As Funnel rapidly expanded, U.S. Customer Success Manager Maria O’Byrne’s philosophy was to automate as much as possible to best support her team — without sacrificing any of their high-quality client relationships.
After all, O’Byrne knew that customers chose the company for more than just its great marketing technology solutions.
“The ‘service’ part of SaaS is a critical factor as to why customers ultimately decide to purchase from you,” O’Byrne said. “They are investing in a service that’s just as important as the product, and you cannot automate away the human, relationship-building part of your service.”
O’Byrne is one of five Boston-based customer success leaders enthusiastically embracing automated features while carving out essential opportunities for human connection between their skilled team members and clients.
As their businesses quickly grew, leaders repeatedly emphasized the importance of relying on data to make informed decisions and garnering open, honest feedback from customers and employees throughout the process. While excited about the efficiency brought about by digital-led initiatives, the featured leaders still believe that no AI can replace personable relationships between their customer success teams and clients.
Built In connected with these five Boston-based companies to learn more about the wins and challenges they experienced when scaling their teams, and what advice they have for other leaders looking to balance automation with the human touch.
At LeanIX, a provider of software management platforms, customer success managers are supported through automated features such as customer account reminders and workspace usage notifications. When scaling teams, Head of Customer Success Taylor Strachan-Koterba encourages leaders to adopt data-driven mindsets and maintain accurate, updated customer relationship management systems.
What are the most important considerations when scaling your customer success team?
When scaling our customer success program at LeanIX, it is important that we continually ask ourselves with each change: Will this positively impact the customer’s adoption and success with our tools?
The customer success manager is the first point of contact, tasked with partnering with customers through their onboarding and their continuous management of LeanIX products. By connecting with our customers via continuous touchpoints, we drive adoption and enable our power users.
To do so successfully and at scale, we prioritize segmenting our books of business and processes to understand where we should be dedicating one-on-one time, and where we can best utilize a one-to-many approach. The intention here is to adapt to the varying customer needs while utilizing our resources in the most efficient manner. The key consideration is to measure the outcomes of these program changes and to iterate quickly when necessary.
When considering one-to-many offerings, it’s important that we are always altering our offerings to add to the customer experience and that we prioritize meeting the customer where they are.
We prioritize segmenting our books of business and processes to understand where we should be dedicating one-on-one time, and where we can best utilize a one-to-many approach.”
How are you striking the right balance of automation and human touch?
Today, the majority of our automation efforts are targeted internally to aid in efficiently and positively impacting the customer success managers’ daily routines. These automated efforts include: essential customer account reminders, drops in health score warnings and notifications on workspace usage. We utilize these alerts to help guide the customer success manager toward critical focus areas for upcoming touchpoints and influence our strategy to mitigate churn risk.
Excluding the human approach can negatively impact our customer success managers’ abilities to build relationships and could negatively impact the customer experience, so we want to be intentional on how we use automation externally. Currently, our partial automation approach works best; we automate time-consuming internal tasks, freeing up time for our customer success managers to focus on customers.
What are the main challenges you’ve faced as your customer success team has scaled?
All customer success leaders should adopt a data-driven mindset to make decisions based on hard data as opposed to guesswork or intuition. For informed decision-making, we must first battle the challenge of our data quality. It is crucial that customer success managers provide our customer relationship management systems with accurate, up-to-date information that can be paired with product analytics to maximize our access to decisive insights.
We are in the midst of improving our analytics to further guide and refine the conversations we have with our customers based on their use cases. As we scale, our biggest challenge will be to maintain and improve the quality of touchpoints without dramatically increasing the time spent on preparation.
By defining playbooks and automating time-consuming workflows, we will be able to reduce time-to-value for our customers, and increase the impact customer success managers have on our customers’ enterprise architecture maturity and overall success.
Leyton, a tax consultancy firm for companies, centralizes and operationalizes its processes so it can provide a quick, effective customer experience. Still, customer success leaders know the value of human connection and urge team members to send clients personalized emails, chats or calls to check in.
What are the most important considerations when scaling your customer success team?
Some of the most important considerations we look for when scaling our customer success team are being able to centralize and operationalize our processes — how we resolve issues that arise, learn from that and create a better customer experience.
In turn, this helps us provide quick and effective customer service and create trust with the client. It also helps us anticipate customer challenges and questions so that we are able to proactively provide answers and resolutions.
Whether it’s through email, a chat message or phone call, we let the customer know we are here and we care.”
How are you striking the right balance of automation and human touch?
It is important to remember that customers want to be acknowledged and recognized. Though automation is convenient, we cannot lose our human touch.
A simple personalized follow-up goes a long way in the customer relationship-building phase. Whether it’s through email, a chat message or phone call, we let the customer know we are here and we care.
What are the main challenges you’ve faced as your customer success team has scaled?
Some of the main challenges we have faced as our customer success team grows are trying to understand the customers needs and issues and getting them resolutions in a timely manner. When you are working with a platform that is newly created, it can sometimes be difficult to get the customer a solid resolution answer as quickly as they would like.
Immuta, a company that enables secure data access, serves its clients via a combination of human- and digital-led initiatives. Chief Customer Officer Will Rahim suggests rooting customer success efforts in data and deep knowledge of the client journey, which paves the way for offering “wow” experiences.
What are the most important considerations when scaling your customer success team?
Customer success is deeply rooted in data and analytics, so building a data-driven customer success model is paramount. To build a world-class customer success organization, you must start with the foundational elements. At Immuta, this begins with a deep understanding of the customer journey, which allows us to identify the core components of success, as well as opportunities to provide a “wow” experience.
Next, you need to be able to scale these “wow” experiences. To do this, we develop consistent, repeatable playbooks, along with related templates and success roadmaps. We also understand that people are at the heart of that journey, so we hire customer success managers with the right skills and proven track records in enterprise software.
Best practices include: identifying leading and lagging indicators then measuring and improving them with maniacal focus; building customer feedback and action loops; implementing customer success systems for support, training and health monitoring; identifying and leveraging predictive capabilities; and scaling through automation and AI that allows a personal touch and enables live interactions.
Digital-led activities that augment what our CSMs do include sharing information that makes the customer more aware of our products and services.”
How are you striking the right balance of automation and human touch?
As we continue to grow and scale, we are focused on deploying a flexible and customer-centric outreach strategy that combines human- and digital-led tactics. Our customer success managers are listening posts within each of our customer accounts, looking for opportunities to drive meaningful outcomes and expand our footprint. They accomplish this through relationship building, which cultivates trust and capital that enable us to serve as trusted partners for our customers.
But there are digital-led activities that will augment what our customer success managers do. These include sharing knowledge, best practices and easy-to-consume information that make the customer smarter and more aware of our products and services.
What are the main challenges you’ve faced as your customer success team has scaled?
Data continues to be a challenge, everywhere! Determining how and where data is captured, stored and shared cross-functionally can be a demanding challenge.
Oversight, ownership of data and technologies deployed to aggregate data that drives insights are not without obstacles. We are fortunate to have confronted similar challenges early on, so we have been able to build processes to overcome them as we continue to grow. In turn, we can better help customers trust their data and insights, and maximize the full value of their data.
At Funnel, a marketing technology company that helps businesses automate data collection, leaders see automation as an asset that cuts down administrative tasks so that teams are freed up to personalize their approaches to customers’ needs. U.S. Customer Success Manager Maria O’Byrne encourages leaders to make data-informed decisions, be willing to try new initiatives and leverage team feedback.
What are the most important considerations when scaling your customer success team?
The two big questions I ask myself are: What do our clients need? What resources do we have available to address those needs right now?
The needs of your clients should always be the north star of decision-making when it comes to scaling a customer success team. For Funnel, as we grew as a company and our product evolved, we had to take the next step of segmenting our client base and our product offerings. This meant building and training new teams within the customer success organization while continuing to serve our existing clients and onboard new ones.
We had to be scrappy at times and build out processes that worked and got the job done, but weren’t going to be perfect. We’re now in a very different, more mature place as a customer success organization than we were a year and a half ago when we started segmenting. Our teams are larger, their skill sets have developed and our resources have evolved, yet I continuously come back to those two questions as my guiding principles.
The ‘service’ part of SaaS is a critical factor as to why customers ultimately decide to purchase from you.”
How are you striking the right balance of automation and human touch?
My philosophy is to automate what you can in order to best equip your team without sacrificing the relationship you have with your customers. The “service” part of SaaS is a critical factor as to why customers ultimately decide to purchase from you. They are investing in a service that’s just as important as the product, and you cannot automate away the human, relationship-building part of your service.
Ideally, we are leveraging automation to cut down on administrative and information-gathering tasks in order to dedicate as much time as possible to actually working with our clients. We want to efficiently provide that tailored approach for each of them, as opposed to fully automating Funnel’s touchpoints with our clients.
Balancing automation and human touch is something that is never really complete. The needs of your clients change, what you have available in your tech stack can change and you have to be willing to intermittently recalibrate and adjust as you grow.
What are the main challenges you’ve faced as your customer success team has scaled?
Working at a company that’s at the stage that Funnel is at comes with the double-edged sword you get when building and growing. There are endless challenges and things that you try that don’t always work, but on the other side of that, we get to build and shape the present and future of how we serve our clients, while contributing to growth at Funnel.
My advice is to make informed, data-driven decisions when approaching a problem, but don’t take too much time to actually make a decision because you aren’t going to get it 100 percent right the first time no matter which solution you go with. Be willing to commit to trying something. Reassess how it’s going after a certain amount of time, gather feedback and data and make adjustments as needed.
My other piece of advice is to trust your team to give you feedback on new processes or ways of working that you’ve implemented. They are the closest to the clients and the ones who are actually going through the motions and workflows, so if they are saying there is friction or something isn’t working, you probably need to make an adjustment when possible.
Overall, trust the data, trust your people, learn from your failures and celebrate the successes.
Leaders at Lusha, which helps business-to-business salespeople engage with leads and contacts, see career pathing as the key to retaining successful customer success teams. Vice President of Sales Henry Spitzer urges leaders to remember their “why” for joining the company, compare their pay and performance to the larger market and gather open feedback from their teams.
What are the most important considerations when scaling your customer success team?
Some areas we have spent time on recently are career pathing and being transparent about building a future at Lusha. It’s easy to get caught up in dollars and cents; however, in a market like this, it’s not all about money. Of course, having attainable commission plans and realistic goals are important, but don’t overlook career progression as a means toward retention.
Whether through assigning special projects or giving opportunities for the spotlight, offering chances to help employees build their non-sales resumés are a great way to retain and help grow key employees.
An AE or CSM is generally most satisfied when they have achieved a healthy amount of busyness without being overwhelmed.”
How are you striking the right balance of automation and human touch?
Job satisfaction for a sales or customer success representative can be affected by a number of factors. The easy answers revolve around attainment of quota, the size of a commission check and recognition. Career advancement is also a critical factor.
Digging a layer deeper, an account executive or customer success manager is generally most satisfied when they have achieved a healthy amount of busyness without being overwhelmed.
Whether it’s solving problems for the customer at the point of sale or helping to optimize an existing account, companies can help ensure that their sales representatives feel empowered by investing in infrastructure to remove roadblocks. Sometimes, it’s as simple as ensuring that departments are communicating regularly, keeping each other updated and having a clear mutual understanding of the roadmap.
What are the main challenges you’ve faced as your customer success team has scaled?
First, ask yourself: Why should someone work here? Oftentimes, we get mired in what’s not working or what’s not perfect, and we lose sight of why we joined in the first place. Reminding yourself of your “why” is the first step.
Secondly, look at the market. Is your pay appropriately benchmarked? How has your team performed against quota? What is the level of transparency, and how much of the vision is being shared with the team?
Even if you can find the answers yourself, ask the team. You may find that in a large forum, people are hesitant to give direct feedback. Block off some time for office hours and make yourself available. Getting direct feedback is critical not only to creating meaningful change but also to getting a better understanding of the underlying causes of issues.
