Four Lessons from Year One of Building a Scaled Success Program
Reflections from Jess Massart, Customer Success Manager (Scale)
One year ago, I joined Teachable to help bring our product insights and expertise to a wider audience. Our Success team meets with a small handful of users to help them level up their businesses, and we wanted to be able to spread that knowledge even further. It was a busy, creative year, and in the spirit of starting the year on an open note, here are some of my main takeaways.
One: Always center programming on what your customer needs
What will help your users level up? How can you remove roadblocks for them? Customers and users will tell you all of this in their platform usage and from any NPS, or other feedback, you’re gathering. Tap into this to shape impactful programs.
For us, when we heard from creators that they wanted to dig more deeply into topics like email marketing, we reshaped our schedule and brought in outside experts to ensure we delivered what would be most impactful to them.
Two: Cross functional collaboration is key
For a project to have a wide impact and reach the right users, you can’t go it alone or even within one team. Pull in stakeholders from the appropriate teams and ensure there’s alignment in the early stages. And remember: it’s never just a one-way request: these projects become opportunities for other teams to boost their own KPIs and reap the benefits of new user insights.
Bonus: explore ways to surface your insights and knowledge so more teams have access.
For example, it’d be easy to have our group coaching program exist just in the Success team. But by collaborating with the Product team, we’re able to bring this experience further in-app and leverage the insights we gain from users in the program to help inform our roadmap.
Three: Build fast, learn and iterate frequently
There’s no such thing as perfect, right? This even includes programs where you and your team want to put their best professional foot forward. It’s ok to be honest about getting started; you’d be surprised how much your users will appreciate that.
When we first launched the live Launch Accelerator, we had only had a month to pull it together. By leaning into our vulnerability and sharing with our attendees that they were part of the first ever cohort and that we were building with them, it engendered more empathy and a deeper engagement.
Which brings me to:
Four: Be human
Even at scale, when you’re talking to dozens or hundreds of users in one go, you still want to try to connect personally. Getting people to engage in the chat and ask questions is key, but so is sharing your authentic self. It’s ok to acknowledge the cat misbehaving in the background, the funky lighting effect happening at sunset, or the weird city noises outside your window (all of which happened to me live on camera over the past year). These things help show that you’re in the moment with your attendees.
There’s plenty more to be said, but all of this helped power a big 2022, and I’m excited to use these ideals to shape what comes in 2023.
