How do you communicate customer success updates and activities to the rest of the company?

One of the most important responsibilities of CS is to ensure that we are sharing the stories and insights we hear from our customers with the rest of the business. To do this, I like to hold monthly presentations where CS presents our feedback from customers. These events are attended by product and marketing leaders, and CSMs present insights from their specific customers, with a theme for each session.

I would suggest that this is done in two ways.

1. Organically by the CSM team - ensure your team understands what success looks like outside standard metrics. Examples could include a meeting where the team engaged with a new senior stakeholder, successful joint marketing activity with a customer, identification of new use cases or value drivers, a successful customer on-site etc. Then, encourage your team to share these smaller wins internally to demonstrate progress.

2. Align with the formal company readouts, or if they don't exist, create a forum bringing in cross-functional representatives to provide a readout of what's worked and what hasn't in the previous period (I would recommend this to be monthly or quarterly).

The most important aspect of communicating customer success activities to the company is identifying what each department cares about. The update provided to a Sales team looks very different than what would be delivered to a Product team. This ensures the updates have value to the people consuming them.

Once you've determined what each department cares about, you then decide on the method of delivery. I prefer to provide updates in a meeting forum to allow for discussion and better understanding. Many other teams may opt for an email or newsletter that goes out on a specific cadence. A lot of this depends on the size of the company and the importance of the updates.

Lastly, don't forget to ask for feedback! If something isn't working or could be better, make sure to iterate.

We've used several methods, depending on the size and type of the company.

1. Roadshows. One of the more effective yet costly in terms of time and useful for larger changes. We share a slide deck, explain the process, and run an AMA

2. Join team calls and/or join leadership calls to walk them through the changes, collect feedback, and share learnings

3. A monthly (or quarterly) "team update" doc that is shared in company standard mediums (e.g., Slack, email, message board...). This is usually a collection of everything that has happened and/or will happen

4. A dedicated slack channel that is read-only for asynchronous updates (generally smaller, non-critical updates)

We conduct monthly CS All-Hands meetings for team updates. Quarterly, we extend this to include all teams under our Chief Customer Officer (CCO), along with company-wide All-Hands meetings. Additionally, we host Leader-level Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) where all teams are represented, allowing for deeper dives into metrics and trends.