Looking for advice on Digital/Pooled Customer Success Teams

Hi ​@Rebecca.Churchill,

Congrats on your new role! I am a scaled CS program manager at my org. What tools are you currently using?

For scaled support, we rely on Zendesk and Jira. For scaled customer communications, we rely on Gainsight. Our Gainsight JO expert ​@dayn.johnson builds widespread scheduled campaigns for us, and with the recent product releases we have been able to leverage Gainsight templates that CSMs can use ad-hoc. Historically, CSMs have used Outreach for ad-hoc templates due to the awesome calendar features that it brings, but are exploring Calendly as a substitute.

Congrats on the new role!

For our part, our tech stack appears to be fairly similar. However, here are some specific things that we have utilized within Gainsight and Zendesk for our pooled support team: 

• User Groups for Round-Robin CTA distribution, this has been very helpful for distributing work amongst a team so that one person is not too bogged down (Maybe you’re already using this one?)
  • We build these user groups into everything from Rules-based CTA generation to follow-ups from Survey Responses
• Within JO, you can utilize the Slack integration to ping a channel when someone, say, provides a survey response. Very helpful for some visibility. 
• We have it set up so that participants in an email program send their replies to an address that creates a ticket within Zendesk.
  • The Gainsight widget in Zendesk is fairly easy to set up and would allow visibility to Gainsight data for those operating in ZD. 

I will say that specialized roles (with things like, say, a unique Title in the User object) can allow for some quick and easy scaling within programs. You can also add custom fields like ‘Department’ to the User object if that also sparks an idea for cross-org collaboration and workflows amongst pooled support.

Just a brief set of ideas, hopefully they help! Happy to keep the convo going if I’m able to provide further assistance.

I’d be interested in learning more about how you do scheduled campaigns and measure the success of the campaign? Or how you make sure customers are engaging with the digital journey piece. We have a large support team that functions outside the Customer Success Management team. For your CSMs, do they use Jira as their email source? As a shared inbox? Interested in how you manage the inbound requests you receive from customers. :) 

This is very helpful!

Do you use Slack in place of Microsoft teams and ZenDesk in place of Outlook? I’m hoping to find new ideas on managing a shared inbox and inbound requests. I like the rules based CTAs. Do you have anything in place to manage the types of inbound CTAs when assigning to CSMs? For example, do you have anything in place to avoid one person getting all X type CTAs and not getting experience in the other areas? 

We do leverage Slack in place of Teams, though Zendesk is our new support ticketing software. We utilize Google Suite for our company comms. 

Zendesk’s ticketing software replaced our shared inbox within Google/Gmail and it has been an effective change for us. If you’re operating with a shared inbox, I would definitely recommend the User Group for round-robin CTA distribution. You can absolutely use the Rules Engine to take input and then create a rule that takes, say, customer questions about their account and distributes them amongst a certain group of users in a round-robin fashion. In the same rule, you can configure it so that another question type, say questions about a specific product, distribute those CTAs to another group of users in a round-robin fashion. 

It all depends on what you’d like to achieve for your users! Happy to elaborate further if you’d like!

We like to categorize our measurements into two areas, customer self-service and customer interventions.

For customer self-service, we measure:

-Open/Click-thru rates of email campaigns sent with Gainsight JO (This can include onboarding campaigns or digital email touches throughout the customer lifecycle.)

-Click/Completion rates of WalkMe enablement campaigns within our product platform

For customer interventions, we measure:

-Tickets submitted by customers via Zendesk

-Email replies by customers sent to the shared CSM inbox, which we only use for specific campaigns. It is not tied to Jira, but it is tied to our Salesforce/Gainsight instance so we can track things such as health scores, etc.

Separating the measurements into two components helps us understand if we need to make changes/additions to our self-service offerings! :)

Another piece to this - for our digital program I like to categorize our efforts into Digital Journey and Digital Operations. We have realized that shifting the mindset of our CSMs and ADs really impacts workflows and how successfully we can scale. Happy to hop on a call with you to chat about it further!