Gong for Customer Success: 3 Ways Corporate Traveler Fuels Their Customer Experiences

Ben Hobbs: Hi there, I'm Ben Hobbs, VP of Customer Success at Corporate Traveler.

Oliver Richardson: And I'm Oliver Richardson, Senior Director of Customer Success at Corporate Traveler.

Ben Hobbs: We're both so thrilled to be here today to celebrate and share our experience with Gong and how we've applied it to customer success. I've been in the customer success industry now for about seven plus years, and part of that time spent at Egencia, which is an Expedia company before I move back to Corporate Traveler. As a leader, I truly believe that if my team are enabled to succeed, then our customers are going to thrive. And I also love to travel. I love food and wine, and I love hiking around my home city of Los Angeles.

Oliver Richardson: I've been with Corporate Traveler for nearly 13 years now, and 11 of which have been in the CSM Account Management space. That's been over three countries. So starting out in the UK where I was born and then moving to Canada and now the US. And I live in San Diego. I love to travel and I love everything about the ocean. I'm very excited to speak to you all today.

Ben Hobbs: I'm going to keep this brief, but I wanted to share a little bit about Corporate Traveler so that sets the scene for why we structured customer success in the way that we have, and how Gong has helped us achieve that. First of all, we don't try to be everything to everyone. We know what we're really good at and we focus on that. Every single one of our customers has their own designated travel consultant, and that consultant is backed up by a small team, and then wholly owned US base after hour service. In terms of our content, we blend our own very special rates with aggregated content. And then on top of that, we layer in any rates that you've negotiated ourselves. So we're very proud to have recent release to our own online booking platform that has been specifically designed for our target market. And last but not least, we provide friendly customer success support at every part of your journey with Corporate Traveler. Here's what we're going to be running through today. First of all, looking at how we got Gong and the evolution of customer success at Corporate Traveler, and then how we've applied Gong to each of our teams to make them successful. I'm hoping we're not the only company where customer success was a little behind sales in terms of a tech stack. Sales had all sorts of cool tools to help them be more efficient, stand out more in a crowded marketplace, and ultimately have a lot of success. CS, we had Excel. Due to the pandemic, however, there was unfortunately headcount reduction, and therefore spare licenses available for a number of tools that we were able to adapt to a customer success use case. Vidyard, Outreach and Highspot, to name a few, but then thanks to our fantastic enablement team the CS technology revolution began. It was then that the crown jewel RCS tech stack was rolled out Gong. As I'm sure you're all aware. The pandemic has been particularly tough on the corporate travel market. And even now, while moving steadily in the right direction, there's a lot of pressure to generate revenue as quickly as possible in order to recoup some of the lost income from the past 18 months, we took the opportunity during this downturn business to review our approach, to managing our very valuable customers. And on top of this, we also launched our very own online booking tool Mellon. We recognized that we needed to evolve our offering from a customer relationship management team to a modern customer success organization. At this time, CTE customer success was born and Gong was there to help us grow. As I mentioned before, we've restructured our customer success team and rolled out a new project. So I just want to talk a little bit about that evolution. First of all, we realized that all of our CSMs needed to be product experts so that they had the ability to upsell and cross sell. We also realized that by providing support for all of our customers, regardless of size, that we would be able to increase adoption and retention of our customer base. To do this we would also need to focus on applying the right products solutions for every customer based on their travel program goals. We also separated the team into four separate teams. We have an onboarding team, implementations, a tech touch team and a high touch team. Also, an amazing customer enablement team. Gong has been a huge part in all of these changes and we'll be diving into how they've done that in just a moment. So before we go into the specifics on how Gong has helped each of our teams, I want to quickly talk about our customer journey to add some clarity. We recognize that a key part of the journey that we were missing was a great onboarding experience. And we were really striving to make it best in class. Our onboarding team have a full internal handoff from the Account Executive and then begin working with the customer to ensure that their initial experience with Corporate Traveler is as promised, driving adoption and customer satisfaction along the way. After six months, the customers then transition to the customer success team who will be responsible for renewals after one to three years. Olie will be talking a little bit more about that later, but Gong's truly enabled our team to be best prepared for those. So due to there being two handovers, one from sales to onboarding, and then another, from onboard into the permanent CSM, Gong's transcribing keyword search and categorization of being essential in making it smooth handover where the customer never has to repeat themselves. So now we're going to talk about how Gong has benefited each of our customer success teams, starting with customer onboarding. As I mentioned previously, we're really proud of what we are doing in the onboarding space, but as I'm sure that anybody who has tried to build a new onboarding process can attest it takes a few iterations to get it right. Gong has really helped us with this adventure by giving us visibility into the performance of the team and efficiency of the process, looking for opportunities to reduce time to revenue and increase CSAT. Both leaders and individual team members are able to review their calls, engage the reaction of the customer and tailor their approach and time spent on any one area moving forward. Salespeople never lie and neither to customers. They typically either aren't armed with all the right information might have selective memory, or might just add a little embellishment to the truth. Gong has enabled a smoother handover from sales to customer success, acting as a source of truth and ability to refer back to the sales process so that we can validate what was agreed upon by both parties. At the same time, it allows the onboarding team to highlight areas of opportunity for the sales team to tighten their talk track. Not only does it help refer back to the sales process, it also gives the onboarding team, the ability to refer back to earlier calls in their process to validate information provided. One of the things I've personally found very beneficial with Gong is the ability to be more engaged in meetings for anyone that knows me well, I'm not a great multitasker, so not having to take notes while I converse this being extremely valuable. This also translates really well in to the onboarding team too, is it allows them to spend less time taking notes and more time listening and learning about what is really important to the customer. Another key feature that Gong provides is the talk ratio analytics, and it's vital that the customer is being heard and not talked to. I'm now going to pass you over to Olie who's going to talk to you about the benefits that gong has provided to the customer success team.

Oliver Richardson: As Ben's mentioned, our customers go through multiple handovers through their journey with us at Corporate Traveler. The benefits that Gong has brought to these processes has been numerous and particularly with the customer success teams, it has allowed us to look specifically at the discussed goals through the onboarding process and do a review of the progress that's been made there. Analyze what pain points were initially talked about and what's been covered and what is left to tackle most importantly, and finally where the opportunities lie to really take that partnership beyond the initial expectations set by sales and our onboarding team. What's fantastic now is that all of this is guided by the actual voice of the customer through recorded calls, with the ability to search on keywords, through triggers that we've set up or the overall sentiment of what the customer is saying to us. So leading that into the actual voice of the customer hearing and taking a record of their feedback from their voice has been so important. Whether it be to, to talk to us about product features that they want to see whether it's booking flow issues or the general travel experience that they're having with the product, or if it's offline to our operational fulfillment. We can now with these, get this information in the hands of the right people by tagging those, those relevant comments and helps us expert at any required action or development as a result. So hearing and taking a record of actual feedback from our customers, whether it be features within our product, whether it be the experience within the booking flow or the general travel experience with us or our operation fulfillment team, offline. The ease with which we're able to tag people to the relevant comments, all overall calls helps us expedite the required action or development in each case. And then finally, I think the most important thing that we've really seen in benefits from Gong for customer success is the ability to learn from others. So taking the tour tracks of our most successful CSMs and making these accessible to our whole team on demand has been a huge asset in improving product tour tracks, renewal language, issue resolution, and many other conversation types that we have with our customers. Now we'll take a look at the benefits for our CS enablement team. The impact of the pandemic on the travel industry has been widely documented. One of the key hurdles we've had to navigate in the CS pillar has been the need to up staff quickly as the market conditions have been changing. In the work from home world this becomes especially challenging, particularly when the basis of onboarding has traditionally been centered with in person classes, attending customer meetings and sitting in an office in team environment. Gong has been essential in expediting the learning curve to meet the demands of the industry and our customers. In this time, allowing on- demand access to library of tour tracks, review meetings, internal prep calls setup to be accessible at time. Traditionally, we've been really good at celebrating success, but not always as good as documenting the journey to get to that point. The hall of fame holds up really successful calls for all to learn from whether tenured or new members of our team. Gong has also allowed for easier cross pillar education, removing the previous limitations of access. This has really improved the relationship between CS and other areas of our business, allowing us to really pinpoint accuracy of talk tracks from sales to us, from us to operations, finance, support, and also product. Now we're going to look at driving adoption of Gong in customer success. We've had our initial challenges with adoption around how is sales platform relevant to CS concern over recording. Whether our customers would accept it, but our CSM at Gong has been a huge help in navigating these and other challenges we have faced. One thing I've really learned from Heather is that we are not wholly unique in the problems that we face, and shouldn't be nervous to share our business goals or challenges. As a result of doing this. Heather has really helped us work through problems, finding solutions that we can apply to our business and getting us to where we are now. One of which is the Gong Awards. Ben has introduced this into a monthly sync up with the pillar to really bring attention to those who have engaged with Gong the most over the previous month. In this example, we have Breadth from our dedicated enterprise team, Carly from our onboarding team, Bree from our CST tech touch team and Miles from our implementation team. It really draws attention to the people who have used Gong the most and the benefits that they have seen from the platform. While we've definitely upped our game in overall adoption within our teams. The next focus has to be around how we start to utilize the platform to, to coach and improve. We are working towards holding leadership accountable and setting expectations around listening and leaving feedback. So we can really engage with our teams and, and help them improve on their day to day roles. I want to give a big shout out to Kim at Momentive who put together a great webinar recently, that really resonated with us. Redefining what a high quality conversation should include in our customer scenarios will really allow us to fully utilize more of the functionality in Gong in this case, scorecards. And then lastly, renewals, we've gone through a redesign of our CRMs opportunity structure, and that's allowed us to really look at how we manage renewals within our customer base. The goal is to utilize the Deal Board, to bring together the full picture of engagement with in structured opportunity phases that make up the renewal process. We hope to continually work toward improving the use our platforms and hope to come back in the future with success around these items, and also more goals that we're trying to achieve in the future as well. I hope you enjoyed the presentation and, and got something out of our experiences with Gong that you can take back to your businesses.

Ben Hobbs: Now we're going to leave you with the hype video that we use to roll out Gong within Corporate Traveler. Enjoy