How to Create a Customer Success Charter

Editor's Notes

• #3: In our webinar last month, Ryan Warren and I introduced Revenue Lifecycle Management and the ServiceSource Maturity Model. If you missed the webinar, you can view it via the replay available on servicesource.com. During the webinar we introduced 5 steps that will help you drive business transformation and get on the fast track to recurring revenue growth. In today’s webinar we are going to focus on step 1: Defining a customer success charter. Define a Revenue Lifecycle and Customer Success Management Charter—What is our vision, goals, objectives and success criteria and how do we eliminate silos and communicate a company-wide RLM strategy? Conduct a Revenue Lifecycle Assessment – What are we doing today in different teams, what does the customer journey look like and what are our current processes? Benchmark to a RLM Maturity Model – How do we stack up in each area against the maturity model? Identify gaps aligned to strategy and goals – Which processes and activities should we worry about? Develop an Action Plan and Prioritize—Where should we start and how do we execute?
• #4: The difficulty in answering these questions is due to the fact that you are busy running a team that is focused on a core set of objectives and deliverables. This is true whether you are a part of customer success, marketing, sales or account management, support, product management or even finance! You are all working to deliver an extraordinary customer experience at the lowest possible cost. But each department has their own challenges, goals, and processes. If teams are pulling in different directions, the result for your customer is an awful experience. Creating a Customer Success Charter ensures that everyone across the company understands the customer journey and their role in the customer experience. It ensures that customer-centricity is part of your corporate DNA, and not just a buzz-word.
• #5: Because after all, we ALL know that failing to plan is planning to fail.
• #6: Now I know that focusing on customer success or your customer experience is not new to a majority of you on the phone. Most of you are charged with running a customer success team. You are being asked some tough questions by your executive leadership team, as they look to redirect funding towards customer experience innovations. As the head of customer success you are viewed as the expert – even if you don’t own the entire customer relationship or have the authority to change processes outside of your team. Your leaders want to know … “How do we organize around our customer and maximize retention?” There are some key questions that go along with this seemingly straight forward questions. Such as who owns the customer relationship? If you don’t have a chief customer officer, then most likely multiple leaders are charged with individual components of the revenue lifecycle. We will discuss this a bit more in a minute. Other critical questions are around delivering on your brand promise, lowering cost to serve – including Customer acquisition and support costs, but also around the cost to retain a customer and the cost of expansion. And don’t forget the questions that delve into how quickly can you expand or contract customer-facing teams, and how quickly can you change processes, services, and delivery based on changing market and customer requirements.
• #7: The difficulty in answering these questions is due to the fact that you are busy running a team that is focused on a core set of objectives and deliverables. This is true whether you are a part of customer success, marketing, sales or account management, support, product management or even finance! You are all working to deliver an extraordinary customer experience at the lowest possible cost. But each department has their own challenges, goals, and processes. If teams are pulling in different directions, the result for your customer is an awful experience. Creating a Customer Success Charter ensures that everyone across the company understands the customer journey and their role in the customer experience. It ensures that customer-centricity is part of your corporate DNA, and not just a buzz-word.
• #8: Note that I said that creating a Customer Success charter ensures that everyone across the company understands the customer journey and their role in the customer experience. Your Customer Success Charter should not focus on a Customer Success Team. It needs to focus on Delivering measurable business results to your customers.
• #9: A successful Customer Success Charter will ensure that executive leadership will be able to identify the business impact and key elements of creating successful customers at a glance. It is important to note that your customer success charter is different from a typical team charter, as you are not just construction a project, but a business transformation initiative, so you also need to consider change management and quality improvement, as part of the charter. Charter Statement: the first item stakeholders are going to want at a glance is why are we transforming our customer success business processes. Therefore the first part of your charter needs to create the urge support for the transformation. It helps to outline the former business processes and demonstrate what is wrong. Is it costly? Is the customer experience inconsistent? Is your churn rate too high? If you can demonstrate urgency, business impact, and ROI, then your charter is more likely to be approved.
• #11: Truly organizing around the customer experience requires a business transformation, which requires buy-in from your executive leadership team. Even if you have executive support and the right questions are being asked the extent of changes that are required may complex and overwhelming. And although overall business transformation is the appropriate course of action, you will need to provide an at-a-glance statement to justify why significant change and substantial financial results can only be achieved with a holistic organizational approach. The Charter Statement is the introduction to and provides context around the charter. It outlines why a Revenue Lifecycle Management initiative needs to be created, the problem (s) that need to be solved, how the initiative is aligned to the greater business strategy, the expected business impact, and the cost not to solve the problems. An introduction to the charter that provide context for all stakeholders, including:- Why a RLM Initiative is needed- Problem(s) that will be solved- Alignment to business strategy- Expected business impact- Cost not to solve
• #15: These statements will be used across the company to communicate what you are going to achieve. Without a clear mission and vision, individuals and teams can too easily get side-tracked and focus on their own agendas verses the overarching goal. The vision outlines the desired future state or “north star” that encourages people to get behind the transformation and alignment of resources. The mission statement provides a succinct overview of what the charter will do, for who, and how the expected business impact will be achieved.