Last week I covered a recap of Day 1 at Strategy Institute’s Customer Success Summit 2018 held at the beautiful Old Mill location in Toronto.
Having the conference in our own backyard was a real treat for the Canadian participants who regularly visit Silicon Valley for Customer Success industry events.
In attendance from various industries were roughly 100 people, all linked together through a keen desire to learn about and keep developing the practice of Customer Success.
Participants talked about the value of coming together as a group to share experiences and learn from others.
Presenters noted that sharing their story was a way of paying it forward, as they benefitted from the learnings of the pioneers before them.
The audience was treated to two days of presentations chalked full of learnings and suggestions for Customer Success practices that could be implemented back at the office, as well as examples of Customer Success transformations organizations are undergoing on their journey to Customer Success maturity.
Moderated by one of our own in the industry, Kelly Hall, Chief Customer Office at Vision Critical, kicked-off and lead the two days expertly recapping salient points from each speaker before introducing the next one.
With plenty of valuable information shared, I have aimed to cover the highlights from each session.
Day 2 Highlights
Cisco’s Chris Doell kicked off day two with a strong presentation on how introducing Customer Success as a mindset drives business growth. Customer Success is more than just a team, all aspects of the business help to make customers successful.
Demonstrating how retention and expansion rates have an accelerated impact on revenue growth drove the message home.
Jacob Rigoli from Pearson Education reviewed the company’s Customer Success transformation. The organization created a framework for building Customer Success and looked to insights outside of the SaaS industry to realize the value of Customer Success.
ServiceSource’s Tony Brucha shared a comprehensive overview of how the company has setup its Customer Success function and reiterated the theme of Customer Success needing to be a company philosophy, not just a department.
Paul Philip of Amity shared the importance of outcome-driven Customer Success. Businesses don’t want a customer health score, they want a healthy customer was the key message.
Infor’s Mary Trick and Shahriar Rafimayeri shared the magic that results when collaboration between Customer Success and IT occurs. They reviewed Forrester’s research that if an organization is not customer centric they will be out of business in 5-10 years. Technology disruptors are speeding up. Make value a habit and think about what value your company is adding to its customers.
Mike Baggley of Intelex rocked his presentation on how Customer Success can learn from Customer Experience. Echoing the themes from the two days, he reiterated the importance of everyone owning the customer experience, mapping the customer journey and measuring outcomes not milestones.
Oracle’s Peter Armaly talked about the silos at Oracle and what the company is doing to break those down to optimize operations for a customer focus.
Star Hofer from eCompliance presented a well-received overview of how to use segmentation to drive customer engagement. She covered how to define segmentation by risk tolerance and reminded the audience that segmentation is not a one size fits all exercise.
The final session of the two days was a panel I moderated on Customer Health Scores. In my discussion with Perry Monaco, Star Hofer, Tony Brucha and Bobby Hennessey we talked about how their various organizations define a health customer, what actions do they take when a customer is unhealthy and what suggestions did they have for the audience on best practices.
Overall the event was a smashing success!
The most gratifying experience was the palpable level of excitement throughout the entire two days, right to the very end, as well as the sincere desire to share and learn from one another.
I look forward to seeing everyone again next year!