Companies who value and proactively cultivate customer happiness reap the rewards.
Eighty-three percent of such companies experience significant revenue growth, a recent Userlane study revealed.
Customer success managers are a critical part of this practice. By staying close to their customer’s day-to-day reality, they are able to be proactive and capitalize on this success rate.
Immersion is key, says Gabriel Fernandez, a senior manager of customer success at HG Insights.
“There is a noticeable difference when you become an extension of your customer’s business and can demonstrate it in client calls,” Fernandez told Built In LA.
There is a noticeable difference when you become an extension of your customer’s business and can demonstrate it in client calls.”
Empathizing with the challenges and goals that shape the customer’s world shifts the bulk of customer success work to proactive anticipation versus reactive problem-solving. More importantly, it helps build authentic and productive partnerships.
“Understanding your customer’s business objectives and removing your personal agenda and solution allows you to better prescribe how to maximize the partnership to achieve company objectives,” Fernandez said.
Built In LA sat down with Fernandez to learn more about his strategies for an immersive, proactive customer success relationship.
HG Insights aims to enable business-to-business technology-focused companies to perfect their go-to-market strategies.
What’s one personal habit you’ve adopted that’s helped you be more proactive as a CSM?
Ingraining myself as much as possible into my customer’s world: I sign up for weekly Google alerts and follow the company on LinkedIn, as well as their executive team and all relevant employees. Before every customer call, I spend time going over these and various other resources to draft up new talking points. This instilled confidence in my customers that their CSM was a genuine partner versus a vendor.
I ingrain myself as much as possible into my customer’s world.”
What role does data play in helping you and your team be more proactive in your approach to customer success?
HG stands for “Holy Grail,” and our company was formerly known as HG Data — so I’d say it plays a major role. We’re actively working with our business intelligence department to create triggers and visuals the CS team can leverage to ensure we’re capitalizing on all opportunities to engage further with our customers and expand our partnerships.
As a team, what’s a system or strategy you’ve put in place to get ahead of potential issues before they arise?
We work with our business intelligence department to create triggers — including those that indicate account risks such as a drop in product usage, detection of a competitor being searched or evaluated, or key information from news articles, 10K reports and so on.
As a larger initiative, we’re always working to enhance our customer 360 score to determine our customer health. Scoring our accounts allows us to ensure that we’re prioritizing the right accounts, at the right time, with the right messaging and resources.
Our product and engineering teams also play a part. As the saying goes: “We eat our own dog food” or “We drink our own champagne” by leveraging our own insights. Examples of this include tracking intent signals across our existing customer base that indicate a growth opportunity being researched or a competitor being evaluated as a potential displacement risk.
By leveraging technographics, we’re able to understand our customer’s tech landscape. This allows us to bring in our solution engineering team to provide guidance and best practices on compiling all the data they have to make it actionable.
