customer success leaders – Success Chain

What is your title and role and how long have you been working in the CS space or similar role?

My name is Shannon Hyson, and I’m the Global Head of Customer Success at a large B2B company in London, England, and I’ve been in the CS space for ten years – even before it was called Customer Success!!

My Customer Success career started when I took a role as Client Services Manager for a media company, and I became immediately aware of the gap between selling the initial solution and waiting for the customer to get in touch if something went wrong. We were missing the critical proactive piece of helping our customers succeed from the start! So I pitched the idea of Customer Success to the company, and they went for it. The journey hasn’t always been smooth, but it’s certainly been exciting!?

“Exploring what an alternative way of doing something might look like and being part of the next step is very exciting.”

What do you like most about being a CS leader?

I love influencing and pushing the Customer Success conversation. There are so many really exciting ways of approaching customer opportunities, and I love being able to challenge thought processes and ways of doing things across our organization and those of our customers to drive better business results. Looking for different ways of delivering customer and company success is very fulfilling.

What does CS success look like for you, your team, your clients, and your organization?

Success is about understanding why a customer would make an investment in your product and then working out what needs to happen to get them to a space where they can say, “Yes, that was a good investment.” To do that, you need to really understand what they are trying to achieve and form a partnership with the different business divisions that will be involved in the success of the product or the evaluation of it. The next crucial part is making sure that by delivering the agreed customer outcomes, you are in turn, making your own organization successful. Hopefully, they go hand in hand, but it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on!

“The right question is more powerful than the right answer.”

What key factors, skills, attributes, and/or characteristics have been particularly helpful to you in enabling your success as a leader in CS?

I really feel that the key attribute for anyone to be successful in Customer Success is curiosity. The right question is so much more powerful than the right answer! It’s a real skill to just listen to a customer and follow up, not with information to soothe, but a question to probe even further.

You can’t apply a solution, whether it be a product or service, if you don’t have a really clear picture of who your customer is and how their business is structured. And that leads to communication! All that listening and questioning needs to lead to a compelling reason to act so the ability to translate your understanding of your customer into a clear plan and outcomes.

“Who is responsible for the renewal?”

Reflecting on this past year, what were some of the business challenges you have experienced in the CS space or are still experiencing, and why do you think that is?

There is still a disconnect between Customer Success and Sales and who “owns” the customer. Who owns the renewal? It’s particularly tricky when creating a CS team in an existing sales environment where traditional views on sales roles are enforced because you can end up with a process that involves the customer being handed across people and roles. It’s not based on the customers’ needs but rather how we are structured internally, and that can be incredibly hard to overcome. Reward also comes into play, and there is always a conversation about who deserves the commission when a customer buys or renews – customer success feels like it’s done all the work, but Sales has negotiated the contract.

What are key areas you focus on to help your clients experience value from software and renew year after year?

It can be tricky – because we are not selling a software solution, the value doesn’t come from what they do online with the product but rather what they do after they use our product and apply the content they have read. We can’t just run a report to demonstrate positive outcome metrics, so we need to ensure that we are constantly in conversation with readers and stakeholders to learn about the value they are gaining from the FT. We then match the usage metrics to the outcomes to show a relationship between behaviors and the business outcomes the customer is trying to achieve.

“Globalization is a big challenge.”

What do you believe is the biggest challenge most organizations face when driving organizational change and getting people to adopt technology? How have you been able to help them??

Globalization is a big challenge. With customers and teams all over the world, we need to be really sensitive to the cultural and technological differences across different teams and adjust our approach. Too often, we use exactly the same communication style and approach regardless of the comfort levels of our internal or external audience, which can lead to several versions of the same message being embedded into processes and systems. We need to apply some customer success discovery to our own way of working!

Were there any surprises this past year (good or not so good) or any lessons learned from your CS efforts this past year?

We have known for a long-time that we had some accounts that were harder to manage than others, so we have stripped out a few accounts that weren’t commercially viable. The surprise in doing this was that it was far easier to get consensus on the change than I had at first expected!

By structuring the team and the accounts that they manage differently, we’ll have the capacity to move the needle on accounts that we haven’t been able to do so before. We did loads of research before making the decision to change our approach, which meant we could include that insight and the expected benefits in a way that made the teams more comfortable with what we were doing and why.

Where do you think the CS industry is headed in the next year or three years? How will it change? What do you see as new challenges in the future??

CS will only grow. I think that getting people to know their customer bases and how they are using the software will become even more important. Customers don’t want me to tell them the value they are getting or not getting. And they don’t want to be told they’re getting value when they’re not. What they want is for me to help them get value out of it. I also think there will be a bit of a mashup with sales and CS going forward in that they won’t be separate functions. We may have sales staff who start in CS rather than start in sales since it is essentially the same thing.

What advice would you give someone who is interested in pursuing a CS career and/or becoming a CS leader?

My advice for someone interested in pursuing a career in CS is to go for it. It is so rewarding and exciting because there is so much you can do with it. You get to speak with such interesting people and have conversations that really matter.

Also, have courage. Don’t be afraid of picking up the phone and calling someone to say, “I just really want to understand what you are doing with it.” Don’t undersell yourself and think that customers won’t see the value from the conversation. And don’t be afraid to ask the question or step on someone else’s toes. The meek will NOT inherit the customer success word.

Customer Success (CS) is an exciting field and while still a very young and rapidly evolving discipline, some initial trends are starting to emerge. One of the most exciting and compelling trends is that many strong and talented women business leaders are boldly breaking new ground in the CS space.

These Customer Success women leaders are doing an amazing job of quickly inventing new ways of working along with creating entire CS teams and departments within their organizations. At Success Chain we have been honored to work with great women CS leaders who possess the skill, vision, adaptability and business acumen that is shaping the field and future leaders. We want to celebrate their incredible accomplishments and share their terrific advice for overcoming a variety of tough challenges in the Customer Success space.

We hope you will join us each month as we interview and showcase a successful CS leader with our top 10 questions aimed at exploring her unique insights and experiences. I

This month we are excited to showcase Jessica Donnelly, who is a Director of Customer Success at a global corporation based in the Washington DC area.

1. What is your title and role and how long have you been working in the Customer Success (CS) space or similar role?

My name is Jessica Donnelly and I’m the Director of CS at a global corporation based in the Washington DC area. I’ve been in this role since June 2016. Prior to this role, I was in the consulting world for 16 years primarily focused on business process improvement, project management, customer relationship management, business development and risk management.

2. What do you like most about being a CS leader?

What I like best about being a Customer Success leader is that there is so much potential to drive lasting, significant change throughout an organization. The CS role has quite an impact on presenting and sustaining value for our customers.

3. What does CS success look like for you, your team, your clients and your organization?

For me, in my role as Director of Customer Success, success looks like the ability to obtain 100% buy-in and advocacy from the executive leadership team. For my CS team, success is the feeling of being valued by their peers and seeing our customers achieve their goals. For our clients, success is realizing the full value of their investment in our products. For our organization, success is functioning in a customer-centric approach that drives the overall strategy, product, and tool investments as well as collaborating cross-functionally to execute our end-to-end processes starting with sales through sustainability.?

“My consulting skills have also been incredibly helpful”

4. What key factors, skills, attributes and/or characteristics have been particularly helpful to you in enabling your success as a leader in CS?

The ability to apply organizational change management principles while communicating internally within the organization and externally with customers has been extremely important. Also, thinking strategically, being proactive and adaptable, and having the softer skills such as being empathetic to our customers. Having business acumen such as familiarity with return on investment, what value really means and how to provide support to achieve business outcomes. My consulting skills have also been incredibly helpful such as listening and observing, being confident to think on my feet with customers, and providing recommendations with tangible results that can be tracked and monitored.

5. Reflecting back on 2017, what were some of the business challenges you experienced in the CS space or are still experiencing and why do you think that is?

One of the toughest business challenges has been the inability to change beliefs about the Customer Success role. For example, we have engrained processes and ways of doing things that are hard to change such as too many customer touch points, which creates an inconsistent customer experience. It’s hard to reeducate and change beliefs when CS is not a tangible output. The right tools and data are needed to help people gain insights and see the value in CS. But the reality is, change is hard. It’s a journey, not a sprint. Changing beliefs about the CS role really needs to start at the top of the organization with CS champions who can help internal stakeholders understand what CS is and isn’t.

6. What are the key areas you focus on to help your clients experience value from software and renew year after year?

Our CS role is business and people focused, not technology focused. To help our clients experience value from our software we have five key focus areas.

1. Our Customer Success team tries hard to get introduced to the client early on and work with them long before Go Live to drive adoption.?

2. We focus on identifying what success looks like for our customers and set realistic goals based on the best practices we share with them.

3. We focus on how they are preparing their users for what’s coming. We help our customers with awareness campaigns and ask pointed questions to help identify potential barriers to adoption such as, do you have authority to make the changes needed?” What is the level of attention and priority of the project?, and What level of preparation and communication with users has been done to facilitate overall readiness for what you’ve purchased?

4. After Go live, we focus on overall adoption, metrics and achievement of goals. We also make a point to capture customer feedback and share it with our internal teams so we can make changes as needed based on feedback from the user community.

5. We work with our clients to develop a roadmap for sustainability. Our adoption check-ins wind down once our clients feel empowered to own adoption and reach out to us for support as needed.

“We try to highlight how important it is that the sponsors are active and empowered to drive change.”

7. What do you believe is the biggest challenge most organizations face when driving organizational change and getting people to adopt technology? How have you been able to help them?

One of the biggest challenges we face is the lack of strong sponsorship and business stakeholder commitment. We try to highlight how important it is that the sponsors are active and empowered to drive change. We ask questions to help them assess and realize that they may not have the right person in the role such as someone who is more focused on technology and Go Live than business outcomes and people. Unfortunately, sometimes we just have to work with the person they identify and be the champion our customers need.

“we need enterprise alignment on the role of Customer Success and it needs to be clear”

8. Were there any surprises this past year (good or not so good) or any lessons learned from your CS efforts this past year?

One of the lessons learned this past year is we need enterprise alignment on the role of CS and it needs to be clear how it impacts each department and individual job responsibilities to avoid confusion and stepping on each other’s toes. It’s a journey and we need to bring everyone along for the ride. We can’t make good decisions in siloes. Full transparency is a must. We’ve also learned that it’s extremely important to assess our CS maturity level and have an action plan in place with parameters to strive for rather than try to tackle it all at once.

Since we can’t do everything all at once, we focused on the overall customer experience and implemented process improvements that directly impact our customers and their perspectives. As a result, we were able provide value for our customers while we socialized within our organization the value CS brings for our customers and our organization.

9. Where do you think the CS industry is headed in the next year or 3 years? How will it change? What do you see as new challenges in the future?

I believe Customer Success is going to take ownership of all customer revenue renewal expansions and upsells. It won’t be sales. There will be more chief customer officer roles running the overall customer journey more holistically. CS should not be buried in operations or sales because CS needs to ensure that the organization is consistently delivering a holistic approach. CS leaders need to have a seat at the table and have their voices heard. As organizations start embracing this role, the demand for qualified CS Managers will significantly increase. The role will be indispensable. It will no longer be an option. Organizations will need to rethink their whole customer experience strategy and evaluate what changes need to be made such as how to leverage data depending on the maturity level of the organization and how to use that data in the best way for customers.

10. What advice would you give someone who is interested in pursuing a CS career and/or becoming a CS leader?

My advice for someone interested in pursuing a career in CS is go for it. I believe the next generation of great leaders could ultimately emerge from CS because there are so many leadership skills that you use while performing this role. For example, you have to inspire audacious goals and keep people inspired. Great leaders inspire, they don’t make you do it. We can’t control what our customers do, but we can guide them.

“And if we do it right, the results can be outstanding.“