Professional Services role versus the CSM role

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 roles and the Customer Success Manager role.

In working with many startup and high growth software companies, they start out building their customer support, and in many cases, immediately hire CSMs to handle their customer engagements. How do you know what roles to hire without defining what services, guidance, training, and support is required to ensure customer value. It’s logical that the first process to get in place is showing the customer how to use the software. However, without a roadmap and methodology to help customers operationalize the software in a more innovative approach, they may just do the bare minimum or focus on configuring it to do what they already do today and miss out on the value they could be bringing to the business with the solution. It’s a bit of a Russian roulette to let the customer figure it, as it can lead to a churn instead of value and ROI.

So, how do we design the customer execution plan with the right roles that will provide the customer with an outstanding customer experience?

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

These roles all require different skillsets and experience levels. When bundled together and put on the CSM’s shoulders to do both Professional Services (onboarding) and Customer Management, the result is a watered down experience for the customer that doesn’t create consistent, repeatable, high quality results.

Depending on the product and target markets, these roles should be defined to best serve the customer 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 consider designing the right roles required and lines of responsibilities.

Professional Services 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.

• Consulting: responsible for delivering a best practice implementation methodology that delivers the customer defined high value outcomes. (expertise in the Industry, business processes, and product)

• Education: deliver high quality training to provide customers with the basic skillsets to begin configuring and using the software as well as learn all the potential capabilities the software can offer. (Experts in adult learning, instructional content development and innovative learning experiences in Instructor Led (ILT), in product or online learning curriculum)

• Support: deliver responsive, high quality communications and answers to customer requests (excellent customer communication and product experts)

Customer Success Manager role 

Strategic Customer Manager responsible for ensuring the customer realizes the high value goals and objectives and ultimately improves software consumption, sets up expansions and guarantees retention for a book of business (named list of customers).

• Owns the Renewal Revenue target, owns or supports the Expansion target

• Single point of contact for customer relationship

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

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

• Manage customer value realization (Customer business value identified and confirmed for customer success story publications)

• Develop customer expansion opportunities. Develop and manage a customer’s end to end roadmap plan. Partner with sales to increase contract value to drive progress towards achieving each customer’s Total Lifetime Value (TLV).

The Customer Lifecycle will help define the Balance in Roles and Responsibilities

Depending on the complexity of the solution and the target market, some software may require more professional services whereas other solutions may be able to digitize the onboarding process within the product or external. 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 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 responsibility. The idea being that 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 conduct 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. 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 with the PS team during the implementation on the tactical activities required through to 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 should be more focused 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.

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 for each of these types of services, we should always be aware of the customer’s perception at all times 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 feels spot on based on the hundreds of customers I have interviewed over the years.

Customers do love having “one throat to choke”, being the CSM role as their 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 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 be scalable.

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