Collaborating with Other Functions for a Holistic Customer Experience

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Your Customer Success team is flying blind.

They have the skill, the drive, and the relationships. But they’re trying to build a coherent customer picture with puzzle pieces scattered across ten different departments. If your tech and data live in silos, you’re not just inefficient – you’re actively eroding trust.

That’s not just bad operations. It’s a growth killer.

When your tech stack is a mess, you get:

• Endless Firefighting: CSMs waste their time chasing basic context instead of creating value.

• Broken Promises: Sales makes promises that CS has no idea about, leaving your team to manage unrealistic expectations.

• Total System Chaos: Teams use disconnected tools, creating information silos that make a single source of truth impossible.

Let's fix it. Here are the non-negotiables for a tech stack that actually drives success.

🤝 1. Tear Down the Walls: Force a Single Source of Truth

Stop letting every department hoard its own data. When sales, support, and CS all work from a unified CRM, everyone sees the same customer. This isn't a "nice-to-have"; it's the bedrock of collaboration.

• How it works: When Sales closes a deal, the qualitative insights (like the customer's real goals and potential red flags) are already in the system for the CSM to see. No more "black hole" handoffs where vital context disappears.

• Hint-hint: If your sales team uses a different CRM than your CS team, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Consolidate them. Now.

⚙️ 2. Automate the Handoff (The Right Way)

A bad handoff poisons the customer relationship from day one. Instead of a stale email thread, build an automated process that actually works.

The playbook:

• Get CS in the room, early: Invite CSMs to the final sales calls. They get to hear the customer's voice firsthand and start building rapport before the deal is even signed.

• Trigger an auto-playbook: The second a deal closes in your CRM, it should automatically generate and assign a handoff document that includes the essentials: key stakeholders, implementation risks, and the customer's definition of a "win" for the first 90 days.

🔮 3. Stop Guessing. Start Predicting.

Your data should tell you the future. AI and predictive analytics aren't just buzzwords; they are your early-warning system for churn.

You know your metrics are working when they combine data points to find hidden risks.

→ Example: One team I know cut churn by 22% when they stopped looking at vanity metrics and started combining signals:

1. Product engagement (Are they using core features?)

2. Support ticket sentiment (Is frustration spiking?)

3. Relationship heat (Has exec engagement gone dark?)

When these streams are unified, your "healthy" accounts no longer churn out of the blue. The signs were there all along.

📢 4. Close the Loop with Product & Marketing

Your CS team holds the key to your company’s growth. Make sure other departments are listening.

• For Product Teams: Don't just send feature requests. Send them with ammo. Create a shared channel or formal process where CSMs can flag requests with hard data (e.g., “This workflow is a top complaint for 45% of our enterprise clients”).

• For Marketing Teams: Your best marketing content is locked inside your CS team's calls. When a CSM finds a customer who saved 100+ hours a month with your tool, that’s not just a win—it’s a case study, a webinar, and a marketing campaign that drives real demos.

This week, try something new:

Get your Sales and CS leaders in a room for 30 minutes. Don't leave until you’ve mapped out the 5 essential pieces of information CS needs from Sales to make a handoff successful. Write them down. Automate the process.

Stop accepting chaos. Technology isn’t about flashy tools—it’s about visibility. When everyone sees the same customer, collaboration stops being a buzzword and becomes your core growth engine.

P.S. For our long-time readers and new champions alike: Next week marks a special milestone! We'll be wrapping up issues 1-27 with a comprehensive recap, giving you a chance to revisit key insights and for new readers to easily catch up on any issues they might have missed. Get ready for a deep dive into "The Customer Champion" archives!

Tomas

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