Planhat's CEO – Kaveh Rostampor – moderates a discussion between Customer Success leaders covering everything from industry trends to daily habits and the future of customer management.
Share
Planhat's CEO – Kaveh Rostampor – moderates a discussion between Customer Success leaders covering everything from industry trends to daily habits and the future of customer management.
Share
Planhat's CEO – Kaveh Rostampor – moderates a discussion between Customer Success leaders covering everything from industry trends to daily habits and the future of customer management.
Share
Tracy Shouldice — We have 8,000 employees globally, and we operate very multi nationally. So we're very distributed in terms of how we do CS, we have a different CS team in each of our four regions. All four of our regions are active on Planhat, we're getting some good value, and we're really excited by the potential.
Michele Conway-Scro — Being in the CS world, I've also been part of the onboarding, where Planhat has been my saving grace. It helps different departments work together cohesively, to have strong handoffs (…) utilizing everything that you have to offer to make our life easier, but also streamline the whole process to provide a great client experience.
“Planhat has been my saving grace. It helps different departments work together cohesively, to have strong handoffs”
Michele Conway-Scro
Director of Business Development
Myadvice
Tracy Shouldice — We have 8,000 employees globally, and we operate very multi nationally. So we're very distributed in terms of how we do CS, we have a different CS team in each of our four regions. All four of our regions are active on Planhat, we're getting some good value, and we're really excited by the potential.
Michele Conway-Scro — Being in the CS world, I've also been part of the onboarding, where Planhat has been my saving grace. It helps different departments work together cohesively, to have strong handoffs (…) utilizing everything that you have to offer to make our life easier, but also streamline the whole process to provide a great client experience.
“Planhat has been my saving grace. It helps different departments work together cohesively, to have strong handoffs”
Michele Conway-Scro
Director of Business Development
Myadvice
Tracy Shouldice — We have 8,000 employees globally, and we operate very multi nationally. So we're very distributed in terms of how we do CS, we have a different CS team in each of our four regions. All four of our regions are active on Planhat, we're getting some good value, and we're really excited by the potential.
Michele Conway-Scro — Being in the CS world, I've also been part of the onboarding, where Planhat has been my saving grace. It helps different departments work together cohesively, to have strong handoffs (…) utilizing everything that you have to offer to make our life easier, but also streamline the whole process to provide a great client experience.
“Planhat has been my saving grace. It helps different departments work together cohesively, to have strong handoffs”
Michele Conway-Scro
Director of Business Development
Myadvice
Bianca Ker — My team is globally based, everywhere from LA and Atlanta to Singapore and Serbia (…) What has been really interesting is to be part of a company that's got tens of thousands of customers and to really start to think about how can my very scrappy team, that does everything, start to lean into these resources that I've never had before. So I'm really excited about that.
Tracy Shouldice — Our company right now is transforming how we do business around the customer, which is a great thing. But you can imagine, in a 35-year-old business, a lot of the effort is going to be change management.
We could have a $500 value customer, but if it's somebody in Google who is trialing our product, that is not a small customer. That is a potentially huge customer. So how do we identify potential in our existing base? And then how does CS become the catalyst, not necessarily owning the growth? But identifying it, sharing it with the account teams, sharing it with the marketing teams, sharing it with the tech support teams for post-sale, that's our challenge, especially in the company, the size and scale of our business.
Bianca Ker — We're now in a place where we can lean into some of the resources and I'm seeing the benefits of that already, where our CSMs are not just so focused on training. I want them to be identifying opportunities, I want them to be a customer strategic partner. A lot of customers come to us and they're buying a platform and think that's it. They don't realize that after they buy the platform, they still have to actually find the right influencer and then negotiate a price with them, and then pay that influencer that price, make sure that influencer is posting that content, look at that data… They don't know all of that when they get into our space. So the CSM has so many other responsibilities, and what we're making the shift now into is - let's get those responsibilities off of the CSMs plate, let's have an onboarding team and a renewals manager, and then CSM owns NDR. They're focused on how to identify, how to renew customers, how to expand, how to educate…
Michele Conway-Scro — We recently started the launch of an onboarding department. To make sure that our client is set up for success, we identify marketing goals, make sure we're setting proper expectations for the tools that they have purchased from us. And once they get all the proper training, then they're handed off to our client success team who works with them throughout the ongoing relationship, as well as renewal, which has the opportunity for upselling. We're testing out a lot of things right now, we're involving the client in that process where we weren't doing that before. And our onboarding team is handling those.
“With Planhat's capabilities we're building out reporting all around the set. It has been super helpful to have a very consistent process that everyone can follow.”
Michele Conway-Scro
Director of Business Development
Myadvice
Bianca Ker — My team is globally based, everywhere from LA and Atlanta to Singapore and Serbia (…) What has been really interesting is to be part of a company that's got tens of thousands of customers and to really start to think about how can my very scrappy team, that does everything, start to lean into these resources that I've never had before. So I'm really excited about that.
Tracy Shouldice — Our company right now is transforming how we do business around the customer, which is a great thing. But you can imagine, in a 35-year-old business, a lot of the effort is going to be change management.
We could have a $500 value customer, but if it's somebody in Google who is trialing our product, that is not a small customer. That is a potentially huge customer. So how do we identify potential in our existing base? And then how does CS become the catalyst, not necessarily owning the growth? But identifying it, sharing it with the account teams, sharing it with the marketing teams, sharing it with the tech support teams for post-sale, that's our challenge, especially in the company, the size and scale of our business.
Bianca Ker — We're now in a place where we can lean into some of the resources and I'm seeing the benefits of that already, where our CSMs are not just so focused on training. I want them to be identifying opportunities, I want them to be a customer strategic partner. A lot of customers come to us and they're buying a platform and think that's it. They don't realize that after they buy the platform, they still have to actually find the right influencer and then negotiate a price with them, and then pay that influencer that price, make sure that influencer is posting that content, look at that data… They don't know all of that when they get into our space. So the CSM has so many other responsibilities, and what we're making the shift now into is - let's get those responsibilities off of the CSMs plate, let's have an onboarding team and a renewals manager, and then CSM owns NDR. They're focused on how to identify, how to renew customers, how to expand, how to educate…
Michele Conway-Scro — We recently started the launch of an onboarding department. To make sure that our client is set up for success, we identify marketing goals, make sure we're setting proper expectations for the tools that they have purchased from us. And once they get all the proper training, then they're handed off to our client success team who works with them throughout the ongoing relationship, as well as renewal, which has the opportunity for upselling. We're testing out a lot of things right now, we're involving the client in that process where we weren't doing that before. And our onboarding team is handling those.
“With Planhat's capabilities we're building out reporting all around the set. It has been super helpful to have a very consistent process that everyone can follow.”
Michele Conway-Scro
Director of Business Development
Myadvice
Bianca Ker — My team is globally based, everywhere from LA and Atlanta to Singapore and Serbia (…) What has been really interesting is to be part of a company that's got tens of thousands of customers and to really start to think about how can my very scrappy team, that does everything, start to lean into these resources that I've never had before. So I'm really excited about that.
Tracy Shouldice — Our company right now is transforming how we do business around the customer, which is a great thing. But you can imagine, in a 35-year-old business, a lot of the effort is going to be change management.
We could have a $500 value customer, but if it's somebody in Google who is trialing our product, that is not a small customer. That is a potentially huge customer. So how do we identify potential in our existing base? And then how does CS become the catalyst, not necessarily owning the growth? But identifying it, sharing it with the account teams, sharing it with the marketing teams, sharing it with the tech support teams for post-sale, that's our challenge, especially in the company, the size and scale of our business.
Bianca Ker — We're now in a place where we can lean into some of the resources and I'm seeing the benefits of that already, where our CSMs are not just so focused on training. I want them to be identifying opportunities, I want them to be a customer strategic partner. A lot of customers come to us and they're buying a platform and think that's it. They don't realize that after they buy the platform, they still have to actually find the right influencer and then negotiate a price with them, and then pay that influencer that price, make sure that influencer is posting that content, look at that data… They don't know all of that when they get into our space. So the CSM has so many other responsibilities, and what we're making the shift now into is - let's get those responsibilities off of the CSMs plate, let's have an onboarding team and a renewals manager, and then CSM owns NDR. They're focused on how to identify, how to renew customers, how to expand, how to educate…
Michele Conway-Scro — We recently started the launch of an onboarding department. To make sure that our client is set up for success, we identify marketing goals, make sure we're setting proper expectations for the tools that they have purchased from us. And once they get all the proper training, then they're handed off to our client success team who works with them throughout the ongoing relationship, as well as renewal, which has the opportunity for upselling. We're testing out a lot of things right now, we're involving the client in that process where we weren't doing that before. And our onboarding team is handling those.
“With Planhat's capabilities we're building out reporting all around the set. It has been super helpful to have a very consistent process that everyone can follow.”
Michele Conway-Scro
Director of Business Development
Myadvice
Michele Conway-Scro — If someone gets churn, it goes to client success. But everyone is part of that really, because we're working together and we're all representing the same thing.
Tracy Shouldice — How do we transform our business to be truly customer centric and surrounding around the customer? That's an old story. We all know it. Our mantra is that customer success is everyone's business.
Bianca Ker — So much time for my team is spent trying to take a look at all the data that we've aggregated and make sense of it, and then take a next step - whether it's a health score, or trying to figure out why they're not using that part of the platform - do you need to send them a bunch of emails to get on a call to train them?
Just because I've worked in CS for 10 or so years doesn't mean that I know what a healthy customer looks like in terms of usage of a platform. I would love to be at a place where I give you my event level data, I give you my Salesforce, I give you my goals, and you tell me. Customers who have renewed, customers who have churned, customers who have upsold, you have their usage data. You have their NPS, you have their activity.
Tracy Shouldice — We have Salesforce as our CRM, we use Marketo for marketing, we use Zendesk and Jira for support. We have all these different platforms. Planhat is connecting to those various sources, and down the road I think it's going to be about data integrations and connectivity to and from Planhat that's gonna be key to really enable us.
And then we're talking about AI and predictive modeling. That's something we've got to think about from a CS perspective - how do you get the intelligence on the CS team to interpret and understand the data and what it means. We're looking at using AI to, for example, assess the potential of an existing account; We've been too insular, we look at the contract value and some usage data based on existing usage of that account of our platform. But there are probably tons of external data points that we might want to compliment that data with, to identify, 10 years from now, how big could that customer be - so that we can prioritize our efforts in the field.
“Planhat could tell us what a a high growth potential account looks like based on the data that's on the platform; it helps our account managers, our sales, our tech support people to be more efficient and effective.”
Tracy Shouldice
Director of Customer Success
Trend Micro
Michele Conway-Scro — If someone gets churn, it goes to client success. But everyone is part of that really, because we're working together and we're all representing the same thing.
Tracy Shouldice — How do we transform our business to be truly customer centric and surrounding around the customer? That's an old story. We all know it. Our mantra is that customer success is everyone's business.
Bianca Ker — So much time for my team is spent trying to take a look at all the data that we've aggregated and make sense of it, and then take a next step - whether it's a health score, or trying to figure out why they're not using that part of the platform - do you need to send them a bunch of emails to get on a call to train them?
Just because I've worked in CS for 10 or so years doesn't mean that I know what a healthy customer looks like in terms of usage of a platform. I would love to be at a place where I give you my event level data, I give you my Salesforce, I give you my goals, and you tell me. Customers who have renewed, customers who have churned, customers who have upsold, you have their usage data. You have their NPS, you have their activity.
Tracy Shouldice — We have Salesforce as our CRM, we use Marketo for marketing, we use Zendesk and Jira for support. We have all these different platforms. Planhat is connecting to those various sources, and down the road I think it's going to be about data integrations and connectivity to and from Planhat that's gonna be key to really enable us.
And then we're talking about AI and predictive modeling. That's something we've got to think about from a CS perspective - how do you get the intelligence on the CS team to interpret and understand the data and what it means. We're looking at using AI to, for example, assess the potential of an existing account; We've been too insular, we look at the contract value and some usage data based on existing usage of that account of our platform. But there are probably tons of external data points that we might want to compliment that data with, to identify, 10 years from now, how big could that customer be - so that we can prioritize our efforts in the field.
“Planhat could tell us what a a high growth potential account looks like based on the data that's on the platform; it helps our account managers, our sales, our tech support people to be more efficient and effective.”
Tracy Shouldice
Director of Customer Success
Trend Micro
Michele Conway-Scro — If someone gets churn, it goes to client success. But everyone is part of that really, because we're working together and we're all representing the same thing.
Tracy Shouldice — How do we transform our business to be truly customer centric and surrounding around the customer? That's an old story. We all know it. Our mantra is that customer success is everyone's business.
Bianca Ker — So much time for my team is spent trying to take a look at all the data that we've aggregated and make sense of it, and then take a next step - whether it's a health score, or trying to figure out why they're not using that part of the platform - do you need to send them a bunch of emails to get on a call to train them?
Just because I've worked in CS for 10 or so years doesn't mean that I know what a healthy customer looks like in terms of usage of a platform. I would love to be at a place where I give you my event level data, I give you my Salesforce, I give you my goals, and you tell me. Customers who have renewed, customers who have churned, customers who have upsold, you have their usage data. You have their NPS, you have their activity.
Tracy Shouldice — We have Salesforce as our CRM, we use Marketo for marketing, we use Zendesk and Jira for support. We have all these different platforms. Planhat is connecting to those various sources, and down the road I think it's going to be about data integrations and connectivity to and from Planhat that's gonna be key to really enable us.
And then we're talking about AI and predictive modeling. That's something we've got to think about from a CS perspective - how do you get the intelligence on the CS team to interpret and understand the data and what it means. We're looking at using AI to, for example, assess the potential of an existing account; We've been too insular, we look at the contract value and some usage data based on existing usage of that account of our platform. But there are probably tons of external data points that we might want to compliment that data with, to identify, 10 years from now, how big could that customer be - so that we can prioritize our efforts in the field.
“Planhat could tell us what a a high growth potential account looks like based on the data that's on the platform; it helps our account managers, our sales, our tech support people to be more efficient and effective.”
Tracy Shouldice
Director of Customer Success
Trend Micro
Tracy Shouldice — If it's a cross sell, maybe they're using security on their endpoints, but there's this huge network security opportunity that we've never talked to them about; When is the right time to have that conversation with that account? What are the predictors of that? What are the little predictor data points that show it's time to engage that account with this conversation, the right time, the right place, the right team? Those are a lot of the technology underpinnings that we're gonna have to be looking at.
Bianca Ker — My team, they have Google alerts on all their clients. They follow their clients on LinkedIn because when they're following up, they've gotta make sure that their messaging is relevant and contextual and helpful: "Hey, I saw you got a promotion, I'd love to talk to you about this". That's time. That's just time. That could be automated, as simple as pulling in a third party data point.
I actually see more of a specialization in vertical and less of a focus on "I've been in CS for 10 years"; I have a friend who just did her master's in public policy and transportation, and she's done consulting. She's never been a CSM. She just got hired by a tech company that's focused on making real estate development and the permitting application process a lot easier to understand. She's a specialist in policy. She's worked in government. She's got no CS background. They tried to hire someone with a CS background, but they didn't know enough about policy. And so I see technology enabling specialists who have no CS background, being able to pick up CS quite quickly because it's tech enabled, but their expertise is in the field.
Tracy Shouldice — If it's a cross sell, maybe they're using security on their endpoints, but there's this huge network security opportunity that we've never talked to them about; When is the right time to have that conversation with that account? What are the predictors of that? What are the little predictor data points that show it's time to engage that account with this conversation, the right time, the right place, the right team? Those are a lot of the technology underpinnings that we're gonna have to be looking at.
Bianca Ker — My team, they have Google alerts on all their clients. They follow their clients on LinkedIn because when they're following up, they've gotta make sure that their messaging is relevant and contextual and helpful: "Hey, I saw you got a promotion, I'd love to talk to you about this". That's time. That's just time. That could be automated, as simple as pulling in a third party data point.
I actually see more of a specialization in vertical and less of a focus on "I've been in CS for 10 years"; I have a friend who just did her master's in public policy and transportation, and she's done consulting. She's never been a CSM. She just got hired by a tech company that's focused on making real estate development and the permitting application process a lot easier to understand. She's a specialist in policy. She's worked in government. She's got no CS background. They tried to hire someone with a CS background, but they didn't know enough about policy. And so I see technology enabling specialists who have no CS background, being able to pick up CS quite quickly because it's tech enabled, but their expertise is in the field.
Tracy Shouldice — If it's a cross sell, maybe they're using security on their endpoints, but there's this huge network security opportunity that we've never talked to them about; When is the right time to have that conversation with that account? What are the predictors of that? What are the little predictor data points that show it's time to engage that account with this conversation, the right time, the right place, the right team? Those are a lot of the technology underpinnings that we're gonna have to be looking at.
Bianca Ker — My team, they have Google alerts on all their clients. They follow their clients on LinkedIn because when they're following up, they've gotta make sure that their messaging is relevant and contextual and helpful: "Hey, I saw you got a promotion, I'd love to talk to you about this". That's time. That's just time. That could be automated, as simple as pulling in a third party data point.
I actually see more of a specialization in vertical and less of a focus on "I've been in CS for 10 years"; I have a friend who just did her master's in public policy and transportation, and she's done consulting. She's never been a CSM. She just got hired by a tech company that's focused on making real estate development and the permitting application process a lot easier to understand. She's a specialist in policy. She's worked in government. She's got no CS background. They tried to hire someone with a CS background, but they didn't know enough about policy. And so I see technology enabling specialists who have no CS background, being able to pick up CS quite quickly because it's tech enabled, but their expertise is in the field.
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