Exclusive Interview: Joshua Stock, VP of Customer Success
Our series, “Great People Make Great Data” showcases dedicated Semarchy team members. The strength and passion of our people drives innovative data solutions and ultimately, a strong commitment to the success of our clients. We’re here to build strong data teams and lifelong client relationships.
As Vice President of Customer Success for Semarchy’s global Customer Success Team, Joshua Stock has overseen an evolution in client onboarding over the last year or two. Josh came onboard in 2022 with the goal to build onto the solid foundation that was already in place.
“I’ve added a lot of new processes and expectations over the last year,” he says. “Starting with onboarding, it’s such a critical stage of the customer life cycle. You want them to have a good experience. You want them to get to the time to value quickly.”
Semarchy’s Rapid Delivery Blueprint
Development of the Rapid Delivery Blueprint has been a big part of Josh’s role. This is like a project plan or set of best practices that can help new clients start to achieve some of their goals quickly. Semarchy’s customer success team work proactively with clients on this plan to help ensure they’re dialed in for success.
At the same time, Josh introduced the Program Management Office to take on a project management role in onboarding, helping to ultimately drive customer success. “ (They’re a) dedicated resource to actually handle the project management side of things. To hold us accountable, but also to hold clients accountable in terms of, hey, we’ve set these collective goals,” he says. “Transparency to me is very important.”
The Program Management Office (PMO) and Technical Services Team include 11 staff members with a combined total of more than 140 years experience
Josh and the team have found a good rhythm with clients through the onboarding process. “We’ve increased our level of proactive communication with clients exponentially,” he says. “Having the Rapid Delivery Blueprint and the Program Management Office, all working together, we were able to scale last year. And we’re able to do so efficiently. We are getting rave reviews from customers based on how we’re approaching things now.”
Since the introduction of the Rapid Delivery Blueprint and Semarchy’s PMO, 100% of customers have met their initial implementation goals.
The Semarchy Onboarding Experience
A key part of the onboarding process is that working with the Semarchy team and products helps to take technical and project load off the client. “We can provide a great customer experience, the customer doesn’t necessarily have to have the expense of an SI – we’ve been able to help lots of customers over the last year successfully implement without an SI,” says Josh.
After the technical onboarding phase, clients are assigned a Client Success Manager whose job is to ensure that they keep moving forward successfully. “The CSM then puts together a success plan. And typically, any client that just went to business adoption, their first success plan is going to be “let’s make sure we’re helping the business adopt this effectively,” Josh says. The Client Success team is able to help with strategies such as helping organizational champions to spread adoption within the organization and to demonstrate the value of their new data management strategy.
“Those success plans are living documents,” says Josh. “They’re continually evaluated – sometimes a client’s priority has changed and you need to adjust.” The proactive approach has even helped Josh and the team to make sure they were positioned to help clients going through rapid changes.
In 2023, Semarchy Client Success proactively contacted our customers over 5,000 times meaning each customer received a proactive touch point an average of two times per month including over 200 strategic business reviews.
Mastering Data with Semarchy
One global entertainment company began implementing xDM, then went through significant internal restructuring. This meant that the person within the company in charge of the xDM project lost funding to bring in an SI for implementation. When the majority of their team was then laid off, they were left as the only person within the company responsible for the data project.
This is where the newly-structured onboarding plan came in to help. “Because we had these new processes, we had a project manager help drive things, we had the Rapid Delivery Blueprint, we were actually able to keep them moving forward, and help them to have a successful implementation,” says Josh. “Now, ultimately, he got his team back.”
Perhaps most importantly, the Semarchy team were able to help the champion left at the company to demonstrate real results against their goals from implementing xDM. Where implementation may have gone sideways due to internal upheaval, it went smoothly and successfully. “We were able to keep their project moving forward,” says Josh, “where traditionally, one person without an SI would potentially be dead in the water.”
A True Ethos of Client Success
It’s clear that Josh and the team take client success personally and go the extra mile to ensure an unparalleled client experience. “I’ve been involved with customer success for a long time and lots of places say, ‘hey, we’re customer centric’,” Josh says. “And that’s kind of a nice buzzword. But, if you were to look at the way we hold our meetings or the way we make our decisions, it really is true that that’s how we approach things.”
“What engages me the most is helping other people succeed,” says Josh. “And mastering data is a very powerful thing. It helps those clients make better decisions so that they can help grow their companies.”
In 2023, 184 success plans were executed with 92% being successfully completed.
The introduction of customized project plans for each client has made a huge difference in helping them to master their data and ensure they stay on-track for meeting their goals. Not only that, Josh and the team manage their own internal data to continue to improve the delivery of Client Success. “Now we’re able to start to measure, where are the bottlenecks? Where are the things that take the longest? And so those are things that you’ll see us approach in 2024,” Josh says. “Now that we have a little bit more empirical data, how can we apply our knowledge and our expertise to try to streamline things even further?”