Interview with Zack Price, Global Success Manager at zkipster — An EnjoyHQ Case Study.
In this Interview, Zack Price shares the challenges behind understanding what makes customers successful at zkipster, and his strategy for putting the customer at the center of every decision.
Hi Zack. Tell us about zkipster, and what your role is there.
Zack: At zkipster, our focus is helping people run the best events around the world. We work with important invite-only events and specifically deliver an app for the event planners. Our app helps them plan everything leading up to the event, and then on the actual day it helps them check people in quickly and effectively.
After their event takes place, we want our clients to be able to understand all of their data from it. We help our clients learn from each event, so that they can use us to continuously build better, more successful events .
I’m the Global Success Manager, I focus on figuring out ways to make our clients more successful, so that they can have an easy time using our software and our app. A lot of that starts with getting feedback from our clients in the first place.
What is your process like for getting the customer feedback you need to make your clients happy?
Zack: I was brought on board at zkipster to help discover what our clients need in order to be able to use our tool to it’s highest potential.
We previously collected our feedback through a lot of independent channels; emails, Salesforce notes, and we used Intercom as our chat service, which worked great as both a support _and _feedback channel, but we weren’t really able to extrapolate the feedback out of it.
This meant that we had very siloed entities where we knew we were gathering a lot of valuable feedback, but there wasn’t quite enough data that we needed to feed through to our product team. This was the biggest issue, we didn’t have a way to quickly identify trends or back things up with evidence.
That’s what prompted us to start researching a platform that could help. EnjoyHQ has been a great partner in being able to help us put our data together, make sense of it, as well as giving me the ability to share that data with the rest of my team.
We’ve talked to a lot of teams in different sectors and industries and the ability to share feedback with other teams is something very important to them. Is it similar for you, and if so, why is it so important?
Zack: Before, we’d kind of just be putting a list of things together of what we thought were important, or had heard during the week through our feedback sources. That’s how we would deliver our feedback. But now, we’re able to start a conversation.
Our system now allows us to speak transparently about feedback, where things are working great, where things are not, and being able to focus from that feedback on what specific features we want improve and put our resources into.
We can now use our data to have a discussion with Product and Engineering teams, around what makes sense for the product roadmap, and whether it’s something that we can quickly put into a sprint, or whether it’s something that we want to park and scope further.
It seems obvious that understanding what makes customers happy and successful is fundamental to every single organization, but how do you view Customer Success as a discipline?
Zack: It’s a very interesting place where we’re at within customer success as a business unit. It’s always been around, but I’ve definitely believe it’s grown over the last few years. What you see more and more of, every single day, is that customer success is at the heart of businesses.
Customer success programs need buy-in from everyone. If the people at the top don’t understand what your customers need, if they don’t see that it’s important, it’s not going to trickle down to the entire company and be a part of the lifeblood of what makes a company successful.
You see people that do it well like Salesforce, like Amazon, like Apple, these are people that have had customer success programs. Customer success programs can be as simple as having a support channel where you can talk with your clients directly, or it’s something where you’re actually able to take valuable amounts of customer data and deliver it to your product team, so there can be quick transitions between the customer need and product enhancement.
Those things really stem from customer success. It’s also helped our sales team a lot too. They’ve been able identify the types of customers that are successful, and what customers are maybe not worth going after at all. You can really create an opportunity to have a synonymous relationship between all different aspects of your business, all stemming from Customer Success. The support people are the ones on the front lines, they’re the ones talking to the client, they’re the ones hearing the pain points from an internal side as well.
Continue to collect feedback & to understand your customers. Relay things back to them, and really deliver on their high expectations of you. I believe in transparency in the customer success realm.
One last question Zack, what is your advice for the people in any team that really want to rally their entire company into paying more attention to their customers?
Zack: Number one, as with anything in life, you have to have a passion for it. The more passionately you speak about it, the easier it’s going to be to get people to buy in as well.
But number two is, you have to build a business case for anything and everything, which is difficult to do at times when you’re not always able to show what the end result looks like right away. What I find helps me with this is reading; reading books, reading articles, reading what others in the industry that have done before. Learn about the others who have already blazed the trail and and take bits and pieces from all that.
You also need to be able and willing to openly communicate with everyone in your team and be open to their feedback. I really try to rely on every single member of my team to understand how they see things, so that I can deliver an experience for them on an internal level that will help me get their buy-in.
There’s are many different elements, and many different people and pieces that are connected to make this work. Make sure you read & build a business case, make sure you communicate, and do it passionately. Those are the things that have really helped me to start engineering this in our company, getting the buy-in I need from other team members and getting feedback from them as well, making everyone a part of the process for helping our customers to be successful.
Zack, thank you so much for talking to us.
Zack: Absolutely, have a great day!