How to Ensure Customer Success during Mergers & Acquisitions

Customer Success (CS) and customer experience are often disregarded when firms merge, despite the fact that it is undoubtedly one of the most crucial components of any business. According to Gartner’s research, organizations of the future will compete mostly on customer experience. Driving Customer Success during acquisitions is the trickiest as even the slightest operational change can have a huge negative impact on both personnel and customers.

While keeping Customer Success in the forefront of your thoughts throughout the Merger&Acquisition process is difficult, the rewards are undeniable: it protects your most valuable customers and your workforce.

We discovered that maintaining a high-quality customer experience necessitates a combination of competent employees and operational methods.

Why is it crucial to consider Customer Success during acquisition?
While customers are the foundation of a company’s worth, acquired companies’ customer relationships are sometimes treated as an afterthought during the acquisition process.

As a result, once due diligence is finished and contracts are signed, customer success teams are frequently in pandemonium. Customer success teams work tirelessly to comprehend and manage the impact on their own customers, as well as acquired and mutual customers.

We’ll look at some of the different challenges that can arise, as well as the best practices for dealing with them, in this guide. We’ve made some generalizations because every acquisition is different, and acquired clients may have different rep/client ratios, ASPs, touch cadence, and so on, but many difficulties stay the same. We’re assuming that our client is the acquirer.

Extra Resource: How to do Effective account transitions in Customer Success

Here are the best customer success practices during mergers & acquisitions:
Include someone on the M&A team who can act as a customer advocate. Assign this individual to customer due diligence prior to the transaction and experience management during the integration.
Evaluate the aim in a way that goes beyond financial reasons. Use business and operating model research to assist you to connect targets to the deal’s strategic goal.
If the deal goes through, conduct a gap analysis. between present and target customer experience capabilities. Analyze customer service, value propositions, channel, brand promise, and engagement to know how to bridge the identified gaps.
Drill down deeper into the present operating model. It is vital to gain a holistic picture of how the target’s different competencies, from culture to IT, maybe merged to achieve success.
The goal is to figure out what the business drivers are and how they relate to one another.
Consider doing workshops with different team members to identify opportunities and new ways to provide value to the consumer. This method allows you to do far more than an analytical spreadsheet exercise ever could.
Go a step further and ask customers what they value the most
Incorporate the business drivers and their relationships into the business case. Determine the value drivers that contribute to the customer experience and customer success. Make sure there’s a clear connection between the fulfilling customer journey and the financial aspect of the acquisition.
Engineer the delivery of customer value into the integration plans, as specified in the business case. This entails arranging integration from the right to the left rather than the more conventional left-to-right method. Begin with the deal’s desired business results, particularly the customer value propositions, and proceed back to the value drivers that will enable those goals to be realized.
Structure the integration such that people’s resources, talents, and traits are in sync with the work rhythm. In each scenario, this will be different.
Quick wins the race. Immediate value delivery with minimal work required after the transaction.
Takeaway
During mergers and acquisitions, constant and regular communication is critical. Make sure everyone in your team understands what’s going on. Because the inevitable change might cause anxiety for many individuals. The Customer Success’ top responsibility should be managing change – for both internal employees and external customers.

Firms that prioritize the customer experience and customer success throughout the process will position themselves for future success. It will also enable them to retain present customers. You can learn more about best customer success practices on our blog.

This blog was originally published in https://customersuccessbox.com/blog/how-to-ensure-customer-success-during-mergers-acquisitions/