If you want to make customer success a priority for your business, you know that you’ll need a dedicated customer success team. Now all you need to figure out is how to put such a team together. That’s exactly the topic we’ll be tackling today, as we delve into what you’ll need to bring together a customer success team that can supercharge your business efforts.

How To Assemble Your Customer Success Team

If you’re looking to put together the perfect customer success team for your business, you’ll want to start by getting a sense of what it is your customers need. Your success team’s goal is to help customers work past problems and achieve the greatest amount of value from your products and services. When you learn about the issues that your customers are facing, you’ll be laying the groundwork for ways in which your success team can step in and help.

From there, you’re going to need to fill your team with the workers you need. At its most basic, your customer success team should consist of a few customer success specialists and their leader — your customer success manager. The CSM serves as the proverbial “tip of the spear” when it comes to customer success initiatives, guiding your team toward your business goals.

You can’t expect just anyone to fill these roles, however. Customer success professionals have specific traits that help them do their job, and you should prioritize the following characteristics when hiring agents and leaders for your customer success team:

• Analytical skills — Your team will need to sift through plenty of metrics to make sense of what your customers want, so analytical ability is a must for your team members.
• Communication skills — Serving as a kind of go-between for your organization and your customers is part and parcel of what your customer success team does. Make sure that they’re comfortable conversing with people and figuring out what they need.
• Level-headedness — Customers aren’t always the most rational or easy to deal with, so your customer success team needs to step up and stay cool when the going is hot. Prioritize candidates who have even tempers, take a relaxed approach to communication, and don’t hold grudges.
• Quick learning ability — Your customer success team has to know the ins-and-outs of whatever products or services you’re offering so that they can successfully communicate with customers about what works and what doesn’t. If you’re hiring a fresh team, that means they need to be able to grasp all those details quickly.

Remember that on top of having all these individual abilities, your team will need to be able to work with one another as well. As you evaluate skills, make sure you’re also noting personalities and considering how they’ll mesh together as one unit. If all goes well, then you’ll be able to assemble a capable customer success team that can help you lead your customers through the all-important value realization process and help you boost your bottom line.