CS from the ground up
Frank Lucier — Our company did not have Customer Success a year ago. So I was brought in to build out the function. So we were starting from scratch. We didn't have CS software, we used Salesforce on the Sales side, and we evaluated multiple different CS solution providers and unanimously selected Planhat, the cross-functional group that we had.
We felt that the solution, that Planhat brought forward, the elegant design, the UI, the UX would support the team and we'd have high levels of adoption because of the way the functionality is built. And then would support management and executive leadership relative to the reporting and insights that we could get out of the solution.
The customer records being at the centre of the platform made it really easy for the evaluation panel to really see how our individual CSM users would be drawn to the tool. And when building out a CS function, we're asking a lot of our CSMs on a day-to-day basis, having to train people in how to use a CS tool, we wanted to make sure that was additive to their day and not something that was onerous.
And we saw Planhat is a really simple tool that provided a lot of depth and power, both for CSMs and from a management perspective.
Seeking the single pane of glass
We came from an environment where we had a large ecosystem of applications that we were using to do everything and customer communications is one of those. Customer visibility is another one of those.
And when I look ahead to Planhat, the objective is to create as much of a single pane of glass as possible through the work that we're doing in Planhat and then data we can ingest from other systems to say yes, we may have a system of record financially for the customer, right? But when we view what is happening with the customer, what is their health, what is their proclivity to buy, their proclivity to potentially churn, and what are we doing about that?
You can come into Planhat and self-serve and get all of that in one place. And then if you're a CSM, you've got one system to work in all day long. Even just a quarter into going live, my visibility into the business is significantly deeper than it was before.
Information leads to impact
I can see on a weekly basis from reporting what the team's doing. We're going to have correlated reporting in the near term that allows us to understand activities we do and then the benefit that comes from those activities.
And it allows me to speak from a much more informed position to our leadership team and to the board about what's happening in the customer base. And what that really is enabling is us to build programs, process, plays in customer lifecycle touch points that are much more valuable to our customers that then lead to more positive outcomes for the business.
Staying ahead of churn
Really to me, where Planhat comes into play is getting ahead of things that are happening within the business, so really understanding where risk lies before a customer's calling and saying, we've moved on, we're not going to use you anymore.
That to me is what really impacts the business. The other are just the outcome metrics that we're looking to manage through CS. And what we're using Planhat for is that it's health scoring to a certain degree.
We're not all the way there yet, but it's really understanding the flow of customer business that we have and understanding where risk lies and why. And then being able to launch plays to go do that for our enterprise level customers.
Proactivity at scale
Chief Customer Success Officer
Velocity Global
Frank is a seasoned customer success and GTM executive with over 20 years of experience scaling high-performing teams in enterprise SaaS. Most recently, he served as Chief Customer Success Officer at Velocity Global and led CS at iSpot.tv, where he oversaw a 60+ person org and drove 200%+ year-over-year expansion. Earlier, he spent seven years at SAP Concur, rising to VP of Client Development, and a decade at ServiceSource, where he helped grow the company through IPO. Frank brings deep expertise in enterprise growth, team leadership, and driving customer-centric transformation at scale.
