A customer success competency model probably sounds more complex than it really is. When broken down, it’s really simple to understand and implement within your business. At the heart of it, though, it’s a necessity to factor into your strategies to ensure you are building a customer-centric team.
What is a customer success competency model?
Let’s break down exactly what this model is and how to factor it into your business for your benefit. At the heart of a customer success competency model is in its name – customer success. This is built around the goal of ensuring that your customers reach their desired outcomes with your organisations products or services.
To achieve customer success, you need to ensure you have a team of employees who are fully on board and prepared for this to make it happen. This is what the model is for. Essentially, a competency model is a collection of competencies and capabilities that a team should be striving towards. These competencies will work together to define an overall successful performance.
Now let’s put it all together. A customer success competency model is an outline of all the functions that your employees should be competent in to achieve overall organisational customer success. Generally, competency models are the foundations you should look into when hiring and training new recruits onto your team. They should outline skillsets, job responsibilities and mandatory tasks needed to achieve the goal of customer success.
Why do you need this model?
Having this model as a backdrop to your company’s capabilities and potential will be great as a standard to evaluate your own, or your team’s, competency against. This will ensure that everyone is on the same path to success, or to see what individuals should do to get on track with the common goal.
You may find that over time, the factors that go into your customer success competency model will alter. And this is expected and part of business development and growth. As you get closer towards your goals and ability to achieve customer success, the things you need to do to achieve that will change. This is also in line with the set of capabilities, skillsets and attributes that make up your customer success team. Capability development is also a great thing to keep track of alongside your customer success competency model.
With all this in mind, it’s now time to dive into where to start, and what to include within your customer success competency model.
Where to start: understand the pillars of a great competency model
When at the start of creating your model, it’s important to conduct a lot of research. That is, into both your company and what they specifically need, and into what other company models are using. You being here is already a great start!
At CXM, we’re always committed to giving our dear readers the best resources to learn and develop their knowledge to achieve optimum growth. CXM is a library of knowledge, so why not re-share previous insights we’ve covered into competencies?
In our 2021 CX consultant career guide, we shared six competencies outlined by CCXP and CX expert, Ian Golding. These are great to work on as a starting point to achieve customer success in your business. Let’s go over what these competencies are:
- Customer-centric culture
- The voice of the customer
- Organisational adoption and accountability
- CX strategy
- Experience design
- Metrics and measurement
CXPA have also listed some of their core competencies. These were created in 2020 based on feedback on the importance of job tasks covering the scope of the CX profession. The list is based on analysis of over 300 CX professionals:
- Customer insights and understanding
- CX strategy
- Metrics, measurements, and ROI
- Design, implementation, and innovation
- Culture and accountability
Another great resource often cited is ‘Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine‘ by Jeanne Bliss. Here are the five competencies she lists in order to guide those at the top for customer success:
- Manage and honour customers as assets
- Align around experience
- Build a customer listening path
- Proactive experience, reliability and innovation
- One company accountability, leadership and decision-making
Internal research
As mentioned previously, it’s great, and even a winning suggestion, to look within your business, and what exactly it needs to reach that end goal. In this case of a customer success competency model, look within your existing team.
What attributes and responsibilities does your team already have that are working well? Which of these are getting you closer to ultimate customer success?
Simultaneously, you can flip these questions on their head. Which of these within your team may not be getting you closer to the end goal? Are there any competencies that may actually be holding you back?
For both sets of questions, you will reach the same results of finding out how to develop your customer success competency model. Paying attention to current and existing competencies and the scale of success they’re bringing is a great place to start.
How to create and stick to your customer success competency model
Now that you have a competency model in place, how do you keep at it and ensure it stays in place to make a difference? Well, that comes back to the reliance placed on internal research.
Online research platforms for your employees to use and let you know what’s working and what isn’t a great start. With how fluid these platforms can be, you can use many different research methods for your employees to let you know how they feel the model is working. With these, you can conduct surveys, opinion polls, and much more.
At the core of it all is listening to your employees on all levels. For a business goal of customer success, that means that, ideally, all employees will be on board for it and committed to make it happen. Therefore, employees on every part of the organisation’s structure should be listened to. They will all have feedback on if the model is successful or not.
Like most functions in a business, constantly evaluating and reassessing the customer success competency model is the best way to check in on it and see if it’s still doing its job and working for your employees. Set aside time on a regular basis to break down each pillar of the model and evaluate if that is still working. Evaluate if all employees are on board for it and think it’s working for them.
For a successful model, you need to know and work on three things from the offset. Plan, organise and evaluate.
Start working on it today; thank yourself later
In business, we all use competencies. They are, very simply put, the knowledge and abilities we need to perform well and reach our targets. A customer success competency model is a great resource for leaders to use to keep teams in check to assure a streamlined effort for success. Individual members of the organisation can also use them to their advantage. Start organising your model today!