I joined Leaseweb as a Customer Care Representative in August 2017 from a background of customer-facing roles. I felt I could contribute significantly to the company and its clients as I have a strong understanding of maximizing customer and company values.
Within 3 and a half months of joining Leaseweb, I moved into the Customer Success Management Department where I have played a key role in leading new initiatives to improve our communications with customers and increasing internal communication across various departments. This is all in support of Leaseweb’s goal of empowering our customers to reach the unreachable.
What is Customer Success?
The Customer Success department began in 2011, in a business restructure that aimed to ensure our customers got their promised business benefits and realized business objectives. Customer Success is relationship-focused client management, that aligns client and vendor goals for mutually beneficial outcomes.
It is our responsibility to make sure the customer is represented within our organization – so we see ourselves as “the voice of the customer”. This means we coordinate customer escalations when we need to, analyze performance results according to SLAs and OLAs, and review all the performance data internally and with the customer. By putting ourselves in the shoes of the customer, we are constantly scrutinizing Leaseweb services and trying to think of ways of improving processes, products, and applications.
Adding more comms to Customer Success
I was asked by Rene Olde Olthof (Chief Operations Officer at Leaseweb) to assist with the delivery of a large project for one of our customers. The delivery would include NL, US, and the newly acclaimed entity the UK. While in the initial stage of the project, it became clear that problems might occur due to lack of communication within the organization, mainly because of possible misunderstandings and misinterpretations.
I noticed the importance of developing interdepartmental work relationships to ensure that nothing went unchecked. I didn’t want poor communication to lead to project failure, along with a lack of commitment, due to project team losing faith and not being able to achieve the project goals.
How was I going to keep all stakeholders informed and inspired? In collaboration with our Knowledge Manager, Frank Roelofs, we designed an online project template on the Leaseweb Knowledge Base, allowing all departments and stakeholders within Leaseweb to access the project status at any time.
Once we had settled with the design and were getting some good feedback, we rolled out the first Customer Knowledge Page and started using it to improve communication for the large customer project.
This resulted in a visible increase in employee engagement, more productivity and most importantly, effective communication.
I was extremely pleased when I was asked to introduce my way of working to our Customer Success Department, which has proven to be very successful and has resulted in the department showing a more defined way of working, and most importantly, increasing the successful delivery of projects to our customers.
Developing our solution at the Hackathon
Leaseweb runs a company-wide hackathon twice a year to give employees the chance to develop new projects, which do not necessarily need to be work-related. Participants are given two full days and nights to work on any kind of project whether it’s to solve a work problem, learn a new skill, or try out a personal project they’ve had in mind.
Our department joined in with the latest Hackathon with a project to create new Customer Knowledge Pages hosted on the Leasweb Knowledge Base. The new customer pages enable the entire organization to have all knowledge about our customers easily made available, including any current projects. These pages outline any special arrangements made with the customer, important events throughout the year, and has space for files (such as meeting minutes) to be added. Most of the Customer Knowledge Pages were recreated and updated, and we expect to finalize the last pages by the end of January 2019.
The Future
Our Customer Success team is continually adding new ideas and processes to improve our service, and I’m thrilled to be a part of that. We’ve had some great feedback recently from a customer about the culture of openness we’ve fostered – whereby we are actively asking for feedback and then acting on this feedback. The recent improvements on the Leaseweb Customer Portal and service reporting are an example of that.
I am very positive about my future at Leaseweb and the future of the Customer Success Team. I’m looking forward to achieving even greater things in 2019!