Customer Success as a Culture — Why Passion, Experience, and Credentials Are Key for InMoment When Hiring CSMs
Customer success teams have gone through strategic changes and growth over the past few years. This important strategy and business focus drives toward the outcome of retaining and growing your customer base. As you continue to adapt and change your customer success strategies and tactics, remember this key focus—customer success is not a department, it’s a culture.
We are passionate about customer success and it’s positive outcome—building relationships that last™. In our latest eBook, our team at ClientSuccess interviewed 7 customer success leaders at the forefront of these changes. These leaders have incredible advice they’ve learned by actually going through the process and learning firsthand.
Our newest eBook entitled “Customer Success as a Culture: Customer Leaders Edition”, shares best practices focused on the strategic and tactical aspects of building and scaling effective customer success teams. Each week, we’ll highlight one of the customer success leaders and will share some of their key learnings with you. This week, you’ll learn from Todd Williams, Executive Vice President, Worldwide Client Services at InMoment.
Let’s get started:
About InMoment
InMoment is a cloud-based customer experience (CX) optimization platform that gives you the ability to listen to and engage with your customers to improve business results through better experiences. Their products and services include Voice of Customer (VoC), Social Reviews and Advocacy, Employee Engagement, Support, and Consulting. They are the leading VoC vendor for the food services, retail, and contact center industries, with deep domain expertise in B2B, healthcare, hospitality, and numerous others.
What are the qualities you look for in Customer Success candidates at InMoment?
- Passion
- Experience
- Credentials
Todd stresses that the above list is usually in that order. “Passion is important to me as it’s something that can’t be taught or learned,” explained Todd. “Passion and personality is critical to the ability to retain and grow customers in the SaaS environment. Over the past decade, I’ve hired exclusively for customer success teams and been involved in literally hundreds of resumes and interviews”. Todd goes on to say, “The qualities that I am specifically looking for involve the desire to succeed and be part of the dynamic and growing organization. In our fast paced software environment, we desire someone who will jump in and ensure 100% retention of their SaaS customers. This quality is displayed in their passion for life and their past experience. Successful candidates usually have some type of past experience in managing relationships and renewals in the technology space. This experience is key as it helps ensure relationships can be built and maintained which is critical and defines the most important factor of Customer Success. Other credentials, such as schooling, clubs, proficiencies, etc, are less important but still define the candidate as grounded and active in their societies.”
How important is past experience when hiring?
As Todd mentioned in the last question, experience is important to him, but he often looks for passion and personality as a predictor of success first. According to Todd, experience is something that can be taught and trained.
How do you know when to hire more CSMs?
Todd specifically hires based upon two needs: planned or unplanned turnover and corporate growth. Both instances require proper planning and effective execution Todd explains that, “Unfortunately, people lose focus, ability, or effectiveness and must be managed up, managed over, or managed out. I am always interviewing, finding, searching, and comparing outside talent with internal abilities. In this process I am always gauging the effectiveness of the team and what abilities and pay scale are out in the market. I then develop a culture that lifts, grows, and rises current talent. However, oftentimes turnover occurs and I’m ready to pull the trigger on the best talent that we have interviewed in recent weeks.”
How has InMoment built a culture around customer success?
“Within the Client Services department, we are responsible for 91% of the company’s 2017 quota,” said Todd. “This retention is critical to the company’s growth strategies. Being such a critical component to the company’s earnings, and being instrumental in guiding the company’s future allows me to pivot the organization around retention of client revenue.”
Read Todd’s full contribution to the ebook entitled, “Customer Success as a Culture: Customer Success Leaders Edition” and learn from 6 other customer success leaders like Todd.
Download the full “Customer Success as a Culture” eBook collection:
Customer Success as a Culture: Sales Leaders Edition
Customer Success as a Culture: Marketing Leaders Edition
Customer Success as a Culture: Product Leaders Edition
Learn more about how ClientSuccess can help your company develop a strong customer success methodology and strategy with easy-to-use customer success software by requesting a 30-minute demo.