Enterprise Organizational Best Practices

After speaking with a client of mine and inquiring about their approach on the above topic, the biggest value add for them was appropriate segmentation of their accounts. Defining clear expectations with their client base about the segment they fall in and what they will receive in regards to support was an "epic" moment for their organization. How are other organizations managing 1000+ customers and what are best practices you can share?

Hi Easton,

I'll add my 2 cents here. At my previous company I managed a team that had over 1,000 customers to care for. Some of the biggest strategic challenges were definitely around segmentation and managing portfolio size of individual CSMs. We didn't have a tool like Gainsight, so I did a lot of this analysis in Excel. The biggest challenge was pulling in all of the data from the various sources - customer records, financials (ARR, add on spend), modules used by each customer, contract terms, special relationships, etc. And each of these data elements came in from a different system.

From a day to day management perspective, I was often called in to manage difficult escalations, and it was important to get a 360 view of the customer before engaging on a specific issue. I would ask my CSMs to pull together a recent summary for me that would include annual spend, contract renewal date, recent support case history, recent communications, key milestones like when they went live or went through a major upgrade. This would be a significant amount of effort, but was important information to have when managing a customer that was dissatisfied. The Gainsight Customer 360 would have been a lifesaver for me and my team.

And then finally another important aspect of managing customer portfolios of 1,000+ is having a lineup of reports that provide the detail and aggregations that you need to understand overall trends in the customer population, individual performance of CSMs, where the health of certain customer segments is being impacted, etc.

So much of the CSM Manager/Director role is working with other departments to ensure that specific customer issues are represented internally and partnering on solutions. Having rich data available via different report dimensions allows crisper messaging internally on the areas that need the greatest focus.

Hope this helps!

-Dan

Check out our recent case study: http://www.gainsight.com/customer/demandforce/
With only a few dozen CSMs, Demandforce leveraged CoPilot into its tech-touch strategy to effectively engage with its more than 30,000 customers!

I would also be interested in hearing more from Enterprise companies, not just with 1,000+ customers, but those who have multiple product lines.