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In a series of interviews, Director of Customer Success at 8,000-employee cyber security software company, Trend Micro, shares how Planhat has impacted on the business.
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In a series of interviews, Director of Customer Success at 8,000-employee cyber security software company, Trend Micro, shares how Planhat has impacted on the business.
Share
In a series of interviews, Director of Customer Success at 8,000-employee cyber security software company, Trend Micro, shares how Planhat has impacted on the business.
Keeping the world safe
Tracy Shouldice — Trend is a multinational company. We are all over the world. We book about two billion a year in revenue, almost 8,000 employees. We're truly multinational. We're all over the world, not just in terms of sales offices, but we actually have all of our functions in the company, very distributed globally.
We're an internet security vendor, meaning we keep the bad guys off of your networks, off of your computers and your mobile phones. So our job is to stay ahead of the bad guys.
Our customers range from very large enterprises down to small businesses. We have a really broad customer base, about 30,000 enterprise customers and about 400,000 SMB customers globally, and we also actually have a large consumer business as well around the world.
“Our job is to stay ahead of the bad guys.”
Tracy Shouldice
Director of Customer Success
Trend Micro
Keeping the world safe
Tracy Shouldice — Trend is a multinational company. We are all over the world. We book about two billion a year in revenue, almost 8,000 employees. We're truly multinational. We're all over the world, not just in terms of sales offices, but we actually have all of our functions in the company, very distributed globally.
We're an internet security vendor, meaning we keep the bad guys off of your networks, off of your computers and your mobile phones. So our job is to stay ahead of the bad guys.
Our customers range from very large enterprises down to small businesses. We have a really broad customer base, about 30,000 enterprise customers and about 400,000 SMB customers globally, and we also actually have a large consumer business as well around the world.
“Our job is to stay ahead of the bad guys.”
Tracy Shouldice
Director of Customer Success
Trend Micro
Keeping the world safe
Tracy Shouldice — Trend is a multinational company. We are all over the world. We book about two billion a year in revenue, almost 8,000 employees. We're truly multinational. We're all over the world, not just in terms of sales offices, but we actually have all of our functions in the company, very distributed globally.
We're an internet security vendor, meaning we keep the bad guys off of your networks, off of your computers and your mobile phones. So our job is to stay ahead of the bad guys.
Our customers range from very large enterprises down to small businesses. We have a really broad customer base, about 30,000 enterprise customers and about 400,000 SMB customers globally, and we also actually have a large consumer business as well around the world.
“Our job is to stay ahead of the bad guys.”
Tracy Shouldice
Director of Customer Success
Trend Micro
Start well, stay healthy
The genesis of our CS function at Trend was driven primarily by retention. So we had a challenge a few years ago where we were noticing we were losing more customers in our commercial business than we wanted.
How do you turn that around and get customers to stay with us longer? Ultimately, that leads to growth with that customer base. If you serve your customers well after the sale, they're eventually going to want to work with you more, buy more, cross-sell, upsell. Eventually they'll advocate for you and speak well.
So that was the driver behind the CS program and for the last couple of years, our primary focus has been on onboarding new customers or existing customers who are purchasing a new product, helping them get off the ground in the first 30, 60, 90 days. So that they're adopting the product using it well—healthfully, which ultimately leads to renewal and growth.
“We had a challenge a few years ago where we were noticing we were losing more customers in our commercial business than we wanted.”
Tracy Shouldice
Director of Customer Success
Trend Micro
Start well, stay healthy
The genesis of our CS function at Trend was driven primarily by retention. So we had a challenge a few years ago where we were noticing we were losing more customers in our commercial business than we wanted.
How do you turn that around and get customers to stay with us longer? Ultimately, that leads to growth with that customer base. If you serve your customers well after the sale, they're eventually going to want to work with you more, buy more, cross-sell, upsell. Eventually they'll advocate for you and speak well.
So that was the driver behind the CS program and for the last couple of years, our primary focus has been on onboarding new customers or existing customers who are purchasing a new product, helping them get off the ground in the first 30, 60, 90 days. So that they're adopting the product using it well—healthfully, which ultimately leads to renewal and growth.
“We had a challenge a few years ago where we were noticing we were losing more customers in our commercial business than we wanted.”
Tracy Shouldice
Director of Customer Success
Trend Micro
Start well, stay healthy
The genesis of our CS function at Trend was driven primarily by retention. So we had a challenge a few years ago where we were noticing we were losing more customers in our commercial business than we wanted.
How do you turn that around and get customers to stay with us longer? Ultimately, that leads to growth with that customer base. If you serve your customers well after the sale, they're eventually going to want to work with you more, buy more, cross-sell, upsell. Eventually they'll advocate for you and speak well.
So that was the driver behind the CS program and for the last couple of years, our primary focus has been on onboarding new customers or existing customers who are purchasing a new product, helping them get off the ground in the first 30, 60, 90 days. So that they're adopting the product using it well—healthfully, which ultimately leads to renewal and growth.
“We had a challenge a few years ago where we were noticing we were losing more customers in our commercial business than we wanted.”
Tracy Shouldice
Director of Customer Success
Trend Micro
CS as a growth-driver
We're offering customers a platform that they can start with a very narrow slice of, and then over time expand their use of the capabilities left and right, right? So they might start off protecting endpoints—computers—but eventually want to deploy security on the network side.
So now we're starting to look at CS as a driver of growth because the CSMs, the customer success managers who work with the customers every day, they're going to know what's going on in that account and when it's time to have that next conversation about growth.
So they have to then partner though with the account teams who do that commercial growth business, right? So CS is identifying the opportunity and then partnering with the field to execute on that.
“Now we're starting to look at CS as a driver of growth.”
Tracy Shouldice
Director of Customer Success
Trend Micro
CS as a growth-driver
We're offering customers a platform that they can start with a very narrow slice of, and then over time expand their use of the capabilities left and right, right? So they might start off protecting endpoints—computers—but eventually want to deploy security on the network side.
So now we're starting to look at CS as a driver of growth because the CSMs, the customer success managers who work with the customers every day, they're going to know what's going on in that account and when it's time to have that next conversation about growth.
So they have to then partner though with the account teams who do that commercial growth business, right? So CS is identifying the opportunity and then partnering with the field to execute on that.
“Now we're starting to look at CS as a driver of growth.”
Tracy Shouldice
Director of Customer Success
Trend Micro
CS as a growth-driver
We're offering customers a platform that they can start with a very narrow slice of, and then over time expand their use of the capabilities left and right, right? So they might start off protecting endpoints—computers—but eventually want to deploy security on the network side.
So now we're starting to look at CS as a driver of growth because the CSMs, the customer success managers who work with the customers every day, they're going to know what's going on in that account and when it's time to have that next conversation about growth.
So they have to then partner though with the account teams who do that commercial growth business, right? So CS is identifying the opportunity and then partnering with the field to execute on that.
“Now we're starting to look at CS as a driver of growth.”
Tracy Shouldice
Director of Customer Success
Trend Micro
A fast track to impact
Each of our four regions has its own self-contained tech support team, marketing team, sales team, et cetera, et cetera, and they like to kind of be self-dependent and run their own operations.
We're starting to get to a point where firstly, playbooks can be triggered automatically. That's huge. So instead of a CSM having to hunt and peck in Salesforce to try to figure out through many screens and tables, which customers need help, Planhat will automatically create a list of tasks for them.
Like these are the four accounts that you have to onboard this week. Make it very prescriptive. That's one thing. The other thing is we're noticing with our CSMs, they're actually really adopting it and they like the fact that they can build relationships with customers and use Planhat as the way to structure the engagement.
I'll give you a good example. We're using Planhat to reach out to new customers to onboard. A few weeks ago, we decided to create a webinar series, so a one-to-many way of getting customers that have the new product but haven't yet onboarded, get them onto a one hour call with a subject matter expert who will then explain how to get the product launched and configured and all of that.
“They like the fact that they can build relationships with customers and use Planhat as the way to structure the engagement.”
Tracy Shouldice
Director of Customer Success
Trend Micro
A fast track to impact
Each of our four regions has its own self-contained tech support team, marketing team, sales team, et cetera, et cetera, and they like to kind of be self-dependent and run their own operations.
We're starting to get to a point where firstly, playbooks can be triggered automatically. That's huge. So instead of a CSM having to hunt and peck in Salesforce to try to figure out through many screens and tables, which customers need help, Planhat will automatically create a list of tasks for them.
Like these are the four accounts that you have to onboard this week. Make it very prescriptive. That's one thing. The other thing is we're noticing with our CSMs, they're actually really adopting it and they like the fact that they can build relationships with customers and use Planhat as the way to structure the engagement.
I'll give you a good example. We're using Planhat to reach out to new customers to onboard. A few weeks ago, we decided to create a webinar series, so a one-to-many way of getting customers that have the new product but haven't yet onboarded, get them onto a one hour call with a subject matter expert who will then explain how to get the product launched and configured and all of that.
“They like the fact that they can build relationships with customers and use Planhat as the way to structure the engagement.”
Tracy Shouldice
Director of Customer Success
Trend Micro
A fast track to impact
Each of our four regions has its own self-contained tech support team, marketing team, sales team, et cetera, et cetera, and they like to kind of be self-dependent and run their own operations.
We're starting to get to a point where firstly, playbooks can be triggered automatically. That's huge. So instead of a CSM having to hunt and peck in Salesforce to try to figure out through many screens and tables, which customers need help, Planhat will automatically create a list of tasks for them.
Like these are the four accounts that you have to onboard this week. Make it very prescriptive. That's one thing. The other thing is we're noticing with our CSMs, they're actually really adopting it and they like the fact that they can build relationships with customers and use Planhat as the way to structure the engagement.
I'll give you a good example. We're using Planhat to reach out to new customers to onboard. A few weeks ago, we decided to create a webinar series, so a one-to-many way of getting customers that have the new product but haven't yet onboarded, get them onto a one hour call with a subject matter expert who will then explain how to get the product launched and configured and all of that.
“They like the fact that they can build relationships with customers and use Planhat as the way to structure the engagement.”
Tracy Shouldice
Director of Customer Success
Trend Micro
The benefit of better relationships
We found that because the CSMs now are able to build good relationships with those customers, when we invite customers via email to that webinar, the open rate on those emails because they're coming from the CSM, are thirty eight percent, whereas a typical marketing email that would invite the customer to the same event would have a one to two percent open rate.
So clearly it's having an effect on how our customers are seeing the customer success function and the relationship that they're starting to build with those CSMs. So from the customer in, we're noticing an impact as well.
But I'm really excited by the fact that Planhat is thinking beyond customer success to customer management because that's a much bigger thing. It involves many more stakeholders, and because we're in a large company, we're talking hundreds to thousands of new people that will be interested in Planhat, which is great.
What I'm hoping to get out of this, the biggest takeaway for me will be how are you going to go about doing that and how can we get on board and partner with you toward that shared vision of CS or customer management being everybody's business in the company?
“I'm really excited by the fact that Planhat is thinking beyond customer success to customer management.”
Tracy Shouldice
Director of Customer Success
Trend Micro
The benefit of better relationships
We found that because the CSMs now are able to build good relationships with those customers, when we invite customers via email to that webinar, the open rate on those emails because they're coming from the CSM, are thirty eight percent, whereas a typical marketing email that would invite the customer to the same event would have a one to two percent open rate.
So clearly it's having an effect on how our customers are seeing the customer success function and the relationship that they're starting to build with those CSMs. So from the customer in, we're noticing an impact as well.
But I'm really excited by the fact that Planhat is thinking beyond customer success to customer management because that's a much bigger thing. It involves many more stakeholders, and because we're in a large company, we're talking hundreds to thousands of new people that will be interested in Planhat, which is great.
What I'm hoping to get out of this, the biggest takeaway for me will be how are you going to go about doing that and how can we get on board and partner with you toward that shared vision of CS or customer management being everybody's business in the company?
“I'm really excited by the fact that Planhat is thinking beyond customer success to customer management.”
Tracy Shouldice
Director of Customer Success
Trend Micro
The benefit of better relationships
We found that because the CSMs now are able to build good relationships with those customers, when we invite customers via email to that webinar, the open rate on those emails because they're coming from the CSM, are thirty eight percent, whereas a typical marketing email that would invite the customer to the same event would have a one to two percent open rate.
So clearly it's having an effect on how our customers are seeing the customer success function and the relationship that they're starting to build with those CSMs. So from the customer in, we're noticing an impact as well.
But I'm really excited by the fact that Planhat is thinking beyond customer success to customer management because that's a much bigger thing. It involves many more stakeholders, and because we're in a large company, we're talking hundreds to thousands of new people that will be interested in Planhat, which is great.
What I'm hoping to get out of this, the biggest takeaway for me will be how are you going to go about doing that and how can we get on board and partner with you toward that shared vision of CS or customer management being everybody's business in the company?
“I'm really excited by the fact that Planhat is thinking beyond customer success to customer management.”
Tracy Shouldice
Director of Customer Success
Trend Micro
Trend Micro
Trend Micro
Trend Micro
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