Our conversation with Kristi Faltorusso of ClientSuccess shed light on the evolving landscape of customer experience and the strategies required to navigate it successfully. As businesses look to the future, they must prioritize sustainable success, embrace AI, and adapt to changing roles and models. Kristi's message of hope reminds us that challenges can be overcome with the right approach and mindset.
What Advice Do You Have For Someone's First 100 Days As Head Of CX?
Kristi's advice is to come in, listen, and learn. Avoid the temptation to make immediate changes. Focus on understanding the business, customers, and products. Find low-hanging fruit for quick wins, build trust, and implement more strategic changes gradually.
What Does Your CX Strategy Focus On Currently And In The Future?
Currently, Kristi is emphasizing three key areas: onboarding, technical resources, and education. For onboarding, she is doubling down on creating a comprehensive program to guide customers effectively. Technical resources involve ensuring customers trust and use our product's data. Education goes beyond product usage, aiming to empower customers with industry best practices.
How Do You Measure Success With CX?
Success metrics vary across initiatives. For onboarding, she focuses on usage, adoption, and goal achievement. Technical resources involve tracking integrations, reducing errors, and minimizing support tickets. Education success is tied to onboarding metrics and includes qualitative aspects like customer engagement in webinars and community participation.
What Pain Points Do You Have Leading A CX Team?
Kristi mentioned the importance of change management and the need to ensure that her team feels like they are part of the change rather than simply having change imposed upon them. According to Kristi, overcoming this hurdle requires getting buy-in and collaboration from team members.
How Do You Establish Partnerships And Gain Buy-In With The C-Suite?
Getting buy-in and support from the C-suite is crucial for any CX initiative. Kristi shared her strategy for gaining executive support. She emphasized the importance of articulating the "why" behind the proposed changes and ensuring that all leaders within the organization are excited about the direction being taken. Building partnerships with executives is essential to aligning the entire organization with the CX vision.
Do You Have An Example Of Utilizing Customer Feedback To Improve Your Company?
Customer feedback is a goldmine of insights for any CX leader. Kristi provided an example of using customer feedback to drive a significant change within her organization. She discussed launching a customer community based on customer requests for more collaboration and sharing best practices. This initiative highlights the importance of actively listening to customers and acting on their suggestions to enhance their experience.
What Is The Future Of CX?
As we discussed the future of CX, Kristi introduced the concept of "sustainable success." She stressed the need for businesses to adapt to changing economic conditions and build more sustainable models, moving away from bloated structures. She also mentioned the integration of AI into CX processes, predicting that AI will disrupt the way work is done and contribute to sustainable success.
Specialized Roles and the Changing Landscape
Kristi talked about the shift towards specialized roles within CX, moving away from the traditional catch-all Customer Success Manager (CSM) model. She believes this change is essential to streamline operations and support sustainable success.
A Message of Hope
Finally, Kristi left us with a message of hope. Despite businesses' challenges, she believes the future holds promise. While acknowledging the difficulties, Kristi expressed confidence that businesses will recover and thrive with the right mindset and adaptation.
About Kristi Faltorusso
Kristi spent the past decade building, scaling, and transforming customer success functions across various B2B hypergrowth SaaS companies. Interestingly, her first career act was in marketing, and what I learned there is surprisingly transferable to my work in customer success.
To stay updated with Kristi's insights and resources, you can connect with her on LinkedIn or visit her website at KristiFaltorusso.com. She also offers valuable resources for those looking to build a career in customer success.
About CX Chats
CX chats is an interview series with Ben Holland, where we talk to industry leaders in the field of customer experience and customer success. Each interview dives deep into the insights from each leader and highlights how they became successful, tips for aspiring CX professionals, and their thoughts on the future of CX.