At Tideworks, we’re devoted to our clients. It’s not enough to sell the right solution — we work to ensure our clients get the most value out of our products as possible. Our Client Services support ecosystem exists to solve problems quickly and transmit the resulting knowledge to our clients and internal teams.
Tideworks Client Services is the latest iteration of our evolving client service experience. We designed our Client Services team to create even more effective collaboration between our client-facing divisions. In combining several functions into a unified whole, we gave our clients a single set of contacts for any issues they encounter.
Read on: Customer Success Management: The Backbone of the New Mainsail 10
With a single contact, clients can access client advocacy, track project status, solve technical issues, and request help with feature enhancements. They have access to the breadth of knowledge diffused throughout the organization. The team captures each Client Services interaction and uses them to improve our products and widen our knowledge base.
To accomplish this level of integration, we’ve defined four different positions. Each requires a specific skill set and deals with a discrete facet of our client services experience. Working together, they can deliver precise answers to any client issue more rapidly. Let’s examine these roles in more detail.
Client Success Managers (CSM)
Client Success Managers are client advocates. They work to build relationships. Their job is to understand how our clients use our products. By maintaining a dialogue, they learn what clients need and how they see their business developing. Managers funnel this information into the organization to help inform product road maps to keep our offerings relevant.
Day-to-day, CSMs work in the trenches. They handle account issues, check-in on project statuses, escalate technical issues to find the right experts, and keep communication lines open. They offer outreach and provide a voice for our clients back to Tideworks. Functioning as the face of the team, CSMs help connect our clients to the rest of the Client Services division.
Client Support Specialist (CSS)
Client Support Specialists are the second half of our client communication solution. While CSMs provide advocacy and outreach, Client Support Specialists help clients with on-demand technical support issues. They are our client-facing help desk. When clients call or email about a problem, a Client Support Specialist will create a ticket and provide basic technical support. If they can’t find a solution, they’re empowered to determine the best source for information and escalate the service request along that path.
They might get a CSM involved if the client needs specific usage information. If the problem is highly technical, they can pull in members of the Tideworks engineering team. Client Support Specialists have ownership of the tickets they create and the tools they need to find the best solution.
Client Solutions Specialist (CSS)
Client Solutions Specialists help translate real-world use cases into improvements, new product features, and better solutions for our clients. They’re product subject matter experts, versed in solution features, and familiar with their different configurations and practical terminal applications. When we release new features, Client Solutions Specialists help clients understand them and aid in implementing them correctly.
Clients often call in Client Solutions Specialists to help them better utilize specific functionality. When clients are interested in a novel application of one of our tools, Client Solutions Specialists articulate the business case and requirements, then translate them into actionable feature requests. Client Solutions Specialists work closely with the product feedback provided by CSMs.
Knowledge Group
This last division exists to spread the Client Services team’s growing knowledge base smoothly throughout the company. They maintain our learning management system (LMS) platform and populate it with content. They solve a problem that every organization faces — how to disseminate knowledge from each team member’s head in a form that benefits clients and the company.
The group creates documentation, videos, training, and other items for easy consumption by clients and other Client Services team members. For example, suppose a Client Support Specialist or Client Solutions Specialist discovers a novel solution to a specific client problem. In that case, the knowledge group might write an article detailing the solution to speed resolution the next time we encounter the same issue.
We also use their knowledge to train new employees, dramatically increasing access to the entirety of Tideworks’ accrued client and product knowledge.
Client Services is Designed For You
We designed our support ecosystem as a positive feedback loop to enhance every aspect of our clients’ experience.
Client Success Managers maintain client relationships and provide a voice for our clients directly to those that improve our products. Client Support Specialists solve even the most complex technical issues by calling in needed resources. Client Solutions Specialists take feedback from CSMs and use it to imagine new features, integrations, and novel ways to use existing features within our products. Finally, our Knowledge Group digests all of that accumulated experience and builds resources to distribute where needed.
The whole system improves with time — solving problems faster, better, and with greater specificity. Our clients enjoy a superior user experience tailored to their needs, and our Client Services Team helps improve our products to aid an ever-expanding client base.
Client Services exists because when you succeed, we all succeed.
