As a Customer Success Professional there is never a shortage of things to do; in fact there is usually more to do than time permits. So what's a CSM to do?
You need to take control of your time and focus on your priorities. Monday's are a great place to start; it's the beginning of the week (for most) and you can use this time to map out how you are going to use your time. I've created a short checklist of activities I've had my teams do each Monday to take control of their time and focus on value for their customers.
1) Prepare: Set Up for Customer Meetings
My first piece of advice to my team has always been to take advantage of the tools at their disposal - Gmail has a ton of features that can help with productivity. Start with color coding your meetings so you can quickly spot when you have customer meetings. Once you have identified all of your meetings for the week go through and make sure that every meeting has an agenda and objective, that key participants have accepted, that there is a link to the meetings ( Zoom, Google Meet, Teams etc.) and that any action items leading up to the meeting have been completed. You can go a step further and drop a note to your customer confirming that they will be in attendance and re-share the agenda.
2) Make a List: Identify Your To Do's
Make a list of your weekly priorities - this can include things like projects and tasks that are outstanding, customer management tasks like renewals or at risk plans, assets that need to be created (decks or documents for your customers) etc. You may also have outstanding internal projects that require your time and attention, so pulling this all together will allow you to see what you have to do and when. If you are using a task management solution hopefully you have the ability to see all of your customer and non-customer related to-do's and can start to prioritize by day; this will ensure you build in the appropriate time to get everything done.
3) Review the Data: What Does Your Dashboard Say?
You can't manage what you can't measure. Data and insights are critical in helping make CSM's successful, so it's important you are reviewing the information available to you early and often. Start your week by reviewing your data - customer health, renewals, engagement, NPS etc. The data about your customer will inform your weekly to-dos. For example, I might spot that I have 5 customers whom I've not had a call with in over 30 days, so I will need to prioritize outreach to help secure these next meetings. I might find that 3 customers replied to a recent NPS survey and I need to understand the correlation between their scores and the data in we have access to and then reach out. The point is there is always something to do based on the visibility we have, so take a look and build your plan.
4) Build In Time: Make Time to Make It Happen
Calendars get packed quickly so it's imperative that you build in time to get all of your work done. If you know you have a presentation you need to get completed for a meeting this week, you need to carve out an hour or two to get it done. The tricky thing about time is that there isn't more. You have the hours you have each week and it's up to you to use them wisely, prioritize the things that will have impact on your customers and your business. Build in a few blocks of time per week so that you have protected time to get things done; and if possible, don't let people book over it.
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