Three ideas. Take what's relevant.
1. Customer Support
You are sitting on hundreds of support tickets and call notes for your customers. Why not utilise an AI tool to review recent tickets for your top accounts? Ask for the three problems that come up most often, plus any feature requests a customer has repeated.
Once you have that data, do some proactive work to address those topics that will be of deep value to the customer.
E.g. “I know you have previously mentioned interest in X feature. I checked with our product team and confirmed that it will be in our next release. Would you like me to book in a call when that happens to clarify how best to maximise it for your use case?”
This is world class customer attention and they will recognise it as such.
If you work in a Customer Onboarding role, this is how you can partner closely with customer support.
2. Strategy
“Be more strategic” - what does that mean exactly?
I coach many people who have been tasked with this specific goal. First, I ask what that means to them and I supplement their response by exploring what the business is trying to achieve and how their work visibly impacts that.
If you are unsure where to start, consider:
What outcome does our company need and by when? If you have company OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) then you will already know this.
Which decision do you wish you had better information on in order to better impact it?
Sometimes, saying “No” is a strategic move, read more about this in my previous newsletter article. ⬇
3. Hiring
At a startup, hire generalists until you can name the thing that’s breaking.
If you hire a specialist too early, you’ll spend six months finding them a job. But people do their best work when they own something, so give ownership before you give headcount.
I was handed customer onboarding after doing the whole CS journey alongside a colleague. I was given room to learn, experiment and build the function. Only after I had built out a plan did I hire for the specific roles.
Ask yourself or your team which part of the business would they like to experiment with building out?
If you need more detailed mentoring, read about my coaching style, hear direct from my clients, and book in a discovery call to see if we’re a good match.
