Accelerating Customer Success with Actor Training

Clear People are the team behind Atlas, a software solution for clients whereby dispersed data and knowledge is collated into one centralised data hub, by using Microsoft 365. 

They save their customers time and money: in fact $1.5 million dollars in annual savings and a 30% reduction on mundane and repetitive tasks – like looking for stuff!

Their clients are in diverse areas such as Financial Services, Construction, Legal and Public sectors.

So what was the issue?

During the post-sales kick offs with Senior Stakeholders, the team’s lack of confidence was undermining their communication.

Specific issues cited were:

1. Reading the slides and their notes when online.
2. A lack of engagement with leaders: they were talking at them instead.
3. Flapping or waffling when they haven’t an answer to a client’s query or committing to something that’s problematic.

Consequently, Senior Leaders in Customer Success would need to jump in, resulting in their time being chewed up and the team credibility being dented.

The leaders were looking to gather the 9 people involved in software implementation, including Implementation Consultants, a Marketing Executive and Customer Success Agents.

The sessions needed to be online with this dispersed team and I wanted to something different for this specific group…

As we couldn’t take the team out of client commitments for too long, the usual 3.5 hour slots for online training were shortened to two two-hour workshops.

Session One:

This covered various elements, the main ones being:

1. Approaches to build self-confidence during Kick-offs
2. Discover how to unearth what the client really wants
3. Building in engagement techniques with presentations
4. How to deal with difficult questions
5. Making a point succinctly and spontaneously.

Session Two:

This session was quite different from the usual training scenario, running as follows:

1. Recap of methods and sharing of successes and challenges since Session One;
2. Role play using an actor, who assumed the role of a typical client.
3. Feedback, and reapplication of techniques with personal action plans.

The Result

Remember how the Customer Success Team was floundering with certain interactions?  Not only as their confidence increased but it’s given Senior Department Leaders their time back.  Learning how to ask questions to clients and build trust has meant that cross-selling has increased by around 25% in the last year.

The client feedback speaks for itself:

“The training has been very well received as I mentioned directly after the training, but I can also state we see clear effect and improvements with regards to the challenges we noticed before.“

Patrick Proesmans – Head of Success Department at ClearPeople

And that was a year after the training! Good interventions stay with you, which is why they’re an investment not a cost.

As for the participants:

Getting an actor on board gave us the opportunity to apply all the techniques in real scenarios.

F. Caceres

“Very grateful for the amount of preparation and care to tailor the subject matter for all attendees/roles. More generally, whilst working remotely. I was sceptical that we’d not get a good team-building energy, however I think we’re all feeling pretty motivated. Superb content and the delivery.”

J. White