Linda Källqvist, Director of Client Experience at Meltwater, spoke with the Women in Customer Success group about the customer journey and the most important aspects.
2. Career Path @Meltwater
2008 CSM Client Relations Stockholm
2009 Managing Director Client Success Nordic
2014 Director Client Experience EMEA
Fun facts:
Avid watcher of Cross Country skiing
True Optimist
Highly skilled Outlet shopper
Passionate about Customer Success
3. Meltwater at a Glance
24,000+
CLIENTS
50+
OFFICES
GLOBALLY
280+
CLIENT
SUCCESS
MANAGERS
200+
CS SUPPORT
170+
PRODUCT
DEVELOPER
5. The Importance of Customer Success
Customer Success is a defined strategy based around understanding your customers’ goals, and
enabling them to achieve them
With Customer Success comes a more customer centric culture. Making sure that your customers
are getting real, measurable value from your service, and that they are getting enough benefit from
using it to justify paying the recurring cost for your SaaS solution – each and every month
In summary, Customer Success is all about ensuring your customers achieve their Desired Outcome,
and when you are able to help them achieve that ever-evolving goal, Retention, Expansion, and
Advocacy will naturally follow
6. How to start with Customer Success
Simply put, customer success starts with your culture. You need to put your customers at the heart of
everything you do, and every decision you make, no matter how big or small.
Customer Success is all about ensuring your SaaS product enables your customers to reach their
desired outcomes, and what better way to make sure you’re on the right track than to actually talk to
your customers? Great communication is key to Customer Success. You need to know what your
customers need from your product, rather than making assumptions – you need to listen to what they
say, and the feedback they provide.
7. what is NOT Customer Success
Customer Success is Not Just a Department
➔ Even if you have a Customer Success department, all
departments need to share the ownership of having
successful customers from product to marketing to
customer acquisition
Customer Success is Not Only Account Management
➔ Making your customers successful includes more that
just upsell and renewals it's about consistently guiding
them to achieve their desired outcome.
Customer Success is Not Customer Support
➔ Customer support is an important department to
ensure that all customer can swiftly get support when
needed but it’s reactive whereas Customer Success is
all about proactively consulting your Customer.
Customer Success is Not about Tured churn or
Saving Customers
➔ Customer Success isn’t about saving customers who
are about to churn, it’s about proactively delivering
value throughout the Customer Journey so they never
get to the point of churning
Customer Success is Not “Checking in” with Clients
➔ Every call and conversation should be about
confirming the needs and adding value to your
customers.
9. Defining & Creating Your Customer Journey
How do you start to define the stages of your customer
journey?
What stages do you think are critical to include in the
customer journey, and why?
11. Customer Journey: Onboarding
The onboarding process is crucial for setting the tone of the
relationship between You & the Customer. This is where their
needs and desired outcome should be discussed and verbalised
into clear objectives
The first 90 days are when the decision is being made if the client
will renew or not, therefore a CS touchpoint between day 30 and
60 is key to ensure that everything goes according to plan and
the client usage is high.
12. Customer Journey: Executive Business Review
The EBR is a mid-lifecycle activity to ensure that the client is successful
and receives the agreed outcome from our product.
The EBR consists of 4 building blocks, each one equally important.
1. Internal Account Review
2. Identify the Executive Sponsors: (Internal and External )
3. Execute a Success Meeting:
4. Conduct Success Plan:
13. Final words
Customer Engagement is key, if the customers don’t engage with your products they are very
likely to churn.
Negative feedback is always better than no feedback as long as you address it, it means that
the customers are invested and want to see improvements.
16. Sources and Goodreads
CUSTOMER SUCCESS 101: HOW TO POWER UP YOUR STARTUP’S GROWTH
By Emily Smith
Customer Success-driven growth
Lincoln Murphy's Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Thought Leadership
