7 Scenarios New CSMs May Fear and How To Handle Them (Part 2)
Professional growth in a customer success role is dependent on delivering as many client calls as possible. But no matter how good the onboarding process is, it’s impossible to account for every situation that may come up in a call.
There are, however, common scenarios that junior customer success managers (CSM) often stress over. In the first article of this series, I described seven of these common scenarios and offered recommendations on how to address them. This article will provide even more tips that I hope you’ll find useful in your own exciting journey as a junior CSM!
1. Product usage is below average
The more clients use the product, the more they rely on its capabilities. While this statement is accurate in general, there are quite a lot of cases when low product usage isn’t an indicator of a problem on the client’s side. Ask the client to describe their use cases so you can understand what’s normal for them. Yes, in many cases there’s a lot of potential to use the product more efficiently, which often involves using more features and/or logging into the product more frequently. However, I’ve come across many cases when the metrics — like weekly active usage (WAU) and seat allocation — seemed critically low, but during the call, the client stated they were satisfied with the product, intended to renew their subscription, and didn’t require their team to open Wrike on a daily basis, as weekly updates were more than sufficient.
This recommendation is actually a specific example of a more general one: Don’t make any assumptions about the client. Here’s an example from my experience. I was getting ready for a call and, as always, I was checking the client’s metrics. I noticed that in the last six weeks, there was a decreasing trend of product usage so I prepared myself for the worst. However, the client told me that 90% of their team had been working on site every day during the last month, as they were preparing for a large event and had to deprioritize other activities. A week after the event their usage went back to normal, and they renewed their subscription.
2. The client’s request falls outside of your responsibilities
Customer success managers position themselves as trusted advisors that clients can reach out to should any problem emerge. It’s great when you can answer the client’s question, but some questions may fall outside of the scope of your responsibilities — and it’s perfectly fine to communicate this to your client so you can point them in the right direction. The most common example is when the client has a technical issue and not something a CSM can help with on their own. In such cases, the client’s request should be forwarded to customer support. The CSM can set a reminder to check whether the issue has been addressed in a few days and if there’s a delay for any reason. Communicate with the client and provide an ETA on when it’ll be resolved. Don’t feel bad when you can’t help the client immediately on your own. That’s why there are other client-facing teams in your organization!
3. The client demands too much of your time
Different companies set different cadences for CSMs to contact their clients. They may be based on various parameters such as monthly/annual recurring revenue (MRR/ARR), billing type (monthly, quarterly, annual), company size, the number of clients in the CSM’s book of business, and more. Regardless of what cadence has been set up for you, it isn’t written in stone. Some cases require more calls, i.e., if there’s an adoption problem in the client’s team or if additional calls can lead to a large upgrade opportunity. In other cases, the client may not require much help outside of an annual business review.
What’s important to keep in mind is that any additional help you can provide to the client should be meaningful and contribute to your individual and team goals. Don’t let your clients take advantage of all your time. Unfortunately, this happens from time to time — it starts with one or two extra calls and then a call every week or two. So at some point, you need to clearly but politely communicate to the client that there’s a limit to the help that they can get from you. Make sure that you share your company’s help resources so the client can find answers to their questions on their own. But emphasize that you need enough time to dedicate to your other clients as well. It’s worth mentioning, though, that this rule isn’t usually applicable for CSMs with strategic accounts, but they tend to have much smaller books of business and all the time needed to address their emerging requests.
4. Pushing the client to commit to something is difficult
Despite how much help you can give to the client, it’s on them and their teams to achieve results. While this statement may seem obvious, you’ll see a lot of cases when both the decision-maker and/or the team are resistant to using the product to its full potential. It isn’t necessarily that they don’t want to use the product, but more so that they don’t prioritize onboarding, implementing new routines, learning new features, etc.
As a result, you may find yourself in a tricky situation where after you did your part, the ball is in the client’s court but progress has stalled. In such cases, it’s critical to get them to complete action items between your calls. It’s important to let them know that they need to finish these tasks to achieve their goals and get a good return on their investment in the product. Ask the decision-maker what deadline they’d consider to be realistic and confirm that they understand what needs to be done and why. If the client’s team is still resistant, the next best strategy I can recommend is taking baby steps. Discuss with the client the necessary minimum of actions required to see some progress and, again, ask them to commit to these actions. Make sure that even this small set of steps leads to positive and visible results. These results will be a seller’s proof to get buy-in from the team to commit to more.
5. The key persona in the client’s organization changes
This is a valid concern, and in some cases, a change in decision-maker can impact what solutions/products the company uses moving forward. But a new decision-maker isn’t always a bad thing. It’s unlikely that the new hire would want to change something for the sake of changing it. As long as processes are working and bringing results, it should be just fine. As a CSM you need to contact the new decision-maker as soon as possible and start building a relationship with them.
A great tip that my colleague Zach Wolfe shared with me is to minimize the risks associated with the change in champion. Ask the current champion to create a document with information on its use cases and benefits. This document will serve as proof for the new decision-maker because it was created internally by the decision-maker’s predecessor.
6. The client’s questions are for a subject matter/industry expert
Sometimes clients ask specific questions that only a subject matter or industry expert would know. Such situations stunned me in the beginning of my career here at Wrike. For example, a client asked me to share best practices on Agile when using our platform, and at that point, I definitely couldn’t call myself an expert in the Agile methodology. What I did in that situation was — as always — ask a lot of questions about the results they’re looking to achieve and the specifics of their business processes. Some of the tips I shared with the client didn’t actually require a deep understanding of Agile; my general understanding combined with Wrike expertise did the job. However, prior to the next call, I took the time to read as much as possible about Agile and other methodologies to provide a better consultation.
It’s important to understand that it’s impossible to become an expert in every field. So will times when you won’t know something. The best advice is to master things that you actually need to master, e.g., your product or service and best practices. As long as you ask the right questions to better understand the client’s situation, you’ll be able to provide a great consultation. And in time, you’ll also have a collection of cases that you were able to handle and then apply that experience in future calls.
7. The client is disappointed with a product update
Products need to continuously evolve to be successful, but clients won’t always be happy about every update. Some clients may happily welcome the changes while others may find them to be a major source of frustration. While there are companies that incorporate customer success departments’ feedback into their product roadmap, it’s highly unlikely that a single client’s request will revert any changes.
So, as a CSM, how can you handle clients’ disappointment about product updates? Firstly, you need to understand why the updates were implemented and communicate all the benefits. You may need to meet with the product team to get the details and brainstorm how clients will react to the updates so you can address their concerns. Be prepared to answer tough questions. Secondly, if the updates require clients to change certain routines associated with your product, offer your assistance. That’s especially valid when you make significant updates to the product’s interface, which could be confusing to navigate. Finally, in certain scenarios, you’ll just have to be straightforward about the fact that the updates are here to stay. Always offer additional support to help them adjust to the changes.
I’d be very interested to know what cases stressed you out at the start of your career as a CSM and how you handled them. Let me know in the comment section below.
