Companies without alignment between their product and customer success (CS) teams might be ushering customers out the door.
While they may have different priorities on the technical side, the foundational roles of the two crucial teams are inherently intertwined. Regular communication seems like it would naturally flow, though this is rarely the case.
“We speak completely different languages,” explained Amber Meranda, senior vice president of client services at Capital Rx. “The business functions we each serve have entire vocabularies specific to that part of the business.”
A 2019 report by UserIQ found that 76 percent of leadership teams consider alignment between product and CS to be of substantial importance, but 34 percent had no shared metrics for success between them at all. Furthermore, 87 percent of organizations with a churn rate of less than 1 percent said alignment between the two teams had been achieved, while those who did not prioritize collaboration reported substantially higher figures. Lack of coordination between a company’s product and CS departments is costing both customers and revenue.
Fortunately, some companies seem to have cracked the code. Built In New York sat down with three industry leaders to talk about how they nurture the relationship between their CS and product teams, and the strategies they use to succeed.
Tell us a bit about how your customer success and product teams work together. As a leader, how do you nurture this relationship?
Ro’s mission is to build a patient-centric healthcare system that radically improves life for everyone. The member experience and product teams have a unique relationship that is fundamental to achieving this goal. Our member experience team interacts with thousands of patients each month, often making us the first to hear about an issue in a patient’s journey on the platform. We synthesize and translate this feedback to our product team, who is responsible for understanding why these situations occur and what we can build to improve our platform.
One example of this was an update related to Ro’s weight management offering, Plenity. This treatment involves taking Plenity capsules twice a day before lunch and dinner. When the member experience team heard from patients that it was often difficult to remember to take the treatment at each meal, we approached our product colleagues to find potential solutions. The resulting product was an opt-in feature that sent patients text reminders to take their prescriptions at defined times throughout the day. Not only did this feature improve a patient’s experience and adherence, but ultimately their health outcomes.
By constantly communicating about each other’s priorities and challenges, we can be strong partners in decisions about initiatives.”
What is the biggest challenge you see customer success and product teams run into when working together? How have your teams overcome it?
As with any cross-functional environment, teams have their own priorities and perspectives that are driven by how they spend their day-to-day. Our member experience team typically spends their time uncovering and running down issues reported by patients on Ro’s platform. Meanwhile, our product team is concentrated on how to improve, scale and innovate our platform for the best possible patient experience. This is why the power of communicating about prioritization is necessary.
While product teams are champions for the learning and feedback from our member experience team, they can also face resource constraints. When presenting an issue or update to our product team, our customer success team has to be deliberate about when to amplify the voice of the patient or escalate particular issues that may be of great importance. Conversely, the product team needs to be able to evaluate the variety of platform issues at hand and prioritize those that are most disruptive to the patient experience. By constantly communicating about each other’s priorities and challenges, we can be strong partners in decisions about which initiatives should move forward and which ones can wait.
What’s a strategy you’ve found to be particularly effective for creating and maintaining alignment among teams?
As Ro grows and launches new services, we need to be able to support more conditions and more of our patients’ health needs. To keep up with this scale, our member experience team has looked to improve the ways in which we share feedback so that it is effectively incorporated into our products and features. One way we have done this is by specialized teams focused on specific treatments and conditions as this aligns better with how the product team is organized.
Last summer, Ro launched a new mental health vertical, Ro Mind, to support patients living with depression or anxiety. In addition to helping new and existing patients understand the new offering, the dedicated member experience team was responsible for helping the Ro Mind team iterate and improve a brand new treatment on Ro’s platform. With any new condition launch, it’s critical that patient feedback is heard and incorporated early as the team tries to find product-market fit. As Ro continues to scale, the member experience team continues to play this important role in bringing the patient voice to the forefront, partnering with the product team to build the most patient-centric experience possible.
Tell us a bit about how your customer success and product teams work together. As a leader, how do you nurture this relationship?
We have members of our customer success teams working directly with product teams on the strategy, planning and development of relevant products. Bringing in the members of the organization that have the closest proximity to the customers enables us to be efficient in our product development. Our process involves structuring various planning meetings for specific purposes with well-defined goals.
As a stakeholder for product teams, it’s so easy to fall into the trap of barking orders because it’s quick. Doing this does not create a culture that thrives. Sharing the vision of where you’d like to get to while providing background, context and actual customer use cases gives teams the understanding needed to be creative in their development of solutions. Having consistent open dialogue throughout the entire process builds the level of trust needed within teams. That constant feedback loop should include what’s working well and what’s not, as well as what might be missing and what would make a good thing great. The process brings product owners and developers to customer meetings.
Finding a way to speak the same language prevents miscommunication and rework.”
What is the biggest challenge you see customer success and product teams run into when working together? How have your teams overcome it?
There are many challenges in team environments, but one that I think doesn’t get talked about enough is that we speak completely different languages. The business functions we each serve have entire vocabularies specific to that part of the business. At Capital Rx, we have also hired many product team members from outside the healthcare sector, which created additional challenges beyond the situational language differences. To overcome these challenges, we set up what is essentially a healthcare and pharmacy school, where stakeholders and other subject experts spend time with the product teams to teach the intricacies of the U.S. healthcare system. It’s a significant time commitment upfront, but it pays off later. Finding a way to speak the same language prevents miscommunication and rework.
What’s a strategy you’ve found to be particularly effective for creating and maintaining alignment among teams?
Completely integrating a cross-functional team. The product area and customer success teams are so often working in silos, so having experts from customer success embedded into the product team creates an expectation and commitment to alignment from the outset.
As SVP of Client Service, I am the key stakeholder of the reporting workstream and I partner closely with the product owner and scrum master at all checkpoints. We talk multiple times a week and continue this model throughout the team. We have a small workgroup that adds the senior director of client operations to refine the strategy and timeline. We also have a large workgroup that adds two clinical account managers, a client analytics manager and subject experts to get into a granular level and brainstorm. The client analytics manager works closely with product and dev on logic, data fields and other components where their expertise can guide how the products are being built. This level of integration has enabled this team to deliver stunning and functional reporting that is a market differentiator.
Tell us a bit about how your customer success and product teams work together. As a leader, how do you nurture this relationship?
Our customer success team is on the front lines in talking to our customers and deeply understanding their needs, so it’s critical for the product team to be strongly connected with the customer success organization. To foster this relationship, we implemented bi-weekly lunch-and-learn sessions which serve as a forum for customer success managers (CSMs) to provide feedback about what they’re hearing from customers that may impact product’s priorities, as well as a chance for product to talk through upcoming projects and get early feedback.
We also bring CSMs into our product scoping process to help design solutions. They always have creative ideas and provide insights that we would never have thought of without that perspective. Additionally, CSMs play an important role in connecting the product team with the right customers to get feedback on upcoming features or participate in betas.
What is the biggest challenge you see customer success and product teams run into when working together? How have your teams overcome it?
Startups have limited resources and there is always more work to be done, which can be very frustrating from a customer success perspective when features that would benefit their customers are not being prioritized. CSMs are the ones who have to deal with customers and ultimately tell them that the feature they want isn’t coming any time soon. At other organizations, I’ve seen this phenomenon play out negatively, causing a rift between the two groups.
At Code Climate, we have built a strong product culture where we work with the customer success team to build our roadmap and make trade-off decisions together. We strive for transparency in how we are thinking about these decisions, which provides confidence to the CSMs and the rest of the organization that the right decisions are being made, as well as frameworks to provide to our customers around how we make prioritization decisions. We also want to make sure that the customer success feedback is being heard and actioned against, so we have built up a backlog of high priority, low effort issues and allow time in each sprint to complete at least one.
It’s all about building trust and empathy, which starts with building relationships.”
What’s a strategy you’ve found to be particularly effective for creating and maintaining alignment among teams?
At the end of the day, it’s all about building trust and empathy, which starts with building relationships! At Code Climate, I’ve made it a priority to forge strong relationships with members of the customer success team, both personally and professionally. I keep my Slack open to any questions, feedback or thoughts and am always down to jump on a Zoom call to talk something through. Often, just listening and empathizing, even if the problem can’t be immediately solved, is a win.
