The Three Key Best Practices Required to Deliver Repeatable and Remarkable Customer Experiences
The latest episode of Kantata’s Professional Services Pursuit Podcast, hosted by Banoo Behboodi, features Gainsight’s Senior Vice President of Professional Services and Upgrades, Peter Wride.
The episode is part two in our series of conversations with Peter, and goes into further detail on best practices the Gainsight team uses to stay hyper-focused on delivering remarkable and repeatable customer experiences. If you missed the first part of the series, read the transcript or listen to the entire episode here. In part two of the discussion, Peter and Banoo go into more detail about the structure of the Gainsight team, their goals, the tools they use, and how they manage and adapt their processes to deliver consistently great customer experiences.
The blog below focuses on three of the many best practices used by the Gainsight team to ensure exceptional and repeatable customer experiences. To hear about the other best practices covered in the discussion, listen to the entire episode or read the transcript here.
Three Key Best Practices To Drive Customer Success Consistently, According to Peter Wride:
1. Rely on Repeatable Processes Instead of Heroes for Customer Success
One common customer success myth discussed by Peter and Banoo is that true customer success requires having a hero at the forefront. In other words, a great customer experience requires a customer success manager that is completely dedicated to the customer and willing to go above and beyond to ensure their success and satisfaction.
Peter explains that this is simply not sustainable as an organization grows: “The customer experience is completely predicated on this jack-of-all-trades person assigned to the project… But as you start to mature, you start putting together some of the processes and you start putting some rigor around it.” Peter’s extensive experience in customer success has shown him that relying on the hero CSM is not scalable. For an organization to grow without sacrificing customer satisfaction, it must document the best practices, processes, and methodologies so not only the most heroic CSMs can deliver remarkable customer experiences. According to Peter, “documenting processes allows other CSMs to understand when they need to follow the methodology, when they need to keep inside the lines, but also ideally, when they can step out of them. Knowing this allows them to step out of them in a way that creates these moments and incredible experiences that the customer’s going to remember…The goal is always to put some parameters and methodology around it so you have a very repeatable outcome-based experience with each of your customers.”
The idea of giving CSMs license to think outside the box and work outside of established methodologies may seem counterintuitive to the concept of establishing repeatable processes and methodologies, but there is a delicate balance here. Peter uses the following analogy to explain this: “You need to have people on the team who know when to follow the sheet music but can also play jazz music, right? They know when to look at the music and they know when to flex.”
2. Adopt Technology That Enables Flexible Approaches
Documenting methodologies allows less-experienced individuals to build strong, personal, and impactful relationships with customers. However, the documentation alone isn’t enough. As we’ve established, CSMs need in-the-moment guidance that helps point them in right direction and lets them know when it’s okay to improvise. This requires technology that supports the entire customer experience. Peter explains that the key to remarkable and repeatable customer experiences is adopting technology that enables flexible approaches to certain processes.
Not every CSM starts out as a hero, but your methodologies, combined with automation technology, can guide them in the right direction, and teach them how to ultimately become that hero. According to Tony, using technology to house methodologies and procedural documentation “enables people to go back into the system, so you don’t require everyone on the team to be this superhuman person.”
To further drive the impact of technology coupled with processes on human performance, Peter shares another analogy. “You know, Tony Stark, Iron Man, is just a human being, but you put some technology around him, and all of a sudden he’s a superhero.” Peter believes that documenting and reinforcing methodologies through software is the best way to enable less-experienced employees to deliver exceptional customer experiences. According to Peter, “Give them some structure with technology around what they’re doing so that they can be heroes. You don’t have to go hire all superheroes, you can hire some human beings and throw some technology around them as well.”
3. Remember That Both Your Employees and Your Customers Are Human
Peter shares, “One of the things I love most about Gainsight is our goal, which is to prove that you can succeed in business by being human first.” He explains that even during moments of escalation, or the scrambles of assigning projects, Gainsight is focused on the fact that every single customer is a human, and the Gainsight team often ask themselves: “What can I do in order to make this human successful?”
Gainsight is also committed to remembering that all of their employees are simply human. Peter shares that they have a policy in place that gives the team a “recharge day” each month, where they can go offline completely and take a moment away from work. “We have policies that, candidly as an SVP of Professional Services, I hate, but the human side of me loves. So as an example… a recharge day every month, if you do the math, I lost 5% of all capacity at one fell swoop… That’s the balance that’s really hard. How do you run an optimized business and how do you also make sure that your teammates are having an experience that they’re not being burned out and they’re excited to be at work?”
What’s important is recognizing that the entire customer experience relies on capable and happy employees to deliver on projects. Employees can’t possibly deliver a great experience if they don’t feel appreciated, are burnt out, or are simply uninspired by the work they are doing. Peter’s take on this is, “The engaged employee and teammate is gonna provide such a better experience to the customer than one that’s on their way out the door. So how do we make sure that teammates feel supported and they feel like they have the ability to go off script sometimes and be human beings?”
“It gets employees excited when they know, hey, I can be my true self at work, and I can be a human being at work. It’s really powerful. We found that to be probably one of the biggest draws that keeps people at Gainsight, is that ability to be their true selves at work.”
Want to Learn More?
These three best practices are just a few of the many covered in Banoo and Peter’s conversation. If you’d like to learn more about how to set up the right technology, processes, teams, and feedback methodologies for remarkable customer experiences, listen to the entire podcast episode here. Subscribe to the The Professional Services Pursuit Podcast to stay up to date on the latest expert advice, trends, and best practices surrounding the professional services industry.