Meaghan Maher is the Global Head of Customer Success Strategy & Operations at Stripe, a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. While not currently working in a customer-facing capacity, Meaghan works on the strategies, tools, operations, and processes that help Stripe’s CS practitioners to be successful.

In September 2022, Meaghan attended CSC’s Customer Success Festival in San Francisco and gave a talk on the lessons that can be learned from an evolving SaaS landscape and consumption business models. In her presentation, Meaghan ponders the next incarnation of customer success. 🇺🇸

In this case study, she discusses his experience at the event, specifically:

  • What she enjoyed about the event
  • What made this event stand out against others on the market
  • Actionable key takeaways she picked up
  • Other sessions she enjoyed

What Meaghan enjoyed about the Customer Success Festival

I found the content to be really strategic; I felt like it was presented in a way that could apply to different business models and companies. So, I really enjoyed hearing everyone's different perspectives, based on their experience.

What made this event stand out against others on the market?

I really liked how it was broken up into keynotes and panelists. I felt like this provided the best of both worlds: you were being presented to as well as hearing a panel of experts bounce ideas off one another.

I liked that trade-off between some of them being keynote-focused speakers, and some of them actually having that panel-type discussion.

Actionable key takeaways from Customer Success Festival

I really had a lot of ‘aha’ moments during the festival. There are some things happening in the CS field that I think we all know are going on but hadn’t had it reinforced before. Hearing how other companies are tackling similar issues has helped validate that feeling. Now I know it's not just us, and everyone's feeling this as well.

Other sessions Meaghan enjoyed

There was a session on customer advocacy* and I loved hearing about how you build those advocacy forums, and how you shouldn’t burn out advocates either. The session explored how to find that balance between:

  1. How to find good advocates
  2. How to bring them into your ecosystem
  3. How to nurture that whole experience

* Psst… the session Meaghan’s referring to was a presentation delivered by Swiftly’s Chief Customer Officer, Maranda Dziekonski, called ‘Converting customers into advocates’

One word to describe the Customer Success Festival?

Customer-centric.

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