A Day in the Life of a Strategic Customer Success Manager at Alteryx

[RosieS]

by Wallace Brown (@WallaceB), Candice D'Arcy-Bryant (@CandiceDB), Mert Senkal (@Mert), Rosie Slee (@RosieS), and Daniel Theuns (@DanTh)

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Welcome to a unique perspective on the role of a Strategic Customer Success Manager (CSM) at Alteryx.

A Customer Success Manager’s (CSM) role is to advocate for the customer, ensuring that they receive the strategic guidance and best practice frameworks needed to accelerate their business outcomes. The Customer Success team at Alteryx has significantly grown and developed in maturity in the last two years, winning accolades such as Digital Customer Success Disruptor of the Year at a recent industry-leading awards ceremony.

As well as leading the charge through its pioneering efforts in Digital Customer Success, Alteryx also has developed a team of Strategic CSMs who work with customers on a continuous basis to help them get the most out of their data and, ultimately, their investment in Alteryx. In today's dynamic business landscape, this role combines the responsibilities of developing strategic trusted customer relationships, driving successful outcomes, and realizing the related strategic value to organizations, so that they can tangibly understand and articulate their value to the organization and industry they work in. Join us as we review a day in the life of our UK-based CSM team, exploring the powerful synergy that arises when a CSM role crosses with that of a strategic advisor, experiencing the insights, innovation, and transformative impact they bring to our Alteryx customers.

Morning: Preparing for Success

After an appropriate caffeine fix, a CSM begins the day by reviewing emails and checking in with their account team. The morning is dedicated to planning, strategizing, and setting goals for the days and weeks ahead. They analyze customer health metrics, performance data, and feedback to gain valuable insights and identify areas for improvement. This proactive approach enables the CSM to anticipate customer needs and align their actions accordingly. By harnessing the power of data-driven insights, our thought leader positions themselves as a strategic advisor, identifying new possibilities and helping to shape the future of their customers’ analytics maturity.

9:30 AM: Engaging with Customers through Success Planning

Strategic CSMs establish genuine connections with customers, actively listening to their concerns, addressing challenges, and providing personalized guidance. Simultaneously, they engage with customers, understanding their pain points, offering strategic guidance, and aligning their expertise with the customers' corporate objectives. Building strong relationships and delivering exceptional value are at the core of a CSM’s interactions.

The clue might be in the job title, but a big part of a CSM’s role is Success Planning – a process during which a CSM will work together with a customer to produce a tailored Success Plan to help them get the most out of their investment in Alteryx, by aligning with the organization's wider strategic goals.

A tailored Success Plan will consider the following:

• Desired business outcomes;
  • e.g., Reduce regulatory fines due to delayed financial reporting by 5% before the end of 2024
  • e.g., Improve Overall Data Literacy in the organization to reduce employee churn by %% before 2025
• Success criteria for achieving these outcomes; and
  • e.g., 5 productionized workflows in the Accounting division reducing month-close processing from 8 days to 6 days
  • e.g., 25% of Alteryx users achieving the Alteryx Foundations Micro-Credential Certification
• Creating strategies and tactics on how we will jointly achieve these success criteria.
  • e.g., Run a hackathon with the financial reporting team to provide quick successes for challenging data problems
  • e.g., Gamify Certification processes to encourage new users

This is an entirely collaborative process. Alteryx CSMs provide best practice advice based on their previous experiences in professional services, but the Success Plan will primarily be driven by that customer’s strategic aims. In line with this, Success Plans are generally built out through a series of cooperative workshops and can then be adapted as the customer’s business goals and analytic maturity change over time.

The Success Plan acts as a framework for ensuring the successful implementation and adoption of Alteryx. Progress is tracked via regular Executive Business Reviews (EBRs) to ensure the achievement of the success criteria and, therefore, the defined business outcomes.

Today, our CSM is creating a draft Success Plan based on their notes from a Success Planning Workshop delivered with a new customer previously in the week. As this is a collaborative approach to success planning, the CSM shares this with the wider account team plus executive stakeholders at the customer to ensure that the whole team agrees on priorities and the “Value 1” objective (i.e., the current top priority for the customer).

11:00 AM – Converging Expertise for Strategic Impact

Success thrives on cross-functional collaboration. Our CSM converges their expertise to engage with internal teams and external technology partners. By uniting a customer-centric approach with strategic acumen, they foster alignment, share insights, and advocate for customer needs.

By collaborating with our approved partners, Strategic CSMs can provide additional value and enhanced customer satisfaction with the Alteryx Analytics Platform. Alteryx has a network of partners all around the world that we can review to find the one best suited to match our customers’ needs. We rely on these partners to complement our own offerings by delivering specialized expertise or services. By working closely with partners, we can align goals, share insights, and jointly develop customer success strategies. This harmonious collaboration amplifies the impact of our CSM’s strategic recommendations, creating a cycle of success and innovation.

Today, our CSM spends the next hour liaising with the partner team to ensure current projects and global enablement series are running smoothly, collecting feedback from different perspectives to maintain a high quality of delivery.

12:00 PM – Networking and Knowledge Sharing

During lunch breaks, our thought leader taps into Gainsight's vibrant customer success community, as well as meeting with the wider CSM team in the London office. They participate in forums, engage with their teams around the world, and exchange insights and best practices. By learning from industry peers, they broaden their perspective and develop new ideas on how to deliver exceptional customer experiences. These successes are then built into repeatable playbooks to share with the Global team. The CSM team will fuel up for the afternoon, getting a bite to eat from London’s exceptional street food markets.

1:00 PM – Drop-In sessions with Maveryx

Drop-In sessions are a great way for CSMs to learn from the Maveryx Community within their customer’s ecosystem and to grow their own technical expertise. During this hour, citizen analysts from different departments and skill levels join a single call to collaborate on workflows and get hands-on technical support from their Alteryx CSM. This always results in a good conversation, be it around chaining apps together, working out solutions to the latest weekly challenges, or troubleshooting schema errors. We are continuously amazed at some of the world-class things people are doing with the Alteryx Analytics Platform!

2:00 PM – Realizing Value to Highlight Customer Excellence

After a drop-in session, CSMs consider how to document and present the strategic value realization from the use of Alteryx at their customers. They leverage Alteryx to analyze customer data, identify trends, and understand who the top users and champions are within their accounts. They can then utilize the Alteryx Value Cloud to outline tangible value within their accounts in order to share this with their executive customer stakeholders. This helps ensure that there is rarely a question around the value Alteryx is bringing across the customer’s teams and that senior leadership recognize the impact of their investment. We work with our Value Engineering teams to aggregate the value from these transformed business processes and work with our customer stakeholders to formulate these stories and promote them to executive stakeholders through EBRs.

When a customer has a big win using Alteryx, Alteryx CSMs can help them to showcase their achievements both internally and externally by capturing an “Analytic Breakthrough” story and quantifying the value realized by transforming their business process into an Alteryx workflow. We do this by walking the customer through a framework to lay out the problem and solution and a methodical approach to quantifying how much value has been seen by that process. People who might be interested in attending a Value Capture session might be:

• A head of procurement who wants to prove to executives that Alteryx is achieving the ROI they predicted during the sale process;
• A manager who understands the potential of democratizing analytics and wants to encourage adoption within their team; or
• A data analyst who wants to showcase a workflow of which they’re particularly proud to the rest of the business.

Our CSM spends an hour documenting recent value interviews, ensuring we both they and their customer have full details on the success story! Capturing value stories on a continuous basis is also beneficial in order to ensure a smooth renewal cycle, with proven ROI already established.

3:00 PM – Leveraging the Alteryx Team with CSS All Hands

A big part of being a CSM is being able to bring the experience of the wider Alteryx community to the customer. We have regular check-ins with other Customer Success and Services team members to share best practices and align on upcoming events and strategic initiatives such as Alteryx’s recently-released Analytics Maturity Assessments and our brand-new Customer Portal: Mission Control.

Over and beyond the above, Alteryx are also able to offer wider business transformational initiatives such as our Analytics Transformation Experience (ATE) and Governance Assessments programs.

An ATE is a vendor-neutral assessment to evaluate the current state of analytical maturity of a department or enterprise and is used in conjunction with Success Planning. It was created in collaboration with the International Institute of Analytics and gives tailored insights to focus growth discussions.

Additionally, a Governance Assessment is a 1-hour session designed to assess the wider data analytics governance procedures at the customer is led by one of Alteryx’s governance transformation leaders. This process helps to provide a gap-analysis and as well as detailed recommendations to ensure that data pipelining, transformation and analytics policies are robust and in line with most recent best practice.

On this particular day, our CSM is using this 30 mins to track their customer’s progress against the tailored plans set out following the customer undertaking the above initiatives.

3:30 PM – Hackathons and Gamification through Alteryx Data Democratization Playbooks

At Alteryx, we’ve long been fans of learning and innovating through competition. More and more, we’ve seen Alteryx users around the world embracing this ideology as well, for example, during the Alteryx Grand Prix at Inspire in Las Vegas. Alteryx uses a framework of over fifteen different data democratization playbooks in order to drive adoption, including Alteryx Hackathons.

One of our customers has asked for guidance in organizing an on-site hackathon. Our CSM spends an hour with their executive stakeholder planning an agenda for the day and identifying potential dates in the coming months. Organizing a hackathon requires careful planning, clear goals, and active engagement. By following these steps, CSMs help create an environment that nurtures innovation, fosters collaboration, and propels our customers toward continued growth and success with Alteryx.

Some top tips from the pros on planning a successful Hackathon include:

1. Identifying the purpose of the hackathon: E.g., task automation, increasing adoption, or finding synergies across the customer’s technology stack. It can be a good idea to have a theme for the hackathon. This can help to engage participants and demonstrate relevance to their individual roles.
2. Crafting a well-defined problem statement. This statement should outline the challenge or opportunity which the hackathon aims to address. This can include how to transform certain lines of business, dealing with a particularly strategic data set, or a macro-overview on data transformation activities within the customer’s ecosystem.
3. Marketing the event throughout the business to drive registration and engagement. Offering prizes can further incentivize participants. CSMs usually come on-site with a variety of Alteryx Swag to acknowledge and celebrate the achievements of winning teams.
4. Inviting senior leadership along as judges encourages attendees to put their best foot forward. Judging criteria can include novelty, feasibility, simplicity, design, and business value.
5. Finally, after the hackathon concludes, it is important to showcase the results to the rest of the business through value engineering. CSMs encourage customers to share pictures on the organization's website and spread the story through their media channels. By doing so, we not only celebrate employees' achievements but also inspire others and promote the customer’s commitment to innovation and data strategy.

With Alteryx Designer at the forefront, the stage is set for a thrilling journey of turning data into insights for yet another business problem.

4:30 PM: Orchestrating Seamless Onboarding and Adoption

To set the stage for long-term success, our thought leader emphasizes the importance of seamless onboarding and adoption during a Success Call with another customer. They create comprehensive onboarding frameworks that not only introduce customers to the Alteryx’s Platform but also align them to their own strategic goals. By guiding customers through the adoption process, CSMs ensure a smooth transition and maximize the value customers derive from their Alteryx investment. Specifically, the CSM can tailor a number of automated Success at Scale triggers through telemetry data to ensure both internal and external teams are aware of users dropping off, highlighting high-use teams, licensing issues or how to collaborate once the customer has reached capacity on their current investment.

Through Success Calls, our Account Success CSM monitors key metrics, analyses customer adoption patterns, and proactively identifies opportunities for improvement. They become trusted advisors, guiding customers on their growth journey, sharing best practices, and empowering them to unlock the full potential of Alteryx. Through continuous monitoring, they ensure sustained success and foster a culture of innovation and growth.

Evening: Reflecting on Impact and Forging Ahead

As the day draws to a close, our CSMs take time for reflection. They evaluate the impact of their strategies, seeking opportunities for further optimization. By leveraging customer feedback and data-driven insights, they refine their approaches, ensuring that every action taken contributes to long-term success. With a steadfast commitment to excellence, our thought leader sets the stage for the next day, adding customer objectives and tasks into their Gainsight cockpit, ready for the next day!

Conclusion

Alteryx Strategic CSMs are an innovative approach to Customer Success, combining traditional Success at Scale roles with elements of Strategic Consulting and being a thought leader. Through the convergence of Alteryx and sector expertise, they nurture relationships, drive success, and deliver transformative value to their customers, ensuring that the overall customer objectives are met and leading with “how can Alteryx be used to drive your overall corporate goals” rather than “how can Alteryx save your team time.”

We trust that this article has shed some light on the wild world of an Alteryx Strategic CSM. If you have a Strategic CSM already, you’re always very welcome to get in touch with them about your current business priorities. If you don’t have a CSM but would like to have a conversation about what Accounts Success could look like for you, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your Account Executive who will be able to point you in the right direction. We look forward to working with you!