Customer Success as a Culture — Why the Importance of Customer Success is Immersed in the Fabric of Act-On
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 on what they’ve learned by actually going through the process of scaling customer success teams.
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 highlight one of the customer success leaders and will share some of their key learnings with you. This week, you’ll learn from Andrew Wise, Head of Customer Success, Europe at Act-On. Let’s get started:
About Act-On
Act-On’s platform empowers organizations to engage with buyers across the entire lead-to-revenue process. And they’ve done it in a way that offers simplicity and ease-of-use for the marketer. They’ve built a platform that gives small and medium-sized organizations all the value of marketing automation – without the unnecessary complexity of big enterprise systems. Their platform offers robust core functionality at the heart of an open marketing technology ecosystem.
How important is past experience when hiring?
Building a successful team in Europe has proven to be more challenging for Andrew and the Act-On team as Customer Success as a function is just getting its start and isn’t a common role or department just yet.
“In my opinion past experience is good, but for us [in EMEA] it’s a challenge finding people with marketing automation experience due to its early infancy in Europe,” explained Andrew. “That’s why it’s key to think outside the box and find people who can adapt and learn quickly.”
What are some interview questions you like to ask?
In order to find the right individuals for the Act-On EMEA team, Andrew has developed several questions that help him to identify high potential candidates, some of which include:
- Why customer success? What interests you about this role?
- Describe a situation where you helped to exceed customer expectations?
- Why should we hire you as a CSM?
- What is your greatest strength?
- What is your greatest weakness?
- Describe a situation where a customer has put you under pressure and has an urgent issue they need help resolving. How did you handle this?
How does your customer success team get support from the entire company?
Culture is important to Act-On, and it’s always ingrained in the team that they should collaborate not only within their own office in the UK and across EMEA, but with the entire company. “We have a strong eco-system and good communication between departments,” said Andrew. “We hold regular ‘all hands meetings’ to ensure employees are up to speed with developments and changes within the organization as well as additional training and support from other teams and departments.”
Read Andrew’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 Andrew.
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.