Customer Success is a nomadic existence. Where is our home planet? It’s been about ten years after the term was coined, and CS teams are still the wanderers of the corporate org chart. When I first became a CS team manager, we were often regarded as a cost center. CS was part of Product, Support, …
The martech industry has, unsurprisingly, a pretty good marketing pitch. To appeal to an organizationally-minded CMO, vendors creates a vision of the marketing stack as a plug-and-play set of apps that snap together and clarity emerges from chaos. In this fantasy, machines unlock data that had been sitting under our noses all this time. We …
If your customer-facing employee training works well, your team is gaining not only product knowledge, but also your vertical’s best practices, and an understanding of the issues and goals of your various types of customers. If your company has this mastered, don’t create a separate onboarding experience for your users. What your users need to know is generally a subset, and it’s …
1. Give them the backstory. Often, the reason behind a new product or feature never flows down to Support or other customer-facing teams. When they understand the internal motivation: the use cases that warrant a feature’s creation, the potential benefits to new or existing customers, or internal factors which necessitate a change, they are able to perform engaged support and provide …
3 Ways to Immediately Position Customer Success for, erm, Success Read More »
Here is an interview I did with Wootric’s amazing team about customer success. Aside from watching me eat, it’s a great discussion about how to roll out a successful CS program. 1. Tell us about yourself? My background is in running support teams for IT managed services for the people that would come out and …
The Jerry Lewis interview is manna from heaven if you enjoy awkward situations as much as I. Anyone who has been on the other side of a prickly interaction with a customer can empathize (with a large helping of schadenfreude) with the reporter, as he keeps digging a hole. Some non-complementary behavior might have helped. Tense situations often devolve into a …
Why aren’t more digital agencies providing core updates as a support offering? Dispel your preconceptions. Support doesn’t mean “coding on demand” or occupying a lonely helpdesk on New Year’s Eve. Offer what you can deliver. Choose the tools that make support easy. And yes, ahem, Pantheon makes it super easy to update core. This alone …
I assumed the role of organizer for the San Francisco Customer Success Meetup about a year and four months ago. While I spend most of my “organizer time” looking for speakers, I took the opportunity to volunteer myself for a speaking slot this month, and led a talk, “Customer Success: Lessons Learned after 4 Years …
A Year and Half In Running the SF Customer Success Meetup Read More »
