How to amplify digital customer success with your support team’s insights

The working relationship between customer success and support teams can make, break, or even supercharge your customer experience, as Jaclyn Mullen of TheLoops showed attendees of ChurnZero’s most recent webinar.

Build the right kind of relationship and processes between CS and support, and you’ll enable a seamless, frictionless experience. You’ll also unlock a goldmine of insights and signals that can predict customer behavior, identify potential churn, and uncover upsell opportunities. To achieve it, however, CS leaders need to shift their perspective on the support function, viewing it as a strategic partner to CS instead of just a problem-solving resource.

Watch Jaclyn’s webinar on demand here, and dig into attendees’ questions below.

Supercharging digital CS with support insights: Q&A with Jaclyn Mullen

Our webinar’s practical takeaways included strategies to foster a more integrated relationship between support and success teams, how to leverage AI and automation to streamline processes and decisions, and how to pick the right digital tools to capitalize on the opportunities of this approach. Here’s what attendees wanted to know more about:

1: Do you have any tips for building a more unified culture between CS and support, especially if they don’t roll up to the same leader?

Jaclyn: I like the idea of starting it through a Slack thread. We often hear that change starts at the top, but that’s not always the case; you can manage up too.

Look into how you can get everybody together around a fun brainstorming session, and consider some design-thinking types of questions. If we could wave a magic wand, for example, and didn’t have any blockers across budget, or technology, what would our culture and aligned customer experience look like?

Challenge your teams to get a little bit pie-in-the-sky, because in these types of conversations and brainstorms, you see little differences and notice things that you could fix very simply with some tweaks. Start with something that’s fun, and abstract, and design-thinking oriented. From there, start to trickle that in across your company communication, and take a little bit more action.

Remember that culture and alignment are living, breathing things. What you create today isn’t set in stone; it’s an evolution. Look how the advances in technology we’ve seen in the last year have forced everyone to mold their businesses in ways they didn’t think possible before.

And remember too that if you’re managing up, leaders love to see how it’s going to impact ROI, so you’ll need to put some numbers behind it.

2: How are people using AI to streamline communication, or gather results from various metrics?

Jaclyn: The summarization feature that a lot of existing tools currently have is interesting, such as the notetaker that comes with me to every single Zoom meeting. With the click of a button, I can summarize the meeting, put it in a Google document, and share it with my other colleagues. These summarization features are key right now.

As far as metrics are concerned, there are algorithms you can program to take your business data. You need an AI engine that you can feed your specific business data into—you can’t just pull ChatGPT into your business and tell it to be a McKinsey consultant or a data analyst. But there are tools that people are utilizing to augment the existing tools in the marketplace.

You can also use ChatGPT and prompt it to do some thinking for you. To have AI start analyzing data, however, you require 1) security, and 2) a company that builds a model called a semantic layer, which understands the output that you’re looking to generate.

3: How can you get an established support team to value their customer success team more?

Jaclyn: Go to the support team’s leadership, bring data to them, and get some dialogue going. As you know, support are firefighting. They’re constantly in that motion. Burnout may be present, depending on the team structure.

You need to open up that dialogue and try to understand why they might not be valuing customer success right now. Changing a perception like this, within the business, is its own topic, but it really starts with identifying that blocker, which I suggest you start by going to support’s leadership first.

Note: Jaclyn continued this question by crowdsourcing it to her network on LinkedIn. Here’s what people said.

4:  Which automations make the most impact in sharing support insights? We use Zendesk, just migrated from HubSpot to Salesforce, and SalesLoft. Our CS team does everything from post-sales through renewal… and bandwidth is tight.

Jaclyn: It depends on how big your team is, and what you need.

We can do a lot of automations around SLAs or things that are happening with the customers, between Zendesk and Slack. We can do automations between Zendesk and Salesforce although those can be a little bit cumbersome to connect. It really does depend on the use case. And, automation for automation’s sake may not always work.

5: Are there any indicators that might come up through support which signal an upsell or expansion opportunity for customer success?

Jaclyn: There’s a variety of different signals, starting with product feedback, where I think the two teams are always a little bit more attuned. Support is usually the brand ambassador: that first line of interaction (or defense) with the customer. It’s critical to be able to mine the product feedback they hear, because their feature requests may very well be there on your roadmap, ready for your Success team to start talking about it.

The other type of signal is when a customer has a certain number of seats initially, then starts talking about getting 20 or 30 licenses, and Support hears about it. The signal here isn’t a feature request; it’s more that their marketing team is starting to talk about how they could use your solution.

Products are not infallible—there are going to be issues—and it’s how you handle it that can make or break the customer’s experience. If your support team can triage, troubleshoot and fix something, and get customers back on the right course, they’re going to love it and want to get other teams involved.

6: On the flipside, what signals (apart from the obvious one of an angry customer) might support be able pick up of an account that’s at risk of churning?

Jaclyn: This is where scoring can come in: the impact score, the contextualization. When you connect your CRM data with the support data, the success data and the bug data, suddenly you understand in real time how much revenue is at risk if a customer doesn’t get a result.

How long that case has been open for, right? What the sentiment of that customer is. I’ve heard about support cases that sit in the backlog for six months, with the customer getting closer and closer to renewal and their CSM sitting on pins and needles.

You need this real-time view, because not having a talk track with your customer in CS is the worst thing. As long as you can say: “we’re getting to this”, or “we have an update on the timeline”—using the insights you’re getting from Support to adjust—you can avoid the surprises that no customer likes.

Thanks to Jaclyn Mullen, TheLoops, and everyone who joined this webinar! For more customer success webinars and resources from ChurnZero, click here.