Customer Success is an often overlooked but essential component for any company to remain in business. Simply put, if you help your customers’ business succeeds then you are doing a great job. As the Customer Success Manager at Greenwing Technology, my primary goal is to ensure that our customers are properly equipped and properly educated on how to use every tool in Greenwing toolbox to meet their business needs. This often includes working with both my team and my customers’ in-house teams, to troubleshoot product related issues, implement new processes, and to evaluate the service that we provided our customers to ensure that we are always looking for ways to improve their Greenwing Experience. Our ultimate goal is to handle everything else that falls within our scope so that our clients are then free to devote more of their time and effort towards other aspects of their business.
What does an average day look like? Some days, I might find myself working with our product team to resolve a product pricing discrepancy that is the result of a spreadsheet submitted by a new customer being in the wrong file format. Other times, I’ll find myself speaking with a long time customer on new products, answering their questions, and then being inspired to write an article that addresses similar concerns that other customers may have as well. I’ve found that the more connected I am with my colleagues, the more I can leverage our collective knowledge and skills to better serve our customers. This usually results in me taking on internal project management responsibilities, such as utilizing programs like Trello and FreshDesk to request additional resources for customers’ issues or to escalate an item to a subject matter expert.
Fostering cross-function collaboration with my colleagues in Sales, Product Management, and Operations is another essential part of being in a Customer Success role. Because of my familiarity with the needs of our current clients, I am often able to provide valuable insight to the Sales/Business Development team as how we can target similar clients in the same industry. In some instances, satisfied clients have marketed our services themselves to other business colleagues of theirs who might not have otherwise been sold on our sales pitch alone.
In my 10 years of experience in Customer Success/Client Services world, I’ve heard customers complain of business partners treating them like royalty during the early phase of their partnership and then catering to their needs less and less, overtime. As a B2B business, we can empathize with our customers because we have some of the same business needs. We understand what its like to be in the middle of a fire drill and to need answers right away. We’ve experienced our servers going down and have had to relay to our customers that we had a plan in place to get everything back on track. I can honestly say that Greenwing Technology is a customer-focused company, were each team member is willing to hop on a conference call with a customer, at a moment’s notice, pulling in as many of our colleagues as needed. We truly don’t view our roles as 9-5s and I believe that my customer’s succeeding means that I’ve succeeded in my role as well.