It’s astonishing to know how product management converges with customer success management at one point. The overlap is the point where customers truly and completely experience the efficiency and effectiveness of your product! And it is intriguing to know how they together can elevate the success of the organizational goals in bringing out the ultimate product.
A Product Manager wants to deliver a product that elevates the experience of a user of the product. S/he wants to come up with features that serve the need or even do more than what they expect. But how does one know what will work and what won’t?
As a Customer Success Manager, you will always want to delight your customers. But that happens only when they realize the value your product offers. You need a powerful product that solves that problem. Without one, do you think it’s possible to provide a great customer experience?
Do you see a gap there? Now let’s try and figure out what the gap is about.
Suggested Read: What role can Customer Success Manager play in product management?
It’s all about collaboration!
A product isn’t fully developed at any point in time. This means that the product keeps evolving with the needs of the customers. So you know where the start of the development was and have you thought about the end? It makes sense for product management and customer success management to collaborate on the evolving product.
Although there is a process of feedback set up, to set things right in designing the product, the close interaction with different customers every day is missing. But gladly, that’s what customer success managers do!
While the product managers stitch the elements, a customer success manager is unleashing the elements to analyze the cause of dissatisfaction at any point.
7 Skillsets common to Product and Customer Success Management!
Customer experience
The common thing about both is enhancing “customer experience”. To heighten this, whatever assistance is at stake has to be mutually gained.
A mutual zeal to give out the best customer experience can help product managers with the assistance of customer success managers and vice versa!
Aggregate level data
A product manager may take up surveys and feedback about the performance of the product. But the intricate level of data is with you (CSMs). CSMs do not just know about one customer perspective but many. This will save the time of product managers and help in working effectively towards developing the desired product for the customers.
Product level solutions
You don’t have to keep guessing if a certain feature solves use cases for the customer or not. Instead, take assistance from the product managers if there’s a need for you to know about the intricate details of the product and its features.
Working on new feature requests
A CSM can pull the feature request data from the dashboard to present the most frequently asked features. It isn’t enough for the product manager to analyze their requests with no further information, hence prioritizing the feature demand and setting up a meeting with the customers can be undertaken by customer success managers in the loop with the product managers. It aids in getting to the specifics needed for developing a successful feature.
NPS survey that brings them together
For both, this brings a piece of smile for the effort they have made so far in building a product and giving value to the customers. And when a qualitative response is received, this surely has to reach both product and customer success teams right? The success is due to collaborative efforts and this needs to stay on. Hence the feedback received should be made available to both the teams so that they can analyze together what worked and what did not.
Decide on Relevant KPIs and metrics
The customer experience isn’t getting any richer because customers are randomly using the product. It gets elevated when they use it to serve themselves for a set purpose. When the value is achievable, perhaps product usage comes by default. So what keeps your customers healthier?
The point is to keep them engaged and not distracted! The workflow can include milestones that your customers have to go through during their journey. This makes sure that the customers take the necessary tasks and keep them intact with the goals to be achieved.
With that said, product usage, time is taken to complete the task and product adoption rate can be such metrics that help the customer success manager to intervene when necessary to boost the inactivity by some means.
For which a use case of customer 360 gives an overall picture of the opportunities of upsells, product usage activity, customer satisfaction rate, and churn risks.
Conducting in-app onboarding
The clashing task among both is carrying out effective onboarding! You can’t afford to make it a disappointing experience for your customers. As a CSM, your Customer Success software, like CustomerSuccessBox, can give you the product adoption data and actionable insights into the same.
A Product Manager can use the data given by you, to know what is of value to customers and how they can improve it further. For example, you may have 100 features, but if the customers are only using 50, other features are not adding any value for them. Once you realize this, you need to drop the others and improve those 50 only. Hence, a CSM and a PM can together analyze the data to drive early time to value.
Product and Customer Success Management convergence can create an awesome product!
The feature demand of a customer, analytical insights from the CSM, and the brainstorming ideas of a product manager can elevate the product to another level. Start creating this alignment in the organization if you haven’t set one! As for how important the experience is to the user, it doesn’t matter whether it’s from the perspective of a product or the customer, it all makes sense to both the teams.
These two operations together create a beautiful customer experience. Analyzing the barriers and solving the challenges together can aid customers in giving the best customer experience and indeed remind them of your top-notch product!
