VP of Customer Success

How To Run a Customer Success Team With Hive

Welcome to A Day in The Life where we are showcasing the day-to-day moments of productivity with teams across the world. We’re asking real people how they spend their day in Hive — and what they accomplish because of it.????

The Need-To-Know:

Today: The VP of Customer Success on a remote team for a SaaS company
Occupation: Vice President of Customer Success
Industry: SaaS, Productivity Management
Location: Manhattan, New York
Hobbies: Cooking, trying out new vegetarian recipes and finding new restaurants.????
Pronouns: She/Her

How would you describe your role on your team?

I am the Vice President of customer success. My responsibilities include ensuring our customer support is timely and helpful while offering the correct guidance. On the customer success side, I ensure that we onboard our customers well. I make sure they understand the product, how to use it day-to-day and that they’re getting the value that they want to get out of the product.

What does the Customer Success Team do?

The customer success and support team is six people. My personal responsibilities go hand-in-hand with what the Customer Success team is meant to do. Day to day, we tend to work pretty closely with the sales team. For example, we hand over new customers to sales and also provide management of customers too.

We also work pretty closely with the product and engineering team on the support side with questions around new features that are being released, any issues that come up and the timeline.

What are some of the main goals of your team?

On the support side, one of our main goals is trying to produce — and we do produce content — that we can post for our customers to learn how to use our product. We’re always kind of in the brainstorming or production of a new course. We also have goals around response time and overall customer satisfaction that we look at on a monthly basis.

Another goal we have is to consider our Greenhealth score. No matter how long it takes, we’re looking to get the customers to what we consider a Greenhealth score, which is the combination of a lot of factors about their usage of the product and their satisfaction with it.

Lastly, a goal we’re working on this quarter is the identification of new opportunities. We have a strong focus on identifying new opportunities that we can pass to the sales team.

What do you use Hive to do personally and how does it help you get your work done overall?

So many things. I would say one of the biggest things we use Hive for is to track the new customers that join and the first steps that we need to do in ensuring that they’ve made it through the operations and finance and assignment process.

We also have projects for all of our initiatives, within Hive, to keep us all on track. Hive forms help our customers communicate with our team if they want certain services, too. When someone fills out a form, an action is created in a professional services project and the entire team has a status board to track our progress. That’s a big help in staying organized.

Hive helps me, as well as the whole team, take all of the steps that happen within the first two weeks of a customer coming on board.

Do you use Hive in tandem with any other tools?

We use Salesforce in tandem with Hive. Using Hive Automate, we’ve set up a trigger from Salesforce for when a new customer or opportunity closes, that’s over a certain amount, which is the threshold that means the customer service team should get involved. The trigger creates an action card in our onboarding project, and it has an action template applied to it.

It allows the salesperson to enter their notes in Salesforce, for finance to set up a subscription and charge, and then for me to assign it to a Customer Service Manager. It’s just like a quick checklist to make sure that our customers are starting out in our systems the correct way.

A Day In The Life Using Hive

9:30-11:30 A.M

I start my day by checking my Hive notifications in the morning. I like to just read through anything. I’ll either just archive it or I leave it unread if it’s something I need to do that day. I like to clear my notifications when I come in the morning or just know which ones I have to respond to or work on that day.

If there are any like DMs or group chats, I go through and make sure there’s nothing really important there that I need to respond to.

I also bring up my calendar — using the Hive My Day Calendar feature — to see where I have pockets of time to work on the things that might need my attention.

12-3 P.M.

During my day, I’m usually carving out time to work one-on-one, take meetings or work on My Actions.

✍???? I’m also a really big note-taker, so Hive Notes is a big part of my day. Not only like in meetings, but even when I listen to podcasts about customer success or join Zoom calls about it. I love to jot down ideas that I hear. Before Hive Notes, I would use Google drive and continually create new Google docs to write things in. It was so disorganized and I just didn’t really like doing that. I use notes a ton for my own personal scratchpad or when things come up throughout the day.

I think that’s one of the like favorite features with Hive right now.

3:30-5:30 P.M.

I repeat my morning process in the evening as well, to close my day out with a clean slate for the morning.

Making a True Impact On a Workday

What would you say are the biggest benefits of using hive overall for you and the team?

I think the ability to just see all the information is key. If it isn’t in Hive, then I can trust that there’s nothing I’m missing, which is really beneficial to focus on the things that we have to do as a team. Hive creates this trust that we’re able to focus on the most important things while we’re supported by some of the automation that we have.

What would happen if you couldn’t use Hive anymore?

I think it would be really hard. One of the huge benefits to Hive is that everyone in the company is on the same platform. I’ve worked with a lot of customers, for example, where the creative team and the engineering team aren’t on the same path because they’re using different tools. It would be so hard to constantly be translating, emailing people or going to Slack and having these long threads where information can get lost. I think it’d just be a lot more chaotic and more work every day just to communicate to colleagues. It would be really challenging.

I can’t imagine working and not using Hive. ????

Would you recommend Hive to other teams and if so, why?

100% yes!

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