Many people find themselves completely changing careers at least once or twice in their life. Sometimes the skills transfer seamlessly and sometimes you may find yourself bringing a completely new perspective to your new industry or role. This can become a point of differentiation and spark innovation when it comes to established ways of thinking in an organization.
I started my career, fresh out of business school, working in safety and compliance roles for transportation companies. I loved it because I could work with all departments and had real responsibilities to the people in the company. I was exposed to terrible accidents pretty fast, so I knew the importance that safety played in the organization and peoples lives. I took this very seriously. Being the business minded recent graduate, I also saw the money that the company stood to save. I had a mentor tell me early on, “the thing about safety is no one will ever tell you how much money you made the company, but they will sure tell you if you are spending too much.” Accidents were expensive and most all were preventable. I quickly found out that the way to really show performance is to show the reduction in costs my efforts directly correlated with.
The other thing about safety is, there are some things you just have to do. Employee vetting, raining, documentation, monitoring, and the occasional corrective action plan were the motions you had to go through to show that you were trying to be as safe as you could. When things went wrong with an employee, there were always excuses, bent rules, lost productivity, and just plain anger. Many times it felt like the whole company was against the safety department for just enforcing the rules. We were the bad guys, costing the company money and employees time. When accidents happen though, the question comes down to “what could we have done to prevent this and why didn’t we do more.”
You see, people didn’t see the actual value in safety if everything was running smoothly. No incidents is expected to be the norm, but as with many things in life, humans just tend to break things. Someone thinks they are innovative and pulls a stunt to save a few minutes or someone thinks they know better and operates opposite all the training that was intentionally prepared for the job. My favorite was “I have been doing this longer than you’ve been alive and I will keep doing things my way.” Some way to thank the person whose motto was, “I just want everyone to go home safe and make some money in the process.”
After 10 years in safety and compliance, I found a career in SaaS, working in Customer Success pretty early in CS becoming more widely implemented. I quickly found myself in familiar territory. A customer ignored the training, thought they knew what they were doing and messed up their entire account. Now they were angry and going to churn. It was like a workplace incident that I had a playbook on how to handle. So I sprang into action. Made sure the fires were out, started to get everyone patched back up, prepared the documentation of where things went wrong to cover the company’s liability, and set the customer up with training to ensure this wouldn’t happen again. The customer loved it, and loved me for doing it. I don’t think to that point, I had anyone really thank and appreciate me for just following a playbook. I was actually making a difference. It made me create more playbooks. It made me double down on incident prevention training. It made me want to keep an eye on things to catch problems before they happened. This was the start of a promising change.
Here are 5 things a Career in safety taught me about good Customer Success
Avoid issues systematically – Incidents always follow trends and few cases are truly a one-off. Seeing root causes of issues allow you to bring attention to the hazards and educate everyone on how to avoid them or eliminate them all together. In CS, this meant watching common support issues and a having documentation readily available, training on them, or working with product teams to eliminate the common issues entirely, making the process easier and more intuitive. Often, organizations are so ingrained in their own product or processes that they believe everyone should follow their path, regardless of if it is intuitive to their customers. Part of avoiding issues is trying to meet people where they are and how they work. That way, you can make your process easier for them to adopt without learning new ways of working that feel unnatural.
Keep training simple and use it as a protection mechanism – In a mandatory training, you can expect people to hear about 50% of what you say. After about 10 minutes, you can expect them to retain about 20% that, and after 30 minutes, you are lucky if they take away 10%. The trick, state the problem you are trying to avoid or the question you are trying to answer. Then, quickly address the most important, highest level take away. Following that, ensure that all the must-says get addressed and always have extra resources for anyone wanting more information.
Document the attendance no matter what your training is. Whether it is a “getting started” session for your SaaS product or safety training for your industrial equipment. When things go wrong that you addressed in that training, you need to have your proof that you tried to avoid it. Customers are generally more forgiving if you can prove that you tried to help them.
Have full visibility of operations – So often things happen in other parts of the business that will cause you issues. Someone promised the customer something special, someone made an exception somewhere, or someone misled them to believe something that isn’t the case. It is bound to happen and likely is not due to malice or negligence. Having visibility into those conversations and the full history of a customer helps you step into their shoes and seamlessly honor commitments and not spend a ton of time in “he said, she said” situations. Those arguments can be held within your org for bad promises made, but don’t let customers see that.
Furthermore, having the ability to see billing errors, self-service upgrades, spikes and dips in usage, or past feedback all can give you the facade of being completely in tune to a customer’s account and establish trust as the go-to expert.
Fix things first, then address the cause – when things break, it is natural to try to see where things went wrong and point fingers to take some heat off you or the company. Many times, issues were caused by customers, but when things are on fire is not the time to point that out… There is still a fire after all. In Auto accidents, the first step is to secure the scene to prevent any further accidents, and that is what you have to do when customer issues arise. Debriefs, claims, and all the fallout is dealt with after the incident is resolved. You have to take care of the customer’s pain point first. Following that, you can point out the cause, offer restitution, hold training, and address the key issues with your team to prevent it from happening again, but focus on putting the fire out before you place blame and make major repairs.
Safety is the number one priority – Like incidents in the workplace, incidents with your product can slow things to a halt, landing you in the category of a risk rather than a solution. In safety, your efforts to keep people safe are the number one priority. In CS, the customer’s continuing operation is. It isn’t their happiness, it isn’t maximizing revenue, and it isn’t even full adoption. We know that all those are a battle. No, It is simply continuing the business relationship and serving your intended function. All those other things come if you are paying attention to helping that customer continue their operation. If you can set your goal as something so broad and easy to achieve, you have a lot of liberty in how you operate. You will have the bandwidth to hold the upsell conversations and offer the training to become fully adopted, expert customers. However, if any of those are the key, you will undoubtedly lose sight of the importance of simply continuing operations, making incremental improvements, and making your customers’ jobs a little easier as a partner with a shared goal. I assure you, they don’t care about your uplift quota, your success plan for their account, or additional features. They work with you for a purpose and that is to keep their business running smoothly. You will be surprised how much customers appreciate a true partner in this relatively simple goal.
Workplace safety is more than a focus, it is a mindset and a mentality. When people’s safety at work truly comes first, you can feel it. It is baked into everything you do. If you say something is unsafe, you are met with a level of seriousness that wants that barrier removed to continue to operate, because your safety is more important than the productivity or money that could be made by compromising it. Likewise, you can feel when your safety is not a priority. You know you have to look out for yourself, because no one else is. You likely know that your time in that organization is limited, because they don’t care about people.
Customer experience is the same way. Customers know if you actually care about their wellbeing over just the money you bring in. They can definitely feel a shift if it happens. My advice is to take the role of the relationship holder seriously. There can be other departments that are revenue or performance focused, but for the people working with the customers, let them focus on keeping things running and keeping your company in good standing. It will yield longer and more stable revenue streams than most any other efforts will.