Customer SuccessCon London 2018

The program will begin promptly at 1 pm.  The registration desk will be open at 12:15.

Customer Success groups are proliferating across the business landscape faster than can be imagined.  The named, designated role of Customer Success Management that began with a software company in the United States in 1997 has grown far beyond the software industry.  The numbers of open Customer Success executive positions worldwide continue to skyrocket.  But in all the increase and expansion, key questions remain to be answered.  Is Customer Success a distinct profession?


Strategy: What is the stated definition/mission of your company’s Customer Success team?  What results are you chartered to produce and why?  From that foundation, how is the group’s performance to be measured?   In many companies, neither the mission nor the metrics are clear or aligned, and this unfortunate scenario can have long term effects on the development of the team’s full capabilities.  


The Mission of Customer Success is to increase sustainable proven value for both the customers and the company.  If your mission isn’t what you want it to be, what can/should you do about it?


Process:  What does the operational workflow of the group look like?  Where is the external Point of Engagement with the customers?  Within the overall corporate organizational chart. where are the internal Points of Engagement?  What are the relationships between CS and Sales?  CS and Marketing? Product/Dev?  What authorities and influences should the Customer Success Executive have?  What data should the group be reporting and where?


People: What are the component functions/parts of an optimized Customer Success group?  On-boarding/ProServe?  Support? Training?  Sales Engineering? Customer Success Operations?  Customer Intelligence?  Advocacy management?  Why should these and others be included in the Customer Success organization?  

What are the key skills and knowledge required for an effective Customer Success group?  What is the case for justifying your staffing requests?


Customer Success Technology:  Currently, only about 25% of all Customer Success groups have a dedicated CSTech application installed.  What are the rest of them doing about systems and technology to support their work?


The Customer Success Blueprint is the result of over 8 years of research conducted by The Customer Success Association.  Senior members of the worldwide Customer Success Community will be present to share their direct personal experiences in the Q&A period and afterward.

Delivering Net Revenue Growth and increased CSAT without relying on adding endless headcount is a common challenge for Customer Success groups and their companies.  Technology is a key factor, but how do you keep a 1 to 1 feel?  What are high return activities?  What *can* be delivered 1-to-many and what needs to remain one to one?

How should a CS team identify a workload balance and appropriate portfolio size?

A key reality is that delivery of Customer Success needs to be shared with other teams.

Growing a Customer Success Team and finding the right balance between 1-to-1 and 1-to-many for a customer base in the thousands is a challenge. As is migrating your approach to markets across the globe, fitting it to the local customer base while respecting cultural differences and making it work in smaller teams.

We’ll also talk about the time to add a CSM to the global teams, how many hats should your “lone survivor” wear and what should their profile be?

Every Customer Success group and professional has been or will be confronted and challenged by an At-Risk scenario with a customer.  There can be a range of reasons why a customer relationship may go Code-Red, not all of them within the control of the Customer Success team.  But when the alert is sounded, everybody pitches in to do whatever can be done in the hopes of preserving the account, and to learn whatever lessons may be realized from the experience.


There is another kind of At-Risk, even Code-Red, situation that can be even more stressful.  That is when the CS group’s relationship with its own Senior Management team goes awry.  The range of possible outcomes range from abrupt termination of the entire group, departure of the CS executive(s), reorganization, etc., and the label of a “failed” Customer Success group.


As with an external customer relationship going At-Risk, there have been several declared reasons for terminating or restructuring Customer Success groups.  Underneath the different explanations, however, there is a core reality:  the CS group was not perceived as being necessary for continuing and expanding strategic levels of profitability for the company.


In this session, we’ll look at some of the things that should be considered as early-warning indicators of an At-Risk Customer Success group — and what you can do about them.

In this session, Chris will share how he grew the Customers for Life team at Fairsail (HR and People ISV on the Salesforce platform)  and the principles that underpinned the strategy.  He will also outline how the team was structured and measured to maximise customer success and help drive renewal rates to over 99%.

It is no secret that Customer Success is rapidly evolving worldwide as companies seek to maximize their customer relationships.  EMEA firms face particular challenges as they work across cultures and languages.

This session shares some hands-on insights and key learnings on how CS is perceived and evolving in Europe. These insights come from 2 perspectives:

1. Different challenges, experiences and lessons learned from various consultancy interventions
2. Information from exchanges with CS professionals at several events and meet-ups across Europe.

In this session, Jason Whitehead, CEO of Tri Tuns, will examine 3 common misperceptions of what it takes to drive adoption and challenge some of the fallacies related to change management and user adoption that are killing your customers' abilities to adopt and get value with your software.  He will then present several proven tactics you can use to shift customers' thinking and improve success.

Join us for drinks and canapes -- and continuing conversations about our favorite subject.