Top Three Trends for Customer Success in 2021

Customer Success and Support organization transformations, as discussed with Angus Klein

DNX Ventures recently hosted B2B Summit 2021 Online, which had a focus on customer services organizations in transformation, due to the rapid increase in digitalization and SaaS trends. In this blog, you’ll find a summary of the fireside chat between Eva Nahari (Principal, DNX Ventures) and Angus Klein (VP of Global Support, Snowflake).

The move towards digitalization has accelerated in the past year in response to the pandemic. Analysts estimate a fast-forward of this trend by years as a result. This means increased pressures on efficiency and online scale, which lead organizations to increasingly outsource to and adopt SaaS. In SaaS organizations, success is directly tied to customer satisfaction, as revenue is dependent on usage. A core pillar for a high satisfaction score in the world of SaaS is to know your customers. It is easier than ever to “know” your customer in a SaaS world as you have the opportunity to collect every interaction they have with your organization through the new online interfaces. The challenge comes down to serving that data to support engineers, product designers, and engineers in a timely manner and insightful form, to enable them to optimize for customers faster. Having a dedicated development team, as well as a data and analytics team, within the support organization can aid in this.

Trend 1: Innovation to look for — Intent Mapping

Understanding why and how customers use products is imperative to meeting their needs. Going forward, ML can help to understand the hurdles customers are hoping to overcome. Being able to see the whole trace of the user’s actions enables vendors to understand users better, meet them where they are, and understand their intent.

Trend 2: Customer needs should be met in-app

Customers define success as being able to use products without friction. Having support within the SaaS application is becoming standard and has added benefits of being dynamic with diagnostics readily available, leaving the need for customers to log into separate portals for support as a thing of the past.

SaaS support professionals exist to be customer advocates. It will forward carry the responsibility to convey product requirements around meeting customer needs within the app.

Combining engineering, product, customer support, and success can help organizations better meet their customers’ needs in a digital world. Organizational divides inhibit collaboration and communication. There needs to be transparency, collaboration, and common aligned organizational goals. Without shared intent in an organization, the goal of improving customer experience can get lost or not be fully met. People working in customer support ultimately work for the customer.

Trend 3: Problem facing support organizations ahead — Noisy Systems

Noisy systems, which make extracting intelligence difficult, is the biggest problem facing support organizations today and forward. In reality, tooling can extrapolate intelligence much better than the traditional approach of scaling by adding roles and people. However, even with increasing tooling, it is important not to overlook investing in training leaders to oversee these applications. The increasing number of touchpoints with customers online also further adds to the importance of investing in customer success and, eventually, customer success tooling.

Advice for Support Champions

Ultimately, success comes through trial and error, and there is no lack of large problems in the world of support. Continually fine-tuning and innovating the best practices of customer support is imperative.

To be impactful in a support role, being a customer advocate instead of a spinmaster is in the customers’ best interest and, ultimately, the company. Investing the time to create co-ownership of the customer experience across departments within an organization can change the game and elevate customer success to another level.

To gain access to the recording of Angus and Eva’s fireside chat, click here.