Camille E. Acey

I recently had occasion to chat with a few different CS leaders whose teams had gone through fairly dramatic layoffs.* One of them asked me what they could do today to weather the storm and get the boot off their teams in the immediate term and here is a summary of what I said.

Embrace Automation, Create Templates, and Write More Docs

Every company has things they are doing for themselves and customers over and over again that simply aren’t scalable. This isn’t to say that scalability is everything; some things — many things! — require a human touch and always ever will, but in the early days of a business you often don’t have the volume and experience to know whether throwing a human or a machine at something will give you the best ROI. You just have to go with your gut. However, when you lose like 50% or even 75% of your staff over night due to layoffs, you’re going to have to sit down real fast and do a fearless and searching inventory of where all your team’s time is going and where you can cut. Low hanging fruit include setting task reminders, sending follow-up emails, and even doing cadence calls. CRM/CSM tools like Hubspot, Catalyst, and even Salesforce can help you with tasks and automated emails, and video apps like Loom can turn what would be a 30 minute to hour-long call into a snappy 4 minute video and a calendar booking link for an optional meeting. Configure and use whatever software you can get your hands on, so that you can get more of this kind of work off your team’s plate.

In the unfortunate situation where the belt-tightening won’t allow you to leverage any paid tools, lean into email templates that can be shared across the team for quick copy-pasting and also spend some cycles beefing up your customer-facing documentation.

Segment For Success

While we are all precious in the eyes of our creators, we aren’t all created equal as customers. If you haven’t already done the critical work of segmenting your customers to introduce different customer experiences, there is no time like the present to define some experience buckets and determine which customers fit where.

The traditional approach with segmentation was to give all your time to the largest, highest-paying customers and then give the smaller ones short-shrift or simply tell them to open a support ticket. These days many CS leaders tend to align more with Lincoln Murphy’s idea of “appropriate experience“. If a customer needs more synchronous support we should find a reasonable way to give it to them regardless of how much they pay. Alternatively, if a large customer has mastered the product to the point that they could give lectures on it, maybe it is time to “graduate” them to be a resource to the greater user community either via Slack or a forum or even Stack Overflow. You can send them swag and give them lots of credit via your newsletter or over socials. Acknowledging and rewarding power user customers goes a long way toward building loyalty and goodwill.

While you may be contractually obliged to keep a certain number of touchpoints with some of your marquee customers, where you aren’t under any such obligation it may make sense to pump the brakes and assess whether your POCs truly need to (or want to!) communicate with you as frequently as they do, and if so, whether it needs to be synchronous. I’ve had a lot of success leveraging email or shared docs to give customers’ status on ongoing initiatives rather than having to sit through a long call to verbally share status. Could that work? Or could biweekly cadence calls turn into monthly or even quarterly deeper dives instead?

When every minute counts towards not only customer retention but employee retention, segmentation can help you use your team’s time more wisely.

Level With Leadership

People in tech talk a big game about 10X performance and increasing productivity, but the idea that 1 person can do the work of 3 or 4 or even 5 is totally absurd. If your company laid off half or more of your team and is expecting you to just pick up the slack, it’s just a no.

If you want to keep your job (at least for the time being), you are going to have to gently introduce a dose of reality while also, at all times, making it clear that you are a team player that wants to keep contributing to the company’s well-being. The best way to do this is to share with them what your team is redoubling your commitment to. If there are certain customer deliverables that are critical to revenue, retention and/or renewal, share your plan with leadership for ensuring they will be delivered while at the same time informing them what will (unfortunately) have to fall by the wayside due to limited capacity.

You should emphasize that you greatly wish to resuscitate the “waysided” efforts once you have more capacity and explain to them how you will keep those efforts warm in the interim. If you get pushback, you would be wise to employ the, “How am I supposed to do that?” verbal technique from former FBI negotiator Chris Voss (of the great book Never Split The Difference), in which you turn it back to leadership to explain to you how you are going to do the work of multiple people and also convince your direct reports to do the same.

They probably won’t be able to.

Because it’s impossible.

Buuuuut maybe this will open up a space to start thinking about what a better future could look like in the medium and long term.

We are living in tricky times here, dear leaders. Good people are being let go for weird macroeconomic reasons that had nothing to do with them and the survivors are bearing the brunt of extra work they never signed up for and probably can’t deliver. It isn’t fair, but it is what we are working with. If you work a little smarter, you will still be just one, single person but you will hopefully be a person with a plan and some room to breath.

*Please don’t ask me to use that “polite company” term “Reduction In Force” like people’s actual lives aren’t affected by losing their jobs, y’all.