How to Bring Transparency to Your Team’s Customer Success Efforts

It is important as a Customer Success leader strive to exemplify transparency within your organizations. There are a couple of reasons for this…they are:

First, the sad fact is that most employees do not trust their employers. If employees do not trust the companies they work for and their managers, then they are not going to give their jobs their full effort which is to say their full expression of their unique skills, talents, abilities and characteristics when they come to work. In order to compete and win in today’s globally-competitive dog fight, you need every employee’s voluntary committed effort to your cause. So, by sharing all that you can, employees will feel trusted, and when trust is built then your employees will feel committed to you and the company and they will give you all of their best efforts – with everything they got. 

Second, the other sad fact is that most customers do not trust the businesses they do business with. If your customers and potential customers do not trust you, they will be easily convinced to stop doing business with your company or they will go with a different vendor that they feel they can trust more. I order to do a great job of keeping customers or attracting them in the first place, you need both groups to trust that you are doing the right things by them. Or at least you can be counted on to do the right things when the time comes. So being open and honest with your customers and potential customers is good business insofar as keeping and attracting customers goes. 

Here are a number of important ways you can be transparent with your Customer Success teams: 

First, always makes sure you are sharing what you can with your whole internal team. Here are some ideas of what to share:

• Updates on strategies
• Updates on current or upcoming events
• Updates on competitors
• Sharing your vision for the future

Second, distribute data to your team on their performance statistics – individual and team. For example, on the Qumu Support team we keep the team informed of overall departmental performance statistics by reviewing multiple team performance reports on bi-weekly departmental update calls. In this call we review the overall team's incoming issues, closed issues, average time to resolution for closed tickets, customer satisfaction statistics and many others. This helps the broader team understand how our department is being judged in terms of our departmental performance key performance indicators. Additionally, it re-enforces a performance-focused culture on the team. 

Further, the Qumu Support team keeps individual team members up-to-date on their individual accomplishments as well by sending out a dashboard of the entire team’s individual weekly performance statistics to all team members. By doing this you can continually identify at a team level what is working and what is NOT working. Managers and employees then can work to improve their key success metrics by putting in place learning plans (NOT performance improvement plans). By making sure team members are continually focused on improving their performance (say just 1% a day) we continually build a better and better track record of success. 

So keeping the team informed regarding team and individual performance statistics is important to improving these statistics over time and making sure the things the team and individuals are judged on is transparent. 

Third, sharing nice comments from your customers with the entire team and your company’s top leaders (via internal company-wide newsletters for example) as soon as those comments are received is another great way to build transparency. This is really just an offshoot of the second item above but customer comments can often time capture qualitatively what your team and the individuals on the team are doing right. This is a good way to keep the “voice of the customer” represented within the company. At the end of the day, these comments give texture to the cold hard metrics that for some can be mind-numbingly boring to look at. 

Building on the point above, use of customer comments to emphasize your team’s imperatives (the things they “must do” to win) is another great transparency-extending technique. This is because you are continually re-iterating what it is that you are looking for from your team. You are not hiding what top performers are doing right and you are not hiding how you measure individual team member success. The yardstick is right out in front and employees appreciate that. At Qumu, our Support team is focused on the twin imperatives of speed & quality and every time we get a customer compliment, we make sure to look for and pinpoint the elements of the customer’s comments that map back to our twin imperatives. As an example, a customer recently had this to say about their support experience with one of our Customer Support Engineers-here is the text of that review:

Always appreciate Bojan's attention detail and willingness to work through the issues. 

In response to the team-wide email announcing this new review, we broadcast the following message:

Sweet review-Good work Bojan! Attention to detail and perseverance are hallmarks of providing a good quality experience for our customers. And as you know we want to be respected for delivering speedy & high quality support all the time and every time. Keep up the good work man – you’re stone cold killing it!

This is a textbook example about how you use customer compliments to enhance organizational transparency and emphasize your departmental imperatives within your organization.

Fourth, when negative feedback is shared by customers with your team regarding some issue your team worked on or some mistake they have made, you need to make sure that the feedback gets back to the team member involved in the situation and that the customer feedback is evaluated for something (even if it is a small improvement) that is constructive and is something the team can learn from in the given scenario that turned out unfortunately bad for the customer. By this method, the team is continually making small improvements daily in order to deliver a better and better customer experience over time. 

Fifth, when customers leave negative comments on your companies support forums, do not edit or delete the comments so long as they don’t violate some pre-set basic forum posting guidelines. A customer’s negative comment in these forums can sometimes be difficult to read but the forums are for sharing feedback - not really for the company to cherry pick and display a bunch of positive comments about how great they are or how wonderful their products are. The focus should be making sure that feedback helps to direct the company toward a better outcome for all customers. So do not (as a matter of policy) edit or delete negative comments from your company’s on-line forum pages. 

Observing a policy of transparency can have a lot of benefits for your company and hopefully the examples above will give you some ideas about ways your company can take advantage of these benefits in small ways that will result in big results when combined together.