We may want to think of our role as a CSM as helping our customer advance work.
According to Oxford Languages Dictionary, work be defined as: activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result.
Achieving a “purpose or result” aligns with our charter as a CSM according to The Customer Success Professional’s Handbook by Ashvin Vaidyanathan and Ruben Rabago:
Customer success is the business methodology of ensuring your customers achieve their desired outcomes while using your product or service.
Therefore, the more we help our customer enable work the more we can fulfill our job of helping our customer achieve outcomes.
What are some ways we can help our customer advance work?
Let’s review:
- Answer questions: questions are an indicator of what our customer wants to achieve. By providing answers we can help advance our customer’s plans.
- Follow-up: when we check-in with our customer we are an accountability partner helping our client reach milestones.
- Share knowledge: knowledge gaps may prevent success. We can help our customer gain insights with our product’s blogs, resources and workflows.
- Get unstuck: our customer may run into issues preventing product use such as a bug or technical issue. We can advocate with our internal teams to get our customer up and running.
- Generate ideas: customers convert business challenges to work in our product to achieve success. We can help generate ideas for our customer on how to use our product for their desired outcomes.
- Add structure: getting to a goal may require prioritizing or ordering tasks. We can use tools such as success plans or establishing a process to help our customer clarify goals and priorities.
- Pitch-in: getting started or working through a challenge may require extra support. We can go beyond our normal offering to help our customer kick-start initiatives and get going.
As a CSM we can help our clients go faster toward their goals by helping our customers advance work.