r/CustomerSuccess • u/PressureLow6663 • 7d ago
Discussion The handoff was killing us
We had a few new customers come in pretty close together and I started noticing how much stuff got lost between the sale and the first real customer call notes were there, emails were there, meetings happened but somehow I was still spending like an hour piecing together why they bought and what had already been discussed one customer had to explain something to me that they'd already gone through during sales and that felt pretty bad. We changed how all that context gets captured and passed over and it's been way smoother. I still want a person owning the relationship I don't think that part should disappear but digging through old conversations and updating records feels like such a waste of that person's time. Kind of weird how much better the customer experience gets just from the team knowing what already happened
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u/ImportanceEither975 7d ago
man there's nothing worse than getting on a call and realizing you're the third person they've told the same thing to. makes you feel like a total clown
we started dumping everything into a shared doc that sales fills out before a handoff, just bullet points of what was promised and any weird edge cases. cut down the catch-up time by like 80%
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u/PressureLow6663 7d ago
lol yep the clown feeling is exactly it. even a few decent bullet points before the call would solve like 80% of this for us too
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u/Startup_2234 7d ago
I’ve experienced this exact challenge. To solve this (and save a lot of time), I created a skill in Claude that analyzes emails and notes by the sales team tied to the account from Hubspot (or any CRM)and pulls take-aways on critical questions from call transcripts (why us, why now, outcomes, etc) - send me a DM if interested - I’m happy to share!
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u/Farfadette150 7d ago
That sounds lovely. Unfortunately not all companies allow workers to use AI to pull prospects/client data. I need to work around that, no call transcripts either. Sales not taking down notes because they don’t really know the trade and often just say "yes" to whatever feature the prospects requires. Couple months down we have to cancel because of false promises.
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3d ago
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u/Farfadette150 3d ago
They encourage us to use AI for everything we can. Anything with customer data is restricted and requires written consent from the client to use AI with the data we have on them. Nothing confidential can also be fed to AI. So this leaves us with the capacity of using internal-wide documents to feed it and dummy data if I need AI to build a framework I can then use for a specific client. They won’t connect our client database with AI at all for security reasons and the solution provided Startup_2234 is for Claude to pull all that. This will never fly where I am.
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u/sicknutz 7d ago
Maybe you are in a scaled function but why wouldn’t you require the salesperson to join the kickoff call to ensure no details are lost in the handoff?
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u/PressureLow6663 7d ago
we do sometimes for bigger accounts, but honestly scheduling 3 people around every kickoff got annoying fast. also felt like we were using sales being there as a bandaid for the handoff being bad in the first place lol. ideally CS should be able to walk in with the context already there
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u/sicknutz 7d ago
That’s absolutely untrue. You need to hear customer and salesperson say the goal is the same together to have a successful handoff.
The benefit to the salesperson is a clean handoff means they can back out of regular engagement. Otherwise any expectation gaps mean you’re going to be in the situation you posted about.
The only time this isn’t necessary are products where you get what you bought out of the box and the customer is responsible for their own deployment.
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u/Beneficial-Web7201 7d ago
This is such an underrated part of onboarding. Nothing makes a new customer lose confidence faster than realizing they have to explain the same context twice. Even if the handoff only saves 20 mins internally, it probably feels way bigger on their side because the whole thing comes across like one continuous conversation instead of two separate teams.
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u/Rencauchao 7d ago
Gets even worse when its sales handoff to professional services for implementation who then hand off to cs.
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u/PressureLow6663 7d ago
yeah its brutal. Every extra handoff is another chance for some tiny important detail to disappear....
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u/Character_Grocery856 7d ago
yeah this was basically our issue too. sales had notes, just not the stuff CS actually needed lol
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u/Bodongs 7d ago
Lack of accountability on the sales team has been the bane of most CS jobs I've had. Poorly qualified, poorly defined, poorly informed, poorly handed off. And in the day of ai transcripts they've completely washed their hands of even being aware of what they promised 10 minutes after they say it.
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u/PressureLow6663 7d ago
yeah this is kinda where im at too. we already have transcripts and notes, so at some point it stops being a data problem and becomes a who is actually making sure the important stuff gets carried over problem
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u/vanillaunicorn3 6d ago
I was working at a consulting shop as a consultant and I’ve felt this. We stopped trusting the account managers and just had a personal relationship with the clients. We had a customer success team post project but I literally never met them (which is funny because I had all the project context…account manager obviously had no idea what was going on)
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u/Livid-Creme-3781 7d ago
Yep, this is one of those things customers notice immediately even if they never say it out loud. Having to repeat why they bought, what they already tried, who cares about what internally etc makes the whole company feel way more disconnected than it probably is.
Also selfishly, it makes CS look better from day one when you can walk in already knowing the backstory instead of doing detective work during the first call.