A few weeks ago, we had the honor of welcoming Christine Rimer to Team Frame AI as our first independent board member. Getting to know Christine through this process has been a terrific experience, and I wanted to write a few words to introduce her and share what I’ve learned from her.
Christine’s resume reads like an explorer determined to stay at the cutting edge of how companies relate to their customers:
- Christine cut her teeth as a product manager delivering interactivity to the early web (raise your hand if you can remember the Shockwave loading screen ✋).
- Over the next decade, Christine drove various Success, Support and Implementation operations at Intuit. For the support leaders out there – imagine the challenge of servicing software when its users include everyone, from Fortune CEOs to your grandmother, handles their money, and becomes mission critical for everyone at the same time each year.
- Later, as VP of Product Marketing and Customer Experience at Momentive (then SurveyMonkey), she helped businesses understand the importance of marrying voice of customer sentiment with the behavioral data to enable organizations to take more timely and targeted actions to improve their customers’ experience.
- As Chief Customer Officer at Guideline, Christine is now scaling and maturing Support and Operations at a fast-growing retirement platform company.
Besides being simply impressive, for me, Christine’s career demonstrates two vital themes about how the roles across the Customer Experience – including Support, Success / Account Management, and Product leadership – are evolving.
1. Support and Product are two sides of the same coin.
“No matter how friendly and efficient your team is, customers don’t pick up a product hoping to talk to support,” says Christine. That’s why support leaders must stay focused on the tasks customers are trying to accomplish. And by collaborating with development teams, they can turn every contact into an opportunity to unblock not just the customers that reach out but the many customers that didn’t.
“It’s essential to form a ‘one team’ partnership with Product around shared commitments to improve the customer experience. Support’s responsibility is to provide clear, ongoing data about what’s driving customer contacts and effort. From there, Product and Support can commit to solutions that reduce confusion, enable self-service, or help support resolve issues faster.”
2. Measuring and acting on the customer experience can’t be separated.
Collaborative planning with R&D teams is one essential skill for Support Leaders. But making those plans stick requires more. “Plans made solely around anecdotes, or ambiguous survey metrics like NPS and CSAT alone, struggle to survive cross-team prioritization,” says Christine. “But when Support is able to track data about specific needs for specific customers, you can predict and demonstrate business impacts like reduced support costs or churn.”
Rich reporting on Support data has helped Christine overcome major CX challenges. “At SurveyMonkey, we identified the ability to use multiple devices as a drag on our NPS. We had just changed an important policy, so it was easy to assume that long-time customers were dissatisfied.” A deeper look at the data told a different story. “When we married sentiment to customer profiles in our CRM, we realized it was our new customers that were dissatisfied. Recognizing the real problem was training, we were able to add a help center article that proactively addressed the issue. The result: a low-cost intervention that reduced support contacts AND increased NPS.”
Our goal at Frame AI is to make sure that Support and other CX leaders have the tools to help their companies – and their careers – benefit from the principles above. With Christine on board, we’re 10 steps closer to making sure that’s true.
