Creating an exceptional customer experience that drives success

Putting customers first has always been in HiBob’s DNA. From the beginning, our overall business strategy has prioritized investing in our clients with a dedicated customer success strategy. Now that we’ve closed our Series C funding round, we’re able to go full-force ahead to achieve our goal of creating even more exceptional customer experiences. 

HiBob further demonstrated its dedication to a customer-first approach when I was promoted to Chief Customer Officer. Taking on this role is an absolute privilege for me. Leading Customer Success in a customer-first company like HiBob allows me to make sure our executive leadership always reflects the voice of our customers.

What are our plans? First and foremost, we’re building a strategy focused on expanding our offerings and investment in customer success and support. We’ll double down on scaling our product and adding value for our fast-growing, global clients who need us most.

Second, Customer Success is working with our colleagues on the Product and Engineering teams to provide customers with the opportunity to influence Bob’s product roadmap. In the last six months, we started building a customer community where HR leaders can meet, exchange ideas, and build an exclusive professional network through Bob. Going into 2022, we’re also planning to develop a partner program that provides more flexibility to our customers in choosing the implementors of their choice.

The core of HiBob’s customer success strategy

To achieve any of this, we need to talk about our customer success strategy. I believe great customer success strategies go far beyond the CS team. As they say, it takes a village, and our commitment to providing best-in-class service and delivering value requires a customer-first organizational mindset. 

Adopting a customer-first organizational mindset

Our CS team prioritizes collaboration with other HiBob teams. We couldn’t succeed if we didn’t. Our partnership with Product and Engineering is key to delivering an exceptional customer experience and supporting our number one objective: ensuring our product delivers real value to our customers. 

How do we ensure this? We listen to our customers and their feedback. We quantify this data and use it to accurately identify client needs and clearly communicate those needs to our Product and Engineering teams. 

In other words, when our Product team plans Bob’s roadmap, our Customer Success team’s partnership with them ensures the voice of the customer sits at the heart of our product strategy. This allows our product’s depth to develop alongside its breadth while aligning directly with customers’ needs and wants. 

In 2022 and beyond, we’ll commit more resources to this partnership. Together, we’ll analyze customer feedback and incorporate what we call the “good cholesterol” directly into the product to support our clients’ growth and solve the problems of tomorrow. 

Delivering value to diverse, global clients

Solving problems and incorporating customer feedback into the product is just one part of the equation. We have customers all over the world with a wide range of organizational architectures and cultures. At our core, we strive for flexibility and a keen understanding of the value we can drive to each of them. Going into every conversation, we understand that value can differ between companies and even more so between regions and industries. 

That’s why we always listen closely. We learn from our customers and build best-practice playbooks into our customer journeys. Our customer journeys are well defined, repeatable, and tweakable so we can proactively address the needs of every client and provide custom solutions.

Designing tailored customer journeys 

While the HiBob customer journey is well defined, there’s no one-size-fits-all. Listening is core to our CS strategy. But when it comes to creating an exceptional customer experience, it’s even more important that our customers know they are heard. We make sure they know that their feedback directly drives Bob’s product development and optimization. 

For example, we all know how the COVID pandemic forced the widespread and long-term adoption of remote and hybrid work. Customers everywhere needed to automate their processes overnight, and the depth of these capabilities became top priority. Within just a month, we redrew Bob’s product roadmap to answer this need. 

We built in more and more capabilities around automation and flows. These allowed our customers to trigger automation for more use cases and work from office (WFO) policies that require health declarations or office capacity planning. As a result, our customers were able to protect their businesses despite the unprecedented changes the pandemic ushered in. Our new capabilities enabled them to achieve (and exceed) their targets and better manage their dispersed teams.

As a testament to how well our customers thrived over the past year, many of them recently went public or began preparing for an IPO. This change in status surfaced requirements like analytics, reporting, and test environments. Companies entering the hyper-growth stage requested more automated features surrounding Headcount (HC) planning. 

In response, our Customer Success team tapped into our partnership with our Product and Engineering teams to incorporate these features into our roadmap for 2022. While we know we can’t meet the needs of every client, we aim to make sure we can meet those that will benefit most.

My vision for HiBob CS in 2022

My vision for HiBob next year and beyond is all about making our incredible customer experience even better. The experience we give customers is one of our key differentiators. Our clients love working with our team, and they love seeing their input reflected in the product. 

In 2022, we’ll focus on expanding our multi-channel customer support services and enabling team ticket tracking. Together, these will help customers manage issues more efficiently via their preferred channel. In addition, clients will be able to see how our Product team directly incorporates their feedback.

We’re investing in tools and restructuring the team to offer better expertise and local coverage, including off-hours services in the US and APJ regions. Another project we’re running aims to launch a unique, premium onboarding experience for enterprise customers. This initiative will make project management and implementation services available for purchase on top of our current enablement service. 

Last but not least, we’re expanding our investment in regional Customer Advisory Board programs that we established this year. With a dedicated Customer Community team, this investment will serve our new partner ecosystem and customer community as a platform for HR leadership to organize groups, events, and social gatherings.

It is a team effort: we’re proud to share in our customers’ success

The CS team at HiBob is one-of-a-kind, and I’m so proud to be a part of it. I’d like to thank each and every member of the CS team for your passion and dedication to providing solutions to our customers’ challenges. Without you, we’d never be where we are today. 

Finally, I’d like to thank our customers. I’ve dedicated my career to providing great customer service, and it’s a true privilege to serve as CCO at a company that puts its customers first. Our business strategy is tied to the growth and success of our clients, and like so many of our customers, we’re a modern, multi-national, and fast-growing mid-sized business. As such, we are even more connected to and proud of that success.