Reducing stress while managing “connected customers”

For the sake of this post a connected customer can be defined as a customer who has a personal or professional connection to your founder, executive leadership, or board member.

Leaders and founders alike tend to share their business with their well manicured networks. One of the rewards to pouring your blood sweat and tears into an idea that becomes a full fledged marketable business is showing pride in bringing personal and professional network connections on as customers.

Inevitably your customer base will be comprised of both net new customers as well as personal and professional connections to your executive team and in some cases the founder or Board of Directors directly.

Seek to understand before being understood. — Cliche, I know…but you need to realize that connected customers have the ear of a member of your executive team and this means you’ll need to strategize how these customers will be addressed.

1. Determine communication expectations between your executive leader and any connected customers they share a personal or professional relationship with.
   It can be awkward for a leader to receive what is perceived to be a failure in the delivery of their service or product. Respecting this will help you empower the leader to quickly address the missed expectation, and improve the customer experience appropriately either by delegating to the most appropriate resource or directly addressing more serious forms of feedback.
2. Strategize with other leaders internally to introduce connected customers to more appropriate points of escalation rather than directly to your executives.
   Internal leaders are instrumental in the delivery of your service or products and thus deserve a seat at the table to provide face time to the customers they serve.
   Likewise internal leaders across service delivery, operations, sales, product marketing as well as product management should welcome the opportunity to join Quarterly Business Reviews with connected customers.
3. Knowledge in the hands of Customer Success does nothing if it’s not trained and handed down to the first line of customer engagement. Clearly communicate SLOs, design expectations, delivery instructions, and other expectations to product, marketing, support, service delivery, and other front line customer touch points.
4. Report regularly to executives on any outstanding wins with these connected customers! As sales teams “ring the bell” when a new sale is made, your Customer Success team should be doing likewise as customers across the business are engaged in a superior experience. When you delight your customers, make it known.
5. Often times your business will need a customer to go above and beyond for expansion opportunities, references, and new product or service go to market activities. These connected customers can often be a wonderful resource for you as you continue to deliver a superior customer experience.

Don’t look at this as providing a VIP experience for a subset of customers who might know the right people in the right positions. — This is about removing stress from internal teams within your company by establishing a well documented set of expectations ahead of time for all involved, including your connected customer.

Leaders who receive consistent, relevant, and concise updates about the status of connected customers will help push to manage requests via the appropriate internal channels within your company.

As a Customer Success leader you need to be at peace with an extra level of effort to build trust in the ranks as you build your CS organization. The best leaders recognize that Customer Success truly wants to deliver top tier experiences that delight the customer base at each and every interaction.