We know that focusing on customer success drives retention and high customer lifetime value (CLV). But what do customer success managers and teams need in order to achieve these goals?
Sales teams, in many organisations, are often supported by sales enablement processes and operations, designed to help customer-facing sales professionals add value to every customer interaction. Customer success enablement is an evolving, collaborative discipline focused on providing everything needed by customer success managers and teams to consistently achieve desired customer outcomes.
What is Customer Success Enablement?
The primary aim of customer success teams and managers is to help their clients achieve the outcomes they desire when using supplied products and services. Customer success operations involve everything from devising effective, customized client onboarding programs to ongoing training for customer success managers and teams.
Customer success enablement is all about recognising and fully understanding the needs of customer success teams and providing the tools, resources and enablement services they need to achieve their own success.
Customer Success Enablement Responsibilities
A primary responsibility that falls under the heading of customer success enablement is to ensure that all staff responsible for customer success are fully trained and have all of the skills and resources they need in order to do their jobs. Here are some of the key responsibilities of customer success enablement professionals.
- Designing, developing and maintaining on-boarding programs for customer success teams and managers.
- Developing product training programs for customer success teams and managers.
- Establishing professional development programs for all customer success teams.
- Devising coaching, mentoring and partnering programs for new customer success staff and managers.
- Determining and defining on-boarding milestones and certification programs for customer success teams.
- Ensuring customer success teams are full acquainted with client relationship histories.
- Training customer success teams in the use of internal tools and processes.
- Recognize that people have different learning styles and tailor training and familiarisation programs to suit them all.
- Identify operational inefficiencies and devise effective improvements.
- Collaborate with all stakeholders to define exactly what customer success enablement is required to deliver in your organisation.
Customer Success Enablement Manager Skills
As businesses increasingly invest in customer success, building dedicated customer success teams to improve customer retention, so the need for customer success enablement is growing. This is highly apparent in the growing number of Customer Success Enablement Manager positions becoming available and advertised.
Looking at some of these vacancies and job descriptions provides valuable insight into the skills required to be a Customer Success Enablement Manager.
- Background in customer success and/or customer relationship management.
- A number of years in direct client-facing roles.
- Proactive, problem solving skills.
- Strong analytical skills and technical capabilities.
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
- Customer account management experience and skills.
- Previous experience in designing effective staff training programs.
- Experienced in devising and delivering on-boarding programs.
- Ability to work closely with staff at all levels in an organisation.
- Proven collaborative skills.
- Previous experience in sharing best practices and striving for continuous improvement.
- Great presentation skills and the ability to create engaging, informative presentations.
Customer Success Enablement – The Future
The importance of customer success in increasingly competitive markets has become very clear. Customer success teams and managers are making the difference between business success and failure. To achieve consistency in customer success these professionals need resources, support, training and effective tools.
Customer success enablement is responsible for providing everything needed and will continue to evolve as an essential, highly valuable discipline for which there is a growing demand.
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