230: Strategies for Customer Success and Retention with Rachel Stanley Navigating the Customer Experience

Rachel Stanley came to Banzai in 2019 with over 10 years of SaaS onboarding, training, implementation, consulting, e-Learning, customer success, adoption and support experience. When Rachel joined Banzai, Customer Success was the only customer-facing job function. 
Since then, Rachel has added Onboarding, Support and Customer Marketing successfully creating a Customer Experience organization that has driven best-in-industry customer satisfaction and grown Banzai’s Net Retention Rate (NRR) significantly. Rachel is passionate about building high functioning teams that consistently hit their objectives. Previously, Rachel has held roles at Amazon and ACS Technologies. Rachel lives in the Seattle area.
 
Questions
· Now, we always like to give our guests an opportunity to share a little bit about their journey. So, could you share with our listeners, how it is that you got from where you were to where you are today?
· Now, could you tell our listeners a little bit about Banzai and what you guys do?
· Banzai focus is really on events and your target is really your marketers are your customers. What would you say are some of your customers main pain points? How is it that you're able to overcome some of those and successfully have a high retention rate because ideally, that's what all organizations aim for, to keep the customers that they have for a lifetime.
· Now, seeing that you've been in the Customer Success space for quite some time now, what are some of the emerging trends that you are seeing in the Customer Success space that you believe if that trend continues in a positive way will help to enhance customer experience?
· Now, Rachel, can you also share with us what's the one online tool, resource, website or application that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
· Could you also share with us maybe one or two books that you've read, it could be a book that you read recently, or even one that you read a very long time ago, but it has had a great impact on you, and maybe even your development and just your continued growth?
· Could you also share with our listeners, what's the one thing that is going on in your life right now that you are really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.
· Now, our listeners would have tapped into this episode, and they're quite intrigued with you, Rachel and they'd like to know how they can reach out to you online where can they find you online?
· Now, before we wrap our episodes up, we always like to ask our guests if you have a quote or a saying maybe something that you revert to or use if during times of adversity or challenge, this quote kind of helps to just get you back on track or get you back refocused. Do you have one of those?
Highlights 
Rachel’s Journey
Me: Now, we always like to give our guests an opportunity to share a little bit about their journey. So, could you share with our listeners, how it is that you got from where you were to where you are today?
 
Rachel shared that beginning of her career, she was actually an office manager for many years and an Executive Assistant. So, her customer base was very internal. And then she took the opportunity at ACS Technologies to apply for, she was an Executive Assistant office manager and applied for a onboarding, like specialist or an onboarding role. And so, that was her introduction into customer facing. And from there, it just kind of took off. She went from onboarding to an actual, like implementation consultants, than she ended up leading that team. And so, they mainly focus on training and implementation professional services. 
And then coming into Banzai, was really when she wanted to break into customer success, it was still kind of new back then, it's really developed over the years. But at Banzai in the last five years, she’s just grown so much, thankfully, there's so many resources like this podcast out