Providing value through customer relationship management

July 24, 2017 by Kyle J Johnson

A team of customer success consultants evaluate customer satisfaction.

About the author

Kyle J Johnson

Revenue operations lead

Kyle provides revenue and sales analysis for all Advicent go-to-market teams. These analytics optimize Advicent pipeline forecasting, marketing strategies, and leveraged media channels to improve efficiency of sales operations. Kyle is interested in combining his three passions: tech, data analytics, and marketing, to drive success.

Technology companies are commonly portrayed as the disruptive innovator due to their product offerings. However, more innovations come out of technology companies than just disruptive products. Technology companies also innovate with their business models by changing their pricing model to attract more users or creating new personnel positions to provide more value.

One of those new positions is the customer success manager. In many technology companies, sales teams are no longer handling the relationship with a client after the sale. Technology companies are employing customer success managers to manage the customer relationship and to show the value of the technology investment to their customers.

A new way to manage customer relationships

Gone are the days of the sales relationship manager. Techs sales teams are too focused on new business and business pipelines to manage current corporate relationships. Thus, technology companies created a new position, the customer success manager. The customer success manager is a proactive support function with your customer base.

At Advicent, the marketing team works with several different technology solutions. Each week, we have a quick call with each of their customer success managers to ensure that the product is working as intended and to answer any questions we may have about the technology.

Customer success managers are a great way to get in front of your customers to ensure they are happy and will continue to come back in the future. Besides answering questions and ensuring renewals, customer success teams play a more important role in proving ROI of the technology investment.

Customer success managers

Some people think that technology is a push-button solution, completely replacing an entire skill. However, most technology just presents a new paradigm to customers because customers go through a skill transfer from one solution to another.

For example, in the financial planning industry, customers may go through a skill transfer from planning in excel to planning in our applications. The customer is not displacing their excel skill, but is gaining a new skill that will make them more efficient. With this shift and the increased cost burden from the additional technology, customers must see a return on their investment.

At Advicent, we go through an exercise about once a quarter with our customer success managers to analyze the ROI of our investment. This ensures that we know what we are receiving for our investment. This exercise can be useful in improving retention of your customers as you are working with them to get the most out of your investment.

Recently, Advicent has created our enterprise customer success team to work with new enterprise accounts. Our customer success team will work with you from the implementation process to answer any questions you may have on the software. Our enterprise customer success team has years of hands-on experience and are ready to handle your questions. The enterprise customer success team is yet another value-added benefit that Advicent is providing our enterprise partners.

To learn more ways that Advicent can increase your firm’s ROI, click here.