Today’s interview is with Daphne Costa Lopes, Global Director of Customer Success at HubSpot. Daphne joins me today to talk about customer success, why the customer isn’t always right, how siloed systems inhibit the delivery of tailored experiences, and what brands should be doing more of to drive customer-led growth.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – There needs to be a really tight relationship between business strategy and target state architecture – Interview with Cale Urwin of Bupa – and is number 511 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: Today’s episode is sponsored by Hubspot who have built an AI-powered customer platform with all the software, integrations, and resources you need to connect your marketing, sales, and customer service. It’s all very cool so do check them out at HubSpot.com.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Daphne:

• The customer isn’t always right.
• For example, when a customer comes to you with a request for a specific solution, it doesn’t mean that they’re always right in how the solution is executed.
• Not that you shouldn’t listen to the customer, dig into the pain point, find out what’s causing it, and understand what they want to achieve. All of those things are very, very important.
• People sometimes mix up the statement ‘the customer is always right’ with the idea that you have to do whatever the customer asks you to do.
• Your job is to be opinionated about the right path forward and then help guide the customer to the outcomes that they want to achieve and that will help solve their pain points.
• The strength of your relationship can probably be measured by how robust of a conversation you can have with the other person because you’ve got each other’s best interests at heart.
• In customer success, we have a term for that. We say we want a customer success manager to be a trusted advisor. So a trusted advisor is somebody that has built enough trust and credit by genuinely helping them solve problems, unblock issues in their organization and achieve results that they have earned the right to have those difficult conversations, to challenge the customer, to push them to do better and to innovate.
• Silos inhibit the delivery of tailored experiences.
• A lot of businesses use multiple disparate systems that touch the customer experience.
• When you have all of those siloed systems that are all configured very differently with very different data architectures, and you’re trying to unify all of this information to create one picture of the customer in order to make decisions on how you guide them to a tailored journey, that is very hard.
• When you bring marketing, sales, service and customer success all together on the same platform, you have a common data infrastructure and a shared understanding of the customer. And then you throw AI on top of that, then you are able to unlock insights and an ability to tailor the customer journey.
• The expectation of our customers today is that if they give you information on your website about something, then they don’t expect to have to repeat that information in 10 other forms. They expect that if they said something to your sales team that is being recorded, passed on and is accessible by other members of the organization.
• Customers have this really high expectation of the customer journey. And by having siloed systems and having tools working in those siloed systems, you’re really not enabling a good experience for the customer. And ultimately, they end up frustrated and it can starts to undermine the relationship that you have with the customer.
• AI doesn’t work if it doesn’t have access to all the right data.
• The problem of siloed systems inhibiting the delivery of tailored experiences is only going to get worse if you don’t get your data house in order and one of the best ways to do that is to bring it all together on a unified platform that works across siloes.
• Customer-led growth is not the same as product-led growth.
• Customer-led growth involves considering your current customer base as the place where your business can grow the most.
• One of the things that is very key in customer-led growth is your ability to deliver value to the customer. Because if you earn the opportunity to solve a problem for that customer and you don’t do it, you’re not able to deliver value on that first purchase. You haven’t earned the right to sell more to that customer. You haven’t built the trust.
• Customer-led growth is a land and expand strategy. But by adding this element of the value delivered to the customer, you really put the customer at the center of that.
• I’ve seen businesses grow over 30 % year on year, just on their install base.
• Customer acquisition is expensive and it’s becoming more expensive.
• Net revenue retention, gross retention or churn are lagging indicators that your customer success team is working.
• What is the leading indicator that a customer is going to renew and grow? The answer is, have they seen value with your product. That is the main reason why somebody renews and expands with you.
• So, if you are not able to measure whether customers are getting value from your product, you’re shooting in the dark.
• A lot of companies might decide to choose a usage metric as a leading indicator and a proxy of value.
• However, there is no guarantee that if a customer is using your product they are seeing value.
• Are they seeing results? Are they achieving their objectives/outcomes?
• What are the value metrics that you can monitor to help you understand which customers need your help to realise value with your product?
• We’re really excited about what HubSpot is doing with AI and how it is getting infused into our products including using AI:
  • To create websites or landing pages. We understand what great websites look like and we’re helping optimize for that.
  • To help you copyright in a way that’s going to attract visitors to your website, but also saves you time and money.
  • To make SEO recommendations to help optimize webpages and blog posts so that they rank higher on search engines.
  • To create summaries of activities on a customers account.
  • And a lot more
• Daphne’s best advice: Bring your marketing, sales and service teams together under the same system so that you can have a unified view of your customer at every single stage in their journey.
• That way, you’ll be able to make better decisions for the business and also offer a better customer experience.
• Daphne’s Punk XL brand: Patagonia

About Daphne

Over the last decade, I’ve helped Start-ups, Scale-Ups and Fortune 500 businesses build and scale global Customer Success teams to service 200K+ customers and $2B+ ARR.

My journey in Customer Success started with a eureka moment I had in 2011: When we deliver value to our customers, we won’t just retain their business… We will capture more of their demand.

Backed by this belief, I spent the following 4 years helping build a ‘CS-as-a-Service’ business. We generated thousands of SuccessQLs for our customers and proved early on that Customer Success could be a revenue driver.

By focusing on Customer-Led-Growth, I’ve helped the businesses I work with achieve 130%+ NRR. Today, I head up Customer Success at HubSpot where my teams serve thousands of customers worldwide.

Since that light-bulb moment, I’ve invested my energy into building and scaling Customer Success teams to be the second engine of growth for tech businesses and helping others do it too.

In 2022, I founded This is Growth a media company dedicated to educating go-to-market leaders and CS professionals on how to build and scale revenue-generating Customer Success teams.

When I’m not at HubSpot or This is Growth, I am a mentor to CS leaders and entrepreneurs and an angel investor at CS Angel.

Check out Hubspot, say Hi to Hubspot and Daphne on X (Twitter) at @HubSpot and @daphnelopes_, respectively, and, finally, feel free to connect with Daphne on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay