What Makes Chili Piper Customer Success Different
Unique Chili Piper CS team differentiators
Customer Success Headcount Calculator
Our Director of Customer Success and Direct of Customer Love both utilize a head count calculator to predict head count needs for the upcoming month/quarter/year. Our team is working under the goal of getting to 80% utilization per team member. 80% is our gold standard of how much time is spent on CS related tasks and the other 20% is for proactive work or passion projects.
For Customer Success Managers the calculation inputs come from current logos, expected new logos, onboarding hours, and adoption hours with customers. Onboarding and adoption hours are measured utilizing the number of customers we have and hours the team spends in meetings.
For Customer Love we take the support hours over hours possible for working each week. The support hours are measured by number of tickets and time to solve those tickets.
More detail here:
Chief Customer Officer Secrets
We see Customer Success as a growth engine for Chili Piper. The CSM roles have risen by roughly 33% according to LinkedIn’s research. With this said, there is not the same level of executive level support for this rise in demand. Gemma Cipriani-Espineira, our Chief Customer Officer (CCO), along with Chili Piper are looking to share the secrets of what it means to be a best in class Customer Success organization with a seat at the table. Chief Customer Officer Secrets is a video webinar series that does this by conducting interviews with other CCOs to learn their secrets and elevate customer teams!
More details here:
Customer Success & Love - Center of Excellence
A Center of Excellence is a method to implement best practice quickly based on research of top companies. We established our Customer Success and Customer Love Centers of Excellence to drive optimal performance, beat the competition, and attract & retain top talent. These are co-ordinated by dedicated individuals who are empowered to drive change. Our process is simple, provide your leaders time to research best practice, prioritize items to take action on, then measure results and publish your findings so others can swap notes and ideas. We have used this framework to scale Chili Piper's CS Org quickly with impressive results!
The only requirements to build an effective Center of Excellence is to have clear a mission and clear metrics for the team so that everything in the Center of Excellence can be prioritized appropriately.
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CS Fail Fast Culture - FUC (F*ck Up + Conclusion) Virtual Event
Our Chief Customer Officer CCO, Gemma took inspiration from an event Barry Cochrane, VP of Customer Success and Operations at ResponseTap, was apart of. The concept was to create a fail fast board where all recent team failures were displayed and talked through. The catch is once a threshold of 10 fails was met, the whole group was invited out to a local pub to chat about those failures and specially the learnings from them.
This inspired Chili Piper's very own F*ck Up + Conclusion virtual event. The goal of this event to to take the shame out of mistakes and turn them into a fun learning experience. Let's face it we will all make mistakes, so this event allows the entire CS team to meet up, submit their FUC for the month, have a drink, wear a silly hat, and learn from each other! In the end this results in updates to internal knowledge, documentation, and highlights team training needs.
More details here:
CS Enablement Manager Role
In a 2019 study powered by LinkedIn showed Customer Success has Grown 736% and is among top 10 fastest growing professions. As Byron Deeter States "One reoccurring theme for every successful subscription based company I've seen is a relentless focus on Customer Success". At Chili Piper we are proving this with investment in our Customer Success teams. That is one reason why the Customer Success Enablement Manger role was created.
It is typical to see a sales enablement function at most companies now a days, and we also believe in the same support of the enablement and growth for the teams focused on helping customers reach their goals once a purchase is made. The role of Customer Success Enablement at Chili Piper can be summarized as supporting the customer success managers, management, and customer love team effectively support our customers to achieve their own success! In order to do this the role is focused on providing tools, resources, and enablement to aid in the CS team's ability to get the job done.