Mistakes to Avoid When Selecting a CS Platform: Not Thinking of Customer Success as a Team Sport

CS is a Team Sport

Selecting the right customer success platform for your organization can be challenging. To help you navigate the process, we’ve developed a four-part blog series about the mistakes you should avoid when choosing a CS platform, including not having a modern mindset, not putting CS in the hands of the entire team, not being able to create inspiring journeys and not thinking of CS as a team sport. In this article, we’ll look at the mistake of not thinking of customer success as a team sport. 

Unlike Finance or Human Resources or IT, “customer success” is not simply a department within your organization. In order to consistently deliver value and positive experiences to your customers, customer success must be a role played by every department throughout the company. In other words, customer success is a team sport, and failure to think of it as such, can result in issues like slow product adoption, poor customer experiences, high churn rates and more. Let’s look at a couple of reasons why customer success should be an organization-wide responsibility. 

The Customer Journey is Collaborative 

Having a well-mapped and executed customer journey is essential to customer success, but the journey does not start and end with the Customer Success team. Planning, designing and running the customer journey is shared across departments, like Sales, Marketing and Product, so you need to be able to collaborate on the steps of the journey across the organization and have one single source of truth that everyone can access.

With Totango’s Customer Experience Canvas, your entire company can collaborate in one shared, virtual workspace and have a complete picture of the customer journey that is updated in real time.Team members from every department can come together to build, run, collaborate and iterate on the journey – no matter where they are in the world! It’s important for all departments to stay current on what is truly going on with your customers and be able to identify any gaps so each team can stay focused on their most important tasks and each account gets the attention it deserves. Having this shared visual workspace is vital to maximizing your teams’ time and energy and enabling your entire organization to provide optimal and consistent customer experiences every time.

Visibility and Consistency are Key to Success

Providing a consistent customer experience throughout the entire journey is extremely important to customer success. In order to maintain consistency, every department needs to be able to instantly tap into customer data and apply it to improving the customer experience. Unfortunately, many organizations struggle with fragmented views of customer information across their departments as data is stored in various systems around the company.

With Totango, however, your company can integrate and sync all of your data into one place for instant analysis and deployment. And to take it a step further, Totango also provides automatically and manually triggered workflows, called SuccessPlays, based on your data that allow your teams to implement consistent best practices to optimize customer experiences at every stage of the journey. Every customer interaction generates information, and by sharing this data across the enterprise without password barriers or siloed databases, you inform the next customer engagement and can proactively anticipate customer needs.

Operationalizing Your Teams is Essential

In order to operationalize all of your teams, you need a CS platform that can take customer information and turn it into clear, goal-based actions that can be shared and understood easily across the organization. With Totango, everyone in your company can access an easy-to-understand visual representation of the customer journey as well as crucial data so the entire organization is aware of each customer’s evolving needs and can proactively seize opportunities or make adjustments as needed. See for yourself how Totango can help your company implement a customer-centered mindset by signing up for free today!  

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