On this month’s episode of The Customer Success Channel Podcast, brought to you by Planhat, I chatted with Nabil Dabbagh, Head of Customer Success at DeepCrawl, an SEO solution that bridges the gap between marketing and engineering departments by ensuring your website’s code is Search Engine-friendly. He has been a part of the growth and scaling up of the Customer Success department at DeepCrawl for over 4 years and has a wealth of information to share, discussing how to structure and restructure your Customer Success organization to fit your growing business needs.
As your customer success organization grows and you hire more CSMs and companies start to consider the structure of who will report to whom. As your business grows it is important to understand which roles are a part of each department. With the growth of CS, more and more companies are starting to place a number of different roles into the CS org, including Account Management, Professional Services, and support. All of these departments are starting to become a part of the Customer Success umbrella. But how do you start to restructure your organization to fit into this new customer success department? But how do you start to restructure your organization to fit into this new Customer Success department?
As one of the first Customer Success managers within the company, Nabil was hired to develop the Customer Success team based on the success in the US. Realizing that the sales team was still owning the renewals, it meant they were losing business so they started specializing teams. They initially started by breaking down pre-sales and post-sales from their commercial teams. But they realized there was a need to break things up further on the post-sales side, introducing account management roles, support roles, and Customer Success ops roles. This is still evolving and the next step is to eventually work with professional services.
The structure of the Customer Success organization is the most important element at the start of a business, as it enables you to have clear roles and responsibilities. Nabil is a strong believer in the RACI matrix (responsible, accountable, consulted and informed). The RACI matrix enables you to create a responsibility assignment chart that maps out every task, milestone or key decision within the team. His tip iis to have a clear structure and clear RACI, especially when scaling because you won’t know what to change otherwise.
As businesses evolve and grow, they will change and mature. The only thing that is constant is change, and as a result you become a lot more sophisticated. As clients’ needs change, the structure will ultimately change too.
In our discussion Nabil helps answer some of the tricky questions when it comes to scaling customer success quickly:
- When restructuring the CS org what was the biggest roadblock? How did you overcome this?
- How did you identify roles that needed to be repurposed? Which roles stayed in CS, which ones moved to another department?
- Which roles do you think are the best fitting for the CS org and why?
Some key takeaways from this discussion:
- Shifting focus meant CSMs were better suited for specific roles. For example, a CSM who is more commercially minded made great account managers
- The biggest roadblock has always been resistance to change management
- Building strong relationships within the team, as understanding and acknowledging a problem is easier to fix than not realizing there is a problem at all
Make sure you listen to the full episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments!