We’ve all seen a one-man band, a musician who plays a number of instruments simultaneously using their hands, feet, limbs, and various mechanical contraptions. While they’re impressive and entertaining to watch on the street, you probably don’t have any of their music on your Pandora stream or in your digital library. That’s because if you compare this talent to a business, the instruments (and body parts) are the tools to keep their business running, the songs are the products they’re selling, and the audience is the consumer. As a result, this one-man band will have to overcome numerous issues around scalability, product reliability and audience experience. It’s only a matter of time before a string breaks or a finger cramps, and this one-man band’s songs (i.e. products) are nothing more than mediocre products with unhappy fans (customers). For long-term success, it takes a true band (or entourage) made up of multiple members, instruments and most importantly, orchestration.
The same is true of customer success. If your support, marketing, sales, services, and other teams and applications don’t work together, or your instruments aren’t in tune with one another, your customer success will sound more like an off-key one-man band than any music masterpiece your customers want to buy.
For customer success management, getting your 360-degree data integrated into other applications greatly improves the customer experience. 360-degree data has health scores, customer contacts, milestones, and other information regarding the customer journey. The 360-degree data lets a customer success manager engage with the right action at the right time, but if that data isn’t integrated into other applications – it is a one-man band. Customer success managers are not the only ones engaging the customer, the same 360-degreee data that makes the CSM smarter can inform support, marketing, training, and consulting. So while aggregating data for customer success management is important, to have the maximum impact, the 360-degree data needs to be available across all customer-facing applications. The CSM needs to share the music sheets, or customer notes, with the rest of the band.
When a customer engages a support representative, the representative must be informed and empowered to handle the the customer’s need quickly. The representative should be empowered with all of the relevant customer data within their support application including 360-degree data of customer health score, customer journey status, and all the correct customer contacts and roles. Knowing that a contact is a sponsor reporting a bug on an already delayed deployment will be critical to deciding how to engage and use resources.
Marketing is starved for data that lets them segment customers for campaigns. For example, having the 360-degree data in the marketing application lets marketing know which customers have high satisfaction levels and are in full deployment to effectively promote relevant offers.
Likewise, training and consulting will want similar information to have the right engagement at the right time. Getting data into hands of people that can improve the customer journey is a top priority of companies that are trying to embed customer success management as a fabric of the company. The entire company needs to be data-driven, and customer success is in the best position to make that happen.
The implication is that 360-degree data you’ve developed for customer success management needs to be connected to your other customer-facing applications. The term Azuqua has for that is “orchestration”. Orchestration means data and workflow across departments are harmonized to improve the customer journey and create customers for life. To avoid making mediocre music by yourself, 360-degree data from your customer success management needs to be integrated into all your apps.
Join our webcast on November 18 to learn more about how to orchestrate customer success.
