SalesTechStar Interview with Jennifer Leire, Vice President of Customer Strategy & Success at Vibes

A data backed customer success model can help build better online journeys and experiences; Jennifer Leire, Vice President of Customer Strategy & Success at Vibes shares some tips in this Q&A:

Read More:  Qumulo Announces Native Support for Amazon Nimble Studio

________

Hi Jennifer, we’d love to hear about your journey through the years…tell us more about Vibes and your role there?

I started my career at a startup many years ago in digital as a jack of all trades; servicing customers across implementation, data analysis, and strategy recommendations, all the way through to renewals. As time went on, and as the company and the digital market matured, I realized that there was a need from our customers to have more dedicated and focused expertise.

The need for increased expertise for customers is something that I’ve seen throughout my career. Every organization I’ve been a part of has had a three-legged stool model. That is where you have dedicated support and areas of expertise in strategy, implementation and data analytics. These three areas are key to optimizing the customer experience and the value customers derived from our platform. Businesses want to have experts to provide strategic guidance in setting up programs that are easy to implement, execute and optimize.

This previous experience guided me along my journey to my current role at Vibes. One of the reasons why I joined Vibes is that mobile is at the critical inflection point where digital was, generally, when I started my career. Brands are in need of not only experts to help start their mobile journey, but to also guide them as they mature. Vibes is well positioned to provide that support and guidance with our experts and an intelligent omnichannel platform that can facilitate their journey.

It’s exciting to be a part of helping brands accomplish this across the digital lifecycle through online and in-person commerce, servicing and loyalty. My role at Vibes is to oversee the core teams that provide this strategic guidance and service to our customers, from technical implementation to mobile consulting to customer care support.

What are some best practices and technologies / processes that you feel customer success teams need to be strengthening more of today?

Because my background is in data and analytics, I’ve seen tremendous success with the companies I’ve worked with by leading with data and telling stories that can generate insights and translate into tangible prescriptive actions. Customer success teams need to enable brands to make better optimization decisions that ultimately drive return on investment for their programs.

This is a best practice that hasn’t really been a core focus for companies in the past, but it is necessary today to define key metrics and align those to the company’s overall initiatives.

How can customer success teams adapt and integrate core processes with other teams (like marketing) to nurture customer relationships in a more integrated manner?

Organizations must break down the silos. One of the first things I did when I came to Vibes was look at the customer experience landscape, along with the different functional departments of our company, and find ways to integrate as one team. With all these different functions driving towards the same outcome for our customers, it’s important that we’re enabling that communication across departments and making sure that we’re all aligned. By having the same goals and objectives, we can facilitate internal and external communications in a way that’s going to enable our customers’ mobile marketing programs to be successful.

Can you talk about the growing trends in customer success models today that you’ve been observing?

One of the growing trends I’ve seen is a greater focus on leading with data and metrics that align and support company initiatives. Most of the time, customer success teams are just focused on the features and functions, not on how these features and functions can drive results. Shifting that mindset from a product perspective to an outcome-based view will result in using metrics that drive company’s goals and enable value optimization.

How do you feel the role of customer success teams will evolve in the near-future?

The three-legged stool model is going to become increasingly more important. Customers’ needs have evolved beyond transactional servicing and require a more strategic approach, providing prescriptive tactical recommendations and optimizations based on data that ladder up to company objectives. Customer success teams must lead with data to tell a prescriptive story that drives business results.

A few takeaways on salestech and customer facing technologies to always consider?

I think one of the big ways to support customer success teams is to have a good customer experience (CX) platform that provides a 360-degree view of your customer and their data. Being able to analyze customer data, including health, NPS scores, product feedback, and market and industry trends, is key. Platforms that can synthesize the data in one spot are so useful to keeping the team up to speed on what’s going on in the industry and their customers, as well as provide insights that are valuable for customer success.

Another factor to consider is how to use communication and other different techniques to break through the clutter and engage with customers. Previously, it was all about email and conference calls. Now, there are ways businesses can leverage other technologies, like video messages and SMS marketing, to grab customers’ attention with relevant information that is personalized and to the point. By using different forms of communication to reach customers, teams can spark more relevant conversations with customers and provide better ways to connect to tell a story.

Read More:  SalesTechStar Interview With Michael Schwalb, GM Of Partnerships And Data At JW Player