When it comes to decoding about- “How should a day in the life of a Customer Success Manager look like? Or How should every Customer Success Manager (CSM) be planning their day? It becomes quite a genuine confusion to deal with. Because it’s not just the amount of tasks or the amount of KPIs that a CSM is probably dealing with which of course is already far too many unlike sales where all you have to do is essentially close the business, but it also revolves around the fact that a CSM has to onboard customers, has to bring in renewals and has to even upsell and handle risk alerts.
So when there are too many things to do, the chaos is pretty obvious. So let’s see how a CSM can organize this otherwise chaotic world and still be successful at the end of the day.
The two essential components of CSM are mainly onboarding and renewals.
Onboarding
It becomes very important for any CSM to plan the activity for the day. So that whenever you see a new customer coming in or even the customer has just been logged in, it should be a planned activity for the CSM to go ahead and set up a kickoff call and help them onboard. And eventually, run them through the onboarding playbook.
Tip:- Here is a blog to check out the 5 Steps defining a perfect Customer Onboarding
Renewals
The next thing that comes around is – Renewals. In the renewal space, the CSM needs to essentially ensure that they’ve always planned things out at least for the month if not for the entire quarter. This will make sure that all the reminders are in and thus as a Success manager you are already on top of those pieces.
Now the other two key factors that will always try to jeopardize your planning are
Upsell alerts and Risk alerts.
Upsell Alerts
So when you see a customer giving you triggers on upselling which is usually characterized when they’re reaching the limit of a particular feature, there could be a possible opportunity to upsell whether it’s new users, a new limit on APIs. Along with that, there could be a feature trigger that will basically suggest an alert whenever a user has consumed XYZ features, which means they might be ready for the next plan upgrade.
Risk Alerts
The second one is the exact opposite to the one discussed above – risk alerts, now these Risk Alerts are essentially measuring customer health score that frankly should be measuring value delivered rather than just logging in or activities details. Now if the health dips or a certain feature that you track which is the key proxy for value delivered is not getting used, these triggers should translate into tasks and activities for CSM which then should be planned for future days.
So yes, you essentially take all these triggers which you’re getting on the unplanned side of things, the upsell alerts as well as the risk alerts, and move them on the planned and the scheduled side of the day.
All of these can be done by using technology such a CustomerSuccessBox and other customer success tools and then move them into the planned side of the bucket. What you want to do every morning is come and see what my scheduled activities are for today and start knocking them off.
In case you are planning to switch to a CSM role and want to know a great insight from a CSM himself, don’t forget to check out this blog – Attention CSMs : How to carpe your diem!
