“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
It is this quote by Maya Angelou that forms the foundation of what customer success truly means according to Stephen Murphy (pictured), the director of customer success Europe for Applied Systems Europe. Having worked with a variety of multinational companies enacting large-scale operational change, Murphy noted how, at the core of implementing such transformation, there exists the need to understand what customers want and to relentlessly deliver that in a mature and robust way.
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“Customer success is about ensuring our customers have a fantastic outcome, but also ensuring that they have a great customer experience getting to that outcome,” he said. “While the path to delivery is relatively simple to track, the customer experience along the journey is a little more difficult and so Applied is creating ways of tracking, scoring and acting upon key customer health indicators.
“And [the reality is] that if you’re having a poor customer experience, you certainly aren’t having customer success. What’s key for customer success is how people feel and that’s a key cornerstone for us and something that the customer success team here at Applied think about day in, day out as they’re liaising with our valued customers.”
Applied’s customer success team is the culmination of the business’s firm commitment to deliver a high level of service for its customers, Murphy said, and it is with this pledge in mind that the team has evolved. The development of customer success at Applied has been founded on four key steps.
The first of these is the need to truly understand your customers. To ensure this, Murphy said, Applied initiated a project which sought to build up an accurate customer profile which it could use to better identify exactly what customers were looking for from their solutions. This was developed using a mix of the source data which the business had already gathered and continues to gather, and industry analysis.
“We also needed to invest in our people, in our customer success managers and in learning and development,” Murphy said. “Our team aims to be [both] a trusted advisor and domain experts for our customers and so we needed to support them with tools and training to help them flourish. A key goal for our CSMs is to champion our customers at Applied and make sure that we, as a provider of cloud-based insurance software, are doing the right thing for the customer. A key mantra within the team is ‘What is our goal, the customer’s goal and how do we achieve both?’”
The third aspect to building a successful team in this complex area is ensuring Team Applied understood the objective, the benefits and bought into the defined objective. It was essential from the beginning that the customer success unit was not viewed as just another front-facing team but instead as a crew of experts who could identify solutions and efficiencies across the organisation that could help both the customers and Team Applied.
“The fourth step is just to get started and pilot the approach,” he said. “If anyone’s thinking about a customer success model for their company, I would say do a pilot and get feedback. You will make mistakes, but look at what they are, replan, reposition and most importantly relaunch.”
For Murphy, customer success boils down to building relationships, identifying customer goals and continuously mapping how Applied’s products will help achieve those customer goals and ensure that customers gain maximum value from their product investments. At Applied, the customer success team work cross-functionally across the entire spectrum of the business; from product development to QA support to marketing to recruitment. This includes working across the customer lifecycle, from the initial onboarding to tracing the customer journey to the very end which creates a 360-degree view of the customer and helps build those relationships which drive service satisfaction.
“While we have a customer success team,” Murphy said, “it’s also important to realise that customer success is also a mindset. So, this is something that we advocate and champion and promote daily within the organisation. Making customers successful is the responsibility of the entire company and not a single department although we are there to help that journey along the way.
“Every single person in Team Applied, regardless of their role and whether it’s customer-facing or not, understands how their work ultimately impacts the customer’s ability to achieve their objectives. Accountability isn’t just transferred to customer success and nor would we advocate for that, it’s about us all working closely together to deliver a seamless customer experience.”
