At Totango’s 2022 Global Executive Forum, customer success leaders from around the world came together to connect with their peers, share ideas and learn about new products and opportunities. To wrap up the event, Totango COO Jamie Bertasi shared 10 key takeaways she gathered from all the presentations and conversations that took place during our summit. Let’s take a look at her top 10 insights.
Top 10 Insights from Customer Success Executives
The Customer Comes Before the Product
The world has now moved from putting the product first to putting the customer first. Executives and boards of directors understand this and anyone who wants to move into a senior management role in a large organization needs to understand this concept and operate with this mindset.
Deliver Value First
The customer focus is driving a shift in the old pre-sale vs post-sale mindset. You now have to figure out a way to drive value to customers as early as possible in their experience with you. Really successful companies are figuring out how to drive value early – even before the deal is signed!
The Customer Journey is the Product of Customer Success
The customer journey is the product of the overall customer success program. Rather than looking at the stages of the journey individually, it’s important to step back and look at the customer journey holistically to see how the actions of the customer success organization are working to improve the overall customer experience.
Manage the Customer Journey as a Product
It’s important to think of the customer journey as a product of your customer success programs.It has a roadmap, a backlog, iterations, and new releases.In order to grow and improve, you have to continually iterate and create new versions of your customer journey, just like you would a product.
Never Stop Iterating
The world moves and changes quickly, so you have to continuously iterate and improve upon your customer journey to keep up. In order to move fast, you need to be able to quickly cycle through the process of planning, building, launching, measuring and learning in order to create the next version of your journey. More iterations equal faster learning and improved results. By continuously iterating, you drive a compounding impact for your business.
The Customer Journey is Shared Across Teams
The customer journey is the combined and shared efforts of all teams within an organization – from Customer Success to Marketing, Sales, Product, Support and more. Everyone has to work together to deliver the customer journey, therefore, you need some kind of system in place that allows all parties to see what’s going on at any point in the journey and to coordinate and collaborate.
Start with Digital
If you start with digital, then it’s easier to scale up. This applies to all customer segments (i.e. a welcome email is the same whether it’s being sent to a small company or a large enterprise). Digital delivers value to all customers, but from there you should build and iterate against the whole journey on an ongoing basis.
Automate
By using automation across all customer segments, you will be able to create hyper- personalized communications at scale, operationalize your teams, and quickly iterate and improve your journeys and products.
Design and Run All-in-One
Totango’s Customer Experience Canvas allows you to get all teams on the same page with what’s actually happening throughout the journey and gives your team time back by removing the busy work of constantly keeping other documents up-to-date.
A Digital Execution Engine is Key
In order to successfully create the ultimate customer journey, you need an all-in-one digital execution engine in place. This engine should enable all teams to quickly cycle through their programs and make changes based on insights to drive the optimal customer experience.
Want to learn how Totango can help you take these insights and put them into action? Contact our sales team today for more information or to schedule a demo.
