EPISODE 6

CUSTOMER SUCCESS

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In this episode, Jen Snyder is joined by Nicole Soltes, Director of Customer Success for GovQA, as they discuss what customer success is, how GovQA approaches customer success, and the benefits clients experience by partnering with a customer success manager. Learn how the customer success team helps agencies effectively engage with software from Success Plan with metrics… to usage analysis and regular cadence of check-ins…to training…to Executive Business Reviews.

Full Episode Transcript

Recording:

This is the Peers in Public Records podcast with Jen Snyder, brought to you by GovQA.

Jen Snyder:

Hi, good afternoon, everybody. And thank you again for joining us on the GovQA Peer-to-Peer podcast. Today, we are lucky enough to be joined by Nicole Soltes. She is our director of customer success. We wanted to take a little time today to talk about what customer success is, how does GovQA approach customer success, and what are the benefits that an actual customer gets by having a customer success manager.

Nicole, if we could just ask for a second, if you would just give us a little bit of background on your role and what your experience has been in the customer success space.

Nicole Soltes:

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me, Jen. Yeah, very excited to really lead up our customer success team right here at GovQA. I have experience, let’s see, probably 15 years in the customer success space in various different industries. Very excited to bring my experience here to GovQA as well. Really what customer success is, is we are our customer’s strategic partners and advocate, right? My customer success managers on the team are our customer strategic partner and advocate within GovQA. So what does that really mean?

It’s our job to know our customer’s processes and makeup and know why they invested in GovQA so that we can ensure that they achieve their goals. We have our customer’s interest in mind and want them to succeed. What we really want to do is make sure that they’re utilizing the platform in such a way that they get the most value out of it.

Jen Snyder:

I see. How would you go about monitoring their usage of a system to make sure that they’re getting all the bang for their buck?

Nicole Soltes:

There’s many different ways. One, the customer success manager actually will do usage analysis. We have tools on our end to understand what functionalities, what features is our customer using. And then we talk with the customer, right? Customer success is actually brought in during implementation, so from square one, to really kind of walk through the entire journey to make sure we understand what their goals are, what their needs are, what they’re really looking to achieve.

That way we can kind of take a customized look at each customer and say, “Hey, this is what this customer’s goal is. They use this feature. Would we expect them to use that feature? Maybe they’re not using a feature that we would expect them to use.” One, it’s really doing some usage analysis. Two, we actually work together and put together a success plan. What a success plan really is, it’s a project plan, right, basically to have the customer reach success. We’ll put together a success plan with the customer talk through, and what we do is identify metrics.

So that when the customer success manager and the customer have regular calls, we can pull up that success plan to see how we’re measuring against those metrics and to see if we need to make tweaks to the success plan, to see if we need to kind of change course, or maybe we’re right on track, which is great.

Jen Snyder:

I think that’s interesting because I know… A lot of times you look at a product, you evaluate, making some changes and maybe improving things with technology. And a lot of times you only end up diving into a small portion of the benefits of that software. It seems like with a success manager, there’s somebody always there saying, “Come on. You can get a little deeper in the water now.”

Nicole Soltes:

Absolutely. It’s always making sure that the customer knows all of our features and functionality. GovQA, we’re making enhancements to our product all the time. We want to make sure that the customer knows the enhancements and capabilities that are available for our customers. So yes, we are the ones saying, “Come on. We have this functionality as well.”

Jen Snyder:

That’s excellent. This is just support that’s given to them as part of their partnership with GovQA? This is not like a premium service they pay for?

Nicole Soltes:

Oh no, this is absolutely just with their partnership from GovQA. And I am so happy that you said partnership because that’s how customer success managers look to our customers. They’re our partners. Really we do love to have that partnership relationship.

Jen Snyder:

Let me jump into your way back machine a little bit. Can you give me an example of maybe a time where the customer success manager wasn’t as engaged with a certain customer? Sometimes it’s just the timing isn’t right. You just don’t get together and maybe things weren’t going as well as possible. Have you ever had like a good, no pun intended, success story where we’ve helped somebody out that maybe might’ve gone adrift if they didn’t have that success partner?

Nicole Soltes:

That’s what we are noticing. For example, one of our customers was speaking with our customer success manager. Like I said, it’s our customer success manager’s job to understand our customer’s process, their day-to-day, their workflow. What we identified was that they probably only use 10% of GovQA’s capabilities. What really we decided would be great as we had some training sessions with that customer to get them on board and get them up to date with what capabilities are now available at GovQA.

Now the customer is very happy, is aware of all the functionality that we have available, and is using GovQA to utilize and get the most value that it can get.

Jen Snyder:

So in looking at a new customer coming onboard, you said you get started with them kind of right at the beginning of their journey with us. What is it that you’re looking for? How do you determine what level should that partnership be? How engaged will you be? Not be? How do you evaluate how to move forward?

Nicole Soltes:

Well, really it’s just talking with the customer and seeing what they need. What did they purchase from GovQA? Did they purchase multiple products and multiple add-ons such as redaction and things like that? And really identifying what their need is. Some customers, they buy us and they said, “We’re good. 

We’re a well-oiled machine, and we can just run this.” And that’s fine and we’ll just make regular connects with them every so often just to make sure they’re aware of feature enhancements and that sort of thing.

But if they are a customer that they have a lot of our products and very complicated workflows on their end, we will have perhaps more regular cadence meetings to make sure that they’re getting the true value out of the platform and making sure all of their questions are answered.

Jen Snyder:

When looking at that partnership with a customer, are you trying to put together kind of a success plan together?

Nicole Soltes:

Yes. We do work on a success plan together, right? Because it’s really that partnership, that understanding of what are they looking to achieve, and then they’re looking to us as the subject matter experts. What are you seeing with your other customers? How are they using the platform? What are the best practices here? We’re the experts there. It really is a mutual partnership here with the success plan.

Jen Snyder:

Got you. Have you always been in an organization that has had a success team, or is this something… I feel like one of the things I wanted to kind of cover here was, what is the difference between customer success and support?

Nicole Soltes:

Yeah. Great question. Customer success is proactive. Customer support is reactive. So if you’re using any software or any tool and something’s not working, or you can’t find something, or you identified a bug, for example, you’re going to reach out to that customer support. Now, customer success is proactive. Again, they are your strategic partner and your advocate. We’ll reach out to you if we identify new functionalities and features that would help you meet your goals. We are also your advocate within GovQA, right?

If you come to us and you say, “I really have this certain need that we need to be met and we need an enhancement,” that sort of thing, we will communicate your needs with our internal teams, whether it’s product teams, technical teams. We are your advocate and really want to be the voice of the customer. See, there’s that difference there where it’s support is reactive and success is proactive.

Jen Snyder:

I get it. Support to me would be more of a fix it, where success is going to be more of an enhance it. Make it better. Am I doing it right? Should I do it better?

Nicole Soltes:

Right, right. Yes. Making sure I get the most value out of the software. Absolutely.

Jen Snyder:

Excellent. So if you had to give someone an expectation of what their relationship from a success perspective will be with GovQA, how do you explain that to a customer coming onboard? Because I have to imagine in a lot of cases, they have not had that kind of partnership.

Nicole Soltes:

Yeah, no, absolutely. Right after implementation and the customer is live, we will work together with the customer and put together some sort of a regular cadence of meetings with the customer. Some are quarterly. Some are bimonthly. Just depending on the needs of that customer. So really it’ll be like a regular cadence of meetings, check-ins, making sure we’re working together with your goals. The other thing that you can expect, again, like I said before, a success plan.

Really those project plans will work together to help you achieve those goals and have those metrics that we identify in order to make sure that we’re measuring against those right metrics. And then we’ll even do executive business reviews. Whether it’s once a year or twice a year, really depending on what’s going on, but really that executive business review, which is more that strategic meeting and chance for us to really gain a deeper understanding of our customers.

And that’s kind of where we take that advisor approach, because we’re looking at our customer’s future plans and making sure that we align the best way with those customer plans, and again, making sure that they get the most value out of the platform.

Jen Snyder:

I can see where this is actually a really valuable piece of our organization, because our product, as you had mentioned, is evolving all the time. So if you have somehow missed something, there could be just nuggets of goodness that could help improve your process even further that you may not be aware of. So having that partnership I have to imagine is just hugely valuable.

Nicole Soltes:

Yeah, absolutely. We do big enhancements. Our product is constantly evolving. We have to make sure that we stay in front of our customers and make them aware of all these new features and functions.

Jen Snyder:

Excellent. Nicole, as we’ve taken a few minutes here today to kind of introduce the world to our customer success group, if you had to leave anything with our audience today as far as what to expect or how to engage, any thoughts that you want to just share with them so that they know you’re out there and this is a really great partnership?

Nicole Soltes:

I would just say in closing, our goal is to make our customer successful. That’s our entire goal. Anything that we can do to work together, whether, like I said, it’s meetings, success plans, executive business reviews, we are partners in true partner definition, and that’s really what our whole intention and purpose is.

Jen Snyder:

Excellent. Nicole, in closing, how would folks get ahold of you? If they are current customers today or they are even considering coming onboard and they’d really like to hear a little bit more about how that customer success partnership works, where would be the best way to reach you?

Nicole Soltes:

The best place to reach me is N, as in Nicole Soltes, S as in Sam, O-L-T-E-S@govqa.com. We also have a success@govqa.com email address as well. And that goes to myself and the entire team. Between those two email addresses, that’s the best way to reach me.

Jen Snyder:

Perfect. Well, I appreciate you taking a few minutes with me today. It’s great to just kind of let our customers and folks know what comes with that GovQA partnership. I think this was a good overview. Nicole, again, thanks for joining us today. Thank you everyone for listening, and we’ll be talking to you again soon with more tidbits about the inner workings of GovQA.

Nicole Soltes:

Thanks so much for having me.

Recording:

Thank you for listening to the Peers in Public Records podcast. To continue the conversation and learn more about public records, visit us at govqa.com or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

HOSTED BY

JEN SNYDER

Chief Evangelist

As GovQA’s Chief Evangelist, Jen is interested in meaningful conversations that look both at the big picture, as well as dig deep into nitty-gritty best-practice working sessions on all government challenges and opportunities including those related to technology, transparency, security, procurement, legislative mandates, compliance, staffing challenges, and more. Jen’s 15 years of experience in the state and local government space includes guest speaking and moderating for government events, roundtables, and associations. She has another 10 years of experience managing local and international business development initiatives for B2B tech companies.

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