Anika Zubair (00:00.416)
Let me ask you this, does your company say it's customer first but still prioritizes internal processes over customer outcomes? Do you ever feel like you're the only one who truly advocates for the customer in the room? If that hit a little close to home, this episode is for you. We're talking about how to build a truly customer success culture, not just in your customer success team, but across your entire organization.

This goes beyond sending a quarterly NPS survey or tagging customer first on your company's value page. We're getting into what it really takes to shift mindsets, break down silos, and turn customer success into a company-wide movement. Hello, everyone. I'm your host, Anika Zuber, and welcome to the Customer Success Pro Podcast, your go-to space for real talk, expert advice, and actual insights in the world of customer success.

I'm a CS executive leader, award-winning strategist, CS coach, and customer success fanatic. I help CSMs and CS leaders build the skills and the confidence to become revenue driving pros and scale world-class CS teams. So whether you're brand new to CS or a seasoned leader, this podcast is here to support your growth. Because customer success isn't a destination, it's a journey.

and I'm here to be your guide and navigate every step of your journey. So join me every Wednesday where you'll get fresh CS tips, tricks, and strategies you can actually use. Some weeks I'll share my own insights and best practices from working in CS over the last 13 years. And once a month, I'll bring on expert guests to dive into the most relevant and pressing topics in customer success today. So if you're ready to level up, hit subscribe on

Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you tune in. And let's make your CS journey a little bit easier together.

Anika Zubair (02:07.683)
Now here's the problem. Most companies say they care about customers, but the day-to-day actions of that company tell a very different story. The product team push features customers didn't ask for, and the sales teams are always over-promising, and marketing end up crafting messaging that doesn't match the actual experience. And customer success? Well, we're here left cleaning up the mess.

I've seen this pattern again and again and I've been at many companies where I've seen this happen again and again. And maybe you're living it right now. The truth is a lack of customer centricity isn't just frustrating, it's super expensive. It costs you renewals, referrals, product adoption and internal morale. So how do you actually change this? Well, let's start with...

the three biggest mistakes companies make when it comes to trying to become a more customer-centric business. Now, the first mistake that I have personally experienced, and I know that a lot of you listening to this podcast is probably already feeling as well, is thinking that customer success owns the entire customer experience. And this is super dangerous, and it's a trap that I don't want you to fall in. While customer success is the center of the customer relationships,

We can't be the only ones responsible for it. True customer centricity needs buy-in from every single department. And I truly mean every single department. Everything from your finance team to your product team to your marketing sales and of course the customer success team. You really need to get buy-in from every single department. Now the second mistake that I see happen way too often is that companies end up using surveys as a

checkbox rather than a conversation starter. I have seen this time and time again and I have to admit I've done this as well where you send out a survey to your customers and you've probably done this too where NPS goes out quarterly but the responses end up sitting in a spreadsheet or in some sort of data analysis tool and they really go nowhere without a follow-up. We end up looking at the data maybe talking about it once or twice

Anika Zubair (04:26.295)
and then the data goes to live and die. And that's why a survey becomes a checkbox rather than a conversation starter. A truly customer-centric organization doesn't just collect feedback. It acts on it. It actually uses that feedback to end up starting a conversation for further improvement and further customer growth. Okay, and another...

mistake that I see happen way too many times, and I've personally been guilty of this as well, is rewarding internal KPIs over customer outcomes. Now I get it, we're all out here being busy and making sure we're being the best customer success pros out there, and we want to make sure our teams perform. So we want to hit those internal KPIs. But I have seen it time and time again where companies say that they are customer centric,

but their internal KPIs just do not show it. And if your teams are only measured on speed or volume or internal SLAs, they're never going to prioritize customer outcomes. And then what ends up happening is you end up trying to speed up process, but that doesn't necessarily mean that your customers are getting value out of your product and service. Now,

What you have to do is you have to make sure you incentivize your teams and their behavior, and it has to be all aligned around a customer-first culture. KPIs that are built for internal processes or internal alignment, that's going to kill customer-first culture before it even starts. OK, I know I've talked about a few mistakes that I've personally seen and I've personally gone through, but let's actually jump into how to create

customer-centric culture. So let's do this one step at a time. So my first step in making a truly customer-centric business is by making customer outcomes everyone's job. And I truly mean everyone. I know sometimes we feel intimidated about making customer success everyone's job, but you need to set the tone from the top. As a customer success leader, you need to take that seat at the table and you need to make sure customer success is a

Anika Zubair (06:45.039)
part of your company's strategic goals. That means involving CS in the go-to-market planning, in the product roadmap, prioritization, and even executive decision-making. You need to make sure you're creating shared KPIs like net revenue retention or gross revenue retention or time to value everyone's job. Everyone contributes to it, by the way, not just customer success.

And you need to make sure that your wider leadership team and the wider business really understands that delivering customer outcomes quicker and making sure that revenue is growing from existing customer base is what's going to make you actually grow as a business and what's going to really make you customer centric as a business as well. Okay, the second step in making your company truly customer centric.

is operationalizing the voice of the customer. Now you might have heard of VOC programs or voice of customer, but usually VOC programs aren't really fully optimized and don't really make companies customer centric because again, they're not really built to deliver customer outcomes. And what I need you to do is you need to turn your voice of your customer into a feedback loop. You need to...

build systems to not only collect all that data that's gonna show exactly what your customer feels and thinks about how they're using your product, but you need to sit down with either data analyst or anyone that's data minded in your team and you need to analyze all that information. And then once you've collected it and once you've analyzed it, we can't let it just sit on a shelf to die or in a spreadsheet to die. Like I said earlier,

Some companies really think they're customer centric because they send out an NPS survey or some sort of CSAT survey or something along those lines that are trying to showcase that they're listening to their customers. But listening is also action and you need to action customer feedback across teams. Then you need to actually close the feedback loop.

Anika Zubair (08:52.035)
So once you've discussed all of this feedback with your product team, your marketing team, your finance team, it doesn't matter who you're discussing it with. Once you've discussed it and come up with an outcome or result of how you're going to either take the feedback forward or maybe change the roadmap or change how you market, you need to loop your customers in so that they know that their voice matters. You want them saying, wow, my company actually listened.

instead of just wondering where all of that feedback went. And the biggest part of being strategic and building trust with your customer is closing that feedback loop. You're gonna wanna make sure your customer really feels like, okay, I've given you all of this feedback, but now you've listened and you've told me that yes, we are going to go forward with it or no, we're not. Now, don't be afraid of...

actioning voice of customer feedback, that's not gonna happen. I think sometimes we feel the need to always action positive voice of customer feedback and close the loop with a positive note. But you can also close the loop by saying, we're not gonna do this because of X, Y, and Z. But what is most important is to actually close the loop. You wanna make sure your customer feels heard, whether it's positive or negative, and you wanna make sure the voice of the customer goes in full

circle. What I mean is collect that feedback, analyze the data, take it back to your internal teams, decide what you want to do next. And once you've decided, don't let that data just live internally. Go and share it with your customer. Tell them why or why not you are actioning their feedback. Hey, I just want to jump into this podcast episode and be honest with you for a second. Creating a customer centric culture is hard enough, but

Improving your impact in driving that culture, that's even harder. You might spend your days actually championing customer outcomes, aligning teams, influencing strategy, but when promotion season rolls around, your name gets overlooked. Why is that, you might ask? Because you haven't connected the dots between your work and business results. Imagine this. Instead,

Anika Zubair (11:09.19)
You walk into your next one-to-one with your leadership and you clearly show how you've influenced revenue, reduced churn, and helped shift the company towards a true customer centricity. You don't just say you're ready for a promotion, you prove it. That's where the CS Promotion Tracker comes in. It's my $45 digital tool built specifically for customer success pros like you, and it helps you document your quarterly wins

Tie them to revenue metrics and turn your day-to-day work into promotion pitches that you're super proud to present. If you're serious about growing your career while driving customer value, don't let your impact go unnoticed. Grab the Customer Success Promotion Tracker at thecustomersuccesspro.com forward slash resources and start building your case for that next big step. Again, go to thecustomersuccesspro.com

Your next promotion might just be right around the corner. Alright, back to our episode. Okay, the third step to make sure that your whole company is brought into customer centricity is you need to enable a level of customer empathy at scale. And what I mean by this is you really need to make sure that your customers are being heard by multiple different teams.

just the customer facing teams. I'm not talking about just sales or customer success because those teams speak to the customer all the time. They're always talking to the customer and they probably have a high level of customer empathy already. But I want you to invite product managers to customer calls. I want you to invite maybe even people from the engineering team to customer calls. And I want you to share success stories and turn reasons and

all of these other reasons why your customers are either properly using your product or maybe incorrectly using your product at your all hands meetings. The way I've really been able to bring in customer centricity at the companies I've been at is by making sure that not only do I bring people in on calls. again, bringing my product managers, bringing my engineers, bringing in my solutions team, all the different teams that.

Anika Zubair (13:30.982)
don't normally talk to customers. I make sure that they join in customer calls. And again, not just the positive calls where they're giving product feedback, I make sure they join the tough conversations as well. The conversations where we're at risk of churn or risk of a lack of renewal. I bring everyone into calls because they need to hear it first. But not only do these people need to hear it first, the entire company needs to hear it as well. And usually we had

company-wide all-hands every single month. And you don't have to do this every month. I'd say probably every quarter is enough, but every month to every quarter, I would bring in all of the customer feedback that my product managers have heard, that my engineers have heard, and I have summarized it into a slide and shared it at a company all-hands so that my executive team, so that even sometimes the board and investors were on these all-hand meetings.

And of course, everyone from the intern to the most senior of staff were in these company all-hand meetings, and they really heard firsthand what the company is doing when it comes to building a customer-centricity environment. And I always say this, and I always say it as well to anyone I work with, is at those all-hands, a slide is great. Showing all that data is amazing, and really being that internal voice of the customer.

But many a times I have brought customers into all hand meetings, both positive and potentially churn customers into all hand meetings, because again, the full company needs to really, really hear exactly what the customer is saying. Now, you might be saying that's not possible because we just have too large of an organization or that's not how my organization works, which is totally cool. There's other ways that you can make sure your entire company is hearing.

exactly what your customer is saying. And I've created Slack channels for real time customer feedback as well. So that's whenever we sent out a survey, CSAT, an NPS, anything that we sent out to our customers, I made sure it was tied back to a company wide channel and made sure that this was a mandatory channel that everyone was a part of. Because again, that feedback is gold dust and you want to make sure your full company is hearing about it. So

Anika Zubair (15:52.806)
The more your organization feels at what the customer is feeling, the faster the mindset starts to shift into truly a customer-centric organization. Okay, the next step that I like to do to make sure we build true customer-centricity is I like to reward everyone in the business that starts to show customer-centric behavior. recognition totally matters. And I know in CS we don't get enough recognition, but just imagine.

Everyone loves recognition. So if your colleagues or anyone else, whether it's a sales rep, someone in marketing, someone in product, if they set the right expectations with a customer, shout them out. And maybe you have a product manager who's fixed a customer pain point, make sure you give them a shout out as well. Or maybe it's your marketing team. Maybe they rewrote a messaging for you or rewrote a page on your website.

that actually showcases customer feedback or case studies, you want to celebrate all of that. You want to make sure you're celebrating the teams that truly put customer centricity at the center of the business and not just an action item. Whenever any other team start to do this and you start to reward it as a customer success leader, not only are you going to be seen as a business leader, but you're going to start to build that mindset within the business that customer centricity

is what gets rewarded, not just finishing tasks. And the final thing that I'm going to say that really builds customer centricity into the heart of every organization is I want you as a customer success pro and leader to make sure you empower your customer success team to lead. You need customer success leaders in the room where decisions are made. Now, if you're a CS leader and you're listening to this, speak up, share the data and advocate all

the time, like I want you to advocate fiercely because culture follows leadership and you need to set the tone as a customer success leader. You need to speak up. Now, listening into this podcast, a lot of you might be saying, well, Anika, I don't actually have a seat at the table or I'm not a part of the executive team yet. That's okay. I started to advocate for customer success in Slack channels, in meetings that I was part of that was just mid management, in company all hands.

Anika Zubair (18:18.66)
You can be a leader and you can be part of the executive team without actually having the title. You don't actually need the seat at the table. Of course, the seat at the table helps. Don't get me wrong, you're then seen as part of the business decision drivers and part of the team that's going to set the tone moving forward, but you don't need it to start. All you need to do is start to set the tone of that customer centricity is the beating heart of the business. And this is how you're going to do it.

And trust me, the more and more you start doing this as a CS leader or even as a customer success individual contributor, the more you're going to be start to be seen as that executive leader. Okay, let me give you a quick story and a metaphor that I love to use as an example of how to build a customer centric business. Now, I don't know about you, but I love watching the Olympics. Now you don't have to watch the Olympics to really understand what I'm saying, but

Imagine your company is a relay team. I love a good relay because it requires everyone on that team to really perform to actually win gold. And I love watching whether it's swimming or running relays on the Olympics. And the thing is, your entire company is the same relay team. The customer journey is actually the baton that gets passed or when you tag someone there next.

that is the entire customer journey and that's the baton in the relay team that you're building. Let's say that sales actually starts the race. They run with the energy and then they close the deal. And then they pass the baton onto maybe the onboarding or implementation team. And then the baton goes to the product team because you're trying to deliver on product values and product results that they were promised. And then maybe there's some issues and that gets passed to the support team.

And then maybe it's back to the customer success team to really showcase value and make sure the renewal is going to happen. In any customer centric culture, everyone in the company is in sync and their eyes are on that finish line, which is customer outcomes. You need to really build all of that as one. And I've seen it time and time again where customer teams feel like they have to own that full journey.

Anika Zubair (20:37.442)
are the orchestrator, you are the person that's going to hand the baton off to the other teams, but please don't try to do it alone because doing it alone means that you're going to probably burn out and also everyone is responsible for customer outcomes. Even though they're trying to build a product, sell a product, market a product, at the end of the day, we're all responsible for customer outcomes. And even in some of the biggest and most established organizations,

I see that baton getting dropped. Someone is in the middle of sprints and then decides to go in the wrong direction, or no one's really even sure who's holding the baton anymore. Creating a customer-centric culture means building trust between each of the runners. You have to practice, you have to have handoffs, you have to align on what's winning the race and what's actually maybe taking you off track. And when you're aligned on what's actually going to win you the race,

That is when you start to really perform on the full customer journey and you become a truly customer centric org. All right, so in every weekly solo episode, I love challenging you guys. And this week, I want to challenge you to schedule one cross-functional sync this week. I don't care who's in it, but make sure it's not the teams that you usually work with and grab 30 minutes with someone in product or marketing and ask them,

this one question, what's one way that we can collaborate to better improve the customer experience? Then actually follow through with one of your ideas that you guys discussed, one action at a time. That's how culture really is built and that's how it shifts. Now, if this episode resonated with you, I would love it if you share it with a teammate, especially someone outside of customer success, because shifting culture requires allies.

And don't forget, if you're ready to take the next step in becoming a more strategic and revenue-minded customer success pro who can actually influence culture and drive real change, then my RevUp Academy coaching program is built exactly for that. You'll find a link in the show notes. All right, until next time, keep fighting for your customers and I'll see you in the next episode next week.

Anika Zubair (23:00.966)
Thanks for tuning in to the Customer Success Pro Podcast. I hope you picked up something valuable to take back to your team. If you enjoyed this episode, it would mean the world to me if you took just 10 seconds to leave a review on Apple or Spotify. It helps more CS pros like yourself discover the show. And creating new episodes takes a lot of work, so leaving a nice review keeps me motivated to keep creating. And don't forget to hit subscribe on Apple, Spotify,

YouTube or wherever you listen to podcast episodes. I drop a new episode every Wednesday packed with practical tips. And if you've got a topic you'd love for me to cover or want to be a guest on my show, send me a message. All the details are in the show notes. I'd love to hear from you. And hey, if this episode helped you share it with a fellow CSM or CS leader. Remember sharing is caring. Cheers to your CS journey and I'll catch you next week for our next episode.