Customer Success for the Enterprise, held on September 18th in NYC was an exciting chance for Customer Success leaders from around the world to exchange their innovative ideas in this ever-changing space.
Four topics stood out from the discussion: enabling customer centricity, turning insights into action, driving results that last, and deciding to buy a CS solution over building one in-house. Read on to find out how you can apply these to your own Customer Success strategy.
Customer Centricity is Key
Jamie Bertasi, Chief Operations Officer and Chief Customer Officer at Totango, kicked off the event and spoke about the need to drive more impact for CS. “Customer centricity is no longer an afterthought. As the leader in Customer Success, Totango is thrilled to be driving the next customer revolution,” said Bertasi.
Keith Strodtman, SVP Cloud Customer Success and Engagement at SAP, spoke about customer centricity and putting their customers at the center of innovation and services. Strodtman said that the way to obtain operational excellence with CS is to set incremental goals internally.
SAP’s CS goals involve providing depth of expertise, harmonizing touch points across any segment and product lines, and creating consistent experiences for adoption, renewals, predictive analytics, and automation. “To deploy at scale and get more sales, CS needs to align around the lines of businesses and geographical regions. You need to go wide versus deep to build the foundation initially. Once that is achieved, then enable the regions to go deep with success paths and health scores, etc.,” said Strodtman.
Turn Insights into Action
More enterprises than ever before are implementing a strategy that centers around their customers to increase overall customer lifetime value, but the goal is to not stop there. Guy Nirpaz, Founder and CEO of Totango, discussed digital transformation as a disruption. “In order to be successful in your digital transformation efforts, you need to implement a CS solution,” said Nirpaz. “Customers are a vital part of the company’s digital transformation strategy. We also find that insight alone is not enough, companies need to be able to take action and rely on technology to drive business results, such as renewals and expansion.”
Mary Trick, Former Chief Customer Officer of Infor, talked about the need to leverage technology to manage customers in order to drive more informed results. “We used to use spreadsheets to manage our customers but as we scaled, that was no longer an option,” said Trick.
By rethinking the way they managed their customers, Infor was able to look at the bigger picture of data and make more informed business decisions around the customer journey.
Drive Results that Last
All the leaders agreed that they can benefit from a system that can create a unified view of the customers, be able to operationalize around the data, and can enable the entire organization to participate in the success of the customer journey.
Eddie Doyle, Head of New Customer Engagement at Check Point Software, discussed training versus drilling. Organizations will not only need to train their teams on CS, but they will also need to drill the teams to continue to execute customer-centricity in everything they do. Solutions like Totango allowed them to train and drilled to drive a customer-centric culture that lasts. “With the right culture in place, financial gains will follow. When you think about it, CS owns the bulk of the revenue,” said Doyle.
Build vs. Buy
When it comes to building versus buying a CS solution, Brian Merritt, VP of Customer Success at Trustpilot, discussed crowdsourcing the industry’s best practices via a third party solution like Totango. Technology providers, such as Totango, incorporate best of breed methodologies and practices into the platforms they build, as they work with other customers and industry leaders. Third party solutions also reduce the requirements to compete for internal IT resources and budget.
With thousands of customers and a large CSM team, managing with speed and scale has become a challenge for Trustpilot. Trustpilot implemented Totango and has seen dramatic improvements in adoption, renewals and upsells.
Overall, the panel was highly motivating as everyone brought to the table their best practices that made the biggest impact on their organization. It’s been proven time and time again that the successful enterprises are the ones that are able to both retain and expand their existing customer base. All the leaders are excited to see what is in store for the future of CS and how it will play a huge part in moving the needle for their overall businesses.
Learn more about Totango here.
