September 14, 2022
Fireside Chat with Kia Puhm
How to take a Customer-Centric Approach
In this Fireside Chat, CMO at FROGED, Stephanie Rubin, sits down with Customer Experience expert, Kia Puhm. Creator of the Intelligent Framework™ and founder of the DesiredPath, Kia, discusses her ‘AHA’ moments throughout her career and how growth is managed by placing the customers in the center of everything.
January 5, 2022
Top 50 Customer Success Influencers 2022
Thanks to the untiring zeal of its passionate community, Customer Success has grown to become the phenomenal force that it is today. Here is SmartKarrot's Top 50 Customer Success Influencers list for 2022 celebrating the inspiring visionaries and trailblazers who are helping shape the field and its future evolution.
April 28, 2021
DesiredPath April Newsletter
Customer Engagement
Solid customer engagement drives customer experience, retention and loyalty. But customer retention techniques can be labour intensive and difficult to scale.
Check out this month's content round-up to learn how to recognize the patterns of successful customers and employ digital tools to take your CS game up to the next level.
March 31, 2021
DesiredPath March Newsletter
Customer Retention Through Value Creation
Customers need to see value but what constitutes value in the customer's eyes? Customer Success still focuses too heavily on reaching software deployment milestones rather than business value realized from the customer's point of view.
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Check out this month's content round-up to learn how to drive customer retention through value creation.
March 17, 2021
Scale Your Sales Podcast
Why you must be agile to support clients?
DesiredPath CEO Kia Puhm was this week's guest on the Scale Your Sales podcast.
In this episode Kia shares why a customer-centric approach is critical for accelerating revenue growth, how to create an intelligent framework that drives revenue more effectively and common mistakes organizations can avoid when trying to scale growth.
February 24, 2021
DesiredPath February Newsletter
CS Benchmark Survey Results & 2021 Outlook
February saw Customer Success executives participate in the CS Benchmark Survey to share how their organizations performed in 2020 against the backdrop of an exceptional year. Resoundingly customer expansion contributed significantly to overall revenue growth. That is, in 2020 Customer Success became even more important for the success of businesses.
Check out the results to compare how your organization fared and see what executives are planning for in 2021.
February 1, 2021
Customer Success Benchmark Survey Now Open
2020 was an unusual year all around.
But what was its impact on business? And how do Customer Success Executives quantify their organization's performance against the backdrop of an exceptional year?
Further, what does the outlook for 2021 look to be and how are companies preparing accordingly to move forward?
The aim of the Customer Success Benchmark Survey is to provide participants with empirical data that they can use to benchmark how their organization fared in 2020, as well as understand where the industry is headed in 2021.
Submit your response today.
November 25, 2020
DesiredPath November Newsletter
Customer Segmentation & Account Coverage
The segmentation model that your sales organization uses to close deals is not efficient post sales to drive renewals. The amount of revenue a customer makes in their own business has no correlation to how they will adopt your technology. Yet companies continue to mistakenly use Enterprise, mid-market and SMB to make account coverage decisions.
Check out this month's content round-up to learn how to better segment customers and align account resources accordingly.
October 28, 2020
DesiredPath October Newsletter
The Customer Success Playbook
Driving repeatable customer success, in the most efficient manner, all while delivering an exceptional customer experience is the aim of every Customer Success organization. Top performing companies codify the patterns of their most successful customers into a Customer Success Playbook in order to scale desired outcomes and revenue growth.
Check out the round-up of this month’s content to take your Customer Success Playbook to the next level.
July 29, 2020
DesiredPath July Newsletter
Executive Business Reviews
A well-run business review can be a great way to gain insights into your customer’s business, deliver added value and improve the customer experience (CX). They are also effective vehicles to increase adoption and expansion, operational effectiveness and revenue growth.
Check out the round-up of this month’s content to learn how to conduct Executive Business Reviews that are relevant, provide value and done with strategic timing in mind.
June 3, 2020
CS During Covid-19
Back to the Fundamentals
CS in Focus held its inaugural virtual event and asked Kia Puhm, Founder & CEO of DesiredPath, to be their first guest speaker.
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The presentation covers the three pillars of a customer-centric discipline that every business should follow to successfully keep and grow customers.
April 29, 2020
DesiredPath April Newsletter
Customer Retention Strategies During Covid-19
We are all learning how to adapt to the new environment. While a lot has changed, keeping customers is still as important as ever.
How do we manage Customer Success during Covid-19? CS leaders share insights. Update your customer retention strategies in order to meet evolving customer needs.
February 26, 2020
DesiredPath February Newsletter
Most Important Customer Success Metrics
We've been working on something exciting!
A 3-part Customer Success Metrics interview series, where we asked some of the brightest minds in Customer Success to weigh in about the metrics that matter to them most. Check out the round-up of this month’s content to learn the most important Customer Success metrics.
January 20, 2020
Customer Success Blogs You Should be Following
UserIQ compiled this list of the top customer success blogs and the experts who run them that are constantly sharing their best new ideas on customer success concepts, strategies, and tactics. DesiredPath's Kia Puhm was featured on the list.
December 5, 2019
Customer Success & Product
Your Product Isn't Perfect, Now What?
There are certain undeniable truths in life: death, taxes and software that does not always work as intended (and more often than CS would like).
What is Customer Success to do when releases go wonky, the product is lacking features customers are asking for, the roadmap shows no indication of when they will be added, or users don't "use the product as intended" (i.e. it's the customer's "fault")?
Join Kia Puhm, Founder & CEO of DesiredPath, as she explores how to navigate this Product-Customer Support-Customer Tug of War to turn a potentially toxic situation into a healthy, natural tension that keeps the product innovative and meeting the evolving needs of the customer and keeps Customer Success sane!
November 14, 2019
Lattitude 44
Tech Conference & Music Week
Fintech and Open Banking: Valuable Lessons from the EU.
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Founder Kia Puhm was invited to speak on a panel discussing changes occurring in the banking industry due to the advances in FinTech. Kia shares how banks can use Customer Experience as a key competitive differentiator in open banking.
October 3, 2019
DesiredPath September Newsletter
Customer Success is a Mindset, Not Just a Department
Collaboration is key for customer success. Customer success is not just one department's responsibility, it is a mindset that needs to be embraced by everyone - vendors, their employees and customers alike - to ensure that customers realize value. Check out the round-up of this month’s content below to help drive collaboration around making customer's successful.
July 31, 2019
DesiredPath July Newsletter
Use Metrics to Drive Growth
Most organizations are unable to measure the value of their customer-focused efforts leading to ineffective spend against retention and inhibiting their ability to focus on growing customer revenue. Check out the round-up of this month’s content below to help you develop an intelligent framework to revenue growth.
June 19, 2019
How To Keep the Revenue Your Company Worked So Hard to Earn
Companies work hard to attract and win their customers but that effort is for naught if the revenue is going out the door just as quickly as it came in. Kia Puhm shares a better way to manage revenue and reviewed the industry's first metrics - developed by DesiredPath - to measure the full customer funnel.
June 4, 2019
Growth x Sales: Accelerating Across the Funnel
As competition continues to pop up, it’s increasingly important to consider a growth approach across each funnel stage (not just lead gen), but also in onboarding, customer success, outbound, conversion, and more. GrowthTO meet-up event saw lighting talks from Coca-Cola, DesiredPath, Google and TopHat to discuss sales' impact to company growth.
May 31, 2019
DesiredPath May Newsletter
It's Time We Understood Our Customer's Desired Path
Use a customer-centric approach to create an Intelligent Framework™ that drives product adoption, loyalty and expansion. Check out the round-up of this month’s content below to help you best understand your customers’ desire path.
April 8, 2019
The Profitability Blueprint
The theme for this year's CSA SuccessCon conference series is The Profitability Blueprint which looks at the role Customer Success plays in generating profitability for a company. DesiredPath CEO Kia Puhm spoke about How to Turn Customers into Bigger Customers.
August 5, 2018
UserIQ Webinar: Top User Adoption and Onboarding Trends for 2018
As customer success has become a critical strategy for SaaS businesses in the Age of the Customer, proper onboarding and strong user adoption initiatives are key to long-term success. This webinar sets out to understand how SaaS businesses today are handling these efforts. How big of a role does user adoption play in the customer journey, where are teams finding success, and where are they struggling?
June 3, 2018
Funnel Cake: The Impact of Customer Success Before the Sale
Funnel Cake recently sat down with Kia Puhm to discuss the impact of Customer Success before the sale. They talk about how Customer Success can have an impact on sales and marketing and what value the role can bring in the earlier stages of the buyer's journey.
April 11, 2018
Pulse 2018: Journey Orchestration, This ain't your grandparent's old journey map!
Companies either do not have a customer journey map, or when they do, it's really the process map they would like customers to follow in adopting the product. This workshop presented at Pulse 2018 reviews how to design a journey map that actually maps to your customer's journey and how that insight significantly helps companies align to it and accelerate their growth.
October 22, 2017
CSA: The Now and Future of Customer Success, A Success Plan for Customer Success
The Customer Success Association held its quarterly SuccessCon event this past week. CEO, Kia Puhm, was invited to speak about the future of Customer Success sharing her thoughts on "A Success Plan for Customer Success".
June 26, 2017
CXPA: Human (aka Customer) Design Thinking
The CXPA, or Customer Experience Professionals Association, dedicated to cultivating the Customer Experience profession and through their local networks, regularly host events to advance the knowledge amongst the industry’s professionals. Run by a dedicated group of CX professionals, the Toronto local chapter headed up by Derek Bildfell, focused on Human Design Thinking for this month’s event.
February 28, 2017
Totango Summit 2017: Journey Towards a Customer Centric Organization
The objective of every company is to drive revenue, and business operations should be aligned to support that goal. View this slideshow to understand what it means to be a customer centric organization and know the three tenets to becoming so.
May 8, 2016
Driving Customer Retention
In this white paper, we will look at how SaaS companies should leverage customer knowledge to develop strong and long lasting relationships that deliver benefits to both parties. We'll also look at the 3 biggest renewal challenges and how to navigate around them.
April 4, 2016
Improving Customer Retention by Managing the Customer Journey
Customer retention means knowing why your customers bought and delivering on your commitment to provide what you sold. By managing the customer journey, customer retention can be a proactive and enjoyable process. Listen to the webinar for best practices on customer retention.
March 1, 2016
Defining & Managing Your Customer Lifecycle
Understanding your entire customer lifecycle is the foundation of an effective Customer Experience (CX) framework that drives revenue, retention and scale. This webinar recording contains the 3 fundamental elements critical for establishing a disciplined and sustainable CX framework that increases product adoption, customer lifetime value, and loyalty.
January 13, 2023
2023 CS Predictions & Trends
12 CS Trends for 2023 from ChurnZero
The time-honored practice of trying to predict what’s to come in the year ahead never fails to get our minds buzzing with possibilities, new ideas, and excitement for the future.
However, it’s tough to predict the future alone—so ChurnZero asked Customer Success leaders across the industry to share their top trends for 2023. A few common themes emerged.
April 29, 2021
Selling Value in a Pandemic
Advice From Leading Scale Your Sales Experts
This past quarter Janice B Gordon, customer growth expert, has had some fabulous guests on Scale Your Sales Podcast all sharing relevant insights on selling value. She captures some of the answers to questions collated before the recordings.
April 22, 2021
Fuel The Vision
Highlighting Everyday FABULOUS Women
Fuel the Vision looks at the stories of how accomplished woman from different fields manage their career and how their presence makes a difference in the workplace. The ones with a strong work ethic and the ability to get sh*t done while uplifting one another.
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Read everyday FABULOUS woman, Kia Puhm's story to start a meaningful conversation and #FuelTheVision.
March 24, 2021
Enhancing Customer Success
Engati CX Podcast
Kia Puhm, Founder and CEO DesiredPath tells Engati CX why is it essential for businesses to consider moving to a customer-centric model to drive customer retention and avoid churn. She also explains why closed-loop, customer feedback and digital tools are effective at building customer relationships.
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Listen to the episode on YouTube, Spotify or SoundCloud.
March 8, 2021
International Women's Day 2021
#ChoosetoChallenge
On this International Women's Day 2021, customer growth expert Janice B Gordon of the Scale Your Sales Podcast wanted to celebrate and profile some of the show's amazing guests.
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Hear from 21 growth experts, including DesiredPath CEO Kia Puhm, on the Scale Your Sales podcast, as they share their insights, and in their own way, all #ChoosetoChallenge.
February 3, 2021
DesiredPath January Newsletter
2021 Top CS Influencer & Blog
January got off to a great start! DesiredPath's Kia Puhm was named a 2021 top CS influencer, our blog listed as top 10 to follow, and we sat down with Flatfile.io to talk about holistic vs random acts of Customer Success. Check out January's content round-up below.
And be sure to participate in the CS Benchmark Survey by February 9th!
January 12, 2021
FlatFile.io Podcast
Map the Customer Journey to Success
Do you know your customer's objectives, challenges, and timeline? If not, you might be practicing random acts of customer success. Your customer could feel like you're executing tactics at them rather than for them.
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In this episode of Customer Success Leader, FlatFile.io sits down with the Founder and CEO of DesiredPath, Kia Puhm.
November 18, 2020
Catalyst Software eBook
Catalyst Software's goal with this eBook is to share what they identified as the most controversial topics in Customer Success. They surveyed CS leaders from around the globe, known for their experience in and contributions to the CS industry to weigh in on these topics.
September 30, 2020
DesiredPath September Newsletter
Scaling Customer Success
Scaling Customer Success is a common problem organization’s face as they grow. What works as a fast-growing startup – where the Customer Success team’s focus is very hands-on, high-touch and usually quite bespoke - does not scale. But changing from what has been a successful engagement model to something new and unknown is difficult.
Check out the round-up of this month’s content to learn how to create scalable and sustainable engagement models.
August 31, 2020
DesiredPath August Newsletter
Growth Strategy Framework
Revenue optimization and protection of retention rates requires solid customer success management. With summer almost over, the fall is a good time to review your growth strategy framework as we head into the last quarter of the year. Especially given the unpredictability of the pandemic this fall.
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Can you customer success during disruption?
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Check out the round-up of this month’s content to learn how to boost your growth strategy framework to ensure revenue growth even in the most uncertain of times.
June 30, 2020
DesiredPath June Newsletter
The Power of Customer-Centric Organizations
From the get go, Customer Success has essentially been about how to make customers successful. The focus of goal attainment however has unfortunately been on reaching project milestones, not value.
Check out the round-up of this month’s content to learn about the power of customer centric organizations.
May 28, 2020
DesiredPath May Newsletter
Customer Success Fundamentals
The crisis has been a forcing factor back to the fundamentals of solid, customer success management. Companies that were not already actively customer centric, have become so and quickly.
Businesses with a customer focused strategy in place are better equipped at keeping customers and their retention rates higher. Check out the round-up of this month's content get back to the basics of smart, customer success management.
March 31, 2020
DesiredPath March Newsletter
Is Customer Success More Important Than Ever?
The world has changed. What impact will the pandemic have on businesses and what role does Customer Success play in navigating companies through this unprecedented time?
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One things is certain: customer success - making customers successful - is more important than ever!
January 29, 2020
DesiredPath January Newsletter
Value Realization Drives Revenue Growth
From the get go, Customer Success has essentially been about how to make customers successful. The focus of goal attainment however has been on reaching project milestones, not value. Check out the round-up of this month’s content to help you measure and demonstrate value realized to customers.
January 16, 2020
The Sales Experts Channel
The Ultimate Sales Experience
How do you practically apply Customer Experience to achieve revenue growth? In this session, Melissa Madian will be joined by the Founder of DesiredPath, Kia Puhm, to provide some real talk on common mistakes made in your customer’s journey, how to combat them, and how to enable your employees to create a fabulous customer experience.
November 25, 2019
SaaS North 2019
The Ultimate Customer Journey Experience
Customer-Centric Success! Value Realization! Revenue Growth!
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Melissa Madian and Kia Puhm held an interactive experience at the Arts Court Theatre which had participants learning how to align around the customer to optimize how revenue-focused functions create a meaningful experience for customers that results in acquisition, retention and growth.
October 30, 2019
DesiredPath October Newsletter
The Ultimate Customer Journey Experience
Customer-Centric Success! Value Realization! Revenue Growth!
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Many trendy terms are thrown about, commanding businesses to do these things or fall behind. But how does a company align around the customer and optimize revenue-focused functions so they create a meaningful experience that results in acquisition, retention and growth of customers. Check out the round-up of this month's content to help drive the ultimate customer journey experience.
September 18, 2019
User Adoption Podcast
The User Adoption Podcast is a series of audio interviews from all over the world with professionals talking about how to improve user adoption for product/service businesses of any size, internally or externally, tech-focused or not. Henrik de Gyor sat down with Kia Puhm of DesiredPath to get her take on adoption.
August 28, 2019
DesiredPath August Newsletter
Customer centricity requires customer centric thinking
When companies embark on their journey to becoming customer centric it can seem overwhelming. Change requires time and people intrinsically like to avoid it. Check out the round-up of this month’s content below to help you reinforce customer centric thinking at your organization.
June 30, 2019
DesiredPath June Newsletter
Turn Customers Into Bigger Customers
Revenue protection is expensive, time-consuming and never goes away. Yet companies demonstrate a distorted understanding of what this means. Check out the round-up of this month’s content below to help you optimize the value of customer-focused efforts.
June 6, 2019
How Companies Can Turn Customers Into Bigger Customers
Kayako invited DesiredPath to present at its live webinar to share the best way a company can organize its business around its customers in order to drive smarter, faster revenue growth.
May 1, 2019
DesiredPath Newsletter
Should Customer Success Own Revenue?
Profitability and whether Customer Success should own revenue continues to be a topic of great debate within the industry. What is not disputed is that companies continue to look for ways to drive smarter, faster revenue growth. Check out the round-up of this month’s content below to help you navigate this challenge.
April 17, 2018
Strategy Institute Insights eBook: Customer Retention and Future Trends
In part two of Strategy Institute's eBook series, they asked industry leading speakers for their input on how to retain customers looking to cancel and where they see the future of customer success heading. The ebook contains insights from five of the 2018 Customer Success Top Strategists and continues where part 1 of the eBook left off.
March 21, 2018
Strategy Institute Insights eBook: Determine Value & Measure Insights
In part one of Strategy Institute's eBook series, they asked industry leading speakers for their input on how to determine the value of customer success and measure customer satisfaction. The eBook contains insights from five of the 2018 Customer Success Top Strategists.
March 5, 2018
Totango Summit 2018: VP of CS Panel, Proving Customer Success Impact
Join Customer Success executives Nate Rosenthal, Square, Gillian Heltai, Talkdesk, and Travis Bryant, Front, as they discuss with moderator Kia Puhm, K!A CX Consulting, the journey their respective organizations took in accelerating the impact of Customer Success with measurable results.
February 4, 2018
Kapta: How the Best Deliver Ongoing Customer Success
Kia had the pleasure of sitting down with Kapta CEO, Alex Raymond, to discuss how the best Customer Success teams out there are delivering ongoing Customer Success. They talk about prescriptive Customer Success Plans, proactive CSPs, how to master QBRs and how to grow into your Customer Success role.
July 20, 2017
NGDATA: Top Customer Experience Podcasts
NGDATA helps brands redefine the customer relationship with data. In July, they posted the list of the Top 50 Must-Listen to Customer Experience Podcasts along with the three key episodes from each. ServiceRocket's Episode 41 with CEO, Kia Puhm, made the top of the key episodes list.
May 10, 2017
Pulse 2017: Using Adoption Parameters to Develop an Account Segmentation and Coverage Model
Companies often segment accounts based on criteria irrelevant to how those customers adopt technology leading to the development of incorrect account coverage models. Listen to the presentation to discover how to effectively segment and resource accounts.
May 1, 2016
Accelerating Customer Expansion by Managing the Customer Journey
Customer expansion means understanding your customer's business and using that knowledge to make your product a critical element to their growth. Listen to the webinar to understand how to make customer expansion a deliberate practice.
March 16, 2016
Customers for Life: Managing the Customer Journey
In this white paper, we will explore three key parts of the customer adoption lifecycle; the customer journey, account coverage model and measuring customer health. By focusing on these three components, SaaS companies can drive customer adoption into long-term customer loyalty.