The Customer Success Channel

Customer experience and usability is an essential part of customer success. You first need to make sure that you have a product that is built and working in a way that is for the customer, and is constantly considering how the customer is going to be using it to gain value. If your product loses sight of this, it’s likely it will flop. I spoke with Zachary Schulte, a member of the Customer Experience team at MeetEdgar, and we talked about how his team, the Customer Experience team, is the voice of the customer and working to ensure the product never loses the perspective of their users. We also spoke about ways to advocate for the customer when there can sometimes be resistance from product team, and how to balance deciding what’s best for the product and what the customer wants.

There’s a new buzz word (or phrase really) humming in everyone’s ears...machine learning. We’ve all heard about it or read some articles on what machine learning is trying to accomplish and how it will start to replace the work of humans, as well as how it can help us work smarter and better. And this can cause some worry or confusion for those of us who work in the SaaS industry. What is machine learning capable of today and what do we hope to be able to accomplish with it in the future? What will it’s role be in our day to day work lives...and regular lives, for that matter?I wanted to learn more about machine learning and AI, and some of the implications it has for SaaS companies, customer success, service, and support roles today and what could be to come in the near future. So I reached out to Cristina Fonseca is the co-founder of Talkdesk, technology entrepreneur, engineer, and machine learning and AI enthusiast. She’s currently left the day-to-day operations of Talkdesk to study machine learning and AI and how it will impact businesses. She has a fantastic way of explaining what machine learning is, and how it can be used to empower and not replace humans. And how in customer success, service and support roles the human will never be able to be replaced, but can be assisted by machines and AI to do their jobs better.

Customer Success doesn’t always have to be called “customer success” for it to be an integral part of your companies values and responsibilities of each of your team members. At Infunnel - a Swedish marketing automation consultant agency - they don’t have a team with the title “Customer Success,” but their team is incredibly invested in helping their clients reach their full potential and the foundations of customer success are in their DNA.They have developed a customer maturity scale and personas that help them better help their customers reach their desired outcomes, and bring in the right type of customer.

Hélène Hagnéré is the Director of Customer Success at Planday, and is not only passionate about caring for her team and customers, but also having a process in place to ensure customer feedback gets fed into the company and back to the customer in the best way possible. She spoke with me about the importance of having a process for closing the loop of customer feedback (whether it be from support channels, NPS, a conversation, etc.), and provides some advice and the ways she has gone about implementing it at Planday.

Customer Success is a field and career path that has been really taking off, particularly in Europe, over the past few years, and that is understandable with all of the new SaaS companies that are establishing themselves all around the world. I got to speak with Sue Nabeth, owner of Success Track Enterprise - a customer success consulting company and one of the co-founders of Customer Success Europe, and pick her brain about her experiences in the business for 7+ years and some of the differences she sees between how customer success is done in the US versus the EU. She also provides insights and advice on what companies can do to help improve their customer success efforts.

Bonjoro is all about making the onboarding experience personal by allowing you to send a personalized video message to your customer’s inbox. With a product that is so customer focused it is no surprise that their sales team and process is very customer centric as well. I spoke to one of their Head of Sales, Amaan Nathoo, about how they have a sales team that is heavily overlapping with customer success and why they have chosen to do so. He also give some recommendations, from the perspective of a sales person, about how to make it so that customer success and sales can communicate better and help each other out.

Listen to what 7 leaders in customer success look for when they are hiring for their customer success team.

Patrick was first a customer of Peakon’s before joining their team as VP if Customer Success in 2016. And the experience he had with the company and his customer success manager made him such a fan of the company that he wanted to work with them! The approach he and the CEO of Peakon have taken to customer success is very people first, and they make sure that the relationship between the customer success manager and the customer never feels transactional - it feels like a partnership.

CEO, David Etheredge, and Director of User Experience, Andy Sutton, at SavvyCard talk about what investing in customer success and user experience early on has done for the growth of their compnay.

Jonas Stanford, the Director of Customer Success at Unbounce, talks with us about what data is important to focus on for customer success teams, and how to effectively use that data to influence your customer success strategy.