When you're part of a customer success team, you're the outward voice and representative of your company. That can be daunting, especially when customer experience makes or breaks a company's reputation. 

Building a solid remote culture and foundation for your customer success team leads to a positive employee experience and successful business. With the proper steps, you can ensure that your team is ready to step up to the challenge, regardless of where or when they’re working.

Why are strong customer success teams crucial for business?

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Your customer success team educates and supports your customers. They’re equipped with the skills that ensure your customers have a positive experience, discover solutions to their problems, and use your products or services effectively.

Customer success professionals are hit with many questions and challenges every day. Building confidence in your team is essential and will lead to customers building trust in your brand.

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Let’s move into ten ways you can train your remote customer success team to make confident decisions:

1. Ask the right questions during the interview process

Use your time wisely in the interview process to understand what drives your candidates, how they respond to different scenarios, and if they can get behind your mission. Behavioral questions highlight where potential employees might need support. Some examples of questions you can ask are:

• How would you change your success strategy for a recurring revenue model?
• If the product was down and that affected multiple customers, what would you do to manage the problem?
• Imagine that you're working with a customer and you realize your colleague gave them the wrong information. How do you handle the situation with the customer and your colleague?
  

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2. Create a well-documented onboarding process

Onboarding sets the foundation for an employee’s tenure. If you want an employee who makes confident decisions, it’s crucial to be transparent about your mission and values during onboarding.

Remote onboarding is a challenging process for everyone, so create a checklist of everything you need to cover. You can produce pre-recorded lessons that get remote team members on the same page regarding your offerings, customers, and company philosophy. Some companies also equip their customer success staff with loose scripts and examples of how to connect with customers:

“Our customer success team needs to be well-trained on our products to handle any incoming customer issues swiftly with top-tier service,” said James Shalhoub, co-founder of Finn. “While we first bring new hires into this role, sticking to a loose script is a must-have tool for consistency and accountability.”

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3. Invest in the right tools and technology

Customer success representatives and managers need the right tools to connect and train their customers confidently. For example, you should invest in tools that help you:

• Educate your customers asynchronously.
• Get feedback from customers consistently.
• Understand and prevent customer churn.
  

Another important tool you can utilize is documentation.
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Remote teams thrive through a documentation-first culture, where every project, process, or change is documented in a central hub. Task everyone on your customer success team with updating the central documentation to limit miscommunications and questions.  

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4. Focus on results over process

Creating strict processes can be harmful to your customer success team. Micromanagement can halt growth for you and your team. 

“You should assign them tasks and monitor their progress. Point out what went wrong instead of blaming others for the failure to meet your expectations.” explains Michael Butt, Vice President Of Marketing at Verta, “One of the biggest mistakes managers make when dealing with remote workers is micro-monitoring their working styles.”

For example, one of your employees may have a recommendation to improve strategy or speed. Adapt your processes based on feedback from your team to be an innovative team. 

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5. Strengthen the bond between sales and customer success

The handoff between sales and customer success is crucial. Nothing breaks confidence more than not following through on a promise made during the sales process due to a disconnect. Sales and customer success teams must bond and create a working relationship with their customers in mind. 
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With a strengthened bond, your customer success team will be able to walk into customer introduction meetings with conviction.

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6. Create trust through team building

Team building for customer success departments is crucial. Employees need to feel comfortable depending on their team members to ask questions and increase shared learning. Investing in simple activities can bring your team together quickly and make a world of difference in how confident your staff is. Some ways you can approach this are:

• Hold virtual team building activities like building terrarium kits, or inviting comedians
• Play games together like Jackbox Party Games, Among Us, or Too Deep for Me
• Offer the opportunity for random coffee chats with colleagues you don't work as closely with

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7. Make work-life balance a non-negotiable

Getting time off as a customer success employee can mean that your colleagues have to pick up the slack. No one wants to fight for work-life balance because they are afraid of what an absence does to their teammates.

As a manager, it’s your job to encourage time off and create an action plan while someone is out.

Time off helps employees feel refreshed, improves employee wellbeing, and reduces unscheduled absences for employers. Improving work-life balance may require you to hire more customer success staff and improve documentation, but it will result in lower turnover and higher productivity. 

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8. Ensure customer success  employees understand their value

Does your customer success department realize how pivotal they are to your organization?

“Reinforce your customer service values and the role your new hire plays in the overall company mission,” shares Ashley Cox, PHR, SHRM-CP, founder & CEO at SproutHR.

Your organization wouldn’t serve the number of customers or scale without a skillful customer success team. Employees feel more confident when they can understand the value they bring to the company.

Customer success is such a pivotal part of a growing organization. As your customer base grows, you need people dedicated to making sure they get the most out of your products and services. Taking good care of your people by using helpful employee engagement tools and training your team to make confident decisions will ensure that your team is ready for the spotlight.