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Key Takeaways from Customer SuccessCon East 2018
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Earlier this week we got to sponsor and attend Customer SuccessCon East that took place in Boston. It was a day packed with learning and discussion all focused on the current state and future of Customer Success.
For those who don’t know, SuccessCon is a series of events that’s put on by The Customer Success Association. The general sessions led by CSA’s Executive Director, Mikael Blaisdell were about the Customer Success Blueprint, which is a result of over eight years of research conducted by the association. The findings were presented in two general sessions focusing on four key areas – strategy, process, people, and technology.
The interesting thing is that even though the numbers of open Customer Success executive positions continue to skyrocket worldwide, there’s still many key questions that remain to be answered. And for that reason, events such as this are great forums to get together with others in the industry to exchange ideas and lessons learned to help push the professional community forward.
In the spirit of sharing, here’s a few takeaways we got from the conference that we’d like to share with you.
You Need to WOW Your Customers
You should focus your efforts on delivering value through WOW moments – a moment where your user suddenly sees the benefit they get from using your product and says to themselves WOW! These WOW moments will result in increased product adoption and ultimately continued growth and higher retention.
Don’t Overlook Operations
Your customer success team is probably running on all cylinders by trying to do many things at once like – building relationships with customers, adding value, increasing adoption, reducing churn and identifying growth opportunities. To do all of these things the CS team members require processes, information, tools, education, coaching and support. Enter Customer Success Operations. The CS Operations function might be the person your missing and didn’t even know it. The CS Ops role can help provide structure and resources, so that each CSM can perform at their best and meet their goals and objectives.
Learn From Your Churn
Don’t miss the opportunity to learn from your customer churn. Every failure has a lesson. If you take the time to see where things went wrong, you can use that information to identify and track early warning signs of at-risk accounts in your customer base.
It’s All About Structure
Even if you create the best processes, hire the best people and have the best technology your Customer Success team could still fail miserably. It all comes down to how your structure you Customer Success organization. You should structure your team so that they can focus on the customer’s ultimate outcomes, which will also allow you to scale more easily.
Reset the Relationship with Sales
The handoff of a new customer between Sales and Customer Success is a critical moment in the customer lifecycle. But for many organizations, this transfer of customer knowledge is a disorganized mess, lacking clear requirements and fraught with tension or even downright distrust between the two teams involved. But it doesn’t need to be that way – and for the sake of your customers, it shouldn’t. That’s why you should take the step to purposefully reset the relationship with sales. By doing so, you can embark on a new partnership between teams that are really on the same side.
If you liked these key takeaways we’d highly recommend checking out a Customer SuccessCon for yourself (you can also check out our key takeaways from SuccessCon Seattle). There are upcoming events taking place in Denver, London, Seattle, and San Francisco. To register or find out more information, check out the SuccessCon website.
New Resource – NPS Cheat Sheet
To learn more about Net Promoter Score (NPS), check out our cheat sheet. In this NPS Cheat Sheet you will find a complete description of NPS and key terms to enrich your Customer Success vocabulary. You will also learn how to administer and calculate NPS, recommended follow-up actions for each segment, and other best practices.
Customer Success Around the Web
- The Ultimate Guide to CAC – Learn how to calculate, understand and improve your customer acquisition cost.
- In B2B Marketing How Do I Prevent Churn? – Top suggestion for better managing customer churn.
- 10 Effective Ways to Transform Your Customer Service & Customer Experience – Ten steps to make deep and lasting changes for your company or organization.
