According to Salesforce’s 2019 “State of the Connected Customer” report, which surveyed over 8,000 consumers and business buyers worldwide, 84 percent of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.
Despite a thirst for artificial intelligence, data-driven insights and automation, the tech industry still places a high value on relationships, and cultivating these relationships often falls to a company’s customer success team.
This isn’t news to Integral Ad Science (IAS), an adtech company whose technology helps marketers optimize campaigns and ensures their ads don’t appear alongside unsavory content. According to Chelsea Chartrand, director of customer success, her team’s focus is on building strong bonds with their clients through transparency and proactivity.
Chartrand’s team shares the data used in their work with customers and gathers feedback on products and services throughout the year. Instead of sitting in a forgotten file, that feedback directly influences the company’s product development strategy.
“We rolled out a new tool this past year that allows customer success managers to submit feature requests based on client needs and asks directly to the product team,” Chartrand told Built In Chicago. “These requests have been critical to our roadmap planning, and we’ve released more features and offerings in the past year than ever before.”
Marketing has changed dramatically since IAS launched in 2009, with “adtech” and “martech” becoming firmly entrenched in the industry’s lexicon. Customer focus is where companies find their edge now, and Chartrand let Built In Chicago in on how her team cultivates that focus.
You can’t improve customer focus without understanding what it is the customer needs. What is your most powerful tool or process for listening to customers and identifying areas for improving customer focus?
Our customers’ success is our success, so we treat customers’ feedback as a gift and strive to ensure their needs and requests are treated as such. One critical tool that helps us understand customer feedback is our Net Promoter Score. We send clients a survey twice a year, and the scores and feedback they provide help drive change and enable us to better understand where we need to improve our service or offerings.
Our people are also critical to understanding customer feedback. The customer success team serve as trusted advisors to their clients and are encouraged to share any and all feedback so that we can make the necessary changes or improvements our clients are asking for.
Collaboration is key to customer support and success.”
What role does data play in your customer focus strategy? Tell us about a time when data helped your team improve customer focus.
Data drives our decision-making and powers the discussions we have with our customers. Customer success managers use data to set their strategies, priorities, goals and in everyday interactions with customers. As a data-driven company, automation is key, and our customer success team has access to a variety of dashboards in Salesforce and Power BI, along with a proprietary “Customer Success App” that generates reports, graphs and scorecards they can quickly grab and use in conversations with customers. They use this data to assess campaign performance, provide optimization recommendations and analyze trends around volume and opportunities.
Sharing this data with our customers has been instrumental in creating more engagement and improving customer focus, especially this year. Coronavirus has impacted nearly all of our customers, and this data has been crucial to understanding their business needs. Clients look to us to ensure their media is delivered next to brand-safe content, and we continuously leverage data to drive discussions around industry trends and how to focus their media strategy to ensure they stay brand-safe and reach their desired audience in the current news climate.
Customer success managers are on the front lines of customer communication and interaction, but improving customer focus isn’t something CS orgs can do on their own. How do you collaborate with other departments to ensure the voice of the customer is represented? What’s been the key to your success?
Collaboration is key to customer support and success, and we partner with a spectrum of teams to ensure the voice of the customer is represented. We have a close partnership with our sales counterparts, as we work together on new client onboarding and existing client upsell opportunities. Additionally, we work closely with our product team on existing and new product rollouts.
Product adoption is a key customer focus, and when customers provide feedback on our offerings we use it as a tool to improve these solutions. The product team highly values the input of the customer success team as a representation of the customer. We rolled out a new tool this past year that allows customer success managers to submit feature requests based on client needs and asks directly to the product team. These requests have been critical to our roadmap planning, and we’ve released more features and offerings in the past year than ever before.
We also continuously partner with the marketing team to ensure we are providing customers with ongoing product updates, information on upcoming IAS-led webinars, industry POVs and partnership opportunities. This has been instrumental in keeping our clients updated and engaged with IAS and industry-wide updates.
