Customer SuccessCon Europe 2017

A strong relationship between the Customer Success team and other functions in the organisation is vital.  A good way to build those relationships is to establish an effective foundation using the customer at the core, and then taking a programmatic approach across the company.  In this session, we will look at various case studies of how Customer Success teams have engaged with Sales, Product Marketing, Engineering and other groups.  Examples include:

• Sales: Joint ownership of account plans
• Product and Infrastructure: Escalation Mgmt programme
• Marketing:  Customer Reference programme
• NPS Surveys across all teams

Sound familiar?  "We had our CSM’s, but the Customer Journey was not clear to the company as a whole.  Each team dealt only with their own silo, and there was hardly any cooperation.  We realized that we had to change the way we worked, to move from ‘silos’ to ‘squads’ that worked together to meet the customers’ needs."

Since we were young and agile, we thought we were very customer focussed and centric, when the reality was that we were sales-focussed. We found that we needed to change.

In this session, I’ll share the experience of making that change — what happened along the way, what worked, and what did not, and how we resolved it. Each touchpoint or transition point in the customers life is critical with your company. From sales to onboarding, to customer success, to support but also customer marketing, invoicing, etc.

You’ll walk away from this session with more insights on how to get your organization customer centric, and what to expect when making the change in the organization from thinking you are customer focussed to actually being customer focussed.

Many enterprise companies focus their customer success management efforts on their top customer segment. It is often a fact, however, that the customer retention and adoption rates are much lower in the Tier 2 accounts. The reason? While there are many parties (PS, education, customer success, etc.) involved in Tier 1 care, Tier 2 and below clients tend to be much less frequently touched by a vendor organization post-sale because of cost and resource constraints.

A company with over 9,000 non-strategic Tier 2 customers faced the challenge of providing an appropriate level of customer success management.  Scaling the in-house Customer Success team to handle the workload for those Tier-2 customers was not financially viable.  The decision was to go with an outsourced delivery model which provided global coverage in the local languages, all set up and rolled out in about 12 weeks.  The resulting improvements in ARR were quite significant, incremental revenue was realized as a result of ongoing contact with the customers, and the program ROI after first year – extremely compelling.

This session will cover the original problem statement, the program design, the components of the solution and the outcomes after the first year in operation.