This means using traditional Account Management ideas will either limit your (and your customer’s) success… or will cause you your Customer Success initiative to fail miserably.
The traditional method of simply looking at what a customer pays us and giving them a particular level of ‘touch’ is old and outdated.
It’s time to logically segment customers based on Appropriate Experience (AX).
Let’s dig in…
For context, on Friday, May 5, 2017, I did a Customer Success Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Facebook live. It was awesome. The video (audio only… sorry) is embedded below and below that is the transcript (edited for better readability) that answers the question.
Customer Success Coverage Models
Katie asks, “Should customer success members be responsible for both small and enterprise level accounts or is it recommended to have a dedicated member for only enterprise level accounts?” Currently, her team has a mix.
First, I’ve talked about Determining the Number of Accounts per Customer Success Manager before.
Instead of just straight-up answering that question, what I want you to do is go back and look at the desired outcome of your customers, specifically looking at the appropriate experience.
Right there, I can almost guarantee you that a small customer and a big enterprise customer are going to have a different Appropriate Experience.
The experience that would be appropriate for each of those types of customers is most likely different.
Right there, that means that if you try to put the same coverage on those customers, you’re going to end up with something that is inappropriate for either both of those customers or one of them.
One of them is going to have an inappropriate experience. What I say is really get to know your customer.
Understand what their appropriate experience is and define your coverage levels from there.
That will probably end up having … It almost always does.
You’ll probably end up having dedicated resources for your higher end customers and dedicated resources for your lower end customers not based on just what they pay but really based on what their appropriate experience is.
I hope that makes sense.
