Chelsey Blair is our Manager, Customer Success for TrainHeroic and shares her experience working for Peaksware.
How does a customer success team have a lasting, human impact?
When a business invests resources in a robust customer success team — providing trained, passionate personnel and smart customer relationship management tools — it demonstrates that the business cares about its customer relationship.
Beyond a first impression, a healthy, customer-focused business model is likely to pay for itself in the long term. Robust CS programs increase the customer lifetime value — or the total revenue a business expects from a single customer relationship — by 125 percent, according to research from Velaris.
For Chelsey Blair, a customer success manager at Peaksware, a comprehensive approach to customer interactions is a balance of team knowledge and a human-centered perspective.
What does a typical workday look like for you as a customer success manager?
At Peaksware, our customer success team is versatile, handling a wide range of tasks to effectively serve our customers. A typical day starts with a team standup where we’ll discuss any challenges, share successes and align on goals. This is followed by reviewing our appointment schedule, which includes onboarding new customers and meeting with key accounts. These meetings are centered around understanding customers’ evolving needs, strategizing business growth and offering tailored advice on leveraging our tools.
Throughout the day, we gather and share customer feedback with the product team to inform future planning. Between these calls, we’ll reply to customer emails, plan proactive outreach, review user data to gain deeper insights and reach out to customers we’d like to connect with soon. Our daily priority is to ensure that every customer interaction leaves the customer feeling heard, supported and genuinely cared for.
How do you stay in the loop with product and customer updates?
Our internal teams use a variety of tools to stay aligned on product and customer updates and ensure that we’re working in sync. Product planning and road mapping are tracked through Confluence, which gives visibility into every stage of the planning and development process. Weekly go-to-market meetings spotlight upcoming launches, while a dedicated Slack channel keeps us instantly updated as items go live.
The success team typically sees the evolution of new items incrementally over the course of development. As a team, our approach is to discuss the impact on customers, our strategy for effective communication and how to best achieve adoption among our key accounts. Peaksware is based on a culture of deliberate practice, and expert instruction is a key part of that. This allows us to blend insights from our internal experts in product and marketing and couple that with our deep understanding of customer needs. This approach ensures that we connect with our accounts in a meaningful and impactful way, supporting their goals and fostering strong relationships.
What helps you stay motivated and on top of things?
In customer success, staying organized and motivated is crucial to ensuring customer satisfaction. One of the best pieces of advice I can offer is to consistently apply these three Peaksware values: be deliberate, be impactful and be human. While it’s easy to get lost in initiatives, goals, and KPIs, how you approach these tasks is what truly matters. With every new task or interaction, ask yourself: Is this deliberate? Is it impactful? Is it human? This simple evaluation can save time, streamline your efforts and lead to more meaningful and effective customer interactions.
My team helps me stay motivated by fostering a culture of continuous learning. One way we learn is by openly sharing experiences — the good, the bad and the ugly. By sharing failures and lessons learned, we can turn setbacks into opportunities for growth. By learning from each other’s experiences, we strengthen the team’s collective knowledge and resilience.
Original article written by Conlan Carter, click here for the entire article.
