Alice is a seasoned Customer Success Leader with over a decade of experience in Martech, AI, Big Data, SaaS, e-commerce, and Fintech. She excels in leveraging AI to enhance customer experiences and leads a team of Customer Success Managers.
Passionate about driving collaboration across departments, Alice proactively ensures customer retention and satisfaction by building executive-level relationships and supporting customers throughout their post sales journey.
Here’s Alice sharing her perspectives on customer success, snippets of her journey, and valuable insights for CS professionals.
Customer success is when the product is fully adopted and utilized the right way. I've seen many customers who don't understand the true value of the product they're buying and try to customize it.
As a result, the product doesn’t meet customer expectations, leading to frustration and complaints, and the manipulation causes stress on the (internal) product team.
As a CSM, you need to get familiar with customers' use cases, especially during the first product training, and tailor the training accordingly. This ensures the product is utilized correctly and avoids frustration later on.
Engaging in customers' business activities while maintaining day-to-day operations.
Balancing high-level business vision with day to day operational (but also important) tasks can be challenging. Setting up a clear account plan to get customer buy-in early on is the key to getting everyone on the same page.
This helps us agree on priorities, allowing customers to focus on business strategies, growth, and ROI while using support tools for day-to-day activities and ticket status.
We use Gainsight, Google Docs, and Google Sheets to update renewal dates, ARR concerns, weekly sentiment, etc. It's somewhat manual. We also need to create decks for business reviews. Even with a standard template, you still need new screenshots and updated numbers – pulling content from various sources takes hours.
I would like to focus more of my time on strategy, action plans, and recommendations instead of spending hours gathering data and updating slides.
Focus on understanding each customer's business, their trends, needs, and tie those back to the product to provide real value.
In CSM calls and business reviews, always address the customer's specific goals to build trust and credibility. If your content could apply to multiple customers, then it might be too generic and missing “unique value”.
I make sure to stay current on product knowledge, vision, and roadmaps. Staying connected with our product team helps me relay the latest updates to our customers and keep them excited.
A shoe retailer I was working with needed to align the release date of their special edition shoes. They needed to hide the products until the release date and ensure they are ranked at the top of search results. The customer had to manage such behavior manually on the early morning of each release date which was painful. To address this pain point, I connected them with our product team to design a feature that hides products until release date and ranks them higher in search results.
This feature is now adopted by other retailers, saving them time and improving their search result accuracy.
We use Gainsight and ServiceNow. We also use Google Docs and other tools to record customer activity. I like Gainsight because everyone in the company – including our renewal managers and AEs– has access to it. You can tag people and send alerts, so everyone can manage and see the status. However, it still involves manual work and lacks customization for certain reports or fields.
We use Microsoft Copilot, integrated with Outlook and Teams. I find it helpful for summarizing emails when I return from vacation, taking meeting notes, and drafting recap emails. I see myself adopting it even more as it continues to add value.
