience and lines of responsibilities.

Professional Services (PS) roles 

PS is responsible for delivering the Customer implementation, training and support that delivers the high value outcomes defined by the customer in accordance with the signed contract. PS partners with the CSM in managing the plan that will deliver on the customer’s expectations and ensures the team drives results for software consumption, retention and expansion.

The following are the three types of roles within the Professional Services Organization

• Professional Consulting: responsible for delivering a best practice implementation methodology that delivers the customer a set of high value outcomes. Consultants should be experts in the Industry, business processes, and product.

• Education: responsible for delivering high quality training to provide customers with the skillsets to configure and use the software and understand all the potential capabilities the software can offer. Educators are experts in adult learning, instructional content development and innovative learning experiences in Instructor Led (ILT), in product or online learning venues.

• Support: responsible for delivering responsive, high quality communications and answers to customer requests. Support Specialist/Engineers are excellent in customer communication, good documentation skills and are advanced level product experts.

Customer Success Management 

A Strategic CSM is responsible for ensuring the customer realizes the high value goals and objectives as a result of the implementation process improving their software consumption, planning the customer’s next expansion and guaranteeing retention for a book of business (named list of customers).

The most common elements the CSM owns and supports:

• Owns the Renewal Revenue target

• Supports the Expansion target

• Single point of contact for customer relationship

• Manages customer consumption of software. (i.e. full consumption of # of licenses or # of units of measure for license purchase)

• Manages customer retention (manages renewals that are not automated)

• Manages customer value realization (Customer business value identified, monitored and tracked to confirm the customer business impact)

• Develops customer expansion opportunities. Co-develops with PS and manages a customer’s comprehensive roadmap plan designed to go deep and wide within the customer’s organization and company. Partner with sales to increase contract value to drive progress towards achieving each customer’s Total Lifetime Value (TLV).

The Customer Lifecycle helps define the Balance in Roles and Responsibilities between CS and PS

Depending on the complexity of the solution and the target market, some software companies may require more professional services whereas other solutions may be able to digitize the onboarding process as a self paced process. This is where journey mapping the customer experience through the entire Customer Lifecycle will help determine what services are required to deliver consistent, high quality results and ROI in a timely manner for every customer.

From the Customer Lifecycle Map, it will become clearer on what types of PS roles are required to deliver on a best practice approach for the software solution. The PS roles become more important when the customer requires consulting expertise on how to operationalize the solution, make the appropriate business transformations, processes changes, cross functional collaboration and changes in the customer’s user responsibilities. The PS role would map what the customer’s processes are today and what the vision of the new process will be once the solution is operationalized. This will define a detailed plan on how to execute the implementation plan to get the customer from where they are today to the vision, goals and objectives defined within the solution implementation plan.

The Customer Success Manager role will be involved in the initial stage of the customer implementation to help ensure the goals and objectives defined in the sales cycle are the same goals and objectives that are used to develop the implementation plan. If Sales did not define any goals and objectives, then the CSM and Consultant will need to define these at the Kick-Off meeting before developing any plan.

The CSM introduces the customer to the PS team and is the escalation path for the customer at all times. However, once the implementation plan is defined and confirmed by the customer, the customer will work directly with the PS team during the implementation on the tactical activities required until their production launch of the software. The PS team takes care of the customer during implementation phases on a day-to-day tactical level. The CSM will attend specific meetings during the implementation phase to stay up to speed on the status and will help escalate and prioritize “Launch Critical Issues”.

CSMs focus on ensuring the high value outcomes are well-defined and allow the PS team to focus on the delivery. This partnership will ensure more consistency and scalability in driving progress and results for the customer’s consumption and retention goals as well as improve Time to Value.

When the CSM plugs the customer directly into the right services to provide quick answers and resolutions, the customer perception of the quality of services and responsiveness is much higher.

Customers really just want a clear, easy to follow plan. They want to understand who to contact when they run into various issues. Most customers are happy to help themselves if there is a well designed online customer self-help center they can use. This is why it is important in the Customer Kick-Off meeting to educate the customer on the process and roles and responsibilities on both teams. This will set the customer up for success and a quicker process for them to get to the end game goal.

Establishing clear lines of responsibilities and ownership of specific customer activities on the customer journey will help each role to be able to execute with quality, consistency and excellence. Creating smooth handoffs between roles is key for an outstanding customer experience along with setting the right expectations with the customer on who to contact during implementation and post launch.

In designing the best approach throughout the Customer Lifecycle for each of these types of services, be aware of the customer’s perception in each stage and how they are perceiving the experience being created by each of these services and roles.

This research done by Salesforce on the average customer expectations and perceptions when implementing new technology tells it like it is.

Customers do love having “one throat to choke”, which is what the CSM role was designed to provide as the single point of contact. However, in each stage of the lifecycle, the customer experience is only optimized if customers can get quality answers and resolutions quickly. This may mean that Customers have direct access to a few other roles in the software organization at the appropriate stages. For example, during a sales cycle of an expansion, they may work with their Account Executive or Sales Engineer; and during the implementation phase they may go directly to their consultant, or post launch they would contact support as their initial step and/or use the online customer help center. For any other requests, questions, concerns, they would contact their CSM. Here is an example of how you could map out the roles and responsibilities along your customer lifecycle.

Establishing a consistent customer experience requires a defined customer journey map for each stage of the customer lifecycle that is specific for each product and target market. From the journey map, it is easier to define the types of services the customer requires in order to go from where they are today to the software vision the sales team shared as the potential high value outcomes and ROIs during the sales cycle.

With clarity in the roles and responsibilities needed to deliver each service required, you will also be able to hire the right skillset and experience to deliver the quality and excellence to obtain the customer’s goals and objectives with consistency. It may reveal that a CSM who owns all service delivery will not provide the quality customer experience to create loyal customers, nor will it scale.

A well defined Customer Lifecycle model for each target market with a purposeful journey map defined for each stage of the lifecycle will allow you to define the right types of services, roles and responsibilities to guide customers to operationalize your solution with a quality and repeatable set of processes. This approach will ensure you establish a great start with your customer and execute a plan that operationalize the solution across the company both deep in capability and wide in usage.

As always, I welcome your feedback. Please subscribe and share the Newsletter with your friends and colleagues. If you would like our help to develop a Customer Lifecycle Model with roles and responsibilities defined to help grow your customer base, please email [email protected].