Customer Success is reshaping the business landscape in Israel. It provides a sustainable path forward for recurring revenue companies to grow predictably over the long-term.
This half-day event brings innovative Customer Success professionals together to learn how their businesses should think about retention, renewals, and delivering customer outcomes.
With speakers from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Cloudinary, Sisense, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, you'll hear from local Customer Success leaders as well as Gainsight's executive team.
I’ll talk a bit at a high level about our philosophy for why it’s important to adopt a client-centric approach across teams in your organization
And then we’ll dive into the more tactical part of the discussion - how CS and Product collaborate together so that greater synergies are achieved
Meaning,
(1) Clients benefit from the collaboration in the form of an improved product and clear follow up of their needs,
(2) Customer Success feels more empowered in working with Product Management, and
(3) Product Management takes on a more customer centric focus
בוא נתחיל בהגדרה של מה הערך של קסטמר סקסס
כאשר אתם עובדים עם לקוח והוא מאוד מרוצה - הוא פותח לפחות 3 דלתות של צמיחה
ספציפית, אתם צריכים להרוויח את הביזנס שלו מחדש בצורת חידוש החוזה
הוא יהיה מעוניין ברכישה נוספת
הוא ייתן המלצה חמה ללקוח פוטנציאלי חדש
כלומר, יש ערך משמעותי לחברה כאשר הלקוחות מרוצים ורואים וואליו
(נושא אחר - לצוות שלנו יש מטרות שקשורות לזה)
עד כאן, על הערך של שימור לקוחות
בוא ניקח את זה צעד נוסף קדימה ונבחן את המושן של לידים ולקוחות
נתחיל בליד שיש לחברה שלכם, הופך לאופציה, בסוף הדיל נסגר, ובמידה והלקוח רואה וואליו מהמוצר, הוא הופך לליד נוסף שיכול לפתוח דלתות להמשך צמיחה של החברה
ושוב חוזר חלילה
כלומר, חברות שממש מצליחות במושן הזה, מצליחות לייצר צמיחה של החברה שלהם מהלקוחות הקיימים בצורה המשכית
A strong csm team helps drive this cycle, so every Lead becomes an opportunit...
In this model, when you have multiple closed loops like this, you’re driving revenue in a Helix type shape - סליל
כבר לא מדובר בפייפליין הצר, אלא בסליל.
כל פעם שאתם משלימים סיבוב, לקוח קיים הצליח לייצר את אחד משלושת הלידים שדיברנו עליהם
והסיבובים יגדלו ככל שתשתפרו בלייצר לידים חזקים יותר
חברות שעושות את זה ממש טוב, מצליחות לייצר הכנסות חדשות בצורה הזו
דרך ציורית להבין מה הערך בלשמר את הלקוחות שלכם ולוודא שהם רואים וואליו מהמוצר שלכם
כדי שהחברה שלכם תעבוד בצורה טובה לייצר את התנועה הזאת, צריך לחשוב על איך כל צוות בחברה תורם לחווית הלקוח ומקבל ערך מלקוח שמשגשג
In the Helix, each team benefits from and contributes to a client’s success
Different functions touch customer at different times, and everyone’s contributing to rolling out the red carpet
-Sales takes them out to dinner and promises the moon
-Services gets the pleasure to share the news that we don’t actually offer the moon, but we’re happy to do what we can
-Product needs to manage many customer asks and explain nicely that their request may not make it to the top 10 among the 1,000 of requests they receive
-And finally, they may end up spending the most time with Support on the phone
לכל צוות יש תפקיד מאוד חשוב ביצירת התהליך הזה
So we all know what we have to do, and cross-functional visibility is critical to this symphony of teams working together in perfect harmony
מה שמעניין, זה כשאתה פורס את זה על פני ציר הזמן, פתאום כול מיני דברים נשברים
שימו לב - לקוח מצטרף, צוות אחד עושה איקס, צוות אחר עושה את זה… כולם צריכים לעבוד בהרמוניה
כשהלקוח מרוצה - כולם שמחים ומרגישים שהם תרמו
אבל כשהלקוח מתלונן - פתאום כולם נעלמו מהשטח, אף אחד לא קשור בכלל
When you actually draw out the customer lifecycle and how each team interacts w your client, you start figuring out who does what
And well, when things go well, everyone wants to be involved. When things don’t go well, suddenly we’re not sure which stage we’re at
Every success has many parents, but a failure is an orphan. Sounds familiar?
Which leads to the question… when a ball drops along the customer lifecycle, who picks it up and drives the turnaround? Who, at the end of the day when all is said and done, accountable to owning the customer?
In other words, who truly *owns* the customer?
I hear a ton of executives arguing about this
– Sales says – the customer is MINE, because I did the initial sale
-- Support says the customer is MINE, because I’m the person working weekends to make sure they can use the product
-- Renewals say the customer is MINE, because I own the expansion and retention
האמת היא שאני חושבת שזה לא ממש משנה - אין דבר כזה הלקוח שלי
כולם אחראים במידה זו או אחרת לחווית הלקוח והפתרון בו נעוץ ביכולת להבין איך הצוותים עובדים טוב ביחד
סבבה, אז דיברנו הרבה עם פריימוורקס וזה הכל מאוד תאורטי. אז מה התכלס פה? מה אתם יכולים לקחת ולהתחיל להשתמש מחר?
I’d argue that there is no “mine”; we all mutually own the customer together, and that designing processes can help define ownership and clarify accountability
Great, that sounds lovely, lots of frameworks we talked through - but tachles, what does this mean? what processes can you actually implement starting tomorrow?
נתחיל בדבר ראשון ליצר הבנה הוליסטית של איזה קשיים הלקוחות שלכם מתמודדים איתם
פגישות של ״לקוחות בסיכון״ - מאוד לא ברור מי עושה מה…
אז מה שעשינו זה אנליזה של הכל הבעיות של הלקוחות שלנו
To begin with, start by developing a companywide of risks in your client base. Develop a strong understanding of risk in your customer base
In our risk framework, we identified 8 buckets that are owned by different executives. We developed this framework which captures 80% of risks across customers.
Basically we have 8 categories of risks – signals that a customer is struggling. And PRODUCT is a key part of this
This framework helps allocate accountability. If a client has 8 support tickets - it’s the Dir of Support, well me, who’s on the hook
This is all about ownership. At the end of the days – I’ll sleep better at night when I know that someone is on it
Product gets their own category, owned by our VP Product Karl
Look you have a great team. You have an incredible VP of Product that wants to make your customers really happy
The key is to put all the information in front of them. Usually when you miss out on an opportunity to build a feature that would really help your customers, it’s when the information wasn’t communicated from the customer to your product team
So we developed this framework where every piece of feedback that your customer provides comes in the form of one of 8 buckets, and is delivered to the appropriate team immediately
So for example when customer X calls us to let us know that bla bla, this is immediately categories as a Product risk, immediately gets escalated to our Product team, and next steps are taken
Through that visibility and ownership we make sure that we do everything we can to drive outcomes and success for our customers
When a product enhancement is so critical to a clients’ adoption of our product, that it requires immediate attention
For our Product risk, we want to have some way to identify its severity - how severe is this risk?
So we put together a stoplight scorecard to determine severity
In our product, we can track a list of risks and their severity so we’ll have an aggregated view of risks by color code
Our CSM team, as well as our CEO, can track an overall view of Product risks
We review these in weekly executive meetings
CS leader can see status of risk
Make sure there’s a PM assigned to each risk and they own the playbook
When a CSM identifies a “red” Product risk, they open a Call To Action with this pre-defined playbook and assigns it to our VP Product
You’ll note steps include coordinating w customer, coming up w a plan, circling back to the customer w next steps, and providing regular status updates
This is disruptive: Inefficient on product / engineering teams, Heavy ‘communication tax’ on all teams, May result in ‘short-term band-aid’
Inevitable, but be very very selective: Require CS/Product leadership’s approval, Enterprise / High Risk of Churn, Be explicit about consequences of not doing, Make the tough calls, Does this request make sense for the customer’s business AND yours?
If you’re escalating, do it well! Make Product commitment, Formal playbook, Close the internal/external feedback loops
This is an incredibly manual, high touch process
You want to reserve it for true risks
The other category is “product enhancements”...
As you know the # of “product enhancements” that clients have is always greater than engineering bandwidth, especially when you’re a larger company
And you also have to think about scale - if we treated every client the same it would be hard for us to sustain our business
We developed a 1:Many approach for “enhancements” that allows us a few benefits:
(1) We bring together information from multiple channels, so everything comes together on our Community page
(2) There’s one democratic process to upvote each suggestion. PMs are very transparent. Sometimes an idea seems really critical to one client, but it won’t get upvoted and then the client understands it’s not a common use case
(3) Community heavily informs our Product roadmap. Our VP Product tracks every single post himself
We use GetSatisfaction for our Community platform
We split Community responsibilities between CS and Product - Product owns product posts, and CSM owns CS discussions that are not product related and more focused on customer success strategy and configuration type questions
In terms of metrics - Product has SLAs for response times. CS Ops team tracks # of users engaged, etc.
PMs engage directly w clients on Community
And there are other ways in which PMs are encouraged to connect directly w customers
Regular cadence of product advisory boards, where we get feedback on the roadmap
Conduct client on-sites and roadshow
Host clients at your office with CSM and PM
At this point, you may ask yourself - are Product Managers actually Customer Success Managers?
So this is a big statement
But the idea behind it is: how can you promote customer centricity in the product org to the extent that PMs get the information then need to do their job well
I’ll share a few more examples for tactics to make Product Management customer focused
As a product team, you might need to find customers who fit certain criteria to gather product input or find beta users.
You can use our Features functionality to see which customers have particular product/functionality enabled.
You can also use usage data reporting to find customers or users that are actively adopting specific parts of your product.
If it makes sense, you can even trigger Calls to Action to be alerted about these customers at the right time.
As a product team, you can derive value from reaching out to your customers at the right time.
For example, you could send emails to your customers linking to recent Release Notes.
Or, trigger emails about documentation and training based on a customer’s product usage. You could also trigger emails at certain times in the customer’s life cycle – for example, a certain number of weeks after they become a customer, or after the first time they use the product.
An important thing to note here is that the CSM has visibility into which emails the client is receiving - so even if it comes from Product, they are still in the loop and can encourage the customer to respond, or to try out a specific feature that’s relevant, etc.
Customer feedback on your product comes from various sources. You can simplify tracking these requests (and keep other teams informed) by bring requests from your support portal and from your community portal into Gainsight.
You can then report on these, and display them on the Customer 360
so other teams working with the customer are in the loop.
Gainsight also provides an efficient way to collaborate with other teams on customer escalations. You can save time by keeping everyone in the loop in one place. These screenshots are actually adapted directly from our own internal instance of Gainsight, so you can see how our Product Management team leverages our platform.
Gainsight surveys offer an easy way to gather product feedback from your customers. Send surveys at particular times in the customer lifecycle, or based on usage patterns.
I’ll share 2 new aspects of survey that we recently launched:
Company wide NPS, including Product, CS, Sales, Support.
יוצר דו שיח מאוד מעניין בין ההנהלה שלנו
We cut our regular NPS survey by end user persona. Product has accountability for end user
לסיכום… כמה דברים שדיברנו עליהם היום
קודם כל - אני מאוד מאמינה בפרוסס בתור דרך חיונית לייצר את הדיאלוג הזה בין צוותים. ברגע שיש הסכמה על זה, זה 80% מהעבודה
אל תחכו שדברים יתפוצצו - הלקוחות השקטים שלכם הם הלקוחות שהכי בסיכון
תמצאו דרכים לעשות דברים טובים בסקייל. ספציפית לייצר קומיוניטי שבו אפשר לתקשר
באיזשהו מובן, כולם קאסטמר סקסס, החל מהמנכל ועד הפרודקט מנג,ר האחרון. כולנו אחראים להאזין ללקוח, להבין ולאפיין את הצרכים, ולוודא שזה קורא.
Everyone is a CSM - including your CEO