Enabling your team IS enabling your customers

There’s one tactic or making happy, successful customers that probably hits a little closer to home than most.

Building a happy, enabled, and empowered team.

Here’s why Carro’s Head of Customer Experience, Con Cirillo, says investing in your team’s happiness is a win-win for everyone.

Research shows happy, empowered team members deliver better service.

The happier your team, the happier your customers.

The happier your customers, the happier your team.

‍Here are 2 principles and 3 tactical ways to enable your customers AND make your team happier.

Principles:

1. Empathy

It's easier to focus on how we think the process should work instead of how the customer or our team doing the work actually experiences it.

Teams that make space to put themselves in the shoes of others, and are intentional about seeking outside perspectives on their work build empathy and identify frustrations faster.

2. Autonomy

Whether it’s for your team or customers enablement is about showing up in the ways they need, when they need it.

Each person needs different things at different times. Build the bridges that will let them choose the best route to get where they want to go.

Being empowered with the data, guardrails, and trust to make the right decision to achieve the best outcome can sometimes be difficult to measure or out of line with your “standard” tactics... but that's ok.

Tactics:

1. Map the decision tree

Try writing out each step of your processes, both from the customer's perspective and your own.

1. Write up a list of questions or decisions for a single new prospect/customer that you know they should be considering to get the most out of your product.
2. Include the true fundamentals that you take for granted. The stuff that feels obvious to your team because you live and breathe the problem. Remember, customers have a day job and can only give this problem part of their attention. You’re the expert.
3. Group each item into “month 1”, “month 3”, and “month 6” buckets based on the order of priority for their situation. This helps build trust with that you’ve got future situations covered, and they know where they’re heading, but they can focus on the situation right now.
4. Share that as a google doc so both teams can get to work on making decisions for each point.

2. Automate predictable tasks

Not all tasks require the same level of critical thinking and strategic insight.

Try having your team make a list of the tasks they do on a daily basis. Identify the ones that have consistent inputs and outputs. These are prime targets for automation. For example:

• Updating the lifecycle stage of a company when onboarding is completed.
• Following up with a customer who has a task overdue.
• Sending a pre-meeting agenda and reminder

Note: Some repeatable tasks may appear difficult to automate when looking only at the process of the person assigned to them. Consider moving a step earlier in the journey to see if there is missing information that is not being passed along.

Eg. Asking a customer about their goals may have already happened in the sales process. Making documenting “Goals” a required input to move a deal to "Closed Won" may remove future work entirely or at least switch the task from “ask” to “verify”.

3. Make it easier to find flow

Being proactive is great – just ask any of the customer success influencers on LinkedIn.

But…

Being proactive requires active prioritization, and it’s hard to stay in a proactive state for too long.

Instead – create a system that prioritizes "flow" by automatically assigning the tasks you need to work on so you can spend your energy tackling the challenges inside the tasks themselves.

Pushing the prioritization logic into a workflow automation like this means you can do it once and make your teams life easier forever.

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Enabling your team is enabling your customers and ultimately everyone will be happier for it.

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