Customer Success Team Profile: AB Tasty

Quick Stats:

Web: www.abtasty.com                Industry: Software                         Company Size: 240 Employees

This month’s team feature profiles AB Tasty, a customer experience optimization company that helps brands build better user experiences and unlock new levels of possibilities. AB Tasty is a global company with ten offices around the world.

Pauline Servant, Customer Success Efficiency Senior Manager, shared with us how AB Tasty’s diverse Customer Success team is utilizing ChurnZero to increase their global customer outreach and communication. Read on to learn more about how implementing features like Plays has made a critical difference in AB Tasty’s CS business operations

Q. How long has your company had a CS function? How did it begin?
A. AB Tasty was founded in 2009. The Customer Success department was built over time, as clients have always been at the center of what we do. The team started more than 8 years ago with initially 1 or 2 people taking care of our very first clients. They also headed various tasks such as product documentation, marketing newsletter, events organization, etc - just like in any startup life! Over 8 years later, we have grown to around 50 CSMs, spread in 7 different offices around the world. This allows us to cover most of the time zones, from NYC to Singapore, and be ready to serve our clients.

Q. What is the primary focus of the Customer Success team at your company?
A. The primary focus of our team is helping our clients reach their business objectives. To do so, we make sure they optimize their use of our platforms. We do our best to deliver a great service experience, be as proactive, and help our clients think outside of the box.

Q. How do you encourage customer centricity across your entire organization?
A. Customer Satisfaction is part of AB Tasty's DNA and always has been. Initially a web agency, AB Tasty converted into a CXO platform thanks to customer feedback. Along with helping customers build, improve and redesign their websites, we built a basic A/B testing tool to provide them with data-driven recommendations. Customers were so enthusiastic about it; it became clear for our co-founder the tool should become AB Tasty's core business.

Today, like our early days, our clients remain our company's main focus. AB Tasty’s co-founders read every single NPS answer and don't hesitate to contact clients directly if need be. Feature-specific surveys and user-testing sessions are held on a regular basis to involve our clients as much as possible in the product roadmap. When our monthly company after-work drinks were still a thing (fingers-crossed they'll be back one day), our clients would often pop-up and share a few drinks with us!    

Q. How is your Customer Success team structured?
A. Although the organization of the CS team has been flat for quite a long time, its size has grown too much to keep it like this. Our structure has now evolved to a more hierarchical one, including a VP of CS who relies on a team leader in each country, who themselves manages between 2 to 4 CSMs.

An exception is made for France, which constitutes most of our CS workforce. Here there is a CSM Director who manages 4 team leaders who are themselves responsible for 3 to 7 CSMs. Around the world, our CSMs manage all types of clients from SMBs to Large Accounts. The exception is in France, where CSMs have been organized into sub-teams, based on the clients' size (very small accounts, SMBs, Mid-Market, Large Accounts). When it comes to Global and Strategic Accounts, these are managed by a specific team leader and his team of 5 CSMs.   

Q. What types of hires have you found most beneficial? Have you noticed any positive correlations with past roles, industries or backgrounds?
A. While most of our CSMs come from web/tech schools, some studied more other topics such as foreign languages and hospitality management. Most of our CSMs previous work experiences were roles in e-commerce, UX teams and web-agencies. Some came from clients or had client-facing positions as consultants in web agencies or working in hotels. We’ve found these backgrounds to be a great strength when taking a position in a CS team! Finally, our VP of CS has served the French Army for 10 years - quite an original one as well. This diversity is very helpful and paramount to the development of the team. It helps us find solutions with a variety of approaches and different perspectives.    

Q. In what ways has ChurnZero empowered your team to do their job?
A. Thanks to Plays, it is much easier to communicate globally with our clients, without each CSM having to manually contact their clients. We’ve also created a generic email address from which we can send more global communication. For example, we can highlight the release of a specific feature, the coming renewal of their contract, or other messages. This is a great improvement for the CS team as they save a lot of time and energy communicating these personally to their own clients.

We also launch automated emails on behalf of our co-founders each time a contact answers our NPS survey (using the Wootric integration). These emails are very useful and impactful for our clients. They are very keen on answering these emails and providing us with detailed feedback which then allow us to improve ourselves and our products. 

Q. Was there an “aha moment” when you saw how impactful ChurnZero could be?
A. Having ChurnZero integrated with several other tools (Salesforce, Wootric, Segment.com) helped us to reconcile the data within ChurnZero and create much more powerful plays. Live Exports have also allowed us to send ChurnZero data to our internal BI tool which has proved to be very convenient.  

Would your company like to be profiled in an upcoming Customer Success Team profile? Email Holly Keener at hkeener@churnzero.net for more information.