At Next Matter we spend a lot of time thinking about automation and customer service.

And while we know a thing or two about how to get them right, we’re always excited to learn from the best minds in the industry.

Whether it’s on LinkedIn, at conferences, or in podcasts, we often find advice that makes us stop and appreciate the impact that a great customer experience has.

So, who are the voices that have most inspired us at Next Matter? What are the insights they have to share?

Here are 15 of the most valuable insights from CS experts and thought leaders around the world. 

1. Kristen Hayer

Let’s be honest, CS teams have a busy and sometimes stressful working life. Often, it can seem like an exercise in whack-a-mole, where you’re constantly responding to emails, fighting fires, and resolving issues.

Throughout all this, you could be forgiven for losing track of the bigger picture. 

The unfortunate truth is that most leaders still don’t understand what customer success is, or how, in very tangible terms, it helps a company succeed. Yes, customer success is about customers, but it is also about the success of your software organization.
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C-level leaders often give up on Customer Success too easily. They see it as a cost. As a “happiness department”. Alternatively, they may see it as a technical team, a high-end, expensive, driver of adoption. 

While both adoption and happiness are amazing outcomes of a strong customer success effort, the true focus should be on customer value.

Customers who see value in a solution will adopt it more fully and be happy about doing business with their vendor. Instead of going after the outcomes, we should be going after the driver: Customer value.

Kristen Hayer, Founder & CEO, The Success League (Source)

This is the central thesis of Kristen Hayer’s recent blog “In defense of customer success.” And as the founder of a leading CS consultancy (The Success League), she certainly knows a thing or two about what CS is really about. 

The clue, of course, is in the name - the true goal of any decent CS team should be to help customers succeed. And all the KPIs, targets, and strategies in the world aren’t going to create happy customers if you’re not focused on this fundamental goal.

In the rest of this article, Kristen goes on to explain how CS teams can understand their customer's goals and help to effectively deliver them. 

2. Nick Mehta

Nick Mehta is the CEO of Gainsight, a customer experience platform that helps CS teams use human-powered AI to automate and scale their operations. He’s also co-written a book about how companies can reduce churn and increase recurring revenue.

Customer education and customer success have the exact same goal; they’re just doing it from different lenses.

There’s no better way to keep and grow your existing customers than having them trained and enabled on your software. If they’re not trained and enabled, then you’re not going to keep them and you’re not going to grow.

Nick Mehta, CEO, Gainsight (Source)

Nick Mehta’s message here is a simple one: For customers to succeed with your product, they need to understand how to use it in a way that actually delivers on their goals.

It might not sound controversial on the surface, but the truth is many organizations fail to see customer education as a key CS goal.

Often, explaining how the product works is the job of the marketing or product team - and it gets quickly sidelined under a long list of other priorities. 

The main point of Nick’s comments is to challenge organizations to reconsider how they CS teams. Instead of reactively putting out fires all the time, they need to be seen as an enabler.

Ultimately, if you want customers to stick with your product, they need to understand how to get value out of it. And sometimes, it should be the CS team’s job to hold their hand through that journey.

3. Kristi Faltorusso

Take a moment to think about the CS metrics you’re monitoring.

There’s a good chance you’ve got KPIs to monitor customer retention, product usage, adoption, and lifetime value.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that - and no sensible CS team should ignore them. But it’s too easy to assume that if customers are using the product and spending money, they are happy with the service. 

Usage and adoption do not tell you everything you need to know about the partnership. Just because someone is using something doesn't mean they are getting value from it.

You need to spend more time validating this and understanding their pain, their goals, and their definition of value.

Kristi Faltorusso, CCO, ClientSuccess (Source)

But here’s the truth that Kristi Faltorusso instinctively understands - using a product doesn’t mean loving that product.

Just think of how much time you spend in your email inbox; very few would consider themselves passionate email advocates.

Often, it’s easy for customers to stick with what they know because they don’t understand the alternatives and haven’t had the time to explore them.

But it doesn’t mean they’re happy and it certainly doesn’t mean they can’t be poached by a savvy competitor with a flashy marketing campaign. 

So what’s the solution? As Kristi explains, it’s important for CS teams to dig beneath the quantitative metrics and understand the qualitative, subjective responses that customers have.

Sometimes, that just involves a conversation and an element of reading the room to spot any underlying vulnerabilities. This ability to instinctively connect with and understand customers is what ultimately separates the good CS agents from the best. 

4. Gemma Cipriani-Espineira

Gemma Cipriano-Espineira is a CS influencer, expert, and VP of customer success.

In this blog, she describes how CS teams can advocate for their own influence within an organization, working from the inside to ensure the executives and C-Suite are always taking account of the customer’s voice, priorities, and concerns. 

You should try to get experience outside of the CS function or find ways to collaborate with other teams. Why? Because customer success doesn't happen in isolation, it's a way of doing business.

So understanding how other parts of the business work is incredibly valuable.

If you can't afford to have a stint in product or marketing or sales or engineering, perhaps you can find different projects you can collaborate with those teams on. Because let's face it – people don’t understand customer success.

Gemma Cipriani-Espineira, Founder, CS Angel and VP of Customer Success, MNTN. (Source)

This is a hugely important topic. It’s far too easy for CS teams to get siloed and for organizations to view them as a transactional function.

This is a huge risk for the organization, since CS teams are closer to the customer than anybody else. 

But it’s the quote above that we thought was most interesting - because it encourages CS teams to boost their own profile by understanding as much as possible about what the rest of the organization is trying to achieve.

After all, the more you understand about what others are working on, the better equipped you are to help them deliver it - in a way that works for the organization and its customers. Wise words, in our opinion. 

5. Daphne Costa Lopes

It’s easy for CS teams to get stuck focusing on customers with the lowest satisfaction and the loudest voices. Often, that comes at the expense of customers that you just don’t hear from that much.

My advice is, if you have a year contract with a customer, have a midpoint check on those goals.
So depending on how many conversations you're having, you know, if you're an enterprise, you might be talking to that customer every week. If you are in a smaller business, you might be talking to them every two months, every quarter. 

We think the midmark of the contract is a really important one. You have time at the mid-mark to actually affect change.

So if you're not meeting the customer's expectations at that point, you have time to recreate a plan and find the resources to help that customer succeed before the renewal conversations start.

Daphne Costa Lopes, Director of Customer Success, HubSpot (Source)

In what’s becoming a theme of this piece - it’s far too easy for CS teams to become reactive firefighters rather than proactive enablers.

As Daphne Costa Lopes explains, this means you may not find out about issues some customers are facing until the renewal comes up - at which point it’s already too late.

A mid-contract check-in can be a great way of avoiding this problem and is a relatively simple process to implement. 

As Director of Customer Success at HubSpot, Daphne Costa Lopes is uniquely placed to understand issues like this - and she’s got plenty of other fascinating insights to share in the rest of the podcast. 

6. Lincoln Murphy

Lincoln Murphy’s Customer Success Goal Discovery Framework is too long to fit into a single quote - but we couldn’t miss it from this piece.

The Customer Success Goal Discovery Framework offers a comprehensive approach specifically tailored for asynchronous and self-service environments. It utilizes the “5 Ws and 1 H” to provide a clear roadmap for uncovering customer goals.

Lincoln Murphy, Co-Founder, Impact Academy Customer Success (Source)

It’s a set of actionable guidelines that help CS agents understand how to identify their customer’s goals and deliver them.

We think it’s particularly interesting because it helps agents dig beneath the surface and understand more about the customer’s fundamental goals and pain points. 

In short, it’s easy for agents (and even customers) to get distracted by an immediate pain point or need. Using Lincoln Murphy’s framework, you can get a clearer understanding of the tangible business goal that everything you do needs to link back to.

If you can help your customers achieve that, you’ll be in a good place to keep them around for the long haul.

7. Rachel Provan

Here’s another easy trap that CS teams often fall into: mixing up breadth of usage with total value.

The right way to start customer segmentation starts with their use cases.

This is the fancy way of saying “What is the customer trying to get done?”  Most customers aren’t trying to get the most they possibly can out of your product.

They’re trying to solve a problem. Our job in CS is to draw the cleanest line from A to B. Don’t show them everything. Show them how to achieve their ONE objective. You’ll show them the bells and whistles later.‍

‍Rachel Provan, Founder & CEO, Provan Success (Source)

Or put simply: The customer that uses most features isn’t always the happiest - and isn’t necessarily getting the most value out of the product.

Conversely, a customer might find that 5% of your features solve a huge number of their problems - and the other 95% just simply aren’t important. 

As the Founder of her own CS consultancy, Rachel Provan is full of fantastic insights just like this.

In this recent blog, she explains her approach to customer segmentation, either by use case, vertical, or annual recurring revenue.

While the whole blog is definitely worth a read, we thought this particular section demonstrated a particularly insightful way at looking at customer value. 

8. Jay Nathan

Jay Nathan is the COO at Churnkey, a specialist customer retention service.

So when we think about customer success, we think about it in terms of that being the outcome that we're trying to drive.

It's not renewals, it's not upselling, it's not advocacy, it's not even adoption.

Is the customer getting what they thought they were buying? Are they getting that result and that outcome? Now, how we help the customer get that is what we call customer success.

‍Jay Nathan, COO, Churnkey (Source)

Jay is also a well-known thought leader in the CS space, with particularly insightful thoughts on how organizations can attract and retain customers.

In this interview, he gives his thoughts on how organizations can develop deep and sustainable relationships with their customers. 

As Jay so perceptively explains in this quote, effective customer success is about focusing on the customer’s goals and seeing yourself as the solution.

It’s so easy to get lost in the details of upselling, advocacy, adoption, and other metrics that are really designed to make CS work for the organization - not the customer. 

Of course, these all have their place and no effective CS operation is complete without them.

But they have to come second to your real goal: Helping customers succeed at whatever it is they’re trying to achieve. If this isn’t your fundamental goal, your customer relationship will be in trouble sooner or later. 

9. Chad Horenfeldt

Chad makes an important and often overlooked point: That customer success has to be about a relationship built on trust.

There are many different ways that you can dissect and break down the term “customer success” but I’ve found that when customers trust you, they are more open to listening to you and working to achieve value from your product.

When customers have found value in your product, they will develop a higher degree of trust for you.

Chad Horenfeldt, VP of Customer Success (Source)

It’s often easy to get distracted by metrics, targets, or business objectives, missing the very obvious point that having a great relationship with your customer can pay dividends. 

Chad is a respected customer success spokesperson with wide experience leading CS teams at companies like Siena AI, Enlightened Customers, The Success League, and more.

In this blog, he explains how effective customer success mixes the best of trust and value. While value often gets discussed as a key CS goal, it’s easy to forget about the equally important people that trust can play. 

10. Dan Ennis

At Next Matter, we spend a lot of time discussing what effective automation looks like. And one topic that comes up a lot is the need to avoid automation for automation’s sake.

Measuring efficiency without measuring effectiveness is a red flag in any Scale Customer Success program. If you're automating processes for the sake of automating them, you aren't actually doing more with less. You're doing less with less. 

Everything we do in customer success is about removing barriers for customers and helping them actually achieve outcomes, so we can grow revenue from successful customers.

Dan Ennis, Director of Scale Customer Success, Workato (Source)

Simply put, if a flashy new tool doesn’t save time or effort for either CS agents or customers, there’s a good chance you’re wasting money without delivering any real value. 

This is the crux of Dan Ennis’ LinkedIn post, that automation can quickly become a self-defeating trap if it’s not done in the right way for the right reasons.

As he explains, having a razor-sharp focus on the tangible outcomes of automation is the best way to tell the difference. 

Dan Ennis is the Director of Scale Customer Success at Workato, a platform for ‘intelligent integration and workflow automation across your organization’. With over 10+ years’ experience leading CS teams across various SaaS organizations, he’s full of fascinating thoughts about effective CS in action. 

11. Greg Daines

Greg Daines is a well-known speaker, thought leader and expert in the CS space, with a particular interest in reducing customer turnover.

He’s also the CEO of ChurnRX, a consultancy that uses analytics, expertise, and training to help organizations increase customer loyalty.

The data consistently shows that customer sentiment has absolutely zero correlation with customer retention and churn. It turns out that what customers say does not predict what they will do!

On the other hand, customer results are by far the best predictor of retention. Customers who achieve measurable results stay 6-10 times longer than customers who don't!

Greg Daines, CEO, ChurnRX (Source)

It’s not hugely controversial to say that CS teams should focus on the measurable results they’re helping customers deliver.

But Greg’s post takes this to the next level, going as far as to say that customer sentiment has no correlation with retention at all. And you can take it from him - because he’s sifted through the data on over 1.8 million SaaS customers to work this out. 

So what does this data tell us? Ultimately, appearances aren’t everything - and having a good relationship with your customers doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to renew.

That decision will always come down to whether or not the product is actually delivering on its goals.

So, take the time to understand what your customers are trying to achieve and make sure you’re collecting the right quantitative information to prove whether or not it’s working. 

12. Ragy Thomas

Customer advocacy has been one of the most influential trends of the last 10-15 years.

Customers expect a seamless and connected experience and value that experience more than anything else. Their influence—and sometimes dis-influence—has never been more important.

Experience is not what you (the brand) say it is. It is how you make others feel. It is being created for you in every interaction with your employees, customer service agents, website, partners, and even your digital assistants.

The need to be laser-focused on your customers and each step of their journey has never been more important.

Ragy Thomas, Founder & Co-CEO, Sprinklr (Source)

Once upon a time, a poor experience could result in one lost customer. Now, through word-of-mouth and increasingly influential online reviews, the damage could be much wider. 

This is the point that Sprinklr CEO Ragy Thomas is making in his recent blog post.

Experience is so important to your customers - whether they’re shopping for clothes online or buying business software. He takes particular note of how a connected experience can make all the difference here.

Those businesses that can create a connected and personalized customer experience will be the most effective at attracting and retaining new customers. 

13. Cinthia Silva

Cinthia Silva is the customer success strategist at Nasdaq, a digital financial services organization. She’s also a well-known public speaker and influencer in the CS space. And we think this quote has some of the most valuable insights of any on this list. 

What if I told you that how you handle the situation can not only restore the relationship but may even strengthen it in the long run?

It’s called the ‘Service Recovery Paradox’. And according to ‘The Expansion Sale’ an SRP results in increased loyalty AFTER you’ve resolved a major failure to your customer’s satisfaction.

The key to achieving a positive result? How you handle the problem, the resolution, AND the apology.

Cinthia Silva, Customer Success - Strategy & Growth (Source)

As Cinthia explains, a negative customer experience doesn’t have to be the end of your customer relationship.

Often, the way you manage the problem has much more of an impact on the customer’s response than the issue itself.

The right response has the potential to not only assuage any negative feelings - but actually create long-lasting positive ones. 

Cinthia’s point reinforces how important CS teams are, and the direct impact they can have on an organization’s bottom line. 

14. Reetu Kainulainen

For all their many benefits - you have to admit that chatbots don’t always deliver the customer experience we want them to. And nobody understands that better than Reetu Kainulainen - co-founder and CEO of Ultimate.

We all know these bot experiences where you want to know if you can return an item, and they blast you with a giant block of text like: ‘Here’s our policy!’

That’s not really a great experience.

Reetu Kainulainen, CEO & Co-Founder, Ultimate (Source)

Ultimate uses generative AI to help organizations deliver automated CS experiences that deliver on customers' goals. 

Reetu’s point is a simple one: The least successful chatbots make the customer experience worse, not better.

Often, automation comes at the expense of personalization, with customers getting the same unhelpful stock messages whatever the nature of the inquiry.

He goes on to explain how companies can avoid these traps, principally by integrating chatbots with your CRM. Check out the full blog to find out more. 

15. Marie-Louise Gaughan

To continue on the theme of AI chatbots, Marie-Louise Gaughan has some interesting thoughts to share. She’s a CS expert and strategist at Alorica, a realtime voice and language translation service.

Recognising that many customers strongly prefer interacting with another person is essential.

Regardless of how sophisticated AI bots become, there will always be a demand for human connection, which allows for more authenticity, flexibility, connectedness, context, and empathy.

Companies strive to deliver what their customers want, and human agents are indispensable in meeting this need.

Marie-Louise Gaughan, CX Specialist, Alorica (Source)

As she explains here, automation can’t mean the end of human agents entirely. Instead, you need to have a mix of human and automated channels - and ideally give customers control over how they want to engage. 

As Marie-Louise goes on to say “AI should be seen as a tool to augment and enhance existing processes rather than a complete replacement.”

At its best, this is what AI in CS can achieve - automating the mundane so CS agents can focus on what matters; helping customers. This ultimately, is the key to effective AI implementation. 

CS automation that actually delivers with Next Matter

If there’s one theme to all the insights we’ve gathered together, it’s this: Effective CS needs to focus on what actually matters to customers.

If you’re not saving them time and money or helping them deliver on their own goals, there’s a good chance you’re going to lose that customer before long. 

When it comes to automation, it’s easy to fall into the trap of adopting technology for technology’s sake. And that’s precisely the pitfall many of the experts on this blog warn against. It’s also the guiding principle of everything we do at Next Matter.

For automation to succeed, it needs to deliver.

So how do we help CS teams do just that? Check out our CS automation solutions to find out more.