A supply chain is made up of interconnected parts of a whole, all of which add up to finished products bought by customers. Take automobiles, for example. Before a consumer buys a car, iron ore is extracted from the earth. The ore is transported to a plant, where it’s turned into steel, which is made into the chassis of the automobile. To make the car, various components—from engines to batteries, electrical components, rubber tires, a metal body, and paint—are assembled. Once the car is made, it’s sold in a retail setting to the end consumer.

Understanding Supply Chains

<ul><li>producers, which make or grow the raw materials for goods</li><li>vendors, which buy and sell materials</li><li>manufacturers, which make materials into goods</li><li>transporters, or logistics providers, which move those goods around the world</li><li>supply chain managers, which ensure that operations run smoothly in everything from planning to sourcing raw materials, manufacturing, delivery, and returns</li><li>retailers, which sell goods either online or in physical stores</li><li>consumers, who buy and use those goods and services</li></ul>

The Stakeholders

A supply chain includes all the raw materials and parts that are made into a product and distributed up the chain for manufacture and sale. In contrast, a <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/innovation-and-growth/globalization-in-transition-the-future-of-trade-and-value-chains">value chain</a> encompasses all the individual steps that are taken to create a marketable product. That includes not only physical components but also various value-adding activities that might be classified as part of the “knowledge economy”—things such as innovation, design, marketing, and sales—and that lead to the development of a product ready for customers.

Difference Between Value Chains and Supply Chains

When any link in a <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/diagnosing-the-pain-in-your-supply-chain">supply chain isn’t working optimally</a>, you might say the supply chain has been disrupted. Different issues can emerge. For example, an increase in inbound material costs, because one material costs more this year than it did last year, can have major implications on a company’s cost structure. Or <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/navigating-the-labor-mismatch-in-us-logistics-and-supply-chains">labour market mismatches can cause operational concerns</a>—for instance, if transport companies can’t find enough people who want to drive trucks to deliver goods.

Supply Chain Disruption

<ul><li>planning and supplier networks</li><li>transportation and logistics systems</li><li>financial resiliency</li><li>product complexity</li><li>organizational maturity</li></ul>Supply chain disruptions lasting one month or longer occur every 3.7 years, on average. And these disruptions can have a steep price: they cost the average organization 45 percent of a year’s profits over the course of a decade.

Five Areas Where Supply Chain Vulnerabilities Show Up

Although <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/how-covid-19-is-reshaping-supply-chains">the COVID-19 pandemic</a> has delivered the biggest supply chain or value chain shock in recent memory, other examples abound. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to the worst humanitarian crisis in Europe since World War II, as well as <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/supply-chains-to-build-resilience-manage-proactively">supply chain disruptions in critical sectors</a>, including agriculture, automotive, energy, and food. Changes in the environment and the global economy have increased the frequency and magnitude of these shocks. For instance, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan shut down electronics factories.

Supply Chain Risks

Supply chain shocks are classified into four different types:Unanticipated catastrophes. These are historically remarkable events that can’t be anticipated and lead to trillions of dollars in losses.  Foreseeable catastrophes. Shocks in this category are of a similar magnitude to an unanticipated catastrophe but differ in that larger patterns and probabilities can guide general preparedness.  Unanticipated disruptions. These are serious and costly events but are on a smaller scale than catastrophes.  Foreseeable disruptions. Some disruptions can be spotted in advance of their arrival.

Classification Of Supply Chain Shocks

Organizations often focus on managing the shocks that they see most often. The COVID-19 pandemic is a reminder that while outliers are rare, organizations still need to consider such possibilities when making decisions and strategic moves. For most organizations, that will mean expanding supply chain executives’ long-standing focus on cost (and capital usage), service, and quality to include <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/future-proofing-the-supply-chain">three new priorities: resilience, agility, and sustainability</a>.

Resilience, Agility, and Sustainability

<a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/diagnosing-the-pain-in-your-supply-chain">Inflation can play a role</a> in supply chain challenges. When inflation occurs, costs for input materials (<a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/outsprinting-the-energy-crisis">such as energy</a>) can rise substantially, having negative effects on companies’ profits and losses. One way to adjust is to increase prices (fairly) for consumers. Organizations can make more informed decisions by using an <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/responding-to-inflation-and-volatility-time-for-procurement-to-lead">exposure matrix</a> to assess which categories of their products are exposed to market forces and whether the market is inflating or deflating.

Inflation And Supply Chains

<a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/business-resilience">Resilience</a> refers to the ability to withstand, adapt, and thrive in the face of internal and external shocks—both known and unknown. More specifically, <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/risk-and-resilience/our-insights/the-resilience-imperative-succeeding-in-uncertain-times">operational resilience</a>, which encompasses supply chains, is about businesses maintaining robust production capacity that can accommodate shifts in demand and remain stable amid disruption, without letting quality slide.

Supply Chain Resilience

Firefighting. This refers to short-term, day-to-day actions that can help identify previously overlooked supply chain gaps. These tactics don’t build resilience, however, so they should be used only in concert with more complex, long-term reforms.Integrating and streamlining operations. Here, three actions can be critical to building resilient supply chains:<ul><li>creating a nerve centre to consolidate organizational responses</li><li>simulating and planning for extreme supply and demand disruptions</li><li>reevaluating just-in-time inventory strategies</li></ul>

Handling Long Term Uncertainty

Quick responses are easier to accomplish, but if long-term resilience is the goal, the following techniques can help:<ul><li>constructing a digital twin of the most critical parts of the supply chain, allowing for simulations and test cases</li><li>creating and testing “what if” scenarios</li><li>increasing data sharing with suppliers</li><li>considering ring-fencing a small part of the supply chain team</li></ul>

Achieving Structural Resilience

Supply chain management (and operations, more broadly) is now a CEO-level concern. Some of the strategic operational questions that CEOs have on their agenda include the following:Can we meet customer demand both today and tomorrow?Should we boost capacity to prepare for prolonged, rapid growth or reduce it to prepare for a slowdown?Where will we find workers who are skilled and digitally savvy?How do we decarbonize, minimize regulatory risk, and stay in business?

The Working Of Great Supply Chain Orgs

Incremental efforts aren’t enough to capture the full potential, and drilling down into the right supply chain structure and physical footprints is a critical starting point. Midsize supplier plants with 1,000 to 1,500 employees were nearly twice as likely as bigger or smaller counterparts to score in the top quartile on productivity. So having production divided among several plants rather than in a single mega factory could help a company move closer to customers and reduce location risks.

The Right Structure

Few established companies have fully digitized their end-to-end operations. But <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/the-ceo-architect-of-the-new-operations-agenda">digitization can be a feasible solution to operational challenges</a> seen across many companies and industries. <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-explainers/what-are-industry-4-0-the-fourth-industrial-revolution-and-4ir">Industry 4.0</a>, or the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), describes the impact that increased connectivity, automation, and more have had on technology, industry, and society.  Industry 4.0 has helped them sustain their operations during the COVID-19 crisis; over half said their digital transformations have been crucial to their pandemic responses.

Digital Supply Chains

Digitization, including advanced analytics, automation, and machine learning, can help operations become more productive, flexible, and geared for speed. Such approaches have yielded real results for some leading organizations—for example, reducing inventory and cost of goods sold by 30 percent, lowering the cost of quality by 50 percent, and improving cash and productivity by 30 percent. Surveys also suggest that digitization and an embrace of Industry 4.0 technologies can <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/lighthouses-unlock-sustainability-through-4ir-technologies">boost eco-efficiency</a> in supply chains.

Digitization For Efficiency

While some leading organizations have already realized value from digitization, others are lagging behind. Modernizing supply chain IT—for instance, to improve demand forecasting and planning systems—can have a powerful effect. For organizations looking to step up on IT for supply chain planning, three steps can help:<ul><li>Redesign processes.</li><li>Select vendors.</li><li>Create an implementation road map.</li></ul>Cumulatively, these changes can have a significant impact, especially when they support a successful rollout of integrated business planning (IBP).

Moving Towards Integrated Business Planning

Discover the world of business and economics.

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Economics

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Marketing & Sales

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Business

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Product & Design

What is supply chain?

Positioning is intentionally defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares about. Customers need to quickly understand your product, why it's unique and why it is important to them. Positioning is vital to every tactic we use, every campaign we launch, every bit of content we create, and every sales pitch we make. If we fail at positioning, we fail at marketing and sales, and the entire business is at risk of dying.

The importance of positioning

<ul><li>Your current customers love you, but new prospects don’t understand what you’re selling.</li><li>Your company has long sales cycles and low close rates, and you’re losing out to the competition.</li><li>You have high customer churn.</li><li>You’re under price pressure.</li></ul>

The signs of weak positioning

Most products are exceptional when we understand them within their best frame of reference. Great positioning considers all these aspects:<ul><li>The customer’s point of view on the problem you solve and other ways of solving that problem.</li><li>The ways you are uniquely distinct from those alternatives and why that’s meaningful for customers.</li><li>The characteristics of a potential customer that values what you can uniquely deliver.</li><li>The best market context for your product that makes your unique value obvious to those customers who are best suited to your product.</li></ul>

Aspects of great positioning

<ol><li>Competitive alternatives. What would your customers do if your solution didn’t exist?</li><li>Unique attributes. The features and capabilities that you have and the alternatives you lack.</li><li>Value (and proof). The benefit that those features enable for customers.</li><li>Target market characteristics. The characteristics of a group of buyers that lead them to care about the value you deliver.</li><li>Market category. The market you describe yourself as being part of to help customers understand your value.</li><li>Relevant trends. Trends that your target customers understand that can help make your product more relevant right now.</li></ol>

The five (plus one) components of effective positioning

<ol><li>Understand the customers who love your product</li><li>Form a positioning team</li><li>Align your positioning vocabulary and let go of your positioning baggage.</li><li>List your true competitive alternatives</li><li>Isolate your unique attributes or features</li><li>Map the attributes to value “themes”</li><li>Determine who cares a lot</li><li>Find a market frame of reference that puts our strengths at the centre and determine how to position in it</li><li>Layer on a trend (but be careful)</li><li>Capture your positioning so it can be shared.</li></ol>

The 10-step positioning process

Your best-fit customers hold the key to understanding what your product is. Make a shortlist of your best customers. The best customers understood your product quickly and bought from you quickly. They referred you to other companies and acted as a reference for you.

Understand the customers who love your product

A positioning process works best when it’s a team effort from different functions within the company as they can bring a unique perspective to how customers perceive and experience the product. Consider these outputs that all flow from positioning:<ul><li>Marketing: messaging, audience targeting and campaign development</li><li>Sales and business development: target customer segmentation and account strategy</li><li>Customer success: onboarding and account expansion strategy</li><li>Product and development: roadmaps and prioritisation</li></ul>

Form a positioning team

We have to consciously set aside our old ways of thinking to consider possible new ways to think about a product. This can be done with a common positioning vocabulary. Get the agreement from the team that the product may no longer be best positioned in the way it was created with a certain market and audience in mind.

Align your positioning vocabulary and let go of your positioning baggage

Understanding the customer’s problem isn’t enough. It is also important to understand the alternatives you are compared to. To do that, you need to understand who your real competitors are in the minds of customers. Grouping the alternatives can help the team move to the next step.

List your true competitive alternatives

List all of your capabilities that the alternatives don't, then group them broadly into "themes". To group points of value, take the perspective of a customer. For example, attributes like “works on any mobile device” or “works without an internet connection” provide value to customers who would like to use the solution in locations with intermittent or no Wi-Fi. You could group those attributes as “supports remote environments.”

Isolate and map your unique attributes or features

Once you have a good understanding of the value that your product delivers, then look at which customers really care about that value. An actionable segmentation captures a list of easily identifiable characteristics of a person or company that make them really care about what you do. The segment needs to be big enough that it’s possible to meet the goals of your business, and have important, specific, unmet needs that are common to the segment.

Determine who cares a lot

Pick a market frame of reference that makes your value evident to those who care about that value.When you choose to position within a specific market, you give your prospects clues about what products they should compare you with.Some ways to do this:<ul><li>Positioning to win an existing market by convincing customers that you are the best at delivering the solution.</li><li>Positioning to win a subsegment of an existing market by targeting buyers who have different requirements that the current overall market leader is not meeting.</li><li>Create a new market category that deserves to exist.</li></ul>

Find a market frame of reference that puts your strengths at the centre

You can use a current trend to your advantage if it helps to reinforce your position and the value of your offerings. Aligning with a trend can help make your offering look current and relevant. <ul><li>Only use trends when they have a clear link to your product.</li><li>Use a trend if it is possible, but you can have a successful business without being trendy.</li></ul>

Layer on a trend

Once you have worked through your positioning, you need to share it across the organisation. Positioning needs to have company buy-in so it can be used to inform branding, marketing campaigns, sales strategy, product decisions and customer-success strategy.

Capture Your Positioning so It Can Be Shared

Once you have completed a positioning exercise, you can consider how to define a story of how a salesperson would pitch the product. The aim is that everyone agrees on how the positioning will translate into a pitch. The team needs to agree on <ul><li>How to define the problem</li><li>The current solutions</li><li>The gap</li><li>The key purchase criteria that a customer should have</li></ul> Next, the marketing team will translate that into messaging to be used in marketing and sales materials, campaigns and the website.

Putting positioning into play

How to find your product’s “secret sauce” and then sell that to those who desire it.

You know your product is awesome-but does anybody else? Successfully connecting your product with consumers isn't a matter of following trends, comparing yourself to the competition or trying to attract the widest customer base. So what is it? April Dunford, positioning guru and tech exec, is here to enlighten you.

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Startups

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Obviously Awesome

<ol><li>REFLECT on what you accomplished versus what you expected to accomplish</li><li>PREP for your upcoming meetings for the next two weeks</li><li>MONITOR reports and tools that will provide you with key insights</li></ol>

The 3 components of Sunday Night Prep: Reflect, Prep, and Monitor (RPM)

<ul><li>Set up a recurring time in your calendar on Sunday nights/afternoons to do this exercise.</li><li>Planning for what you want to accomplish in the morning won’t get you the results that you want.</li><li>Free tools like boomerang will delay the Email from going until Monday.</li><li>If you’re not prepared for an upcoming meeting, see if you can push it back. Don’t waste people’s time.</li><li>You should also reflect on some of your personal development goals. Ask yourself what you could have done better the previous week.</li></ul>

5 planning tips that you don’t want to forget

This is my Sunday night prep as a Customer Success leader. It should relieve any anxiety you have and better prepare you for what will be coming at you.

The #1 productivity hack every Customer Success Leader should follow

Product Discovery is the process of figuring out what needs to be built. It validates your vision, gives you a clearer picture of user needs, and gives you key answers to roadmap-building questions.<ol><li>Is the problem worth solving?</li><li>Will our solution work?</li><li>Will people pay for it?</li></ol>If the answer to any of these questions is NO, you need to go back to the drawing board. Product Discovery is the process of working on your idea, asking questions of customers, until you get three big YES’S.

What is Product Discovery Anyway?

<ul><li>Map out the goal of the product (your why). Not just the vision for the product itself, but how it fits in with the company goals.</li><li>Think about your metrics. Knowing how you’re going to measure success gives you a concrete goal to aim for.</li><li> Decide what your limits are.</li><li>Identify what the risks are. Break down your worries into two categories: things you have control over and things you don’t.</li><li>Get to know your users. This is perhaps the most crucial stage in Product Discovery. As a Product Manager, your customers mean everything to you.</li></ul>

Steps to Product Discovery Success

Product Discovery is the process of figuring out what needs to be built. It validates your vision, gives you a clearer picture of user needs, and gives you key answers to roadmap-building questions…

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Career

Product Discovery 101 for Product Managers

The key is constant communication regardless of the scale of the teams. Periodical reviews for hindsight, experimentations, backlog, roadmaps, and KPIs have so much value to ensure we are focused on the right problems, understand our customer friction and competitive landscape.If each team is engaged, contributing and has skin in the game, they are aligned. Objectively defining backlog or new ideas helps to effectively prioritize the right problems and ultimately define product vision.

Getting cross-functional teams aligned on the same product vision

Darian Spicer is currently the Director of Product for Macy’s, where he has enjoyed a lengthy, 21-year career. He’s also a Product School alumnus! We were lucky enough to chat to him about his…

Day in the Life of a Director of Product at Macy’s — Alumni Stories

In a nutshell, product design encompasses the process of creating a product, from understanding the problem to creating a solution.Product design really is the unsung hero of the product world. No one notices if you do it really well, but everyone notices if you don’t!Even if you’re not a Product Designer, knowing more about good product design will make you a better Product Manager.

What is Product Design?

<ul><li>Product design used to be relegated to the world of physical products. It started out as ‘industrial design’ which was the commonly used term before mass-production became the most common way to get products to market.</li><li>Now, we can use it to describe both hardware and software design.</li><li>While no company has ever gone out of their way to build ugly products, when consumer tech really started taking off in the late-eighties/mid-nineties, what mattered most was that the technology worked.</li></ul>

A Brief History of Product Design

<ul><li>The iMac is an example of a big company first discovering the importance of aesthetics.</li><li>When the first Macintosh came out in the 70s, it wasn’t the prettiest thing ever.&nbsp;</li><li>When the iMac G3 came out in 1998, people fell in love. Then-VP of Industrial Design, Jony Ive, asked himself “What computer would The Jetsons have had?” As the first computer Apple were designing for the internet era, Ive wanted ‘the future’ to be reflected in the design.</li><li>From there, product experts have been striving for the best product design, bringing together a number of criteria and components.</li></ul>

Apple’s Product Design Revolution

Product design professionals generally regard The UX Honeycomb by Peter Morville as the classic diagram for the seven essential aspects of UX.<ul><li>Useful: A product that fills a need.</li><li>Usable: It reflects how easy it is to navigate your product.&nbsp;</li><li>Findable: Findable products have intuitive navigational structures.</li><li>Credible: A product that deserves the trust of your customers.&nbsp;</li><li>Accessible: You want your products to be available to whoever needs them.&nbsp;</li><li>Desirable: Branding and storytelling + the overall quality of your product.</li><li>Valuable: Your product needs to go the extra mile, to delight customers.</li></ul>

The UX Honeycomb

Generally, a Product Manager owns more of the product vision. They define the problem, have a deep understanding of their users, work with stakeholders, and own the roadmap.A Product Designer has more of an artistic flair. They take the problem defined by the PM and create research-driven design concepts which will solve the problem. They collaborate with engineers to ensure that what’s being built matches the criteria of the UX honeycomb.

Product Manager vs Product Designer

<ul><li>UX Designers are focused on information hierarchy, flows, interactivity, and they’re helping you map that out.</li><li>A Visual Designer helps your product design team make your product look like yours, and nobody else’s.</li><li>Content Partner: Words matter, and you need a Copywriter to make sure the language of your product sounds natural. T</li><li>Researcher: The people who tell you the what, why, and how to make sure your product is successful. Good design has to be data-driven. Your researchers will be able to tell you what works, what people like, and what users respond to.&nbsp;</li></ul>

Meet the Team

In our mission to make you the best possible Product Manager, we’re taking you through some of the most fundamental, but often most misunderstood and overlooked aspects of the product world. Today’s…

LinkedIn has a reputation of being an awesome place to work. It’s one of the highest ranked companies on Glassdoor, with employees noting things such as great work/life balance and a 97% approval rating of former CEO Jeff Weiner.In 2019, LinkedIn was also officially recognized as one of the best places to work for LGBT equality and disability inclusion, as well as one of the most ethical companies.

Workplace culture

In terms of workplace culture, LinkedIn has set out their main values on their careers portal:“Transformation: Every one of us is here to transform ourselves, our company and our world for the better. Integrity: We don’t believe the ends justify the means. Do the right thing. Collaboration: We’re capable of so much more when we work together. Humor: Changing the world is hard work. It’s important to have a few laughs along the way. Results: We set clear goals. We measure our success. We fix what doesn’t work. We deliver.”

LinkedIn: company values 

Aside from making your resume as attractive as possible, and getting the right experience and the right training, there are a couple of ways to actually land the interview.<ul><li>You can find jobs for LinkedIn directly on their careers portal. </li><li>You may also get a job through their employee-referral scheme, or if you’ve properly optimized your LinkedIn profile, a recruiter may contact you directly.</li></ul>

Getting the interview

The number of phone interviews and exactly who will be on them varies, depending on the team you’re interviewing with. Generally, your first interview will be with a recruiter. This is just a box-checking interview to make sure you have the bare essentials for a PM job.Then you’ll have between three and five more telephone interviews with various team members. This is where they’ll be gauging things, such as culture fit, previous experience, personality, skills … everything. You should be told in advance whom you’ll be talking to.

Phone interviews

Who attends your onsite interviews will depend on what team you’re working with. They’ll likely be with senior product managers and a director of product.&nbsp;These are the interviews where you really have to bring your game face. Make sure you know your resume, back to front. Show how data-driven you are by not just knowing what projects you worked on, but the metrics involved.

Onsite interviews

<ul><li>What feature or piece of work are you most proud of?</li><li>How would you increase enterprise engagement?</li><li>If you were a VC, are you more bullish on AR or VR? What app would you build? What would be your killer feature?</li><li>How would you design furniture for Airbnb?</li><li>What is your favorite product? How would you improve it?</li></ul>

Sample interview questions

<ul><li>Finish your profile. Fill out your profile with all your education and achievements.</li><li>Think about your keywords. If you want to show up in searches, you need these words on your profile.&nbsp;</li><li>Use visual aids. Upload screenshots of things you’ve worked on, or photos of you with your team at events.&nbsp;</li><li>Follow industry leaders. Don’t just blindly add anyone and everyone.&nbsp;</li><li>Get involved in professional groups. Online product manager communities are a great way to network online.</li><li>Avoid funny/witty job titles.&nbsp;</li><li>Interact with product managers. Comment on articles about product/tech, or even write your own.&nbsp;</li></ul>

How to use LinkedIn to get a PM job

If you’re hunting for your next job in product management, you should definitely already be familiar with LinkedIn. You’ve seen all the job titles possible (I don’t know what a product development…

How to Get a Product Management Job at LinkedIn

Today ’ s Crms are loaded with features to help you make the most of your customer relationships. But what really matters is how your team uses them to set up and maintain that success. Many companies have trouble getting Acclimated and finding a steady rhythm with their Crm. Others have trouble getting Buy-In and full cooperation from different players in the organization.

How Our Customer Success Team Uses a CRM

Copper ’ s platform offers three activity types: phone calls, meetings, and To-Dos. If you have more client interactions than these, you can also create custom activity types like “training” and “Demos”. With this detailed data on hand, we’re able to provide more personalized, actionable, and Proactive support. If you have more customer interactions than these,

1. We take full advantage of activity types.

The dynamic two-way integration between Zendesk and copper allows our cs team to access a complete view of interactions that a customer or lead has had with the business. Any of us can view new, pending, on hold, solved, closed, and open tickets associated with a customer or lead in the “related” section of their Crm record.

2. We integrate Copper with Zendesk.

A snazzy Crm platform is nothing without a concerted, Systemized, and streamlined effort to use it. Cue copper’s collaboration features like@ -mentioning, customer and seller moment visibility, and real-time sales help from your team are some of the most commonly used by our teams here at copper. The@ -mention feature is one of the fastest and most efficient ways to make sure that a team member is looped into the right conversations.

3. We use Copper to collaborate. A lot.

You can&nbsp;<a href='https://support.copper.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000558631-Working-with-Custom-Fields' class="idea-content-link" target='_blank' rel="noreferrer">create custom fields </a><ul><li>Date fields&nbsp;</li><li>Number fields&nbsp;</li><li>Checkboxes&nbsp;</li><li>URLs&nbsp;</li><li>Percentages&nbsp;</li><li>Currencies&nbsp;</li><li>Tags&nbsp;</li><li>Connect fields&nbsp;</li><li>Text areas for keywords or paragraphs&nbsp;</li><li>Single and multi-select dropdowns&nbsp;</li></ul>

4. We use Copper to make handoffs much smoother.

What really matters is how your team uses them to set up and maintain that success. After all, best-in-class capabilities are pointless if you’re not using them to their potential, right? Many…

Almost every single company claim to provide great customer service, however, we still hear complaints from customers so we will presume that there is an opportunity for improvement.In order to have a thriving customer support team you must define what "great service" is for your company. Afterwards, once you've set a standard you then only need to deliver on your company values, consistently exceed customer expectations, and examine any legal requirements.

Defining Great Customer Service

It's tempting to say that your company will be available on every channel for your customers however, this isn't applicable for small teams without having to spread your team too thin and deliver inconsistent customer support quality.In order to figure out which channels to support you need to find out what channels your customers are using the most (tech support/live chat/social media), start with focusing on fewer channels, and then capitalize on your existing skill sets.

Choosing which channels to support

So that you may be able to provide high quality, reliable customer support, you must have a great customer support team, but how do you filter out the ones that you need? Here are some questions that can help you better choose candidates:<ul><li>What is the ideal support personality you're looking for?</li><li>What skills should your support professional have? </li><li>How will you integrate this new hire to the team? and;</li><li>How do you keep them?</li></ul>

Hiring the right people

Customer service softwares produce detailed results for us, but it doesn't tell you which metrics matter to your team and what you need to do about them. In order to choose which metrics matter here are three big questions that will help you decide:<ul><li>Why are you reporting?</li><li>Who are you reporting to?</li><li>What do you want the outcome to be?</li></ul>The metrics you choose to report should be meaningful and authentic. Afterwards, take a baseline measurement, set internal targets for your team, and work forward.

Measure the right data

<ul><li>Selecting customer service software: You need to know the difference between "nice to have" features versus necessary features along with the apps that you need to integrate. Having slow or unhelpful tools will waste your support's time.</li><li>Internal Systems: Customer support teams are heavily reliant  on internal systems such as custom database searches, configuration pages, and logging systems to access customers' fix issues. If you can't afford attractive software, make sure that it's not painful to use.</li><li>Set aside a budget for individual tools for your support team, it'll be worth the investment.</li></ul>

Picking your tools

The only downside to having a knowledge base is that it's time consuming to develop, but here are the benefits of having it:<ul><li>It will lessen the strain on your support team</li><li>Allow for faster onboarding </li><li>Greater consistency of support; and</li><li>Saves time for both support and customer</li></ul>

Creating a knowledge base

It's highly recommended to have a customer-focused company, but what should the goal be? The goal is to build in systems across teams that support great service.Support managers are encourages to:<ol><li>Push decision-making to the front line</li><li>Automate customer-friendly processes</li><li>Create feedback loops; and</li><li>Making the team feel respected day in, day out.</li></ol>

Integrating support into your product and company

Follow these 7 foundational steps to build a brand new support department or maximize the success of your existing customer support team.

teamwork

Teamwork

How to Build a Thriving Support Team and Department - Help Scout

A well maintained, updated account plan is an incredible resource to keep you in the know and two steps ahead of your client. This document should be a one-stop-shop for reacquainting yourself of your stakeholders, their evolving success criteria or expected outcomes, and current projects or tasks. This means you don’t need to go digging in your success platform or CRM to get back up to date.

You Should Be Doing Account Planning.

Rather than having to go back and sort through your call notes or your CRM in order to prepare for a renewal conversation or QBR, your account plan is a great place to start. Updated accordingly, your account plan should be a record of recent successes, projects, and initiatives. As a living, breathing document it tells an ongoing story and can be utilized by you and others throughout the customer lifecycle.

Account Planning for QBR Schedule

Account plans are like the insurance policy for a success team. Things happen — people quit, leave the company, get sick, or even (hopefully!) get promoted. While we always wish for ample time for transition and formal handoff calls, we don’t always get that luxury and sometimes have to pick up the pieces while in motion.In the anticipation of the unknown tomorrow, prepare for it today by covering all your bases and thinking one or two steps ahead.

Helps In Transition Times

When it comes to account plans, don’t try to do it all at once. Start with just a handful of your clients or chose just a couple of data points to begin collecting and start building your library over time. I’ve started blocking 2, one-hour blocks throughout the week to spend time updating my account plans and have started looking forward to that time!

Keeps leadership and peers in the know

Recently I covered the building blocks to structuring an impactful account plan. Now that you’ve got the basics down, I want to revisit why it’s vital and worthwhile to invest the time in keeping…

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