Seasonal downtimes allow for vital reorganization

When you understand seasonal factors that impact your customers, you can take a measured approach to ensure their success. Below are three considerations to take into account once you’ve identified busy times for your clients

Craft Backup Support Plans

It’s unlikely that your customers busy stretches perfectly align with your company’s availability. When your office is closed or you are on vacation, your software is still expected to be fully functional. If bugs or issues arise, does your team have a way to get them addressed in a timely fashion? If you do have people available to assist, do they have the necessary context for client accounts?  As a Customer Success representative, it’s your job to make sure your clients have a path to issue resolution at all times. Work with support leadership to form backup plans and communicate these to your customers. Additionally, use this touch point to teach support about anything specific to your accounts, such as custom work, non-standard use cases, etc.

Clean Your Data to Improve Customer Experience

When your clients are unavailable, clean up their CRM data to improve their long-term experience. Few people, if any, like the task of data cleanup. In Customer Success, performing this work is a necessary evil and your downtime is the perfect opportunity to tackle it. In order to make it more bearable, remind yourself of the value of completing the work. For example, having updated primary contacts will make it extremely easy to stay in touch with customers in an automated fashion. Even if you already know who to call for your accounts, outdated primary contacts in the CRM will likely opt your clients out of any email programs, preventing them from receiving valuable content.

Evaluate Your Technology

Seasonal slowdowns are an ideal time to think holistically about the tools your organization uses. The evaluation of your tech stack should center around 3 main questions:

• Are we seeing the promised value from all our tools? You’re a customer in somebody else’s success program. Make sure you’re holding your vendors to the same standard your clients hold you to.
• What are the manual, time-consuming tasks the team is performing repeatedly? Can these be automated? The answer is usually yes, so free up some capacity if the price to automate is reasonable.
• What are we missing? Now is the perfect time to investigate tools that you haven’t previously considered. You may uncover a pain that you haven’t realized you have yet.

These are far from the only three things to consider in the context of customer business but with solid support plans, up-to-date CRM data, and an ideal technology stack, you’ll be ready to help customers succeed when they’re available.

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Scott Berry is one of the co-founders of the Chicago Customer Success Podcast. He is currently the Director of Customer Success at VS Networks.