Lincoln Murphy Customer Success AMA Transcript and Video – May 19, 2017

On Friday May 19th, 2017, I did a Customer Success Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Facebook live. It was awesome. The video is embedded below, along with the questions that were asked and my answers.

Yep, if you don’t want to watch or listen, no problem! I got the entire AMA transcribed (and cleaned it up a bit for readability, added links, etc.) and posted that below. I answered 13 questions in great detail.

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Table of Contents

Here’s the list of questions I covered in this AMA:

  1. Should Sales or Customer Success handle Upsells?
  2. How do we help our salespeople with Customer Segmentation?
  3. How to incorporate High/Low/No Touch into Onboarding?
  4. How do I target my customers when they’re not online?
  5. What if our customers don’t like technology?
  6. What’s the best way to define roles?
  7. How to keep customers engaged post-training?
  8. Should we tell customers what to do?
  9. How to implement High/Low/No-touch Segmentation?
  10. Is it appropriate to ask a customer how often they would like to meet?
  11. How do you reset customer expectations if they haven’t been managed correctly?
  12. What users to focus on during Onboarding and Engagement?
  13. How are your Portuguese lessons are going?

How are your Portuguese lessons are going?

Oi, Daniella! My Portuguese lessons are amazing. Actually, I’ll tell you, I actually had a really great experience with Street Smart Brazil, is the company that I go through. And I’m learning Portuguese, it’s actually funny, I’m learning it, I can’t remember anything right now, but also it messes with my English. So I find myself when I’m speaking English now, I’m thinking about things in Portuguese and it’s messing me up.

So I’m like, how do you say … Car, you know? I’m like oh. But Street Smart Brazil is really a very cool company. I signed up for the wrong course, when I first signed up, and Daniella, my instructor, when do Skype lessons … She lives in Florianopolis, in Brazil. Our first Skype session, she was talking to me in Portuguese and I thought: “Oh no! This is going to be one of those immersion things and I have to catch up.”

And it turns out, I had signed up for a course, meant for people who were already fluent. It was a course for business-Portuguese. And, I said you know, I messed up, apparently I can’t even speak English, or I can’t even read English, which is right there on the sign up form. But I thought, I wanted to learn business-Portuguese.

So we figured that out, and we had a few lessons. And then I got an email from the CEO of the company, saying: “Daniella says you are doing great, that’s awesome. You signed up for the wrong plan. You signed up for a more expensive plan. We’re gonna put you on the right plan, which is a few hundred dollars less.”, or whatever.

And I thought: “Man, that’s awesome!”, and I told her: “You don’t know this, but I work in this world of Customer Success, and what you just did was a very customer-positive thing.” You took a short-term revenue hit, you know, they went from something that would cost a certain amount, to a little bit less. Like I said, a hundred dollars a month, or something like that. They took that short-term revenue hit. But what are the chances … Number one that I’m gonna tell everybody to go to Street Smart Brazil if you want to learn Portuguese.

And number two, that … I’m gonna stay longer. That I’m gonna buy more. If new training comes along that I want to take on, other courses, other books or whatever, that I’m gonna do that. That I’m gonna tell people. So I’m gonna stay longer, I’m gonna buy more, and I’m gonna advocate for you. That’s what we all want. So she took a short-term revenue hit, to get probably a lot more value out of me as a customer. That’s a lesson in Customer Success. I didn’t even initiate that. I thought: “Well I screwed up.” And then I get this email because Daniella told her, that I had signed up for the wrong course, and then she did the right thing. Which is amazing.

So Street Smart Brazil. That’s where I’m learning Portuguese. And really messing with all of my language skills. But it’s amazing, and hopefully when I get to Brazil next week, some things will start popping and I’ll be able to order pão de queijo properly.

Update… Brazil was awesome and my Portuguese is getting better! I ate a lot of pão de queijo!

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About Lincoln Murphy

I invented Customer Success. I focus primarily on Customer Engagement. Learn more about me here.