how to customer success the heck out of them
TRANSCRIPT
How to Customer Success
the Heck out of Them
Jean Walters, Director of Customer Success
Greenhouse Software
1prepared for: Work-Bench Workshop, April 2015
2
Agenda
Introduction
Customer success maturity
> Phase I
> Phase II
> Phase II
Other learnings
3
Section 1 Introduction
• Director of Customer Success at
Greenhouse
• Customer successing in the SaaS space
since 2004
• Previous experience at National Council
on Aging and eChalk
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Hi, I’m Jean.
One woman’s journey (mine) leading and
growing a customer success team at a
startup.
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We’re here to talk about …
• Quick background on Greenhouse’s
approach to customer success
• Deep dive into the evolution of customer
success at Greenhouse, including team
structure, tools, and lessons learned
• Misc. sharing
• Q&A
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What we’ll cover in this presentation
• Greenhouse, as a company, is customer-
focused; Customer Success is just the
team that specializes in it
• We have an ambitious – but not ridiculous
– goal to get better at providing service
and support as we grow
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What we’re trying to do
• Be helpful
• Be human
• Be honest
• Be humorous
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Our approach
Customers tell us
• Positive feedback through all kinds of channels
• High NPS
Customers show us
• They are highly engaged, especially with meaningful
features
• They recommend Greenhouse to their friends
• They renew
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How we know we’re successful
• 2 Strategic Account Managers (1 NYC, 1 SF)
• 5 Account Managers (2 NYC, 3 SF)
• 3 Customer Support Specialists (2 NYC, 1 SF)
• 1 Customer Training Specialist (NYC)
• 1 Manager, Customer Data Operations (NYC)
• Other customer-facing roles outside of Customer
Success:
• Renewals Manager – Sales (NYC)
• Solutions Engineer – Engineering (NYC)
• Customer Marketing Manager – Marketing (SF)
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Current Team Structure
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Section 2 CS Maturity
Phase I: Figure it Out
Phase II: Specialize & Scale
Phase III: Work Smarter
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How did we get there?
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Phase I: Figure it Out
• January 2013 – April 2014
• 0-150 customers
• 2 Account Managers (1 NYC,
1 SF)
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Phase I: Overview
• Figured out what the onboarding process
should look like for our product and our
customers
• Experimented with various tools with the
goal of keeping track of customer info,
providing robust support to our
customers, and starting to build scalable
workflows
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Phase I: Summary
Account Managers
• At Greenhouse, Account Manager role = Product Expert
• Leverage creativity and mastery of the product to lead
customers to solutions that fit their needs
• Inform product roadmap by advocating internally for
customer feature requests while managing expectations for
future releases
• Lead efforts to evangelize Greenhouse as a larger platform
for org change
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Phase I: Team Structure
Account Managers were responsible for:
• Customer onboarding (kick-off, training, data
migrations, etc.)
• Managing support chat and email
• Engaging directly with engineers to
troubleshoot technical issues
• Sending release notes to customers
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Phase I: Team Structure cont’d
• join.me
• Olark
• Pipedrive Salesforce
• Intercom
• Zendesk
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Phase I: Tools
• Investing in a support platform with a hosted
knowledge base / help center was a really
good move
• Repeated 1:1 training sessions for existing
customers is in demand but not scalable
• No longer possible for Account Managers to
also manage support chat and email
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Phase I: Lessons Learned
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Chats Per Day January ‘13 – April ‘14
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Phase II: Specialize &
Scale
• April 2014 – March 2015
• 150-490 customers
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Phase II: Overview
April – Dec 2014• 3 Account Managers• 1 Customer Support Specialist
Jan – March 2015• 2 Strategic Account Managers• 5 Account Managers• 3 Customer Support Specialists• 1 Customer Training Specialist• 1 Manager, Customer Data Ops• And …
• Renewals Manager• Solutions Engineer• Customer Marketing Manager
• Recognition that certain tasks call for attention
and expertise that wouldn’t be scalable for an
Account Manager to fully own over time, including
basic support, renewals, data migrations, and
training beyond onboarding
• First attempt to use data to understand customer
health and stay ahead of churn
• Begin to align customer need with type of Account
Manager
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Phase II: Summary
Customer Support Specialists
• First point of contact for all support communications across multiple channels to answer
questions, provide guidance, troubleshoot and escalate issues, and route product
feedback appropriately
Renewals Manager
• Focused solely on upselling and renewing existing customers
Customer Training Specialist
• Ramping up training program to deliver 1:many trainings on a regular basis
Manager, Customer Data Ops
• Works with customers through the data migration process, beginning-to-end
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Phase II: Team Structure
Strategic Account Manager
• Assigned to work with large, complex
customers that require deep engagement,
regular check-ins, project plans, etc.
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Phase II: Team Structure Cont’d
• Bluenose
• Wootric
• Confluence
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Phase II: Tools
• Attributes of best Account Managers
• Product-oriented
• Empathetic
• Creative thinkers, problem solvers
• Hire Account Managers before you need them
• A third-party customer success management platform doesn’t make sense
for us. We decided to dedicate internal resources to help us use our data
to get a status of customer health
• Customers love talking to each other! Really successful first-ever
customer summit. Trying to figure out how to bring customers together on
a regular basis
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Phase II: Lessons Learned
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Chats Per Day April ‘14 – March ‘15
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FAQ Views May ’14 – March ‘15
16,687 help center views in March 2015
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NPS
• April 2015 - ?
• 529 customers
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Phase III: Work Smarter
• Obtain account balance and roll out specialized training and data
migration services that will enable Account Managers to focus more
on existing customers
• Use data to target customers for outreach and then use data to
gauge success
• Nail down more concrete metrics
• Experiment with the “right” cadence for check-ins with customers
(how long after onboarding, how often, which types of customers)
• Structure onboarding to be goal-focused in the context of the
product; establish account review to check on progress toward
those goals (establish value, reinforce value)
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Phase III: Summary
Onboarding Specialist?
• In an effort to align customer need with type
of Account Manager, we would like to
introduce a 3rd type of role that would work
with smaller customers who don’t
necessarily care to have a dedicated
Account Manager. Instead, they can turn to
general support after onboarding.
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Phase III: Team Structure
• Home-built tools that compile and analyze our
customer data to assess health and risk for
churn
• How we’re gauging risk of churn:
• Manual trigger (Slow start, team turnover,
wrong expectations, unresponsive, difficult
personalities, rocky data migration, outlook of
business is uncertain)
• Low NPS
• Key contact turnover
• Haven’t paid
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Phase III: Tools
• TBD
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Phase III: Lessons Learned
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Section 3 Other learnings
“Thank you for having a chat
service with such helpful folks on
the other end. Saves me a ton
of time”
“Being able to text/IM with you
on the spot with an intelligent
response is awesome”
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Customers. Love. Chat.
“I'm a current customer of yours and have
noticed that your team is exceptional in follow-
up and answering questions in general. I've
always had a fantastic experience. That being
said, I'm heading up the build of our Customer
Excellence Team and need to hire ~100
people. I'd love to pick your brain on how you
qualify or vet your customer service folks.”
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Not So Humble Brag
• Phone support?
• Tiered support?
• Feature request loop
• Customer community?
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Things we still need to figure out
