Summer is Here – Bring on the Customer Success Interns!

Summer is officially here, and many college students are searching for an internship. As you see these ambitious young people in other departments in your organization, like sales or marketing, you might be asking yourself if it would be a good idea to bring on an intern to help with your Customer Success efforts, and we think it is.

As you most likely won’t want to have an entry-level intern take over a portfolio of customers to manage, like the rest of your CSMs, there are still tasks that could be appropriate for an intern to lend an extra set of hands to at little to no cost.

Here’s four ideas for projects that a Customer Success intern could help manage for you over the summer.

 

1.) Write Thank Yous

Handwritten thank you notes are such a rare throwback to old-school customer service, because hardly anyone does it anymore as it’s hard to find the time, but they are always a pleasant surprise. That’s why it’s the perfect task for a college student (who also probably has had a lot of practice recently with graduation thank you notes).

Create a report of accounts that are up for renewal during the summer months, and as they close have the intern get a handwritten thank you note out to the main point of contact. If you have any branded swag that can be sent out in a package, even better, as people would be more likely to take pictures and post on social media, which would be an added bonus.

 

2. ) Create an FAQ

Any customer facing team has had the feeling of being a broken record, when it comes to informing their clients of certain information. But with the help of an intern they could take these commonly asked questions and turn them into a useful FAQ page.

FAQ pages are important because they save time for both customers and employees. Customers don’t have to go through the trouble of contacting a CS team to get answers to simple questions. Employees don’t have to waste time offering guidance for questions that are frequently asked and could be easily answered with a standardized response.

Have your CS intern look through support tickets and look for trending questions as well as have them conduct a few interviews with CSMs to get an idea of the content that would be valuable to include.

Creating this new deliverable will be a huge benefit for everyone.

 

3.) Conduct a Customer Survey

Hopefully your Customer Success team is already running regular (and automated) Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, but outside of that you might find that you haven’t surveyed your customers recently to get a more detailed gauge on their satisfaction and feedback.

You could use this opportunity to have your intern build out a customer survey and manage the process and data analysis.

This data could be used to help determine product or service performance, collect product feedback, identify opportunities for new products, measure customer loyalty, and find ways to improve the customer experience.

 

4.) Ask for Customer Reviews

Over the last decade, customer reviews have become a vital part of the software purchasing process, however the step of proactively asking for reviews from customers can easily fall by the wayside.

Use this time to have your summer intern pull a report of all of your Promoters (customers that gave you a 9 or 10 on their NPS survey) and have them send out an ask for a customer review on a review site that covers your industry (look at G2 Crowd, Capterra, and TrustRadius).

This is a small task of writing an email with the ask, but it will have major payoffs for your company when it comes to your marketing and customer acquisition efforts.

 

Hopefully you found these ideas to be helpful ways to engage your interns for maximum growth and effectiveness and most importantly, how you can help them learn about Customer Success first-hand.

 

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Customer Success Around the Web

• 20 Customer Success Questions to Ask Your Next Candidate –Interview questions to ask to learn if they have what it takes
• Professional Services and Customer Success in SaaS Startps – Read why Professional Services resources need to be used wisely and differentiated from Customer Success.
• To NPS or Not to NPS?  – Does your organization collect NPS data? Should it? Read on to find out more.

Fighting Churn is a newsletter of inspiration, ideas and news on customer success, churn, renewal and other stuff and is curated by ChurnZero.