Philippe Mesritz
VP, Customer Success, Experience & Operations
Khoros
United States of America
Having spent time leading several technical support organisations before making his transition to envisioning, creating and leading Khoros' first customer experience & operations team, Philippe's role has expanded even further over the past 18 months to incorporate the organisation's global customer success operations.
The strategy that Philippe has been working towards has three main goals - improving operational capabilities, decreasing the risk to forecasting and improving outcomes and values for customers. This has translated into three key measurables: gross renewal rate for customers, eNPS for employees, and (to ensure the organisation is becoming more operationall sound) forecast accuracy.
Initial efforts were focused on a back-to-basics approach, creating a large cross-functional group to identify pain points, gleaning insights from customers and teams including sales, technical support and finance. The insights from these sessions led to the rebuilding of the internal account framework, guided by customer journey mapping work that Philippe has previously undertaken as head of CX. This new six stage account journey has improved accountability as well as providing a noticeable improvement in service experience for clients.
A new customer success strategy team has also been created, responsible for driving a deeper understanding of account strategies and consulting with CSM team, as well as the introduction of a customer operations analyst role, responsible for building out detailed templates and processes, something that has accelerated Khoros' ability to deliver great customer success.
With Philippe's new role now bringing together CX and customer success, the organisation has been able to surface new benefits for customers - for instance, the customer success team has been able to capitalise on the customer experience and outbound customer engagement team's delivery of newsletters, automated user journeys and journalist-style thought leadership articles to provide an overall engagement model setting customers up for success by helping them improve their CX.
Furthermore, by breaking down these silos the organisation is having a cultural revolution, with huge strides being made in customer-centric thinking, with internal webinars on topics such as NPS and Voice of the Customer receiving record numbers of engagements.
We’ve been able to align significantly greater between CX and Customer Success by combining the teams into one and really ensuring that the end result has the best interest in mind for both the employee and the customer.
