156: How to Achieve and Sustain Customer Success – Formula Explained with Aaron Thompson Navigating the Customer Experience

Aaron Thompson is a Chief Revenue Officer at SuccessCOACHING, the leading provider of Customer Success training and education. He is a connector, educator and public speaker with over 20 years experience helping companies improve retention rates, increase recurring revenue and recoup customer acquisition costs. Aaron enjoys skiing, kayaking and golfing with his family and friends.
 
Questions
 
Could you share with us a little bit about your journey? What customer experience is and then what customer outcomes are and maybe give us a practical example of that. Could you maybe share with us maybe one or two drivers that you think can help organizations to try and stay ahead of the curve as it relates to anything that may be impacting them as a result of the pandemic? Could you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business? Could you also share with us maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you? It could be a book that you read a very long time ago, or even one that you've read recently that has impacted you. Where can listeners find you online? Do you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you'll tend to revert to this quote; it kind of helps to keep you on track or get you back on track if for any reason you got derailed. Do you have one of those?  
Highlights
 
Aaron’s Journey
 
Aaron shared that every job he’s had his entire life has been customer facing. The first job he had was working at a health club, helping the members check in as they came in the front door, cleaning the club, etc. And he had a job all the way through high school, all the way through college, all customer facing in different regards, call centers, customer service, little retail here and there. And then about 36 years old, he actually got laid off for the first time in his career. And he had been down a technical track as a software programmer, he had been an implementation consultant, he had been a trainer and instructional designer and most recently was working in customer support at a SaaS company and they laid off about 100 people.
 
And for the first time he found himself without a job and he didn't know what he would do next. And so, he started looking at other kind of pivots in his career and thought maybe he would go into a sales track, he looked back into kind of the technical side. And long story short, there was this company in Portland, Oregon, where he’s based that was looking for a new Head of Customer Success, that was going to be tasked with fixing the churn problem. See, they had a 40% year over year churn rate. And obviously, that was preventing them from growing. And so, they wanted to bring someone in to fix that hole in the bucket. And with his support background, he was able to get that job. And he tells this story when he does my classes now and his certifications in customer success.
 
His first day as the Head of Customer Success, he came in and again, he’s tasked with fixing this churn problem. And he thinks he knows what customer success is at this point, it's like support on steroids or kind of account management 2.0.
 
And he came in on day one as the head of CS and he thinks, “Well, you know, what I've never actually Googled “What is customer success?” And long story short, he finds the industry, the technology players, the books, the authors, Jeanne Bliss and CCO 2.0 is really critical at the beginning of his development, of his strategy. And so, in a 12 month window, he was able to go and create his own customer success strategy, implement that strategy at that company, and take a 40% churn rate down to 8% in 12 months, by really doing some really foundational customer success practices, and starting to really, do quote unquote, customer success, not just customer support.
 
And so, at that point, he actually exited that company and founded his first c