Podcast Takeaways: ’nuffsaid – Real Strategies for Customer Success

Episode 1: Creating Feedback Loops Between Success, Product, and Marketing

• Train all customer facing teams (sales, success, support) to properly extract feedback from customers
  • What problem are you trying to solve with a feature request?
• Host regular meetings (2x per month) for front line teams to update product on what is happening
• Conduct quarterly deep dives into customer feedback, surveys, closed-lost opportunity reasons, and churn reasons

Episode 2: The Challenger Concept for Customer Success

• Teach, Tailor, Take Control
  • Teach prospects how your product solves common industry challenges
  • Tailor the solution to the prospect’s specific needs
  • Take Control by pushing the customer to challenge their own assumptions (and ultimately their processes and goals)

Episode 3: Four Points of Friction Between Sales and Success

1. Misalignment at the beginning around what you are selling and how success delivers on that promise.
   • This can be written into the SoW.
2. There is not a clear understanding of what it takes to onboard the customer.
   • Who is involved?
   • How long will it take?
3. Miscommunication of what the CSM is responsible for and what the customer is responsible for.
4. Lack of shared understanding of roles (Economic sponsor; power users; etc.)
   • Collaborate on a customer journey to ensure the economic buyer is involved throughout the duration of the contract

Episode 4: Creating a Relationship Coverage Strategy

Three parts (see nuffsaid blog post here)

1. Define power user, champion, and buyer roles
   • Champion is an advocate for the adoption and ongoing use of the product. They have to have the authority to change business process. Finally, they can directly influence purchasing decisions.
   • Buyers make purchasing decisions without approval from anyone else. They influence business process decisions by demanding business goals/outcomes.
   • Power Users is not defined by frequent usage; rather they are defined by needing the product to get their job done.
2. Measure relationship strength
   • Define the customer’s entire lifecycle and how engaged the CSM and customer should be at each stage
   • Set standards around relationship strength with each person at the customer
3. Set relationship coverage expectations
   • Type of org (SMB vs ENT) vs. Product Breadth

Episode 5: CS Needs to Play a Bigger Role in the Feature Request Process

• The success team has the best understanding of customer needs.
• 5 Step Process:
  1. Track all customer requests in one place (to be able to search, sort, edit, and filter)
  2. Assign a business value to each customer request across customers (existing ARR & future potential)
  3. Assign a churn risk to each request across customers
  4. Estimate the product, design, and engineering effort (cost) it will take to complete the request
  5. Update the customer when the request is complete

Episode 6: Get the CFO to See CS as a Revenue Driver

• Need to overcome two problems (a) CS tends to scale with revenue growth (b) Other departments make more sophisticated arguments about how investments will drive revenue growth

1. Understand the CFO goals
2. The CFO wants the head of CS to care about the cost to retain revenue (CS spend / ARR)
3. Ensure your cost to retain revenue aligns with your CFO’s
4. Define the cost to retain revenue for each business segment
5. Sign up to drive more revenue compared to the prior year (net retention)
6. Get credit for the total revenue managed, not the total renewed
7. Even if you have a perfect plan, be ready with smart answers for how to reduce costs

Episode 7: 5 Prerequisites to Scaling Customer Success

1. CS needs to be a top priority at the executive level (rather than embedded in another team)
2. Narrow the focus of CSMs
   • Split commercial and non-commercial responsibilities
3. Segment customers along experience, not just spend
   • Take into account customers’ specific preferences and ARR potential (not just current spend)
4. Scale your ‘right-touch’ engagement model by creating a customer community
5. Education needs to be closely aligned with CS
   • align on content, timing, and delivery method

Episode 8: Create Playbooks to Mitigate Risk

1. Head of CS needs to understand why customers churn
   • Capture churn reasons in CRM
   • Conduct loss interviews
   • Collect & look at usage data
2. Categorize reasons into 5-10 higher level themes (aka: risk types)
   • What it is
   • When it typically occurs in customer lifecycle
   • Identify early warning signs & whether or not it was preventable
3. Build playbooks for each category
   • Ensure they are living docs that improve over time
   • Outline intended outcome
   • List data to collect and questions to ask
   • Outline actions CSMs should take

Episode 9: Advocate for These Sales and CS Incentive Changes

• Create team-based bonus plans based on net-retention (rather than individual commission plans)
• CS should have commercial responsibility for upsells.
• Sales should have incentives tied to customer health over the first 90 days.

Episode 10: When and how to Introduce Success in the Sales Cycle

• Don’t hand-off; hand-overlap.
• CS should be involved pre-sales for selected strategic deals. The CSM adds value by sharing specific stories of customer success.

Episode 11: Your First 90 Days in Founding a CS Team

• Days 1-30: Determine the Why, Where, and Who of CS
  • Why: For example, net retention. Align the Why across all internal teams.
  • Where: For example, direct report into CEO.
  • Who: Core skill sets of hiring profile. Also, Who in terms of your customer segments.
• Days 31-60: What & When
  • What:: KPIs: Define leading & lagging indicators; Compensation; Training; Playbooks & processes
  • When: How do your customers want to be engaged? How do you want to engage them at various milestones.
• Days 61-90: How
  • Consistent execution and iteration based on feedback with & impact on the customer
  • Early on, team leaders should take on some accounts personally
  • Start measuring KPIs

Episode 12: When to Look for Your First Customer Success Hire

• Depends on the WHY:
  • If upsell, background in sales
  • If onboarding, background in training & education
• It is a lot harder to train on critical soft-skills
  • Ownership/accountability
  • Collaboration (esp. advocating for customer with Product)
  • Communication
  • Curiosity/Growth Mindset

Episode 13: Career Pathing for CSMs

• Focus on competency level development.
• Given concrete examples of how competencies are expressed at each level. But be clear it is about continued performance, not checking the box one time.

Episode 14: Your First CS Hire Explained

• Even at an early stage, it is important to have someone who is responsible for CS (even if they have other responsibilities)
• Key skills:
  • Consultative
  • Communication
  • Project management
  • Change management
  • Tech-savvy
  • Business acumen
  • Intelligence
  • Humility
  • Collaboration

Episode 15: Signs You Have an Everything Department

• If your team does not have a strong definition of purpose with clear KPIs (esp. net retention)
• If you don’t have good data to drive decisions
• If you are doing tickets (which means you are support not success)
• If you don’t have strong alignment with sales
• If you are not part of the pre-sales motion (at least for strategic customers)
• If you don’t have a relationship with the economic buyer

Episode 16: An Incentive Structure that Drives a Customer-Centric Mindset

• Give sales an incentive to ensure new customers are successfully implemented (and renew); give CS an incentive for closed won new business
• For engineering, pay an incentive for when features pass a certain usage threshold

Episode 17: 2020 Year in Review

Here is a partial list of proudest CS achievements:

• Better CS enablement
• Clear career paths
• Data-foundation to measure and improve/grow the business
• Updating account health notes (for top accounts) on a regular basis (as fast as weekly)
• Customizable QBR templates (and generator)

Episode 18: Why You Should Implement a Customer Maturity Index

• Think of a 2×2 with two dimensions:
  • Customer health score
  • Customer maturity index: Customer’s ability to do their job such that they release value from your solution.

Episode 19: Be the CCO That Builds Relationships with Marketing

(no key highlights)

Episode 20: CSM Comp Plans – How to Think About the Base Salary/Variable Split

• CS teams tend to have a broader set of goals than sales has. Consequently, it makes sense to focus on objective-based bonuses rather than outcome-driven commission.
• Smaller companies should index more heavily on NPS, renewal, referenceable customers. Larger companies should index more on net retention.

Episode 21: The Customer Data Your Cross-Functional Peers Need

• CS leaders need to think about what decision other departments need to make
• Examples are:
  • Churn forecasting
  • ICP Fit (each quarter, update each customer as: good, stretch, or bad)
  • % of customers willing to advocate for your brand
• Log every executive business review (EBR) in narrative format and share back to the wider business
• Anyone who interacts with a customer needs to be aware of the customer health
• Conduct periodic (quarterly) reviews of (strategic) accounts
• CSM sentiment should be a big factor in the customer health score (esp. to capture relationship health)
• Create a data point for ‘growth potential’
• Use maturity assessment benchmarking as an overall roadmap to guide engagement model, EBRs, etc.

Episode 22: Tactics for a Strong CCO & CMO Relationship

• CS is the best source of case studies and reference customers
• Create a post-sale customer community that includes Marketing assets

Episode 23: How to Build a Customer Advocacy Program

• Include a CRM field for whether or not the customer will be a reference. Update this every time you have an EBR (as long as the customer is not at-risk)
• Track % of customers willing to be an advocate as a KPI

Episode 24: Finance Feedback for CCOs (From Blend, Lever, UserTesting, and HigherLogic)

• Invest in support to ensure rapid service ticket response times
• Track renewals in cohort – at least first year vs. tenured renewal
• The cost to retain is very cross-functional: product, customer marketing, CS, Finance (billing experience), etc.
• 2 of the 4 CFOs said ‘The jury is still out on the value of Gainsight.’
• Assessing CSM performance:
  • Commercial: Net retention
  • Non-Commercial: NPS; CSAT

Episode 25: Coach Your CSMs to Facilitate Engaging Meetings

• Talk less, listen more (while engaging your curiosity)

Episode 26: 3 Ways to Strengthen Your Relationship With Product

• Ensure the CPO and CCO meet for at least 30 mins every week
• Align metrics between CPOs and CCOs (ex: monthly active users)
• Make sure insights from your voice-of-customer channels are flowing to both CS & Product

Episode 27: These 5 Coaching Methods Will Build a Consultative Mindset with CSMs

(no key highlights)

Episode 28: CS Ops – The Force Multiplier Role

• CS Ops should report to the CS leader
• 2

Episode 29: Risk Forecasting Should Be In Your DNA

• Risk forecasting is determining which accounts are likely to churn and then committing to a plan ensure customers get the value they anticipated.

Episode 30: 3 Essential Questions to Ask Before Buying Software

1. How will it make the customer experience better?
2. How will it make our CSMs more productive?
3. Does it give the CS leader the data s/he need?

Episode 31: Bring Customers Into The Heart of Your Business, Literally

• Ensure CS has a clear purpose that everyone can repeat verbatim
• Regularly (ex: every 6 weeks) bring customers in to speak to your CS (and sales and product) organization. In addition to other questions, ask “What will it take for your to stay with us long term?”
• A customer-centric organization does not necessarily do everything customers want. Rather, a customer centric organization listens to customs and applies a customer lens to decisions.
• During pre-sales, the main job of CS is to help win deals faster. Though rare, CS should raise an alarm during pre-sale if they know a prospect will not achieve the value they are seeking.

Episode 32: The Low-Touch Model Maturity Scale

See this for more detail

• The modern CS coverage model:
  • Enterprise Accounts: Strategic CSMs with one to few accounts each (in rare instances one might have multiple CSMs on an account)
  • Mid-Market Account: Dedicated CSMs typically with many accounts.
  • SMB: Low-touch or tech-touch
• Phases of the low-touch maturity:
  • Phase 1 – Dedicated CSMs: Every customer gets a named CSM. The CSM is generally reactive and covers ~50 accounts. Limited use of technology.
  • Phase 2: Content, support systems, and technology in place with human intervention for selected proactive campaigns & reactive plays.
  • Phase 3: Digitally led customer experience that drives adoption & engagement.
• Roles for building a low touch team:
  • Operations: Build systems & processes for the CS team
  • Advocate: Addresses problems with product adoption and other risk triggers
  • Content: Educates different types & stages
  • Programs & Enablement: Deploys campaigns to drive adoption
  • Upsell & cross sell: Deploys campaigns to upsell & cross sell.

Episode 33: A Customer Advisory Board Plan That Works

• Know your goal (ex: engage & collect feedback)
• Think programmatically
• Share your vision for your product and for the industry
• Gather holistic CX needs and close-the-loop

Episode 34: Why It’s Not “If” CSMs Should Own Renewals, It’s “When”

• CSMs should own renewals when
  • The effort to get clients to value is low
  • The product has great UI/UX
  • There is limited change management,
  • Original sales cycle (and renewal) was short & simple
  • Drivers for upsell are ‘more of the same’ (ex: add on module or more users)
• Even if sales owns renewals, CSMs should still be tied to revenue (often a team goal for net retention)
• CSMs should forecast churn (and held accountable to it)

Episode 35: Career Lessons from 15 Years in Tech

• Ask for what you want
• ‘No’ just means ‘not right now’
• Say yes to new opportunities that are presented to you esp. when you are not sure you can do it
• Dedicate yourself to mastering your craft
• Don’t be afraid to take a step back to take two steps forward
• Don’t compromise your values for a job or company – it’s never worth it
• Understand what your manager’s boss needs and help them achieve their goals
• Focus on identifying the most important problems in the business regardless of your role
• Seek out mentorship moments (learn from everyone around you)
• Your company does not care about you (even though the people do)
• You are the only one who can take control of your career
• Seek promotions based on impact not effort
• Achievement for achievement sake is unsatisfying compared to lifting up the people around you

Episode 36: De-Risking Account Transitions

• Coach your team to have empathy for the customer
• Be direct with your customer. Why this is happening, what is happening, and when it will happen
• Don’t make the customer do work in the transition
• Strive have a short overlap (1 or 2 weeks) between the old & new owner
• The new owner should deliver a quick win
• The CS Leader should check in with each customer before, during, and after

Episode 37: Why Your NPS Might Be Higher in the U.S.

• European clients may not know what the “customer success” means is since it is less common. They are more familiar with “business consultant.”
• NPS scores are lower across the board in Europe

Episode 38: A 360-Degree Growth and Maintenance Plan for Your Low-Tier Customers

(no key highlights)

Episode 39: Coach CSMs on How to Communicate “Fires” Internally

• CSMs should meet regularly with Support, Implementation, Product, etc. and be coached to be comfortable communicating when a customer is having a major issue.
• The more urgent the escalation, the shorter the notification

Episode 40: Build vs Buy? You Need to Lay a Foundation for CS First

• Identify your needs. Select a third-party platform that serves most of your needs and be prepared to supplement with internal development.
• Startups should generally tilt toward buy since engineering dollars are better used on your core product.
• To custom build a CS solution, expect that it will take 1 to 2 years to develop, pilot, and scale.

Episode 41: Don’t Just Throw Together a Digitally-Led Engagement Model (Panel Discussion)

• If you pile too many accounts on CSMs, they will only be able to be reactive
• If you need to move an account from high-touch, dedicated to a low-touch, pooled/velocity model,
  • Take into account their historical support needs, current health, and renewal timing (strive to move at/after renewal).
  • Communicate transparently and personally (not via email!)
  • If genuine, position it as better service esp. if you have invested in educational content & systems (ex: LMS; AI support tool) available 24/7/365.
• Selected KPIs:
  • Lagging: Gross & net retention; expansion pipeline
  • Leading: license utilization; feature adoption; CS plans and risk mitigation plans
• Align CSMs to segments when the customer behavior, lingo, and use cases vary.
• Have a dedicated renewal team. The renewal team should (need only) engage CSMs when churn risk is high.
• The CSM/ARR ratio should be lower when: (historically, it was $2M to $3M per CSM)
  • ARR is high and/or there is large upsell potential
  • Limited number of users per account
  • Your solution is complex (or rapidly evolving)
  • CSMs also have commercial responsibility
  • Your tools & processes are less mature
• Capture whether customers prefer digital vs. human touch
• Customers who engage with support (within reason) renew at higher rates than those who are silent

Episode 42: Interview CSMs Like Intercom

1. Take home test with:
   • Questions with written answer (to assess writing & thinking ability)
   • Question with video response: How would you describe (our company) to someone with no technical knowledge?” (looking for energy/passion in general and for the role/company as well as for verbal communication ability)
2. Screening call with recruiter
3. Screening call with hiring manager (to answer questions and sell the company to the candidate)

Episode 43: How Digital Customer Engagement Works at Zendesk

• Tech-touch can benefit all customers
• Even with a tech-touch program, pull humans in when customers are at risk – not engaging, not successfully implemented, etc.
• Traditional coverage:
  • High-touch: 1 to 5
  • Medium: 1 to 20
  • Low: 20 to 50
  • Tech: 50 to several 100
• As an alternative to traditional coverage, you can have dynamic coverage where CSMs get shorter-term account assignments to engage healthy (to upsell) or at-risk accounts with human-centric plays

Episode 44: How Customer Success Becomes Equal to Product, Sales, and Marketing

• Being able to correlate engagement with retention is critical to showing you add value

Episode 45: Does Your Success Team Have an “Innovation and Intelligence” Role?

• Set an outside-in rather than inside-out time to first value metric

Episode 46: How VMWare Sets Up Listening Posts for Customer Sentiment

• Gather feedback at each key moment that matters.
• To collect feedback, meet customers where they are at. This may happen via email, in app, text, etc.

Episode 47: Debate Part 1 – Is “Ownership” a Last-Century Concept?

(no key takeaways)

Episode 48: Debate Part 2 – Does Assigning Ownership Create Division?

(no key takeaways)

Episode 49: “Treat Onboarding Like a Product” and Other Advice for Working with High Volume SMB Customers

1. Make every touchpoint count
2. Success must start early (to prevent churn down the road)
3. Create best practice onboarding path(s)
4. Specialize CSMs to become functional experts
5. Invest in systems
6. Create customer communities

Episode 50: Breaking Down the Risk Escalation Process

• Start by defining specific risks, levels of risk, and categories of risk
• Document the processes that lead to solving the risk
• Categories
  • Product issues (incl. bugs; product-market fit)
  • CX (ex: pricing terms; contract terms; NPS)
  • Customer stakeholders (decision makers; power users; key admins)
• Create risk escalation teams to offload CSMs

Episode 51: Why CSMs Must Act Like Psychologists

• Emotion is a key component of assessing risk

Episode 52: 6 Ingredients CSMs Need to Mix Into Every Customer Relationship

1. Personalization
2. Integrity
3. (Exceeding) Expectations
4. Empathy
5. Time to Value
6. Responsibility

Episode 53: If Your Risk Assessment Doesn’t Look at Personas Within Accounts, It’s Not Accurate

• For people in each key profile, codify:
  • Relationship Strength: None; Weak; OK; strong
  • Sentiment: Negative; Neutral; Positive
• The entire idea of account health is to be proactive

Episode 54: Moving From a Career in Sales to CS? Listen to this VP’s Advice

• The money is better in sales but the stress level is much higher too

Episode 55: Why CCOs of the Future May Have a Background in Product

• CS needs to spend more time celebrating wins
• As in-app tools increasingly help deliver customer success, product chops will become more critical

Episode 56: Step 1 of Growing Your Executive Influence

• Be the leader/team who is most able to help others get things done

Episode 57: How We Drive Advocacy Through Customer Marketing

• 4 steps to drive advocacy:
  1. Run live customer events (ex: monthly fire-side chats)
  2. Record customer stories on video and in writing
  3. Measure team on # of stories produced
  4. Share the stories internally with employees and externally with other customers
• Customers always want to hear how other customers are using your solution

Episode 58: How Outreach Reduces TTV With Customer Education

(no key takeaways)

Episode 59: Defining the Ideal Customer Profile – The CS Leader’s Guide

(no key takeaways)

Episode 60: The New School System of Customer Segmentation

• In addition to segmenting on ARR and health scores, segment on adoption and maturity
• Health scoring components:
  • Engagement (includes NPS)
  • Technology Health (ex: uptime)
  • Operational Execution (ex: support tickets)
  • Adoption: Quantity & quality of usage
  • Outcomes
• Maturity can be applied at the account level or the individual user level.
• Unless the customer is not using, usage in and of it self may not be that predictive of retention

Episode 61: How Salesforce Monetizes Customer Success

• Salesforce customers are supported by:
  • Account Manager
  • Renewal Manager
  • CSM
  • Sales Engineer
  • AEs who get pulled in to upsell additional products
• Ways to ‘monetize’ CS
  • Higher level of support (incl. expert coaching sessions delivered as 4 meeting engagement)
  • Incentives for influencing cross-sell & upsell
  • Incentives for influencing Professional Services
• There is a big shift to aligning with customer value via the customer’s KPIs
• If customers are not attending your annual conference (ex: Dreamforce for Salesforce), that is a red flag

Episode 62: How CS Teams Can Help Support Orgs Be More Proactive

• Support handles technical issues/success; CS handles business issues/success
• Support at its best is also proactive! This is well reflected in the Technical Account Manager (TAM) role which are critical for complex, specialized platforms
• Support and CS much share customer information
• The most likely trend is that support & success become a single CX organization

Episode 63: CCOs Need These Skills to Become COO

• Create a track record of solving cross-functional problems that matter to your CEO
• Be a data-driven decision maker (by leveraging smart analysts)
• The best CS leaders recognize that churn is an organization wide responsibility. To that end, they focus on ensuring the right decisions are made at the executive level.

Episode 64: A Hiring Philosophy from Klue’s VP of CS

• The guest was previously at Vista Equity Partners where the philosophy is to hire a limited number of senior experts plus lots of entry-level people with the runway to grow into bigger roles over the next 3-4 years. (HPEL = high potential entry level)
• Traits/characteristics:
  • History of progression
  • LIke to break away from status quo
  • Studied something different than what was expected of them
• Become known as a talent factory for people
• If a direct report of yours fails in their role, then you either mishired or your failed to coach
• Host: Wonderlic is a good assessment of people who are able to learn quickly.
• Interview question for CS: Please give me an example of something you have done to help someone else on one of your team?

Episode 65: How to Measure VoC at the Speed of Relevance

• NPS needs context so that you learn how to delight repeatably.
• Social Promoter Score: Did you recommend us? To whom? For what purpose?
• Let milestones dictate when you meet with customers (rather than strict periodic, ex. quarterly, times)
• Support is a treasure trove of customer insights. Excerpt and share parts of calls and share with executives and associates.

Episode 66: How to Use Health Scores and Usage Data to Increase Customer Retention

• Every company should have two health scores:
  • Proactive: Value delivered (either measured directly or via a periodic maturity assessment)
  • Reactive: Risk encountered
• In guest’s study, they did not find that having a health score did not correlate with churn. (JD: This is different than whether or not health scores are not predictive of churn).
• Too many health scores are based on what is available rather than what is actually correlated with retention.
• Health scores tend to over-index on usage. Engagement & relationships are good. Value delivered is under-represented esp since it is hard to measure.
• The job of the CSM is to proactively take the client through a journey to realize the value they are seeking. Create a playbook with best-in-class milestones.
• Maturity assessments are generally more valuable for CSMs than health scores.
• If you cannot measure outcomes, at least measure the number of (value-centric) use cases.
• Ways to engage customers: Benchmarking; customer advisory boards; EBR/QBRs
• A better way to track usage:
  • Differentiating features
  • Sticky features (esp. integrations, automation rules)
• Ask your team for their (qualitative) understanding of what tends to lead to churn. Common examples:
  • Request to review contract
  • Multiple outages in a short period of time
  • Support tickets that took too long to resolve
  • M&A
  • Executive churn
• For businesses with low ARR, it makes sense to have a retention/recovery SWAT team. For businesses with higher ARR, the CSM should already be the most trust person to address risk.

Episode 67: 3 Tactics for Accelerating Your Career From Gainsight’s CCO

• Build relationships outside of CS
• Level up your sales & finance skills
• Define, manage, and report regularly on your metrics
• Bias for action: Build operating rhythms and optimize processes.
• Go out and proactively solve the most important cross-functional problems for the company (esp: CS + Product)
• Adaptability/Calm-under-fire
• Build great culture/followership
• Focus on investor success, customer success, and employee success

Episode 68: Asana’s Kalina Bryant on Why a Culture of Connection and Empathy is Key to Successful Customer Advocacy in a Hybrid World

• Advocacy exists to give customers a voice with executives and with the customers’ peers
• Advocacy programs:
  • Executive briefings
  • Customer roundtables
    • Centered around truly valuable study results
    • Ensure group of true peers
    • Send wine the day before (to ensure virtual attendance)
  • 1:1 Peer Connections
  • Executive Dinners
  • Fireside chats (with mega-execs)
• Executive sponsorship programs are more geared for sales

Episode 69: How to Get Budget for a CX Initiative

• 4 reasons: sell more (with supporting metrics); save money (with supporting metrics); fits mission; prove new initiative will not negatively impact or create conflict with another team
• Our most important metric is time to resolution
• Pick something to measure & improve and go do it
• NPS is useful as a lagging measure and must be paired with knowing & improving those things that increase net retention

Episode 70: 3 Great Things That Happen When CS Owns Sales Engineering

• End-to-end CCO should be responsible for:
  • Sales Engineering
  • Professional Services (incl. implementation)
  • Customer Support
  • Customer Success
  • Customer Operations
• Sales engineers should have a component of compensation tied to post-sale (esp. time to value)
• “I have yet to see CS have the ability to actually fire a customer.”
• If you sell a technical product, no deal should ever close without the participation of professional services.

Episode 71: Engineering Customer Value-Led-Growth

• Engineer the journey clients go through to achieve the value they are seeking. Set a clear goal and a clear path to achieve the goal.
• Every executive in the company should have their compensation (at least in part) tied to net retention

Episode 72: Two Tactics to Level-Up Your VoC Program

• 2 Tactics:
  • Capture audio & video of customers telling their actual stories
  • Make that information searchable across the entire company

Episode 73: Scaling? Here’s How to Get Ahead of a Declining Customer Experience

• 4 things you can do to improve CX as you scale:
  • Capture how each of your customers define value
  • Set up a VoC program
  • Track the right data to confirm customers are getting value
  • Proactively review the customer journey as it is happening
• If you CS team is almost purely reactive that is a clear red-flag that CX is on the decline

Episode 74: The Core Themes of Customer-Led Growth

• CLG companies measure themselves on what the customer is achieving
• Customers increasingly prefer self-service for most/all of their needs

Episode 75: Why CS Has the Best Opportunity to Hire, Retain, and Promote More Black Leaders

• Create an inclusive environment
  • Make sure team members can safely voice concerns
  • Create ERGs
  • Educate your entire team about micro-aggressions, etc.
• Recruit & hire differently
  • Review the hiring pipeline
  • Take more time to hire since minorities need time to confirm the environment is inclusive
• Recruit, hire, & promote black associates
  • Have specific goals for recruiting not a general “diversity” goal

Episode 76: How CS Ops Works at LinkedIn

• LI’s CS Ops reports into a centralized Ops team rather than directly to CS
• Benefits of being part of a centralized ops team:
  • Broader picture & influence across the company
  • Arms-length relationship makes pushing back more acceptable
• Sub-groups
  • Regional by line-of-business
  • Specialized roles: BI & Systems; strategic planning
• Strategic parts of the role:
  • Holding CSMs accountable (processes, metrics, compensation, etc.)
  • Product roll-outs
• Trust comes from consistency over time.

Episode 77: How to Break Into CS Ops With Gainsight’s Seth Wylie

• It is easier to get into CS Ops at the company you are already at; start by volunteering for projects
• System thinking involves:
  • Seeing problems as symptoms of a bigger issue
  • Considering the holistic impact of solutions across the business
• Have strong opinions (esp. about things you have experience with) lightly held. Also be open to new ideas.
• Ops people have a tendency to lean either in the direction of strategy or execution. Each type has value in different contexts.
• CS motions must be documented in playbooks
• 4 areas people add value in CS Ops:
  • Systems/tools skills
  • Data & analytics (spreadsheets & SQL)
  • Enablement (esp. if you have done role)
  • Programmatic marketing & content creation
• Career development
  • More technical
  • More strategic
  • People leadership (incl. governance)

Episode 78: Signs your CS Team is Operating Like a Cost Center, Not a Profit Center

(no key highlights)

Episode 79: Why Customer Onboarding Should Never Really End

• Treat the entire customer journey as an opportunity to onboard (esp. new features, new users, new stakeholders)
• Discover common needs from your high-touch customers
• Take what you learn from high-touch customers and apply small chunks to low-touch customers (ex: help center assets, webinars, etc.)
• High touch can be low value; low touch can be high value.
• Set a goal to get 100% of users onboarded (via their desired channel, in-app, on-demand, group, or 1:1).

Episode 80: GitLab’s Jeff Beaumont on How CS Ops Drives Net Retention

• Measuring CS ops effectiveness:
  • KPI accuracy (digital engagement & product usage; health scoring)
  • Special project to fix inefficiencies (ex: activity capture tool for solution architects using Troops.ai)
  • Giving leaders visibility on problems/opportunities they are not aware of
  • Helping leaders free up time (esp. time spent on data analytics)
• Maintain a visible, stack-ranked priority list that all leaders can see so they understand focus & trade-offs
• Field Operations at GitLab serves: sales, channels/partners/alliances, cs and includes enablement, operations, and strategy/analytics
• Preferably, CS Ops people should have been CSMs
• The main benefit of centralized CS ops is alignment with sales (and marketing) as well as sharing ops best practices & expertise
• Measure:
  • Gross retention & net retention
  • CSAT
  • Involvement in case studies and customer-advisory-board
• Three ways to be more strategic:
  • Be a trusted, unbiased advisor
  • Be a planner
  • Add insight on top of analytics (be diagnostic and prescriptive)
• Update leaders on analytics & insights weekly

Episode 81: Use High-Touch Strategies to Inform Your Digitally-Led Model

• Take the most effective high-touch programs and figure out how to automate them
• Upsell & cross-sell should still be a top-focus even in low-touch channels
• Tech-touch programs are overwhelming customers with dashboards & emails; instead break playbooks into actionable steps
• Sometimes overall health might look stable but it is simply that the rise in one factor is masking a drop in another factor

Episode 82: For Gainsight’s Lane Hold, Digital CS Is a Strategy, Not a Segment

• Digitally-led strategies apply equally to low-touch and high-touch customer segments
• Digitally led programs
  • New user experience at first login
  • EBR (might deliver directly to customer or prep for CSM)
  • Expansion: When customer is at 95% utilization, trigger message (direct to customer or to CSM)
  • Personalized track & session recommendations for conferences
• Listen for triggers (usage drops; press releases; leadership changes; M&A; etc.)
• CSMs are naturally protective of their customers.
• Use in-app guidance to lighten CS load; good example is UI changes

Episode 83: The Future of Digital CS? Just Take a Look at Brian LaFaille’s Program [*]

Apple; Spotify; Listen Notes

• Named CSMs focus on the top 3% of strategic accounts. Each high-touch CSM focuses on only 3-4 accounts. Everyone else is in a pooled model.
• Move accounts to new CS segments as they renew
• For the pooled segment, CSMs work on 18-24 short-burst engagements, each lasting 7, 15, 21, or 30 days.
• Be as transparent as possible, “Hey, I’m going to be with you for 7 days. I really want to make sure we accomplish x, y, and z. Here are the resources I’m going to use to do so. When can we meet?”
• Touch-points are either
  • Time-based
  • Trigger-based: Ex. “Hey, I noticed you are not using our mobile application. We have an upcoming webinar about how to use Looker’s mobile app so that your employees can access dashboards on the go. Would that be of interest to you?”
• Channels: Email, webinars, in-app & guided journeys by persona using (via Pendo).

Episode 84: Tips for Launching a Digital CS Strategy with Elisabeth Courland

• Make sure your emails are worth reading
• Ask, “We promised to deliver x value to you. Have you achieved this objective?” Remove all the rest of the unnecessary surveys.