How can you invest in customer success to improve adoption, expansion, retention, and customer satisfaction? And how do you do so while still boosting revenue?
These were some of the questions and considerations explored at TSIA’s 2nd annual COFFIE event, the Chief Customer Officer (CCO) Forum for Innovation and Efficiency, on June 7, 2023. This event, led by TSIA’s Customer Success Research Team, allows customer success leaders to connect with peers to share insights and best practices and to create a dialogue around innovation and efficiencies within customer success.
Attendees started this event with introductions and shared their #1 business challenge, which was met with empathetic nods and knowing smiles. This forum allows us to foster community in the customer success space, working to address the top challenges CCOs are facing to find potential solutions. These discussions explored scaling customer success, monetization, leveraging partners, offers, and more. Participants were encouraged to join our Customer Success Research Journey in which we explore monetizing customer success–fostering yet another way to ensure that we work together with our community to develop findings that benefit the customer success community at large.
In case you missed the event, this blog will explore the key takeaways from this forum discussion and the accompanying presentations, as well as details on how to attend our next COFFIE Talk event.
Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: Aligning Partners, Education, Support, Customer Success, and the Customer
During our forum event, Mark Sims, Chief Customer Officer at OneStream, shared valuable insights on ensuring alignment in customer success and the tools used to achieve this goal. Sims presented OneStream's platform capabilities and their challenges in aligning various elements for customer success.
Sims emphasized the importance of corporate performance management (CPM) and empowering finance operations. OneStream's platform incorporates an AI engine to facilitate scalable processes, ensuring organizations have a powerful and efficient CPM solution.
In discussing OneStream’s challenges and successes, Sims’ presentation covered their goal to align partners, education, support, customer success, and the customer, or an “everything, everywhere, all at once” approach. This reflects their commitment to topics that many customer success organizations can benefit from, such as:
- The partner ecosystem and marketplace: OneStream has a robust partner ecosystem with over 280 ecosystem partners and 200 limitation partners. These partners extend OneStream’s platform capabilities and offer industry-specific expertise. OneStream also provides an open marketplace for partners to create and share tools, enhancing the platform's functionality and enabling tailored solutions for various organizations.
- Addressing implementation challenges and customer success: Sims discussed OneStream’s approach for implementations and road mapping, allowing organizations to prioritize their financial needs. Sims acknowledged the challenge of aligning implementation partners, the OneStream services team, education, and support while ensuring customer satisfaction. OneStream heavily relies on its partner network for successful deployments, making partner enablement and education crucial.
- Creating lifelong customers through transformation: Sims explored how OneStream works to create lifelong customers by expanding its use cases and platforms, facilitating continuous growth and transformation. Their true platform solution differentiates them from the industry corporate performance management norms. Achieving a transformational approach requires alignment with partners at different levels. It also requires addressing customer adoption and understanding through ongoing education and alignment efforts, as well as breaking the lift-and-shift mentality.
- Solving challenges with a customer-centric journey map: To address complexities, OneStream has developed a customer-centric journey map. This map guides OneStream’s interactions from initial curiosity to implementation, renewals, and expanded use cases. Sims emphasizes that the entire organization is part of the “office of the customer,” ensuring a consistent focus on customer needs and experiences across departments.
- Driving a proactive and customer-centered approach: OneStream aims to build customers who are fully satisfied and eager to serve as references. OneStream’s mission is to make every customer referenceable, and they maintain a comprehensive document listing customers and their contact information. This proactive approach reinforces customer satisfaction and provides a valuable resource for prospective customers to connect with existing ones.
By aligning partners, education, support, customer success, and the customer, OneStream maximizes customer satisfaction and facilitates continuous growth and transformation. Their customer-centric approach and focus on a strong partner ecosystem contribute to their success in the corporate performance management market.
Aligning Microsegmentation Strategies with a Purposeful Customer Success Portfolio
This theme of alignment continued with a presentation from Eduarda Camacho, the Chief Customer Officer at BMC. BMC, an IT infrastructure software company, successfully aligned its micro-segmentation strategies with a purposeful customer success portfolio. With a focus on driving growth, strategic partnerships, and enhancing customer experiences, BMC undertook a data-driven approach to overcome the challenges of managing hybrid portfolios, varying account maturity levels, and limited customer success investment capacity.
Here are some of the key strategies and insights Camacho covered in this presentation:
- Segmentation based on customer behavior: To streamline their approach, BMC analyzed historical customer behavior, allowing them to identify patterns and create segments that extended beyond the traditional metrics of account size and annual recurring revenue (ARR). They considered additional factors such as product lines owned, pipeline opportunities, adoption maturity, and growth potential. By doing so, BMC could effectively categorize customers into different tiers or buckets, each with a tailored coverage and investment strategy.
- The benefits of alignment: The alignment of BMC's organization around this segmentation strategy yielded numerous benefits. It established a common language and clear investment policy, simplifying the sales team's ability to position BMC's investments and monetize customer success. The central hub of BMC's organization, Success Central, played a vital role in aligning programs to microsegments, ensuring consistent implementation across the company.
- Consolidated offering strategy: BMC consolidated its diverse services and offerings into three comprehensive success subscriptions: starter, enhance, and advanced. These subscriptions combined various elements such as support, professional services, education, and value-added services. The aim was to provide a fit-for-purpose portfolio that catered to the unique needs of each microsegment.
- Effective implementation and adaptation: Regular revisions of the segmentation strategy were conducted to stay in tune with evolving customer needs and opportunities. BMC differentiated between proactive customer success management and reactive support, investing in tech touch or digital touch approaches for specific segments. This approach ensured that resources were allocated strategically and in line with customer outcomes.
BMC’s success in aligning its micro-segmentation strategies with a purposeful customer success portfolio demonstrates the power of data-driven decision-making and targeted resource allocation. By analyzing customer behavior, creating tailored segments, and consolidating offerings, BMC achieved greater clarity, scalability, and effectiveness in its customer success initiatives. This approach empowered BMC to drive adoption, expansion, and revenue growth while delivering exceptional customer experiences.
Fostering Community for Customer Success Leaders
As the event concluded, the COFFIE Talk provided an opportunity for customer success leaders to discuss their challenges, pain points, and success strategies, showcasing the immense value of the customer success community.
Investing in customer success is essential for improving adoption, expansion, retention, customer satisfaction, and driving revenue growth. By embracing the lessons learned at TSIA’s COFFIE event and leveraging the insights from leaders like OneStream and BMC, organizations can unlock the power of customer success and embark on a transformative path of success. Together, we can foster a community that thrives on communication, collaboration, and continuous improvement in pursuing exceptional customer experiences.