I sat down to a Zoom chat with Hannah Dickey, an alum of the Praxis program, this week to discuss the role of customer success. Here are the takeaways!
Customer success is wrongly viewed as “customer service: rebranded.” It’s about foreseeing problems and proactively reaching out to fix them before they happen. In Hannah’s role at Remedy, she serves as the first point of contact for customers in need of Urgent Care medical service.
“In the medical field, if the customer doesn’t have a real person to talk to, they’re less likely to use the service,” Hannah says. “And since I’m the first point of contact, both with incoming calls and the online chatbox, that’s incredibly important.”
The first problem is No one to talk to means loss of business. So Hannah being there is the solution. Fairly self-evident!
Customer Success requires a certain can-do attitude: the kind that says “I’m going to conquer this hurdle with you and change your mind or die trying.” Hear what Hannah has to say about tackling angry customers:
“The hardest parts of the job are also my favorite parts: anyone who comes in angry at us. I love a good angry customer. They come in on fire with their problems and I love listening, asking “What’s going on? Where’s the issue? What caused it? Who caused it? How could this company I love cause this?” Then, once they’ve gotten it out of their systems and torn me to shreds over it, I go through it with them to see if I can deal with their problem and have them go to their friends ranting and raving about how amazing we are. Instead of them complaining about where we messed up, we have a more loyal customer now.”
But customer success isn’t just about finding solutions to presented problems, it’s about anticipating them and having a solution prepared ahead of time. Hannah touched on the skill of foresight- when you know where the conversation is going so that you can have the answer to their dilemma waiting for them- but balanced against listening to their story in case your foresight was incorrect.
Central to these concepts of wanting to change minds and tackling problems head-on is the core aspect of empathy. Empathy enables you to understand the feelings of others and feel them yourself. It can be a powerful tool to motivate finding a solution!
Alongside empathy is compassion. You can feel all the feelings in the world, but your motivation to fix them will be self-focused. Compassion enables you to place your motivation on a more objective standing, doing it for their sake. Instead of helping them so they’ll get off the phone with you, you help them so that their problem is solved. Hear how Hannah exemplifies this in one of her stories:
“We’ll have moms call in. You can hear their kids screaming in the background, the other kid going “Mom, mom, mom, mom.” We need just a bit of info from them, get it as fast as possible, tell them the whole process because their husband booked it last time, and you can just hear this mama give one heavy, contented sigh after that five-minute conversation is over and having this burden lifted off of her. Now she knows what to do and where to go.”
You could just hear the joy in Hannah’s voice as she described giving this kind of assistance. She truly loves helping people. And that’s the kind of attitude you need for customer success.
My sincere thanks to Hannah for agreeing to an interview!