Can you tell us a bit about your background? Where do you work? What’s your role? And how long have you been in the Industry?
I’m a Customer Success leader and advisor in the space of midsized Tech startups. My most recent role is of VP Customer Success at Namogoo. My career path started in Sales, turned Account Manager as I realized my passion is for longer term relationships, and evolved into Customer Success as I started leveraging people-skills with a strong technical understanding to generate value out of technology. I’ve been in the industry for 10+ years, during which I had the opportunity to build and scale both enterprise-oriented high touch models, as well as SMB low/digital touch ones, which I really enjoy. Happy to share my experience out of the several market offering I had the privilege to build CS programs for.
Let’s dive in, tell us how you go about driving engagement in your software?
Regardless of software, it all starts and ends with value realization. Recoding the key reason a customer signs up with a platform and what impact they are looking to drive for their business allows us to focus the onboarding attention on making sure first value is attained very quickly and as expected. Once first value is established it generates the right amount of rationale, motivation and momentum for the user to continuously engage with the platform to increase that output long after onboarding. To that end, we apply specifically outlined and measurable Success Plans which are baked into a client journey tracker to signal for CSMs when a client goes astray as well as trigger automatic flows to reengage. Lastly, golden nuggets “How-To”s relevant to clients’ goals are periodically shared to eliminate any training or enablement gaps.
How do you think an organization can encourage a knowledge sharing culture?
Mainly by empowerment. Celebrate your champions and power users, put them in the front and provide them the platform to show off their contribution to the collaboration’s growth. Develop a Train-The-Trainer model to generate partners out of your key users. Empowerment also means self-sufficiency - it’s critical knowledge and training materials aren’t gated and are readily available for these users to rely on.
What are the top 3 things that you would like to see being impacted by a software enablement methodology/platform?
Higher CSM:Customer ratio – CSMs can cater to more having these educational touchpoints streamlined.
Data-Driven Enablement – less free form training sessions. More structured segments of verbal and written enablement sessions readily available at any time which by we can deduce what drives the right actions in our platform to continuously refine it.
Accelerating time to value – removing dependency of timetables scheduling for CSM and client and allowing the customer to attain value quicker by becoming more self-sufficient.
What measurements and KPIs do you use today to define your Software Engagement goals?
Log-in cadence per persona– not only amount of logins but actually which users are logging in (champion/decision maker/user etc..)
Number of actions per session – given the product also provides analytical value we look for clients who are acting on insights within the platform.
Performing a key action – there are certain actions that we happen to know drive critical value in the product.
Personal Question to close the talk. Since we know sharing the Knowhow is a team effort and we are big sports fans. What is your most memorable team sports moment?
Not a huge sports fanatic but a moment I recall is Maccabi’s sixth win in 2014. After completely losing their lead (and practically the game) the team pulled through in overtime and closed an 11 points gap, winning back a game all thought they’d already lost.
If someone wants to connect with you, what’s the best way to do it? Social/Email etc?
I’m most reachable on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maor-ben-ishay
