Customer satisfaction is at the heart of our commitment. But who are the experts who provide this day-to-day support? To better understand this key role, we invite you to meet Marina Bizouard, Customer Success Manager. In this interview, Marina shares her background, the skills essential to her job and the strategies she implements to optimize customer relations. Find out what she has to say and go behind the scenes of Customer Success Management.
My name is Marina, and I have been Customer Success Manager (CSM) at Arago for 2 years. For the past year, I have been managing the CSM division, while maintaining a portfolio of SAP Concur and SAP SuccessFactors customers. In terms of achievements, I would say that what makes me particularly proud is the positive feedback we get from our customers about the follow-up, support and exchanges we offer them. To give you a concrete example, I had a customer who found SuccessFactors difficult to get to grips with. I set up a specific support plan, adapted to their structure and needs. Thanks to this, they were able to open up the various modules to all end users. Now they are looking ahead to other functionalities, other modules and so on. Together, we succeeded in overcoming the reluctance.
Firstly, the CSM is responsible for customer satisfaction. The priority is to have good communication, empathy and analytical skills in order to establish a relationship of trust with customers, understand their needs and the criticality of requests. Secondly, organization is also important, as we manage around twenty customers, each with their own particularities. It's also essential to be inquisitive, because as a CSM we need to know about major product developments so that we can inform our customers. Indeed, curiosity enables us to explore the product roadmap in order to anticipate, communicate upstream and implement action plans adapted to future developments. Understanding our customers' context and business needs remains essential.
Today, an annual satisfaction survey is sent out to our SuccessFactors and Concur customers. This survey assesses overall satisfaction, satisfaction with response times and quality, relations with our teams (consultants, CSM, sales) and customers' plans for the future with Arago: renewals, plans for new modules or new functionalities. Of course, we don't wait for this annual survey to broach the subject with our customers. We take advantage of our steering committees to raise this issue and gather their point of view. During these committees, we take a bird's eye view of the account's overall activity, and how recent events and achievements have unfolded. The objective for CSM is to improve and increase customer satisfaction.
The strategy is quite different, depending on the degree of maturity of our customers with regard to our solutions. In fact, this breakdown enables us to personalize our interactions and offer support tailored to each individual. For new customers, it is very important to offer very regular follow-up to check and validate with them how well they are getting to grips with the tool. For customers who have been with Support for several years, we need to be more proactive and communicate on new features, new services and product roadmaps.
In this interview, Marina Bizouard sheds valuable light on the strategic role of the Customer Success Manager. Thanks to a proactive approach and rigorous monitoring, Marina and her team turn challenges into opportunities, guaranteeing long-lasting, fruitful relationships with our customers. 🚀
