On this month’s episode of The Customer Success Channel Podcast, brought to you by Planhat, I chatted with the inspiring Kristi Faltorusso, VP of Customer Success at IntelliShift, and voted one of the top 25 Customer Success Influencers of 2020.
When establishing their CS team, many organizations start with a reactive business strategy, responding to unanticipated issues only after it occurs. Shifting the mindset to a proactive strategy can enable the team to anticipate those issues, therefore eliminating the problems before they appear. So, how do you make that shift from firefighting churn to a lean and mean proactive CS machine?
One of the things that make Kristi unique, is her ability to break down CS and make it simple. So much so that she is launching her new brand, CS Real Simple. It started after speaking to so many CS leaders who always seemed to face the same issues, confusion on how to approach CS, how to build it and how to deploy an effective CS program. She found people were just overcomplicating things and forgetting their main objective, to make their customers successful. Kristi embarked on this new journey through her desire to help people move their programs forward, be more successful and keep CS simple.
When shifting from a reactive to proactive CS, Kristi suggests identifying where in the company’s maturation are you deploying CS. If you’re at the early stages with only 10 customers, then it’s super easy, you can just flip from reactive to proactive. But if you’re trying to drive proactive change in a large organization with a lot of customers all in different stages of their customer journey, then you can’t just flip a switch. Speaking about her current role, Kristi had to do things differently while she built proactive strategies. Firstly, she figured out what the things keeping the lights on were. You’re going to have to keep some reactive things in place while you pivot, so, what is the one thing you can do today to be proactive? For Kristi, this meant changing their engagement model as they hadn’t spoken to some of their customers in years. The number one proactive change they could do immediately was to reach out to customers first. That one thing you change will lead you down the proactive path.
Another proactive element is the design of the program and to design and craft it from the outside in. Kristi has seen many companies fail at CS because they design inside out and design the CS journey based on what the company needs, not what the customer needs.
In our discussion Kristi helps answer some of the tricky questions when it comes to moving from reactive to proactive CS:
- What are some of the basic metrics that you need to put in place to make sure you make the shift from reactive to proactive?
- Even with the best of intentions, some CS teams will always end up firefighting, how can you go about changing that mindset?
- In your experience, what is one main thing you have learned as you shifted from reactive to proactive customer success?
Some key takeaways from this discussion:
- Start to design something but put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Think about what they need in order to be successful and design that program with no barriers
- The number one proactive change they could do immediately was to reach out to customers first. That one thing you change will lead you down the proactive path.
- Design a program as if there were no limitations, no restrictions on budget, people, resources, and creative operations, just design your best program ever. Then, figure out what you can actually deploy day by day and start chipping away at it.
Make sure you listen to the full episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments!