On this month’s episode of The Customer Success Channel Podcast, brought to you by Planhat, I chatted with Daniel Ennis, Scale Team Manager at Monday.com about scaled customer success and explores its significance in today’s ever-evolving business landscape.
Daniel Ennis has over a decade of experience as both an IC and people leader in customer success with companies and customers of all sizes. Dan worked with large enterprise customers and the long tail of low ARR, high volume customers. He currently leads the US Scale CS team at monday.com, where they built a motion that retains, achieves success, and grows 1000s of customers. He was a part of building this out from day 1 at Monday and has been scaling CS for years.
Customer success at scale has been a longstanding practice, but it has gained even greater significance in the current economy. So, what are the initial steps to consider when establishing a scaled CS team? How can we strike the perfect balance between automated interactions and maintaining a genuine human connection with customers? And what are the key metrics and KPIs that your team should track?
Scaled customer success has seen steady growth over the years, but the events of 2022 and 2023 compelled many organizations that were not already heading in that direction to take it seriously. In an era where additional funding or hiring may not be reliable options, companies must find ways to empower their customers to achieve success.
In our discussion, Daniel helps answer some of the tricky questions when it comes to scaling customer success quickly:
- Automation plays a significant role in scaling customer success efforts. How do you strike the right balance between automated interactions and maintaining a human connection with customers?
- What about AI and chatbots, what sorts of other tools are you guys using to scale?
- One concern with digital customer success is the potential for customers to feel like they’re just a number in a system. How can companies use technology to make customers feel valued and understood on an individual level?
Some key takeaways from this discussion:
- As your company and customer base grow, it becomes important to meet your customers where they want to be met, and with the level of support that they actually need to accomplish their goals. That’s not the same for every customer.
- The foremost principle is that automation should always prioritize the customer. While it may sound cliché, it cannot be emphasized enough. Starting with a mindset of automating tasks solely to lighten the load on your team may result in a service that feels overly mechanized to the customer. A more effective approach involves leveraging data to determine when human intervention is necessary and appropriate. Scaling operations is not about removing the human element entirely, but rather directing it toward the moments when customers truly require personalized attention and assistance
Make sure you listen to the full episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments!