There’s something called a “delivery gap,” in which most companies believe they’re giving customers a great experience, when in fact, they’re not.
A survey by Bain & Company confirmed that 80 percent of surveyed companies believed they delivered superior experiences, while only 8 percent of their customers felt the same. This disconnect highlights the obvious: Many companies do not truly understand their customers.
In order for businesses to deepen their relationships with customers and truly exceed their expectations, they need to prioritize customer focus, or, the practice of truly putting customers’ needs first. Yet, this isn’t always easy to do. Because clients’ strategies are constantly evolving, customer success teams must remain nimble and agile when crafting customer-focused strategies.
For some CS teams, focusing on macro-level goals is key to helping clients succeed. For others, data analysis and cross-functional teams are essential to unlocking the specifics of an organization’s consumer base.
Regardless of the approach a company takes to customer focus, the end goal is the same: to continually evolve alongside clients so that the product meets — and hopefully exceeds — their expectations.
Built In NYC recently caught up with four local tech leaders to learn about the approaches their companies take to improve customer focus.
For marketers, delivering synchronized customer experiences can be challenging. Dynamic Yield wants to change that. Their platform enables brands to build customer segments in real time, which can be used for personalization, recommendations, automatic optimization and one-to-one messaging.
Director of Customer Success Ben Malki shared how his team supports clients’ needs and goals by focusing on the macro-level needs of the market.
You can’t improve customer focus without understanding customers’ needs. What is your most powerful tool or process for listening to customers and identifying areas for improving customer focus?
We partner with brands of all sizes and industries, but we organize all customers around the same concept of “programs, not projects.” Programs are designed for the long-term: they are a collection of tactics that are woven together. Projects, on the other hand, are strictly tactical and serve the short-term. Therefore, one of the main goals of our customer success organization is to instill a “program” state of mind. We push clients to think more strategically about their experiences and ask questions about whether an idea has a clear objective, how they plan to measure success, what insights are meant to be extracted, how an experience ties back to their personalization program, and so forth.
A lot goes into our onboarding and planning processes, and encouraging our clients to build sustainable frameworks for their programs is one way we are able to keep track of their needs and goals. To this end, we use Asana to support and track projects, but we continue to make sure we still focus on macro-level goals that align with our clients’ desired business impact. These goals are things we are constantly working toward, and the projects and tactics we employ along the way should always ladder up and support these macro goals.
What role does data play in your customer focus strategy? Tell us about a time when data helped your team improve customer focus.
As an experience optimization platform built to help organizations craft stellar consumer experiences, Dynamic Yield is devoutly data-led. This is true on a global and segment level. We work across our client base to employ a personalization framework that shifts the concept of strategy from something that is brand-centric to one that is truly customer-centric, and data serves as our guiding principle when implementing this switch. Our team members put together business impact emails and quarterly business reviews for every client to showcase their program’s performance and progress, outlining clear reporting based on data pulled from Tableau and insights gleaned from the reporting capabilities built into the Dynamic Yield platform. This allows us to continually showcase the value of testing and personalization, validate hypotheses, glean valuable learnings from unexpected outcomes and learn more about our customers’ unique situations and opportunities so we can support them better.
One of the main goals of our customer success organization is to instill a “program” state of mind.”
Customer success managers are on the front lines of customer communication and interaction. How do you collaborate with other departments to ensure the voice of the customer is represented?
Dynamic Yield is very much structured around the well-being and success of the programs we are building with clients. Our executive team, backed by years of experience working with leading brands, understands the macro-level needs of today’s market, which is not only essential to crafting our vision, but also for meeting expectations in a rapidly evolving technology landscape.
We are also fortunate to work in an empowering environment with little bureaucracy to tiptoe around. Departments constantly work alongside one another, collaborating to ensure best practices are instilled and that we’re constantly refining the way we work. And we’re able to do so because of how much we communicate with one another and with our customers.
Our community site, a forum for Dynamic Yield customers, includes the ability to submit feature requests. Product and research and development teams regularly join customer calls to ensure our product roadmap serves the needs of more than 350 customers. Support teams monitor and analyze incoming tickets, so we can optimize certain functionalities and make the platform easier to work with every day. Our strategy team, which works closely with customers on an individual level, incorporates the insights learned working alongside teams back into both our customer success and professional service offerings. And sales and marketing then integrate the true voice of the customer within the buying process, sharing the knowledge learned along the way with the rest of the industry and therefore allowing us to attract new and innovative brands and turn them into happy customers.
Justworks is on a mission “to help entrepreneurs and businesses grow with confidence.” The company’s platform grants businesses access to benefits, automated payroll, compliance support and HR.
Senior Vice President of Sales and Customer Success Robert Lopez told us how data plays a large role in their customer success strategy and why they decided to create a product support specialist role.
What is your most powerful tool or process for listening to customers and identifying areas for improving customer focus?
We have implemented a variety of tools and processes at Justworks over the years. One meeting that the team really enjoys and helps us orient around the customer is our weekly “strive for excellence” debrief. In this meeting, the team reviews a recent customer call and gives their team members feedback around what worked, what didn’t and how they can improve. We use it to collaborate and calibrate to ensure all managers are on the same page with what our customer focus should be. This helps drive alignment across the team in order to understand how to best handle nuanced customer questions.
What role does data play in your customer focus strategy? Tell us about a time when data helped your team improve customer focus.
Data is a cornerstone of how we operate. While numbers don’t always tell the entire story, we find them incredibly useful in order to understand historical trends and help build forecasting models. Just recently, we noticed that our team felt quite underwater, and we dug in to understand what was driving the issue. After digging into the data to understand some of the root causes, we learned that it was not solely a volume issue but that questions had become much more complex due to recent legislation around COVID-19 such as the CARES Act and Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Understanding this can help guide our training program and lets us know to guide the team efficiently when things become more complicated.
Data is a cornerstone of how we operate.”
How do you collaborate with other departments to ensure the voice of the customer is represented?
Early on at Justworks, we realized we needed an extremely tight feedback loop between CS and our product and engineering organizations due to the constant customer feedback we receive. We decided to move a member of our CS team to be a product support specialist (PSS). Still sitting under the CS organization, this person shifted away from being a customer-facing agent and became a more embedded member of the product team by taking part in weekly meetings, design sprints, user testing and customer research. The team member now acts as a bridge between product and customer success, enabling them to get a deep understanding of product development and lead prioritization at Justworks. This has given the CS team and broader company confidence that we are surfacing the right issues at the right time by ensuring that our customers always have a strong voice as we evolve the product.
VTS aims to make life easier for commercial landlords and brokers. Their leasing and asset management platform centralizes critical data and workflows in one place, thus enabling real estate professionals to focus on attracting, converting and retaining tenants.
Data Product Manager Julie Walsh talked about the company’s commitment to evolving alongside their customers and how cross-collaboration has fueled their success.
What is your most powerful tool or process for listening to customers and identifying areas for improving customer focus?
Our culture is our most powerful tool for improving customer focus; it’s in our DNA. The company is committed to making our customers smarter and faster. The reality is, our customers' needs are changing constantly and we are proactively working to solve their biggest pain points every day. Our commitment to constantly learning, innovating and iterating gives us the ability to stay ahead.
What role does data play in your customer focus strategy?
Data is everything. We are bold in our actions and hold ourselves and our clients accountable for the results. Quantifying everything we do allows us to learn quickly from failures, celebrate wins and continuously improve outcomes.
There is a constant feedback loop between our internal teams and our clients.”
How do you collaborate with other departments to ensure the voice of the customer is represented?
At VTS, we operate as one team with a shared customer-centric mission. There is a constant feedback loop between our internal teams and our clients, and we never stop seeking opportunities to learn and share new insights. Our cross-functional collaboration and unity is the key to our success.
