Chapter 8 Exercise: Define Your Customer Values Explore what customer success looks like for your business. Define the values that the business must embody to support that vision. More specifically, what are some of the brand attributes (use adjectives) that describe ideal customer interactions? What are the employee behaviors that reinforce those brand attributes? Think about your customer experience roadmap. How will those behaviors need to change to support 2x, 3x, 10x more customers? 2. Take Time to Understand Your Customers’ Journey Pop quiz! Can you list all the touchpoints you have with your customers today? What are the top one or two most important customer touchpoints, and why? Which customer touchpoint is most impactful on securing the renewal? I’ll bet your mind immediately started scouring your product interface, sales messaging and interactions, website design, email marketing campaigns, and much more. You’d be right to do so. When you stand in your customer’s shoes, you quickly realize the myriad ways customers interface with your business, and it doesn’t come together as a seamless experience unless it’s intentionally designed to feel that way. A pitfall I’ve seen with startups is the belief that hiring a CSM will improve customer interactions. However, all it really does is give your customers yet another access point they have to figure out how to use. And it only gets more challenging as the business grows. The advantage of having CSMs on watch is that they are the quarterback for the account. They can drive adoption, proactively identify risks to renewal, and pull in necessary resources to mitigate or eliminate that risk. But investing in a customer success function is not a magic bullet, and it alone will not ensure a high customer retention rate, especially if other parts of the customer experience are broken. Take a step back and look at your end-to-end customer journey to assess which touchpoints are working well, where there are pain points, and where a CSM can interject to make the most impact.