Customer SuccessCon Seattle 2016

You won't need to print your ticket, just bring a business card or other identification to the Registration desk.

Customer Success groups are proliferating across the business landscape faster than can be imagined.  The numbers of open positions worldwide continue to skyrocket.  But in all the increase and expansion, key questions remain to be answered.  How is Customer Success as a role generally defined and perceived?  How do companies typically deploy CS resources in their organizational structures?  What are the relationships between CS and Sales?  CS and Marketing?  What technologies are in use by CS teams? 

The presentation is based on the ongoing research of The Customer Success Association.  The findings will be discussed by a panel of senior Customer Success leaders.

A customer journey map is your methodology for ensuring that key activities happen with every customer to maximize adoption.  But a methodology is only as good as your ability to get all of your customer facing roles (and your customers!) to follow it. Join this case study session where we will discuss the trials, tribulations, and successes at Apptio in how we rolled out our adoption methodology. We will discuss the operational aspects of how we governed the activities using technology, the internal organizational change management that we needed to drive, the metrics we created around adoption velocity, and the insights we were able to get through the instrumentation

Join Emilia D’Anzica, VP of Customer Engagement  at WalkMe for an interactive session on building your customer organization with a V2MOM framework: Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles and Measures.

We will begin by defining what a V2MOM framework looks like in the Customer sector, and expand our discussion to include the specific steps taken to execute this initiative.  How do you create and manage a Vision, establish Values, implement Methods, identify and tackle Obstacles and then Measure your own success?

Participants will have the opportunity to work on their own V2MOM Customer Success framework during the session and will leave with an example to take back to their own organizations.

For many companies, the most successful customers with the highest LTV are the ones who are educated -- not just about product features, but about key workflows, best practices, and maturity in the broader industry. Yet many customer success programs don't invest in ongoing, scalable education programs; it is often an ad hoc CSM activity that leaves tremendous value on the table.

Customer Success teams who make a true investment in Customer Education will see an impact in the way their team's tribal knowledge scales out to have an impact on Sales, Marketing, and even Product. We will walk through the different possible components of a Customer Education program and how they can complement one another.

We’ll also discuss some of the tools and platforms that will be essential to your “Customer Education stack” and how you may want to prioritize your investments.

As a case study, we will discuss Optimizely's Customer Education program: Optiverse, which includes a self-serve and facilitated Academy program, Knowledge Base, Community, Certification, Trainings, and even in-product education.

In this highly interactive session, you'll learn:

• What are the components of Customer Education?
• What is the business case for Customer Education?
• What are the KPIs within Customer Success, Sales, Marketing, and Product that an Education program can drive?
• Why does it make sense to pull these together instead of making them separate properties? What are the tradeoffs for doing so?
• What systems should you be using to enable a Customer Education program?
• What types of content should you focus on to achieve better LTV and marketing attribution? What types of content affect your customer contact rate or headcount ratios?
• How do you work with other teams in the organization to align efforts?

Supporting 400 customers with a single Customer Success Advocate was quite a challenge.  Here’s how Panopto succeeded.

1.  We crafted a risk detection system to alert Customer Success at the first sign of account danger, using 5 telling indicators very early in the customer lifecycle.
2. We automated our systems, including Salesforce workflows, to maximize efficiency and the time available to spend on meaningful customer interactions.
3. We leveraged surveys to find customer success stories and pain points.
4. We streamlined and organized our customer data.

What could/should the profession become in the next few years?  How might that future be accomplished?  The sea-change in the technology industry’s profits-realization strategy, from selling perpetual licenses to on-premised software, ushered in Customer Success as a necessary role.  But the evolution of the industry and of the business sector overall hasn’t stopped.  It’s not about the software anymore.  The next big transformation, from product to authentic customer centricity, is beginning.  What will it mean to your company?  What will it mean to you as a customer success professional?

A panel of senior Customer Success leaders will give you their perspective on these issues as well.

A Customer Success team inevitably acquires a lot of data about the customer in the course of their work together.  Effectively applying that data, however, is often another matter, especially in balancing the relationships with Sales and Marketing.  How should the Customer Success team build the credibility with Sales to where inappropriate prospective deals can be stopped before they become a retention problem?  And with Marketing, so that the marketing campaigns attract the right kind of leads?  Why should an individual Success Plan be done for every customer as a part of the selling process?  Who should do renewals and up-sells, and how should that process be handled?

The vast majority of SaaS companies have negative operating income and few have a solid plan in place to become profitable at scale. SaaS companies need to take a hard look at their profit timeline and make key strategic investments and organizational changes to ensure their survival.

One of these key strategic investments is found in Customer Success.  In this session, we will work through ways to monitor metrics such as customer acquisition costs, payback period, customer retention costs and efficiency ratios, customer revenue churn as well as customer count churn, and how to align compensation for both sales and customer success to ensure customer retention.

We will discuss best practices on how Customer Success can achieve negative churn, reduce effective cost of sales through diverse revenue streams to achieve your GAAP profit timeline goals.

Could this happen to you?  "I’m sorry to have to tell you that Senior Management has made the decision to reorganize our company’s approach to customer retention.  As a result, we will be phasing out the entire Customer Success Group over the next few weeks.”  Or: “We’ve decided to make some changes in our organization.  Moving forward, you’ll now report to the VP of Sales rather than to the CEO.”  Even if reorganization is not in the immediate picture, the implied or explicitly promised budget allocation for headcount and technology can suddenly evaporate.

In this session, we’ll look at:

• What questions should you ask and to whom during the recruitment process before you even take a role?
• How do you recognise the first signs of trouble once you have taken the role within the first 3 months? What are the early warning signs?
• What factors could introduce risks you cannot precisely predict or influence? (e.g. change of management, new investment)
• What are the real red flags that your position and / or team is in danger?
• What can be addressed easily once identified?
• What factors are in the ‘zone of doom’? (in your circle of concern but not in circle of control)
• How do you make the decision to stay or exit?
• How do you exit with your head held high?
• Lessons learned / wrap up

What if you could make your customers more successful while you sleep?

Web self-service is an established practice for technical support organizations looking to deflect low-value support cases.  But customer success organizations can deploy knowledge and tools to a higher purpose, self-success—helping customers receive and perceive more value from your offerings with knowledge and automation, at scale. In this interactive session, we'll discuss the hows and whys of self-success:

•  What are the strategic drivers for self-success?
• What does success look like, and how do we measure it?
• What content, services, and technology are required to help customers achieve business outcomes, rather than just fix problems?
• Can we extend the current support knowledge base, or is this a fundamentally different offering?
• What’s the business model?  How does it fit into our other Customer Success offerings?  Do we risk cannibalization?
• How do we encourage customers to use our self-success offerings?  What kind of help will they find most useful?  What will they be willing to take on themselves? (Giving people nutritional information doesn’t automatically make them thin.)
• Does a self-success offering undermine the work of our CSMs?

Learn from industry colleagues, and share your questions, observations, and experiences.