Last week we had a conversation with Maggie McCarthy, Vice President of Customer Success at Thought Industries, a customer education platform. Maggie's unique background spanning hospitality, product management, and customer success brings a fresh perspective to CX. Here's what we learned:
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Last week we had a conversation with Maggie McCarthy, Vice President of Customer Success at Thought Industries, a customer education platform. Maggie's unique background spanning hospitality, product management, and customer success brings a fresh perspective to CX. Here's what we learned:
Maggie: For me, it's less about the industry and more about solving problems for people. It's about how you continue to iterate and adjust over time. My roles have adjusted over time from customer success to product management to professional services and back to customer success.
Whenever I'm transitioning roles to a new team, the first thing I do in my first 90 days is pretty basic. It's not rocket science. You listen, you get the data, but you make sure that it's actionable data that you can work off of.
Maggie: I did a customer journey exercise last fall when I came into this position. We brought cross-functional resources across the company to map out all the different interaction points that everybody has with a customer. Then we went through and marked what was missing from this board. We put sentiment across those interaction points - do we think it's green, yellow, red? Do the customers perceive it as green, yellow, red?
That helped to start building out the roadmap for what we want to attack. I then took that information and validated it with the customer success managers to ask, "Does this resonate with you? Where are you struggling when you're interacting with customers, and where do we need to put our focus for this year?"
Maggie: Data informs any decision-making that I've done, both as lead of product and lead of customer success. It's very difficult to prioritize and not just listen to the loudest one screaming in your ear. Building out systems to help you rank and prioritize is crucial, both for feature requests, feature feedback, adoption concerns, and balancing that with the fire and the opportunity.
You can fall into the trap of just prioritizing the fires, and that's going to keep you in reactive mode forever. You always have to make sure that there's a prioritization ranking for what's the opportunity that this drives for this customer, for other customers, and for the business.
We've developed a framework for prioritization. We look at customer tier (which is a combination of ACV, customer revenue, and account hierarchy), plus renewal date. The closer we are to the renewal date, the higher it'll rank. The combination of these metrics prioritizes risks higher.
Maggie: The transition from customer experience to product was initially driven by being so close to the customers. I ended up being really close to our product and understanding what we needed to build next for success.
In this role where I've transitioned back to customer success, what that experience brought for me is a lot of empathy on the product side. I know it might sound easy to make a button blue, but it's not always that easy. That's allowed me, when I'm talking to customers, to better project, "I totally understand your frustration. It might not be that simple, and here's maybe why."
It's also helped me make some early key assumptions or ask key questions to gather more requirements. In turn, I work to enable my team to be better CSMs from that perspective. I have them look at it like this: Build out your roadmap, your product is your customer’s success.
Maggie: We can't serve our customer base on a one-to-one basis for every single customer. So we've had to look at initiatives that help us interact with them on a one-to-many scale. We adjusted our customer tiers and consolidated to build account teams. Now I work very closely with our VP of Account Management to make sure that we're allocating as a team so that we can be as efficient as possible with the entirety of the book of business.
We've also implemented things like product roadmap updates that don't need to be done one-to-one with every customer. We have product reporting out monthly on impactful releases, quarterly with roadmap updates, and posting that to our customer community for everybody.
We've had a lot of success with open forum office hours. We extended that to four times a week, allowing customers to get quick questions answered without waiting for their CSM or support.
Maggie: We're building out a new at-risk framework to help us have better visibility into where the paper cuts happen with our customers and how we can react to them. It's a combination of automated playbooks triggered by customer actions or inactions, and CSM-triggered risks.
We have five stages, with everything entering at stage one, which the customer success manager owns. If they get blocked or can't complete it, it moves up through the stages. The further you get through the stages, the more cross-functional resources get assigned to assist with the problem.
Talking to Maggie was a masterclass in how to approach customer success with a product mindset. Here are the key takeaways:
1. Map the customer journey: Start by understanding all customer touchpoints and the sentiment around them.
2. Prioritize based on data: Use a combination of customer value, renewal date, and opportunity to prioritize issues and initiatives.
3. Balance fires and opportunities: Don't just focus on putting out fires - make sure you're also investing in opportunities for growth.
4. Leverage product management: Understanding the product side can help you communicate more effectively with customers and gather better requirements.
5. Scale strategically: Look for ways to serve customers efficiently, like tiered account teams and one-to-many interactions.
6. Manage risk proactively: Implement a framework for identifying and escalating at-risk customers.
By applying these principles, companies can create a more data-driven, strategic approach to customer success. As Maggie put it, "Build out your roadmap correctly, your product is your customer success motion." It's about creating a culture where customer success is seen as a product in itself, requiring the same level of strategic thinking and continuous improvement as any other product.