Customer Success in a complex business transformation

The mandate

I joined Mercell when Customer Success was under considerable pressure. Customer churn was high, resolution rates were low and there was a substantial backlog of customer enquiries and support tickets.

As a member of the executive leadership team, I was responsible for more than 125 people across Customer Success and customer services.

My mandate was to establish direction, structure and clearer ways of working, strengthen accountability and improve the organisation's ability to serve and retain customers.

The challenge

The issues facing Customer Success could not be viewed in isolation.

Mercell had grown through multiple acquisitions in the European public procurement market, bringing together different platforms, systems, operating models, cultures and approaches to customers.

At the same time, the company was moving from country-based operations towards a functional organisation across markets while pursuing a major technology transition. Existing platforms still needed to support customers as development resources increasingly focused on a consolidated platform for the future.

The transition was particularly complex for public-sector buyers, where customised solutions, established workflows and integrations made technology changes more difficult than on the supplier side.

The consolidation of financial systems and customer data created further operational challenges. Many of the consequences ultimately reached Customer Success.

What I did

Customer Success had accumulated a broad range of responsibilities: customer enquiries, onboarding, proactive customer contact, cross-selling and upselling, consultancy and first-line support across multiple markets and platforms.

I focused on four connected areas:

• Direction and priorities: Clarifying what mattered most amid competing operational and commercial demands.
• Structure and accountability: Establishing clearer responsibilities and expectations across an organisation of more than 125 people.
• Processes and consistency: Creating a more consistent approach across markets while bringing together practices inherited from acquired businesses.
• Cross-functional execution: Identifying where customer outcomes depended on Product, Technology, Support, Finance and other functions and bringing those dependencies into executive decision-making.

The objective was not to remove accountability from Customer Success. It was to distinguish between issues the organisation could and should solve itself and those requiring coordinated action elsewhere.

My contribution

Not every underlying issue could be resolved within the duration or scope of an interim assignment. But the organisation had a clearer understanding of its priorities, responsibilities and the changes required both within Customer Success and across the functions on which customer outcomes depended.

The assignment reinforced an important operating principle for me: customer problems are not necessarily customer-function problems.

Customer Success can improve its organisation, processes and accountability, but it cannot compensate indefinitely for issues originating elsewhere in the value chain. Sustainable customer performance depends on alignment between what a company sells, develops, delivers, supports and promises.