On this month’s episode of The Customer Success Channel Podcast, brought to you by Planhat, I chatted with Wayne McCulloch, Global Head of CS (SaaS) at Google Cloud, about the taboos of Customer Success.
The function of Customer Success is still maturing, and most companies are currently evolving and growing their CS departments. That being said, there’s all these unanswered questions that people don’t really mention or avoid. For example, is it okay to charge for CS, who should own the customer feedback loop and should the CSM hold a revenue number?
One of the world’s leading CS experts and a Top 100 CS Strategist, Wayne McCulloch works with Google Cloud’s entire SaaS portfolio as the CS Leader. He’s a keynote speaker and the recipient of multiple industry awards with more than twenty-five years of experience in customer-focused roles. Wayne began his software career at PeopleSoft and Vignette before becoming an SVP at Salesforce, the Chief Customer Officer at Kony, Inc., and the VP of the CS Group at Looker.
Now he’s sharing what he knows as a chief customer officer leading global success functions. In The Seven Pillars of Customer Success, Wayne provides an adaptable framework for building a strong CS organization. From customer journey actions to the development of transformation advisors, you’ll read detailed examples of how companies have put these seven pillars to the test.
In our discussion Wayne helps answer some of the tricky questions when it comes to the taboos of customer success:
- Should a CSM do it all? Or do you have an onboarding manager, then CSM, then account manager?
- Who should own customer advocacy, marketing or CS?
- Is customer success really the culture of a company? how do you actually get a company to become customer centric?
Some key takeaways from this discussion:
- I do not believe CSMs should sell or should have a quota at all. That is not their function, not their core competency and it’s not their skill set. However, CSMs should be ´up-telling´ value all the time
- I believe that ultimately customer success managers will be paid for service. It will be a paid-for service because it should add tremendous value that customers want to pay for that service
- So collecting the feedback and presenting it to a company I think is owned absolutely by the success function. The action of implementing and making it right is definitely engineering and product design. It’s also a way to showcase that you’re listening to customers and you care about what they’re seeing in a very visual and visible way
Make sure you listen to the full episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments!