What is onboarding? It’s the process of getting someone up to speed so they can be as effective as possible and achieve success. And you usually want that to happen as quickly as possible. The term can refer to new hires for your own company (employee onboarding). But for most SaaS products, we use
All posts in customer success
I talk a lot about customer success here, and that will likely only increase over time. It’s what I focus on every day, after all. If you're new to the “field” or are curious of what it entails, this guide from Lincoln Murphy is a great place to start. It’s a longer piece of writing and covers his definition of customer success, several tangential thoughts about what it is and isn’t, then he gets to the practical. The end of the guide is broken into a list that covers “the role of customer succ…
For those who start in support in the web or software world, how do you move on to something different?
Ian Golding takes the time to discuss the differences between the definitions of several approaches regarding customers. He uses customer experience, customer service, and customer-centric. It’s a good article on the subject and it culminates in his definition of a customer-centric organization: > Putting customer focus at the heart of everything you do, in order to achieve customer satisfaction and loyalty I’d agree, and it’s essentially how I would define customer success. When customer succe…
There has been no greater exercise to improve my writing than to write a series of onboarding emails. I’ve done this at InVision and Wildbit and am so thankful for the experience.
This post from Intercom is a little older (although you may not know it, seeing as they’ve removed dates from their posts), but highlights a lot of foundational concepts for someone focused on customer success. > One of the fundamental challenges of teaching is the fact that not every student learns in the same way or at the same pace. There are not many things I enjoy more than coming up with a high level plan to educate customers and make them successful. But it’s easy to read a post like th…
The HBR gives an interesting look into the changing landscape of pro-customer successeting (my own term coined as marketing, customer service, and product management slowly morph into an amorphous blob of goo before our very eyes). It gives fascinating insight into how successful companies are putting value, and therefore money, into the customer journey. As a customer success professional, I can’t help but admire the scale and finesse achieved by Sungevity (a solar panel retailer) as describe…
Customer success is about just that: your customer. So what does it look like on a day to day basis?