Cisco : Breaking Down Silos to Unlock the Full Potential of Customer Success

Cisco Blog >Partner

As a partner in today's competitive subscription economy, you have everything to gain and nothing to lose when you prioritize the customer's experience and deliver maximum value at each stage in the relationship lifecycle. These principles are the fundamental tenets of Customer Success, and while they may sound clear cut, for many partners the challenge is implementing them across their entire organization. That's where a Customer Success charter comes in.

When establishing a Customer Success practice, a charter plays a valuable role in uniting traditionally siloed business departments under a shared directive. It becomes the blueprint and company-wide go-forward plan, documenting the focus, key components and necessary actions toward establishing a full-on Customer Success culture. A charter not only aligns everyone in the organization with your Customer Success goals and objectives, but it also provides an overarching plan for achieving them.

If getting your Customer Success practice on the right track in 2017 is at the top of your list, then putting a charter in place is a great place to start. Later this month we'll team up with the experts at TSIA to explore the process in detail in our webinar, 'Working Together to Deliver Value.' For a preview of what we'll cover, check out the overview below.

The act of creating a Customer Success charter starts with exploring, defining and documenting what 'customer success' means to your organization. According to ServiceSource, your charter should be made up of the following components:

• A charter statement that defines the mission and vision, and provides context for all stakeholders. The charter should address why Customer Success is important to your organization, the problems it will solve, opportunities it can generate, and the expected consequences of doing nothing.
• Your goals, objectives and the benchmarks and/or metrics you will use to measure your program's ongoing success.
• Key executive and team players, and their roles and responsibilities.
• Your implementation roadmap and communications plans. Outlines the events, activities and messaging that will clarify your Customer Success charter internally, helping establish a personal connection with the people and departments that are critical to its success.
• A list of the various factors that can positively and negatively affect Customer Success with risk analysis, assessments and recommendations for corrective actions.

A charter not only identifies the goals of your Customer Success practice and the metrics you'll need to track process, but it also clarifies the cross-functional roles and responsibilities within your organization. Consequently, all contributors will gain an understanding of the big picture strategy along with how to tactically support Customer Success from their unique vantage point - be it for onboarding or billing.

The bottom line is that for Customer Success initiatives to be effective, all actors within your company should operate with the same goals in mind, and with a roadmap as to how they can influence the customer experience throughout the full lifecycle. When customers get everything they were promised and value realization is continuously achieved, their success will ultimately be your success.

Learn More

Join us May 30 at 2 p.m. EST for our next Customer Success Talk webinar: Working Together to Deliver Value.