How We Are Building CS at OE

Customer Success’ Mission: OpenEnvoy's Customer Success team turns our customers into advocates who fuel the continued growth of our company.

Let’s break that down a little. Building a customer base that advocates for our company means that any relationship is primarily focused on the customer’s needs. If they are to be satisfied with their experience, each interaction with OpenEnvoy should feel seamless and should enhance their day. They should walk away feeling confident that the customer success manager (CSM) prepared customized analysis to help them progress toward their business objectives.

To ensure they are satisfied with their results, our CSMs need to capture and measure outcomes in a way that is truly accessible to all levels of the business - from the end users to the executives. That visibility not only makes their investment with OpenEnvoy truly worthwhile, but also empowers finance teams to make better decisions and to capitalize on competitive advantages.

A business relationship that results in a customer willing to talk about their experience publicly is the bar we set as a company. To achieve referrals that fuel our growth, we can’t simply meet expectations. We must hold ourselves accountable to surprising and delighting our customers, and to exceeding their expectations in such a way that they can’t help but tell their colleagues!

Customer relationships are key.

OpenEnvoy employs expert CSMs to facilitate process improvements for finance teams including AP automation, freight audit, and expense reconciliation. Ultimately, this means we help our customers prevent wasted spend, achieve detailed end-to-end spend visibility, and enjoy streamlined approval and payment workflows.

We’ve all had the experience of purchasing software that didn’t pan out the way we expected. Our Customer Success team is the difference between purchasing a gym membership and hiring a personal trainer. When our customers purchase a solution from OpenEnvoy, they receive  a success plan specific to their starting point and desired outcomes. A CSM also partners with every customer to help them along in their journey.

How do we do it?

So, how do we go about building a great Customer Success organization? We break it down into people, process, and performance.

People

The CSM is a strategic partner who facilitates a journey that maximizes the value of a company’s relationship with OpenEnvoy. In order to deliver on this commitment, recruiting and retaining ideal candidates is critical. Our hiring process includes assessments of a person’s ability to:

• Empathize
• Synthesize information
• Analyze data and extract key takeaways
• Prioritize work
• Provide strategic guidance to an executive audience

When a new CSM joins OpenEnvoy, they can expect to receive continued professional development on our own product, industry trends, and customer success best practices. These initiatives keep the team sharp so that each interaction with a customer provides maximum value.

Process

Any Customer Success organization should have an outlined customer journey - starting from onboarding and initial success planning through regular partnership reviews, annual renewals, and expansion. Within that journey, CSMs are empowered to customize the content and goals of each step to fit the customer’s needs.

When we kick off the relationship with our initial meeting, we aim to deeply understand the current state, process, and pain points. Then, we write a customized success plan, setting a step-by-step course to the desired outcome that includes the right training, integrations, and change management. Once set up for success, we continue to partner with customers to ensure the visibility needed to showcase ROI, as well as to identify additional opportunities for improvement. Regular partnership reviews along the way also allow us to continue to check success against the plan and adjust the course as needed.

Performance

The performance of our Customer Success team is the culmination of the performance of every employee at the company, and is measured in happy customers. We expect customers to be so satisfied with their experience that they opt to continue and expand their relationship with OpenEnvoy.

We believe expansion is rooted in successful customers who see increased usage as a ‘no-brainer’ path to increased ROI. We are constantly evaluating our performance by the satisfaction of our customer base, and we employ a growth mindset to proactively seek out ways we can improve our people, process, product, or company as a whole. Our work across internal teams amplifies our customer-centricity, further contributing to the success of OpenEnvoy. After all, customers are why we are in business in the first place!