News — 28 Jun 2022
Affise Wins Customer Success Award
On October 6, ChurnZero announced the winners of annual ChurnHero Awards, which recognizes teams who are building meaningful relationships with their clients in proactive, impactful, and measurable ways. And we are super excited to announce that Affise has become the inaugural winner of the 2020 ChurnHero Awards for the Renewal/Expansion category!
Judged by a panel of CS experts, Renewal/Expansion Hero Award celebrates the innovative way Affise’s Customer Success team has proactively handled continuing and expanding partnerships. We caught up with the Head of Customer Success, Tanya Grypachevskaya to find out what makes Affise’s Customer Success team and approach stand out from the competition.
– Hey, thank you! It is truly a great accomplishment made by each and every Customer Success team member and we are extremely proud that we became a winner in one of the most competitive directions – Expansion & Renewal.
I would not say Customer Success is a new direction. As a separate department it was created when software developers switched from what we call a traditional model to subscription-based one. With the SaaS model it becomes much easier for customers to switch between products, thus companies faced a great challenge to retain customers. And that is where customer success as a direction was developed with the goal to engage customers and make sure that software stays relevant for the client’s business.
That also differentiates customer success, customer service and account manager. Customer service & account management are reactive to customers requests and have case by case interactions.
Customer success is focused on relationships, proactive communication and what is most important – mutually beneficial outcome. If a customer is not succeeding in his business, neither SaaS they use for business will.
At Affise, we have passed several stages of CS path. At this moment we are collecting platform usage data, inputs from CS communication with customers to understand how & when we need to reach our user for better outcome.
Customer Success team call at quarantine
– As a rule, each customer is working with a dedicated onboarding manager. Communication starts from investigating customer needs and expectations from the platform, and then creating an implementation plan. Onboarding team is working on product adoption and tracking customer efforts’ score.
We also supply all new users with onboarding materials: email, Affise academy and product tours inside the platform.
– Affise is frequently awarded for Great User Experience. What do you think sets Affise approach to customers from your competitors’?
– Each of our CS managers have faced some pain points and all bottlenecks in the performance marketing business, as we all have a background in the sphere. And this experience helps us be more comprehensive and compassionate in our approach.
– Every piece of data about usage, retention, growth, feedback collection, etc. is and will be automated. What we cannot automate is human interaction and building partnership.
You can send automated congratulations about the national holiday but you will not be able to predict that customer retention will drop because he is going to paternity leave for a month. Without communicating with your partner you cannot congratulate him on becoming a father and understand why he is not really into using product at this moment:)
There is a standard distribution: Business to customer, business to business, etc.
What I find much more appealing is business to human. Remembering that your partner is the same human as you are, creates an empathy-based approach and much stronger relationship.
So nothing groundbreaking: If you are treating your partner the way you want to be treated in your business – you will have much more chances to succeed.
Written by
Head of PR and Marketing Communications
Anastasia Zaichko is a creative B2B marketer, passionate about helping companies achieve their sales, growth and visibility objectives. Weekdays she's all about identifying new opportunities for marketers to grow and get more value from affiliate channel. Weekends include traveling, partying and instagramming about all of the above. She strongly believes in the power of content, networking and the Universe.
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