CSM secrets Of Influential Customer Success leaders

Creating personalized experiences, with Peter Crysdale!

Hello Success Family,

 

After a while, I was able to resume some great conversations with the customer success family!

 

I have been obsessing over the topic of scale, especially in times of downturn like the ones we are in. How does CS continue to scale, without increasing costs and yet at the same time not lose business?

 

One answer that came out was the use of AI and automation in the creation of white club experiences (thanks Dickey Singh 🙌 for that beautiful expression), and the creation of personalized experiences with the use of AI and automation. That seemed to be the only way!

And that was confirmed by .Peter Crysdale. of Minerva @minervaknows which is creating great strides in the area of creating personalized knowledge bases and the making of the "intelligent customer".

Take a listen!

 

Customer Success Vs Product Marketing, How do we do?

In this episode, Preethy Padmanaban raises some great points with Jason Noble on the need and contours of working between Product Marketing and Customer success!

Fernando Vs Jyo Shukla, Product or CS?

In this episode, Jyo Shukla, a popular Customer Success leader, takes on questions from Fernando Cerioni, who is known for his tough Product management skills!

Enjoy this episode, where both conclude that Product & CS must work closely together for the organization to succeed!

CSM debate - Paul Vs Nam

In this debate - Nam asks some compelling questions on CS for Paul.

 

but in the end, customer success wins!

Redefining customer experience, with Adrian

In this episode, we have Adrian Brady-Cesana, Founder and Chief experience officer at CX Chronicles.

In CXChronicles, they are set out to find what customers are doing to enhance the overall customer experience and allow organizations to scale effortlessly. CXChronicles focusses on 4 main pillars to help organizations optimize: Team,Tools, Processes and Feedback 

 

Key takeaways from this episode are:

 

Customer experience is what an organization defines it and a great customer experience is how well you deliver it.

Four pillars to an organization's success: a) Keep a customer success scorecard 2) Conduct a through customer journey mapping 3) Build and share playbooks and bake into customer FAQs 4) Voice of customer reports

Most organizations grow wrong in not building a company with a customer centric or customer focussed compass

A prediction for the CS industry is that more of revenue and performance based functions such as sales will now move into customer success.

His favorite cartoon character as a CSM? Superman.

His tips for CS success: a) Someone should be a great conversationalist b) Listen to customer's issues c) Ask excellent questions. 

His own skill/brand reputation is for having intense curiosity. And he encourages everyone else to follow the same!

Crushing Churn with Anita Toth

Today's episode of CSM secrets is with Anita Toth, Chief Churn Crusher at Anita Toth! It is a venture that makes data & insights more contextual and actionable.

Key insights from this episode are:

1) Anyone can collect data. It is as simple as asking a few questions. But where organizations need professional help is in asking the right questions to ensure collecting high quality data, cutting out everything else that could be noise.

2) The Customer 360 Insight System was built ground up to enable organizations to collect and analyze data that is able to contextualize the problems or situation at hand.

3) Two scenarios that could greatly leverage from such a methodical approach is during post onboarding and during exit. These are two critical moments in a customer journey and meaningful data collected during this phase and the insights that are derived could be an eye opener to the entire organization.

4) During difficult conversations & when handling customers, one trick or tip to set the tone and navigate the situation is with a compelling, well thought out opening statement (Prepare, Prepare, Rehearse).

5) And a prediction? Well, the plethora of AI tools that are booming in the CS space will soon attain maturity and will help CSMs take better decisions and become more successful in what they do.

And during rapid fire round, well which favorite cartoon character is a good CSM? She surprised me by saying which one is not - Yosemite Sam! Well checkout why that is the case.

 

Onboarding for success, with Will

In this episode, we have Will Stevenson, COO and Founder of Onboard.io, a platform focussed exclusively on Customer onboarding.

Onboard.io is a culmination of several years of research on where companies go wrong with onboarding and how to make onboarding more efficient than what it is today.

Hence, instead of going with a template based approach, onboard.io operates with variables. Connecting different variables for scaling, automating and driving seamless automation that can be seen by various stakeholders and measured continuously.

Key insights from this episode are:

1) On boarding is a critical step in setting the right expectations for customers and also in ensuring common understanding among all stakeholders to build trust and to get customers to invest for the long term.

2) A critical step towards success in CS onboarding is to NOT share bits and pieces of information but to share in complete transparency what outcomes the customer can expect from working with you, the BIG picture if you will.

3) Non Subscription based companies, are quickly catching up to this CS trend of "Success is in Onboarding well" and unconventional industries are the quickest to adopt. And the early feedback has been extremely encouraging.

4) A big trend that he sees is one of more and more investment into customer success and the function being an integral component of every other - Sales, Product, Marketing et al. Customer success is the new trend.

5) A recommendation therefore is to put customer at the center and move away from traditional B2B practies to what is working in B2C now. Such as, product led growth, contact free sales, more power in the hands of customers.

Apart from all of these, some of what we spoke during Rapid fire were leadership lessons in themselves:

1) Winnie the Pooh is his favorite cartoon character as a CEO, as he is non-egoistic and making friends and always helpful for others.

2) Self-awareness, situational awareness and determination are the keys to success and to deliver extra-ordinary results.

3) He follows this one TAB rule to retain focus. Whats that?

Check it out in this really insightful episode! And also dont miss checking out on his other venture, Do Good Mission which is his way of giving back to the society!!

Can do with Candu, Jonathan

Have you felt this pinch as a CSM? You want to customize your website for delivering personalization but you are blocked because you do not have the tools to do that.

Well, Candu is a tool to enhance an existing web app to deliver incremental changes to a webpage, like, adding sweeteners to enhance the experience and deliver good customer experience.

I sat down to discuss about this quite interesting tool that sits at the intersection of customer success and marketing, with the Co-founder and CEO Jonathan. Some key insights from this episode are: 

Candu is designed for digital CSM where repetitive conversations can be easily customized and delivered via web pages rather than emails. Candu provides more power to content creator/marketer to deliver value to the user base

Account based marketing customizing for specific customers provides a way to complete scale the digital CS approach

Such customizations actually doubled the engagement of customers and paved a way for them to stay on

Most ideas for customers come from the CS world. Best people to give ideas are the account teams. Why not empower them with tools?

A good digital CSM can drive huge growth. It is both an analytics and marketing role.

A Good CS is about how we apply the same excitement on NOT what we build last  but what the customer used first. That first excitement.

This and a lot more in this insightful episode!

Jetting high in Customer Experience

Liliana comes from one of the toughest industries where it is quite a nightmare to keep customers happy, even if a small element goes wrong. Aviation and that too for a very popular brand, Jetblue!!

Coming from a background where she was directly responsible for delivering an extra ordinary user experience to customers of JetBlue,  the knowledge she gained helped her start her own venture in customer experience design - "The Petrova experience".

Key takeaways from this episode are:

1) The power of information/data. Empowering and arming the customer with near accurate data and equipping them with the power of choice, building apps to deliver data quickly and then the power of co-creation, where customers participate in the process, are 3 key pillars to customer experience.

2) Customer experience is driven by two drivers: The brand value needs to come through else the customer experience is not well done. Customer experience is the successful delivery of a brand value.

3) Customer experience is a non linear outcome. It requires close examination of user behavior, employee behavior and also organizational culture to bring about optimal customer experience. For instance, Even if the technology is great, if the employee experience is not great, the end customer experience is impacted. 

4) Thinking from an outside perspective of what the customer is looking for rather than an internal approach is critical - Design thinking is a crucial aspect of customer experience.

5) A major trend is an overall elevation and authority of Customer Success Executives and the evolution of intelligent algos(AI) that are all set to disrupt this space even more.

And a great answer that I absolutely loved was that if she were to work from the moon, one function she will take is "Copy writer". I loved it.

This and much more in this very insightful episode!

 

Customer Marketing is an opportunity for your customers!

In this episode of CSM secrets, we have Dana Alvarenga, VP of customer success at Slap Five.

Dana has been voted 2021 Top 100 Customer Success Strategist and also TOP25 CMA Influencer. Dana is very passionate about customer marketing and customer advocacy.

With an extensive background spanning across Sales, Business development and Customer success, this episode has some great takeaways for aspiring CS professionals:

1) A field facing role, any role handling customers - even if that involves managing a restaurant, really helps in shining in a customer success career. It is critical to have that exposure. External sales experience helps.

2) Customer experience is the broad spectrum of support, implementation, on boarding and even involvement in the sales process - an End-End flawless delivery across all touch points. And measured by the overall success of all of this, not just churn, net retention and number of happy customers.

3) Customer advocacy is to be looked upon as offering opportunities to showcase customer's success and not to be approached with the old school mentality of customer's doing you favors.

4) Customer marketing is on a huge growth trajectory.  And organizations are going to the extent of creating roles with KPIs that define success based outcome in these areas. Leaders are beginning to focus heavily on customer marketing as a growth area.

5) Customer marketing should sit in various places - CS, Product and marketing to be very effective.  And providing what customer want - networking opportunity, connecting to peers etc could be some outcomes of Customer marketing.

Listen to this episode for more insights!