Building a customer centric service model: A case study

Growth is a team sport.

It doesn’t matter if you have a product led model or a sales led model, at the end of the day, it's the customers purchasing the product that drives revenue. Not the product team, not the marketing team, not sales.?

And the reason customers purchase products is because they find value in the product, and they find value in the product because it solves a problem they have.?

That means that driving sales, or business growth, is more about helping people solve the right problems, in the right way, at the right time, and facilitating a process that accommodates for that comes from having a customer centric service model.?

Internal friction = external friction

Too frequently, service models and customer operations are built around internal processes that need to be satisfied. For example, sales needs to know who should be paid commission. This internal operational need causes them to do things like assign dedicated reps based on territories or other criteria. They may not have the same technical knowledge as support, so need to handover to support to answer certain questions. Once the deal is made, there's also a handover for post sales team to nurture the relationship long term. These handovers can sometimes make a contact bottleneck for customer questions, or result in confusion for the customer on who they should reach out to for what, both before and after the deal is closed.

That doesn't provide for a great buyer or customer experience.?

Another example: Marketing needs to chase a KPI on how many leads they get to sales, so they may focus customers to sign up for a demo vs. providing more self serve educational materials that could be preferred to the customer.?

Customers feel these internal moments of friction as external moments of friction.?

According to Nick Toman, Group Vice President, Gartner and co-author of the Effortless Experience

“ Customer loyalty depends on how easy you make it for your customers to do business with you”

In their research, they found that the majority of customers, notably 96%, who had high-effort experiences reported being disloyal, compared to only 9% of customers with low-effort experience,” says Toman.?

The key sources of effort include:

• The need to contact a company more than once for the same issue
• Having to repeat information to multiple reps
• The customer’s perception that it takes additional effort to resolve an issue or get information - like maybe they had to call instead of getting information from the website, or other channel switching - where customers prefer to get information in one channel bug get redirected to another because it's preferred by the company for internal operational purposes.

But, the challenge is….effortlessness changes depending on the complexity of the customer. A single decision maker is going to have way more ease in a self-serve process than a multiple-stakeholder B2B Enterprise process.?

A customer centric service model is one with processes around what's best for the customer instead of trying to fit the customer into an established playbook.

To illustrate what I mean, I am going to share of how we built customer operations from scratch at Moxion to build a service model perfectly suited for our unique customer base, and how you can take these same approaches to rethink your customer operations and build a process around your customer.?

What's a service model?

First off - what do we mean here by a service model??

Service models are how a company delivers goods and services to their customers, and can encompass every touch point of the customer journey.?

• Self-service: Where customers can mostly find their own information to buy and use the product without much guidance.?
• Personal Service: Customers are predominantly managed by a 1:1 relationship that guides them in a high touch manner.
• Group Service: This might be a community, group classes, webinars, and more.

In other words, your service model is ?how you help your customers from start to finish. Most service models use a combination of tactics, you may even use all of the above, particularly if you service multiple types of customers.

It includes what channel offerings do you have, like phone, chat, email, community, or a knowledge base.

It's how much human effort or digital touch goes into any customer.?

And it's what actions should happen at each step of the customer journey.?

Intro to Moxion

When I first started at Moxion - I knew I was in for an above average sort of challenge.?

For one, the customers were a particularly demanding and high profile nature - Hollywood film and television productions.?

Also - when I interviewed for the role of heading up customer success, they said “technically we have a 100% churn rate because productions always end”?

And this is true unless you are Richard Linklater filming boyhood 2.?

They also said "it's important for us to deliver 24/7 support because the nature of film production means that hang ups on set costs thousands of dollars a minute, and by the way, you will have a team of 2 people to accomplish this with."

Now - most normal people with healthy boundaries around work would hear this and see ??????????????????????????????????????????????????

But I said "sounds good!" because I have a Capricorn moon sign so my boundaries around work are questionable at best.

Moxion's nearly non-existent service model

Once I got into Moxion, there were a few process issues created based on satisfying internal operational needs instead of customer needs:

Number one: If anyone had any interest in Moxion at all, they had to call sales....on the phone. This was straight out of 1996. There was a single sales person who wanted to make sure they talked to every prospect on the phone before delivering any information. This was so they could “control the sale” and also so they could track commission as a sales win (aka, satisfy an internal operational need).

Number 2: CRM one step above post it notes. There was no tracking, no understanding of what worked and what didn't from a customer relationship or revenue perspective.?

Number 3: Sales handovers to post sales support and success were chaotic. They were literally shared as a PDF that then was posted in a slack channel (because for some reason that made more sense than to just put this in the CRM), and frequently involved jumping on a call to talk about it because there was no organizational or operational shorthand for customer segments or type that would allow us to understand basic things about the customer to operationalize off of.?

As you'll learn from this post, this customer segmentation is the key to building a service model that's personalized at scale.

Number 4: Every customer was a snowflake. While we treated every customer like a special snowflake - in a way….we were treating all customers the same. Everyone had the same bespoke process regardless of if it was the Netflix executive team or a small budget indie opportunity, it was all a one-stop-shop style sales demo of the product and all you can eat onboarding training no matter what they were using the product for, the complexity of their operation, or who was getting onboarded.?

But it wasn't all bad. There were a few saving graces that provided a great foundation to build upon.

Moxion had a baseline of really good how-to documentation. This was a saving grace. What Moxion lacked, however, was video or other sorts of enablement documentation like guides and best practices.

The team was also super knowledgeable, which was a blessing - but there were just only two of them besides myself, so it was quite a skeleton crew. They were burned out from delivering 24/7 support between only two people for so long.

And yet somehow we became one of the most beloved vendor relationships of some of the biggest companies in the world.

And experienced massive gains in revenue growth over a very challenging time - between 2020 and 2021.

While our Support Volume actually stayed level - and this even includes the conversations we started taking on during the sales process (more on that later).

So - how did we do it?

Seven steps to building a customer-centric service model

We did it by building a customer centric service model, which meant going back to the basics, and building from there.?

These are the seven steps we took in building our service model:

1. Talk to customers: This is what I mean when I say go back to the basics. There's nothing more basic than getting to know your customers.?
2. Track trends: If you have a post it note style CRM, you won't get the data you need to build the right model.?
3. The Home Edit: Take all of your customer data out of the pantry, the closets, the garage - and organize the crap out of it.?
4. Define customer segments: From that organization, discover trends in customer data.?
5. Define operational paths: Use those customer segments to inform your different operational paths - like what customers need to discover when, and how much touch they need to be successful.?
6. Then, you need to put it all together: Use segments and paths to design service model - like high touch and digital touch models.?
7. Scale and grow.

Step 1: Talk to customers

The first thing I did when I came into Moxion, after getting enough product knowledge to not be embarrassing, was to jump in head first into customer conversations - specifically over 1:1 calls.

If there was an onboarding session, I took it. If a customer had trouble and wanted a coaching call on something specific, I jumped on the line.?

Now, I know - some businesses will argue that this level of touch is expensive, and doesn't merit the ROI. Fortunately with Moxion’s price point the ROI was definitely there - but I would argue that when you're just getting to know your customers as a leader, the goal of these calls is not high touch support, but customer research.

No matter the call, I would ask questions like:?

• what is your company like??
• What is your role?
• What are you hoping to use Moxion for??
• How were you doing this previously?
• What are some of the pain points you had with the previous workflow you're hoping Moxion will solve??

these questions illuminated some important things like:

What sort of company or business: are there different types of customer types we service or is it all the same. I discovered it was different. We served productions (remember that 100% churn rate) but also studios and post houses or VFX and animation houses.?

What is your role: what titles or personas we talked to, which helped me to understand what their goals were based on their position.?

What are you hoping to use Moxion for? This gave me a direct understanding of their use case.?

How were you doing this previously? This helped me understand if they were coming from specific competitors, but also the baseline workflow.?

What are the pain points? This informs what obstacles customers will especially be trying to overcome when learning or adopting your product.?

Now I realize this is very specific to B2B - so if I were to tailor this to D2C I may jump on a chat or deliver a survey, and ask questions about who they are, why they are interested in buying the product, what they are hoping to achieve with it, etc. D2C doesn’t have the same complexity of B2B, so sometimes a survey to gather this intel is perfectly adequate.?

If you’re working B2B, these questions are easy enough to fold into any sort of onboarding or coaching call when you first meet customers.?

Step 2: Track everything

Once I started talking to customers, I needed to get an understanding of common trends, and that’s where tracking comes in.

Like I said - the CRM system in Moxion was one step above tracking things on post-it notes, so I campaigned to implement Hubspot for this sort of tracking and reporting at the customer level.?

You can use your CRM or Help Desk to track these trends, depending on whether or not the data you’re tracking is on the customer or company level (which is better to track in a CRM), or conversational level (which is better to track in a help desk). An easy way to track these is to create fields for them in a CRM, and record them on the company, contact, or deal level - depending on how you’re leveraging the objects in your CRM.?

In Hubspot, the CRM we use, I created fields for:

• Company Type
• Role
• Use Case

That helped me collect those data points against certain customers.?

Then, via our help desk (which happened to be Help Scout), I’d track things like channel requests: For example, were certain people looking to jump on calls or training sessions, or prefer videos or knowledge base - this helped me to understand what sort of engagement or self-serve channels certain customers were gravitating towards.

I also tracked which features customers called out as valuable for different use cases if they mentioned it in a conversation, email, or call. This helped inform things like value propositions.?

I also tracked features they were requesting, if we didn’t already have them. This helped with product development, but also informed whether or not we had product market fit with some use cases, but not others.?

Lastly, I also tracked trends in how people expressed they wanted to buy. Like I said at the beginning, this is about service models and purchasing is part of that. And, our current process was “call sales” - which I suspected was causing friction for potential buyers and I was right.?

We found a great deal of customers asking if we had a free trial, videos and guides, and writing the listed support contact to ask questions presale to avoid calling the sales line, or customers who preferred weekly cadences while in the evaluation process.?

Step 3: Organize (i.e. The Home edit approach to organizational data)

Once I had a sizable amount of data to work with, I started putting things in a matrix. I call this approach "the Home Edit approach to organizational data." If you’ve seen that show on Netflix, one of the first things they do is take everything out of the closet, pantry, garage - whatever they are organizing - and start putting them in piles. That’s how they start organizing.

So, I did the same. I put all of the various trends in a matrix to see what trends emerged.?

I came out with something that looked like this:

The matrix shows trends in what roles correlate to what company types that then typically apply to certain use cases. It also shows what features apply to certain use cases, what features they were requesting, and what channels are frequently requested or required in certain use cases or customer types.?

It’s hard to see on this slide because there’s a lot of information on here, but the Matrix includes:

• Use Case: How is the customer using the product?
• Roles: Who are the buyers and users for each use case?
• Customer Type: For us this was production, company, or studio - for other businesses this may be verticals, business type, d2c vs. b2b etc.?
• Channels: How did certain use cases require us to engage?
• Buying Style: How did certain use cases change the buying process?
• Value Features: What each use case found valuable.
• Upsell options: What were extra features we were selling that applied to specific use cases - this helped with personalization later.
• Activation: What needed to happen in order for the customer to be considered “using” a certain use case.
• Competitors: Who did our team need to be knowledgeable about when coming up against certain use cases?
• Customers: Customer examples that were successful we could learn from, and help others learn from.

The key learnings that came from putting things in this organizational matrix were:

Three Distinct Customer types Emerged

Studio, Production, and "Company" (post houses/animation studios etc) emerged as three distinct customer types that all had slightly different needs and processes. In fact, studios used in a way that could actually be a different pricing model that correlated more to a subscription model vs a project based one, which means we no longer had a 100% churn rate.

Some use cases higher lift than others

Camera-to-cloud required implementation and higher lift buying process, Dailies required training sessions for three different user roles, but HDR and Editorial could be self-serve trial predominantly

Different use cases had different buyer and user roles

Diffferent buyers and users emerged depending on the use cases, which had different needs and goals

Step 4: Define customer segments?

I then used this Matrix to define the customer segments, which you can start to see at a high level here:

.....but before getting too much into that, let's do a deep dive on segments.

When it comes to customer segmentation, I like to segment across three axis:

• Operational segments: This is how much human touch or digital touch a customer needs to have to be successful. Highly complex customers, like enterprise for example, typically need a lot of human touch in order to find success as there are many stakeholders and processes that need to be accounted for. Low complexity customers, on the other hand, do better with low or even know human touch and primarily digital touch or self-serve channels.?
• Personalization segments: These should correlate to what should be personalized about a customer’s experience exploring your product. Use cases is a good example of this. If we take a well known tool like Trello, for example, how a software company might use trello would be very different from say, how a wedding planner might use trello. This means you need to introduce them to very different things during their buying and service process.?
• Lifecycle Segments: This points to where the customer is in their lifecycle. Is this presale? Onboarding? Post-sale? Renewal and expansion phase? End of life and churning? All of these segments should be defined and understood in order to provide for a cohesive customer experience across their entire lifecycle.?

We came out with the following operational segments:

• Studio customers
• Production customers.

Studio Customers are like our enterprise segment. These could be understood as “Netflix” or “NBC Universal.” These customers had roles like the VP of production technology, and were mostly product technologists. They also were using us for a very specific use case bespoke to Studios - as an administrative platform used to house all productions under one roof, and facilitate studio level digital asset management workflows. As I mentioned before - they were actually using the product in a completely different way - one that correlated more to a subscription model.

Productions, then, were the individual production customers that sometimes fit under studios, but sometimes did not. If NBCU was the Studio customer, Jurassic Park would be the production customer. These customers had a different role that purchased and served as a point of contact as well, which was the post production supervisor. Productions had more of a need for speed, and preference for very low touch engagement like videos and guides so they could get started more quickly without juggling peoples schedules for training sessions. In fact, some times productions would need to get up and running that day, which didn’t give us a whole lot of time for training and onboarding new users for the very first time, which meant we needed to be really, really smart about how we introduced them to the product and activated them as quickly as possible.?

We also semi-shelved a segment: Post house/animation house/VFX house segment - we found we had very few of them in regards to both volume and revenue, and that the features that they needed were not on our near term roadmap, and they weren't the same features that studios and productions were requesting. This indicated we didn't have product market fit in this segment.

We decided to focus our energy predominantly on Studios and productions and would revisit operationalizing this segment when we had more indication of product market fit, and more of the features they indicated they needed in a product.?

Then, in terms of personalization segments, the most prominent one that emerged was use case:

Studio workflows, only relevant to studios, were partnered with the Studio Customer operational segment. But again, from the customer research we did, we discovered they used the product in a way that correlated better to a subscription model, so that completely changed how we priced for that segment.?

And the various production use cases:

• Camera-to-cloud
• Dailies
• Post Production Cut Review
• Finishing Review
• Full production workflow

were all project based vs subscription based, since they were production projects.?

Each of these had their own customer journey, points of activation, and features to highlight to show customer’s value.?

Step 5: Use segments to define operational paths?

So, now we have operational segments (how much touch or what sort of touch a customer should receive) and personalization segments (how should their experience be personalized while learning and adopting the product) it was time to pair these with lifecycle segments to create a cohesive operational path.

It looked a little something like this.

Operational segment: Studios

Each of these sections here are a lifecycle segment, and the activities that should take place in that segment. We are looking at the Studio customer operational segment.

Studios followed a high touch sales process lead by Enterprise AEs, then were intro-ed to Studio Success in the purple zone where they tag-teamed through trial and proof of concept phase. Then, once the deal closed, Studio Success took over with onboarding, expansion, and renewal.?

Personalization segments weren’t as impactful in this customer segment because we were already hand holding them, but knowing if a Studio was interested in us for only rolling out a specific use case did help - for example. Apple started with the finishing review use case, and Disney started with the camera-to-cloud workflow use case, so we followed the enterprise process, but using the use case personalization segment to inform what we rolled out to them to first.?

Operational segment: Productions

Productions, on the other hand, were our high velocity segment. Not only were they a lower complexity customer type, but they frequently needed to get up and running very quickly - sometimes the next day. This made having any sort of sales handover impossible, as it made it too easy to drop information.

So instead, Productions reached out to production success, who handles the customer through the entire production lifecycle, eliminating handovers on customers that have a high need for speed and low need for a complex sales process, reducing friction and providing for a more effortless and seamless experience for customers that valued speed and efficiency above all else.?

We also set up a trial form and onboarding intake form to simplify the buying process for them.?

At the demo and onboarding stages, the different demos and onboarding emails, videos, guides, and training sessions were personalized by use case, our personalization segment, identified on the intake form - either the trial form or onboarding one.?

This facilitated a personalized experience for each production, but administered in a highly repeatable and scalable way, which allowed us to get productions set up and running as quickly as possible.?

Informing the entire buyer's journey

Now, if your service model is:

operational segments x personalization segments / lifecycle segments

And growth is a team sport about getting the right information to the right customer, in the right way, at the right time -?

You can actually start this personalization much earlier, partnering with marketing in the awareness stage by using personalization segments to inform webinars, blog content, and other forms of buyer enablement specific to those personalization segments, and that's a way you can have a truly cohesive, personalized customer journey from their first touch point onwards.?

Step 6: Use operational paths to define offerings, teams, and service model?

The next step would be to take these operational paths, and use them to define your offerings, teams, and essentially that is your service model.?

We started with our operational segments. It became very obvious we needed a high-touch team, Studio Success, and a high-velocity team, Production Success.?

Internally, we socialized it as whaling, fishing, and farming.

Whaling made up the high-touch team, Enterprise AEs and Enterprise Success, which we called Studio Success.?

The high touch team followed a high touch process that lead to a slow transition and long handover process over a proof of concept period where Sales and Success worked together in tandem.

Fishing, on the other hand, was our Velocity Success, or our production success team. Because we knew productions were low complexity, transient (100% churn, remember), and frequently had a need for speed, Production Success handled the full lifecycle for those customers.

There were also additional benefits to fishing with CS - as they already had 24/7 coverage, were product and customer experts, and this allowed CS to contribute directly to revenue generating activities which helps fund CS and provide resources, as if you can tie to a revenue metric, you’re no longer a cost center.?

It wasn’t worth doing outbound sales efforts on fish because the low value of the deal. Granted, the deal was still $15,000, but compared to the million dollar plus deals of Studio customers, it was a major difference.

Production Success handled inbound to close, and also any extension revenue to avoid handovers and mitigate unnecessary complexity for this high velocity process.?

Instead, Fishing’s success relied heavily on operations and automation managed through Hubspot - we would automate steps of the customer’s lifecycle to prompt proactive outreach at key moments, for example, for a semi-automated proactive and reactive hybrid.

We also supplemented with buyer and customer enablement. We invested heavily in videos, guides, and other self-service tools to reduce human touch as much as possible while still getting customers the information they needed as quickly as possible

We also invested heavily in internal enablement. Our CS team was not only trained on support intel, but also value prop intel - this helped them recognize opportunities to drive value empowering the team to both be helpful and strategic simultaneously.?

All of the fishing metrics were based on conversions. So, production success wasn’t measured on volume of productions but conversions of productions that landed with them.?

And the results were pretty good on those conversions:

Instead, Farming - our studio success, was responsible for number of productions and that was counted as an expansion metric typical for customer success.

So, essentially how farming worked in tandem with fishing is that our Studio Success would make the Studios happy and successful with a high touch process geared around making sure they achieve their desired goals and outcomes, as well as supporting them in a high touch manner.

Then, they would send us more Fish (productions) as an expansion metric.?

Production success would scoop the fish up in the net and support them throughout their entire lifecycle with a sale, onboarding, and support process that was specific to their identified personalization segment, which in our case was use case.?

This has resulted in massive growth - as you can see where Moxion started Whaling, Farming, and then eventually fishing - it’s resulted in a great amount of growth. Which is amazing….because we have had no marketing and no other changes in that timeframe here.?

And also super happy customers, as our operational processes were curated specific to their needs.?

Step 7: Scale and grow

Now that we have our operating segments, and Moxion began expanding rapidly, it became time to scale and grow the team. The team with the most volume needed to scale first, and that was production success.?

Staffing production success mainly hinged on making sure we had both enough coverage to provide 24/7 support that our productions relied on, but also enough coverage that team members could keep up with the operational and enablement needs required for fishing to be successful.?

To accomplish this, we chose to scale this using a support driven growth methodology to structure the production success team. Here, customer-facing tams serve as the engine that fuels and informs decisions across departments. For this to function, it's important to set up scalable feedback loops between departments. This means we’d break up our team into various specialties in order to curate feedback loops from the voice of the customer back to various departments of the business - like product, growth, and engineering.

Hiring for Production Success

After we finished hiring purely for coverage on the Production Success side, we started to hire Generalists and Specialists.?

Generalists are Front line support and success helping customers through calls, emails, chat, an other applicable channels

Specialists spend a bulk of their time doing those same activities, ?plus 40% of their time on defined responsibilities per specialty.

As far as what those specialties look like, these are split into Product-Growth-Operations, and engineering.

Product specialty owns things like the voice of custmer program aggregating customer feedback to circulate back to product, growth specialties help the marketing and sales feedback loop, eventually specializing on things like trial conversations, demos, and inbound growth conversations. Operations helped with scheduling, choosing tools, internal enablement, and training, and Engineering was a bit more like a standard relationship in technical support.

But, by keeping these all under the same tools, processes, and leadership - we keep all of the customer data in one location vs broken into silos, and eliminate the need of handovers. This creates a way more effortless experience for the customer.

This is also good for the team and longevity, as specialists allow the team to contribute and grow their career beyond management, which keeps knowledgeable team members happier longer, and also siphoning amazing customer knowledge throughout the business.?

Scaling Studio Success

On the flips side - Studio success is a bit more like a traditional Enterprise Sales and Success pod - but that made sense for the enterprise customer base.

There’s an Enterprise AE to navigate the sales process, with a handover to a CSM, and also if I kept going I would have liked to have had a Solutions consultant or Sales engineer to help facilitate custom development - but to start we have had an engineer fill this role instead.

Because we only had a very few but super high value Studio customers, these were scaled based on geographic needs, for us that is Los Angeles, but should I have stayed I would have also placed these in EMEA and APAC.

Applying to your business

I hope this was a helpful case study in not only creating a service model from scratch, but in avoiding the pitfalls of falling into established service models geared towards optimizing internal operations, and not one that's focused on delivering the best possible experience for your customers. As a recap, these 7 steps are the recipe for success no matter what stage you are at your business:

1. Talk to customers - or if you're already a mature company leverage existing customer relationships and research?
2. Track trends - if you have a post it note style CRM, you won't get the data you need to build the right model.?
3. The Home Edit - take all of your customer data out of the pantry, the closets, the garage - and organize the crap out of it.?
4. Define customer segments - from that organization, discover trends in customer data.?
5. Define operational paths - use those customer segments to inform your different operational paths - like what customers need to discover when, and how much touch they need to be successful.?
6. Then, you need to put it all together - Use segments and paths to design service model - like high touch and digital touch models.?
7. Scale and grow.