According to the Holmes-Rahe life stress inventory, being fired at work comes at position number eight on a list of 43 most stressful life events. The dreadful dismissal notice is a difficult experience, on both ends – for the manager giving it, and for the employee receiving it. However difficult it may be, it signifies a change of circumstances everyone needs to address. Customer success drives businesses. When a customer needs an alternative to how things have been done in the past in order to grow, project halt and people need to be let go. It’s a tough call for the company and for the people. However, customer success deserves its due attention.
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CUSTOMER SUCCESS: THE DIGITAL AGE PARADIGM
In the age of customer-centricity, businesses are propelled by customer success variables even more. The highly demanding digital transformation that we go through is creating and dissolving jobs at a frantic rate. Many people are not ready to deal with the fast pace of change, regardless of what side of the equation they are on.
Employees need to learn and adapt quickly. Otherwise, they become obsolete in the fast-changing environment. Managers need to find talent with fresh skills fast or they risk failed projects and diminish the value of already achieved customer success rates.
It is not too far-fetched to qualify modern companies as fluid structures. In such structures, existence and growth highly depend on the flexibility of its people.
In today’s businesses, customers are the most important people, and their needs dictate how far will a business go.
Employees, clients, stakeholders, and end-users are all customers for product managers. Therefore, managers are most likely to be dealing with a lot of stress to keep everyone productive and satisfied.
INCLUDE STAFF MANAGEMENT IN THE CUSTOMER SUCCESS STRATEGY
What does this mean in terms of hiring and managing staff? To answer this question, we need to understand what is customer success. Additionally, we need to ask why so many teams rely on customer success managers to make the strides forward.
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Customer success is about getting maximum value out of a product or a service. It is a revenue-generating variable that includes a percentage of the individual success of each team and each person on a team.
When a client aims at cost-effective resource management, all pieces from the individual success puzzle come together. The sum affects how much value they will create for the client’s business success.
It is no wonder that an effective customer success strategy requires some serious discernment on behalf of the product manager. This is vital when hiring and managing people.
TURNING WORKPLACES INTO WORKSPACES
The changing nature of jobs in the digital age asks for a new way of doing work.
People become more important than maintaining traditional structures and hierarchies. A critical event such as being laid off work is not as devastating as it used to be.
On-demand staffing agencies provide people with specific skills for short-term or one-off projects. Employees learn how to deal with uncertainty better.
Workplaces have become workspaces.
Workspaces are elastic and strongly motivated by what a customer wants.
When the customer is spoiled for choice, you could drown under the weight of seemingly impossible customer requirements. The competition can surpass you.
If you are well prepared, you could view such dynamics as a growth opportunity. In turn, you can make maximum use of it while the iron is hot.
At first, you may think that hiring people per hour is easily quantifiable for generic jobs that don’t require high levels of creativity, complexity, and innovation.
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But is there such a job in the complex synergy of virtual projects?
The short answer to this question is “nearly no”. There is a way to put a number to what a person does even if it involves profound expert skills.
By dissolving the structure of tight, long-term, and permanently-connected teams, the new on-demand agency of the future adopts a customer-centric approach.
It provides talent in just the right quantity to help customers grow at an acceptable rate without wasting resources on huge, early-on investments.
Sales and marketing are important business elements. However, so is having a customer success plan, even in the early startup stages, when a business is vulnerable to volatility.
To invest more in customer success, you need to invest more in people, too.
BENEFITS OF A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN AGENCY
What happens in a team that works on remote projects and handles well the customer success process?
- You hire the right people.
- Projects cost less.
- Stress dissipates.
- Clients write 5-star reviews.
Hiring people with a customer-centric view provides unexpected advantages for managers, staff, and customers. Clients are not the only group that benefits. This is not the truth, even it initially seems that way.
There is a huge collaborative network of people and projects coming together across borders. Many work for a short time, ready to knock off projects that don’t produce long-term cohesion.
And it’s time we pay more attention to how scalable and adaptable digital agencies help everyone reap the benefits of customer-centricity.
Many recruiters and CEOs tend to call the agency of the future a “staffing agency”, “job agency”, or a “work agency”.
Such interpretation limits the potential of the newly acquired image of scalable agencies. It distorts the understanding of project management in a geographically-dispersed working environment.
Aside from providing trained staff for “work-per-hour”, the agency of the future goes a couple of extra miles. It includes:
- Customer success
- Agile project management, and
- Innovative technologies.
In this way, everyone benefits:
- Clients can cherry-pick people, skills, products, and services available in the agency.
- Employees are able to choose what and how they work on. They can invest in what they love to do and are best at.
- The manager’s reward is a structured, cost-effective method for managing projects, without overspending on time, people, and space.
TREAT EVERYONE AS A CUSTOMER
There is plenty of effort going into finding the right people to partner with.
In the overall picture of a project, everyone is someone else’s customer, even when they are not a client.
That’s why customer success demands so much of our attention when we search for the best way to grow a business.
People are the key to that success. If you have the right tools to find, hire, and manage high-performing teams, the agency of the future will grow.
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