In enterprise tech companies, the roles of Customer Success (CS) and Professional Services (PS) are increasingly blurred. The combination of strategic and operational capabilities of both functions are critical for delivering customer outcomes. Therefore both CS and PS are critical for the retention and expansion of customers.
In light of this, there is a compelling need to move from blurred to crystal clear integration between CS and PS. This is rapidly becoming a top priority for leading enterprise CCOs and CROs.
Many enterprise organizations struggle with silos between their CS and PS functions. These silos can exist across the mission/charter, processes, systems and/or organizational designs of each function. These disconnects lead to inefficiency in the customer lifecycle, failures in customer outcome delivery, churn risk, a lack of scalability and rising unprofitability.
In this article, we’ll drill into these silos and learn how to eliminate them in order to create 20:20 clarity for both your organization and your customers.
What Are the Common Disconnects Between Customer Success & Professional Services?
1. Fragmented Customer Journeys
Delivering outcomes and best-in-class experience for customers requires a seamless, end-to-end journey. However, CS and PS are often navigating from different ‘maps’. These maps can include different definitions of success for customers (see #2 below) and conflicting delivery and success management processes. This results in hand-offs between the two teams that become points of friction and gaps. Gaps into which key insights and actions, critical to driving successful adoption for the customer, get lost.
2. Misalignment on Customer Value
Both CS and PS will, or at least should, rank customer value delivery as core to their teams’ missions. However, many organizations do not have a standardized and cross-functionally approved definition of what customer value means and how to deliver and measure it. This lack of standardization around customer value cascades down to the metrics and targets prioritized by both teams and the respective processes, playbooks and methodologies used.
3. Operational and Organizational Barriers
The fragmentation and misalignment between CS and PS strategies highlighted above are inherited by the organizational design and operations of each function.
Without a clear and integrated strategy to drive customer experience and outcomes, role definitions between the two teams are often duplicative and riddled with competency gaps. These gaps can include competencies that range from value consulting/engineering skill sets to specialized industry or technical expertise. These competency types are essential for driving customer outcome achievement in most B2B technology stacks.
At an operational level, we find the usage of customer success platforms and professional services automation systems that are designed to indulge the siloes between CS and PS rather than bridge them. These disconnected systems make it difficult to share insights, track customer outcome delivery, and coordinate actions effectively across CS and PS.
Creating a Seamless CS + PS Customer Experience
With the key disconnects between PS and CS identified, let’s examine 3 opportunities for building an integrated model that will drive a customer outcome delivery lifecycle that feels united for customers.
1. Establish a Customer Outcome Framework
To deliver a unified customer outcome journey between CS and PS, a shared customer outcome framework that forms a steel thread across the two teams must be defined. This will enable:
- Standardizing success planning across teams from pre-sales to post-implementation.
- Joint accountability and integrated processes for driving adoption and achieving customer outcomes.
- A common dialect that both teams can use to drive a consistent experience with customers when planning, delivering and verifying customer value.
2. Design Integration Points
Instead of approaching the design of CS and PS activities as separate stages of the customer lifecycle, design them to be integrated to deliver a seamless customer experience and maximize collaboration between the two teams. Integration opportunities include:
- CS involvement in the product implementation process. At a minimum, CS should have a ‘consulted’ role in the implementation and proactive customer-facing presence through the project governance model. This will help ensure alignment from day one.
- PS involvement in success planning with customers, across the customer lifetime. Delivery of outcomes within a customer’s success plan will likely have dependencies on PS capabilities. Enabling PS to help prescribe and agree what activities will happen with the customer to achieve the next outcome will drive both internal efficiency and success for the customer.
3. Centralize a Digital CS+PS Experience for the Customer
Adopting a digital customer portal can be a powerful enabler in breaking down customer experience siloes between CS and PS. By providing a unified, transparent experience for both teams and customers, it drives alignment, accelerates value delivery, and increases efficiency. Key ways a digital customer portal can support this include:
- Shared workspace for CS, PS and customers to collaborate on defining and agreeing target outcomes.
- Centralized visibility into outcome-delivery progress, project milestones, success plans, and risks.
- Reduced friction at handoffs by streamlining transitions and communications between CS, PS and customers.
- Increased accountability and transparency between CS and PS in front of customers through real-time access to progress and deliverables.
The CS + PS Integration Imperative
Integrating CS and PS is a critical strategy for companies in the recurring revenue economy. Organizations that successfully align these functions will reduce inefficiencies, increase retention, and create a foundation for long-term growth.
If you would like to watch a webinar that drills down even further into this subject, check out this link!
