At software companies, we are used to worshipping developers and salespeople. One of them creates the product and other sells it; you need a minimum of these two functions to create a company.
But there are so many other roles which are critical to the success of a company. In this article, we talk about customer success managers, also sometimes known as account managers. In a B2B SaaS company, they are the first port of call when a client needs help with the product. And since a B2B SaaS product is usually quite complex, clients need help quite often. Customer success managers (abbreviated to CSM henceforth) get calls from the client when the service is down, or not working properly, or simply to understand how to accomplish what they want to achieve.
Engineering makes a product which is buggy and fails more often than they would like to admit. Salespersons sell the product by overpromising capabilities. When the rubber hits the road, it is the CSMs who pick the calls on the daily basis, listen to angry clients and try to get the engineering to improve the product.
At QGraph, one of our largest clients was, what I will call for sake of anonymity, Z. Since Z gave us a lot of revenue, we wanted to keep them happy. A long time employee of QGraph, C1, was the CSM for Z. Since C1 had been with QGraph for a long time, he knew the product very well.
C1 provided great support to Z. He was able to answer their queries efficiently.
In a complex product like QGraph, the problems reported by clients were of two types: misunderstandings and real problems. Misunderstandings arose because client was unable to understand the product in some way. Product behavior depended on a myriad number of factors and it was sometime hard to understand some outputs, and easy to confuse them with product problems. In such cases we just needed to explain the behavior to the client. But there could be real problems too with the product and then the engineering team needed to fix it. Depending on the severity, we sometimes needed to provide a quick fix at odd hours of the day.
Biggest strength of C1 was to act as a filter for the tech team. He was able to look at the client problem, go through the internal log files, query our databases and able to distinguish between real problems and misunderstandings. This reduced the load on the tech team, and in particular, me. We only got the real product problems.
Then we got acquired, and after a few months, C1 decided to leave the company. C1 was replaced by another CSM, who we will call C2. C2 was new to marketing automation. I was very worried that all trivial perceived problems will trickle down to me and I will have to work extra hard to maintain client satisfactin. C2 too was a bit nervous and we had several sessions where I explained him the product in detail types of problems frequently faced by Z. It was clear to me that the learning curve was too steep and there were going to be problems.
As C2 took charge of Z, something unusual happened. Client satisifaction, instead of worsening... improved! The number of problems on which I had work on urgent basis declined!
C2 was clearly less proficient with the product. How did he manage that? How was he able to answer the queries of clients that required deep knowledge?
And then I realised something: empathy was big factor in client satisfaction. C2 was able to establish a relationship with client which was deeper than transactional client-server relationship. We are all humans first. How he exactly managed that is an art, a trait of personality, which is not easily copyable by a logical personal like me. When someone asks me how a certain thing works, I explain them how it works. I don't ask them how their day has been, or how is the weather at their place. But C2 did. It is not that C2 did it for his longer term gains, it was just C2's style.
It turned out that when people complained about the product, they wanted to be listented to more than they wanted a fix immediately.
As a result, if a problem was found at midnight, when I would have to fix it immediately previously, now C2 negotiated with the client and get back to me saying "it is sorted", which was his way of saying that we can look at it the next day.
Lesson learnt is that sometimes, at least in short run, empathy can make up for product deficiency.