As Beacon’s Director of Customer Success, my job is a direct embodiment of our company’s Clients First value. We want to deliver the best products and customer service for our clients so that they can accelerate innovation and enhance their competitive advantage. As Beacon continues to grow rapidly, we need to make sure that our capabilities and competencies are keeping pace with our product offering, our customers’ needs, and our geographic coverage. So we have been actively adding to our customer support resources while enhancing the processes, playbooks, and knowledge bases that form the foundation for continued success. This includes both optimizing technical support and implementing a customer success group to enhance communications and build stronger relationships.

Taking the Scenic Route to Customer Service

I often say that I took the scenic route to Beacon, from building trading and risk management solutions, through project management, product management, and then a series of increasingly senior customer service roles. These jobs have involved travel and even long-term postings to different countries, as I helped oversee service expansion. One of the biggest benefits of this experience has been building empathy and understanding of different cultures, scenarios, and time zones. Critical characteristics of success for me have been transparency, inclusion, and accountability throughout the customer service organizations, traits that I am happy to see are core elements of Beacon’s culture. As we hire additional support staff, we continue to look for people with diverse backgrounds and experiences who understand software engineering and a variety of customer business needs along with the essential soft skills to be effective in this critical role.

Optimizing and Expanding Technical Support

Technical support engineers are often the face of the organization for customers, from initial onboarding through training, development, and of course incident response. Increasing human resources is certainly an important part of supporting our growing client base, and we are on a path to triple our support headcount this calendar year to bolster our global support locations. But not everything is or should be a support incident. We also need to ensure that we are satisfying customers across a wide range of different interactions, including account management, client engineering and project management, and technical support. So we are continuing to enhance our capabilities across these specialized roles and monitoring our progress with a selection of metrics, performance indicators, and customer satisfaction surveys.

Implementing Customer Success Management

Customer success management is a recent addition to Beacon’s organization, augmenting technical support with a broader, more holistic view of each customer’s situation. The objective for this group is to be the voice of the customer within Beacon, serving as trusted advocates and advisors and helping to build stronger relationships. Success managers work closely with customers to understand their business and how they are using our platform, with an eye to helping them get the most value out of their relationship. They are also on the lookout for insights and observations that will contribute to the continuous improvement of our support processes, our product features, and our overall customer experience.

Ensuring a Delightful Customer Experience

My primary objective is to ensure a delightful experience for all of our customers across the complete range of their interactions with the company. From our client engineering engagements and flexible service tiers, through our follow-the-sun support model, online customer portal, and rapid-response incident management, we are obsessed with building and optimizing processes for the best possible experience.