Best Of
Aligning Marketing and Scaled CS
Hello!
I'm working with marketing on unifying our marketing campaigns and our scaled CS emails. Does anyone have suggestions on how to create a 360 view of all campaigns?Plus addressing scheduling?
Re: Office Hours Conversation - CX
Someone in the call, maybe @Julie Fox, mentioned gifting customers. We did that from early on at ThoughtTrace (acquired by Thomson Reuters), sending fudge from Tiff's Treats from the customer success team as the very first step following the close of a net new customer.
Re: Kicking Off New Digital CS Program
Hi Garrett,
Great topic - and we could spend days discussing. I've done this a couple of times, most recently creating a 5 person team managing 13,000 customers and $50M ARR. High level tips:
- Start with the data you have, and not the data points you want. Chances are you don't have the data that is most valuable. Build to it. Think about what metrics you can easily pull now that you can use to determine actions.
- Define the channels available to you right now: 1:1 contact, 1:M group webinars, automated in-app messaging, segmented emailing, all customer email, etc. Each channel is different and will require a unique strategy. Don't try to do it all at once. Start with one channel, iterate and take those learnings to another channel.
- Start with the comm that is most important to you now. Is that post implementation adoption to new customers, or renewal risk to existing customers, or something else. Doesn't matter what it is, but think about #1 and #2 above and start the comm with what is most critical today.
- Move fast and don't be afraid of making a mistake or making a few customers cranky. The beauty of digital is that it's volume work. You can try things out with lots of customers and get pretty good data back quickly. It will take you a bunch of tries before you really figure out any one strategy or channel or segment. But make constant iteration a cultural element to your team.
Happy to chat anytime as this is a massive topic. Hit me up 1:1 if you want to connect.
Andrew
Re: QBR/EBR - When you have no data
I have a pretty strong take on this, Ashley.
Replace the QBR concept with a customer listening session. Use it as an opportunity to ask disruptive questions about their company's top-level priorities and challenges. Then just be the student. Listen without solving or selling. I call this The UBR - the U stands for "you the customer," since that's who the meeting is all about. No slides, no agenda (other than understanding how they view the world).
Happy to chat more about this any time.
Re: Meet Your Peers
Hi All,
Excited to be here and looking forward to networking with everyone in this subgroup! Currently I lead the customer org/post-sale side of the house for ECP - a vertical SaaS platform primarily focused on serving senior housing (assisted living, independent living, and memory care).
The majority of my professional career has been in healthtech, having also spent ~10 years at Epic in a variety of implementation, ops, and customer success roles. Before jumping back into healthcare with ECP last Fall, I led customer for another vertical SaaS business, Indeavor, helping global manufacturers optimize their labor through technology. There I was focused on re-organizing the post-sale teams and roles, architecting the customer journey and its parts, value realization strategy, and scaling ops. Great experience and very different space for me!
On a personal note, Madison, WI is home and my wife and I are expecting our first little one this summer! Always happy to connect and my inbox is wide open for those first time parent hacks as well :).
Jeremy London
+1 713-253-1116
Jeremy.E.London@gmail.com
JLondon
Thanks Jeff and Jay!
As many of you may have already seen on their LinkedIn posts, Jeff and Jay are transitioning away from Higher Logic, and thus GGR leadership. Their inspiration, knowledge, and influence have impacted so many, and of course, GGR was their brainchild.
We wish them all the best in their next endeavors, and will always be grateful for the mark they have made on CS professionals and the CS industry.
GGR will remain commited to the ideals and principles that were adopted from the start and will continue to be a space for people to come together and grow.
Thank you both for all you have done and will continue to do!
Read their good-byes here:
Welcome to 2024, a letter from the CEO
Since the beginning, the foundation of Gain Grow Retain has been centered on connecting people, knowledge and ideas to advance the state of customer success.
My name is Rob Wenger, and as CEO of Higher Logic, I want to acknowledge the remarkable success of Gain Grow Retain and extend my sincere appreciation to Jay Nathan and Jeff Breunsbach as they transition from Higher Logic and GGR leadership. Their vision in creating a community of customer success leaders started in 2020 and has grown to nearly 12k members—a milestone worth celebrating. We appreciate everything they’ve done and look forward to their continued insights as part of the customer success community.
As we start a new year and new chapter of GGR, our mission remains steadfast. We are dedicated to bringing together customer success leaders and experts to share their insights and experiences with this community. Through initiatives like CS Leadership Office Hours (which kick off today, January 11), the blogs written by many of you, and the webinars hosted by our partners, we want to amplify the voices and stories of those doing the work and leading the way.
Our goal is to make it easier for you to meet, interact, and build stronger relationships with your peers through the Vanilla by Higher Logic platform that GGR is built on. We look forward to continuing to introduce new features, like the job board we launched last year, and technology to the community.
So, what’s to come? More events. More resources. More opportunities for discussion and connection. More expert knowledge and new ideas. GGR is more than just an online community; it has become a movement, and we are excited about the opportunity to continue being a space for collaborative impact.
- Rob Wenger, CEO of Higher Logic
Re: How to measure customer outcomes
You can ask your customers if any/all/other of these are what they bought the product for, adding to the list any you are missing. If a customer is unsure, no worries, you can frame the question around, "Other similar customers to you engage with us for these reasons. Do any resonate with you?"
You can ask this question via 1:1 conversations, email surveys, and/or in-app pop up messaging. You can track the responses in your CRM or database of choice. A customer may have more than one Outcome selected.
Tracking CSMs' completion of this can be done in your CRM/database as well. To start, you can create a simple measurement/marker of "Do you know the Outcome for this customer? Check the box if 'Yes'. Enter the answer:..." If you have blanks in that report for either of those two fields, you will know the customers that need to be addressed.
This is a straightforward but powerful question/approach. The next steps from here will be to follow a similar exercise to know how the customers are Measuring success towards those Outcomes. Not how are you (i.e. adoption data), but how are they (i.e. via looking at an increased sales close percentage or a cost reduction indicator). Those Measurements are quantitative. There also will be qualitative Measurements of customer sentiment, which can be tracked via NPS, CSAT and other direct communication with customers.
After Measurements, the ongoing question of whether you are meeting Expectations is the marker to know how you're performing with a customer. You know the Outcomes they seek, how they are Measuring those results, if their Expectations are realistic and if they're being met/exceeded/not. That's a cohesive way to understand each customer's relationship with your product and company.
I hope that helps! Thanks for asking, Borge.
CS Platform for early stage startup
We are an early stage startup and need to implement a CS Platform that is very user friendly, not difficult to integrate, integrates with Hubspot and cost effective. I have used Gainsight in the past and would love to use it again, but don't have the budget or the time. Would love to hear everyone's POV.
Thanks everyone!
SYoung