The Toronto Customer Success Executive Breakfast is a forum whereby local industry leaders get together over breakfast to discuss the still young and rapidly evolving field of Customer Success.
Co-hosted by Natasha Narayan and myself, and Sponsored by Gainsight, senior executives in the field of Customer Success are invited to share their knowledge and expertise amongst their peer group in an intimate and highly interactive setting.
The breakfast is an opportunity for these leaders in Customer Success to convene, exchange ideas and further define industry best practices.
Three years!
It is hard to believe that the Toronto Customer Success Executive Breakfast just celebrated its three-year anniversary.
It feels like only yesterday that Natasha and I were discussing how to build an environment where leaders from within the Customer Success community could come together to share their challenges, concerns, successes and future ideas amongst one another in a trusted space.
Time flies when you are having fun.
To celebrate the occasion, we took a trip down memory lane to review the highlights and sessions from the past three years and also looked to the future to plan out what we want to cover next.
Here is a list of articles covering past sessions:
1. How to Grow & Scale Customer Success: At the inaugural session, predicated on 21 years’ experience building and leading various Customer Success organizations, I presented my story on leading and scaling Customer Success at Eloqua.
2. Where Customer Success is Trending: Dan Steinman of Gainsight, and co-author of Customer Success – How Innovative Companies are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue, present CS industry trends.
3. Group Sharing Session: At the third event, members were asked to share what their organizations are currently doing around the three topics of Customer Journey Mapping, Segmentation and Customer Health Scoring.
4. Have Customers Tell You How Great They Are: I sat down with one of the members for a “fire side chat” to talk about how their organization implemented an approach to increase customer engagement and success by including a regular customer self-assessment into the practice.
5. Predictive Analytics: Jason Soo of Firmex presented how their organization’s predictive analytics solution helps them be far more proactive in determining customer health and at-risk accounts.
6. Automated Self-Help for Scale: Peter Armaly reviewed Oracle’s approach to a tech-touch model used for scaling Customer Success.
7. CEO Insights on Value Realization from Customer Success: Omer Rabin shared with the group the findings from McKinsey & Company’s research conducted with CEOs and what their value realization expectations are from Customer Success.
8. TSIA CS Research Trends: Phil Nanus from TSIA flew in to present to the group the TSIA’s latest findings on Customer Success Trends.
9. Handling Rapid Growth: Greg Boyd and Jesse Goldman each shared what Axonify and Influitive respectively are doing to handle their Customer Success efforts in a rapid growth environment.
10. Health Scoring: Jocelyn Brown reviewed Allocadia’s path to developing a health scoring model along with the initial results the company is seeing from it.
11. Slashing Onboarding Time in Half: Star Hofer presented eCompliance’s change management approach to transforming customer onboarding and the corresponding impact it had on customers and their organization.
12. Customer Success Strategy: Rory Hochman of Uberflip presented their journey on building a Customer Success strategy.
13. Impressive Results through Customer Success Plans: Steve O’Connor of Maropost provided insight into how the organizations uses CSPs to drive customer accountability, success and value realization.
Stay tuned for overviews of future sessions.
And if you are responsible for the Customer Success strategy at your company and are interested in joining the group, please contact me at kia@thedesiredpath.com.