And here we were, launching the first Customer Success Café in Lyon – the second biggest city in France – where I moved 2 months ago. My co-host, Chloé – who still lives in Paris – and I will join another company in Lyon later this year. At the time, I had no idea of the maturity of the “CS market” and the interest for such an event. What a surprise when 15 people registered online and 9 showed up at the event.
Our overall impression was that most of the people who came were new in the Customer Success space and they did not know where to start to grow their Customer Success organisation.
Interesting enough, one of the topic raised by the group was on how to go from a Support organisation to a Customer Success one. We all see the need and value of a customer success function in a company. But “moving from a customer support approach, where you are answering clients tickets with incidents and questions in a reactive mode, to a customer success one, where you aim at helping customers meet their expectations with the product and even more, can be difficult”, as highlighted by one of the participant!
From there, what has been identified by the group as required to pivot from support to customer success is the product-usage analysis to anticipate customer needs, map the ideal user-persona journey and your user drop-out journey. Thanks to these two journeys, it is then possible to determine the key moments and the drop-out ones; both will be needed to create appropriate communication campaigns or human interactions. Implementing satisfaction surveys like a NPS is also a place to start.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) and metrics to promote customer success actions at a C-level was the subject of the second group. For NPS, we compare the response rate when sent by email or in-app, and by far people have a better response rate through in-app. Email is more frequently used for satisfactory survey, and can usually be sent at the end of the implementation period, to know all about the client feedback on the sales cycle, the product usage and the interaction with the Customer Success Manager.
We also talked about the compensation plan, even if only half of the group had a bonus in their comp! One company had a variable comp plan on a monthly basis, and the second one provided it on a quarterly basis plus a percentage of the renewal (if successful!).
What was interesting with this group, is that half of the participants had worked in a company where Customer Success was already well implemented while the second part included people who had just started as a CSM. One of them was actually doing a support only role at the moment.
The second Customer Success Café is just around the corner and we are really curious to see what is coming next, and if the same people will show up. We would love to create a strong community in Lyon, where nothing exists for now for CS practitioners; however people seemed eager to discuss more about customer success and to compare their own experience and challenges. So let’s do it!
To join us in Lyon, check out our next event here.