Owning Retention & Standardizing CS Across 17 Acquisitions ft. Rebecca Nerad (Advantive)

Tell me, let's go back to bringing together all these lines of business and the products within them into one cohesive strategy.

It's no different, I suppose, than a CCO at a large company that has different product lines that they're all overseeing, even though yours may come in organically through the acquisitions.

But tell me a little bit about how you do that, how you think about- creating as much uniformity as possible across your larger advantage of work.

To me, there are themes that are true across companies, across software, right? When you think about cancellation or at-risk or down-sell motions and when you think about engagement and onboarding.

And so what we developed was a pretty standard at-risk process to be able to handle that.

So it's... intentionally simple and being able to log an at-risk ticket this is this is where a human is actually saying hey i heard a customer say this right they're frustrated with support or i know that there's so someone within the organization not necessarily customer success is logging that at-risk ticket um And we need to make that process really simple, but also have the data be useful enough that across the lines of business, we can identify trends.

So it has some of the product specifics, but it also has some of the reason codes behind it so that we're able to send it to the right teams to action, but also then therefore, you know, look for some of the trends later.

We also then developed save plays.

And again, they apply across all of the lines of business.

I think where we've had more differences are around engagement.

When we think about some of the larger tier customers and we have quarterly business reviews, yes, we still do find value in QBRs.

I know that's hotly debated in customer success, but as far as making sure you're engaging with your top customers and listening to them, if you don't want to call it a QBR, that's different from some of the long tail where some of the companies that we've acquired have had very different ways of engaging with those customers.

And that's what's hard when you bring them into a larger model.

So to be able to have more of a one-to-many outreach for those customers as opposed to a QBR, what does that look like? What does engagement and outreach look like for a CSM? How do we partner with product marketing? There are some of those motions that have been, it's less about it being one LOB versus the other and more about how do we segment to be able to serve those customers appropriately.

So that's your scaled success.

That's your longer tail, your smaller customer base.

Give yourself a grade in that segment of your business.

How do you feel about that segment?

There's still work to be done.

I think we have a very strong marketing leader who's done a great job of general outreach to our customer base and guiding the product teams.

It's more that next level of, um, for specific customers tiered to their products and what's meaningful to them that right.

How they drive additional value.

That's been tougher.

Yeah.

What are your thoughts? What would you like to be doing X number of months from now? How else would you like to be