dEALING WITH UNDERSTAFFED cLIENT sUCCESS tEAM

In every organization I have worked at, or consulted to, the Client Success team believe they have too many accounts. Typically, it’s because of staff turnover, New Business team closing lots of deals and/or because Client Success is asked to do more and more (ensure usage, be the strategic partner for the client, look for upsell opportunities, secure the renewal, find success stories etc etc).
Generally, the number of accounts is not too high – it’s a lack of prioritization that makes it seem overwhelming. One solution is to tier accounts. Customers in the higher tiers are treated with high priority, customers in the lower tiers are lower priority. Tiers are determined by actual spend, potential spend, product usage or some other quantitative measure. Below, I give my perspective on the pros and cons of this approach.
Pros

• It aligns well with the economics of the business i.e. more resources allocated to customers that generate more revenue.
• It’s generally easy to draw a line in the customer base i.e. stack rank the customers, and the first 100 are “Platinum”, the next 100 are “Gold” and the last 100 are “Silver”.
• It’s also generally easy to write down the differentiated service offering that prioritized customers get e.g. a 24 hour response time SLA (vs 48 or 72 hours), weekly check-ins (versus monthy or quarterly), first access to new products etc.

Cons

• It can be difficult for the organization to agree on the factors used to prioritize – Customer Success may want actual spend, Sales may want potential spend, Product may want product usage. It may be difficult to get a consensus.
• Differentiated service levels can be difficult to implement e.g. “Creating a custom report is not included in the Silver package. But Customer X wants to tweak a custom report. Is that included?" It is almost impossible to write down every use case and decide in which package it belongs.
• It’s difficult for front-line employees, who are trying to build a relationship with the customer, to say no. When tweaking that custom report will take 3 minutes, it’s easier to just do it rather than have a 30 minute conversation with the customer on why it’s not part of the package they purchased but they could upgrade if they want.

My suggestion is to implement this approach when
1.      It’s clear which factors should be used to prioritize customers, and those factors are agreed upon by the entire organization
2.      Your customer base follows the 80/20 rule i.e. 80% of the revenue comes from 20% of the customers. This makes prioritization a little easier. The further the customer base deviates from this, the harder it is to implement this model
Otherwise, you may need to address your "understaffing" issues through additional resources and/or improved workflows.
Feel free to contact me if you’d like additional thoughts on when to implement this model and how to make it successful.