ASP 2020 Conference; Customer Success + Support: A Powerful Partnership
Event Information
About this Event
For a long time, we primarily measured customer satisfaction, then attention shifted to the customer experience, now we focus mostly on customer success. This is essential in the subscription economy. How should customer success and customer support work together for both the customer and the company? Our conference will explore this from many different directions. Including direct, indirect, inside, outside, connected, community, self-support. We will examine roles, responsibilities, and metrics. We will hear from and support leaders who now have responsibility for both success and support. Is it better when these functions are closely integrated? These questions and many more will be discussed by our presenters. If you are in Support or Success, this conference will be for you. ASP conferences are relatively small, intimate, and feature lots of discussion. You will not only get to ask your questions, but our presenters are accessible and open to one-on-one discussions. Meet and share with many other leaders who also struggle with these and other current issues. Our sponsors are also part of our community and participate equally with other attendees. Many are experts in specific processes, techniques, and technology.
Oct. 6th
10:00 Welcome and introductions Al Hahn, Executive Director; ASP, Dennis Smetzer, President TSANet; Robert C. Johnson CEO, TeamSupport
10:15 Customer Success + Support: A Natural Partnership
In the software as a subscription era, staying in close touch with your customers and thoroughly understanding their needs isn’t an option. It’s a bedrock requirement if you want to stay in business over the long term. What information do you need to have in order to maintain a healthy connection? Who will gather it, and who will do the ongoing analysis that will enable your company to succeed?
In virtually any software company, the team that far and away has the most interaction with the customers is Support. As a potential source of insight into the customer base, there is no better channel — but it needs to be effectively focused. Here is where the partnership with the Customer Success group needs to begin, and expand from there into a cohesive long term strategy for winning.
Mikael Blaisdell, Founder & Executive Director, The Customer Success Association, Publisher of Customer Success CEntral.
Robert C. Johnson with live interview and Q&A.
10:55 Navigating the Customer Journey With Support & Customer Success
How Red Hat evolved our proactive & reactive teams to drive a better customer experience. A balanced approach across region and technology focused dispersed teams.
Paul Lyons, VP of Customer Experience & Engagement, Red Hat
Scott Froehlich, Sr. Director of Customer Experience & Engagement, Red Hat
11:40 Roles, Responsibilities & Metrics
As Customer Success matures as a discipline, best practices are emerging and help us answer many questions you may have for your own team:
• Where should the Customer Success team report?
• Should we separate onboarding and retention duties?
• How do I make sure that my CSMs are not just escalation managers, under a different title?
• How many accounts can a CSM handle?
• Should we invest in Customer Success technical experts?
• How can we work positively with the support managers?
• How do we work with Engineering?
• How exactly should I calculate churn?
• Do I compensate the team based on retention metrics alone?
Françoise Tourniaire, Founder FT Works, Co-Founder, ChurnSquad, Author of The Art of Support
12:15 Break
12:40 Coveo Customer Insights
Justin Loera, Technical Program Management Consultant, Dell Technologies
12:30 Customer Self-Service – Helping Customers Succeed
Customer Success + Support are rolled together when we are able to help our customers help themselves. We will examine some of the keys to customer self-service as well as the pitfalls, and discuss how customer self-service can be one of the most important aspects of customer success.
Dave Muirhead, Sr. Director of Customer Support Services at Oracle
1:05 Live Panel Discussinmg Success in Self-Support
Moderator, David Kay. Panelists: Jennifer Macintosh, Françoise Tourniaire, Dave Muirhead, Mikael Blaisdell
2:00 End of Day One
Oct. 7th
10:00 Brief review of first day and announcements
10:10 After Customer Success; Digital Transformation
Enterprises are still largely siloed in their approach to dealing with prospects and customers. Today, most have built a self-service experience for their customers that is focused on logging support cases and searching the knowledgebase, but in 2020, is this enough?
We continue to move towards personalization; the ability to personalize each interaction an individual has with your company, at every step of their journey is becoming more and more important. We have all heard the digital transformation buzzword over the past decade and at the heart of Digital Transformation is a fundamental shift towards the customer experience as the most important driver of business value.
Jennifer Macintosh, One of the Top Women Leaders in SaaS, Customer Success Visionary
10:45 Customer Success & Support in the 20's: Your Company's New Growth Engine!
Customer Support and Success organizations were created to address two ostensibly separate issues – to resolve customer problems and to prevent churn. Both disciplines have grown considerably over the years with new and evolving goals, processes, technologies and skill requirements. However, they have remained by and large as separate functions and as such perhaps yet to deliver to their full potentials. In this talk, Omid will present how Customer Support and Success can work together to find smarter ways, using AI and automation, to proactively manage customer issues and drive customer value and revenue growth.
Omid Razavi, Ph.D. VP, Customer Success and Services at SupportLogic
11:25 Customer Success + Support in the Indirect Channel: It’s Complicated
Managing the boundaries between Support and Customer Success can be challenging in a single organization let alone more than 400 third party organizations. Companies working to engage customers and ensure their success through a reseller channel need to build strong foundations that can adapt to work with varied and often imperfect data to make key decisions. Join us to learn how Dassault Systemes SolidWorks has evolved their process of identifying customers potentially at risk and targeting the right resources at the right time to address issues that put recurring revenue at risk.
Ian Baxter, VP Worldwide Technical Services, SOLIDWORKS
Frank Aloia III, Director SOLIDWORKS Customer Success & Enterprise Services
12:00 Break
12:15 The Convergence of Support and Success – Research & Industry Practices
Support and Success teams must find ways to cooperate and collaborate to provide the customer experiences necessary to retain and expand customers relationships. For some companies Support and Success roles and functions will remain distinct, for others, convergence is inevitable. This presentation will explore the leading trends and practices from across the technology services industry to describe how companies are forging powerful relationships between Support and Success functions and blending teams to create new types of service offerings. This presentation will examine the industry examples and practices for defining key staff roles, organizational structures, metrics, programs and policies.
Tom Sweeny, Chief Analyst & Founder, ServiceXRG
1:00 Rethinking Support & Customer Success
Republic Wireless has taken an unconventional approach to support for their members in the sense they don’t have a traditional 1-800 number or call center, yet they are able to consistently receive high customer satisfaction scores and measures of customer success in an industry where that is the exception instead of the norm. Ben will explain the reasons and complexities behind their strategy, how they’ve kept customer success as a focal point throughout their decision making and business adjustments, as well as how they define this success.
Ben Garris, Manager of Online Support & Customer Experience at Republic Wireless
1:35 Live Panel Discussing the Day's Ideas for Driving Support & Success Outcomes
Jennifer Macintosh, Omid Razavi, Ian Baxtyer, Frank Aloia, Ben Garris
Oct, 8th
10:00 Recap of Day Two
10:10 Knowledge-Centered SXervice and Customer Support/Success
Arnfinn Austefjord, Global Head of Training & Certification at the KCS Academy, Center for Service Innovatyikon
10:40 Enriching Multi-source Data to Create Powerful ML Based Analytics to Enable Customer Support & Customer Success Teams to Drive Customer Outcomes
Learn how Rubrik uses customer and machine data backed by powerful ML based analytics to create alignment, awareness and success outcomes for both internal and external customers. Hear about how Rubrik is transitioning from descriptive analytics to predictive analytics and it’s journey from reactive to proactive customer support. In thibables s session we will share how data impacts customer support, customer success and sales opportunities.
GIRI IYER, SVP Global Customer Support & Success at Rubrik
11:15 Success + Support: The Formula for a Seamless Customer Experience
Offering world-class customer support in the B2B (business-to-business) space is critical to providing a positive experience and maintaining loyal customers. However, traditional support is only one piece of the post-sale customer journey. Customer success has emerged as a natural extension to customer support, helping companies go beyond support to optimize revenue, create greater customer value, and lower churn. Learn how combining support and success creates a seamless B2B customer experience, and why it’s essential to choose support and success technologies that are focused on the customer as a whole, rather than individual interactions. Keeping customers happy isn’t easy, but building strong B2B relationships is essential for growth. The combination of support and success is a secret recipe more companies are uncovering to reduce churn and drive new business.
Nichole Herran, Customer Manager Manager, TeamSupport
11:50 Break
12:10 Lessons in Change Management for Building a Scalable Customer Success and Support Team Using AI
Change is never easy and when you're incorporating the latest advances in techniology - AI adn machine learning - havoing a stroing chjange management practice in place to support employee adoptkion is criticasl. Dell Technolohgies is committed to advancing human progress for customers as well as employees. Learn from Justin on key chjallenges and success in rolling out AI-powered search & recommendations technology to support staff to ensure a world-class company is delivering world-class customer service experiences to consumers everywhere.
Justin Loera, Technical Program Manegement Consultant at Dell Technologies
12:45 ASP Best Support Websites Winner
To be announced
1:20 Panel Discussing Day's Ideas to Drive Support & Success Outcomes
2:00 Conference Ends
Conference Hosted By TeamSupport