California-Based Customer Success Firm Plants East Coast Roots in Atlanta With New Training Program

Keeping customers engaged with your product as well as listening to their concerns often lands on the shoulders of a company’s customer success team. Customer success managers are the next step following customer acquisition through sales— their role is to support and retain already on-board clients. However, it’s still fairly new field and there aren’t many resources to learn how to effectively approach and nurture the customer experience.

SuccessHACKER is a customer success management consultancy, based in San Francisco, that helps tech enterprises to increase and improve customer lifetime value and satisfaction by providing customer success-focused training and coaching services. The firm just opened an East Coast headquarters in Atlanta, at Atlanta Tech Village, with General Partner James Scott at the helm.

“Delivering value to all customers on a repeatable basis is hard! Like all hard challenges, to solve it you need a good strategy, a strong team, and well-designed processes,” says Scott. “That’s what Customer Success is all about. Customer Success is more than just a role, a team or a department – it’s the operating system of a modern software company.”

SuccessHACKER is now launching a new program called SuccessCOACHING, a weekly, cohort-based coaching program with 24 foundational topics, practical exercises, live discussion and personalized feedback from experienced Customer Success executives. The program is taking applications for a Fall 2017 class.

Scott, who moved from California to Atlanta to support SuccessHACKER’s operations on the East Coast and in Europe, shares more about SuccessHACKER’s launch in Atlanta and the SuccessCOACHING program.

Why choose Atlanta for your East Coast HQ? 

When we did our research about the best location for our East Coast hub, we considered a number of factors including size and growth potential of the tech community, accessibility to the rest of the East Coast as well as Europe, tastiness of the local cuisine and friendliness of the locals. Atlanta impressed us on all fronts.

The tech community is booming, thanks to the investment and hard work of organizations such as Atlanta Tech Village, Techstars Atlanta, and many others. There are also some great software success stories with many more currently being written. Atlanta has achieved a lot, but feels like it has plenty more to give. We are excited to now be able to call this wonderful city home and pledge to play our part in its ongoing development over the coming years.

What does SuccessHACKER do for companies?

SuccessHACKER is a boutique Customer Success consultancy practice that helps high growth technology companies with Customer Success strategy and operations. We do this by providing specialized consulting, training, coaching and recruiting services for Customer Success leaders and their teams.

Companies that we work with typically experience increases in customer lifetime value, reductions in customer acquisition costs and improvements in customer satisfaction. Or put another way — stickier, more profitable customers!

Why do companies need customer success training services?

In today’s subscription-based economy, a low barrier to entry for customers also means a low barrier to exit. If customers aren’t receiving value from their investment in your product or service, it’s very easy for them to go elsewhere. As a result, a well-designed and robustly-executed Customer Success strategy has gone from being a differentiator to becoming a critical success factor.

But whilst most companies understand the need to deliver a cohesive customer experience that delivers recurring value, they struggle with execution. Leaders understand the “Why?” or the “What?” of Customer Success pretty well. It’s the “How?” that most are struggling with.

As ex-Customer Success executives, we totally get the challenges of moving an organization from a reactive to a proactive approach to Customer Success. We can help others avoid some of the mistakes we’ve made over the years and help them get out of a reactive, firefighting mode and onto the front foot, taking control of the customer experience.

Tell us more about the new program, SuccessCOACHING. Who is your target audience?

Well, it’s hard to execute successfully on a Customer Success strategy without first thinking about the success of your employees. Unless you empower those on the front line with the skills, knowledge and tools they require to deliver your strategy, your results are likely to fall well short of expectations.

SuccessCoaching is a 6-month long, instructor-led, interactive program designed to empower participants with the tools, knowledge and support network they need to be successful in their Customer Success careers.

We have weekly group coaching calls where we work through real-life challenges that participants have experienced in their jobs. We also have private 1-1 coaching sessions with experienced Customer Success executives, for those discussions that require a more personalized approach. And we run SuccessCoaching in a cohort format, which means participants stick together in the same group throughout the duration of the program.

How will you support the community here in Atlanta?

Community is an important part of our mission at SuccessHACKER. In fact, we already host an online community, OUTCOMES, of over 2,500 Customer Success professionals from across the globe.

We’re passionate about also supporting the Customer Success community here in Atlanta. We’re looking into co-hosting regular meetups, as well as perhaps establishing a larger annual Customer Success event. We encourage anyone who’s interested in helping make this happen to get in touch with us. And we’ll be posting more details as they’re available on our website and in the OUTCOMES community.