Is Bandwidth the Miracle Cure for CS Burnout?
The Cost of Customer Success Burnout
Regular exercise is like a miracle cure for many health conditions. But what’s the secret ingredient that drives optimal performance for Customer Success (CS) teams? It’s bandwidth. Across my 20 years in SaaS, I’ve seen time and again how a lack of bandwidth becomes the #1 obstacle for CS teams. This leads to burnout, missed opportunities, and a decline in proactive customer care.
Handling multiple customer accounts, troubleshooting, increased reporting demands, and retaining customers comes with a cost. The burnout and fatigue that every CS executive comes across in their everyday life is a direct result. While CS leaders and teams both recognize huge efficiencies with technology and organization, both continuously note that available bandwidth is fleeting. Even worse, once a team gets behind its task tempo; it tends to stay behind. And a team gasping for air is not applying its greatest strengths, being the human counterpart to a human customer and driving the feeling of mutual love.
Teams scrambling to catch up are prone to skip needed preparations for say, upsells. Teams caught in the fatigue of everyday rut fail to recognize renewal signals happening in real-time because they just aren’t looking anymore. The list of oxygen-deprived CS issues gets pretty scary: incomplete tasks, missed deadlines, drop in quality of work, proactive is abandoned for reactive, and some of the most important cerebral efforts of creative problem-solving for renewals and upsells simply get neglected.
How Bandwidth Improves Customer Success
Let’s reverse this and give the CS team a strategic advantage in the marketplace. Available bandwidth returned to the CS team lets amazing breakout moments happen. With bandwidth, CSMs can take on complex issues in stride, even in the middle ofa hectic average day. With bandwidth returned customers become partners, CSMs and their counterparts become trusted allies, and the increased revenue numbers begin speaking loudly for themselves. Your CSMs are the indelible impression and lasting human-to-human relationship drivers with your customers; help them be their absolute best. Available bandwidth is the miracle cure for an optimally running CS department.
Technology: The Key to Increasing Bandwidth
Technology can help defend against burnout and provide more Customer Success bandwidth. Software-assisted notifiers, organization, and prioritization metrics can help CSMs stay on pace and keep their head in the game. Intelo AI leverages machine learning technology built specifically for the CS department and uses advanced pattern-recognition to uncover the true assessment of any one single account, or a portfolio of accounts, or even an entire customer base. This allows all CS team members to stay afloat of their workloads and to remain proactive in their duties. At Intelo, we built this software to ensure CSMs have the bandwidth to provide the best, most proactive customer experiences. Want to fight burnout and boost customer love? Learn more about Intelo.
Intelo.ai’s dashboard snapshot.