How can I get the customer success and support teams in my company to leverage service partners?

Great question! I recommend you spend time meeting with individual team members - the CSMs and support agents actually working with your customers - to get a better understanding of their day to day before trying to get them to leverage service partners. It's important to recognize how busy these teammates are already just trying to ensure customers are happy and they may not have immediate capacity to take on something new like leveraging a service partner. Once you do find teammates that have capacity, be sure to work with them to educate other teammates on the benefits they experienced while working with you to leverage said service partner.

Facts and data will help you prove the case. Showing a business case that supports reducing the costs to the business by off-loading services the partners can provide. Most internal support teams are limited with their resources so share how partners can take on those services to help them achieve their goals (retention, resolutions, call time etc). Also showing either in-house or industry data around retention of customers through partners. Normally better retention rates are possible through partners which means (in SaaS) billings continue longer and the CLV is more valuable to the company. Share how specific partners are driving value for your competition.

I’ll answer this question with a question (annoying, I know.) What value does the customer success and support team get from service partners? This is a question that my team has been working on with our customer success team, all year. We’ve created workflows to incorporate partners into renewal and upsell conversations, or to help smooth out friction with customers experiencing challenges. But until you know how your CS/Support team perceives Partnerships, as well as what their needs are, it will be hard to drive adoption of service partners.

Good enablement is essential for anybody in your organisation to be able to leverage service partners. The main objective of the enablement sessions should be that the teams have a good understanding of the value that partner will drive to their clients/prospects, are confident in how your teams would work together, and ultimately trust those partner to make them look good. Three things that can be done to help support this and build trust are; 1. A strong joint value proposition 2. Multiple case studies with mutual clients 3. identify the key signals that indicate that client or prospect could benefit from your services partners offering.

1. Start by creating a customer success plan. This will help outline the goals and objectives of your customer success team, as well as how they can work with service partners to achieve these goals. 2. Make sure your customer success team is properly trained on how to work with service partners. They should understand the role these partners play in achieving customer success, and be able to effectively communicate with them. 3. Work with your service partners to create a strategy for customer success. This should include the services they offer, as well as how they can help support your customers’ success. 4. Cooperate with your service partners to measure customer success. This will help you track progress and ensure that both your team and your service partners are meeting the needs of your customers.

This is a bit tough to answer without more context. It depends if your CS team is designed to service accounts or not, and if that is an additional revenue stream for your company or not. Basically, you have to find an angle that a service partner either saves them time/work and improves the end product/experience for your users. Figure out what their goals are and what challenges they experience. Then try and solve for those with your service partners. Additionally, what data can you find to support how beneficial your service partners are? Do they have a higher Avg Sales Price (ASP)? Do they retain longer? Do they use more features? Give them quantitative data on top of qualitative data to build your biz case.