In the Spring of 2017, Experian Data Quality launched our first Customer Success team under the leadership of Mary Conway. With five members already, the team is off to a strong start. Accounts have begun to be distributed to the Customer Success Managers (CSM) based on varied criteria, CSMs have met with the Account Managers aligned with the accounts, and a survey has gone out to our customers to gauge the current health of our customer relationships.
Four of the five members of the Customer Success Team
There is a great deal of enthusiasm about this team at Experian Data Quality, from senior leadership to the members of the team itself. People have asked what exactly the CSM’s responsibilities are. Customer Success cannot be defined by a checklist and is not a one-size-fits-all practice. Customer Success varies greatly customer to customer. Every customer purchases our products and services for different reasons and since their use cases are different, so are their support issues—all resulting in the fact that their engagements with the Customer Success team will be different. Customer Success is all about the health of the customer. Is the customer fully engaged? Are they finding all the resources they need? What is and what is not working? The result of this ongoing, rapport building strategy should result in a strong, mutually beneficial relationships.
In organizations that have Account Management and Customer Success Teams, it is often asked where their responsibilities differ. In short summary, the Account Manager sells the product and creates long-term and ongoing strategic plans with the customer based on upcoming projects. Here at Experian, the CSMs do not sell; our focus is exclusively on the health of the customer. The CSM is a resource for the customer so that ideally, customer loyalty becomes the base of the relationship. Companies that have both Account Management and CSM teams see the most success when both teams collaborate on a consistent basis regarding the accounts they serve. In many cases, the Account Manager and the Customer Success Manager develop relationships with different contacts: the AM with those who are familiar with the use case and hold purchasing power and the CSM with those who actually use the product. One other thing to note is there is no charge to the customer if they have a CSM assigned to their account. It’s an investment Experian Data Quality makes out of a commitment to our customers’ satisfaction.
As stated in a Forrester article, Customer Success Management Is The Key To Outstanding B2B Customer Experiences, “this new discipline [Customer Success CX] seeks to ensure that the value B2B customers were promised in the pre-sale period is delivered in the post-sale experience”. Similarly, in an article, Tech Go-to-Market: Make Customer Success a Cornerstone of Your Customer Experience Strategy, Gartner claims that, “For greater business impact, technology business unit leaders should use a customer success function as the driver to improve customer experience.” That two of the leading analysts in the data quality space endorse a customer success team indicates how crucial this function can be and how essential it will be for any business trying to keep on the leading edge of the customer experience. Here at Experian Data Quality, we hope to leverage our new customer success team to do just that.
As the CSM Team continues to develop, we will share our successes on this blog periodically. Stay tuned!
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