Driving Product Innovation through Customer Relationships
From the keyboards of Alana Rosenwald, Director of Customer Success and Jessica Driscoll, Senior Customer Success Manager.
As Customer Success Managers, Alana and Jessica bring our customers industry expertise, as well as broader market perspective. Alana spent almost 7 years on the brand side in e-commerce and retail, allowing her to understand what it is like to be in the customer’s shoes, having done many daily marketing tasks herself. She also has been a part of 4 martech companies, bringing unique insight and consultation on what the martech and analytics stacks look like, and how to operate most efficiently. Jessica has worked for various marketing and advertising SaaS platforms, serving a broad range of customers from verticals like media & publishing, retail, and financial services. Each experience has honed her skills, particularly when it comes to understanding the heart of each customer challenge and how market shifts impact daily business operations. They both leverage their experience to foster strong communication on complex challenges, driving resolutions that lead to product adoption.
Now let’s hand over the keyboard to Alana and Jess!
A primary part of the Customer Success Manager role is to capture the customer’s voice and to ensure that as a company, we are driving innovation from a customer-first perspective. We do this through conversations and processes that drive understanding of business objectives, use cases, and requirements for execution. We also believe in approaching customer relationships from a highly consultative and strategic perspective. This allows us to build strong partnerships, which opens the door to gaining clear insight into what product features matter and why.
At ActionIQ, we begin the process of aligning with our customers from day one, heavily emphasizing partnership throughout new customer onboarding. A customer’s onboarding experience often sets the tone for the relationship for years to come. Having weekly syncs with the project team, weekly strategic sessions to develop short and long term adoption strategies, providing executive sponsorship and monthly check-ins, and being available via Slack, are just some of the ways that we open up the lines of communication. We also aim to be in person with customers as often as possible, to foster trust and to spend significant time diving into needs and planning together. Delivering for our customers early and often shows them that they can rely on us as their advocate within the walls of ActionIQ.
Once customers begin to adopt ActionIQ as part of their daily routine, we work closely with all stakeholders, to understand how processes are working in real time. By evaluating the workflows both within ActionIQ and other platforms, we can identify where product enhancements will impact ease of use, unlock new functionality, and ultimately drive more ROI. Even if a process is streamlined and simple within ActionIQ, the downstream process may be extremely complex for execution. As part of our partnership, we work to understand these bottlenecks, so that our teams can work to improve them. We aim to look at use cases and their associated processes from the perspective of all cross-functional teams. This allows us to account for users with various levels of technical expertise and needs.
One of the best ways that we help our Product team innovate, is by working broadly within an organization. The power of ActionIQ can be leveraged by operational, CRM, paid media, development, and product teams. There are applications of the product for everyone from a manager responsible for daily campaign delivery, to an executive looking to understand audience trends daily. While it can be extremely challenging to develop a product that can self-service such a broad range of functional roles and personas, taking a value driven, use case based approach, allows us to justify investing in such a wide range of capabilities; and allows us to find multiple uses for features that otherwise might be niche.
A great example of this was the development of our multi-value export functionality. Over a number of months, the Customer Success team dove deep into challenges our customers were having creating synergies between leveraging a single view of the customer and optimizing when users had multiple values associated to a single data point for one user. Speaking to clients across multiple industries including Retail and Media, we were able to derive a clear value story from capabilities requests. By creating flexibility to export multiple values associated to a single data point, ActionIQ would unlock improved match rates in paid media channels, enable complex multi-offer use cases, improve contact strategies, and provide the ability to address users with multiple accounts. Having these clear value outcomes allowed our team to prioritize development of the feature.
One of the biggest benefits of working at a tech start-up is the ability to share experiences from the front lines with the entire organization, including product. By building close relationships with our customers such that they can talk to us about their victories and struggles, we can get a clear picture of what products and features they need to push their business forward. When we bring new use cases back to the Product Team, we’re very focused on defining business impact, both positive and negative. We will often test more manual solutions to reduce time to value and prove out new concepts, in an effort to work in an agile manner. Most importantly, as we partner with customers to test and learn, we often make direct connections between our customers and product, take active feedback and ideate together.
Since we’re a relatively small team, we are constantly sharing our experiences and bouncing ideas off each other. This results in finding patterns, trends and commonalities among our customers that turn into strong stories we bring to our Product and Engineering teams. Sharing real life examples and connecting our customers directly with our Product team means that the development work that gets prioritized is exactly what our customers need. Understanding the “why” behind our customers priorities and requests means that we can focus intently on what will drive value rather than what we think will matter.
So, all of this begs the question: what does the future look like when it comes to product innovation as a result of trusted customer relationships? For one, the rise of artificial intelligence means that some of the more administrative tasks of a customer success manager can be automated, allowing us to squarely focus on digging deep with our customers in every conversation. This focus will hopefully allow us to drive speed to market and bring even more agility when addressing customer needs. Similarly, adoption of comparable technologies across our cross-functional partners means that customer success, much like sales, will become part of everyone’s job.
ActionIQ is a new kind of customer data platform for enterprise brands, giving marketers easy and secure ways to activate data anywhere in the customer experience. ActionIQ’s unique composable architecture means data can stay securely where it lives, and marketing teams only use the tools they need. We are backed by top-tier VCs Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and March Capital. Enterprise brands such as Autodesk, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, e.l.f. Beauty, Atlassian and many more use our Composable CDP to achieve growth through better customer experiences.
Learn more at https://www.actioniq.com/
Read our product blog at https://www.actioniq.com/blog/
Explore our career openings at https://www.actioniq.com/careers/
Want to get in touch? Contact us: https://www.actioniq.com/contact-us/
