How to Scale Customized CX

Eric Crane

Published 12/8/2020

Being on the receiving end of a customized customer experience is the warm, fuzzy feeling every customer loves. But how do organizations personalize their CX at scale?

Can every customer get the warm fuzzies?

Teresa Anania, VP of Global Customer Success & Renewals at Zendesk, thinks — to some degree — every customer can have a customized experience. She shares her CX strategy with Eric, as well as…

Developing an outcome-based approach with high-touch customers
Engaging an entirely remote CS team
Giving us advice for new CS leaders

Building out a differentiated customer experience for her customers and peers in the business has given Teresa the opportunity to rise to the occasion when it comes to finding outcomes to new challenges, especially within the ever-changing landscape brought upon by the Covid-19 pandemic.

But it wasn’t easy, Teresa was thrown into the fire to quickly learn:

How to scale the experience
How to scale an organization
How to drive outcomes
And most importantly, how to combine all of the above in a way that sustains a healthy customer success practice

Developing an Outcome-based approach

Putting the customer first should be top priority. Listen to their vision of success and tailor their customer journey to that.

If you wait for the customer to renew before knowing the value that your customers are getting out of your solution, you’re too late.

It’s an exercise of developing the right data and insights to inform the right action and using that to trigger outreach.

“It’s really building out this personalized experience, where we're blending both digital and human.” — Teresa Anania

Ask the important questions:

Where is the customer?
What inspired them to buy your solutions?
What are the goals they want to have?

Engaging a Remote CS Team

Right now, customer success is arguably more challenging than it’s ever been. While the pandemic has made things more difficult, it’s also brought the importance of customer success to the spotlight.

Teresa says her goal is that despite all of these new challenges, that her people still love what they do.

This is achieved by

Caring for team members by making sure they have what they need
Ensure a good work-life balance & take breaks
Investing in enablement
Getting team members excited and feeling empowered in their roles

Advice for New CS Leaders

How can we ensure new leaders take on the right traits to inspire their teams?

Teresa uses an approach called dynamic segmentation. What does this approach do?

Aligns the right person to the right account
Protects and maintains strong relationships

Teresa’s 3 pillars of advice for new leaders:

Realize the importance of data, and know it doesn’t have to be perfect. Use basic information about usage, utilization and the customer experience to inform how to build out engagement models.
Care for your people: create an experience in which they love what they do.
Measure, measure, measure: both human and digital engagements.

Creating collaborative, secure workspaces with your customers and their data saves you time while providing a memorable experience.

In this podcast Teresa shares her CX strategy with us, as well as