Just how transferable are skills and experiences in other disciplines to customer success?

One profession that seems to be at the forefront of the movement to CS is professional educators. And for good reason, there are lots of parallels between teaching and education and making customers successful, so much so that at times it's hard to tell them apart.

Today’s guest is Jeffrey See, Assistant Principle for the DC Everest Area school district. In this episode you’ll hear how he:

• Compares the role of educators and CSM's
• Creates strategic outcome driven action plans
• Leverages data to prioritize action and make decisions
• Uses customer discovery methods to get buy-in for project budgets
• Puts the ultimate success of students above internal measures and tactics

Enjoyed this episode? Connect with Jeffrey on LinkedIn and let him know, or subscribe for future episodes of Happy Customers.

So many companies fall in love with their product and focus their time on making them as high quality as possible, but the improvement that is actually most impactful for the business is being the best at guiding customers through a process that results in the outcomes they want.

Building repeatable paths to value that enables customers to succeed is the best way to reduce churn, increase retention and ensure ever expanding customer accounts.

Today’s guest is Samuel Hulick, creator of UserOnboard and founder of Value Paths. In this episode you’ll hear how he:

• Defines a value path
• Discovers the outcomes customers are seeking
• Thinks about the function of products and services
• Thinks about onboarding measurement and experimentation
• Encourages companies to think about products as stepping stones

Enjoyed this episode? Connect with Samuel on Twitter and let him know, or subscribe for future episodes of Happy Customers.

What makes for a great customer experience? And how can you be intentional about making every touchpoint amazing when there is so much happening and so many fires to tend to at a growing startup?

Should you try to automate everything and create "scalable" self-serve experiences? Or is a more human-led approach to making customers successful more effective?

Today’s guest is Con Cirillo, Head of Customer Experience at Carro. In this episode you’ll hear how he:

• Defines metrics to align the business on CX
• Ensures everyone hears the Voice of the Customer
• Strategically puts humans in the loop for high-risk actions
• Applies learnings from scale at HubSpot to startup life at Carro
• Prioritizes his time on the highest impact experience challenges

Enjoyed this episode? Connect with Con on LinkedIn and let him know, or subscribe for future episodes of Happy Customers.

In software we love to think in terms of scale and building once and selling forever, but there’s often a gap between what software can do and the outcomes customers actually want to achieve.

Effective customer onboarding can help bridge that gap, ensure customers see value, and are set up for ongoing success.

Today’s guest is Donna Weber, author of the best selling book "Onboarding Matters". In this episode you’ll hear how she:

• Defines customer onboarding
• Uses a success plan as the basis for aligned onboarding
• Addresses onboarding misconceptions and common red flags
• Thinks about overcoming sticking points in the onboarding journey
• Recommends companies go about scaling their onboarding programs

Additional onboarding resources from Donna:

• What is Orchestrated Onboarding and Why You Should Care
• Onboarding ≠ Implementation
• Whoever Understands The Customer Best Wins

Enjoyed this episode? Connect with Donna on LinkedIn and let her know, or subscribe for future episodes of Happy Customers.

How do you become a customer centric company?

That’s the question that so many companies are asking themselves right now because the truth is it’s really, really hard.

I've been asking CS leaders what it takes in practice to become a company that genuinely cares about making customers successful. And there’s one thread that keeps being pulled. Companies that make customers successful have a strong culture that puts them at the center of everything they do.

Today’s guest is Ellie Hutton, Director of Customer Success at Dooly. In this episode you’ll hear how she:

• Structures the CS org at Dooly
• Sets goals and metrics for customer success
• Intentionally builds a culture that earns the right to grow
• Avoids internal politics and puts the customer at the center
• Builds practices to help all Dooligans get closer to customers

Enjoyed this episode? Connect with Ellie on LinkedIn and let her know, or subscribe for future episodes of Happy Customers.

Adopting new software is a big business decision for any company. You’re likely investing considerable time, money and effort to get it up and running.

Having a partner that is aligned around your goals and expectations of that investment can be the difference between a prosperous long-term relationship and a spiral into frustration and ultimately an expensive break-up.

Our guest today is Jerry Henry, Director Professional Services and Onboarding at Sendoso. In this episode you’ll hear how he:

• Defines 4 pillars of onboarding at Sendoso
• Empowers his team to get creative helping customers
• Reports on the business impact of onboarding performance
• Maps the journey for customers from closed won to successful
• Ensures a smooth handoff from sales to onboarding for customers

Enjoyed this episode? Connect with Jerry on LinkedIn and let him know, or subscribe for future episodes of Happy Customers.

In a time where software is eating the world and companies are frantically trying to figure out how to grow bigger and scale faster it’s easy to forget that at the core of every business are people like you and me trying their best to help other people.

But people don’t “scale”, so how do you ensure that your customers are still being successful even as the business explodes.

Our guest today is Dan Ennis, Scale Team Manager on the Customer Success team at Monday.com. In this episode you’ll hear how he:

• Prioritizes customer touch points
• Makes reactive customer outreach feel proactive
• Designs experiments to improve customer outcomes
• Uses data to strategically include a human in the loop
• Collaborates with other teams to map the customer journey

Enjoyed this episode? Connect with Dan on LinkedIn and let him know, or subscribe for future episodes of Happy Customers.

Companies that put customer success at the center are playing the game by different rules than those that don’t.

In today’s world of commoditized software and infinite choice, the company that becomes their customer’s trusted advisor is the company that wins.

Our guest today is Maranda Dziekonski, Chief Customer Officer at Swiftly. In this episode you’ll hear how she:

• Pitches customer success to executives
• Structures her customer success team
• Aligns the company to customer outcomes
• Builds a proactive customer success practice
• Thinks about hiring and leveraging technology to scale

Enjoyed this episode? Connect with Maranda on LinkedIn and let her know, or subscribe for future episodes of Happy Customers.