saas

Customer Success

State of Customer Success 2018

Stephen Danelutti Leave a comment

I attended Pulse Europe (the 4th) on the 8-9th November, an event run by Gainsight, a Customer Success (CS) technology vendor. They run the larger, main event in the US and I had the pleasure of attending last year where I captured the State of Customer Success 2017. So this is a timely update with a local, regional flavour.

Below are some general observations, main takeaways and then I captured notes from the sessions I attended (including my spin on things).

Chatting to the GM of the European office of Gainsight, Dan Steinman, I concluded that not only were Gainsight in the CS technology business but also in education. He agreed.

By that we didn’t mean the services part of Gainsight where they do offer education in support of their technology (see Gainsight University). I mean the education of an industry, a nascent one that needs it. It’s in their interest of course, to grow the category and also the industry within which it operates, mostly Enterprise Software [as a Service]. 

We also discussed how other industries could benefit from learning about the CS business, like car manufactures which I have written about before: The connected car vision is missing a few connections

I digress, the point is Gainsight take a leading role in informal education and for helping grow and share learning between individuals, companies, for the category and beyond. In this respect they are very successful and the event achieved that aim too.

Main take aways:

1. Tighter integration between product and CS, the move to self service and broader alignment

This was a theme driven not just by Gainsight on the back of their acquisition of Aptrinsic (more here). I’ve been seeing this more and more and driving it in my work and it is definitely a growing trend.

It encompasses two elements:
(1) greater collaboration between product and CS teams on high touch interactions with and insights from customers and,
(2) the built in onboarding, help and product adoption features in products that drive end user self service.

This trend is possibly the most evident but there is also the need, oft talked about, of greater alignment within customer service oriented teams and with sales and marketing teams.

2. Lack of innovation

I found at this event and on the whole that there are no real innovations being driven or presented other than in company products themselves (point above). I am writing an eBook / trend report about this and in the work I do mentoring startups and it is a main pillar I stress.

I think in an industry or category often struggling to find its way (see next point) we will have to do more to innovate and increase the impact of customer success activities. There is so much scope since the customer is at the forefront of everything and technology is changing so much and so fast. But innovation needs to come to business models, processes and people too.

3. Hype Cycle

The chart below was presented by Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight in one of his keynotes. Billed as a maturity chart, you could also easily see this as a hype cycle. I’ve been through the early curve twice in companies and seen it happen in others. I’ve also seen it happen with many technologies which the cycle most often refers to. I got an impression that as an industry we are in a trough of disillusionment.

Perhaps I’ve been in CS too long and lack the starry eyed optimism of a newbie but I’m saying this from the perspective of what I hear. I hear too much justification, disagreement on the function and its impact, arguments on who owns the customer, fights with other disciplines like customer experience, etc.

It just feels like the conversations are typically of the kind you find in the trough of disillusionment. It’s also a period characterised by lack of innovation as mentioned. That’s not  a bad thing. If I’m right, I’m looking forward to the slope of enlightenment for the industry as a whole because on this, I’m a true believer 🦄 🚀

Day 1 – 8 November ’18

Keynote – CS trends

This is a list that Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight ran through:

  1. CS drives sales. Prospects talk to customers and advocacy is key. So if you ensure customers are successful, they will act as willing reference points and that will help close deals. I totally agree with this and think it’s an undervalued KPI (from the vendor point of view).
  2. Company-wide priority. Top down involvement, endorsement and integration into operations is critical for CS success. Having been  a part of two reorganisations because this was not done right from the start, I absolutely concur. Where CS fits is still being debated though and the dust has yet to settle on that. More on this later.
  3. Career success. CS is one of the twenty most promising jobs of 2018. Growth in Chief Customer Officer’s was talked about and the fact they are primed to be the next CEO’s with some early examples quoted.
  4. Prescriptive. There’s a greater drive to commonality, standardisation and bench-marking. The periodic table by Gainsight below is an attempt to define this. With this lacking in many of the organisations I’ve worked in and with, it’s going to be a challenge to define for an industry but I agree it’s critically needed.
  5. CS movement. The growing attendance at Pulse conferences and book sales was pointed to as evidence of a growing CS movement. A little self serving perhaps but I can definitely feel an uptick in tempo over the years. The jobs market is also an obvious indicator and aside from CS being a most promising job, the number of openings I’m seeing is rising almost exponentially.
Periodic Table of Customer Success Elements – by Gainsight

CS in EU

  • Pockets of activity mentioned like London, Berlin, etc. For me they echo the startup centres in EU where often the bigger, better SaaS companies reside and thus CS naturally follows.
  • EU is learning and following fast and a couple of stand out companies were quoted as evidence of that – see next point (in brackets is what they are excelling in):
  • Slido (Voice of Customer); Intelliflo (ROI); ReviewPro (tech touch + human, e.g. 3 mails following sign up – if no open, human contacts); Signavio (customer health); Attraqt (exec alignment/sponsorship – internal); Response Tap (success planning); Workfront (risk management); Gainsight (stakeholder alignment – external).

CS and Product

This was presented by Travis Kaufman, VP Product Growth, Aptrinsic on the back of Gainsight’s acquisition of Aptrinsic. Ultimately its a reflection of the strategic direction Gainsight believes they need to take to grow the market and no doubt themselves. There are some compelling arguements.

  • Sales and Marketing have done it (quotes about Salesforce’s acquisition and integration of several marketing platforms into their offering), now CS and product need to. Hardly compelling evidence but some other drivers were mentioned which do make sense.
  • Driven by
    — Data. Drive new opportunities based on usage data.
    — Scale onboarding by extending the journey into the app.
    — Influence product roadmap based on data not opinions
  • Product is way to scale CS engagement for high volume, low touch accounts. I’ve written about this multiple times here and here.
  • Feature / user feedback built into the product and covering onboarding as well as ongoing use will expand.
  • Sales and marketing consolidation will be followed in the CS / product world is the firm prediction – I’m rooting for this outcome.

Accenture analysis

A talk on why CS is the new growth mantra which is based on the main C-Suite challenge around delivering profitable growth. 500 executives were surveyed for the insights amongst 10 brands: Microsoft Azure/O365, Tableau, Symantec, Adobe, Salesforce, SAP, Cisco, Workday, Dell-EMC, Marketo.

  • A customer’s level of trust in a brand is the single most important 
    factor in a renewal decision (55% said so). Trust is the #1 influencer and counts no matter how long a customer has been buying a product or service. 
  • First impressions count – deployment (installation, activation and setup) is the most important CS activity. It is 2 times more significant in determining whether a customer will renew. A bit of confusion on their part here. As pointed out in various other presentations over the two days, I would separate out CS management from deployment activities and for me its much more about how you launch to end users: Launch like a boss – bringing consumer startup practice to your enterprise technology platform.
  • Longer term customers value access to self service tools and the ease of renewal – 73% think its important and it can have a 20% influence on renewal decisions. I love this since it validates a lot of my thinking: Role of Self Service in Customer Success.

Must win moments for a CS team

By the author of The Three Value Conversations: How to Create, Elevate, and Capture Customer Value at Every Stage of the Long-Lead Sale. This presentation was about a messaging approach for customer renewals, price increases and upsells. It was part based on a quote referenced by Nick Mehta (see screenshot) that renewals are really resells. It also emphasised the need to tell a better story. Great example of Malcom Gladwell’s Tipping Point book success – he wasn’t the originator of the theory, Morton Grodzins was. But Gladwell popularised the theory through better story telling. Other points:

  • Selling (acquisition) stories need to be different to staying (retention) stories because the latter reinforces preference stability as opposed to disrupting change / status quo bias.
  • At point of renewal, there is no sense selling on new features/functions which many sales people do, but rather on reinforcement.
  • Some really good scientific and evidence based reasoning (neuro science, behavioural economics, social psychology and decision science) on why good storytelling works. Totally get this having done several sessions on storytelling before – key CS skill I would say.
  • Focused around the customer retention path post sales (why stay), but also answering questions around why the customer should pay more and evolve (expand). 
Customer Deciding Journey

Success Planning

ResponseTap and Micro Focus went through some of their common approaches.

  • No common view of desired customer outcomes between sales, deployment, onboarding, etc.
  • Single source of truth needed – one document
  • 3 time lines created for a plan (short, medium, long)
  • Everyone agrees on common outcomes before plan is approved – sales, CS, support, etc,
  • Benefits/Learning:
    — Having a common customer journey between departments
    — Tracking NPS at different stages is useful and should cover various journey phases: sales, onboarding, then service/support and CSM
    — CS should review internally feeding progress back to the organisation
    — Improved cross team collaboration and decision making
    — Better renewal rates after implementing

Self Service

This applies mostly to the support function and was presented by someone from Insided.

  • Most customers don’t want to contact companies for support (72%, Forrester) so important to address well from a self service point of view.
  • Free trials and freemium customers also need support
  • Automation is not the answer for everything. 7 out of 10 interactions with chat bots fail.
  • Including community responses in help centre search responses is good practice – Google quoted as example.
  • Peer to peer answers are viewed as more trustworthy. Best is for the company to focus on company and FAQ material and the community, the long tail of other queries. Coincidentally I just came across another research based post that bears this out: Why Online Communities Are The New B2B Superpower
    — From the post: online communities are the third most common digital engagement channel for post-purchase customer feedback or support (after email and website).
  • Support or help in product is best and voice queries are rising (digital assistants).

Scaling user onboarding but keeping a personal touch

Again this was presented by Travis Kaufman, VP Product Growth, Aptrinsic. I agree with this approach from a scale, tech touch point of view. The only problem I see with it is the potential over emphasis on features. This can be a distraction from the all important emphasis on business outcomes which should never be forgotten.

  • Most of the user experience happens within the product and so it’s a good reason to focus on this which I totally agree with.
  • Onboard users to aha moments – key features you want to emphasise.
  • Onboard to new features as they release
  • Re-engage users to complete critical tasks
  • Product teams need to know what feature adoption rates are and also what the qualitative feedback behind that use is. Work with CSM’s to leverage this and drive or accentuate further use. 
  • Derive personas for specific use cases. Ask in qualitative surveys or deduce from the use of a feature and who you intended it for.

The quest to be LAER efficient

From the President and CEO of TSIA (Technology Services Industry Association) J.B. Wood, a great overview of the industry as a whole. Also touching on the broader opportunity with XaaS (Everything as a Service). The TSIA is an association that works with the top 400 tech companies to understand what they are doing and what impact that has.

  • LAER: Land Adopt Expand Renew. Where XaaS meets profitability – see operating framework in slide below.
  • 5 key markers on the path to LAIR effectiveness which is comprised of 4 stages – see this also in slides below
  • Monetisation of CS falls in the effective phase. Allows for investment in better CS activities
  • Point made that Cost of Sales and Marketing (COSM) is too high in cloud companies because customer acquisition costs (CAC), customer expansion costs (CEC) and customer retention costs (CRC) are based on activities being driven by traditional sales and marketing teams.
  • If the CS org were to manage activities covering the latter two it would drive down COSM. Fair point and this lead to a lot of discussion around the CS org owning renewals, upsells and expansions – the standard discussion that always comes up and was covered in other talks/discussions. On this topic I feel like the verdict is still out even after years of discussion. See also Nick Mehta’s point on this from his keynote on Day 2.

CEO’s view of CS

A panel discussion between CEO’s of Futrli, Precursive and TaskRay facilitated by the CCO of Box, Jon Herstein. All had robust CS functions so naturally the input was mostly positive.

  • What can you do to make CS successful? Spend time with the team. Understand the problems customers and CS org experiences. Get quantitative/qualitative feedback on ideal CS function then build it. Get people to think like customers – spend time there.
  • How to avoid silo’d CS function and ensure cross company accountability? Success hacks across functions. Have hypothesis that will achieve CS outcome then try prove. Non traditional customer facing roles spending time with customers, e.g. engineers. Love the hacking idea – I’ve written about this before: Success Hacking
  • Where will you invest? Automation of tasks so CS can focus on value work. Love it – say no more.
  • Any questions from VC’s around CS? A resounding YES around what is being done and how. They want insights into CS like scope of effort, ration of CS individual to customers, on what, etc.

Day 2 – 9 November ’18

Keynote, Nick Mehta, CEO Gainsight

Rumination on the raison d’etre of the CS org and where and how in the organisation it works best based on Gainsight experience. All makes total sense and as it should be for now.

  • Started on the debate over CS being a role or strategy. If not solved there’s a danger we lose the initiative. It should and can be both.
  • The CS charter: CS (Customer Success) = CX (Customer Experience) + CO (Customer Outcomes). CS > CSM (Customer Success Manager), in other words, Customer Success encompasses CSM’s and many other areas besides.
  • Lessons from Gainsight:
    — CS and Renewals separated at Gainsight. Different skills and tasks and difficult to do both well.
    — CS and Account Management also separated. Expansion happens off the back of adoption, outcomes and different audience relationships that CS build.
    — CS and Services. Handover opportunities and knowledge for skilled teams from CS to Services to implement deep work and methodology (project management).
    — CS and Marketing. Building the right outcomes and thus advocates happens in CS, formal references and stories developed further by marketing.
    — CS and Support. Strategic, exec stakeholder and impact work is for CS. Technical skills, process and speedy results should be covered by Support.
    — CS and Product. They have so much common ground: adoption breadth and depth; customer feedback, etc. Too often they have different ways to measure and silo’d thinking. Again example of sales and marketing and need to combine CS and Product which Gainsight are doing.
    — Exec team and CS. CS provides insights to customers, execs can amplify, drive resources, decisions and problem solving, etc.

Sirius Decisions: B2B alignment and impact on business performance

Sirius Decision are a research and advisory company focused on demand generation and performance measurement. They presented findings from various bits of research.

  • B2B Revenue Engine expectations have been increasing, challenging organisations to drive stronger alignment across customer success, sales, marketing and product teams.
  • The historical view of alignment predominantly around the buyer is no longer sufficient to drive growth and profitability rates ahead of the market and the competition.
  • Customer engagement is one of the six critical areas of alignment that B2B revenue leaders must focus on.
  • Achieving and maintaining alignment within customer engagement initiatives requires a roadmap to realise the business impact it can deliver to the organisation.
  • Engagement scoring (for all the various customer interactions) highly sought after by CMO’s

Customer Success at Cisco

Alistair Wildman, Head of customer experience EMEA was interviewed on stage. This is what he shared after being there and in his position for 6 months.

  • They call it customer experience which includes CS. Covers other functions: support, service, etc. So it’s the whole post sales experience.
  • Hardware has been wrapped up into services subscriptions model
  • 80% of post sales efforts happen through partners – they are key in strategy. Not like Microsoft apparently although not true. Good analogy of a pit stop, one tyre is changed by Cisco, the other three by partners.
  • They have account based CS which is a direct engagement model and technical CS which will work with partners on customer challenges.
  • Data is key. They are still in the process of building dashboards to understand usage which they think will take 2-3 years.
  • Lessons from Salesforce (where Alistair worked previously): Hire for skill not for count. Senior people that know how to do the job. Develop skills through customer engagement simulations with product for training.

Data science at Gainsight

I attended this session thinking I was going to get insights into the cutting edge practices adopted by Gainsight but it was more like a basic intro to data science. Here are my brief notes before I left the session.

  • We are heading into the age of predictability which is where we want to be – anticipating trends, heading off negative ones, leveraging positive ones. 
  • Tasks to consider are: identify the nature of your data sources; quantify and get a score for your data outputs, understand and plot maturity stages, move up the scale.
  • Prescriptive analytics understands causes for outcomes and prescribes solutions upfront. Needs AB testing of playbooks. This is the kind of deep level insight I was hoping for but we merely skimmed the surface.

How do VCs see CS

Joyce Liu (Dawn Capital), Paul Morrisey (Battery Ventures) and Stephen Millard (Notion Capital) were interviewed by Igor Beckerman (CFO Gainsight).

  • Usage and adoption is a clear priority early on. Value comes later. Customer advocates seen as important and so too Customer Advisory Board’s (CAB).
  • Metrics in the boardroom. Predictability and causality key. What are targets likely to be and why are they what they are.
  • How much to spend on CS. Depends on whether the company has big end customer’s vs small end customer’s. Onboarding should be a big investment. Where early value is seen with correlation on outcomes, investment goes up. CS can be a cost centre in the early days but profitability is important later.
  • CS leaders. Some of the best were waiters in the past – they all have a love for service. For larger companies, those that can have quality conversations across a broad range (multi functional). Systems thinkers and those that can take multiple perspectives (customer, industry, vendor)
  • CCO to CEO. If former responsible for 90% of long term profit that stands to reason it will happen.
  • Decision factors for investment. Talking to customers to get their views on the company. Tools and processes in place are also a key decision factor.

Bonus

Brain Cox came and spoke on astronomy and the result was 🤯 Some excellent perspective after two days of intense CS overloading.

Customer Success

SaaS beyond Software – Automakers

Stephen Danelutti 3 Comments

customer success

The auto industry needs Customer Success managers. Geoffrey Moore, famed author of Crossing the Chasm and father of Moore’s law is writing a new book on Customer Success. This slide above comes from a talk where he is quoted applying the concept of customer success to manufacturing. I applied the same thinking in this blog post a while ago to a specific type of manufacturer – the automaker: The connected car vision is missing a few connections.

Be more SaaS

 

Customer Success

Role of Self Service in Customer Success

Stephen Danelutti 1 Comment

Customer success teams were put in place in technology SaaS and subscription companies to ensure that customers are successful in their use of the technology they invested in. They have become a core part of ensuring the customer derives long-term value and ultimately stays with the vendor (in other words renews the subscription).

But has the vendor and customer become too reliant on them?

I am a customer success manager. Far be it for me to be talking myself out of a job. But actually that is the point. If I could get to it (that point) I would have done my job I think.

Especially with technology products you would think that the technology itself would play a major role in helping users use it and get value out of it. And with the advent of AI, machine learning and automation, even more so.

Enterprise technology is quite a different beast though. The complexity of organisations means that technology use and adoption is not straightforward. It’s dependent on many environmental factors. Like culture, organisational complexity and maturity, etc.

Factors that technology is not good at dealing with but humans are. These have to be factored in, so to speak, in terms of how you ensure use and value creation of a technology in an organisational context. So I don’t see human effort going away anytime soon.

Still, lets look at how technology can and should help to alleviate burdensome tasks best left to machines.

In my mind, a lot of the help technology provides is ultimately geared towards the user being able to self help or serve. And its not just about the end user but also those responsible for end user adoption – the people customer success managers typically work with. I’ll call them adoption managers for sake of clarity. They are typically the ones served by Customer Success Managers most directly but as you will see in the next section, I certainly am driven to make them as self sufficient as possible too.

Technology’s role

By this I mean two things:

  1. What role the technology itself provides with things like built in help and support from onboarding guides to a help manual that can be contextualised with key features as well as be generally available to users.
  2. What role any other technology provides to support the end users and adoption managers. For example, as part of recent hackathon efforts at Microsoft where I currently work, the team and I all won first at a local UK level and then at a global level, for a solution intended to support customer success managers and adoption managers. We called the solution Journey because that is what adoption typically is. Here are a couple of slides from our pitch deck which hopefully explain:

The origins of the idea and also current manual efforts are documented in this post I shared on LinkedIn: Co-owning success with Office 365 customers

Validation has come from winning the hackathon awards (at the global level we won in a field of over 24 000 competitors and 5 000 entries). We also received solid validation from customers we are working with on the current manual efforts mentioned and all new customers we introduce it to.

So it seems there is appetite for this gap in the market. You can watch a very short demo of what we pitched and won with and answer 3 short questions in a follow up survey here if you like – it would help with further validation.

Survey

AI and Automation

According to a study on Customer Service trends:

The future of customer service is about giving customers more control and better access to operations, so they can build their own experiences in real time. To do this, in addition to investing and moving customer service to cloud-based operations, they focus in on how to work better with automation.

I am totally in agreement with this as I wrote in this post: The Future of Customer Success is Not Human. Even though the context of the study above covers customer service trends which is very different to customer success, it is still broadly applicable. The domain is the same.

I think these activities are going to continue to expand in use and value, especially to alleviate customer success manager efforts where they are overloaded and too much is expected of them and where bureaucracy has crept in.

Technology can help reduce bureaucracy

In the post where I wrote that the future of customer success is not human, I quoted a study on bureaucracy. It has customer service, in which again I would suggest customer success falls, at the top of the rankings of roles and fields where bureaucracy has crept in (list of rankings pasted again here). Being a practitioner I would concur with that and the point I made then and again now is that technology can help avoid this.

Of course a large portion of the problem stems from overzealous management ptractices which is not something technology can help with. But by and learge I see it as a valuable counterbalance.

What needs for human intervention will never go away?

Assuming that technology can take up a lot of slack and reduce bureaucracy, what does this leave the customer success manager and those responsible for adoption to do?

Well it will be to focus on those intractable problems that I mentioned earlier technology will not be able to help us with and will become increasingly needed. Thorny problems and challenges that can be overcome to improve the customer experience. Those that require and will take imagination, creativity and innovation and will focus on the challenging art of managing people.

I have two separate posts on these topics that elaborate on that if interested.

Customer Success

Role of Sales in Customer Success and 6 rules to guide you

Stephen Danelutti 2 Comments

How many times in your role as a customer success manager working with customers, have you struggled with the solution you are trying to implement where it has not been sold right?

By solution I mean what is constituted in the solution selling process (products and services, solving problems or needs and/or delivering specific business outcomes).

By not being sold right I mean when a customer thinks they are buying and getting one thing and once the deal is done they discover it’s something else.

Sometimes this is a result of over promise to close a deal. Most often this is around what a product can or cannot do, a feature/function mis-sell.

The area I am concerned with and covering in this post is a result of ignorance of what it takes to make a customer successful with the use of a SaaS solution and where this leads to misunderstanding of the effort required or provided. Generally the lack of clarity arises in one or all of the following areas:

  • What the vendor provides as part of the service the customer pays for and what might fall outside that. With SaaS, lets be honest, the majority of the responsibility lies with the vendor to prove value and keep the subscription afloat in terms of recurring commitment. That’s why customer success teams where set up. But a customer success team is not a silver bullet. So first sales people have a responsibility to position the customer success role and effort correctly and then make sure the customer understands that it cannot all be down to the customer success manager or team.
  • What comes with the product in terms of onboarding and adoption support. In the best case scenario, your product has clear onboarding process and functionality built in that supports end users as they start using a new technology and as new features get added over time. A good vendor will also provide documentation and learning material to supplement this. A good sales person will point to this as part of the sell but that’s the easy part.
  • What the customer needs to do in terms of driving value. This is the hard part. This is where sales people often trip up. They don’t make clear to the customer that resources, effort and commitment is required on their side at all levels. Especially with complex enterprise products covering complex people oriented processes.
  • What is the end goal in terms of what business outcomes are being striven for. This includes the measures for success and how you are going to track against them and the need for doing so.

It makes implementing any solution really difficult when these expectations are not made clear up front. I have often had to get involved in “go back” motions which as the name suggests, requires going back to the customer to resell the solution right.

Click to enlarge

This is a monumental waste of both vendor and customers time. Not to speak of the messy job of clarifying misperceptions which is never a good thing.

As someone who needs to implement such solutions post sales, I am acutely aware of this so I’m sharing my experience and thoughts of what will hopefully avoid such situations.

SaaS sales are already complicated and your product has to be easier to buy than to use but use and what it takes to be successful with it, need to be a clear part of the solution you sell.

6 rules to guide you

Whether you are in sales or customer success and ideally this is done together and before anything is sold, make sure the customer knows these things:

  1. Use cases are the currency of success and should be defined as part of the sales process, not afterwards. They are part of the solution sold and a key way in which value is delivered (use cases should have clear business outcome targets and KPI’s to measure success). Getting a customer success manager to do this after the deal is done is to close the stable door after the horse has bolted.
  2. Make clear where culture change is necessary to make a technology implementation work because it requires such different work practices. Also that the customer is responsible for managing this, not the CSM. The CSM is not a resource but a guide. By definition a customer success manager cannot appreciate and know an organisations culture as well as someone who works there. Nor can they influence the change that is often necessary.
  3. Maturity and value take time and there are no quick fixes where complex organisations and technologies are concerned. Big bang approaches at launch are often necessary and the first 90 days are critical but will seldom do the job in the long run. Iterating your way forward by constantly tracking progress and tweaking where needed is best.
  4. Data is the way to track progress, it is the only way to measure success. First that the product is being used and then that intended outcomes are being achieved through a well defined set of KPI’s. This should be made up of a solid set of quantitative and qualitative data focused on product usage and then tied to business outcomes. Ideally this comes as part of the product and service but crucially, this needs attention and effort.
  5. Business outcomes are the value deliverable, not a well configured product, a great process, a changed culture, etc. The latter are the means, business outcomes are the end game. Making a product available is not automatically going to achieve desired outcomes. Return from a technology investment requires clear value definition upfront (use case definition aligned to a vision and goals that are constantly measured against and changed where needed) but you need to manage these other things to get to there.
  6. Success events are activities that will lead to usage and value creation. They are often activities that a CSM and those responsible for adoption in the organisation work on together to plan and execute. Do these and track the impact they have on usage and business outcomes constantly. This takes time and commitment and often, crucial involvement from senior executives.
Customer Success

Connecting customer advocates to drive product strategy and customer success

Stephen Danelutti 4 Comments

yammer-customer-love
Yammer Customers – From the Yammer Customer Love board on Pinterest

I’ve written a lot about ways to scale success efforts but the best is always face to face. Events like customer meetups are a perfect way to bring customers together. I’m running these in EMEA for the company I work for currently. The context is enterprise technology. This is what I’ve learned so far and I’ll update this post as I go along.

The ideal conversation at a customer meetup would be to discuss shared successes. We all know those are hardly going to be the only outcomes. Discussing failures and how to overcome challenges are also good topics.

Meetups in the context of customer success should not only be about technology. They can also be a means to building relationships with your strategic customers. They should build your customer advocacy base too. It is a rich means to nurturing customer advocates and a customer community.

Aspects outside technology can also be topics for exploration. How something like organisational culture impacts on technology adoption. How a well designed approach can aid your technology adoption efforts.

Yet you should also use customer meetups for your product team to meet customers. The purpose here would be to share insights about whats coming in the product roadmap. Customers also have the chance to provide nuanced feedback on what they want and need.

You should avoid the feature / function trap of enterprise technology adoption. Make it about the strategic use of technology. Bring product teams closer to customer needs and pain points. You could cover use cases which are the currency of success. A meetup is the perfect environment in which to discover and share successful use cases.

Above all, meetups should be learning environments. Settings where people can come together to share expertise and learning. They should also encourage new and different thinking. At best they bring people, tools and techniques together. They drive openness and foster creativity to help solve problems.

The ideal customer attendee is the advocate. They have an interest and passion for your product and the industry in which operates. They have deep knowledge and the willingness to share it. If they don’t have these attributes, the customer meetup is the forum to nurture them in.

From the vendor side (customer meetups are most often run by the vendor) there are ideal attendees too. Those passionate about making customers succesful are obvious choices. So bring the customer success team into the meetup. Product teams are the other obvious choice. Product managers and even hard core software engineers should attend.

If you can have senior executives attend, that is ideal too. It shows how serious you are about customers and the meetup format.

Don’t get sidetracked or become unfocused. The meetup is always about the customer and their needs. Its never about your cool product or your clever founders or your awesome people. They will shine through anyway if you make the customer shine first.

What to avoid

There is sometimes debate about inviting prospects. Some would treat the customer meetup like a demand generation event. To make it more impactful. They would have marketing more involved to drive attendance. Sales people involved to have customers convince prospects to buy. Don’t let them do it.

Strategic prospects that are well advanced in opportunity stage could attend. Screen them first. Make sure they have the right intent. Are they genuine in their passion and intent to learn or do they want to verify a decision. If the latter, there are better ways of doing that. Like a reference call.

Sales focused events are different. Attendees of these events know hard selling is a primary motive. You can market the crap out of those you attend or sponsor :)

Who owns and leads customer meetups also comes up. Customer success teams should in my view, not marketing. They are close to the customer and know their environment. The meetup can also be a forum to forge closer ties as well as drive further customer success work.

Which does not mean there is no place for marketing. They can help promote as well as scale efforts.

But if customers think the meetup is a vehicle for marketing or sales, you lose their trust. The potential to build a community of customer advocates is no longer there.

The ultimate goal of a series of customer meetups is to build a community of advocates. If that drives loyalty in your company and product as it should, that is a beautiful thing.

ideal meetup venue.png
The Ideal Meetup Venue

Guidelines for a successful meetup

  1. Location. Make the location as accesible to the majority of your customers as possible. This means transport links as well as general accesibility. If it means taking your event to the customers location, do it, e.g. a roadshow.
  2. Venue. This is the more important factor and you should not underestimate it. A well lit, expansive yet informal and cozy environment is ideal. You want to inspire creativity and encourage openness. It would be better if the location was away from your regular work space unless you have an amazing space. Doing it away from a regular work space helps take your mind away from business as usual. These days in any major city, there are a plethora of options. And services like Breather can help.
  3. Numbers. If possible keep it down to a manageable number. This depends a little on the size of the venue (don’t cramp people). But it’s more about interactions. Too many people and conversations will not be cohesive in the managed part of your agenda. Fifteen is ideal, twenty is manageable.
  4. Time and frequency. Time of day is the first consideration. The options are early morning or evening. Morning is likely to eat into work time whereas the latter into personal time. Each has merits and challenges. You can experiment between meetups. I tend to choose mornings from 08.30 – 10.30. Two hours is a good duration and does not take too much work time out of the day. Quarterly is a good frequency.
  5. Cost. This should not cost the earth. If you are fortunate to have a large budget you can go wild but it is not needed. Location hire and refreshments will be the main costs. I have catered for the finest coffees and a mix of pastries and healthy alternatives before. This included a personal barista with her own coffee machine – the real deal. We chose to emphasise coffee (tea was a side option) because of its history in London. Workshop Coffee was the supplier. Venue (see pic for example), breakfast, coffees and teas all came in at £700.
  6. List. You need to manage a list and track attendance over time. There are so many tool alternatives I’m not even going to go into them. Most important is that it is shareable so you can get others involved to see who is attending or has in the past. This will aid further promotion. It’s also useful if the main organiser leaves or cannot manage a certain event.
  7. Promotion and communication. You shouldn’t go overboard. If you have a history of meetups to draw from so much the better. You can explain previous events and successes. When starting out make clear the purpose of the meetup and set the tone. Consider your ideal audience and craft your message with them in mind. They can be executives, technical or business users. You could get fancy with a email marketing tool but it’s not necessary. Key is to be brief and impactful so you get a response.
    I would start 2 months ahead of the event and target 3 follow-up mails after the initial mail. Follow-ups can provide more info and remind potential attendees to sign up. You can also encourage sharing with colleagues. Use of social media depends on how broad and public you want to make the event. I favour a managed attendance approach in private (not public and free for all). Social can, if you have the permission, be a good way of sharing activities on the day. That way you promote your brand and further attendance down the line.
  8. Managing signups. I currently use Splash. It’s a landing page tool and then some. The obvious alternatives are Meetup and Eventbrite and there are many others too. Key is to have a branded and customisable means to attract and manage RSVP’s.
  9. Agenda and facilitation. The agenda should be as light as possible and not be too overbearing. Start with time and space for attendees to connect and converse. They would do this while filling up with refreshments and food. I’d give this at least half an hour and it provides time for late arrivals. You could then have a brief intro for ten minutes covering the agenda. The core part of the meetup could impose a structure beforehand. Or attendees could determine the agenda on the day, like an unconference. Make it an interesting mix.
    Remember the customer is the hero and his or her information needs are paramount. I find customers speaking is both demanded and more effective. If you mix that part with internal speakers, emphasise customer speakers. Give them more time. Have more than one speak. You could cover this in an hour and have three speakers talk for five minutes each. You could then open the floor to Q&A for ten minutes. Extra time is buffer. Company representatives can then have time to talk.
    Cover subjects the customers should know about or have an interest in. End with a close recapping the sessions main outcomes or topics concluded on. You can also try and get input for the next event. You can have a combination of MC or facilitator/s. The former should not dominate and manage intro’s, time and the agenda. The MC could also play role of facilitator or if you have break out sessions you may need a few. Facilitators are only needed if you want to drive clear outcomes. I would be judicious in my use of this approach for customer meetups. These are more relevant for workshops.
  10. Speakers. This depends on your approach and does not need to happen at every event. Speakers could be a mix of internal or customer speakers as mentioned. The thing about speaking though is that you make it conversational. Try and avoid imposing the use of slides if you can. They can play a role and are necessary if you needs to demo products or examples. It is far better for speakers to engage in two way dialogue.
  11. Follow-up. One email to thank attendees will generally do. I add a survey to my mail. This is useful to get feedback from the event to determine its success. You can also get input for your next event and as a way to identify topics to cover. Attendees can also suggest areas for improvement. If you do carry out a survey you could follow-up one more time with the results of the survey. Make clear what actions you will take as a result.
  12. Connection between events. This is not for everyone. What I am referring to is a community or collaboration tool. Attendees can connect and carry on discussions between meetups. You can also discuss and agree topics before an event. This will need effort on your part – community management effort. You also need to think about the tool. It could be a public tool like LinkedIn, Facebook or G+ (which you can make private). Or it can be part of your online success portal which is what I recommend. Use this to enhance conversations and solidify your community.

I’ll keep updating this post with my learning. If I find good articles covering the same topic I’ll also add them. If you have any input please add a comment. I’ll add the best stuff to the post.

#customer-success

Customer Success

Customer Success from the customer and vendor’s point of view

Stephen Danelutti Leave a comment

Just a quick doodle to capture this thought I had and a note to accompany it.

Customer Success is the business I’m in. That is, the task of ensuring the customer of my technology platform (mostly this is what it concerns) is successful in the use of the platform.

We both have an interest in being successful but often come at it from different sides. So I plotted it on a graph.

We both have an interest in all of the elements, it’s just the focus that’s slightly different.

The vendor wants to drive usage and adoption. Adoption means the users are using the tool. If they are not satisfied with it they won’t use it. If they are not using it, come renewal time the customer won’t renew.

The customer wants to be happy that the product does what he or she wants it to do and gets the results targeted. NPS stands for Net Promoter Score in case you weren’t sure. It’s a good proxy for happiness :)

Customer Success, Sense Making

The feature / function trap of enterprise technology adoption

Stephen Danelutti 2 Comments

blind-spot

Features and functions are easy to obsess over. They are tangible. You can click a button and it does something. Or not, at least not what you expect. And you can obsess about why not and what it should be doing.

I’ve been included in countless enterprise technology adoption programs and find this the most focused on area. This and plans. Plans are also easy to obsess over. You can move dates, tasks, people responsible, etc. Again this is a tangible area of activity, or seemingly so.

It’s the the difference between deep work and shallow work that Cal Newport covers in his book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.

In my view the feature and function work and also the planning work is shallow work. Which is not to say it’s unnecessary. It must be done and is critical for success. But it plays a small part. Currently the majority of the effort sits here and accounts for a small part of success in my humble opinion. It should be the other way round.

Deep work is the human behaviour work. Thinking how to change it. The strategic work that takes you out of the shallows and the weeds. The creative, imaginative work that forces you to think about where you are going.

Its easy to see why the feature, function and plan work is the work that dominates. You can easily avoid confrontation on difficult people work when there is a plethora of functions to play with or talk about. You can spend endless hours discussing why something does or doesn’t do something or even playing with it.

Questioning why you are doing something that may not be working or taking responsibility and hard decisions for needed changes. Understanding misalignment to a broader purpose. This is impossible when your head is stuck in the nuts and bolts of features and functions.

How to avoid the trap?

  1. Have a long term vision that you can look up to and that can steer you. It shouldn’t be immovable, indeed have an approach that allows for course correction like this one I created: Lean startup methodology applied to successful enterprise technology adoption. You’ll notice this approach starts with vision setting.
  2. Make specific time for the deep work, even put some rules in place so that you cannot digress into feature, function and planning work until it’s time to.
  3. Show the trap. Paint a picture of it and share why you need to avoid it. If people are aware of behaviours and activities that are not leading to productive outcomes in the context of the bigger picture, they can avoid them.
  4. Stop and reflect on where you are and what is important from time to time. It will allow you to see the wood from the trees. You could start meetings by reminding everyone of the purpose of your overall work and what to prioritise.
  5. Be outcomes focused instead of things focused. Always think about what the result of something is and this will help you talk less about features/functions. This also requires a healthy focus on measurement and being data driven.
Sense Making, Startup Innovation

Lean startup methodology applied to successful enterprise technology adoption

Stephen Danelutti 10 Comments

The Lean Startup isn’t just about how to create a more successful entrepreneurial business. It’s about what we can learn from those businesses to improve virtually everything we do. I imagine Lean Startup principles applied to government programs, to healthcare, and to solving the world’s great problems. It’s ultimately an answer to the question ‘How can we learn more quickly what works, and discard what doesn’t?

What Tim O’Reilly, CEO O’Reilly Media, said above pretty much sums up what I am trying to do here: apply the methodology to a great challenge I face daily in my role in customer success – successful enterprise technology adoption. To find out more about the core methodology you can head on over to www.leanstartup.com.

The methodology has been highly successful in its application with startups but far more broadly now too as Tim O’Reilly suggests. I’ve been thinking about it a while and captured how I wanted to apply it very briefly and simply in a customer success management primer I put together on SlideShare. I’ve added the relevant bit as a diagram above.

It’s not unlike what the co-founder of Percolate where I currently work has suggested in this article: Noah Brier’s Three Rules For Leveraging New Technologies. There’s no specific reference to the lean startup methodology but you should see the similarities and they are based on the lean startup methodology’s heavy reliance on software engineering approaches which Noah Brier does reference.

I’ve been applying the approach loosely with the customer success planning and execution work I have been doing with customers and now felt it time to capture that in a little more detail. That is what this post is about. It’s also in the context of my most recent work which is marketing, as in Noah Brier’s post, but I believe it can be applied widely for most enterprise technology platforms. It also chimes with earlier thinking I’ve done which seemed to resonate at the time: Why leaders of digital initiatives inside organisations need to think like start-ups.

Contrasting approaches between enterprise technology then and now

This approach I am taking is in direct contrast to previous approaches to technology adoption. Enterprise technology platforms used to be highly configurable and customisable and were often planned and prepared for launch far in advance of launch dates. They would exist in this form for years afterwards until a new version was ready for re-launch. This was tied in, to a large degree, to a vendor’s approach who would plan new features and functions years in advance before releasing a new version. Now with SaaS (Software as a Service) that has all changed.

Customers no longer get to change the platform to the degree they used to and vendors have vastly reduced development cycles to ship new features more frequently, sometimes as often as weekly. However, most often these are tested with a handful of BETA customers and then shipped when ready on a quarterly basis.

With new features coming this frequently and with the lack of customisation and configurability, it doesn’t make sense to plan too far in advance. A far more iterative and experimental approach is called for.

The model in summary

lean-success-planning

This approach supports customer and end user success with the use of their enterprise technology platform. So those chiefly responsible for the platform’s success as well the users of it. It combines what has worked well with many global customers in my experience and incorporates lean startup methodology. It’s based on the view that success cannot be achieved by chance but needs a good design which is measurable, executable and iterative. 

It targets key outcomes including measures of success (KPI’s), plans the necessary activities and resources required to succeed and reviews progress periodically that allows for course correction or continuation of successful activities. I simplified the steps from the Lean Startup methodology for my purposes to three.

Note that this model is narrowly focused on planning and execution activities and does not take into consideration some critical supporting activities. Things like a champion network, an online support environment, etc. I’ve written about all of these to some degree or other under the customer-success tag so follow the link to find out more.

Where the cycle starts in relation to implementation/onboarding

Generally there is a phase of work prior to the success management cycle starting that includes getting the platform ready for launch. This would include things like configuration of the system, setting up workflows and permissions/ roles, access and security settings, provisioning of users, etc. These technology, governance, authentication, legal, support and security considerations have to be mapped out and delivered in accordance with the organisations policies, most often managed through IT. This would ideally be followed by a successful launch of the platform which I’ve written about here: Launch like a boss – bringing consumer startup practice to your enterprise technology platform

The success management cycle would ideally have been been planned ahead of launch as part of the implementation planning, e.g. the initial uses cases and workflows you launch with form part of a longer term success vision and planning cycle.

In some cases, a customer will have launched and have been using the platform for many months, even years, without a robust success methodology in place. In this case you would have to take stock of where successful (or not) platform usage is and work from there. It may require a platform relaunch. At best, there are some successful uses of the system in place already and you want to take these to the next level.

Envision

  1. Set vision, objectives and broad measures of success
    On overarching vision is a good thing. Some of the best work I’ve seen done articulating the work needed here is in this article: Strategic Communication: How to Develop Strategic Messaging and Positioning. This drives the overall program of activities and provides focus for the use cases that will deliver against the vision and objectives. Generally I would suggest planning in yearly cycles as this will be made up of 4 quarters of iterating use case delivery.
  2. Identify and plan use cases
    Enterprise technology adoption – Use cases are the currency of success – go to this post I wrote to find out more about uses cases. As mentioned above a set of uses cases should be iterated for at least three months of active use – this is probably the minimum amount of time needed to properly use and test use against set outcomes. These uses cases should broadly align with the vision and high level objectives you have set for the year.
  3. Stakeholder engagement and delivery /change program
    This is essentially the execution plan. It should at least incorporate time, task and responsibility elements that you can tick off as you go along. Many of the supporting elements that I cover in my primer referred to earlier should also be considered: a champion program, training, a governance model involving main stakeholders, etc. I’d also call out a collaborative community and online support elements in particular – covered in a post here: Scaling your customer success efforts online – a guide.

Execute

  1. Launch platform and use cases
    I’ve already linked to the post I wrote about the importance of launching well – see further up this post.
  2. Governance / monitoring
    Ongoing monitoring, especially in the early stages, should include key stakeholders and regular check-ins. You could set up a steering committee and meet monthly for instance. If the platform was critical to your business, why wouldn’t you do something like this and have the most senior of stakeholders involved.
  3. Champion check-in
    This is called out specifically because champions are crucial to success. Champions help to reduce the strain on the resources of the core project team and help drive engagement throughout the community, especially in early stages.
  4. Ensure ongoing support through dedicated channels
    The article mentioned under point three in the Envision section covers what I am referring to here.
  5. Gather data
    You should have set the key metrics you want to measure as well as how you are going to measure them in the use case definition phase. Don’t leave it as an afterthought and whether its qualitative or quantitative, gathered through survey responses or as output of system use, collect data as you go.

Evaluate

  1. Evaluate progress holistically against vision, objectives
    Check points could occur monthly, even weekly in the early stages, but at the very least should be quarterly. Whenever you check in though, make sure you are looking directly in front of you as well as in the distance, i.e. are the activities in the immediate past still leading you to where you want to get to in the long term. The best way to explain is through analogy. If you are walking looking at a map, if you don’t look up from time to time you might walk into a lamp post :)
  2. Evaluate against set KPIs and measures of success
    This is the practical task of studying the detail. Mapping the data against the expected outcomes.
  3. Revise plan as necessary
    Adopt the way of the minimalist, remove until it breaks. If the data doesn’t support the hypotheses you set out to validate, then check where you are going wrong. The measures, the tools or the hypotheses could all be wrong. If you cannot correct, you may need to discard.
  4. Rinse and repeat with following initiatives
    You need to repeat the cycle above at least 4 times in a year as mentioned and hopefully at the end you get to a level of use and maturity that you can then progress on from for the next year. See maturity point below.

NOTE: When starting with your first success cycle, be aware of any preceding activities like an implementation or onboarding phase with all that it set out to achieve. This can be used as a baseline for the use cases and measures in your initial success cycle.

Maturity over time and an approach to driving it


Over time, with successive quarters and years of use, you would expect an organisation to become more and more proficient in its use of a technology platform and that value outcomes will also increase over time – see diagram.

And if you expect that all users will be equal in their stages of maturity well you are likely to be disappointed which is why you might want to break maturity levels up between your users and segments of users – see next diagram.

Also, there is likely never to be an end to the overall maturity path as new features are added to the platform and new users come and go.

An approach to managing maturity levels between different users and /or segments of users is not critical to the success methodology. But if you are dealing with a great many users in a large organisation with many different geographical or vertical segments, you may want to consider it.

The diagram above is pretty self explanatory and hopefully its clear how you might be able to work with something like this. You really want to keep it as simple as possible because you don’t want to add complexity especially where the organisation or technology already is.

Which leads me neatly to a final point. This whole methodology, like the lean startup approach, is very simple and experimental. That is the beauty of it and the reason for its effectiveness. Good luck using it and if you have feedback about what works or doesn’t or any improvements, please do let me know in a comment.

Customer Success

Enterprise technology adoption – Use cases are the currency of success

Stephen Danelutti 5 Comments

I work in customer success in the enterprise technology space and have written several posts on the activities required for the role – find them under the customer-success tag. This one is about the use case which I see as the currency of customer success management.

A use case is a set of interactions between a user and a system to attain a particular result or function and is often represented by a process or work flow. Use cases should ultimately be geared towards delivering a business solution.

A solution is designed to integrate multiple facets of a company’s business through interchange of info and processes and should produce outcomes that achieve business goals.

The use case is the input, and the solution is the output.

Use cases / solutions can be captured to show the value a platform is providing to the business. It can also be used to share amongst users to support further use and value creation across different parts of the business. See more on this at the end of the post.

Each use case should have its own measure of success and can be broken down into 4 parts which could easily be captured in a single page or slide document template:

  • Challenges and objectives / expected outcomes.
  • Workflow and/or functions breakdown to focus on.
  • Success criteria (KPI’s).
  • Additional factors for success (change management, training, etc.).

Managing use cases

As far as possible have a method that is simple, quantifiable and results should be taken as representative. You could start with a simple spreadsheet for collecting and managing a use case pipeline. Apply a selection criteria that will allow for quick shortlisting. From a shortlist you could (but don’t have to) use an online survey to get feedback on priority and demonstrable value.

Example criteria for shortlisting use cases

Criteria used for selection (score 2/3 to be progressed or selected)

Relevant

  • How important is this for internal stakeholders. Case studies that touch core business operations carry more value.
  • Financial: How does it impact on the bottom line
  • Customer: How does it impact on how our customers perceive us
  • Internal Process: How does it improve productivity
  • Learning & Development: How do we improve and create value

Measurable

  • Key KPI’s / metrics can be identified
  • These can be measured through survey’s or analytics and tied to the use cases

Deliverable

  • Delivery of business value can be quantified in some way.
  • Resources to manage are available (people, budget, time)
  • Key stakeholders identified and involved
  • They suit the organisations level of maturity in use of the specific technology

There are two types of use case that generally need managing:

  1. Pre-existing. Function / activity already being used or carried out to good effect (good outcomes) and can be captured for purpose of sharing good practice and perpetuate further use.
  2. Planned. Function / activity that the organisation would like to see being used or carried out. Idea would be to propose a workflow or process, train users on it and then monitor to see if intended outcomes are achieved. Share if it worked well or iterate further if needed.

Click for larger view
Pre-existing use cases will only need to be captured and tracked so you have a record of them and so that you can share them. The management ends there until you get to the point of sharing or communicating them. Clearly these types of use case will only exist where the platform has been used for some time. When you are launching a platform for the first time, all uses cases will need to be planned and executed.

In the case of a new platform launch, ask the vendor if they have any from other customers that can be used as a baseline. When a platform has been around for a while but you are only starting the work of managing use cases at a late stage, ideally you are able to identify as many pre-existing use cases as possible.

Pre-existing use cases (I call them serendipitous use cases :) have come about spontaneously and hopefully reflect a natural use of the platform. They are unforced or not mandated and as such they are the purest form of a use case. These type of use case are like gold.  When I manage business value workshops with customers in which identifying uses cases is big part (see diagram), I dedicate a separate session for these.

Readying planned use cases for execution

Analyse responses from surveys if you have used them or manually evaluate each use case and select the ones that have scored highest in terms of priority. Next identify a person who will help drive their development. Progress with the development of the top 3 or 4 use cases. Finalise the use case format/template mentioned at the beginning, ready for distribution and work closely with use case leaders and users. On this last point, the more complex the technology, use case or organisation, the more you will likely need an owner and team of people supporting it.

Executing the use case

This should be done over a short period of time but that also depends on the complexity of the organisation, technology and/or use case. I suggest roughly a three month period. In this time users should be trained on the use case and supported in getting up and running where needed. Progress should be followed pretty closely and ongoing support provided where possible. At the end, determine where the goals for the use case have been achieved. If it does perfectly then you could adopt this in future uses as is. If not you may need to tweak and iterate further on the use case in a second, quarterly cycle. You may, at worst, need to discard it. If the former case, you can then go on to share it.

Sharing successful use cases – perpetuating the success

sharing-use-case-success

A critical aspect of achieving success (and ultimately in my business that means driving adoption of a technology platform) is capturing the essence of the value it delivered in an easy to understand, simple and ideally visual way and then sharing or communicating it. This is also fundamentally important for those responsible for the platform in the business and who have paid for it and must ultimately justify its value and ROI.

It is by capturing successes through use cases and sharing them that you perpetuate success. Users in the organisation not using the system yet see how others who are using it and are inspired to use it in similar or even better ways. It becomes a self fulfilling and virtuous circle of success.

The diagram you see here could be a simple way of capturing the outcomes of a successful use case delivered over a period of time. It is fairly self explanatory. The key thing about it is that the easier you make it to share the better. An image file is likely to be the best way to do that. You could even go so far as to share a template with use case owners or the general population of users so they can capture their own unplanned or serendipitous use cases and then go on to share them.

Customer Success

Scaling your customer success efforts online – a guide

Stephen Danelutti 8 Comments

success-online-home

I mentor startups that go through Microsoft Accelerator’s London program. Because of recent experience I focus on customer success management practices and enterprise software startups, but not exclusively. I recently joined a startup (again) and here too I’m helping with building out a customer success practice.

In all cases what often comes up is the importance of an online presence to deal with various elements of customer success. So I thought I would capture what I have recently been communicating as important and that is the purpose of this post. If you are not sure about what customer success is, I’ve written a simple primer on SlideShare.

To clarify what I mean by online presence, this doesn’t just mean a website with some documentation. This could be a basic starting point but there are many more considerations. I’ve broken these out into sections in this post, explained each and tried to give examples from companies who I know do it well.

The purpose of a good online presence would be to educate, support and add value to the way the customer uses products and services. As an extension of  a company’s support, service and customer success department it’s intended to scale those efforts. If done really well it will enhance the customer experience, build an army of customer advocates and ultimately drive loyalty.

Education

success-online-eduThis goes a step beyond basic product information that would be well served by a good document library. Incorporating rich media like a video series and even going as far as incorporating a certification program could really enhance a learning program. Pixelmator does an awesome video tutorial series.

Education doesn’t just have to be delivered on the site itself. Offer a webinar series where customers can sign up and attend predetermined sessions with other customers. These would be delivered using screensharing, chat and audio/video software. This could be added to a formal training program as a way to top up and refresh learning.

A webinar series needs a team to run regular sessions that customers can get a calendar view of from a page on your site, sign up for and drop in to. If you have a global customer base, stagger the times to cover all time zones.

Community

salesforce community.png

This is the dark horse of a well delivered customer success presence. Not easy to deliver well, it takes serious and authentic effort. If achieved it can deliver substantial benefits:

  • Customer on customer support, scaling and reducing your own support efforts and costs
  • Building an army of customer advocates they scale your marketing efforts
  • Incorporating good collaborative and content features can really help drive the learning process for customers in the community.

Salesforce have done an amazing job with this incorporating their own community platform on the back of their success site.

On the risk side, you may have customers mounting an insurrection if things go wrong or they don’t quite appreciate a new product release. Having a good community management contingency plan in place is critical. The Community Roundtable has an excellent Community Manager Handbook if you want to develop this further.

Support

success-online-supportThis is a fairly obvious area and the cornerstone of any attempt to help customers. Mostly a case of helping them with problems they are experiencing with your product or service, it’s often a question of turning a negative situation into a positive one. But that is a golden opportunity to enhance the customers experience if done well.

In an enterprise environment with a complex product or service that’s especially tricky. Support for the enterprise may have to take many different user types into consideration like the end-user, someone who acts on their behalf, an IT help desk for instance, etc.

A means to log issues and track responses would be table stakes but even this is not done well by many, if at all. In my view this is best done on a site (main site and/or a support or success site and also “in app” ideally) and personalised to the individual so he or she can track progress and responses, rather than via email. Other things to think about (and check out Code School who does a great job with many of its activities):

  • Do you offer a good FAQ (and good search) where users can find a solution without needing to raise a support ticket?
  • Is there a way to contact a human immediately in the event of a pressing problem, either by phone or by chat?
  • Can and should you go beyond problem resolution to feature requests, e.g. an area for users to submit and vote on ideas?
  • With all that is possible these days with AI and chatbots, can you automate the process?

chatbot customer support.png

Documentation

success-online-docsAgain this is a really basic area that should be relatively easy to do well. Surprisingly many companies don’t.

You should at the very least have a well laid out and searchable or filterable document area on your site. The structure should be intuitive in relation to your product and service or offering. You could go further and structure the content for user type or proficiency level.

In addition to this there are some really basic things you can do to enhance the experience. For instance, you can incorporate rich media like video but if you want to keep that to a learning section, you could simply include gifs which are simple, animated images.

Percolate where I currently work does a really good job of this in my view.

Roadmap

Office 365 Roadmap.png

 

If you have decided to expose your thinking about the future direction of your product (this is something more specific to product features than service elements) you can make this a compelling part of your efforts. This is also most often a consideration with complex enterprise software products where future enhancements might impact on a customers operations. It’s of special interest to those responsible for the platforms use.

There are risks to doing this. Customers holding you to ideas that are in essence just ideas, not commitments to develop something. The risk is you add something to the roadmap and then for some reason or another it has to be removed or changed. Expectations that this created then have to be managed. If done well this can be an incredibly powerful way of engaging and ultimately committing customers to the future of your product and company by making them co-creators.

If you were to offer a feature request and/or ideas section on your site, this could even be incorporated into the approach. Submitted ideas that are incorporated into the product roadmap is an incredibly tangible way of showing customers that they are co-creators of your product.

Microsoft does this really well for Office 365 features and they took this approach from Yammer where I used to work until we were acquired by Microsoft and we then perfected the approach.

Other things to think about:

  • Positioning and branding
    Showing customers how committed you are to their success seems a natural strategy. You could make your customer success efforts a substantial part of the selling proposition by emphasising them boldly. Salesforce is probably the best example of this (link shared further up). Like them you might do it separately or on your main website, with pro’s and con’s to either. You could give them a specific identity that employees who focus on this and in general, as well as customers, can align with.
  • Customer success stories and use case library
    Use cases are the currency of a good customer success program. Both to show customers how they can use your product or service as well as to capture good use of it (thereby inspiring further use). If you turn the latter into well told stories that resonate then even better. Some way of capturing and categorising them for easy reference would be useful.
  • Customer success program
    Have one in the first place (I cover this in my primer shared at the beginning) and then lay it bare for customers to see. The benefit of this is that customers are shown you are serious and have a well laid out approach to making them successful. It should also show what resources you are putting behind this but also the commitment required on their side – because you cannot always outsource customer success.