Effective Customer Success Execution: A Customer Centric Approach to Creating a Customer for Life

By Jackie Golden

“Customer experience,” or CX, has become a hot topic in the past decade. This guide will show you how to build a world-class customer experience model that delivers a results-driven approach that ensures a consistent, repeatable, and quality customer experience for your clients over the long term.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9780996783118

Book preview

Away

CHAPTER ONE

The Benefits of a Customer focused business model and strategy

Over the last 20 years, I have had the pleasure of working with hundreds of customers, specifically in the high tech industry, helping them implement software solutions that were designed to revolutionize their business and to provide a competitive edge.

As many of you have probably experienced, thoughtful and strategic use of technology provides a significant edge to innovation capabilities, operational effectiveness, automation, employee capacity and productivity, and many more operational improvements.

Many great technology companies have helped transform top corporations worldwide with their hardware, software and various product innovations. Most of these innovations have focused on improving specific aspects of a corporation. For example, financial reporting with improved transparencies and insights. In addition, there was the business intelligence craze, which offered dashboard reporting on key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Then we had the ERP revelation in automating manufacturing and tracking more insightful information to find ways to reduce costs. Remember, too, the Master Data Management era that uncovered the power of quality data versus bad data and how to maintain one source of the truth. Of course, my favorite is the latest around Big Data Analytics and the ability for technology to actually learn from the data and provide answers and predictions.

Wait! What happened to the customer experience? Notice that in all these innovations to help companies succeed and grow, the focus was never really about what the customer was experiencing as part of the strategic formula for success. It was a combination of behavior management techniques, with a solid strategic plan, that created the right corporate climate, which followed a concise dashboard of key metrics and targets, with the right people on the bus who were motivated in the right ways, creating an excellent quality product. Finally, there was the idea of a solid customer support team. However, a customer success program or the development of all of the above elements lacked a focus on the customer’s expectations and the value required to be a transformative solution for the customer.

Only in the last five to ten years has the concept of creating a customer success plan become critical in creating a successful company.

By contrast, when I left the corporate finance world and joined my first technology company, Hyperion, as a consultant, my focus right from the beginning was listening to what the customer was trying to accomplish and finding the best solution for them using the Hyperion products.

Ultimately I created my own methodology, which became my personal approach to consulting with each customer to whom I was assigned. In fact, Hyperion created a methodology shortly after I joined. And I was able to contribute to the final outcome. However, I was one of the few people in the meetings who kept mentioning that our focus should be to create a better solution for the customer. I thought we should focus on what would make the most impactful financial solution besides just the basic reporting.

The Hyperion methodology team was focused on creating a best practice approach with a prescriptive step by step set of tasks that all consultants should follow and documents that were required to be delivered on each assignment. As Hyperion evolved into a larger company with multiple products, the methodology began to crack because we didn’t have a best practice approach to designing a robust, impactful end-to-end solution using all of our products so that the customer would receive a clear vision of the final solution with a detailed roadmap of how to get from where they were to the ultimate vision.

Don’t get me wrong, I have also worked with customers that had no idea where to start or even what they wanted. They knew only that there had to be a better way and they heard that Hyperion was a great product. In those cases, of course, we had to create a plan and provide a roadmap for them. But the real difference was that I helped them define the vision and a clear roadmap on how to get from where they were to the vision. I was also determined to transfer my knowledge and experience to them so they could begin to see how the technology could provide them with the solutions that helped transform their business.

It then turned into a more collaborative conversation over time so that the customers were able to create better ways, new designs, reports and types of information that would enable them to do their job better and to provide the company with more insightful reports. That’s when it was fun and exciting. The student became the teacher and I began to learn from them. It added to my knowledge and abilities to deliver a more tailored solution to meet my customer’s needs based on their type of business and industry in my future consulting.

So why do I share this story with you? It is the lessons of these stories and the success that followed that empowered me to create the Customer Experience framework and a new, innovative approach that helps companies develop the best Customer Success strategy that will drive the outcomes and results that shoot them to the top of their market.

In my last few years with Hyperion, I was in the Strategic Account Management group with a focus on the large strategic accounts like CoBank, Phelps Dodge, Safeway, and many others. Our team mission was to manage multiple implementations of the Hyperion products across many customer teams and organizations. Again, I found myself asking the executive sponsors at these accounts a lot of Why type questions. It was vital to understand their business model, how they do business, why were they looking for this type of solution, and what they expected the solution to do for the company. In other words, only after we understood what they defined as their success criteria could we determine what we had to deliver. By delivering to their success criteria, we were developing a loyal relationship so that they would walk into their next executive or leadership meeting and rave about our solution that would optimize their results.

I’ll never forget my first Whiteboard session at CoBank in Colorado. I had representatives from all the organizations that were interested in using the Hyperion products in the same room. Although they were looking to me right away for all the answers, they ended up spending the first few hours answering questions. As they answered my questions about their business, I began to draw a model of how they were organized and how they operated including how data flowed so we could discover the best source of information that we needed to integrate into the Hyperion products. We also ended up with some nice diagrams of how they operated today that mapped out their processes and interactions with other groups. It showed many bottlenecks, duplicate information, and conflicts, which was interesting to many of the team members who were unaware of these issues.

The surprise came when the team members began asking each other more about the diagrams on the board. They began to edit my drawings and create their version of reality. But they didn’t all agree. In fact, many team members were surprised by the information and were learning more about how their own company actually operated. This discovery process helped the team to agree on where they were today and what the priorities should be for a Phase I solution to provide the most impactful benefits to the company. Want to guess how close it was to what was originally discovered in the sales cycle? Nowhere near what the team had defined as their success criteria during the sales cycle.

This process became a running theme from customer to customer. I did the same thing at Phelps Dodge and Safeway. The sales team was fascinated by the results of these Whiteboard sessions and how much they drove the real plan and strategy we put in place for deploying the Hyperion products and the final solution that the customer’s implemented. This triggered the Sales Organization to create a Strategy Workshop where they brought in the Strategic Account Managers to help map