CS Is a Team Sport: Building the Cross-Functional Retention Culture That Scales

[Speaker 1]
Afternoon, everyone. Firstly, apologies. I hadn't realized that I should have come dressed as Indiana Jones, so clearly missed that memo.

As Lisa said, I'm coming between you and happy hour, so yeah, hopefully this is something that you might enjoy and then we'll have a few drinks afterwards. So my talk, customer success as a team sport, building the cross-functional retention culture that scales. A little bit about myself to start with.

How did I get into the industry? I've got a degree in logistics and I decided very early on that software logistics was where I wanted to be. I could see my future there.

I spent some time in cloud delivery after many years in project management, delivering projects in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and the UK. I then spent seven years at SailPoint, growing their customer success team from a team of six to 26. And at the end of my tenure, spent some time in global renewals.

Boy, do they work hard there. I then moved across to Savient about a year ago, where I'm now Vice President of Customer Success for EMEA. I run and scale RCS Motion, focusing on our key strategic aims and growth targets for FY27.

So I thought I'd kick things off with a Slido poll. And the question to you all is the following. If our retention rate dropped by 5% next quarter, which department do you think would be responsible for fixing it?

So a retention drop of 5% next quarter, which department would be responsible? Is it customer success? Is it product and engineering?

Is it renewals? Or is it sales? Just give you a few seconds to...

[Speaker 3]
Okay.

[Speaker 1]
Just when you think it's finished. We all done? Okay, so some interesting results there.

You all kind of in general think it's customer success with kind of more, slightly more on product engineering, a little bit on renewals, a little bit on sales. Okay. Thank you all for that.

[Speaker 3]
If we can, yeah.

[Speaker 1]
So I think that I've kind of tricked you a little bit there. For me, all of them are responsible. Hence the point in my talk, it's a team sport.

And I think that hopefully over the next few slides, you'll see that really all of them should be responsible for fixing this. Hopefully this slide might be familiar to some of you. The chaos of misaligned customer success.

So what happens when CS isn't aligned with other internal departments? From a marketing perspective, you get messaging conflict, broken funnels. From a sales perspective, they over promise.

From an engineering perspective, lots of bugs, delays, issues. No product input coming in from customer success or the customers. Finance, no ROI tracking.

Lost metrics, budget overspend. And of course, famously support being very reactive, putting out fires, burnout, inconsistency. So hopefully you're familiar with this, maybe in past organizations, maybe in your existing organization.

Good luck with that one. Or maybe you can spot it in some of the organizations that you work with on a daily basis. Disjointed, siloed mess.

That sometimes feels like separate companies, let alone departments. Things tend to break even more when things are going wrong. Compounding effect of conflict and uncertainty.

Unhappy customers, very reactive rather than proactive. Lack of metrics, structure, and eventually churn, both within your organization and at the customers. The shield of success in the middle there is a complete tangled mess, well and truly broken.

For me, it looks more like one of my daughter's necklaces that she spends ages getting me to untangle for her. I do that and eventually it breaks. So why do we think customer success, traditional customer success, is failing?

I see a lot on LinkedIn about why this is happening. Almost on a day-to-day basis, I see customer success is failing, AI is gonna take over all of our jobs. It's really trending at the minute.

I've got a particular link to what Chuck and his team said earlier on that. I think there is room for us, and within some guide rails, I think we can all be very successful. So just some thoughts from me.

Why do we think it's failing? Is it because it's an isolated department? Is it because it's the newbie?

Is it because we're potentially sometimes the customer-facing voice of support? Are we sales admin? Are we the coffee and cake team?

It's a particular favorite of mine. You name it, I've heard it. All the other business departments are clearly pursuing their own goals, multiple customer interactions, very disjointed and fractured relationships both internally and externally.

So I'm hopefully gonna walk you through what I feel is a five-step converged journey, giving you some practical steps of how to transform your customer success model from a single department working on its own to a company-wide ecosystem where everyone aligns and works together. I think also in some organizations, it's a marathon, not a sprint, so try not to do too much too quickly. Change management's important.

So these are my five steps, moving from left to right. You can view this as a very simple maturity matrix, if you will. So stage one, very reactive and siloed.

Customer success acts as an isolated firefighting team. It's very fragmented with very many inconsistent handoffs. Moving through to stage two, teams start to share data.

It's very informed and coordinated. Metrics start to be standardized. You're actually getting there from a very, very early stage.

Maturity perspective. Stage three, you start to be strategically aligned. Functions start to co-own NRR, and there's a unified customer data platform that bridges the organizational gaps.

Stage four, now very integrated and proactive. Customer data flows across systems. Product telemetry automatically triggers proactive outreach.

It's really getting there. And then for me, the final stage, stage five, a converged ecosystem. CS is embedded in the company DNA.

It's mapped to every department. Everyone drives collective responsibility. So have a think.

Where is your organization in this? I know where mine is. I know where I want it to be, and it's not at stage five, so.

So, that for me is the stages of the journey. And I think no matter the size of your organization, it's very similar. How do we get there from stage one to stage five?

I want to provide you with a set of practical steps to move from stage one to stage five. And one of these is the invisible touchpoint matrix. Mapping non-customer facing roles.

Everyone's heard about RACES, I'm sure. But for me, this works much better. What's the point in it?

It's a step to ensure that CS and the whole company are working together, aligned on roles and responsibilities. This is started by defining how each role being reviewed drives operations, strategy, and infrastructure across the business. Who supplies information to the department and who receives information from them?

The inputs and outputs, so to speak. I would then suggest these inputs, tasks, and deliverables mapped into a CPOC diagram, defining touchpoints and bottlenecks, any handoff required, and pinpointing any potential failures and delays. More on the CPOC diagram in a minute.

We then need to measure how well we've done, agree SLAs, and track them. Evaluate progress against your agreed SLAs and feedback any improvements and suggestions where appropriate. So here's an example CPOC diagram.

It's a fairly simple example. And as I said before, I feel it's much better than a RACI, but perhaps not a direct replacement. But it serves value as it maps the processes end-to-end and allows a consistent improvement cycle to tighten things up when necessary and identify where problems are found.

So if we just take an example, looking at marketing along the bottom there, you've got the suppliers that are obviously the marketing team. Inputs, just some examples here. Marketing collateral, campaign data, customer segmentation, case study requests.

What are the processes? Gathering customer stories, really important, that one. Testimonials being requested.

Identifying advocates. And then from an output perspective, what are we expecting from marketing? Well, we're expecting some customer success stories, some case studies, some testimonials, hopefully some referral programs, and hopefully some advocacy data.

Obviously, who are the customers? Well, actually the marketing team themselves, CSMs, their target audiences. So trying to identify on this where the touchpoints are, where potential problems are, it's a very simple diagram.

I've also added in some customer-facing roles in here, because it's important to expand the initial review of the non-customer-facing roles and see where customer interaction is happening. Of course, this can be adapted as your organization grows. It's a constantly evolving process.

So it's all well and good, but on the mission to improve customer success, and of course, ultimately, to serve your customers better, make them more successful and value-driven. But if leadership isn't aligned with your maturing customer success organization, then what's the point? Leadership cares about top-line growth, maintaining the base, and a scalable business.

What you need to do is frame the shift from customer success and retention to the whole company owns customer outcomes. I put this diagram together to help frame the moving from silos and potential churn and high-risk to cross-functional ownership, addressing and mitigating risk much earlier in the cycle. Everyone works closely together.

On the left-hand side here, you can see all the things that go wrong with a very siloed organization. And what they end up in is they force customer success to act as a very high-priced reactive support network, fixing systems, not root causes. And what we're trying to do is to move to the much more flowy model on the right-hand side with the unification of all departments towards shared success.

Drives long-term growth and value. I've seen some very complicated models of these, but simplicity is better. And you might end up with multiple iterations for different departments in different areas, but I think it's a good diagram to focus on.

With all of this, it's important to demonstrate the financials. You should be able to clearly demonstrate the potential improvements in efficiencies across the post-sales organization. And doing it well, as I'm sure you all know, will hopefully lead to improved NRR, reduced time to value for your customers, improved CSAT, MPS, and more expansion opportunities.

It's a complicated improvement cycle, but one that will surely strike a note with your execs. So from a metrics and ownership perspective, it's important that once you've done the research, you now need to put the plan in place to put it in action. So some practical suggestions are here.

Set up a pod structure. Chuck and his team mentioned that earlier. So it's a bit of a buzzword.

Make sure you've got an aligned customer team. Meet regularly with defined objectives. Collaborate.

Ensure that each department is accountable for their part in the process with clear handoffs. Ensure involvement by everyone within the QBR where necessary. Even if they're not on the call, they can still take an active role.

I think that's really important. Also found that creating a unified escalation channel on Slack can help, focusing on actions, owners, and dates. This will hopefully get rid of executive-bounced escalations.

We've all had that email from leadership asking us what the hell we're doing. What the hell is going on? They've received an email from the AE to tell them about a customer issue.

Or worse, it's come directly from the customer and missed you out. I'm sure we've all had that. The AE's probably forgotten to tell the CS leader that there's an issue.

This should try and move away from that. Wanted to touch a little bit on AI-assisted CS motions. We heard a lot earlier in the keynote with regards to this, but I've got a couple of ideas of my own.

Thankfully, they didn't copy them. So we all know that AI has the power to change our jobs and outlook and be a very pivotal tool for success and change. Done well can drastically increase operational speed.

However, it's worth saying that at speed, this will amplify any existing organizational drag. So it's important to be well-considered and right before implementing. Unless everything is in harmony, the customer experience and value that your organization brings will break down even faster.

So I'm about to give you a couple of examples. And I think really you need to be at a stage four or five of the maturity matrix to do this. Spend some time using Staircase or a similar tool where applicable.

Perhaps measure how quickly an AI-surfaced insight results in a product fix or improvement. Obviously against the baseline that you've done before. Run regular AI insight reviews with all departments involved to get their feedback of what's important.

Remember that AI might give the recommendations, but leaders and CSMs own the guidance and next steps. My second example, I spent a lot of time recently surveying how much time my CS organization spends in different areas. I did the survey in December last year and asked the CSM team to define the amount of time they spent on key tasks they do as part of their job.

I then analyzed the data and decided that changes needed to be made. Ideally spending time, of course, on more important things for the customer rather than administrative tasks. We've all been asked to improve efficiencies within our organization by a given percentage or to reduce additional headcount needed for next year.

Amongst other changes, I've then looked at where AI tools can assist here. Some examples are, of course, slide generation through AI, through products like Matic, exec briefings and pure digital customer success for those scaled accounts. We've implemented a lot over the last year and recently rerun the survey.

Some significant time improvements can be seen, making more time for the CSMs to work with the customers, but also ensuring greater time for internal alignment and much less time on very boring, very admin heavy tasks. So what does success look like? How do you know that you've had some success within your organization?

Early threat detection is key. Product is more aligned with customer needs and wants and CSAT starts to move from a lagging to a leading indicator. Issues are flagged earlier to give engineering and product more time to resolve.

Functions are aligned and involved in the process. They involve each other in decision-making. For me, a great example of this is when the sales leader actually asked me to be part of his interview process.

I was initially shocked that they and I can see the benefit of this harmonized pod approach. I have an involvement in their organization, they have an involvement in mine and it all works much closer together. The customer feels like they're encountering one team rather than a fractured, disjointed team.

Roadmap is aligned with customer needs and product and focus groups are established, feeding in key industry experience. So a little bit of a before and after model now and some of the things that you'll start to notice as you move through that five-stage process. Churn risk will be identified much earlier in the cycle.

Hopefully, if you've got things set up right, potentially now via AI, if you have things set up correctly. I get a weekly email of anything that happens within the organization that might identify some risk for any given customer, it's very useful. Good data in equals good data out though, so be careful on that.

Risks will be mitigated months in advance of any renewal. Aligned account reviews monitor any ongoing problems and proactively move forward as one. Customer handoffs within the organization move from being painful and ill-informed to seamless with standardized cross-departmental documentation and proactive planning.

So to coin a bit of a phrase, passing the baton of success. This is the image I've used both for my own teams in the past, but also within the organization to help gain buy-in. People start thinking about customer success in terms of a relay race with a baton of success being passed around the track from department to department, all working together.

Think about how you can create your own baton of success. Define what good looks like and strive for improvement where possible. Map and drive those converged conversations, define the metrics, gain exec buy-in and reap the rewards both internally and for your customers.

So hopefully with what we've talked about, it's given you a few practical suggestions moving from that tangled shield of success that we started with, to what I would say is a gold star ecosystem. Single shared vision and goal. Remember this isn't about improving your customer success, it's about improving your whole organizational success.

Both you and the company will start reaping the rewards. Break down those silos. I know for me in my career I've faced a lot of these.

Sometimes the simplest of changes has the largest effect. One example that happened to us recently, I inherited a very disjointed customer success organization with an offshore scale team in India reporting to a global head. We've recently merged our scale organization into our Amir customer success team.

A very, very small change, but what it's meant is that barriers have come down. Our AEs and customers now have a single point of contact for anything that goes wrong. And of course we can run things differently just because we're one team.

We can have a more digital CS model for scale, more enterprise and strategic model for those higher ARR customers. But it's no longer a tier based on a specific ARR. It's a joined up model and I can talk to the AE, RVP and the rest of the CSM team to define what's best for that customer.

It's not just rooted down one path or another dependent on that ARR tier. So some key takeaways. Identify the problem areas.

Where is your organization not working together? Identify and map the touch points. Define and agree your metrics for success.

Really important to gain exec buy-in for your plans. Implement your model. Through a minimum viable product if necessary.

Sometimes breaking down change into smaller chunks often helps. Start to break down those silos. Find your champions within the business who actually wants to make a difference rather than do things as they've always done.

That is really key. Set up regular calls and Slack groups to enact the change. Measure the improvement and reap the awards.

Most importantly of all, pass the button of success around your organization. One team, one vision. If anyone wants to connect or follow me on LinkedIn, QR code's on the right hand side.

Happy to take any questions.

[Speaker 2]
Thank you, Steve. I think to that, yeah, there we are. Thank you.

Okay, so we've got some great questions. Thank you, everybody. Let us start with, my organization has made the evolution but has slipped backwards recently.

Largely due to the changing dynamics on the sales side. What are the suggestions to pivot around X function changes out of our control to ensure consistency?

[Speaker 3]
Wow.

[Speaker 1]
Can we just have that one more time? That was a bit of a mouthful.

[Speaker 2]
Organization has made the evolution but has slipped backwards.

[Speaker 3]
Questions to pivot around.

[Speaker 2]
You really gave him something to think about.

[Speaker 1]
That's a good one, isn't it?

[Speaker 2]
That or it's my West Country accent. It's just a big paragraph of West Country is sometimes a bit much at this time of the day.

[Speaker 1]
So slipping backwards. Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
I mean, I guess the key challenge with this question is things move forward, they move backwards.

[Speaker 3]
Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
But when it's a team outside of your control, how do you influence that?

[Speaker 1]
I think, again, it goes back to my point about finding a champion. Find someone within the sales organization that you can work with. Many times in the past, we've had new salespeople come in and it has felt sometimes like a bit of a step backwards.

Find someone within the team that you can work with and enact some changes with them. And then that will start management, being able to see that the change is different and you can move forward. I think that's important.

[Speaker 2]
I feel as if this next question is almost the same, but not quite. How do you make those teams accountable?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. That's a constant challenge. Again, it's finding someone that will work with you and make it clear to them that the changes that you're making are actually for the whole organization.

It's not just for you to look good or for them to look good. It's for the whole organization to make that change.

[Speaker 2]
Okay. If I were upvoting, I would have upvoted this next one. I really like this.

How do you foster a culture of empathy and valuing the strengths of different functions? It's easy to turn finger pointing when things don't go as planned, blaming them. How do you keep that empathy in there?

The next country is also a very important part of the question.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, I thought that was an interesting question. So I'll take the bottom bit first and then we'll go to the top bit. My problem at the minute is that I keep going to the same country.

I've been to Sweden about 45 times. I was in South Africa last week and I've been there seven times. So I'm trying to find somewhere new.

There's actually a lot of places in Europe I haven't been to. Where would I like to go next? We have a customer in Luxembourg.

I've never been there. That's high on my list. And then with regards to the question, I think that this comes down to actual management and leadership.

Yeah, if you take a team of CSMs, they all need managing in a different way. If you try and manage them all in the same way, then you're gonna have a problem. Either they'll have a problem or you'll have a problem.

So I think you've got to recognize the different strengths and weaknesses of your team in the same way that you need to within the different functions. I think finger pointing, the support team will always feel like they're being finger pointed at. That's a great example, but work with them.

Try and understand where they're coming from. Try and understand their values. Try and understand why they come to work every day.

I think if you do that and spend some time actually with them, either face to face or over Slack or Teams, et cetera, then I think that will help.

[Speaker 2]
Thank you. Next one. What pushback or friction did you encounter from other teams when trying to make CS everyone's responsibility?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. So I think that certainly leadership see it. They see that it needs to be everyone's responsibility.

I think if you're trying to track sales from the quarter into some of this, they kind of see, well, why is this important to us? Within our organization, sales are responsible for renewals. And I think if they see that you're working to that common goal of not only the renewal, which obviously benefits everyone, but some cross-sell upsell at that time as well, then you can bring them on the journey with you.

You've got to find what's in it for them.

[Speaker 2]
Love it. I am going to do a cheeky and jump down to, given CSMs may feel threatened by AI, how did you ensure a truthful response to the CS time survey?

[Speaker 1]
Lovely question. I'm not sure if that was from my two CSMs that are in the front, but. Again, you've got to get buy-in.

I explained to them why we were doing it. We all worked together on working out that those functional areas that we were identifying the time for, and they knew right from the start why we were doing it. Hiding these things is not the right way to go.

You've got to explain the reasons that you're doing it, and that actually the whole point in the survey is to try and make their lives easier, to move away from the admin that they clearly spend a lot of time doing. So hopefully some of the work that we've put in over the last year, using Gainsight, using Gong, using Staircase, has actually stopped them from doing a lot of these admin tasks. I don't know if they think that, but...

[Speaker 2]
That was a yes in case nobody heard it. Okay, where is your team on the five-step journey? Why is it a possible challenge getting to step five in general?

[Speaker 1]
So I think that my team is very much at stage two to three. They might not like that, but that's kind of where we're at. I think we've made a massive difference.

We've made a huge difference over the last 12 months. And I think that we can get to stage four, going into 2027. Yeah, I think stage five is a kind of perfect example.

I would love for us to get there. I'm not sure we ever will, but you've got to always have a target. You've always got to push things, so.

[Speaker 2]
Okay. What answer would you give to a team that says, CSM is not our focus, we don't have time, we don't have enough resources?

[Speaker 3]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
I think you'll encounter this a lot. Yeah, there's always going to be a resource problem. An AE of ours recently didn't want to involve the CSM in some CSO-led conversations.

He said, oh, it's my job. It's something I've always done. Why would I include the CSM in it?

And I sat back with him and discussed it and said, well, we might actually want to baseline what he wants to do and where he wants to go and understand his vision and understand his strategy for the next six to 12 months as we implement and make sure that we get him to that end point. Was that something you were going to do from an AE perspective, or should you actually be focusing on what you're there to do, which is to sell and to work very closely with us? And I think when you can explain that you as a CSM team are actually going to help them out, make their lives easier, that will gain buy-in.

It's not easy.

[Speaker 2]
Thank you. I really like this one. That's a mouthful, wow.

I've definitely seen a lot of poor behaviors being motivated by the wrong metrics over the years. So I'm going to jump into this one. What needs to change in board metrics to get customer outcomes as shared responsibility more clear?

Many seem stuck in thinking retention just happens. There's no major issues, rather than CS as needing to prove value the same way sales does. So I think what are the board metrics that need to change?

Steve's going to hate me. I keep going for the big chunky ones.

[Speaker 3]
Yeah, wow. What needs to change in board metrics to get customer outcomes as shared responsibility?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, I mean, this goes to what you see on LinkedIn all the time about the average earning of a sales leader versus the average earning of a CS leader. The fact that they get a new Ferrari when they sell a new deal and we get a pat on the back or a handshake if we manage to retain something. So I think that's a really interesting concept.

And I think that we do need to, as a CS team, as a load of CS leaders or CSMs, actually try and frame the value that we bring to the organization. So they see us as something that's useful, a team that can help expand, be a revenue driver rather than a sink of revenue. I think that helps.

I think from my own experience, we didn't look at CSQLs as a CSM team at all. And it's something that I've implemented. We were just seen as a cost center that kind of occasionally helped from a retention perspective, kind of occasionally helped from an advocacy perspective, drove some people to our events, and that was kind of it.

The coffee and cake team, as we said at the start. And I think that once a team can start identifying customer success qualified leads and leadership can start seeing that the amount of revenue that you can generate as a team, that starts to change those metrics, both in your favor, but also from a team and a company dynamics perspective. Good question.

[Speaker 2]
Wow. That's a great question. Okay, we've got time for one more.

Do you want to cherry pick which of the last two we've got? Let me know which one we're going to go with.

[Speaker 1]
I'm going to do the top one. Sorry, I'm going to wimp out on the bottom one.

[Speaker 2]
How can we make other teams accountable to CS?

[Speaker 1]
I think this is similar to what we've said before. Again, you've got to show your value as a team. YSL is going to want to do anything with you.

Again, you need to show that you're actually helping them out in the work that you're doing. Why are marketing going to want to work with you on a complicated diagram that perhaps means nothing to them? From a marketing perspective, how can you help them out?

They probably have a target for the number of videos that they might want to be done, or number of case studies that they have to provide from a board perspective. That's probably one of their KPIs. I think if you can show that working more closely, spending time on these processes will get them there, that will help.

[Speaker 2]
Thank you. Thanks, Steve. Thank you.