We can’t talk about new processes or change without reviewing our old friend the Kubler-ross change management curve. The change curve (modeled after the grieving process) is real. EVERYONE goes through it when something changes, it’s just a question of how long and how severe. The goal is to shrink the curve, making it short and shallow.
I’ve edited the traditional Change Curve/Grieving process below to more real-world examples of how these stages present themselves in employees, but you’ll know it when you see it.
Asking CSMs to follow processes that haven’t been properly tested will result in abandoned processes, a loss of leadership credibility, and eventually turnover
Imagine if pharmaceutical companies were allowed to develop drugs based on what should work and never had to test the results before selling them to the public. We can all foresee problems with that, yet I’ve seen operations do this exact thing over and over again with customer-facing processes. Asking CSMs to follow processes that haven’t been properly tested or iterated will not improve Customer Success. It will result in abandoned processes, a loss of leadership credibility, and eventually turnover.
Instead, I recommend a more formal plan to implement new processes that will improve Customer Success. What you’ll find by following the steps below, especially if you’ve rolled out processes that haven’t worked in the past, is that your processes will have credibility and employees will give you at least some benefit of the doubt.
10 steps to rolling out processes CSMs will follow:
- Test the preliminary process with multiple customers yourself. EVERY time I’ve done this, I’ve tweaked my process based on real-world exposure before I have someone else try it. (It’s how I know this works!)
- Don’t surprise anyone. Let your team know what you are working on and why. Ask for volunteers to help develop it.
- Gives credibility to the change
- Starts the grieving process (see change curve above)
- Test out how transferrable the refined process is by providing explicit instructions to a small group of CSMs, maybe only two at first. (This is not ‘scripting’, but it’s close – you are trying to determine best practices but also identify outlier exceptions)
- Determine a way to validate and coach the test group (record video calls, or email responses) this is important for spot-checking the real process.
- Iterate the process to include new findings from the small test group that still achieve the overall goal.
- Standardize the customer responses or outcomes that are captured from the process. The information should be recorded in drop-down choices or results. Capture these in your CRM (or spreadsheets if you can’t get it built in the CRM yet) Free-form text is fine to start with, but it won’t scale.
- Reporting: Develop a quantity measurement by CSM (Customers contacted, data captured, etc) and an effectiveness measure (Conversion, desired outcome). Be sure to track customers missing data. This allows you to compare CSM adoption. (If you can’t report on it, you don’t really mean it, and worse, you won’t know if people are following it or not) Do not launch a process you can’t report on!
- Roll out the process to everyone or stage the rollout across certain groups first. Publish the reports or have them displayed on a live dashboard. Even if the process doesn’t work, there is value in failures.
- You will be challenged on “exceptions” by CSMs. This is part of the negotiation process (see curve above). Say “We will address exceptions when they happen, if you run into that situation, let’s discuss it.” (This allows you to address the real exceptions and build a process around it but not get bogged down in hypotheticals or “can’t because(s)”).
- In the reporting, you will see some early adopters and some not. It’s important to validate the early results by spot-checking and making sure the process was understood by everyone and the ‘results’ mean what you think they do! (It’s not micro-managing, it’s managing)
Some have argued that they don’t have time for the above process. I agree this can be a challenge. Consider the results from the last function you rolled out that wasn’t successfully adopted. How much time did that one take and what were the benefits? If you didn’t improve Customer Success capabilities because the process wasn’t adopted, then you probably lost credibility. If you don’t have time to develop or roll out new processes the right way, get some help! Interim leadership labor is available for a fraction of what it costs to hire a CSM. Sales & Marketing don’t do it all on their own and neither should you!
