Defining Customer Success at Qualtrics

Customer Success at Qualtrics

Customer Success at Qualtrics is extremely focused on showing value to our customers. Our main goal on the Customer Success team is to drive usage, adoption, and value. The term Customer Success (CS) can mean different things to every company. Depending on the company, CS can include delivery and deployment, training and enablement, technical account management, or just purely product support. Customer Success Representatives at Qualtrics focus on helping their customers get the most out of the XM™ product, resulting in renewals – and often expansion – of their partnership with Qualtrics. 

Our Customer Success team works to gain a deep understanding of the needs of our clients by asking questions around what a business is trying to accomplish and matching those needs with XM solutions to give clients a clear way to maximize their use of the product while materializing tangible returns on their investment. This understanding ensures that the CS team can competently partner on building a plan to succeed in the customer’s goals. One of our central values at Qualtrics is being “Customer Obsessed” and this influences our focus on helping the clients achieve their desired outcomes. 

“Our main focus is helping our clients achieve their business objectives through better experience management. To do that we need to build, in collaboration with the client, a roadmap that states clear activities, milestones and KPIs. That is only achieved by understanding what their business objectives are, how they are measured, and what their plan is to get there. We use the XM platform to enable them to provide better experiences and consequently, achieve those business objectives.” - Rodrigo Manzanilla tort, Senior Manager, Customer Success 

Main Objective of Customer Success Reps

A common misconception surrounding Customer Success is that the majority of the job is handling everyday technical support problems. While there are times that aiding in this is necessary, we have a support team that acts as a first line to handle those issues so that a Customer Success rep can focus on relationship management. This includes meeting with customers regularly to ensure their needs are being met and looking at key metrics like utilization, number of surveys, and number of users to show how the XM product is working for them with the goal being to derive the most value for clients. 

“We want our CS reps to lead out with thought leadership, business discussions, and driving ROI. Reps need to think critically about maturing their programs and focus on relationship management.” - Ron Mantel, Senior Manager, Customer Success

Our main objective in Customer Success is to drive retention and expansion. CS reps are expected to maintain relationships with customers as advisors and advocates to ensure they are getting the most out of the product and to expand and mature programs for customers. 

Career Growth

Qualtrics’ Customer Success department recently went through the process of completely revamping the career growth map. In the past, it was difficult to see the growth process throughout your career – after so many years you could look back and see how far you’d come, but in the moment it was hard to feel the progress. It’s important to feel like you’re building towards the next step in your career so we changed this process. 

Qualtrics created a new organization called Customer Success Associates. Starting out, these CS Associates have the opportunity to learn the product by driving client engagement and value for customers. They also receive direct mentorship and this creates a rotational program to move through. Once you graduate out of CS Associates, you’re into our new portfolio model, which gives you more domain focus and more responsibility. We’ve found that this process is more meaningful and resonates really well with our team. 

Junior level Customer Success reps start out with a larger number of low revenue clients, while senior level reps have a small amount of high revenue clients that they work with on a very personal level. This system allows for reps who are just starting out to learn the product and what works for different customers as they work their way up to more senior levels. 

Success in Customer Success

During the recruitment process, there are many skills we look for in potential candidates – things like business acumen, being comfortable having difficult conversations, the ability to develop strong client and executive presence, being structured problem solvers and communicators, are all assessed.

One of the most important things we look for in a potential candidate for Customer Success, something that separates the good from the great, are people who are curious and have a solution-oriented mindset. This means being the person who takes charge and figures out how to get things done right. We look for people who can thrive in true white space environments – where you have the empowerment to take charge of how and where you choose to spend your time. This is not the type of job where you come in and know what you’re going to be doing every day. There’s a lot of freedom with it, so it’s important to be able to juggle a bunch of things at the same time and understand what needs to be prioritized and what can be dropped and picked back up later.

“It's really exciting to be part of a hyper growth company. As an employee, you have the opportunity and expectation to be entrepreneurial, which fuels innovation and advancement for our customers and employees.” - Megana Balentine, Senior Manager, Customer Success

In Customer Success, we have a unique opportunity to define how our customers are able to think about experience management. There is a lot of autonomy in the role to work with a client and define what they need and what they’re striving for and then figure out how to achieve that. There is a support system within CS leadership that allows for a more entrepreneurial approach to CS.