The current organizational structure of your Services team and alignment with other customer-facing teams may be inhibiting your ability to deliver outcomes. Organizational alignment, increased cooperation, and shared goals are key to customer retention and revenue expansion initiatives.
The State of Service Organizations
Service organizations are optimized to achieve task-based service objectives such as case closure efficiency, onboarding and adoption milestones, case deflection, and attainment of target Net Promoter Scores. While these are all important objectives, they are inadequate goals if not directly aligned with achieving strategic outcomes such as retaining customer relationships, growing account value, and contributing to ARR.
Companies focused on transactional tasks are not able to maximize retention and expansion of customer relationship value. Sub-optimized organizations may:
- Achieve transactional success but miss opportunities to identify customers at risk.
- Create delivery efficiencies though self-help and service automation but fail to deliver services necessary to help customers adopt and use products effectively.
- Establish new relationships but fail to retain them for more than a year.
- Provide a timely accurate response to support issues but miss an opportunity to upsell additional services.
Are you Organized for Success?
Consider the following characteristics – and if any of these attributes describe your Services Team or your company – it’s time for a change.
The following characteristics are inhibitors to Service success:
Narrowly Defined Customer Experience Strategy
The lack of a well-defined and coordinated Customer Experience (CX) strategy perpetuates inefficient and siloed organizational structures. When specific teams and individuals are not held accountable for contributing to overall CX strategic objectives, revenue and retention opportunities will be missed.
Siloed Organizational Structures
Service remains predominantly siloed with separate departments for Support, Education, and Professionals Services and are often separate from Product Management, Sales, and Renewal teams. Siloed organizational structures inhibit the ability to provide coordinated and efficient resource allocation to deliver the services necessary to sustain healthy customer relationships.
Lack of Common Goals
It is unrealistic to expect that cross-organizational teams will regularly coordinate activities if there are no incentives to promote this behavior. The lack of shared goals that transcend organizational boundaries assure that teams will focus their efforts only on the tasks and activities they are goaled on.
Limited Coordination
Siloed organizations do not actively coordinate activities throughout the customer relationship lifecycle. The lack of coordinated action is often the result of narrowly focused practices to achieve specific tasks and silo-specific goals with little or no incentives to promote cross-functional cooperation.
Sub-Optimized Resource Utilization
Use of overlapping and complementary resources from post-sales teams are not coordinated or pooled to drive customer success or achieve service delivery cost-efficiencies.
The Journey to Organizational Transformation
As companies refine their customer experience (CX) strategies and recognize that retention and relationship growth are paramount objectives, organizational transformation is inevitable. Here are three critical steps to successful organizational change:
- Define a Service plan to describe what you are trying to accomplish with Services and how you plan to get there.
- Build the right Services team with the right people, in the right roles, doing the right things.
- Change can be a daunting task, but often it is the only way to drive towards Service success – It’s imperative that you understand inhibitors to change and overcome obstacles.
