Crafting Customer success through Customer Experience

Great customer service is vital for the success of any organization. The product may be the best in the business, but unless you provide exceptional customer service, the business might fail to take off. A case in point is the Customer Success team of LiftOff which is helping Thrively, a strength-based personalized learning experience platform, with their support needs and thereby ensuring success of their customers.

Thrively enables students to embark on a strengths-based journey that develops the whole child. The learner-centered platform helps students to uncover their strengths, find their passion and purpose, build skills and develop agency so they can thrive in life.

LiftOff has an experienced and dedicated ‘Customer Success Team’ that does the dual job of customer support and customer acquisition and retention. As part of customer support, the team works closely with the educators to resolve all the issues reported. And as part of customer acquisition and retention, the team supports ‘open-office hours’ where teachers can jump in to learn more about the platform functionality and support continued use of Thrively and help convert the free users to paid customers.

So, what exactly does the Customer Success Team usually do?

Customer On-boarding

The Customer Success team works with districts and schools to setup all the teacher and student rosters.. The team ensures that teachers and students are onboarded smoothly and thereby ensuring they have a delightful experience on the platform. Most of the support issues are related to students not being able to login and teachers not seeing the correct students in their classes which impacts usage and engagement significantly. So, getting the rosters right and smooth on-boarding of teachers and students is critical to successful implementation.

Supporting Account Managers

The Account Managers at Thrively work closely with the customers and help with planning, implementation and ensure deeper engagement. The Customer Success team works closely with the Account managers to understand the needs of the customers so they can support them better (be more proactive than reactive). The team has a daily check-in call with Account managers and this will ensure the continuity of support. “The LiftOff Customer Support Team has been terrific. They have been very proactive and they take the load off of my plate by quickly addressing all the technical and other support issues that get reported and this helps me focus more on implementation and driving deeper teacher and student engagement’ says Jeanette Simenson, Head of Customer Success.

Open-office hours

The Customer Success Team facilitates open-office hours for Thrively users and customers. The purpose is two-fold: a) product demo to bring users up to speed on Thrively functionality and b) ‘Ask Me Anything’ sessions where customers can jump in and get their questions answered. This has been a huge success as customers feel they can jump in anytime they have issues and get it resolved.

“The team conducts Ask Me Anything sessions twice a week for users who can come on a call and ask anything related to their account and/or features of Thrively,” shares Isha, a Customer Experience advisor at LiftOff.

Product improvement facilitated through feedback

Any feedback received on the product in terms of usability or other feature requests/enhancements is noted and shared with the product team. The support team also joins the engineering scrum meetings once a week to learn about the features being worked on. “Unlike other companies I have worked with, we roll out new features/enhancements here at Thrively almost on a bi-weekly basis. This makes it harder for us to be on top of every feature that gets released. By being part of engineering scrum meetings, we feel part of the product and also have a complete understanding of the features being worked on. This will help us support the customers better” says Vijay Mahantesh, a team member of the Customer Success Team.

Quality check on the content

Thrively has deep content support for teachers and students in the form of playlists, videos, sparks and lessons to help develop academic, social, life and career skills. The support team ensures the content is age appropriate, fresh, checks for broken links and replaces content where necessary so users have a delightful experience.

The team sets a great example

The Customer Success Team has gone out of their way to help resolve issues to achieve the objectives of the Thrively users.

Vijay recalled an incident when the data received from the district was not in the format needed. The way the district had organized the class assignments for their teachers and the format in which the data was needed was different.

The team had to work incessantly to make sure the data provided by the customer maps to the right format so the data can be loaded properly without having to go back to the customer to fix the data at their end. “They were about to start school the next day and we figured out they didn’t have time to make the fix on their end, but our team managed to resolve the issue just on time and ensure the rosters are set up properly,” says Vijay.

Going the extra mile

The Customer Success Team also helps nudge free users into becoming Pro users of the platform. The team does this by:

• Offering premium content to free users for a week to test and understand the benefits of the Pro version.
• Doing regular follow-up with free users and encouraging them to become Pro users by explaining the benefits of Pro features and help overcome any friction users have in converting to Pro.

Thrively helps students identify their strengths, interest areas, and aspirations, and helps them in choosing the right career path, a one-of-its-class product designed for students wherein the Customer Success Team at LiftOff thrives on donning varied hats to achieve the common goals of all stakeholders.

About Thrively

Every child has a genius. Every child deserves to thrive. At Thrively, we are guided by those two core beliefs. With a little ingenuity and a lot of hard work, we’re helping kids reach their potential. We’re helping parents understand their children better. We’re helping teachers connect with their students on a more personal level. We are a team of parents, technologists, educators, entrepreneurs and adolescent development specialists who are passionate about helping every child thrive. Know more about us.