Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to the Table Service podcast where we'll dish on all things support, success and beyond with the people and companies building the future of customer experience. I'm your host, Jordan Hooker and I'm excited to introduce you to today's guest, veteran customer success leader Lara Barnes. Laura was recently awarded the outstanding Woman in Customer Success award and I'm excited to hear from her wide ranging experience. Laura, welcome to the table.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Thanks, I appreciate you having me.
[00:00:30] Speaker A: Well, I'd love to start just for any of our listeners who are not familiar with you and your background or your LinkedIn videos which are just incredibly valuable. We'd love to hear just a little bit about your background and experience in customer success and customer experience.
[00:00:47] Speaker B: Sure. So, past seven years I've been in a company. I built everything from scratch from the customer success and renewals team to putting in all of the processes and systems globally as well as helping build the team and rolling out a full coverage model for 3,000 customers and running renewals across 460 million. And previous to that I was Oracle Marketing cloud running Europe on the B2C side with multiple acquisitions at the time. Also previous to that I was at Microsoft, Facebook, Orange, many other businesses. In order to really my role has always been very revenue focused, but very much around servicing those customers and getting them to get the best out of the technology that they have purchased.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: Well, I'm excited for our conversation today because I know from that experience you've seen the wide ranging landscape of pre customer success is a particular discipline to now where companies are really struggling to figure out what it looks like to have their revenue operations organization and what it looks like for customer success to be a driver of incredible value. So let's hop right in. I think one of the biggest challenges for customer experience organizations is siloing and how fragmented the customer experience management organizations are.
Why do you think this is and what do you think companies can do to combat this challenge within their organization?
[00:02:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, you know what we're really experiencing at the moment is there's a pressure on the customer success industry.
We're seeing customer numbers around, net retention dropping.
We're also seeing that customers are not getting value in. It's much, much easier over the past couple of years to really switch because most companies have actually gone to cloud solutions so it's very easy for them to unplug and plug in somewhere else. And also I believe that customers are really expecting more. When I was going out and seeing these customers and I've been in customer success in SaaS for the past 15 years, it comes down to customers are expecting more. It's not just about buying some technology and plugging it in and hoping for the best anymore. They're expecting the outcomes from whatever they have bought and it's the way it should be.
And I believe that the retention of those customers is absolutely tied to them getting value if they're not getting value. And many, many companies over the past few years since COVID have really been assessing their tech stack and looking at what they're actually using. They haven't got the ability to just buy lots and lots of tech anymore. There is a consolidation and they're under pressure, margin pressure. And so they're looking at what is valuable and how and how do they use it and what is it actually bringing to them in terms of outcomes for their own customers. And that's what they're ultimately trying to the puzzle and the problem there is they're actually ultimately trying to solve.
[00:04:05] Speaker A: Absolutely. And do you think customers are generally getting the value that they expect from the myriad of SaaS options available to them on the market, or do you think that most companies are failing to deliver that value?
[00:04:18] Speaker B: So are they getting value? I believe that companies really try the CS teams, the professional services teams, the support teams. They are really trying hard and to help these customers. But it really depends on a number of things. Setting the right expectations right from the beginning. It's not just about going in and selling and meeting your own sales target and selling to these companies anymore. It's about understanding what those customers really need to achieve and following through that process to that value outcome. That onboarding and implementation I can't emphasize enough is so important to a relationship. It's a make or break really.
And the measurement of that success along that whole journey needs to be joined up. And I think your previous question was what's really happening? And it's because we're so siloed. I think as organizations, you set up a product team, a marketing team, then it goes into pre sales and solutions engineering potentially, and then you've got your sales team and then you traditionally have your customer success team. If you're lucky enough where you might have account managers, you then have a support team, a professional services team. If you're doing in house professional services and supporting those customers through their journey, you have a knowledge and learning team, maybe even a renewal team, finance team. They're all traditionally set up, but what nobody's really stitching together is that whole end to end, that customer journey all the way across from you know, the awareness demand, the purchase, the consumption and the renewal, they're not joining all of those dots up. And I think that's what is really holding back so many of these SaaS businesses and what really should be changing and how they do that is by looking at the revenue operations, like you said, the data, what is each of those stages along that journey, what's actually happening? And I think the ability for companies to be scalable, to be sustainable, it really, really comes down to utilizing the systems that you already have in. You spend a lot of money as a company putting in a system like Salesforce or ServiceNow or, you know, Netsuite and you might have Game Site or another CS platform, you might even have a professional services platform as well. How do all of these systems talk to each majority of the time they don't. And so you spend a lot of money on a sales platform that then doesn't talk to your customer success platform or your licensing platform, or, you know, your finance platform. You're not actually stitching together everything across the business and you're not seeing those moments that matter in a journey from you sell a piece of software through to you implement it and what all the pitfalls were in implementation. Potentially you might be doing it with a partner, you might be doing it internally. Are you actually meeting the beginning goals? What were the goals right at the beginning? And are you actually meeting those goals for implementation and onboarding and, you know, how are you driving the customer to adoption? Because if they don't adopt it, they're not going to renew it. And the CFO at that business is going to be looking for return on investment. And how are you showing that return on investment?
So there's all these things when running reoccurring revenue models, you really need to understand how all of those touch points are affecting the customer or benefiting the customer. And there are so many other ways of looking at it. I'd really started to look at in my previous job, we'd been doing a lot of the stitching together and it took time, but we did it and we really started to see a 360 of our customers. But the most important area that we really started to delve into and saw risk and opportunity was in overlaying behavioral data. So sixth sense data to understand how and what your customers are out there looking at. Are they looking at your competitors? And you shouldn't be feeding your competitors and giving them that opportunity. You should be all over those customers to ensure that you retain them. Because within SaaS, it takes such a lot to acquire those customers in the first place. The retention and the growth of those customers is so important and there's obviously an opportunity cost to that too. If you lose a customer, it's the lack of you're not going to get that growth, certainly not going to have that as an advocate. And you're also feeding your competitor.
So there's, you know, many, many factors for losing a customer and it's never really ever straightforward. But those are the things that understanding risk and opportunity and looking at sentiment data as well. You know, if you've got there's some very cool AI technology out there at the moment around sentiment and tying up the internal systems that you're using, whether it's your email or, you know, your slack channels or your shared areas with customers and how you're engaging with those customers, you can, that AI capability can take on that sentiment and give you scores. You can overlay that with all of your engagement data with that customer and it can build out a really strong health score to flag up which customers you should be prioritizing. That could be risky.
So there's so much happening within these businesses that I just don't think there is enough focus from a stitching together of data across all of your customers that could really start to unlock and drive such incredible insights.
Lots of companies do nps.
How many companies actually take that NPS to an nth degree in terms of going back in to each of those departments and making changes and holding those teams accountable?
Majority of companies use an NPS as a metric to score themselves. But really the most important is how you align the data across your whole customer experience and drive those outcomes for those customers.
[00:10:52] Speaker A: Absolutely. Closing the loop. Definitely one of the things that I've seen most companies either struggle to do or just choose not to do because as you mentioned, they're more interested in scoring themselves than they are actually using that feedback to improve the organization.
Drilling in just a little bit to those thoughts, what do you think that companies should do to measure their particular customer facing teams to be able to see if they are driving to these better methods of retaining and growing customers?
[00:11:25] Speaker B: Well, I think it's impossible to deliver a superior customer experience when the entire revenue cycle is made up of disconnected processes, policies and procedures. So I think by aligning those different areas, it's really one of the things that businesses should be considering. But also what should they be measured on?
That was your question, wasn't it? Yeah. So absolutely it's around understanding what those customers are trying to really achieve, and the ability for that to be then put into a form of success plan that everyone is held accountable for across that team, I think is really, really important. And that team, I mean, is the salesperson, so the ae, the customer success person, potentially professional services and support. And there would be hubs of people around each of these customers. You know, one of the areas that I think they really should be focused in on. Every team has different metrics, but what businesses should be considering is that one overarching customer metric that everybody measured on, and that could be like customer lifetime value. So if you're measuring everybody on one customer metric, everyone starts to align to that. But I think it's not just about putting in one metric across the whole business. It's a bit like nps. It means nothing unless you're held accountable for it. So it's, how do you set the cadence and rhythm of the business to be really focused on customer experience and measurement of that? And how do you hold people accountable at those moments that matter, or identification of those moments where a customer is not experiencing something as well as they should be? How do you react fast in order for that situation to be turned around? And that comes down to processes and data and systems, right?
[00:13:39] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:13:41] Speaker B: And so I think aligning everyone to that kind of customer lifetime value is really important. And then it really starts to show each of those teams how and what is important to the business moving forward. It'll take a good 12 to 18 months for everyone to really kind of align to that and change those operating systems. But if you can use data in a way that helps those teams react faster and meet their targets faster, as well as, you know, meet the customer, it would be so much better as a way of operating, because I think we get so lost in the silos and the roles and responsibilities do bleed between the teams, and you can have that bleed. But there really does need to be a fundamental, you know, accountability and responsibility for certain teams in how and what they do to measure that customer's experience.
[00:14:40] Speaker A: Say a company wanted to shift their strategy towards a strategy like you have described to drive greater customer value, to drive better cohesion across the organization, better quality of work amongst their team, and collaboration. What do you think a company should do and what consideration should they have to begin that process?
[00:15:03] Speaker B: I think it should come from the CEO, to be honest, it needs to be very much focused on a CEO mandate of how customer experience is going to be measured from now on in. But I think the ability to break down those silos, the accountability and also the data driven insights is really important. But I think it comes down to helping companies be more prescriptive and systematic in their approach across the sales team and then how and what the CS team does and the professional services team, I think it's the prescriptive cadence that would help align across those processes and systems to ensure that you've got. It has to be simple, it can't be, it can't be too difficult and it needs to be very simplistic. But as long as it's a procedure that is like a machine and you're basically running that machine, I think that is how it should operate. And I think that, you know, unifying like commercial operations is really important. So when you think about that traditional silo, there's silos of teams.
You've got your marketing operations team that's looking at customer stuff. They might be looking at advocacy or references, they might be looking at prospects. And then you've got a sales operations team who are looking at how and what the sales team are doing and how they're operating internally. They might even be looking at market information too. Then you've got, you know, maybe you've got an analytics team or a business intelligence team. They're doing their work across the data. And then you've got a product ops team that's looking at how the operations of the product is.
Maybe they're looking at the profitability of certain products or they're monitoring the usage of certain products. And then you've got a customer operations team having one team that looks at the overall customer end to end to help drive those insights in. How those teams then stitch themselves together is how I think it should be done.
[00:17:23] Speaker A: Absolutely.
Well, as we wrap up our conversation here, we'd love to take another minute or so for any other thoughts you'd like to share with us that you think are important for our listeners.
[00:17:34] Speaker B: I think it's really important to consider the simplistic side to what a customer is really after. And they choose your technology because you meet an objective.
It's the responsibility of the vendor to make sure the customer meets those objectives.
And it sounds so simple, but it's so difficult because there are so many stages and parts of the lifecycle these customers go through and things change with that customer too. And it's about working out how you adapt with that customer in order to retain and help that customer achieve their outcomes. And ultimately it's about working out how you help that customer moving forward and that grows the business overall.
Last and final thought, well, thanks so.
[00:18:26] Speaker A: Much for joining us today. If somebody wanted to connect with you or hear more insight from you, where would be the best place for them to do that?
[00:18:34] Speaker B: Yeah, you can catch me on LinkedIn, Lara Barnes, you'll find me. There's plenty of videos there that I've been doing over the summer to give some further insights into how and what customer success teams should be focused on and a lot more thoughts on how companies should be looking at structuring in order to meet the customer requirements and needs.
[00:18:57] Speaker A: Make sure to link that in the show notes as well for easy way for our listeners to get there. Well, Laura, thanks so much for joining us here today at the Table. Really appreciate the time and your insights.
[00:19:07] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you.
[00:19:08] Speaker A: Thanks to our guest, Laura Barnes for joining us today. You can find out more about Laura by checking out her LinkedIn, which you'll find below in the show notes. You've been listening to the Table Service podcast hosted by Jordan Hooker, presented by Tableau Consulting, music by Epidemic Sound.
