My Journey in Customer Success So Far

Excerpt from The Startup’s Guide to Customer Success

You might be wondering why I wrote my first book about Customer Success. Well, I come from a diverse background that started with my love of technology and education.

A bit about me, I work at an education technology startup. While I was excited by the mission and the team when I was introduced to the role, I did not fully understand what I was doing or what exactly I was striving for in customer success.

The company that I work for offers 24/7, on-demand homework help via a student’s smartphone or tablet. Essentially, if a student is stuck on a homework problem late at night, early in the morning, or whenever really, all they had to do was open the app, take a photo of their homework problem, and they would be connected to a real live person who would help them with their problem.

At the time, my company had just started a program where we initially worked with schools to bring our product to underserved, under-resourced populations. We knew we had a product that would benefit all students, so we wanted to figure out how best to access to quality, one-on-one support to those students who may not normally have access to these kinds of resources.

From this program, we worked with a bunch of teachers and school administrators, and quickly realized we needed to do more than just sell our product well. We realized that in order to succeed, we needed to keep our key stakeholders happy and informed about their students’ activity with our service. We needed to streamline the onboarding experience, so that we could sign-up more students, remotely, at once without compromising effectiveness. We needed to be three steps ahead so that when the school asked for something, we were already there with an answer.

Due to this process, customer success was born — albeit not called customer success yet by name.

I was excited by this new journey and I was honored to be at the helm. There were so many great articles and ideas I could implement for our customers — we could implement a dashboard, so schools would be able to see everything in real time. We could host onboarding webinars and check-in calls to make sure administrators, teachers, and staff members were set up for success. We could send swag to every school, so students would be more excited about learning.

However, the honeymoon phase quickly faded. People, articles, and books recommended large investments just to get some of the basic things accomplished.

“Have a score for every customer so that you can monitor their health and write out a playbook for how to address a customer when they get into x health category.” Great idea — but at the time we operated off a Google sheet and maybe some scribbles on the side of my notebook. We didn’t have time to write a playbook. Heck, we didn’t even know what problems we would face. Every client had a different school
system and a different demographic of student and technology use. Due to the strong seasonality of our product, we didn’t have time to finish quarterly business reviews, let alone write playbooks.

“Invest in these third party apps to help monitor and manage your clients.” Would love to, but we don’t have the money nor the headcount for it. I have been on multiple demo calls where I tell them “So, I’m a team of one and would like to learn more about your product” and the salespeople would just say (and correctly so) “Sorry, we can’t help you because our minimum contracts are $10,000 and even that’s on the low side. Reach back out to us again when you have at least five people on your team.” So how do I get to five when I can’t even succeed at being a team of one?

This was an incredibly frustrating time for me and I do not want others to go through the same thing that I did. Now that I’m further along, I’ve realized that I didn’t need those huge investments to build a customer success organization. I just needed to know the basics, create a strategy, get buy-in,
and execute.

I wanted to create a resource that was tailored toward people like me back then — lost in the sea of information, and overwhelmed by sorting through all of them to see what piece of advice would work well for your company’s business model. After all, because more and more smaller companies are investing in customer success, we need a customer success model which works for all of us — not only those who can shell out the big bucks for large integrations and consultants.

That’s how my journey into customer success started. Throughout my career, I’ve connected with other customer success leaders and have collated my learnings and insights into my book The Startup’s Guide to Customer Success.

Over the next weeks, I’m going to be sharing excerpts and stories from my book, The Startup’s Guide to Customer Success in this blog series.

The Startup’s Guide to Customer Success launches on February 22, 2019. If you’d like to be the first to get a copy, you can pre-order it on Amazon — here is the link: https://www.amazon.com/Startups-Guide-Customer-Success-Champion-ebook/dp/B07NDR49NF

If you want to connect with me on social media and learn more, message me on LinkedIn.