How to Excel as a Virtual (Or Hybrid) Sales Leader, According to Remote Managers

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Make no mistake: your customer success department is a separate team in your business, but they shouldn’t be an island. There needs to be a web of communication between customer success and sales, marketing, and product development – not just a back-and-forth, but set discussions like monthly team check-ins or quarterly strategy assessments.

Senior Manager of Customer Success at Moz, Wilkinson is a Princeton alumna and data-loving website design wizard with something to say. At Moz, she oversees strategy and direction with the customer success team. Her advice here comes twofold.

First, in an interview with Amity, Wilkinson explained her team’s most significant advantage with their customers:

In one of her older blog posts, Kopprasch details how one of the web developers at Buffer helped a customer by responding to his complaint. She details it at the beginning of the post like this:

Author: Ryan Singer

The number of pages: 176

Buy here: Basecamp What we like:

Back in December, SmileDirectClub customers were shocked to learn that the company had gone out of business overnight. No one notified customers, many of whom were halfway through their dental alignment. There were no refunds and no continuation plan other than “Contact an orthodontist. Good luck!”

As a customer service coordinator, Jackie Ryan suggests “conducting customer feedback surveys and interviews and analyzing customer behavior to better understand why they are leaving.”

Some open source or free options include OpenBOM, Odoo, and SolidPartners’ 4G:PLM.

Martina Bretous runs HubSpot’s Next in AI blog, and she’s spoken to countless AI experts. Etienne Cussol, compliance analyst and Termly, told her, “AI models’ reliance on massive amounts of data to learn and to generate is at complete odds with some of the core principles of data privacy, such as data minimization, purpose limitation, or privacy by design and by default.”

Through digging into the customer experience industry, I recently learned that trust drops an astonishing 67% when reviews drop from four stars to three. 

Conversely, trust spikes up to 95% at the five-star level.

Still not convinced customer service is a worthy investment? New research shows that when customer experience is part of your overall brand strategy:

In the name of excellent CX, you should also go above and beyond by making an inclusive interface so that all customers feel comfortable accessing support. 

From 2021 to 2023, HubSpot's Trends team has done deep dives into the lucrative business opportunities in customer reviews. As the workplace landscape shifted, customer interactions didn't lose importance. In fact, many affordable customer experience startups, like Freshworks, reported a 20% revenue increase in Q1. 

• Baby monitor brand Nanit made national news after they 10x’d conversions when they prioritized CX by adding human customer-service reps to calm the fears of new parents. 
• Meanwhile, bigger brands like Apple have begun to offer video chats with live product specialists to enhance the online shopping experience.

Google is the best place for tackling small to medium local business reviews. But, these businesses can be especially vulnerable to negative reviews because they are so niche. Still, you shouldn't avoid or ignore them as they come in.

Sure, Google's less glossy than Instagram and TikTok — but there is money to be made by mastering Google Business Profile. 

Rather than just thinking about these reviews as feedback and customer service, think of them as free promotional content where you have a great chance to present the transparent, thoughtful humans behind your business. Reply to every comment and review to keep the human connection alive and engaged.

Success story: Touch Systems, a Belgium-based software company, received around 300 phone calls per week, and most of the questions were identical. Furthermore, their internal documentation was disorganized, so customers couldn’t find exactly what they wanted.

MoviePass was a subscription-based business that let customers see one movie a day for $10 a month. But, after receiving over 1,500 complaints to the Better Business Bureau, the company suspended its service and is “unable to predict if or when the MoviePass™ service will continue.”

Pro Tip: Use specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals. For instance, instead of a broad objective like “Understand customer preferences,” refine it to “Identify three key factors influencing customer purchasing decisions by the end of the panel discussion.” This specificity not only guides your questioning but also sets clear expectations for the outcomes, making it easier for you to measure success and apply the insights in a practical way.

Pro Tip: ServiceHub can help you streamline your CS interactions. With a universal Conversations inbox and free CRM as a single source of truth, ServiceHub can vastly improve communications across your CS team and channels.

Buyer personas would be very helpful in this situation. You can use them to identify target audiences more likely to participate in a survey. (Psst: If you need help creating your buyer personas, HubSpot offers a free tool to do so.)

6. Zonka Feedback

It grew in popularity as a convenient orthodontic solution but, over time, faced scrutiny over its practices' legality, quality, and safety. These issues amounted to significant financial losses compounded over the pandemic, pushing them to bankruptcy after failing to sell.

One of the last news releases on the company's website stated, “SmileDirectClub intends to continue to provide affordable and accessible oral care to its customers without disruption. The additional liquidity the Company received from its founders, coupled with its normal operating cash flows, is intended to ensure SmileDirectClub is able to continue meeting commitments to stakeholders without disruption throughout this process.”