Heather Hernandez for Customer Success Festival | San Francisco

Speaker: Heather Hernandez, VP of Customer Success at Alara Imaging

Heather Hernandez: Hi, my name is Heather Hernandez, and I am a customer success executive. My background and specialty is in healthcare startups, digital health or healthcare software. And I love building out a customer- oriented perspective across the organization, ensuring that the customer voices represented, minimizing churn and growing net dollar retention (NDR) year over year and helping teams build out the infrastructure and tools necessary to scale. And it's a delight to meet you!

Heather Hernandez: At the upcoming CS Festival taking place September 7th through to 8th in San Francisco, I will be a part of a panel speaking about customer success and sales enablement scale. So really ensuring that you have all of the key basic infrastructure. Have you finished your customer journey map? Do you have health scores in place? Where are you on all the basic CS infrastructure? Thinking about some key tools for you, do you have a great knowledge base, what does your CRM look like? How developed are you? We'll talk about training that CS mindset across not only your CS team but also the company. How do we get everybody who could potentially interact with the customer to have that empathetic, customer- obsessed mindset? There are some easy, quick ways to do that. Then a lot about automating and processes; how do we create foundational processes that we can continue to scale and innovate as we continue to grow and learn. So excited to share everything that has worked well for me and excited to learn from you as well.

Heather Hernandez: So three reasons why it's important to shine the light on customer success. One is that investing in CS is going to basically signal shift between from reactive account management to proactive coordinated efforts. So not only will customer success investment make your customer experience better, It will also level up your internal product team, the product innovations you'll make aligned with customer insights, your marketing team, your sales team, your research, your implementation team – all of these teams will be better fed with data, better supported and have better coordination with a customer as a result of a customer success expert. So number one: more proactive and coordinated customer experience. Number two is that your customer experience will be improved at every point throughout their journey. So all the way from their sales handoff to implementation, optimization, ensuring they're discovering, that they're realizing value. all the way through expansion and up-sell. This will be a more coordinated and tailored experience if you have a great customer success team. So we've got proactive management, we've got better customer experience. And then number three, is that all of this ties into growing growing your revenue year over year. So not only will customer success protect those customers and keep those accounts from churning by ensuring that their experience is great, ensuring that they're getting value out of your product, they're also going to help them thoughtfully optimize, expand, provide more value for you as the company, there's going to be this wonderful long-term partnership, which is really great to invest in. I think you're not only going to protect your customer base that you've worked so hard to acquire, you're going to expand and increase NDR year over year.