Field Notes: Customer Mutual Accountability

As a customer success or account team leader, your goal is to have your team actively engaging with customers. But what recipe will work? Successful account growth strategies have a great balance of mutual accountability driven by strategic plans, quarterly business reviews (QBRs), and mutual action plans (MAPs) with associated responsibilities and tasks. Every great customer meeting ends with a clear next step, a mutual plan, and a road for follow up.

Solutions that can help

• Creating Clear Next Steps: Companies can improve customer success by laying out clear next steps including follow ups after meetings and a process and system of tasks that must be followed by each team member.
• Consistent Conversations and Dialogue: Communication is key. It’s essential that conversations take place on a regular basis both internally and externally. Additionally, these conversations should bring value to relationships. This can be achieved by reviewing current activities, discussing future growth, and determining pain points that require improvement on a regular basis. 
• Increased Efficiency: The right strategies allow reps to do more with less. For example, regular meetings are not a significant company expense. But they can be quite beneficial in increasing customer satisfaction. They will also save companies huge amounts of time and money they may otherwise spend putting out fires. 
• Visibility of the Team’s Performance and Impact: Teams should constantly be made aware of the quality of their performance and how it is impacting the customer. That way they will know how to improve processes to increase customer success moving forward.