Get to know our Head of Customer Success, Michael Harbottle. Michael has been with Oak for around 4 months now and is in charge of the Customer Success Account Management Team. We caught up with Michael to get to know a bit more about him and his role.
I’ve been at Oak for 4 months now and I head up the Customer Success Account Management team. It’s a relatively new team to Oak so a lot of the work I’m doing now is really about getting the foundations in place and building on some of the great work we’ve already been doing with our customers.
The role of the CSAM team is to help customers achieve their goals and objectives, and giving them an amazing experience when working with us. We are here to ensure they see real value in Oak. If we do this then the task of having long-lasting and valuable relationships takes care of itself!
It’s important to get the basics right. Our aim is to be a proactive and trusted partner to our customers - adding value at every point - we are not just the person supplying the technology. In terms of how we do that, it’s important to have honest and regular conversations to make sure we are on track. Sharing examples of best practices from across our customer base and staying up to date with the latest trends in the space always means we are pushing our customers forward.
The great part of Customer Success is that we are involved in almost all aspects of the business and work alongside nearly every team - no two days are ever the same.
Between customer meetings (and all the meeting prep) our CSAMs are following up on support tickets, answering technical questions, setting up meetings, coordinating new feature launches as well as finalising customer renewals.
As a CSAM team, we get together most days, have a coffee and chat about what’s going on with our customers. This has been even more important when working remotely and really helped us keep our customers at the centre of everything we do.
Firstly, we want to understand what they are trying to achieve - this means asking lots (I mean lots!) of questions. Once we have a good idea of a customer's objectives, we use our experience with other customers and knowledge from across the rest of the team to help them achieve it - this is a real partnership approach. The sooner we can help a customer see value in Oak the better.
I love working alongside some talented CSMs and a team that cares about their customers. We also work with some incredible organisations and passionate people from a wide range of businesses of all different shapes and sizes - you are always learning something new.
We want to continue to build on the foundations we have in place to deliver an amazing experience for all our customers. In the long term, I’d love to bring our customers closer together and create a really strong customer community.
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