At Aspect, we're more than just our software products—we're our people. The Frost Radar™: Workforce Engagement Management, 2024 highlighted Aspect’s investments in customer support as a valuable approach.
So in today’s Ask Aspect, we’re talking all things customer success with Dan Zuckerman. Dan has served as a leader on both our Sales and Customer Success teams, previously as our Global Director of Customer Success and now our Director of Enterprise Accounts. With 25+ years of experience in building customer relationships, Dan has established and maintained strong connections with Aspect customers.
Q: What role does customer feedback play in our customer success strategies?
The Customer Success team is the primary advocate for our customers within Aspect. The CS culture is “we are the customer’s voice,” so customer feedback is pivotal. We use it to drive numerous improvements including back-office processes, product enhancements, and strategy changes with how we deploy Engineering or Services engagements. Without customer feedback, we couldn’t improve our business in a meaningful way and deliver the value our customers expect.
Q: How do you balance proactive and reactive customer success strategies when working with Aspect customers?
In a perfect world, the majority of outreach would be proactive. But the reality is, reactive communication does happen and is an important part of customer success strategy. It takes a cohesive, cross-functional team to deploy a balanced strategy. The Customer Success team has to work across the organization to ensure clear and meaningful communications are delivered to customers.
Q: What metrics do you find most valuable when evaluating the health of customer relationships?
Customer Health is a critical metric tracked and one that is constantly evolving. We leverage both quantitative and qualitative data points to form a health score. Quantitative data examples include license utilization, # of support cases and severity, software version, # of opportunities, and other data analytics.
Qualitative data examples include the account owner’s “gut” feeling on the overall relationship, the relationship strength with key senior stakeholders, and renewal likelihood. We can factor in different weighting schemes based on the importance of such measurements to create a holistic health score.
Q: How is our Customer Success team structured to enhance both efficiency and client satisfaction?
Nearly every account is positioned with a Customer Success Manager and a Solutions Consultant. This dynamic duo enables our teams to support customers with their tactical and operational needs, as well as their strategic initiatives. Our Services and Training organization also falls within CS and while these teams are assigned on a project basis, we oftentimes deploy the same resources to customer projects over time as the familiarity and past knowledge is helpful in project success. This model helps build trust and relationships.
Something we hear regularly from customers (especially those who leave and return) is that Aspect is by far away the best in the industry when it comes to customer success and support. We make customers feel the love.
Q: What attributes make for a successful Customer Success team?
Strong communication both internally and externally helps build customer relationships and trust. Being adept at coordinating a variety of topics and knowing where to get support within Aspect is critical to success. In some ways, CS is the master of nothing but the knower of everything. Being highly organized is another skill required to navigate the many areas of the business we touch on a regular basis. Lastly, thick skin and confidence. We represent the face of Aspect and mediate customer situations to successful outcomes.
Q: How do you approach the handoff between Sales and Customer Success teams to ensure smooth support for Aspect customers?
Some prospects want to meet their Customer Success team prior to signing a contract to develop trust early on in a relationship. Oftentimes, the handoff is done post contract. Sales maintains details of the prospect pain points and needs during the sales cycle that are then knowledge transferred to Customer Success. After this internal knowledge transfer, an initial intro call with the customer is scheduled. We are currently deploying AI tools that will make this process less arduous. The goal is to capture key sales cycle moments and data that can be summarized then shared across the organization.
Q: What are the essential elements for maintaining strong customer relationships in the tech industry?
I mentioned earlier the need for strong communication. Although no one likes to admit it, most people realize that technology does fail us from time to time (and often at the most inopportune times). Transparent and clear communications to work through these challenges is essential.
Demonstrating value and ROI with key decision makers are two other important elements. There are many technologies out there fighting for the same business and many times, the variance in supplier features is miniscule. We cannot maintain relationships based on product features.
We maintain relationships by demonstrating how Aspect solutions not only solve our customers' business challenges but also deliver specific, measurable ROI—allowing us to clearly show where the business saved $X. Finally, it's crucial to ensure that decision makers who sign the contracts are fully aware of the value we deliver and the positive impact of our work.
Missed our last “Ask Aspect”? Catch the last installment where we chatted with Director of Brand Marketing, Gillian Grefé on bringing Aspect back and revitalizing a brand legacy. For insights from our workforce industry experts, explore our conversation with Kelly Person, Strategic Manager of Solutions Consultants, about maximizing workforce planning success in contact centers.
