CS100 Speaker Preview: Ursula Llabres – Building Customer Success at Scale
Building customer success at scale starts with a vision, not headcount. Ursula Llabres on using content, community, and tech to serve every segment well.
TL;DR
- Ursula Llabres says building customer success at scale should start with a vision of the ideal customer experience, not be treated as a separate, later-stage problem.
- Scaling CS means leveraging channels like email, communities, social, and webinars to deliver content and self-serve experiences to many customers at once.
- Customer success at scale benefits enterprise accounts too, since content, community, and programs create multiple meaningful touchpoints across a large organization's divisions.
Ursula Llabres, VP Customer Success at InsideSales.com was recently announced as a speaker at the upcoming CS100 Summit, the premiere conference for customer success executives and leaders.
The CS100 Summit will take place September 13-15, 2016 at the St. Regis Hotel in Park City, Utah and will attract 100 customer success executives traveling in from across the world for an exclusive 3-day learning event. Customer success executives, leaders, and innovators will come together to focus on ideation, strategies, and real-world applications of customer success.
Ursula brings with her a fun and addicting energy centered around making a company human by centering the focus on all things customer success. At the CS100 Summit, Ursula will share from her incredible experience, but in advance, we want to give our attendees a sneak peek into just a few things she’ll discuss:
Why Customer Success at Scale Should Always Start With a Vision
According to Ursula, designing what the customer experience should look like begins with envisioning the ideal experience. Questions like “What does it look like?” “When should it start?” “How should we engage with our customers?” should all be questions executives and CSMs should start to seek out for their own organizations.
She went on to explain that, “The ‘how’ is the beginning of how you’re going to design your customer success program. All too often, customer success leaders think about scale in separate terms, but it’s important to start thinking about scale even at the start of the journey.”
The creativity of customer success comes when data, strategy, and operations all blend together. Customer success leaders should be thinking about how to deliver an incredible customer experience at scale in a way that they can leverage incredible technologies like email, communities, social, webinars, etc as channels to deliver the messages and content to many people. *“Content becomes king,” explained Ursula. “Content can be produced by the community itself, and individuals can self-serve based on where they are in the journey.” *
When designing a customer success program that scales, the concept doesn’t just apply to small companies, but really benefits the enterprise as well. Often times a large enterprise client will have a dedicated CSM assigned to their account, but that enterprise has many divisions. Your content, community and programs come into play in this scenario to create multiple, meaningful touch points across an entire organization - no matter how large.
Start Thinking About THIS Before the CS100 Summit
Ursula urges attendees to come prepared with where they are at in their journey, whether as a CSM or as a leader designing a customer journey from the beginning stages. “What are your company objectives?” “How are you measuring what success will look like as an organization?” “Where is your company at in the process of delivering on this?” Based on the answer to that, Ursula recommends attendees of the CS100 Summit come with questions they’d like to answer. “Knowing what you want to learn determines your compass,” explained Ursula. “The best thing that comes from these types of events is meeting people and learning their stories and unique points of view. The more that you prepare, the more you’ll get out of it.”
3 Things To Remember About “Customer Success at Scale”:
- “Customer Success at Scale” is about being nimble, flexible, creative and economical in designing and delivering customer success services for ALL your customer segments. Technology and customer success operations play an important role - more than other traditional Customer Success Manager (CSM) models.
- The ideal design of a customer success program that scales should consider catering to multiple segments of customers. Programs serve to help the smallest deployments in a cost effective way as much as large enterprise accounts to help make onboarding and driving adoption an agile experience.
- Your customer success program at scale should align to the guiding principles of your customer success philosophy and should clearly communicate its benefit to customers. It’s one single customer success journey delivered in a programmatic and scalable way, not different journeys that in turn create inconsistent experiences.
Customer Success Matters to Ursula Because...
Ursula is of the philosophy that customer success is a company philosophy - not a specific department’s responsibility.
“Focusing on the customer helps me directly create value for company and customer alike,” explained Ursula. “If customers are successful using the tool and getting value from the experience, then automatically the company I work for also experiences value which could come in the form of ratings and reviews, advocates, expanded revenue, and success in general. Customer success is a journey and it’s a challenge. It joins so many areas of the organization from product to marketing to sales to operations to finance and beyond, and gives visibility into departments that usually don’t have access to the customer. Customer success lets you bring the voice of the customer to those teams and makes the company human and creates a sense of focus.”
Interested in attending the CS100 Summit and hearing from Ursula along with many others firsthand? Don’t miss out! Register to attend today: http://cs100.clientsuccess.com/
Frequently Asked Questions
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