“Listen if you want to be heard.”
Long-time UCLA Basketball coach John Wooden’s advice is applicable far beyond the court, and customer success managers know well that listening to customers’ needs empowers each CSM to offer the best support possible.
For the customer success managers at Scorability, listening well means no two conversations are the same — because no two athletic programs have the same needs.
What Scorability Does
Scorability’s platform enables coaches to efficiently identify, engage and recruit athletes to their programs, extending the impact of their recruiting efforts and helping athletes connect with the best programs for them.
“I’m lucky because I get to spend my days supporting and advocating for our customers — the passionate, inspiring coaches using Scorability to recruit athletes to their programs,” VP of Customer Success Catherine Avera told Built In Austin.
In order to best support those coaches, Avera and her team run training sessions to onboard coaches into the product to support athlete discovery and evaluation while staying responsive to customer needs.
“I love these planned, well-organized activities because they allow me to prescriptively support our customers and ensure their success. But I also love the organic, unmapped interactions that occur each day with every phone call, text and email between me and our customers,” she said.
Each of those organic conversations help Avera learn more about how to better equip her team as they move forward.
“As a company, that’s where we find the gold — the answers to the questions we didn’t know to ask,” she said. “It’s in that conversational vulnerability and having the courage to go off-script that we’re able to build an amazing product and create a world-class customer success function.”
Avera shared more with Built In Austin about how the Scorability customer success team continues to support coaches at every level while thriving in their own careers.
How do you stay in the loop with product and customer updates?
Scorability heavily promotes the intersection between customer success and product development, so I’ve been involved in product strategy and the management of our product roadmap since day one. I serve as an advocate for our customers, putting a voice to their needs. All my customer interactions uniquely position me to help our product team identify market opportunities and understand the challenges our coaches face during recruiting.
The customer feedback loop takes center stage at Scorability — our leadership and product teams love hearing customer stories and interactions with our product, so we get together frequently to talk about customer feedback. Everyone gets motivated hearing customer success stories and excited exploring possible improvements to add more functionality and utility to our product.
Are there any organizational principles, words of advice or helpful tools that help you stay on top of things?
We’re humans first in everything we do. Remembering that principle means we set aside the script and open ourselves to meaningful connections with our customers. In over a decade of leading customer success teams, I’ve always seen the same truth, and I live by it:
The people matter most.
We’re so lucky at Scorability to have the opportunity to serve amazing people — not just the college coaches and staff but also the aspiring young athletes who dream of playing college sports.
It’s an inspiring pursuit, and I am grateful to work with a team who shares my passion and believes in what we’re doing. With our strong company alignment around our mission to improve college sports recruiting, I find a ton of support from everyone here. No one works alone on an island, and everyone wants to pitch in and celebrate our successes. That type of shared energy makes all the difference.
