As a Customer Success Manager, you cover a wide range of tasks and, as a result, your workdays may end up being very different from what you planned initially. Therefore, it is important to have a kind of guideline that will help you spend less time looking at your backlog deciding what to do next and more time completing the tasks that contribute to the achievement of your overall objectives.
Looking for effective ways to boost your workday productivity? Get inspired by our tips and tricks on how you can set yourself up for success!
Have a Clear Plan
As a Customer Success Manager, you definitely have a large backlog of tasks, and it’s easy to get sidetracked and end up spending your time on the wrong activities.
It is important to have a clear plan of what you are going to do when you arrive at your desk at the start of your day. Let’s look through the best practices to achieve this.
Use your calendar
First, be sure to have a recurring plan for each day of the week. Most likely, you already have time scheduled for regular activities like recurring weekly meetings, webinars, and other things. Therefore, focus on scheduling blocks of time around the existing items.
Keep it simple and use high-level tasks. While you may need to allow for some flexibility sometimes, on the whole, you will notice that the closer you stick to your schedule, the more productive you are.
Here is an example of how your calendar may look like:
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Next, be sure to take into account your personal productive hours. Some of us are morning people, while others are “night owls”. So, whatever your most productive hours are, it is a good practice to adjust your work schedule accordingly. If you are a morning person, schedule important calls and meetings before lunch. If you are not that energetic in the morning, dedicate your first working hours to tasks that can be done “on autopilot”.
However, if you are having trouble keeping to the schedule, you may want to review it with your manager. Check your work plan together to see whether it contains unnecessary activities. This way you will ensure that it is actually tailored towards meeting your objectives.
Set Daily Goals
Setting Customer Success daily goals is a great way to focus attention on your desired outcomes. In addition, it can motivate if implemented correctly. Setting the right goals is also fundamental to a successful work environment.
A good idea is to follow the SMART Goals framework to ensure your objectives are clear, relevant, and achievable.
Don’t let distractions control your schedule
A typical Customer Success Manager’s day is filled with incoming support tickets, emails, and phone calls from customers. Don’t let these interruptions take you away from your scheduled plan.
Learning how to communicate with your customers (and co-workers) and set realistic deliverables will help stay focused on your top priority tasks. Let’s illustrate it with the following example: instead of responding with “I’ll drop everything right now and look at that”, try “I’ll create a ticket in our system for you; we will review it as soon as possible, and I’ll provide an update for you by the end of the day”. This way, you can stay focused on your scheduled task, and you can review the incoming task during a block of time you may have scheduled later in the day.
Prioritize Daily Activities (correctly)
To make goal completion more effective, you need to prioritize your tasks. This will help you focus on the right activities and identify those that can wait. Focusing on the wrong activities will inevitably result in failures to achieve the desired outcomes within the desired timeframe.
Let’s look through the common mistakes that Customer Success Managers make when prioritizing their tasks:
- Spending excessive time with a low value highly demanding customer (low value - high effort) at the cost of neglecting a high-value customer who may be renewing or wanting to expand (high value - low effort)
- Focusing on the tasks that appear easy to complete but may have a minimal impact on achieving your objectives.
To sum up: always stay focused on your goals, and give higher priority to the activities that are of high value for both you and your customers
Systemize your Approach
Most SaaS companies have an established system of customer success management, including the IT infrastructure with powerful software platforms. So, be sure to complete your daily activities within your company’s systems and processes.
Here is how the use of software tools and technologies can help you as a Customer Success Manager:
- Save you time by automating routine tasks
- Allow you to assign/delegate tasks to other departments or team members
- Help you to stay focused and manage the incoming distractions
- Track your progress towards achieving your key goals and objectives
- Provide visibility of the status of your customers, your daily efforts, and your achievements
Userlot is exactly the platform built to make the lives of Customer Success Managers way easier by helping them manage their daily schedule, prioritize tasks, and automate tracking and reporting of the key insights.
Wrapping up
Customer Success Managers tackle a wide range of tasks, assisting customers with service and demonstrating product value, which is critical to customer retention and future business prosperity. To successfully achieve your goals, it is important not to lose focus in the constant stream of daily tasks. The proven ways to achieve this include planning your daily activities and setting daily goals, prioritizing tasks, and using modern software tools.
We hope you find this guide useful, and the practices we have shared will help you achieve your Customer Success goals.
