AMA: RocketReach Senior Director, Customer Success & Sales, Wynne Brown on Customer Experience

The key to ensuring smooth customer onboarding are simple, powerful and sometimes hard to achieve: 1) Setting clear expectations on the path with milestones and timelines, and then get customer sponsor buy in: you will fail if you don't have a counterpart on the customer side that is equally invested in onboarding. 2) Meet users where they are: in this digital and high speed world, you have to have an offering that is on-demand and ideally in-product. Even your largest enterprise customer spending bazillion dollars with you does not want to have staff all have to find a time to meet live. It is inefficient and unnecessary. 3) Establish key knowledge check points that are supported by live office hours with an expert. This can be a combination of a video call or a Slack channel. For every question one person asks, 20 people have the same question. 4) Circle back mid process to understand what users have been most successful so far and make some spot videos with them. Other users seeing their successful peer who likely has a reputation as a leader or top performer succeed on your onboarding path will help pull all the users through the back half of onboarding. 5) Celebrate completion and then set expectations for the value period! Don't just say goodbye or have the customer and users think that the journey is over. It has just begun!

Before you can worry about reducing TTV, you need to make sure you have clear definitions of what that value means. The sliding scale of standard to fully custom will depend on your product: commodity out of the box all the way up to an enterprise platform. Once you have a clear definition of value, publish to your customer a plan about how to capture that value on a timeline. The crucial part? Who owns what piece. The most common blocker to TTV is your Customer not know what to do when. Start always with simple messaging while the sale is fresh and important to the Customer: you paid x to get y. This plan gets you the value you want in the quickest time period. The biggest mistake made is when vendors don't follow the plan and hold the Customer accountable for their side of execution.

There a few "plays" you should always be ready to run when you think about customer relationships: 1) Change in champion: folks switch jobs. The loss of your champion can be engagement-killing if you haven't multithreaded. For every strategic account, you should have multiple contacts. For every large account, you should have more than one contact. Only for your VSB or SMB segments that should be running on a fly wheel anyway is it reasonable to think you would only have one contact. 2) The customer doesn't think they've received value. This is almost always due NOT to the lack of value but due to the lack of a shared and agreed-upon way to measure value. If your product is simple, it is likely that measurement is standard across the board. If your product is complex like a platform that has myriad use cases, your CSMs should capture the two or three goals the Customer has during implementation and onboarding and agree to how outcomes should be measured. Then you must provide a steady cadence of measuring those results! 3) Ghosting. You just can't get in touch with your customer. Usually this is unrecoverable and you should work on this problem for your current and future customers, not the one ghosting you. The solution here is to look back at the ghost and figure out where the break with you happened. That is the moment in the customer journey that needs to be fixed.

When we think about turning around at-risk Customers, the first step is to create categories that allow you to run plays against the risk. This seems obvious but often teams get paranoid and worried... and worry is not actionable. Throw into the mix that it is 2023, and it feels like so many more customers than usual are at-risk. Likely you think a customer is at-risk because usage has dropped off. The best defense against this is early intervention; have their priorities changed? Their strategies? You need to get to the root cause of the drop off. Implementing a Customer Success Platform early and thoroughly will help you have visibility into your customer base. Without a CSP you will not have time to act. In 2023, decreasing budgets and layoffs are causing churn left and right. Often the best defense about churn is actually focusing on logo retention vs dollar retention. Everyone is running on tighter budgets so it is a win to keep the account so that in better times it can grow back as hiring and budgets bounce back.

Having a Customer Success Platform (CSP) is crucial to be able to personalize the customer experience. You should not even attempt to personalize without a CSP that will allow you these crucial things: 1) relating users to an account and the total spend of that account (this helps you prioritize since none of us have enough time to do everything) 2) setting benchmarks for what healthy usage looks like for different types of users 3) track user behavior against those benchmarks With this type of system, you then know who is who and what they're doing. Without that information, how on earth could you personalize anything meaningful for a customer or user? The goal of personalization is to identify how the user can get more value out of your solution. This can range the gamut from prompts in-product if a user is missing using some key functionality or tool or email messaging to inform users of new releases that they likely are going to be able to leverage.

The only constant is change and that should go for the customer journey as well. The assumption in this question is right: the customer journey should always be evolving. The market evolves, customer needs evolve...so your mapped customer journey should evolve too. The best approach to continuously improving the customer journey is listening. Listen to your customers and hear from them where they are frustrated or experiencing friction. Listen to your data by watching the key milestones in onboarding, adoption and value delivery to see where usage drops, rises, etc.

In many ways, Customer Success is the hub of all activity in a company. Sales needs to know where they are winning or losing with the expectations they're setting; overselling or selling shelfware will cause churn. Marketing needs to know what customers are thriving with your solution so that you can evolve your ICP; they also need great customer stories to fill your website, case study materials and panels. The product team loves what they build and they need to know if the baby is beautiful or ugly; they need access to customers. Here are the key meetings that CS should drive - and give CSMs a chance to show their expertise and contribute to these as part of their own professional development: 1) Marketing monthly: review stories and ICP 2) Product monthly: are there new features that need testing or feedback by customers? Have the needs of customers changed and there is now a new feature that the customer base is asking for? 3) Sales monthly: everything rolls downhill. Help sales be their best by providing an overview of talk tracks that are working and those that are not.

You MUST have a Customer Success Platform. All customers want to have optimized onboarding, adoption and value delivery and even your enterprise customers want a lot of digital and on-demand interaction. To manage all of this, you have to have a system that can interpret user behavior into calls-to-action for your CSM team. All other tools or tech are nice-to-haves...

As you grow, the fear is that the quality of what you deliver will degrade. The question here is how to keep it consistent... but I pose that as your customer base grows, your customer experience should improve. The more data, the more insights, the more you should be able to more rapidly adapt to what is working and what is not. Here are the foundational components that you need to set up and that constantly improve as you get more and more data via a growing customer base: 1) Customer journey: what are the milestones that matter in pre-sales messaging and the sales process and then in the implementation-adoption-value journey? 2) Staff excellence: every communication with prospects and customers should be flawless and resonate. Use an email system that allows you to see what content is resonating with your prospects and customers and always share templates so standards are kept high. 3) Usage data: you gotta see what people are using in your solution, and that evolves over time. As other integrated systems evolve, you might have a tool that needs to evolve with them. Identify and then obsessively watch the key functionality of your solution to glean insights. 4) Customer advisory board: this can be informal or formal, but the essential thing here is that you aren't guessing about what your customers think or that you fall back solely on usage data. Talking directly with the humans on the other side of the table will never be replaced.

There are two forums for showcasing and celebrating - most of you are thinking maybe there is just one? Case studies and panels, etc? I'm actually not going to talk about that since that is what is more well known. Let me pivot this question instead to talk about the second forum: internal. As your company grows, your non-customer facing staff grows. Whether it is back office folks in business functions like BI or Finance, or engineering functions like devs or QA, there are plenty of colleagues who are secondary or tertiary to hearing from customers directly. Our CS org provides a once-a-month Customer Corner video on an all-hands channel. This video is produced by a CSM who summarizes the customer's use case and account history and then shares a story about value delivery, a success, a customer advocate who got promoted... some great news due to the solution you provide. It thrills folks who have contributed to the companies success but aren't front line to hearing from customers. I can't emphasize enough how much folks love Customer Corner stories and because they are internal and private, you don't need logo rights!