CSMs can adopt an attitude of being relentless as a way to help our customers reach success.
CSMs are tasked with helping our customers achieve outcomes with our product. An approach of being relentless or “determined, dogged or persistent” using synonyms from Merriam-Webster’s Thesaurus can help us partner with our client to achieve their goals.
In short, we can “stay after it” as a framework to help our customers push through challenges and meet their objectives.
What are some practical examples of how we can be relentless? Let’s review.
- No Value.
Our customer may communicate that they aren’t receiving value from our product. This can be a risk that requires addressing quickly – if a customer doesn’t receive value they may leave our company.
Here we may want to put efforts into diagnosing the situation, troubleshooting the issues and developing a plan to help the customer see value. We want to react with priority by listening to understand, creating a path forward, executing then monitoring and adapting to help the customer see value from our product.
2. Workarounds
Our customer may have a workflow or process they want to achieve. When the task can’t be completed their work may not continue or ideal outcome achieved. Barriers to the customer getting their work done can cause a risk for the effectiveness of the product.
CSMs can help brainstorm alternate ways the customer can complete their project. We can be creative by digging deeply into researching our product for ideas, consulting colleagues for suggestions and looking at success stories of other clients. We can also see the opportunity to advocate for our clients with feature requests.
3. Use Cases
Customers may approach us with business challenges they want to solve with our product. The customer has an objective or vision they’d like to achieve and a CSM’s ability to provide effective solutions is a “Moment of Truth” in the customer relationship.
We want to listen to our customer’s situation. What are they trying to achieve? Why is this initiative important? What is the situation driving the request? We can fully understand our customer’s situation and use our knowledge of the product to present ideas and solutions to the customer. Showing the customer we’re committed to helping them solve hard challenges is a win for the Moment of Truth.
4. Product Evaluation
Our customer may come to us and challenge our product features, quality or make competitive comparisons. We need to act on our customer’s comments to address doubts and concerns.
We can begin by listening to the customer and confirming we will support their needs through an evaluation. We should create a sense of openness so that the customer can honestly share their feedback and we can report on results of our evaluation with transparency. Overall, we can support the customer with a thorough evaluation of their concern and show we are invested to help the customer make the best decision.
5. Long-Term Relationship
CSMs want to avoid a customer relationship from becoming routine. We work with customers during their lifetime with the company and it’s important to have a fresh vision and excitement about plans ahead.
We want to keep up our intensity as if the customer was in the beginning of the relationship with our company. Here we may want to think about Apple’s “brand bank” approach making sure each of our interactions lead to a positive experience and outcome with our company whenever possible.
A relentless approach helps us communicate our intentions to our client. We show the customer we’re in this together and that we’re committed to their success.