Breaking Into Tech: Lessons from Customer Success by Paola Cáceres
Customer Success Management: A Comprehensive Guide With Memes
Today, we want to uncover a career path that’s filled with exciting opportunities and pivotal business insights – we are talking about customer success management. This is your guide to understanding and mastering the dynamics of becoming a successful customer success manager, brought to life by some quirky memes!
About Our Keynote Speaker, Paula Casarez
Paula Casarez, a Colombina native presently based in Munich, currently works as a Customer Success Manager.
She has previously held roles as a project manager and account manager before diving into the ocean of customer success.
Her current position involves working for a company in the heart of Munich. She believes challenging oneself with new roles is a significant part of career growth, and that is what we aim to help you achieve by the end of this article.
Understand Company Versus Customer Goals
The first crucial lesson a Customer Success Manager needs to grasp is the interplay of company versus customer goals. A quintessential example of this can be seen in a conversation between Thor and Hulk, metaphorically representing a customer success manager (Hulk) and a customer (Thor). While Hulk is assured of the significant value customers derive from the product, Thor has reservations.
How can we tackle this issue? One solution is to valiantly address it by setting tangible, measurable goals strategically aligned with the product. Using SMART Goals to convert customer expectations into concrete goals can open the path to successful customer advocacy for your product.
Power of Storytelling and Influencing
Storytelling has a profound effect in influencing people’s perceptions and beliefs. It enables the listener to visualize the situation and comprehend its implications. But storytelling must be paired with asking the right questions to truly understand your customers’ needs and expectations. Engage in closed-end questions but do not shy away from open-ended ones. These generate broader responses that often give you a deeper understanding. An excellent approach to influencing is leveraging the ‘hero's journey.’
Handling Difficult Conversations and Frustrations
Handling frustration and difficult conversations is an inevitable part of a customer success manager's role. Encounters with unhappy customers and renewals that do not proceed call for a tactical and empathy-filled approach. Paula recommends following a simple three-step strategy: Disarm, Diagnose, and Describe, which involves showing empathy, researching the problem, and summarizing your steps for resolution.
Urgent Versus Important: Time Management
A customer success manager often juggles numerous tasks, ranging from meeting business review deadlines to responding to urgent customer calls. Recognizing what is urgent versus important is crucial to manage one's time effectively. Time management techniques such as Pomodoro or time-blocking can be beneficial. Furthermore, distinguishing between proactive and reactive tasks can also help prioritize your schedule.
The Customer At The Center
The final, and perhaps the most significant lesson, is keeping the customer at the center of all activities. A customer success manager is an intermediary between the customer and the organization, guiding collaboration between different teams. Building and fostering relationships is the key element here as it ensures that the customer's needs are always prioritized.
Conclusion
Understanding and transforming into a successful customer success manager is a journey best learnt by doing. It is a role filled with opportunities to learn, grow, and connect. We hope this guide, brought to life with engaging memes, has given you some valuable takeaways towards nurturing your customer success management quest. Now go forth and conquer the customer success world!
Want to Connect?
If you would like to connect with Paula or learn more about her work, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn. She is always eager to share insights and connect with like-minded individuals passionate about customer success and personal development.
Video Transcription
So thank you so much for joining me today. I hope you can see my slides. I hope you can hear me. And hello to everyone. If you can just put your name or the city, you are listening or attending this amazing conference from, that would be awesome.So thank you so much for joining me today and I hope you are having a great time here at the We maintain the network global conference to 2022. Uh This is my third time being as, as an ambassador, as a country leader and now as a keynote speakers. And now we are going to talk about customer success management in a nutshell and explain with memes. So we are going to spend the next 10 minutes to find out what I have learned from this career path. So I did break, I break into tech with customer success. So that's gonna be our focus today in my presentation. Thank you for joining. So, I'm Paula Casarez. I'm I'm a customer success manager at USA USA is a company here based in Munich, Germany. I'm from Colombia, but now currently based in Munich, Germany uh prior to customer success.
I work as a customer, as a project manager and account manager. And I love challenging myself with new things, with your new path, with, with new career path. So I, I decided to go for customer success management and thank you so much for joining today. So that's the question that we are going to answer today. What is in the life of customer success manager and not to die in the attempt. So the next 10 minutes, we are going to talk about five important lessons to learn from my, what I have learned from this career path and not to die in the attempt. And also explain with memes. Let's get started. So the first lesson that you you need to understand is to understand company versus com customer goals. When you are on boarding, a customer from the from the on boarding processes until the renewal, you always have to have to talk about goals. How are we going to uh achieve your goal with our product? What are our company goals? What are the customer goals? But to understand this, I use the first Thor and Hulk conversation here. So me as a whole as a customer success manager. I'm, I'm I'm 100% sure that my customer is getting a lot of value with my product. But the customer is like, are we though? So th is is is hesitating a bit. So we need to understand first. What problem does my solution fix or improve.
What is the, the main goal that we are going to challenge ourselves with using our product? So that's why the way we are going to talk about here, goals. The first thing you need to ask your customers is about measuring goals. We are going to benchmark your goals with, with our product. So that's the the first and most important thing to do throughout the life cycle of of the customer uh with our product, how do we turn expectations to goals? So they have an idea, maybe reduce support tickets, maybe improve uh interaction rate. But how do we turn expectations to goals? So you can use maybe uh one of the techniques smart goals just to understand um how they the we are going to tackle this goal. For example, reduce support tickets, you can say, ok, we are going to reduce support tickets by 30% over the quarter or over the year. So we need to turn expectations and uh two goals, that's the most important thing. And customer advocate for your product, that means if your customer get is getting a lot of value with your product, your customer is gonna be advocate for your product is gonna be ambassador for your product. We can do, we can utilize this success and for another prospect for another customers and then your customer can advocate for your product. The second lesson and and most important one, storytelling is in influencing and asking great questions.
The the most powerful tool to, to influence people is by through, through storytelling. This is what I'm doing today. So storytelling and influencing but also asking great questions. What does this mean? So here we see evolve from the Simpson when you buy a new software, but you don't know how to use it yet. So we need to get the real question to get real answers. For example, if the customer is buying our our product, why they are buying our product? So that what would happen if uh so we can use questions with, with our customers about close or open questions close. Like are we going to renew your, your contract? Yes or no. But also we need to persuade, persuade our customers of change always is not a good thing or is it like um is it's difficult to, to get this this done? So change is about persuasion and then here's here is uh one of technique that I'm using with my customers. Hero's journey. So if you tell a customer a story about other customer while using your product, you can use, you can use utilize OK. Now you can, you can tackle this objective with having this story. So hero's journey here, for example, you can start with an A contest.
Uh The this this user is not getting a lot of value because the feature is missing here is the pain but always the solution is the the the product, but the hero is the customer. So always ask great question is is key to be as a uh a successful customer success and cons consultative approach. You are like the best friend for your customer within your company. So you are acting as a consultant. So you need to ask great questions in order to influence them. And the third one handling frustration in difficult conversations. So as a customer success manager, I'm dealing a lot with difficult conversations um about not renewing to cancellation or not getting value out of a product.
So this is a like a daily that for for us as a customer success managers and here when an account turns but says they love working with me, but it wasn't my fault, but we need to get start started this conversation with our customer also in with my manager. I didn't understand what I what is what is going on here with my customer. So you need to to use to utilize this 100 this difficult conversation with this golden um sequence disarm diagnose and describe. So disarm you need to show empathy to your customers saying for example, I'm so sorry to hear that. I understand you are coming from diagnose you. You need to research about the project about um what is going on? What are the main painfuls um of being of being may maybe canceling, canceling cancellation the contract or something and describe summarize. Let's let's go for next steps. And so some or and so feelings are real and listen as a customer success manager, I I I'm learning, learning by doing, learning by doing with my customers. Always listen, active listening, empathy and communication skills are the most wanted skills as a customer success manager.
So listen, feel as are real. And always we are going to have difficult conversations. If you get, if you are getting through a difficult conversation with your customer, you are going to have a better and a stronger relationship with your customer. The 41 understand urgent versus important.
So here always as a customer success manager, we are dealing not always with, with difficult conversations, happy customers. We are dealing with um sending emails to our customers for example, or having internal meetings, but we need to understand what is urgent versus important.
So here for example, uh from the Jurassic Park, we have three dinosaurs. Oh me as a customer success manager, I have uh decks to be made for the business reviews or I have customers to check in calls to do because they, they are, they need me. They are uh uh in a need for for a customer success or internal meetings to attend. So I have to deal with a lot of things. So multitask uh kind of work here, but we need to understand what is the origin and what is the important. We need to move from the origin to the important things that are are happening um with our time. So time management is always a good idea. Maybe you can use a Pomodoro techniques um like you are focusing on, on a certain tax for a certain amount of amount of time or maybe you can use time blocking for focus for, for send the email, something like that. And we need to understand what are our plans, what are our proactive at? What are our reactive um activities, plans, meetings, uh proactive we are going to sell, we are going to tackle an abso and reactive. We are going to focus on technical issues or support issues. So we need to move from the urgent to the important in regards to these three types of activities. So productivity must based on uh value of the task that's important one and not for, don't forget about your personal development time.
This is one of my um my um I'm spending a lot of time training myself listening to others, networking. For example, here attending this conference, personal development time is always a good, is a good tool just to learn from you, learn from the customers and move on the customer at the center. This is the list the last but not least um explanation that I want to talk, talk to you about uh the the all that matters, the customers at the center, the customers is all that matters from our, our um for our company. So here for example, we have from the, from the Avengers the Civil War. Me as a customer success manager, acting as a Captain America, you have to build this feature because my customer otherwise my customer will turn. But I man is saying no, as a head of product or as a product manager in my company, we are sticking to the product road map and there is no reason and then we ended up having a a war. No, we need to drive collaboration between teams. We need to manage across teams within my organization because we are going, we are the face to face uh uh best friend of the customer within the company. So we need to talk with product, we need to talk with finance.
We need to talk with several teams across, across the the the the the the company to build relationships at the end. That's all that matters. The customer success. The customer is at at the center and the customer success is the face to the to from the customer to the organization. We are, we are like intermediate um actor to, to this relationship. So it's always that matters customer at the center. So congratulations. You made it. Uh you are a customer success now, I hope you learn about how to be a better customer success manager. As I was saying, it's all only about learning by doing with your customers and, and happy to connect with you. This is my company here based in Munich Germany about user link, connecting people with technology. And we are one of the leading digital adoption um software providers. Thank you so much, Elena. And if you want to talk with me, connect with me, let's connect on linkedin and I'm, I'm happy to, to, to connect with you on linkedin or here in the conference. I hope you're having a great time and talk to you later. If you have questions, questions don't, don't hesitate to put it here in the, in the chat. Thank you so much for, for your time and for joining me, that's, that was customer success in a nutshell. Thank you so much.