PRITHWI:
That [CS] team I really feel for, you know, you pick up literally anyone and say.. “Hey, Guess what? Tomorrow you are a Customer Success Manager and here you go… show value!”

What do you feel about that? You are seeing this you know.. and how do you come out of this?

ANDREAS:
Well, I couldn’t agree with you more. In… Professional Services, the world that I emerged from into Customer Success, you are dealing with basically the implementation & onboarding part of a customer journey.

PRITHWI:
Correct!

ANDREAS:
And it takes already technical and business skills and interpersonal skills just for that part, and then you are asking someone in CS to do even more, when it transitions then into the adoption phase with the customer into this nurture phase, into this support phase, into the executive alignment phase. Suddenly it’s like… I need to be six people in one…Right?

Um… and that becomes very taxing and that is why I typically… describe Customer Success, not as a huge bag of swiss army knives that have all these tools, blades, and gadgets and everything else that matters.. that Customer Success is more like an orchestra! The CSM assigned to an account draws the other resources and keeps them in harmony.

So you need a technical architect, you don’t need to have all the technical knowledge. You need to have someone to talk about some of the financial analysis or do some data analytics or this that or the other. So that you as a Customer Success Executive really that is assigned to maintain that relationship with the customer on the other end are empowered to make more strategic decisions instead of doing all the things that are involved in this. You don’t need to be proficient in 20 different systems, how to solve a technical problem how to do all this other stuff a lot!