The Customer Success Channel

In this episode, our host Anika Zubair chats with George C. Huang, Director of Customer Experience & Success at Remo, a tech startup behind Remo Conference, an interactive videoconferencing platform for creating interactive online experiences that rival live, in-person events.A large part of Remos’ success is directly related to Customer Success and their customer experience. They have scaled and grown their business but specifically their Customer Success organization over the last 3 months. We discuss how focusing on Customer Success from the beginning can lead to astronomical growth.Podcast enquiries: sofia@planhat.com

In this Podcast our host Anika Zubair chats with Chris Jones, Director of Customer Success at Enboarder, an experience driven onboarding platform, about Remote Customer Onboarding. Chris has worked in Customer Success for 6 years, having worked with both small to medium sized businesses, through to global corporations rolling out SaaS solutions. Chris has been involved in developing a Customer Success team at LinkedIn, as well as building and growing a team in the fast growing startup that is Enboarder.Tech companies have started to onboard new customers remotely. For some companies this is something that has never been done before and for others it was a natural transition. But now after months of remote onboarding is your method working? Are you able to keep your customers engaged? And can you deliver a successful onboarding experience remotely?Podcast enquiries: sofia@planhat.com

Our host Anika Zubair chats with Nabil Dabbagh, Head of Customer Success at DeepCrawl, an SEO solution that bridges the gap between marketing and engineering departments by ensuring your website's code is Search Engine-friendly. He has been a part of the growth and scaling up of the Customer Success department at DeepCrawl for over 4 years and has a wealth of information to share, discussing how to structure and restructure your Customer Success organization to fit your growing business needs.

Our host Anika Zubair speaks with Anna Poorna, Head of Community at Freshworks, the customer engagement software company that enables organisations of all sizes to deliver better experiences. A true customer advocate at heart, Anna has 8+ years of experience in Customer Success and Marketing and in her previous roles helped run and scale the Customer Success teams for the EMEA market at Freshworks.Anna has been building up a customer community for years and has held positions like CSM, CS lead and for the last year she has been working on building out a customer community at Freshworks. We discuss with Anna, how to start an online customer community and also how a customer community can be used to scale your customer success effectively while making sure you maximise your communities potential.

Our host Anika Zubair speaks with Lauren Cumming, Head of Customer Success at Fixflo, a property maintenance software solution. Having experienced some of the unique challenges that come with working in startup environments and the growth of Fixflo from startup to scaleup, Lauren shares her tips and tricks on managing and scaling a Customer Success team throughout this transition.

Our host, Anika Zubair speaks with Dan Farley, VP of Customer Success at Seenit on how to make impactful Customer Success changes during Covid-19.COVID-19 has completely changed the global economy and it is now, more than ever, extremely important for teams to work together. It is especially important that Customer Success teams come together, strive to retain customers and support their customer base. As a business, it is difficult to know what to focus on, as there is no playbook for these events.

Our host, Anika Zubair and now VC investor Rav Dhaliwal talk about how he has scaled Customer Success teams, how Venture Capitalists look at Customer Success strategies of their investments and his views on Customer Success leading indicators such as NPS and CSAT. Prior to becoming a VC, Rav has run Customer Success at Slack in EMEA, and held senior Customer Success positions, managing key processes like Customer Onboarding and expansion at firms such as Zendesk, Microsoft and Salesforce.Customer Success is fast becoming one of the key drivers of company valuations. Having a clear, repeatable customer lifecycle, low gross churn, strong customer net retention and a Customer Success strategy that maximises customer lifetime value are differentiators when VCs assess potential investments.

Our host, Anika Zubair talks to Adrian Beck, Senior Director of Customer Success at Tanium about his experiences growing the Customer Success organisation from 15 people to 70 people in 7 countries over 3 years! As any Customer Success leader knows, recruiting strong CS team members is incredibly challenging. Firstly, CS is fast growing but still a young profession so the pool of experience is small, secondly there are many different forms of Customer Success Management from high touch to pure tech touch and thirdly succeeding at Customer Success requires a broad set of skills. Put simply, it’s hard to succeed at Success. *Apologies for the audio around the 17 min mark

Working with third party vendors to provide your customers with additional services is beneficial to you and the other vendor involved. It can do a lot from a sales perspective by helping to drive business to you and your partners business more quickly. But in Customer Success we’re all about the relationship post-sales, and there is no reason to drop the ball on the customer relationship and success for either party. The third party vendor relationship can be a challenging one to navigate when it comes to how to handle customers; when is it the third-party’s responsibility to step in? Who is the best contact for the customer when it comes to handling issues? I talked to Violaine Yziquel, Director of Customer Success at Box, about it. She’s in the process of creating and testing out new processes to ensure that this relationship doesn’t sacrifice the customer’s success.

This week I spoke with Paul Henderson, an author, speaker, consultant and founder of Outcome Leaders on customer success, about his new book that’s coming out. The book is called The Outcome Generation - How a New Generation of Technology Vendors Thrive Through True Customer Success, and it provides advice for companies who want to take their operations to the next level with a customer success mindset in marketing, sales, and customer success by focusing on success outcomes. You can find his book coming out on Amazon, and more info on his site: gen3cs.com.