Customer Success: Leveraging CRM in a PSO to Create a Coordinated View of the Customer

Professional Services organizations have long been measured by the fundamental objectives of profitability, utilization, and services revenues. However, facilitating true customer success hinges more squarely upon how well a company understands the needs of its customers, sets achievable expectations around the delivery of those needs, and executes beyond those expectations.

As our organizations become more complex, the need to understand our customers becomes both more challenging and more important. Through the proliferation of SaaS business models and the improvement of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools, we now have many capabilities to become more knowledgeable about our customers, be proactive with that knowledge, and better serve our customers.

Companies who successfully manage customer relationships execute as closely coordinated teams, across not only Professional Services, but across all customer-facing functions. More organizations are structuring themselves to incorporate the Professional Services organization as part of a broader Customer Success function – along with Technical Support and and Account Management / Customer Care groups – that manages key relationships with a company’s existing customer (and revenue) base.

The combination of these teams sets up an ideal coordination between all customer-facing functions enabling an organization to achieve the following:

Achieve and demonstrate deep customer understanding

As PS organizations become more closely integrated into other customer-facing functions, it is important that the customer relationship be well documented. An effective CRM system needs to capture all customer activity (beginning with marketing’s identification of a lead) across multiple customer facing organizations — not just Professional Services, but also Support, Sales, and Account Management / Customer Success Management. In addition to understanding the pulse of the customer, today’s leading edge PS organization needs to put itself in the customer’s shoes and understand the customer’s overall experience with their company from the customer’s perspective. An integrated CRM solution with visibility and access across all customer-facing organizations allows companies to do this.

For example, a services team can scope out a technical services integration more effectively if they understand a customer’s usage patterns and metrics. Using CRM to answer a few basic questions:

• What are the customer’s usage patterns?
• How many users do they have
• What percentage of their users are logging in and using the system?
• Are there seasonal or day/time peaks or lulls in usage?
• What degree of customizations has the customer already made to their instance?
  

Additionally, looking at usage metrics to find out which features of the system get the most use and whether there might be any high-value features that are underutilized can help the PSO make recommendations that will help their customer receive greater value and become more loyal as a result. For example, if the services team goes in to a project understanding that the usage metrics indicate that the customer isn’t fully taking advantage of a solution’s Analytics and reporting capabilities, the services team can advise the customer on ways they might use those features to help understand and quantify the value they are getting from the solution.

The services team can also understand what kind of challenges a customer might be facing (or not), based upon support case history in the CRM system. Many times, support cases can be indicators of need for delivering deeper training or other relevant services that can serve as a revenue opportunity for the company as well as a way to drive value for the customer.

Turn the PSO into a responsible stakeholder for maintaining fresh customer information

Similarly, the work (technical or consultative) that a PSO performs for a customer should be well documented in a CRM system in order to empower the company’s other departments to engage with customers in an informed manner. Siloed PS systems create a real challenge in this area. Because making data available in CRM for other organizations is not necessarily top of mind for busy consultants, one method to encourage that contribution is to drive incentive compensation based on data from the CRM. This encourages the updates to happen and further enforces your CRM system as a key system of record.

Use the CRM system across functions to identify at-risk customers, and enlist the PSO to strengthen those relationships

Not all customers are equally served by a standard product, and unfortunately, not all Sales organizations get it right every time when assessing a customer’s needs. If a company uses a CRM system to track customer health or to identify high-level issues/concerns beyond individual cases, then anyone in the PSO working on a project can get a quick pulse on the customer by looking at the CRM system. Those indicators can also be used to help enlist the PSO to help get at-risk customers back on track. Additionally, the PSO can share their insight and experiences working with the customer via the CRM system for the rest of the Customer Success organization to use.

The deep knowledge that companies like Facebook and Google have developed around consumer behavior on the Web have raised the level of how much information customers expect their SaaS providers and software vendors to have about them and how well they expect those companies to understand and anticipate their needs. A well-deployed CRM solution, combined with solid SaaS usage and behavioral data… all brought together by an integrated Customer Success function should allow a company to have a holistic view of their customers and allow them to not only understand them, but predict their needs and concerns.

Whether or not your PSO is part of a Customer Success organization, you can be more connected with your customers by simply being more connected internally. Companies of any size or level of maturity have the opportunity to become more connected internally in order to make their PSO more credible, more effective, and deliver more value to their customer base.