On this month’s episode of The Customer Success Channel Podcast, brought to you by Planhat, I chatted with Alex Farmer, VP of Customer Success at Cognite, an Oslo-based DataOps scale-up which helps digitize heavy-asset industries, enabling them to operate more sustainably, securely, and efficiently.
Advocacy is something every customer success professional is striving for with their customer base. Creating a strong number of customer advocate is what every SaaS business is looking for. But what makes a good customer into a advocate? Is it how much of your product they use? Is it based on positive survey feedback? How about being a reference for a future sales call? Not only is it difficult to define a customer advocate it is also a difficult journey to transform your good customers into great advocates. If you are looking to start of your advocacy journey and really turn your customers into true advocates that keep on reading.
But what makes a good customer become an advocate? Is it how much of your product they use? A positive survey feedback? Or them becoming a reference? Not only is it difficult to define a customer advocate but it also difficult to transform your good customers into great advocates.
As customer success continues to grow and expand, the role of the CS is ever changing. This opens up more opportunities for people to become CS leaders in the space. With experience in several different Customer Success Manager roles, Alex’s advice to others who are aspiring to become a VP of Customer Success, like himself, is to own the space and claim it as your own.
CS is still relatively new and Alex already challenges the fundamentals of its development and rightly so. Having worked as a CS leader in 3 different organizations he had to adjust and adapt to the new surroundings and teams. It isn’t quite as clear cut as implementing repeatable playbooks and taking one CS structure to another company. He has had to constantly unthink CS and work backwards from what the customer needs to find the right solution.
In our discussion Alex helps answer some of the tricky questions when it comes to creating customer advocay:
- When should a SaaS company start building out an advocacy program? What is the first step?
- Who’s responsibility is it to create customer advocates? Customer Success, marketing or the wider business and why?
- What sorts of milestones/touch points should a SaaS business build into their customer journey in order to make sure they end up with advocate?
Some key takeaways from this discussion:
- It’s really important for CS leaders to unthink the conventional wisdom, and really put themselves in the customer’s shoes
- Focus on advocacy, whether or not it is a formal program. I have conversations with startups who are trying to figure out this whole customer success thing and my advice to them is to start really simple and create 5 fields in your CRM or in an excel document and make one of those 5 fields – are you willing to be an advocate?
- When it comes to advocacy it’s important to start and focus on it from day one. It enables CSMs to have a better understanding of their customers and keep track of their progress.
Make sure you listen to the full episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments!