Building Success : Product Roadmap And Customer Success
Creating products that customers love to use is crucial for retention and growth in the world of SaaS. Today’s fast-growing-software companies (FGSC’s) build products that reflect the voice of their customers. A recap of the Customer Success Chat on Building Success - Product Roadmap and Customer Success.
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SuccessHacking : Customer Success as Growth Hacking
Successful SaaS companies are recognizing and leveraging the relationship between growthhacking and Customer Success. Our February CustomerSuccessChat, the fifth in the series, explored these topics and more as we discussed SuccessHacking -- Customer Success as GrowthHacking.
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6 Exciting Emerging Trends in Customer Success
If you're committed to achieving your Customer Success goals in 2015, there's never been a more opportune time to do so. We're truly in the Golden Age of Customer Success, with ever-improving tools and processes available for reducing churn and increasing customer engagement. We recently released an episode of our Customer Success Radio podcast in which we discussed new trends that are emerging and taking hold in Customer Success. Here are the practices we called out as up and coming or catching fire in 2015.
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Growing Successful Customers: The Ins & Outs of Upselling
Knowing how, when and where to upsell is crucial for customer growth in a SaaS business. But what role should Customer Success teams play in an upsell? Can an upsell ever actually increase the risk of churn? What do you do when customers actively try to avoid bumping up to the next pricing tier? In our January Customer Success Chat, we explored these topics and more with experts David Mitzenmacher, Allison Metcalfe, and Tom Krackeler and many other participants. Here's a recap!
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MindTouch & Frontleaf Partner to Provide Powerful Customer Insights
We're excited to announce a partnership between Frontleaf and MindTouch, representing an important step in the maturity of Customer Success applications and practices. Our shared tenets and product syngery demonstrate the benefits of having a comprehensive strategy for delivering an exceptional customer experience.
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To Boldly Go Where No Podcast Has Gone Before: Customer Success!
There are some great cloud technology and software podcasts out there, but there’s never before been a podcast dedicated specifically and exclusively to the topic of Customer Success for cloud software companies. We're proud to be changing that, with the launch of our new Customer Success Radio podcast!
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Connect the Dots between Enterprise Software Training and Customer Success
It's time for training professionals to step away from the laser focus on learner satisfaction surveys as the primary data collected and start measuring the impact training programs have on customer outcomes. Bill Cushard from ServiceRocket pick's Tom Krackeler's brain on the topic.
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Want Customer Success? Invest in Customer Training.
Training is hard. It's time consuming to develop, costly, and needs constant updates. This is a big reason why so many enterprise software companies, especially Cloud/SaaS platforms, under-invest in training their customers. Here, Bill Cushard gives his expert take answering questions and digging in on the whys and hows of linking Training and Customer Success.
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Customer Lifecycle Marketing to Drive Loyalty & Lifetime Value
Interested in best practices for utilizing communications to influence your customers and drive increased loyalty, advocacy, retention, and lifetime value? Anthony Nygren of EMI Strategic Marketing shares his perspective and expert advice on Customer Lifecycle Marketing.
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How to Nail & Scale Customer Onboarding
In onboarding your SaaS customers, how can you be sure that each one will achieve top-notch value quickly and land on the right path towards retention and growth? And once you nail that process, how can you make it repeatable and scale it as your customer base grows? Frontleaf recently hosted a CustomerSuccessChat on the subject, with industry leaders Andrew Racine, Julie Giannini, Katie Kortnie, Shannon Kluczny, and Tom Krackeler. Here's a recap!
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Starting Down the Pathway to Customer Success
Guest blogger Hsin-Ju Chuang explains that, although there are many twists and turns on the pathway to Customer Success, you can point yourself in the right starting direction by creating the mindset and structure, collecting the data and knowledge, and building a resource repository for your customers.
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Frontleaf & New Relic Boost Customer Success Analytics
Within minutes of deploying New Relic to our Frontleaf production environment, we were collecting a wealth of performance information that has helped us pinpoint errors, tune queries, optimize code, and refine our system architecture. Learn how we transformed that data goldmine into invaluable customer insights, and how you can, too!
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High-Touch at High Volume: Automated Outreach for Customer Success
Frontleaf recently hosted the second CustomerSuccessChat on Twitter, featuring Customer Success industry leaders Colin Nederkoorn, Derek Skaletsky, Marc Baizman, and Tom Krackeler. This month's chat about automating Customer Success outreach drew experts and enthusiasts for a lively debate. Here's a recap of some of the gems!
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A Triggered Outreach Cookbook
Are you managing Customer Success at high volume, but looking to keep things high-touch? Get some superpowers with these example recipes that can enable you to drive highly personalized, better timed, more pertinent customer outreach than ever before, all with significantly less time and manual labor involved.
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To Serve or To Foster Self-Service, That Is the Question
In our role as purveyors of Customer Success, we're continuously working to ensure that our customers are seamlessly achieving value by utilizing our SaaS application and interacting with our company. But to that end, how do we know when it's the right time to jump in and serve them personally, and when it makes sense to direct them to non-staffed resources that can provide assistance, perhaps even faster and better than we can?
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How to Build a Winning Customer Success Organization
Looking to start up or fine tune Customer Success in your company? We were lucky to get the opportunity to pick the brains of four industry thought leaders, who shared their experiences and advice around building a thriving Customer Success organization, the hurdles they had to clear, and some tips for doing it right.
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Becoming a Data-Driven Customer Success Team
What do Bob Hayes, Chad Horenfeldt, Lincoln Murphy, Nichole DeMeré, Todd Eby, and Tom Krackeler all have in common? If you guessed that they are all Frontleaf 50 to Follow honorees… you're right! But that's not all. They were also the Customer Success industry experts that Frontleaf brought together earlier this month when we hosted the first-ever CustomerSuccessChat on Twitter.
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Look Both Ways: Customer Success that Spans Enterprise & SMB
Does your SaaS application serve both Enterprise and SMB customers, or are you considering moving up- or down-market so that it does? Make sure you carefully weigh Customer Success implications in the process. Todd Eby of Five9 shares his experiences and expert advice on building Customer Success practices that work for both markets.
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Leading Growth Experts Discuss Why Customer Success Is Crucial for Growth
Many people see Growth and Customer Success as two very separate functions within a SaaS company — getting customers in the door vs. keeping them. But the experts agree: Growth and Customer Success are actually two highly interrelated practices, and each one fails without the other.
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Frontleaf 50 to Follow
We are pleased to introduce the Frontleaf 50 to Follow, our first annual list of the movers-and-shakers in the world of Customer Success. We are recognizing the innovators who are pioneering the best practices, building the enabling technologies, and educating the industry on all things Customer Success. Congratulations to the honorees! And we hope our readers have the opportunity to check out some of their fantastic work.
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Climbing the Data Analytics Ladder for Customer Success
Customer Success teams are more data savvy than ever, and are utilizing data analytics to get an edge in their efforts at customer retention. But what kinds of data analytics are Customer Success teams putting into practice today? What are the biggest challenges? And how can we best proceed up the 5-Step Data Analytics Ladder for Customer Success?
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Looking to Break into Customer Success? Here’s What Employers Are After.
Eager to know what hiring companies are looking for in a Customer Success Manager? Or how you can best prepare your application materials and interview strategy so you have the best shot at landing that dream Customer Success job? We've got fascinating study results and actionable tips for you!
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Customer Success for Ninjas: Tips for Scaling Customer Onboarding (& Walls!)
The new customer onboarding phase is a unique opportunity to leverage a personal touch to create early value and a lasting positive relationship. But that makes is tricky to scale! If you’re stuck trying to build or adjust your onboarding operation for better scalability, here are five effective tactics to the rescue.
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Customer Success for Ninjas: How to Command (the Attention of) Your Product Team
Ever struggled to get buy-in for customer needs among product owners? Here’s an action plan for working respectfully with Product Management to ensure a Customer Success agenda is reflected in your company’s application roadmap.
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Converting from Customer Service to Customer Success
Have you been inspired or asked to reinvent an existing Customer Service team and make it over as a Customer Success operation instead? Here are three driving mottos to rally your team around through such a conversion process.
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3 Smooth Moves in Applying the Customer Success Mindset
Customer Success is becoming ingrained in the daily operations of more Software-as-a-Service companies every day. Here are three examples of how applying the Customer Success mindset is great for your customers and great for your company.
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Keeping the Dogs Awake: How to Measure & Prove Customer Value
It’s definitely in your best interest to keep your customers from becoming "sleeping dogs". Make it your mission to continually measure the value your customers are gaining from your product, and to demonstrate that value to them simply and often.
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Illuminate Your Customer Success Operation
All too often, the job of retaining customers in a Software-as-a-Service business feels like a series of shots in the dark. But there is no need to stay in the dark anymore. You can illuminate your Customer Success operation by gaining “customer clairvoyance”.
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Customer Value – Do You Own It?
In order for your Customer Success function to really serve your customers and your company, it’s critical that you own establishing and delivering Customer Value from the perspective of the people and businesses that are using, and hopefully will go on using, your application. In this post, we’ll look to our customers and talk about how to define the value we provide them, and why it matters.
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The Telltale Signs: What Your Customers Are Doing, Saying & Achieving
How could we know whether or not our customers were happy or engaged? How could we tell which were likely to renew, and which were headed off the rails to churn-land? And better yet, how could we use that knowledge to get out of reactive mode and instead proactively address churn risk before it was too late? Our solution...
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SaaS Customer Bill of Rights
When we developed a new product line at my last company, we decided to explicitly put together a "Customer Bill of Rights", which served as a set of organizing principles for our customer success initiative.
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Customer Success Begins at the Bottom Line
Heard the one about the Customer Success team that talked to each of their top tier customers every week, ran detailed monthly risk meetings, sent NPS surveys twice a year, followed up personally with responders, and still got surprised every quarter with an unacceptable churn number?
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Should They Stay or Should They Go?
Can you feel the buzz? The world of Software-as-a-Service Customer Success is hopping right now. Gone are the days when the only customer-oriented focus was on acquisition. “Retain, retain, retain” has become the new do-or-die motto. And I couldn’t be happier.
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Go Ahead and Price Your SaaS Low — But You Better Nail Customer Success!
Does it make sense for inside sales reps to work deals as low as $99/month? A critical part of the "how-low-can-you-go" calculus is your customer success model.
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Five Steps to the CREST of Success
Success… every company delivering Software-as-a-Service wants to achieve it. And there is a rapidly growing, now almost overwhelming awareness in the industry that customers – and their success – are perhaps the most critical components of our own.
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