Customer Success — What?
What my card says and What I think I do.
Many of you wont know me unless you signed up for a trial at Organimi. Those who are lucky to know me must have heard from me within a couple of days of signing up and using Organimi. You probably don't remember me though. In the age with so much digital noise, it’s hard to make an impact. But in case you do — I am the guy who makes sure that everything is going well. As an early stage startup our customers/users mean the world to us. That isn't everything I do here at Organimi but it’s one of the things I do – I run Customer Success with Brett (Co-Founder/CTO).
Customer Success sounds funny. It does to me too, even though I’ve been with Organimi for a while now, I haven’t really gotten used to my title. We’re not big on titles here (Everyone does everything) but my business card had to say something right?
I’ve been reading up on Customer Success but there’s little out there on it that actually defines it in a succulent way. Since it’s a young field that’s recently risen out of the SaaS industry, every one interprets it in their own way. So allow me the permission to divulge my own thoughts on this post.
The way I look at Customer Success is the intersection or rather combination of user acquisition,user experience, sales/marketing (Frankly I have hard time drawing a line between Sales & Marketing).
Allow me to me explain:
First you have to make sure people find you. So I get involved with alot of the marketing and demand generation campaigns we do. This can range from social media to whitepapers to email campaigns and whatever may strike our fancy. (psst … shameless as it is, this blog post is part of the social media strategy)
Second you have to make sure people have somewhere to go when they click on the ‘Click here’ button – so I get my hands dirty in market automation using Hubspot with Joe, our resident Demand Gen and Market Automation Guru.
Once people sign up and they’re treated properly and get the best possible experience in the product (That’s part of customer success too in my opinion – automating the process to deliver the best possible user experience)
After they sign up I stalk them – Not in a bad way. We are metrics driven like any other start-ups. Our dreams are made and shattered based on numbers. So to make sure everything is the way it is, I monitor closely our metrics in Mixpanel and measure engagement meanwhile daydreaming about magical potions and messages that will drive that user engagement up and up and up… the sky’s the limit.
And of course apart from all the automation, everyone likes a human touch, so I reach out to all you good folks who are using our trial to make sure you’re making the best of our product and how we can help make your life easier.
The sales bit comes in the end formally sometimes. But then again, in a small tech startup like ours, everyone is selling all the time.
So in my opinion, the end goal of this is to turn customers into evangelists. Yes you heard me right, We want to deliver such an exceptional experience to our users that they love us and shout our name from the roof tops. I don’t think We are there yet, but we as a company are just coming to grips with it.
In essence then, Customer Success is a blend of different ‘departments or roles’ and the end goal as with everything else is to provide the best possible user experience. So the next time someone mentions that they’re a customer success manager, just nod and say ‘sounds very cool’ because we've moved past the era of job titles and roles. The boundaries are fast becoming fuzzy.
Disclaimer: all of the above is the authors personal opinion and by no means reflects on Customer Success Managers in other organizations or the views of the company on Customer Success Management.
Note: The above post is a very slightly modified version of the original post that I published on http://chaicharsi.com/
Written with the help of R2k on helpmewrite.co
