Source: Gainsight Customer Success Community
Throughout my career, I’ve worked for a handful of digital agencies and served a wide array of clients. I’ve seen projects completed on time and in budget, but still faced situations where clients weren’t satisfied and chose to bring their business elsewhere, leaving our team scratching our heads wondering where we went wrong. The key element missing was making client success the focus of our relationships and work.
Client, or Customer, Success Management is a trending philosophy and practice. So much so, that I recently attended Pulse by Gainsight, a Customer Success conference, in the heart of San Francisco. So, what is Client/Customer Success? At Mediacurrent, it’s an organizational practice of taking a proactive, consultative approach to our client relationships, ultimately becoming an extension of their team. We’re driven to achieve our clients’ desired outcomes: to grow engagement, enhance business processes, and evolve their digital presence.
Rubbing shoulders with my peers at Pulse was a great experience - I was able to learn how we can scale our best practices as we, and our clients, grow, as well as receiving confirmation that we are already on the right track with current methods. Here are my top Pulse takeaways and what they mean for the client experience at Mediacurrent.
#1 - Client success doesn’t always have to be high touch
When you partner with Mediacurrent, you have a dedicated team of world-class developers, strategists, designers, a project manager and a client success manager working with you. Our first instinct can sometimes lead us to push for many and frequent touchpoints. Naturally, we want to make sure the project is running smoothly and that desired outcomes are being met. But this can also feel overwhelming to the client.
Instead, we shift our focus to intentional touchpoints. This means doing our research ahead of time, understanding your business model and industry, regrouping with our internal team before meetings and being proactive to bring trends and recommendations to the table.
At Pulse, one of the best practices recommended was to use technology as much as possible - this may take the form of client surveys, CRM tools, effective communication systems, etc. Utilizing technology in this way allows us to feel lower touch to the client in the amount of touchpoints, while being high touch in the value we are providing.
#2 - Client Success is a growth engine, not a churn preventer
At the end of the day, our clients renew with Mediacurrent because of the quality of our work, the talent of our team, and the results our team provides. Mediacurrent’s growth is dependent on the success of our clients.
Each individual role at Mediacurrent is aligned with our client journeys, even if their individual role isn’t client-facing. Our marketing team has meetings with our Client Success Managers to align content and campaigns with the topics that are most relevant and important to our clients. Our recruitment team is making sure we are bringing the best candidates to Mediacurrent to continue to provide our clients with the top-notch work and experience they have grown to expect. This alignment throughout our organization is key to our clients’ success and our growth.
#3 - Client voices need to be injected into the service lifecycle
As a Client Success Manager, I am focused on being a trusted advisor for my clients. In many ways, I function as a mediator, identifying issues or areas of improvement and then working with my team to solve complex problems. These touchpoints happen with my clients on an ongoing basis, not just at the beginning and end of a project. Yes, we still have project briefs and retrospectives, but by collecting feedback throughout a project we are able to be agile and identify and act on issues proactively and even make adjustments to processes to better serve our clients.
Final thoughts
Client success at Mediacurrent will be constantly evolving, just as our services do. I’m thrilled to have had the experience to attend Pulse, learn from leaders in the industry, and bring best practices to our team to help us continue to deliver results and positive experiences to our clients. If you are a client or someone who partners with an agency, what has set your relationship with your agency apart and why? I would love to hear your first-hand experiences with client success management practices!