Process Makes Perfect with Ash Glenville: Customer Café Podcast
“It’s like the least sexiest thing on LinkedIn, but I write about it with pure joy because it’s the most underrated thing.”
Ash Glenville, Customer Success Manager at Zesty
Stick with Ash, and you too will acquire a taste and desire for processes. As a side benefit, your job and workspace will run a lot more smoothly and collaboratively.
Hailing from all over the world, Ash brings her personal experience from living in different regions and cultures and channels it into her work as someone who knows how to empathize, understand and empower her colleagues and customers.
You’ll want to listen to the entire episode, but you can catch some highlights below:
- Ash began her high-tech career in PR but found her home in customer success. What does PR have to do with Customer Success? Ash had experience working with customers and process optimization and implementation, so customer success was a good fit and easy transition. In PR, Ash had to learn different technologies for each client. Ash stepped up and created solutions to simplify the workflow. She found ways to “uncomplicate” things and processes. PR was all about communication and messaging. Ash believes that a good CS manager “owns the narrative.” Nothing is fully developed “from the get-go”. Always working with a product that is being developed when it comes to startups. Products may be unfinished and have some bugs, but as CS you want to “shine light” on specific areas. In other words, control the narrative. Play up your assets.
- Don’t create metrics for the sake of creating metrics. Create metrics that are necessary and make sense. Create metrics that will allow you to adjust and improve how your company serves its customers in terms of product and service.
- Use those metrics to create or refine processes. Ash is an unabashed processes person. No matter what role she is in and no matter what company, she digs in and gets involved with processes. Ash considers herself to be a “knowledge sharer.” She develops processes and shares them. If you follow her on LinkedIn, she talks a lot about processes. Ash believes that processes are underappreciated, and that people think that they are “onerous and boring” but without them life and work would be a lot harder.
- “You can’t grow without having the right foundation”. You can’t scale without documentation and processes. For new team members to hit the ground running you need roles, responsibilities and a company knowledge base documented for newbies to get going asap efficiently and effectively.
- Crash hackathons no matter your role. Ash “got to see the completely opposite perspective” from what she regularly sees when she inadvertently fell into a central role in a Zesty hackathon. She brought a fresh perspective as someone who is regularly engaged with customers. People were coming up with ideas at the hackathon but “they didn’t realize how useful they were” because they don’t have the same breadth and depth of customer knowledge. In short. Crash hackathons. Your interest and input will also demonstrate your cred with the R&D team, and they will take your feedback and input more seriously moving forward.
- Keep your customers up to date even if there are no updates. If you are waiting to provide a full answer you can write them indicating that. Nobody likes to be left hanging.
- If you aren’t already following Brene Brown, get started with her Netflix documentary: The Call to Courage.
For more tips on process building, account management and customer success, follow Ash on LinkedIn!
Want to build a strong team and collaborate smoothly and easily with your colleagues? Get started as a beloved beta user!
Looking for more to listen to? Join Menachem Pritzker and Sharon Weiss-Greenberg, hard core Collabrians, as we drink coffee and learn from collaborative leaders in sales, customer success and account management.
Ready to get started? Customer Café by Collabria: Sales Collaboration Tips for Pros is available wherever you listen to podcasts. You can listen on Spotify, Apple, or you can click here to start listening now!
