Customer Success Summit 2018 – My Learnings

by | Apr 3, 2018 | Community |

By Piotr Lisowski

Totango sponsored one member of the CustomerSuccessNetwork.org to join Customer Success Summit 2018 in San Francisco. Piotr was our representative on the ground, and here’s his experience.

Customer Success Summit is a premier 2-day customer success event organized by Totango. Industry leaders and visionaries identify and share innovative practices and trends to drive customer engagement and positive business outcomes for customers. The event gives opportunity to learn from each other about Customer Success. Customer Success leaders from different companies give keynote sessions, suggest how to apply innovation and technology to accelerate the impact of customer-centric approach at the company. There are also interactive sessions with advisers and experts that give opportunity to have an open discussion and hear about other people’s experience. For me Customer Success Summit was an excellent way to study high quality content, explore new ideas and meet new peers. On top of that it is always a lot of fun with the CS community!

MY KEY TAKEAWAYS

Day 1

  • To deliver CS results fast CS actions need to be broken down into practical components.
  • Companies must think like their customers and provide effortless experience.
  • It is crucial to gather usage data, system engagement data and business metrics to monitor and predict customers’ behavior.

Day 2

  • In customer-oriented companies customer satisfaction should be no. 1 metric (can be achieved by joint goals with other departments).
  • Not following-up on NPS (or other customer satisfaction measures) response is worse than not sending it at all.
  • CSMs should spend their time having meaningful conversations.

Summary

Most companies would not exist without their customers. To maintain the contracts and grow their customers it is essential to think like them, try to look at the customer journey from their perspective and do everything to be able to give them an effortless experience. Product consumption is the lowest level of adoption. Customers should be loyal to the product, to the brand and refer solution to their connections in specific industries.

In business timing is essential. To benefit from the right timing companies must gather data, analyze it and be able to predict customers’ behavior. Customer satisfaction is the most important metric in customer-oriented companies. Some companies believe it is more important than revenue. By focusing on having loyal customers it is easier to achieve high revenue as when focusing on the revenue itself.

Customers’ feedback makes sense only when the feedback loop is closed. Therefore, organizations should always show that customers’ feedback matters and is used properly in different departments. It should be shared among the whole company to make each employee realize who should benefit from their work at the end of the day.

Finally, there are a lot of innovative approaches like AI, Machine Learning or Marketing Automation tools that can help organizations to scale and serve their customers in an excellent way. Next to different very specific tools there are software vendors who focus on addressing customer-oriented organizations and provide complete goal-oriented products that use the data to make employee’s work easier and better, like Totango. By automating some aspects of the work, creating dashboards, tracking progress or running smart marketing campaigns CSMs can focus on having meaningful conversations with their customers.

Watch the sessions here.

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