If your customer success team has only one or two people responsible for covering multiple products with complex features, how would you recommend dividing workload in the short-term so as best to support long-term growth and expansion of the team?

This is undoubtedly a challenging scenario. Here are recommendations for smaller customer success teams to follow in this situation.

1. Understand the highest priorities for the business and how that translates to positively impacting customers. There are typically many tasks that CS teams can be doing, yet only some that drive significant internal and external (customer) value. Therefore, focus on those high-value activities that align with your business objectives.

2. Look for friction points in the customer journey and how to solve them. For example, you work on ways customers can self-serve on requests frequently coming to the CS team.

3. Leverage the teams around you to lighten the load and look for ways to automate some of the repetitive requests.

4. Segment the install base so you understand which customers to focus on in the short term.

5. Work through a weekly, monthly and quarterly plan around how to engage your customers. Typically there are a smaller number of customers that will de-risk your business by focusing on them initially. However, if you work in a higher volume, more transactional business, time would be best spent on understanding what touchpoints your customers require at a minimum to ensure they are getting value and building them out by leveraging digital where possible.

In this scenario, I aim to pinpoint areas where the most significant impact can be made. If one product exhibits notably lower retention rates, focusing efforts there may be prudent. Alternatively, if a product contributes substantially to revenue, it warrants priority attention. Specializing team members to focus solely on one product can also streamline their efforts and enhance expertise.