Summary
At this point, you should have an appreciation for the importance of two things. First, you should understand how important it is to track a number of key quantitative and qualitative metrics, which together should form a comprehensive view of customer engagement from a CS point of view. Second, you should understand how critical it is to your company’s business and to its customers that effort be made to continually optimize these key metrics your CS organization focuses on. In the world of CS, there should be no room for set it and forget it when it comes to metrics. The world beyond CS doesn’t even work that way. To build a reporting system and imagine it doesn’t require ongoing maintenance is to be willfully blind to the reality that your company’s business continues to change and adapt to the customer community – it changes because it reacts to and anticipates shifts in the market, as well as due to shifts in strategy that are determined by the executive team. Moreover, setting and forgetting ignores one other significant reality. In the same way that your company changes, so do your customers, and they do so for the same reasons.
As mentioned earlier, business is an exercise in mathematics. The sooner CS professionals understand that their effort to help customers achieve their desired outcomes needs to be performed in measurable ways, the faster their careers will develop. They’ll develop because measurement systems allow proper expectations to be set, and they allow everyone to see movement or stasis, both of which are useful signals of what to do next.
Finally, your appreciation of quantitative and qualitative metrics should be grounded in an understanding of how they are informed by and need to consistently stay in alignment with the strategy of the CS organization and, at a higher level, the overarching strategy of the company.
In Chapter 2, Building a Strong Foundation – Key Knowledge for Success, you will learn about the necessary skills for excelling in a role in CS. You will learn about the importance of skills specific to your company, such as product expertise, industry or domain knowledge as it pertains to your company’s solutions, and the kinds of technology your company utilizes. This chapter will also touch on the set of soft skills that are relevant for CS professionals, such as understanding customer needs through discovery, communications, relationship building, problem-solving, data appreciation, time management, collecting feedback, conflict resolution, negotiation, employing a challenger mindset, and public speaking and presentation skills. It will also address skills that are specific to the CSM role and that are customer-facing. Such skills include onboarding, training, retention motions, and expansion motions. Finally, we will address the importance of CS operations for professionals to be skilled in project management, data analytics, marketing, and process design.
