Deep collaboration and How it can help Customer Facing teams

Introduction

Deep collaboration is an interesting topic, especially at the times when teams are working remotely and workforce is becoming global.

It is interesting because it impacts organisation productivity at scale.

Understanding Deep Collaboration

Deep collaboration is when each member of a team brings their full self, bringing their skills & knowledge together for completing a common shared goal/objective.

For example, for bringing a better experience to customers (say metrics is Full Resolution Time — FRT), requires cross teams to have a deeper collaboration.

Let’s take an example of a simple customer query that pops up on a customer chat like Intercom or Fresh Chat or Zendesk Chat.

Case Study

Customer : Hi, I am stuck and not able to proceed to create a new report on your platform.

Support Agent : Thanks for reaching out. I am sorry to hear that you have not been able to create a report. I will help to sort that out.

—-

—

(After the conversation, it was found to be a new scenario of reporting feature that the customer is trying , for which there is a system anomaly)

To maintain a consistent customer experience with optimum Full Resolution Time, it requires the Support Team (L1), (L2) & Engineering ( Defect fixing ) to come together — understand the customer context well.

Challenges in Deep Coloboration

The first challenge is understanding context, by participating team members who is looking to solve the above issue for the customer.

• Who is the customer & what’s the contractual obligation? — This detail is often in a CRM system.
• What’s the current status /stage of the customer? Have they gone live? What’s their current pulse? — These details are often in a separate Customer Success tool or Project management tool.

The second challenge is to make sure that when the Support Agent transfer this case to L2, he understands the issue & the context. Often L2 is on a separate system like Jira ( which is an internal issue tracking system, as against the customer-facing ticketing system — which the L1 team uses). There is a loss of valuable contextual information as well as productivity loss while filling in the required fields for the L2 team.

The third issue is issue triaging. This is often required as there is only a limited number of issues that can be handled at any point in time by the L3 team. Without enough account context, it’s a very subjective triage or taken purely from a technical perspective, often having a large business impact.

Which comes up the question: how do you get all the teams that have an impact on the customer experience to effectively collaborate in their respective contexts, ensuring that account context is well understood and driven systematically across systems and teams?

Driving Growth through deep collaboration

Account Based Collaboration

How do you drive teams in Sales ( Account Managers ), Customer Success (CSM), Support ( L1, L2), Engineering ( L3), Marketing ( Customer Marketing & Advocacy), and Product Managers ( new Feature requests ) work together as an Account Team and collaborate to help grow it, resulting in spectacular NRR?

This is, perhaps, the key to driving high growth through retention and expansion of existing accounts.

Interesting Read on Deep Collaboration

1. https://venturebeat.com/2020/12/05/salesforce-slack-mashup-signals-the-rise-of-deep-collaboration