How to Ensure Your Customers Never Feel Alone
CS Show and Tell with Natasha Evans, Director of Global Customer Programs at SalesLoft
At SalesLoft we promise our customers “you’ll never be alone,” but with a customer base of over 3000 that’s not an easy feat. Here’s how we created a customer program model and leveraged our own platform to deliver on that commitment.
What we knew
We wanted to have different layers and mediums of support to offer the right help to our customers when they needed it the most.
We wanted to deliver the right content at the right time but in a scalable way.
We wanted every customer, no matter how big or small, to receive the same standard level of service and to have an opportunity to get help from our team.
Our customer promise
How we’ve structured our Customer Success support
On-demand resources: As most SasS companies do, we have an incredible offering of on-demand content. Our SalesLoft University is full of “how-to” videos and webinars, and our Knowledge Base is one of the most detailed I’ve ever come across. We have articles on how to execute on every part of our platform. So, we were incredibly lucky to have a really strong foundation.
Help when you need it: We were hearing from our customers that sometimes our on-demand content wasn’t enough and that they needed live help. Our challenge was offering this in a way that was helpful to the customer whilst still being feasible for us as a business. In came Office Hours. We offer these twice daily, every working day of the week. This means our customers are guaranteed to be able to speak live to a member of the CS team at SalesLoft on any given day. Not only are these now the most scalable way for us to help customers that need it in-person (virtually), but they’re also seen as a hugely valuable part of being a SalesLoft customer.
Advancing your skills: Our customers were hungry for more than just “how to do this;” they wanted to learn tips and strategies on how to execute in a more commercial, creative, and efficient manner. So we created a webinar program that offered exactly this; with different topics hosted by employees, partners, and customers.
How we engage our customers
We talk about these incredible resources at every stage of the customer journey and at every opportunity we get to speak with our customers. We also work really closely with Sales and Marketing to ensure we’re aligned on promotions and messaging.
On top of this, we’re pretty lucky that we’ve been able to leverage the cadence part of our own platform to drive awareness and ensure we’re sharing relevant details of our content and live programs at the right time, but in a scalable way. Here are three ways our CS team accomplishes this:
Journey cadence: We know that new SalesLoft customers need specific types of content as they get deeper into the platform and are often eager to receive more help. So, every new customer gets added into a “Journey Cadence” once they’ve completed their implementation. It’s a 19-step process that spans 150 days, designed to deliver the right messages and point them to the right resources at the right times. By design, we don’t get many replies to these emails because we direct customers to the right places to get the help they need. Even so, we’ve seen open rates of 40-50%.
Customer love cadence: CSMs run a bi-weekly/monthly cadence that they add all of their customers to. We create templates that the team can then use to share all the upcoming live programs, new resources, and product updates that they might want to know about with all of their customer stakeholders in one easy step.
Customer health cadence: Periodically we run a review of the health of all of our customers and add them into cadences that drip-feed relevant content to them based on an area that we see they can improve.
Our results
We’re continuing to iterate on what we have available to ensure that we’re adding maximum value to our customers. But here’s the results we’ve seen so far:
We’ve had over 9500 attendees with our live customer programs in the last 12 months.
We’ve calculated that we’ve saved at least 4800 Customer Success working hours by delivering our virtual programs in this scalable way vs 1:1.
Our Office Hours feedback has an average rating of 8/10.
Key things we’ve learned along the way
Don’t underestimate the change-management aspect of launching a program like this, both internally with CS and Sales as well as with customers. Leveraging programs and resources like this is a behavior that constantly needs to be reinforced and encouraged.
Some programs/resources will be more highly adopted than others and that’s ok; you can amend your offering based on where you see customers are getting the most value.
Get customer feedback! After all, you're doing all this for customers and you need to know it’s hitting the mark.
Natasha currently leads Global Customer Programs and EMEA Customer Success at SalesLoft, the provider of the #1 sales engagement platform. Natasha spent the last 7 years consulting and enabling salespeople to use technology to improve conversions and increase revenue, most recently leading Customer Success for LinkedIn's UK Talent Solutions business. You can find her on LinkedIn.
This is great Brandon - thanks so much for sharing this. The office hours was a good reminder.