In this episode, Marija S. Pilley talks to Kia Puhm, Founder and CEO of DesiredPath, about:

• Kia's career journey

• Career lessons

• What does it mean to be customer centric?

• Where to start in getting to know your customers?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Top 10 Customer Success Blogs to Bookmark and Start Reading Today.

ChurnZero recognizes DesiredPath blog as Customer Success industry go-to for insights, strategies and guidance.

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.

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.

SaaS onboarding makes or breaks your customer retention. It’s a learn-or-churn, adopt-or-get-dropped experience for users.

ChurnZero asked the experts for their advice on how to crush customer onboarding and provide the roundup in their eBook.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

ChurnZero asked industry experts to weigh in on predictions for Customer Success in 2020. Kia Puhm, shared her insights on where the practice is headed.

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!

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.

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.

Kia Puhm, Founder & CEO of DesiredPath and frontierswoman in the field of Customer Success was recently invited to CS in Focus' third event in their inaugural series, CS & Operations.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Helping Sells Radio sat down with DesiredPath's founder & CEO, Kia Puhm, to discuss how it's time companies started documenting their customers' desired path instead of defining the journey for them.

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.

UserIQ highlighted their favourite pieces of motivational and helpful content that kicked off 2019. Why the the Customer Journey is the Desired Path to Success by Kia Puhm was one of their top 5.

UserIQ's 2018 SaaS User Adoption and Onboarding Benchmarking Report showed that companies are still struggling with user adoption and onboarding. They recently interviewed Kia Puhm for tips on creating a user adoption strategy.

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?

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.

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.

On International Woman's Day, Hubspot asked Kia Puhm what advice she would give someone looking to grow their career in Customer Success.

ChurnZero invited Kia Puhm to speak on their webinar about accelerating account expansion. Listen to learn more about how to use your customer journey and segmentation to drive up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.

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".

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.

Last Wednesday CEO, Kia Puhm, had the honour to appear as a guest on Helping Sells Radio to speak with cohosts Sarah Brown and Bill Cushard about the product roadmap tug of war.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Meet 2022’s leading women leaders and influencers in customer success as SmartKarrot celebrates their inspiring achievements this International Women’s Day.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

DesiredPath founder Kia Puhm named Top 50 Customer Success influencer 2021.

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Meet the leading Customer Success influencers and thought leaders who are helping shape the field and its future evolution.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

As the Toronto CS Executive Breakfast wrapped up another successful year, Kia Puhm recapped the biggest trends from 2019 and outlined where the industry is headed next moving into 2020.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Software Executive Magazine featured DesiredPath's article on how to "Keep the Revenue Your Company Worked So Hard to Earn" in their June edition.

Owning revenue is critical to scaling Customer Success yet the debate about whether they should do so is still hotly discussed. DesiredPath moderated a live webinar panel discussion hosted by Nudge to get to the heart of the matter.

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.

On Valentine's Day Wootric waxed poetic about the CX professionals that "make our lives better, share their expertise, uplift our spirits, and show profound generosity" to help contribute to the widespread adoption of CX. Kia is a CX expert they love.

B2B Lead Blog invited Kia Puhm on its podcast to discuss Customer Success and how to accelerate growth through a customer-centric approach.

Digital CMO sat down with Kia Puhm to discuss Customer Support and find out why being customer-centric and understanding the customer journey is key to providing a great customer experience.

CEO, Kia Puhm speaks at the inaugural Strategy Institute Customer Summit about driving revenue through holistic customer management by leveraging the customer journey.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Vision Critical invited Kia Puhm to speak on a panel of Customer Experience (CX) experts together with Paul Teshima (CEO of Nudge.ai) and Tammy Chiasson (Director CX, Strategy and Innovation at Tangerine).

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.

In this white paper, we will look at the key components of a successful customer expansion program - understanding the customer, segmentation, business maturity and expectation setting.

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.

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.