Rediscovering Customer Success

by | Mar 21, 2018 | Advice, Blog, Community, Onboarding |

By Tim Royall

After 2 years away from customer success (CS), or anything resembling a CS role, I decided to rediscover this area within the business world which is in a constant state of growth and expansion. On my journey to explore the exciting world of customer success I happened across a meetup event which I immediately signed up for, the Customer Success Cafe.

Not being in a CS role currently I have taken it upon myself to do the reading, watch the conference vlogs and generally brush up on CS from my previous role in a B2B/C technology business and i felt this environment would be a nice relaxed way to add to my study. The CS Cafe turned out to be a great way to combine my learning around the subject matter as well as meeting CS professionals and lending from the their real world experiences, I also got to know some genuinely nice people and CS lovers in the process.

The format took the shape of some initial meet and greet chat over a coffee and banana cake, followed by our facilitator introducing the main focus of the session. The idea is to pick 2/3 topics of interest or concern from which to raise and discuss within the group, utilising the experience of those being in roles for a number of years and for the likes of myself to listen closely to every nugget of information on offer in order to gain a true insight into the real world workings of a CSM in action.

We had an array of topics to discuss, from my broad ‘What steps would you take to implement a CS team in an organisation with little to no CS processes’ to more focused topics like ‘What does a self service customer facing model look like’. One of the main topics we discussed at length was around the customer journey from Onboarding to Activation, focusing on what the customers journey from the end of the sale into the onboarding phase and beyond comprises of and them importantly what steps we can take to make sure they’re actively using the product to achieve their business goals. We also looked at ways to help engage and incentivise customers in order to foster good activation habits and when and how best organising check up calls, emails and QBR style health checks to keep an eye on their progress.

For me, i felt this was an invaluable opportunity for people to pose the types of loaded questions for processes you’re doing on a daily basis and trying to identify ways to improve, or like me you’re adding the knowledge gained to your arsenal as and when you need to act on it.

I would definitely recommend these sessions to anyone looking to build on their knowledge base of CS, gain third party insight into issues or challenges you’re having and also to meet new and like minded people.

 

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