Customer SuccessCon Europe 2015

The research of the Customer Success Standards Initiative has only begun to probe the extent of what CSM teams are currently doing across the breadth of the industry, but even the preliminary findings offer insights and innovations that could accelerate the progress of your company’s CS program.  Where is the Point of Engagement for a CSM team?  What specific authorities do CS execs hold, and how are they used?  What tools should every CSM team have in place?

The State of The Profession is an overview of what is currently being done in in Customer Success ic the areas of Strategy, Process, People and Technology by CSM groups worldwide.  It begins with a summary of the findings from the CustomerSuccessresearch.com surveys, followed by discussion with a panel of senior CSM experts and general Q&A.

Case Study: Citrix - International Customer Success

Citrix’s client was a large bank located in South Africa with offices in 20 countries across Africa.  The goal of the project was to implement an enterprise mobility management solutions.  Citrix’s Customer Success team was located in Ireland.  How to build a trusted relationship with the channel partner, identify the appropriate key stakeholders and launch the largest product deployment customer history?  It wasn’t easy, but Citrix accomplished the project, and in the process, transformed the Account Manager role into a new status as Implementation Trusted Advisors.

Embedding Customer Success into a start-up or established tech organisation is a challenging task for anyone. By its very nature, it is a team effort to make Customer Success part of an organisation’s DNA.  In this session Peter will talk through how he led a team of talented people through a transformational programme of establishing and improving Customer Success internally and externally. Topics will include Metrics, CSMs, Technology, Customer Success Plans and Segmentation.

Founded in 2007 in Copenhagen, Zendesk now has over 45,000 customers of all types and sizes.  With such a diverse customer base, making customers self sufficient is a vital key to scaling Zendesk's customer success organisation.  In this session, Rav Dhaliwal will share his perspective on what has worked and why in enabling customers to drive their own success.

What could/should the Customer Success profession become in time?  Why?  This provocative peek into a possible future is not something that will ever be handed to you on a platter, it will take careful building and courage in order to make it a reality.  Are you ready for the challenge?

Drawing upon the work to date of The Customer Success Standards Initiative, the session will conclude with another panel discussion and general Q&A.

All across the global Customer Success Community, executives and companies are facing the difficult challenge of building teams and operations that can scale.  Along the way, they are finding that errors in organizational efficiency become increasingly glaring, and costly, as businesses grow. The core of the challenge is data.  Having disparate data sets and teams tracking unrelated metrics affects productivity, collaboration, problem resolution, and most importantly, profitability. It’s like trying to win a relay race when each member of your running team is choosing his or her own routes.

In this session, Bill Hobbs, Totango's Director of Sales, will discuss how:

• Aligning Sales, Success, Pro-Serve/On-boarding, Training and Support towards a customer-first vision
• Translating real-time data into actionable insights
• Maximizing your human resources

can help you to build a foundation for growth that can economically scale the team.

Customer Success leaders are under increasing pressure to keep the level of service their customers expect while scaling massively to serve the needs of even more customers and geographies. And—of course—not breaking the bank …  

In this highly interactive session, Phil Verghis will share how he tackled that challenge, beginning in 1999 with Akamai. Learn some of today’s techniques for scaling customer self-success by getting everyone to improve knowledge every time they interact with it. Then learn the secrets of how some cutting edge Customer Success teams are realizing productivity gains of up to 300% by looking at the customer’s experience across multiple groups in an organization.

The Customer Success vortex continues to exert significant influence on other organizations in the enterprise.  Another way to say it is "Customer Success is eating the enterprise".  As recurring revenue businesses mature, the percentage of bookings/revenue coming from the install base continues to grow and that is shifting company focus from acquisition to retention.  Doing retention well requires both Sales and Marketing to be very tightly aligned with Customer Success and, in many cases, those orgs are becoming part of Customer Success.  Let's talk about it.