Without purpose, Customer Success becomes a vacuum. We can wholeheartedly guarantee that if you don't define the purpose of Customer Success, someone else will do it for you. On top of that, you will be fighting an uphill battle as every department pushes more and more responsibility your way, without consulting you first.
Your purpose statement will be the rallying cry for your team and will help them focus on the right thing. So, what does a purpose statement look like? Here's an example from one of our clients:
"To partner with our clients and make them look like rockstars."
When you define your purpose, you can use it as a litmus test for your entire Customer Success organization. For example:
You can answer each question with a yes or no. There are no maybes or 'pretty close' responses here. With the example above, we took a closer look at whether their kick-off call processes fulfilled the purpose of making their clients look like rock stars. The answer was a firm no. We reworked the onboarding process to ensure that the customer was the focal point of the discussion, rather than promoting themselves or talking too much.
Your purpose statement permeates everything you do in Customer Success. For most CSMs, a lack of purpose forces them to change hats between 'making a customer happy' and 'getting the customer to spend more money.' When they have a purpose, you know exactly where and how to spend your time. They will feel a great sense of pride and ownership. They will be able to understand how they are perceived, how they are performing, understand the impact their work has on the entire company and have fun! In short: where focus goes, energy flows.
When you start building your purpose statement - heed this rule: You can drive satisfaction, or you can drive revenue, but you can't drive both. This statement does not mean you can't have both revenue and satisfaction; it means you cannot drive both at the same time. When you try to drive both, you'll end up with a team of Customer Success Managers who have no idea where to invest their time or how to prioritize their effort.
When you focus solely on driving satisfaction, revenue becomes a byproduct of your purpose. When you release a new feature, there's a significant chance your customers will say "I already know the value I'm getting out of this product. I'm also going to use it for this. Sign me up!"
Here's a question to prompt your purpose creation thought process:
"What do you want your Customer Success Managers to think about every single day?"
Do you want them to think about money on every single call with a client? The answer is usually no. Do you want them to think about providing an incredible experience and driving satisfaction through the roof? The answer is usually yes.
A client of ours was a sales-oriented Customer Success organization, led by a sales veteran with 20+ years of in the trenches sales experience. When we went through a workshop exercise of creating a purpose statement for this team, they landed on 'The purpose of Customer Success at [redacted] is to build trust and loyalty with our clients'. Why did they land there? Because they came to the conclusion that the money will take care of itself and that everything will fall into place, if they focused on the right thing.
How do you define your core values? If you're not in the position to bring us in, here's a clear, step by step walkthrough of the process we use to get to these outcomes. Note that the engagement in these sessions is a function of having an expert facilitator in place to help you. These are the first three exercises we do with our consulting clients.