Customer Success Team Spotlight: Criteria Corp

Criteria Corp’s Customer Success Team (and a few furry friends)

Criteria Corp is a leading provider of professionally developed pre-employment screening. Across their suite of aptitude, personality, and skills tests, the group helps organizations make better talent decisions. Criteria Corp’s Customer Success Team is primarily based in Los Angeles, but includes team members across the US (Chicago, Denver.)

Learn what Patrick Blanton, Vice President of Customer Success shared about his team. You’ll learn about the team’s structure, the team’s proudest moments, and how WalkThroughs have enabled immediate support and guidance to customers.

How did CS begin at your organization, and what is your team’s primary focus?

Criteria Corp started with Account Managers and was a largely reactive team. What originally began as effectively ‘Customer Support with a bit of sales” eventually evolved into a fully mature CS function.

Our CSMs are dedicated to delivering value and customer specific outcomes.  They do additional discovery as part of the onboarding process, onboard effectively, and then manage the account to drive Engagement, Adoption and ultimately the renewal.  They are the owners of the relationship with the customer, so all requests from the customer are handled by the CSM or escalated by them.

Criteria has always assigned a dedicated CSM to each account, regardless of customer size. We are experts in pre-employment testing and are very consultative when working with our customers to help with their hiring process. 

How is your CS Team structured?

We have tiered out our team by customer size. We also have specialized teams for Support and Implementation & Integrations. That said, the goal of “Customer Success” is woven cross-departmentally throughout the company: we work very closely with our Product team, making sure customer feedback is a high priority; and we of course work closely with the sales team managing the transition from sales process to onboarding.

What moments make you most proud of your team?

My team’s empathy has made me most proud. Our CSMs genuinely care and are working with their customers to deliver the outcomes most important to them. They are all natural problem solvers, which paired with their empathy is a really powerful combination. It does amazing things for our customers.

What ChurnZero features have you found most beneficial for your team? Why?

We have found the segments and plays to be one of the most impactful tools for our team. We have three different tiered teams broken out by the size of the customer. Each of those tiers follows a different engagement cadence and handles their customers slightly differently throughout the year. Segments and plays have allowed us to provide each team with their own unique cadence, which helps the team organize their day and has created wonderful new efficiencies amongst each tier.

Another tool we’ve found particularly beneficial has been the in-app messaging capabilities. We recently leveraged the in-app WalkThroughs to provide immediate support and guidance for customers that had received early access to a new feature set. Not only did the messaging allow us to more easily guide all of these customers, but it demonstrated to teams beyond Customer Success just how helpful ChurnZero can be in providing us insight into customers, and helping us target the right people. This experience really helped the other departments get excited about a tool they otherwise hadn’t really explored previously. 

Was there an “aha moment” when you saw how impactful ChurnZero could be?

We’ve actually had a few “aha moments” once we began really fully leveraging the platform. Our first occurred when the initial round of in-app NPS responses started flowing in. That was something completely new, and was engaging with customers while they were in our app. We had previously only surveyed account admins via email previously, so we were now hearing a completely new customer voice.

Another moment for us was when a member of our team departed to start their own business. We needed to transfer this CSM’s accounts to other members of the team, and ChurnZero’s automation allowed us to accomplish a task in just a few minutes that might otherwise have taken the team hours to do. Handing off accounts has always been a very manual process, but pretty much everyone who got accounts handed to them during this transition breathed an audible sigh of relief when they learned that most of the handoff process would happen automatically. Things like this make the ChurnZero exciting because the system allows us to do things en masse that we otherwise never would have been able to accomplish.

Customer Success Around the Web

• Building a Customer Success Health Plan for 365 Days a Year– Everyone pays attention during renewals or a customer complaint, but what about the other 360 days of the year?
• Four Customer-Centric Metrics to Drive B2B SaaS Retention – Track these top metrics to make sure your business isn’t just talking a big “customer-first” game.  
• Don’t be a Gas Station: Creating Emotional Loyalty in Customer Success – Find out why building emotional loyalty doesn’t happen in silos and how you can create it. 

Fighting Churn is a newsletter of inspiration, ideas and news on customer success, churn, renewal and other stuff and is curated by ChurnZero