Earlier this month I attended a 2-day Customer Success conference – “Pulse Europe”. I had participated in the inaugural European conference in 2015 and found it to be very informative on the evolving industry and how I could further enhance the Datalex approach to Customer success.
Customer Success is reshaping the business landscape globally. It provides a sustainable path forward for recurring revenue companies to grow predictably over the long-term. It completely upends the conventional wisdom on how your business should interact with clients.
Pulse Europe is the largest Customer Success event in Europe and took place in the heart of London on the 30th of November and 1st of December.
http://www.gainsight.com/pulse/europe/
My key take-aways from the 2016 conference were:
1. The focus for Customer Success has very much changed to value and business outcomes for customers and this is being reflected in customer success strategies where Time-To-Value (TTV) is a key metric.
2. To help achieve 1 above, companies focused on customer success must have data analytics to quantify value being delivered to customers.
3. Customer success started in subscription software businesses but has now extended to a wider range, for example, A Keynote was delivered by Shannon Hyson, Financial times in the media space.
In particular, points one and two resonated with me most, as these are areas we are currently focused on for Datalex customers.
We discussed a wide variety of topics during the session including the importance of culture in global teams, hiring strategies, and how to make team members feel like they are part of a family irrespective of their location and proximity to company HQ. These challenges are extremely relevant to Datalex as we are a truly global company with customers and operations spread across the globe. Some of the activities we use to overcome these challenges revolve around the core theme of the session "no matter how sophisticated communication technology becomes, there will never be a substitute for face-to-face human interaction". These include:
- Company wide World Cafe (Team members create new points of view through dialogue and discussion and pool their information)
- Team building and get togethers in HQ (at least) once per quarter.
- Regular 1-1 meetings
In addition to this, the core of our Hiring strategy for customer success is to recruit world class talent close to our customers ensuring they are immersed in local culture, language and with strong personal networks.
The Datalex Customer Success mission is to ensure our Customers are as successful as they can be through our Product, our People and Trusted Partnership.
Ultimately, everyone in Datalex contributes to Customer Success.
https://www.datalex.com/customers/
John Shields
Global Head of Customer Success, Datalex