Customer Success as a Culture — How Monetate Uses Its Own Products to Improve the Customer Journey
To succeed with customer success at your organization, it takes incredible alignment and collaboration with the Product team. We interviewed and asked 8 industry leading product leaders their advice on how they put customers first when building new products or working on existing products at their particular companies. Today we’ll highlight Joanna Milliken, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Monetate. In this post, we’ll briefly explore her approach to Customer Success alignment as it relates to the product team at Monetate.
Download a complimentary copy of the ebook “Customer Success as a Culture: Product Leaders Edition” to see Joanna’s full contribution and get access to other product leaders’ viewpoints.
About Monetate
Based in Pennsylvania, Monetate powers multi-channel testing & personalization for brands worldwide. Built for speed, the Monetate Platform’s easy-to-use interface allows marketers to create, test and deploy an unlimited number of personalized digital experiences with limited need for IT or consulting resources. With Monetate, marketing is transformed from a world of discrete campaigns to one of always-on, personalized experiences that maximize the lifetime value of each individual customer.
The Vision of Monetate’s Product Team: “Purchase, Adopt, and Champion”
The vision of the product marketing team at Monetate is to inspire customers to purchase, adopt, and champion the company’s products. In order to bring real value to the customer, Joanna and her team need to understand the customer deeply and make sure they are connecting Monetate’s solutions to their real world problems.
Joanna and her team interact with customers across the entire relationship with Monetate by supporting the sales organization and actively participating in the sales process with prospective customers. “We want to learn all we can about our customers’ motivations and expectations for our company and products, before they buy,” said Joanna. “A straightforward buying process sets the tone for the rest of the customer relationship.” Her team is also involved in post sales where they conduct win/loss interviews to identify opportunities for improvements in positioning, product messaging, and sales process. Finally, her team also spends a lot of time with current customers. “We get their feedback on products before we take them to market, participate in onsite quarterly business reviews, lead road-map webinars, and work 1:1 with customers to develop use cases,” explained Joanna.
The Customer Experiences Drives Everything
“The customer experience drives almost everything we do at Monetate,” said Joanna. “We have a team devoted to gathering and synthesizing input from customer interviews, surveys, online advocacy and community, services requests, and dozens of other inputs. This insight is shared across the company for every department to use in decision-making to ensure the customer is always front and center.”
Monetate recently did an extensive customer study which entailed in-person interviews around the globe, surveys, and input from their Customer Advisory Board. Monetate used that to redesign their Services model. According to Joanna, “Customer feedback indicated that we had an opportunity to provide a clearer understanding of our Services offering, including new packages, so we used that input to deliver a new model that was on target with customer input.” For the product team specifically, Monetate tries to be very “outside in”, which means they prioritize everything from defects to new features based upon customer impact.
Product Roadmap & Customers Are Inseparably Linked
When it comes to product roadmap, Monetate’s Customer Advisory Board is a critical component. Joanna and her team do detailed roadmap reviews every quarter, and, “Feedback from our Customer Advisory Board is weighted slightly differently, especially if they have feedback that we have heard before – we’re more likely to give those items a higher priority,” explained Joanna. “We develop a relationship with our Customer Advisory Board members to get a deeper sense of their problems and the benefits associated.”
When giving advice to other product leaders, Joanna suggests that everyone should “Walk a mile in the customer’s shoes – use your own products and go through the customer journey yourself to understand what works well, what frustrations you encounter, and to better understand requests your customers have for your product and company.”
Read Joanna’s full contribution to the ebook entitled, “Customer Success as a Culture: Product Leaders Edition” and learn from 7 other product leaders like Joanna.
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
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.