Work-Bench Workshop April 2015

How to Customer Success the Heck out of Them

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Introductions

•  Director of Customer Success at Greenhouse

•  Customer successing in the SaaS space since 2004

•  Previous experience at National Council on Aging and eChalk

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Hi, I’m Jean.

One woman’s journey (mine) leading and growing a customer success team at a startup.

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We’re here to talk about …

•  Quick background on Greenhouse’s approach to customer success

•  Deep dive into the evolution of customer success at Greenhouse, including team structure, tools, and lessons learned

•  Misc. sharing

•  Q&A

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Agenda

•  Greenhouse, as a company, is customer-focused; Customer Success is just the team that specializes in it

•  We have an ambitious – but not ridiculous – goal to get better at providing service and support as we grow

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What we’re trying to do

•  Be helpful

•  Be human

•  Be honest

•  Be humorous

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Our approach

•  2 Strategic Account Managers (1 NYC, 1 SF)

•  5 Account Managers (2 NYC, 3 SF)

•  3 Customer Support Specialists (2 NYC, 1 SF)

•  1 Customer Training Specialist (NYC)

•  1 Manager, Customer Data Operations (NYC)

•  Other customer-facing roles outside of Customer Success:

•  Renewals Manager – Sales (NYC)

•  Solutions Engineer – Engineering (NYC)

•  Customer Marketing Manager – Marketing (SF)

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Current Team Structure

Phase I: Figure it Out

Phase II: Specialize & Scale

Phase III: Work Smarter

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How did we get there?

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Phase I: Figure it Out

•  January 2013 – April 2014

•  0-150 customers

•  2 Account Managers (1 NYC, 1 SF)

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Phase I: Overview

•  Figured out what the onboarding process should look like for our product and our customers

•  Experimented with various tools with the goal of keeping track of customer info, providing robust support to our customers, and starting to build scalable workflows

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Phase I: Summary

Account Managers

•  At Greenhouse, Account Manager role = Product Expert

•  Leverage creativity and mastery of the product to lead customers to solutions that fit their needs

•  Inform product roadmap by advocating internally for customer feature requests while managing expectations for future releases

•  Lead efforts to evangelize Greenhouse as a larger platform for org change

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Phase I: Team Structure

Account Managers were responsible for:

•  Customer onboarding (kick-off, training, data migrations, etc.)

•  Managing support chat and email

•  Engaging directly with engineers to troubleshoot technical issues

•  Sending release notes to customers

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Phase I: Team Structure cont’d

•  join.me

•  Olark

•  Pipedrive è Salesforce

•  Intercom

•  Zendesk

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Phase I: Tools

•  Investing in a support platform with a hosted knowledge base / help center was a really good move

•  Repeated 1:1 training sessions for existing customers is in demand but not scalable

•  No longer possible for Account Managers to also manage support chat and email

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Phase I: Lessons Learned

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Chats Per Day January ‘13 – April ‘14

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Phase II: Specialize & Scale

•  April 2014 – March 2015

•  150-490 customers

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Phase II: Overview

April  –  Dec  2014  •  3  Account  Managers  •  1  Customer  Support  Specialist  

             

Jan  –  March  2015  •  2  Strategic  Account  Managers  •  5  Account  Managers  •  3  Customer  Support  Specialists  •  1  Customer  Training  Specialist  •  1  Manager,  Customer  Data  Ops  •  And  …  

•  Renewals  Manager  •  Solu@ons  Engineer  •  Customer  Marke@ng  Manager  

•  Recognition that certain tasks call for attention and expertise that wouldn’t be scalable for an Account Manager to fully own over time, including basic support, renewals, data migrations, and training beyond onboarding

•  First attempt to use data to understand customer health and stay ahead of churn

•  Begin to align customer need with type of Account Manager

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Phase II: Summary

Customer Support Specialists

•  First point of contact for all support communications across multiple channels to answer questions, provide guidance, troubleshoot and escalate issues, and route product feedback appropriately

Renewals Manager

•  Focused solely on upselling and renewing existing customers

Customer Training Specialist

•  Ramping up training program to deliver 1:many trainings on a regular basis

Manager, Customer Data Ops

•  Works with customers through the data migration process, beginning-to-end

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Phase II: Team Structure

Strategic Account Manager

•  Assigned to work with large, complex customers that require deep engagement, regular check-ins, project plans, etc.

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Phase II: Team Structure Cont’d

•  Bluenose

•  Wootric

•  Confluence

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Phase II: Tools

•  Attributes of best Account Managers

•  Product-oriented

•  Empathetic

•  Creative thinkers, problem solvers

•  Hire Account Managers before you need them

•  A third-party customer success management platform doesn’t make sense for us. We decided to dedicate internal resources to help us use our data to get a status of customer health

•  Customer love talking to each other! Really successful first-ever customer summit. Trying to figure out how to bring customers together on a regular basis

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Phase II: Lessons Learned

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Chats Per Day April ‘14 – March ‘15

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FAQ Views May ’14 – March ‘15

16,687    help  center  views  in  March  2015  

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NPS

•  April 2015 - ?

•  529 customers

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Phase III: Work Smarter

•  Obtain account balance and roll out specialized training and data migration services that will enable Account Managers to focus more on existing customers

•  Use data to target customers for outreach and then use data to gauge success

•  Nail down more concrete metrics

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Phase III: Summary

Onboarding Specialist?

•  In an effort to align customer need with type of Account Manager, we would like to introduce a 3rd type of role that would work with smaller customers who don’t necessarily care to have a dedicated Account Manager. Instead, they can turn to general support after onboarding.

Management

•  Leads on the specialized teams that have grown quite a bit, namely Customer Support and Account Management

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Phase III: Team Structure

•  Home-built tools that compile and analyze our customer data to assess health and risk for churn

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Phase III: Tools

•  TBD

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Phase III: Lessons Learned

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Misc. Sharing

“Thank you for having a chat service with such helpful folks on the other end. Saves me a ton of time”

“Being able to text/IM with you on the spot with an intelligent response is awesome”

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Customers. Love. Chat.

“I'm a current customer of yours and have noticed that your team is exceptional in follow-up and answering questions in general. I've always had a fantastic experience. That being said, I'm heading up the build of our Customer Excellence Team and need to hire ~100 people. I'd love to pick your brain on how you qualify or vet your customer service folks.”

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Not So Humble Brag

•  Phone support?

•  Tiered support?

•  Feature request loop

•  Customer community?

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Things we still need to figure out

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Q&A