A sit down with Bant Breen on scaling customer success.
We recently sat down with Chitra Madhwacharyula on The UNCAGED Show to discuss her career as a Customer & Partner Success Leader, and her new book ‘Scaling Customer Success: Building the Customer Success Center of Excellence’. This is an edited excerpt from our discussion.
Bant Breen:
Welcome to Uncaged. Today we’re speaking with Chitra Madhwacharyula. She is an expert on Customer Success, and how companies and enterprises can think about expanding those activities and managing them more efficiently and effectively. In fact, actually, she’s the author of a relatively new book called Scaling Customer Success: Building the Customer Success Center of Excellence. Congratulations, Chitra. But before that, we want to go through the book, and I certainly want to talk about some of the learnings that are there for folks. I think the customer success space is incredibly important. As we start the conversation, maybe you can spell out what you see as a customer success center of excellence.
Chitra Madhwacharyula:
Absolutely. So, before we even get there, let me talk about what I mean when I say customer success. Really what we are talking about is, that once the customers or partners come in and they sign a contract with the company, they sign on to build a working relationship with the company. From that point, those relationships usually go to the sales team. And that’s where customers are involved. Customer success comes into the picture when partners are involved. In many cases, when partner success teams come into the picture, they handle activities like customer or partner onboarding, day to day management of our customers and partners and they keep track of what the success factors are to make these relationships successful. They make sure that these partners and customers are enabled properly to be equally successful. So to provide clarity, identify the right kind of metrics and then track them and make sure that everybody’s aligned towards the common goals.
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Bant Breen:
Yeah, I’m excited to learn more about it. So tell me a little bit about scaling customer success, the book, and some of the magic and learnings that we might find in there.
Chitra Madhwacharyula:
Absolutely. So this book came about from my personal experience: I’ve been a professional for 23 years now, 17 of those years have been in customer-facing roles, in professional services and customer and partner success, and also in consulting. I have also been an individual contributor. I have grown these practices and managed these practices. During the course of doing that, what I have discovered and, you know, my coauthor also had a similar experience, that, a lot of companies are really good at launching these practices and getting them to a certain stage. So this typically starts with focusing on the highest value customers in terms of the revenue that they bring in, and, you know, sometimes the growth potential. Then, they focus on these customers and they have a pretty good handle on how to work with these customers. And then what? Right. So then the question comes up: how do we expand this model to all the customers in a company? Usually, you know, that takes some investment. You might not follow the same business and engagement models with all your customers. That would require some scaling capabilities. And really what this book talks about is like, how do you set a foundation for scaling your customer success practice from the very beginning? And once you set that foundation, how do you build upon it? So you obviously start with a certain subset of customers, that’s the most common model. But then how do you expand that model to all the rest of your customers without a major reorg? Or without really overhauling your current practice? (This is what would happen if you haven’t planned for scale from day one.) So, this book is a practical handbook. The way we look at this book and the way we have written this book is that any customer success leader or manager can pick it up and read through it and directly implement some of these workflows and practices, that we have identified in the book into their own customer success functions and practices.
Bant Breen:
Well, that definitely seems exciting. Thank you so much, Amanda, for being on Uncaged. I really enjoyed our conversation, and look forward to having you back on the show.
To see the full interview on the Uncaged YouTube channel, go to:
https://youtu.be/ggf2fAtZ9u0
