The 5 Pillars of CS

In the age of hyper-growth for customer success, it is vital to have solid foundations over which you can build and expand. What are the pillars that will ensure a good alignment once your team has grown to dozens or even hundreds of people? Are these foundations the same for every company? In this episode of Gainsight Gamechangers, Henry Trevelyan Thomas, Vice President of Customer Success at Tessian joins us to chat about his blog article Building a Customer Success Team: 5 Pillars of Success. Henry walks us through each one of the 5 pillars: People, customer, growth, community, and product, and tells us how to implement them and whether this model could apply to other industries. Listen now to learn how getting these five principles right can skyrocket Customer Success in your business.

Jump straight into:

(00:55) - Who is Henry Trevelyan Thomas and his role at Tessian - “When I joined, we were around five people sitting around one table. And we've now scaled to around 200 people split across both the US and London.”

(04:40) - How to find alignment between the team, leadership, and CS - “There are so many overlaps with other areas of the organization. It can be really hard to know what you should and shouldn't be doing.”

(06:11) - Pillar # 1: People & people satisfaction - “Once every one of the team starts to realize that anyone can instigate change, everyone gets with the mindset of thinking like a business owner and a leader.”

(10:46) - Pillar #2: Customer Health - “Customers are only as healthy as they think they are. This is where the gut feel from the CSM really needs to come in, it requires the CSM to have great empathy and awareness of what's happening in the account.”

(14:11) - Pillar #3: Customer Growth & Onboarding - “If we nail onboarding for a customer, we have so much confidence in our product and the value that it provides that we know they're going to see value in the first couple of weeks.”

(18:02) - Pillar #4: Community Building - “I do think the community aspect of it and being plugged into that network is super important as well in order to help them in our world and mature their customer success strategy.”

(21:22) - Pillar #5: Product Enablement - “Our customers can no longer afford to spend hours on the phone or in a meeting trying to figure out how to do a specific thing within the product. And it's on us to figure out how we remove friction.”

Resources

Connect with Henry via LinkedIn

Building a Customer Success Team: 5 Pillars of Success

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