In a situation where your customer champion quits, all of a sudden you are either looking for a new champion, or you’re just handed over to a new champion, somebody who’s replaced your older champion. What should you make of this situation? How should you approach the situation to upscale your customer success? But first, let’s discuss who is a Customer Champion.
Who is a Customer Champion?
When trying to implement a new technology at your customer’s place, the greatest challenge that you face is to evolve the ownership to the Operational areas of the business. The most effective way to do this, is to identify a team of individuals who can represent the customers and the customer experience in internal discussions. This is who we call as Customer Champion. They are ones who understands the true potential of your product, ensures the company allocates resources and appropriate actions are developed and deployed. So when a customer chanpion quits, although may sound stressful but I think we all need to recognize that this is an opportunity.
This is an opportunity to build new relationships, to bring in new energy in the entire relationship, and the entire technology even if you are at your best and doing pretty good.
How do we treat the exit of a customer champion as an opportunity?
Onboarding opportunity
A lot would depend upon where you are in the technology adoption with this particular customer. You may want to approach this entire situation by literally treating it as a fresh boarding opportunity.
And you’d want to take them through, if not the entire onboarding maybe but maybe through some of the complex pieces of data onboard, inviting other users and configuring the system to some extent, but at least like a mini version of the onboarding itself.
Reselling opportunity
You may want to look at it by reselling, revaluing, and enforcing opportunities. Because if you have a new champion, it is not necessarily that he or she is brought into the technology yet. Maybe they don’t even understand the value proposition very clearly. So, it might make sense to actually go ahead and literally proceed and treat them as a pre-sales prospect, and not just treat them as an existing customer.
You already have an advantage of a signed contract with them, of pre-configured and pre imported live data and that’s your advantage. But you do want to make sure that they understand the value proposition, very clearly.
Using both of these techniques, then you decide what your next course of action should be. Essentially by demonstrating value, reinforcing value, and understanding what they expect from the product as they are taking over this new role and responsibility. Then create this new relationship with them.
Also, you must know what would they like to drive out of this entire process and with this entire relationship, what would they like to drive as an outcome using the technology that you or your organization’s providing them. Now once you have sold the product to your new customer, you wait to implement it and that’s called Valley of Death.
Additional Resource- The ultimate upsell playbook template
Conclusion
Here we can conclude that it’s definitely a brilliant and a brand new opportunity. So, be excited, be thrilled. You have a new champion, let’s get some new energy, and let’s take them to heights that they’ve never reached before.
P.S. – The main image has been taken from pexels.com
