Complexity to Clarity With an Expert Team: Customer Success

We caught up with our Vice President of Customer Success, Jessica Countess, to hear about her journey into facilities management and ServiceChannel, why her team’s collective know-how and guidance leads to tangible results for our customers, and how she sees facilities management evolving in the coming years.

You’ve been with ServiceChannel for almost 10 years. How did you find your way to ServiceChannel?

I worked for Toys “R” Us corporate for ten years, where part of my job was sourcing, procuring, and installing ServiceChannel and then supporting and managing it for our internal business. That gave me an opportunity to get to know the people at ServiceChannel and the problems it was able to solve. When I was looking for a career change, I was really drawn to the company because I knew the people and had great relationships with everyone I worked with. Everyone was always so positive and encouraging, and that was the kind of environment I wanted to continue my career in.

Tell us about the customer success team and how it works.

Our success team is about 30 strong, and yet we all get together on a weekly basis. We also have breakout meetings throughout the week, where smaller teams get together and solve unique challenges and problems. We probably spend about 20% of our time meeting internally to learn products and services, share best practices, become familiar with what’s coming, and use that information to provide the best possible service to our customers.

Since our team members come from vast backgrounds, including multiple industries within facilities, retail, restaurant, and corporate real estate, they bring that knowledge to the rest of the team and serve as an internal subject matter expert, both for our customer success managers (CSMs) as well as throughout the company.

How do you account for the tight-knit relationships and positive culture at ServiceChannel?

It comes from that idea that a lot of the team here is just so interested in making the best results happen for our customers. I think it’s also something that we nurture as individuals and as team leaders. We love this environment that we work in, and we want it to continue, so we make it a point that everyone participates in our conversations. We seek out cross-functional input and ensure that we’re collaborating so that everybody feels like they’re part of the solution.

ServiceChannel seems to have quite a few employees who were former customers. Why is that?

Yes — our customers are very knowledgeable about their industry and the products and solutions we offer, and those who are passionate about spreading that knowledge and best practices often talk to us and look to join our team.

What do you love most about working in facilities management?

I love that in facilities management, the people we’re working with are solving day-today problems, and those problems impact both myself as well as my family, because we go and shop at their stores, we eat at their restaurants.

Facilities management makes me feel like I’m a part of local and national brands — I’m helping to keep local restaurants running, retail spaces operating, entertainment venues available. And ServiceChannel is keeping those locations not only looking beautiful, but also safe for everybody who’s going to visit. It makes me feel great that the problemswe’re solving every day aren’t just helping our clients, but they’re helping the entire community.

How do you foresee customer success changing, especially in
companies like ServiceChannel, as the digital world continues to evolve?

We’re always looking to evolve customer success at ServiceChannel, and as we continue forward, there are a couple of factors that are going to influence us. Certainly, we’re all aware that AI is a very big opportunity area, and that’s going to offer us a lot of chances to double down on our best practices and find ways to deploy them even faster.

The other area that we continue to focus on is finding ways to ensure that our customer users have the knowledge and best practices showing up to them through tips, tricks, and guidance in our application. That way, they’re getting that information while they’re in their workflows — but they can still connect with their CSM at their regularly scheduled frequencies.

What is ServiceChannel’s plan to keep up with ever-changing tech while keeping things personal?

The facilities management industry is based on day-to-day personal relationships and relationships between humans and their physical surroundings. The human touch is what makes customer success such an embedded part of ServiceChannel.

As long as the world and technologies keep changing, ServiceChannel is going to evolve with them, including AI and fantastic things we haven’t dreamt of yet. But the CSMs will still be the connection to providing best practices, insights, and helpful guidance to our customers.

How does ServiceChannel’s onboarding process ensure new hires embody the company’s — and the customer success team’s — core values?

Onboarding for new customer success team members is a fairly long process. It takes several months, and during this time we want all our new employees to feel comfortable that they’re a part of a team as well as a larger organization.

New team members are given the opportunity to do self-paced learning, and we also do hands-on learning, instructor-led learning, and a lot of shadowing so that all new employees can experience the role and to gain the knowledge they need to interface with our customers. And through it all, they have a fantastic support group of peers who are always available and eager to help them.

What is the future of customer success in the facilities industry, and where does ServiceChannel fit into that vision?

The facilities industry continues to be the center for brand experience for any of the companies that they support. ServiceChannel will stay relevant now and in the future by providing companies with the data they need for effective decision-making, consolidating and creating efficiencies, and supporting the humans behind it all. It’s the human touch that our team provides that helps our customers stay ahead of their competition.