How CSEs Drive Success for Companies and Clients

What is a CSE?

Customer Success Executives or CSEs act as a bridge between companies and their clients. Their responsibilities include listening to customer feedback, addressing clients’ needs, and promoting a healthy and mutually-beneficial business relationship overall. Their role is essential to the growth and success of their company.

At RainFocus, our CSE team is led by Bryan Pritchard. Bryan has been with RainFocus for nearly two years and has worked various customer experience related jobs in the events industry over the last 21 years.

Advice From an Expert

We sat down with Bryan hoping to better understand why CSEs are so important. Reflecting on his two decades of experience in the industry, he shared these valuable insights with us.

What would you say is your top priority as a CSE?

“Maintaining the customer relationship and building trust in our brand to drive meaningful experiences and KPI-centric data into the customer’s event portfolio.”

Relationships are the foundation of successful business partnerships, and trust is the foundation of every good relationship. Bryan works closely with clients to ensure trust is developed and maintained.

What is your strategy for solving client problems?

“Communicate early and often with an open and honest dialogue surrounding any opportunity.”

Having this type of communication from the beginning of the relationship allows Bryan to negate future problems by establishing expectations and creating a shared vision. When you are honest with your clients, your clients will be honest with you, and you’ll be successful together.

What do you do when you encounter a problem you don’t know how to solve?

Rather than take a pessimistic approach to what most people would consider problems, Bryan views these obstacles as opportunities and treats each as a pathway to future success.

“Opportunity resolution requires a delicate balance of nurturing and discipline; by working in tandem with senior account leadership best practices can be achieved by:

1. Restating the factual timeline that led to the opportunity in order to remove emotion.
2. Listening carefully to realize the desired solution.
3. Provide an open approach for agreed resolution and point out how this will not only solve the need but make [fill in the blank] better.”

How do you know when you’ve been successful in your role?

While it is easy to point to numbers and statistics as a measure of success, Bryan has a more progressive view of his success.

“Success comes in many ways and it’s not always tangible.

• Securing unsolicited ‘winning’ statements.
• Signing previously unsold business opportunities thanks to platform satisfaction.
• Word of mouth advertising based on relationship and performance.”

What is one thing you wish people knew about your job?

“The Customer Success Executive is not just an internal escalatory figure, but actually the client representative for Voice of Client (VoC) championing. This works two ways:

1. Supporting product development in a ‘what’s needed now’ way.
2. Providing a go-to feedback loop for clients’ requests, so they do not get lost in quarterly requests and roadmap notations.

In short, we are here for the client and not just to get more sales—it’s about their experience and driving KPI/ROI for them.”

CSEs Help Secure Lasting Relationships

Client success is a top priority at RainFocus. We want our partners to be excited about their experience with our software, and CSEs help make that happen.

“I believe that success has a lot to do with listening to what customers want and then implementing those improvements and changes. RainFocus invites feedback, is receptive to it, and shows that they care by improving the product in a way that directly impacts their customers’ needs.” – Sarah Mills, Senior Manager of Global Event Technology for Splunk.

This quote is a testament to the importance of a successful CSE. It is important that your clients feel heard, and that they see positive changes in your product as a result of their feedback. A good CSE prioritizes their client’s concerns and nurtures a healthy and beneficial partnership.

To learn more about how RainFocus can improve your event experience visit rainfocus.com.