If reacting to someone’s needs is the mark of a good relationship, proactively anticipating and addressing them is the mark of a great one.
For customer success managers, a proactive approach can be the difference between putting out fires all day and having time to nurture and grow valuable accounts.
Much of this strategy comes down to putting in additional time up front to prevent headaches later on: comprehensive onboarding can avert frustration down the road, regular check-ins can nip problems in the bud and learning the ins and outs of a customer’s business can set both teams up for better communication.
Moving from a reactive approach to a proactive one can be challenging, though. After all, urgent issues will still crop up and demand a CSM’s attention. But if a good relationship based on proactivity has been established, these escalations can be handled with ease.
“Having a good rapport with your customers allows you both to know there is positive intent when communicating,” said Shane Weekes, senior manager of strategic programs and customer success at Hypori.
As an enterprise mobile security company, Hypori specializes in protecting sensitive employee and organizational data for global corporations and federal agencies. Its CSMs are an integral part of this process, helping to ensure customers’ unique and complex needs are met at every step.
By tailoring its approach to each problem, analyzing customer behavior and feedback and keeping lines of communication open, its customer success team can maintain thriving relationships. Here, Weekes tells Built In Austin about the strategies putting the team ahead of the game.
Hypori develops mobile security and privacy solutions for corporations and federal agencies.
What’s one personal habit you’ve adopted that’s helped you be more proactive as a CSM?
As a Hypori CSM, it’s important for me to have strong communication skills and to proactively build a relationship with the customer. Whether the conversation is about good or challenging issues on their program or project, I am transparent and genuine.
You could see this in action when a new customer experienced their first service disruption. The customer’s project management office was immediately notified via email and phone with all available information. They knew we were there to help. Once resolved, another round of emails and calls were sent detailing the issue and required resolution.
Having a strong, trust-based relationship with this customer allowed these communications to be quick and productive without any missteps, and they appreciated our transparency and partnership.
What role does data play in helping you and your team be more proactive in your approach to customer success?
As a Hypori CSM, data is always important, whether it be daily enrollment numbers, operations tickets or customer satisfaction surveys. Every data point tells the story of your customer and how successful they are with your product. Using these different data points, you can see how well your customer is adopting your product as well as any issues they may be having.
As a Hypori CSM, data is always important. Every data point tells the story of how successful your customer is with your product.”
Recently, we proactively conducted a customer satisfaction survey on a large customer base and found that, while they liked our product and it met their requirements, they wanted additional capabilities. Our team took the feedback to our product team to see where in our roadmap these customer-specific requests could be addressed. We then used the roadmap and survey results to create a one-page summary to demonstrate that we heard the customer’s issues and show how we planned to address them.
We provided the survey results to the customer and individual survey participants (end users). Both were thrilled with the summary report because it showed we were actively listening and responding to their unique challenges. We have seen enrollment numbers increase since the survey results were published.
As a team, what’s a system or strategy you’ve put in place to get ahead of potential issues before they arise? What other teams, if any, help support this strategy?
A strategy that we have at Hypori to get ahead of any customer issues is individual customer success plans. Within each customer’s plan we work together with the customer to identify their definition of success, current and future requirements, key challenges, milestone dates and measurements (metrics) of success. Having the customer as a key part of the success planning process demonstrates our commitment to their success and creates consensus on how we will achieve it together. Once the plan is finalized, all Hypori stakeholders/teams meet to review the customer’s milestones and what is needed to ensure they will be successful.
