The Churn360 team had a fun Sunday recently in Bangalore, where they hosted their first informal customer success meetup. It was an evening of networking, knowledge sharing, and delving deep into the different procedures within customer success, their pain points, challenges, and best practices. The catch-up allowed the team to showcase the brand Churn360 and its capabilities and became a part of the customer success community in the region.
Churn360 partnered with CS Mentor, a well-known community founded by customer success expert Ankit Aggarwal, to host the event. CS Mentor, which involves customer success professionals from different parts of the country, specializes in knowledge sharing, networking, and helping people find jobs. The event, which promised an evening of coffee and insightful chats at Bangalore-based resto-bar, was attended by more than 40 customer success professionals from different IT companies.
The ice-breaker session began with CS Mentor organizing a game of Bingo where every circle had a question about customer success. People who got five circles vertically, horizontally, or straight in a row won prizes. That led to a lot of laughs and small chit-chats. The participants were later split into five groups and made to pick chits. Each chit had a topic focussing on the different stages of customer success, including
- Sales to Customer Success Managers Handover
- Product Adoption
- Churn reduction and risk mitigation
- Internal collaboration and discussion
- Upsell and cross-sell opportunity
So, each group had to get into an internal huddle and discuss their chosen topic. Post discussion, one representative from each team had to give a short talk on the common challenges they faced with the particular stage or aspect, its importance, and some best practices people followed or came up with.
It was great because a lot of people came from different industries and backgrounds, so we could bounce a lot of ideas off each other and learn from each other, says Director of Churn360, Suprej Venkat.
“It also gave us insights on the pain points and challenges in the industry and what they ideally require in a customer success platform,” he added.
The team also grabbed the opportunity to create more brand awareness on Churn360 and highlight the value they could derive from it. “Be it any survey you conduct or blogs you read for research, nothing beats a face-to-face discussion with anyone to understand what they really go through,” says a Product Consultant at Churn360, Rakul Vijay. “And our casual meet up got a lot of customer success professionals to really open up, share issues and probably solutions with their peers, giving us feature and enhancement ideas to work on,” he added.
Valuable insights were something the team walked away with in plenty of post-event. “We had many takeaways, including the fact that it is ideal to have a separate team for onboarding the customer and another team to stay with the customer once they have begun using the product,” says Market Analyst Rajasri Nagarajan. “We also realized that it is important for our internal communication to be channelized correctly; for example, the seriousness of the customer’s issue should be communicated down to customer support or engineering team so they handle it as soon as possible or suitably,” adds Manager, Customer Success, Apurva Thrilok.
Other learnings included the importance of a solid “Sales to CS” handover. With Sales team members usually being the face of the company concerning customers, sales must communicate customers’ exact requirements during onboarding. “This way, we don’t have to probe the customer again to get all the details required to develop an onboarding plan. It’s ideal for customer success to create a detailed document that a sales team can fill in before handing over a customer,” says Senior Customer Success Specialist Ram Balasubramaniam.
“We learned the importance of marking and communicating even soft wins with the customer, so they notice some impact immediately,” he added.
As Suprej says, the key to building a product that aligns with customer needs is spending quality time with them and understanding their pain points. The team was certainly able to do that. Looking forward to many more fun events by the Churn360 team.
