The News: Last week I attended the Customer Success Festival (#CSFest) in Austin, TX. This was an in-person event created by the Customer Success Collective, a global community of customer advocates passionate about enabling people working in the customer success profession. The Customer Success Collective is part of The Alliance organization, a professional development organization and the event focused on highlighting customer success in a SaaS company. Read more from the Customer Success Collective.
Recap and Highlights from the Austin 2023 Customer Success Festival
Analyst Take: The Customer Success Festival last week in Austin was an in-person event created by the Customer Success Collective, and was my first introduction to this organization.
Why attend? That’s an easy one. We have really doubled down on all things customer success here at The Futurum Group. My colleague and our chief customer officer, Bill Ruff, and I thought this would be a great way to see what other organizations and business leaders are doing and thinking about on the customer success front, the challenges they are facing, and the tech solutions they are using to help better serve customers. The Customer Success Collective graciously invited us to attend, and my goal here is to share the highlights of the event, get you thinking about the role customer success initiatives can ultimately play within your organization, and also point out some key opinion leaders in this space that you might want to have on your radar screen.
Some Specifics from the Alliance’s Austin-based Event
The Austin event was but one in a series of events put on by the Alliance, all with a view toward providing a forum for attendees to learn, share, develop, network, and scale with those interested in customer success. It was clear from the onset that the Customer Success Collective is a community of forward-thinking CS enthusiasts with one shared goal — to provide exceptional customer experiences 24/7 as well as to educate and empower others to do that as well.
The master of ceremonies for the Austin event was Microsoft’s Ayman Husain, Director, Customer Success, Data, AI & Advanced Analytics, Azure Intelligent Cloud. Not only did Ayman MC the event, he also did a short did a short presentation sharing insights from his work at Microsoft and noted that he will also be presenting at the Customer Success Festival in Las Vegas on May 24-25. Here is Ayman’s recap of the Austin event.
What I most enjoyed about the Austin-based Customer Success Festival event is that this particular event is relatively small, attended by a few hundred at most, which provided an easy entrée into the experience without being swarmed by a massive event. Not that I don’t go to and enjoy many huge events, but the intimacy here was nice, especially as a first experience, and attendees had lots of opportunities to get acquainted with one another, speak with the various presenters, and engage with the sponsors, all of whom provide solutions designed to help level up customer success initiatives.
Additional presenters and discussions at the Austin event included:
- Tradewing’s Rob Zambito moderated a panel featuring Instabase’s Melissa Lipscomb, Gainsight’s Lane Holt, and Beyond Booksmart’s Michelle (Mimi) Fernandez about their top strategies for mitigating customer churn risk.
- GoCardless’s Jess Osborn gave a fantastic presentation on Customer Success and Product, and how they are an intersection for durable growth.
- Totango’s Chris Dishman – co-presented with JLLT Corrigo’s Taylor Hodges about CS Operations, and the increasingly important topic of growing revenue at scale.
- Torch’s James Williams, TimelyMD’s Becky Banasik, and MuleSoft’s Matthew Primero participated in a panel discussion on engagement model techniques to increase customer loyalty and retention.
Other presenters, subject matter experts and contributors included Guidecx’s Harris Clarke, LinearB’s David Gunn, Vitally’s Jamie Davidson, BILL’s Doug Norton, Unit21’s Emily Garza, and LogicMonitor’s Jillian Bierman.
Customer Success: The Key to Happy Customers and Business Growth
If you’re focused on Customer Experience/Customer Success, I encourage you to find and connect with some of the folks I’ve mentioned above — they are on the leading edge of what’s happening in this space. And if you’re not sure whether a CX/CS focus should be high on your radar screen, take a look at just a few of the event attendees — I think you’ll see that the answer is a resounding ‘yes.’
Here’s also a look at the demographics of the event attendees, which I thought was impressive as well.
Why CX/CS?
Why an obsessive focus on CX/CS? For SaaS based organizations — and really for all organizations of every type and size — there’s no doubt that customer loyalty, customer retention, growing revenue at scale, and tech solutions focused on helping deliver the best in customer experiences are all integral to success — especially in challenging economic times when everyone is working hard to do more with less. Happy customers stay, happy customers buy, happy customers tell others about their experiences, happy customers drive growth. It really is that easy.
If customer success is your area of focus, you might consider putting this organization and their events on your radar screen and consider attending at some point. The upcoming Customer Success Festival Events include New York March 14-15, Amsterdam May 10-11, Las Vegas May 24-25, and San Francisco September 13-14, and if you click through any of these venues, you’ll find a list of speakers and topics for a deeper dive.
Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.
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Image Credit: Customer Service Collective
Author Information
Shelly Kramer is a Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. A serial entrepreneur with a technology centric focus, she has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation. She brings 20 years' experience as a brand strategist to her work at Futurum, and has deep experience helping global companies with marketing challenges, GTM strategies, messaging development, and driving strategy and digital transformation for B2B brands across multiple verticals. Shelly's coverage areas include Collaboration/CX/SaaS, platforms, ESG, and Cybersecurity, as well as topics and trends related to the Future of Work, the transformation of the workplace and how people and technology are driving that transformation. A transplanted New Yorker, she has learned to love life in the Midwest, and has firsthand experience that some of the most innovative minds and most successful companies in the world also happen to live in “flyover country.”
