We’ve all been there: that frustration we feel when we start working on a new application or platform, or the confusion when a feature update has been released. And at the end of the day – we are all looking for the same result – to complete our work as efficiently and successfully as possible.
Innovating customer experience is at the heart of digital transformations, and Enterprises across the globe are in a constant race to deliver innovation faster than ever. IT organizations have adopted a countless number of tools to meet the pace of change, and yet, these tools are worthless if users aren’t reaping all of their benefits – if they aren’t maximizing their own experience.
Customer experience is no doubt a value at Panaya. Therefore, we were especially proud when one of our key customers, named his favorite Panaya feature, Rudy Bembaron – their customer success representative: “As soon as we had a small issue, Panaya’s representative called us and solved the issue. Once, he called us proactively before we generated a mistake – saving us much time and energy,” said Laurent Demesse, Operations Applications Manager at Shiseido EMEA.
To understand this approach from up close, we’ve invited Rudy to tell us a bit about his role and what customer success means to us at Panaya:
Tell us about your role – what are your key responsibilities?
My role as Customer Success Manager is to make sure my customers are satisfied with our products and that they are aware of all the different capabilities they can enjoy. To ensure customers have a seamless experience with our solution, I also offer advice, best practices we’ve learned from both our customers’ journeys and my own experiences. In this type of role, it’s important to be proactive, communicating new features with each release and also providing feedback to our product development team based on my customer needs.
Finally, I am also in charge of training my customers and ensuring they have the “key to our solution” to work in autonomy.
What does being a customer success manager mean to you?
I think that the key word here is success. When a customer tells me, “we finished this project on time and our management felt it was an easy project, but in reality – it was a complex project,” that means I truly accomplished my role because the project turned out to be a real success. I honestly believe that my customers’ successes are my successes.
What’s your biggest challenge?
My biggest challenge is getting customers to realize additional benefits from our solutions – to make them think out of the box so that they enjoy features they didn’t think they would need. We know that, in many companies, processes are already in place and it’s not so easy to change them. I once asked one of my customers “What are the main pains you have with your testing today?” They answered: “We have no pain”. However, the reality was that they had many pains (no documentation, no process to handle defects, no existing test catalog…) – they were just unaware of how much they could simplify their testing processes.
What’s your favorite part of your job?
There are many things I love about my job, but I think my favorites are:
- Understanding my customer and finding the right solutions for them: each customer has its own challenges that sometimes require to “adapt” our solution to their needs. I like to understand the context, the need and then provide the solution that answers what they are looking for. It reminds me of when I was in university studying computer engineering – we had multiple projects and challenges, and we had to think and find solutions to complete the project.
- Receiving recognition from my customers: I think the best part of my job is when my customer says: “thank you.” I think the CSM role is a real differentiator. We are not only a software vendor, we are also a real service provider and our service is to make our customers happy.
To hear more about how customers are experiencing success with Panaya, check out our Featured Customers page.
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