Comments
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@BeverlyvandeVelde We are taking a somewhat different approach to this. Education has been made part of customer success. We have done this for two reasons. It plays better to the strengths of the two teams (a poor reason but sometimes one has to work with what we have). Customer success is in constant contact with…
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The suggestion to begin with design thinking is a good one. Design thinking can be kicked off in a workshop, but it requires much more than one workshop to cycle through the five phases: empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test. As an alternative, Kees Dorst's Frame Innovation approach is even more powerful than design…
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@Tommy Glicker Let me see if I can pull it into a slide that I can post here. Basically it depends on two things - where the category is in Moore's Technology Adoption Cycle and the strategy for positioning the product/service. Selling to Early Adopters 70-90% of investment into creating positive differentiation Selling to…
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@Tommy Glicker Another way to think about this is how you plan to create and maintain differentiated value. You need to allocate your investment dollars into three buckets. What are the table stakes. What do I have to do to just stay in the game? What are the negative value drivers (unique costs of my solution or…
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This challenge can come up with growth as well as employee turnover in the customer success organization. I think the first thing to ask about is continuity in the customer experience. Switching out people, though often necessary, is disorienting for the customer and can lead to a degradation in customer experience. I…
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@Goncalo Pereira I feel your concern. TSIA should develop some shared best practices on this. It is possible that a three step response is needed here ... Acknowledge and plug Preliminary patch Fully validated and tested patch Or something like that.
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@Goncalo Pereira I am seeing people want to tighten up on these and shorten response times. Shorten doesn't do it justice, our clients expect security flaws to be addressed immediately. Close the service in minutes and have it back up with the service issue addressed in 24 hours. We have stepped up investments in security…
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@Jasmine Pilar When developing skills for customer success I have seen two useful design strategies. Use your customer journey map, organize the skills around the touchpoints. Doing this makes it easier to align the skills with the actual customer support process and diagnose problems or skill gaps so that you can target…
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@Alexander Ziegler Makes interesting points on micro credentials and badges. We recently did an integration with one of the major badge management systems and I can attest to the power of this approach. You will want to develop your own badges for your own business solutions and culture, but you may also want to leverage…
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@Martina Stiegler Do you have an update on this that you can share?
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Hi Goncalo - Can you share a bit more about what type of SLA you are referring to? Availability and uptime Time in which system errors are corrected (bug fixing) Data recovery time when the system has to go to backups Security issues All of these are important and customer demands on each of them are becoming more severe.…
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My default position is to keep data for as long as possible and use it to identify long-term patterns. Storing data is cheap. Finding it and getting meaning out of it is much more expensive. We generally keep data for seven years, but on certain applications the logs cover all use form the time the app was spun up. There…
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PSAs are not really the best solution for this. I would reach out to the vendors of the more sophisticated subscription management systems as these are increasingly supporting hybrid revenue models, including those based on usage, and at least some of them have worked harder art revenue recognition than most software…
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Customer Success Of course in the current world this needs to be more than a page and updates via social media are important.
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1) Do you currently use automated emails for communicating with your customers to help drive successful renewals? (Y/N) Y 2) If yes, what is the primary benefit you’ve seen? (increase in dollar renewal rate, saved time of reps in contacting customers, customer satisfaction, other) This is complementing a manual process so…
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I think we need a new term for this. Most companies have had professional services of some form, there are very few B2B solutions that do not include professional services. Some organizations provide these directly, others through partners, but virtually all solutions when delivered at scale require some level of…
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I am doing this right now as well. The approach being taken is to break this up into a set of roles with no assumption that all the roles will be filled by one person. We want to have a more agile organizational approach. For each role, we identify the responsibilities and the skills. Role Responsibilities Skills Maybe we…
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Hi @Amy Lifschitz This is one of my passions. We operate a large skill and competency management platform with team building functionality. We can support many different skill categorization systems, but here is our default. We do not use a category of soft skills as it is not very meaningful or actionable. The categories…
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We only calculate billable hours for utilization as that is what drives the business model, but we intentionally keep our target low, 50%, as that aligns with our business model. We follow a service led growth strategy so profitability on our services is very high as our consultants can leverage a lot of powerful software.
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@Erin O'Malley You may want to try to draw this as a systems diagram with feedback loops. There are several different types of feedback loops to consider here: Content contribution Content use Value creation Monetization When I do this work I generally do these independently first and then add layers and look for the…
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I wonder if you could take a step back and explain why you have chosen this approach and how you decide what goes behind the paywall. Understanding the role of the knowledge database in the overall value creation (how you create value for your customers and used) and value capture (how you claim part of that value back)…
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Have you checked the skill profiles of Field Service Engineers and Remote Support Staff? Are there skill gaps between the two groups? Are there complementary skills? How will this interact with your values and compensation models?
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I kind of think you need to fix the usage tracking problem first. We are having great success using Pendo for this. That said, I guess you are going to need some form of structured survey. Before you do that though, make sure you have a formal value model and know how it connects to your pricing model. Normally I would say…
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@Alex Gershman What would need to happen to make your customer success managers more accountable for success? Are different skills involved or is it more a question of how they are directed and motivated?
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For Ibbaka, in both cases these are handled by the Customer Success team, sometimes supported by the Professional Service team, both of which report directly and independently to the COO.
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Our customer success leader generates some of our best requirements as he is closest to how the platform is actually used. I hope product/solutions teams are in constant conversation around how the solution is actually being used and how it is delivering value. At our shop I would say that strategy gets 30 points, sales 30…
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Very interesting question. I suppose the answer is both, or it depends. But in my own experience the answer is that they mainly have to be built ground up. Why? If it is a go-to-market partnership with channel partners, the value created by the partners, profit or revenue sharing and joint marketing activities are usually…
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Hi @Randy Bastarache I think what you are calling 'service delivery' we would call either 'implementation' which is part of customer success or in a few cases our dedicated (and very small) professional services team. The first year is on the combined value of the Professional Services and the Subscription, on the…
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We make sure that the sales person who closed the original deal gets a tail end of the ongoing subscription, but the commission goes down year by year. Generally (there is some difference by service line) ... Initial sale - 10% Year 2 - 5% Year 3 - 2% Customer success is responsible for renewals and gets 3% per renewal…
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Make sure they incentives align with the strategic plan. Sales people tend to be coin operated and will do what they are paid to do, not what you exhort them to do. It is critical that the sales incentives align with strategy. Are professional services meant to (i) lead to new subscription revenues, (ii) support value…