Planning and hosting our first customer event
A few weeks ago, we held our first-ever customer event. We invited a small, special group of Asana enthusiasts to join us at our office for drinks, food, and a whole lot of information about Asana. We wanted to create a space where Asana champions from local companies could get even more ideas about how to use Asana to achieve more with their team.
Our co-founder Justin Rosenstein spoke about how Asana uses Asana. Jackie, one of our Product Managers, then gave an overview about we make product decisions and what’s next on the roadmap.
Why did we host a customer event?
In January of this year, I left my role as our Customer Support lead and joined the Sales team to start our Customer Success program (or CSP). The question we set out to answer was, “How can we help our customers best use Asana to meet their teams’ unique needs?”
Since many of our customers are extremely passionate about Asana and know the needs of their teams well, we decided that it made the most sense to invite these Asana “champions” to our office. Hosting events like this one is one way we’re experimenting with empowering our champions. By sharing the ways we use Asana, we hope champions bring fresh ideas on ways to use Asana back to their teams.
How is Customer Success different from Customer Support?
The line between Sales and Support is certainly fuzzy. While the Support team is focused on resolving customer issues, the CSP helps customers use Asana in the right ways for their needs. For instance, we guide our customers to use Asana to capture steps in a project, manage individual tasks, and run great meetings.
Our ultimate goal is to help all of our customers, not just champions, be successful with Asana. We make customers happy by creating long-term value for them, not by talking them into using a product that doesn’t meet their needs. We’ve even gone so far as to say, “That use-case isn’t a great fit for Asana. Here’s another tool that might better meet your needs.”
Why is Customer Success important to the rest of the Asana team?
The CSP is all about creating another channel where we can listen closely to our customers. Much like how we use insights from our Support team to improve the product, Customer Success provides useful feedback to our Product, Marketing, and even Support teams. The feedback we get from CSP complements our qualitative and survey data by providing stories from our customers. We use this feedback to make product adjustments and produce content that addresses common questions.
For instance, our Marketing team recently published an article on the Asana Guide about using Asana to manage long-running programs. The article was born out of a doc I created to help answer questions from customers about better organizing their projects.
Successful teamwork
Ultimately, we want our customers to be successful with Asana so that teams achieve more with less effort, and do great things. This is why I’m so personally interested in building a great Customer Success program. Our first customer event was an important step toward empowering our customers to use the product in the best way possible for their teams.
