For anyone seeking to expand a company’s reach or revenue, strong alignment between customer success and product teams needs to be a top priority.
An intertwined relationship between the two teams may seem obvious on the surface — the CS team’s frequent contact with customers can provide the information and clarity that the product team needs to adjust and prioritize developments — but there seem to be far more stories of disjointed or simply abandoned collaboration attempts between them than there are successful ones. In fact, customer success platform Totango reported in its 2021 State of the Customer Success Industry and Salary Survey that 75 percent of CS team respondents said that organizational alignment was a top challenge they faced as professionals. At the same time, only 29 percent stated that they spend more than 50 percent of their time collaborating with their company’s product team. So, why is this the case?
“The biggest challenge CS and product teams run into is having different priorities,” said Ricky Vidrio from Assembled. “The CS team must advocate for their customers’ live issues and feature requests while product teams need to focus on innovation.”
Despite a difference in prerogatives, bridging this gap is essential to piecing together the overall customer experience. After all, software company HubSpot noted in its 2020 State of Service Report that 69 percent of high-growth companies diligently collect and track customer satisfaction to improve their products. The correlation HubSpot found between high-growth and customer feedback is likely no coincidence — if companies seek to remain competitive in a high-growth environment, listening to their consumers when developing and updating products is the only way to cultivate enough loyalty to expand or grow.
It’s clear that alignment is essential for future company success, but how is the relationship between the CS and product teams established and maintained in practice? Built In San Francisco sat down with Vidrio to further explore how he fosters a collaborative work environment between the two teams at Assembled and how he overcomes challenges within that dynamic.
Tell us a bit about how your customer success and product teams work together. As a leader, how do you nurture this relationship?
The relationship between the CS and product teams is critical to the success of our organization. Customer success managers are a key source of data that our product team can utilize to their advantage. Our CS team has helped us pinpoint our target customer profile, increase product adoption and gather essential product feedback. As leaders, we focus on communication and prioritization. We have regular syncs to discuss account health, live issues and product feedback, and we host quarterly sessions together to brainstorm roadmap features to prioritize.
The relationship between the CS and product teams is critical to the success of our organization.”
You noted that it can be tough to align these two groups due to their differing priorities. How have your teams worked to mitigate that?
Both teams can overcome this by having a shared outcome. At Assembled, we share the product market fit metric. This helps us align on the same outcome, which in turn creates higher levels of customer happiness, retention and expansion.
What’s a tool you’ve found to be particularly effective for creating and maintaining alignment among teams?
Having a shared metric keeps both teams aligned. Our CS team has learned to effectively communicate the needs of our customers, and one way we have done this is by utilizing Chorus.ai. We have worked together to align on the top customer feature requests and use Chorus to create playlists of snippets of each request. This helps our product team understand the problem we are solving as opposed to just having a vague customer feature suggestion.
