Bang a Gong (get it on) in Customer Success
Start using Gong or be left behind
More and more customer success is moving from art to science. I see a lot of similarities with the change we’ve seen in sports where it’s much more data driven aka Brad Pitt and Moneyball. While we don’t have CSM metrics like WAR yet, we’re not that far away. The two factors driving this movement are the rise of new technologies and the growth of CS operations. Gong and other call recording technologies like it have changed the ballgame first for sales and now for customer success.
If you aren’t familiar with Gong, it’s a call recording software that can plug right into Zoom and other video software to capture the audio and video of these calls. It does more than that. It breaks down the metadata of these calls so they can be easily examined and reviewed in many ways. CSMs can now assess their own game tape (their calls) and CS leaders can take on the role of football coaches and do the same. It can answer the questions: Did the CSM mention a certain new product? Did they use more open than closed questions? Did they greet the client appropriately and establish rapport early on? Did they dive into client statements to better understand them? How did they handle curveballs from the client? Were they prepared enough for the call? The list goes on and on. This is the movement from art to science.
I’m a big proponent of hiring the right people and providing them the coaching they need to help them improve. Gong is a very helpful tool here. I don’t want to micromanage our team but I do want calls to have certain components and I do want to ensure we’re maximizing the time that we have with clients. As an example, we discussed as a team the need to go through recent product enhancements and the proper way to do that. This includes speaking to the impact of these features on the client’s outcomes and not just relaying what the features do. Gong allows you to set up trackers so you can narrow in on these parts of the calls to ensure that they are being done in a certain way. Making small improvements can drive massive change over time.
Besides being a coaching tool and allowing CS leaders to provide regular feedback, Gong does a lot more. I use it to:
Uncover client issues. I scan the trackers to see if competitors are mentioned or if there are potential issues where I need to jump in
Review where things went wrong. If issues occur such as clients feeling they were oversold or claims that items were discussed but never delivered we can go back and review the calls. We can determine where the miscommunication happened and how to prevent similar issues in the future
Improve internal hand-offs. Gong can make it easier to move accounts from onboarding to post-onboarding (if you have split up those roles up) and from CSM to CSM if clients are transitioned. You get to know the clients before ever speaking to them by hearing what’s important to them.
Improve employee onboarding. Certain calls can be showcased as part of new employee onboarding so that others can use them.
Provide feedback to the company (both good and bad). I regularly share call highlights with individuals and other teams. There are so many hidden nuggets on these calls that people would never know about. As an example, a great question to end a client call is to ask “what have you recently found helpful from our product?”. Clients will typically mention a new feature that they enjoyed using. You can now create a clip of that and share that with your product and engineering teams. That two minutes you spend will make the world of difference in bridging the gap between the different functions in your organization and aligning your company around the customer.
While you may hate baseball and dislike data analysis, you can’t hold back technology from the transformation that is happening in customer success. It’s best to embrace it and get ahead of it. Bang a gong (get it on).
PS: a great song from the 70’s:
Great post, Chad. I agree that the practice is moving steadily towards more science-based approaches and, for some of us who have predicted it for years, it's about time. Funny you brought in Moneyball in this article. I write a monthly internal newsletter and each month I write a lead article that focuses on a specific aspect about Customer Success. A couple of months ago the lead article was about science, data, and transformation and I revolved it around the Moneyball story. :-)