Building a Customer Success Team: Roles, Responsibilities and Best Practices

Simply getting new customers isn’t enough anymore; keeping them is what matters. Because customer retention should be a business’s number one goal, it’s important to focus on ensuring that customers stay happy with your products and services. Taking a proactive approach by setting aside dedicated time to properly train and build a customer success (CS) team that can identify and solve potential issues is crucial in achieving this. 

Your customer success team is the face of the company to your customers and directly impacts retention, expansion and loyalty. This blog will guide you through the essential steps of building an effective CS team, covering key roles, responsibilities and best practices.

Why build a CS team?

CS can often be confused with customer support, so let’s explain how they differ. CS teams aim to build long-term relationships, understand customer goals and ensure they get maximum value from your product. Additionally, customer support teams are relatively reactive because they solve problems as they arise and deal with immediate issues and questions. 

Conversely, CS teams take a more proactive approach, and effective agent management largely contributes to this. When customer issues come up, agents are trained to inform CS teams, which allows them to address these concerns proactively with future customers. This also reduces the load on support by solving problems before they appear. 

Here are a few other benefits that building a customer success team could have on your business:

• Improved customer lifetime value
• Reduced churn
• Increased product adoption
• Enhanced brand loyalty
• Acquired valuable customer feedback

Key roles within a CS team

Understanding the benefits of a CS team is just the first step; now let’s discuss how to organize one.

CS manager (CSM): Whoever takes on this role would be the primary point of contact for customers. They would deal with onboarding and training the team, as well as overseeing proactive engagement and relationship building. They would also be responsible for advocating for the customer internally as needed.

Director of CS: This role would involve leading and developing the CS team, defining Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and fostering collaboration with different departments.

While these roles are essential for any CS team, your business may benefit by adding these additional positions depending on your unique needs. These roles include a CS operations specialist who helps ensure desired results are met, an onboarding specialist who assists new hires and even an education specialist who can strengthen customer satisfaction efforts.

CS best practices

Here are a few ideas for best practices within your CS team:

Define clear goals and metrics: Defining clear goals and metrics will involve paying attention to and addressing churn rate, retention rate and product adoption. 

Invest in the right technology: This will be essential to the success of your CS team. For example, TCN’s communication and task management automation tools would streamline CS processes and alleviate a lot of wasted time.

Strong onboarding program: Developing a strong onboarding program will be essential for your CSMs. It will equip them and your team with the necessary knowledge and skills to assist your customers.

Department collaboration: Give your CS team a way to align with different departments. This might include sales, marketing, product and support. This helps the team continuously learn and develop, and helps keep them updated on industry trends and best practices. 

Create a customer-centric culture: Ensure your entire company understands the importance of customer success and how it refocuses the company on what really matters – the customers. Look at CS as a blueprint for building a great team! 

Building a CS team is key to your business success

Despite all the positive outcomes that will result from building a customer success team, there can be challenges. Like most departments, finding out how to scale your team without compromising quality is key, but this guide will aid your business in its pursuit of building a great CS team. 

Building a CS team requires intention and effort, but it is well worth it. Utilizing this business method will directly impact your business and create overwhelming customer loyalty. 

Yes, your CS strategy and solution will depend on your company’s unique size, resources and goals, but they will be a driving force for growth. You’ll be on track for deeper customer relationships and higher recurring revenue.

Now that you know how to build a great CS team, you also know you can’t have a truly successful one without training your agents to provide the best customer experience possible. TCN has the perfect guide to help you manage your contact center agents.