Knowledge might be power, but shared knowledge is what empowers people to thrive in their role while feeling like a part of something bigger. What’s the point in just one or two people having all the information and influence? Collaboration and knowledge sharing often mean shared creativity, ownership and success.

We asked six leaders in customer success to share their knowledge sharing and collaboration tips, stories and insights with us. And in the spirit of sharing, they’re here for you to peruse and use!

Dan Farley, Vice President, Customer Success at Seenit

It’s not rocket science, but having everything in one place and visible for your entire company allows knowledge sharing for best practices, learnings and more. At Seenit, this translates to using Notion as a best practice capturing tool. In Dan’s words, “Every time we see something, it goes into Notion.”

“We have a Customer Success space on here where we create and share our documentation in regards to best practices across the CS Team, which is visible to the entire company.”

Emma Tiegan, Head Of Customer Success & Operations, SmarterQueue

Even if you hate the sound of your own voice, you might like this creative idea Emma Tiegan of SmarterQueue recently shared with us for kicking off a project through collaboration.

“A routine I’ve set is to record myself talking through my thought process at the kick-off of every larger task or project we’re working on. That recording will then be sent to the entire Customer Success Team for them to share their feedback, suggestions, ideas, [and even] jokes sometimes!”

“That recording won’t be edited, chopped or changed. I’ll celebrate team members who spot mistakes, come up with better ideas, pick holes in my logic and give constructive feedback.”

Lauren Cumming, Head of Customer Success at Fixflo

Team meetings are where Fixflo’s Customer Success Team discuss what has and hasn’t worked, while standard operating procedures and playbooks are in place to ensure that there is guidance on a lot of what the company and team is doing. However, in a fast-changing world, keeping these updated can be a challenge.

Lauren explained that: “In the scaleup world, things are always, always changing so it’s difficult to keep everything updated and document everything but getting knowledge out of each of our heads is definitely something we are working on to reduce business risk, and sharing is caring!”

Troy Pratley, Head of Customer Success (EMEA) at Amplience

Two of the most important scenarios for knowledge sharing are new people and new product features. Luckily, Troy shared a little insight into both when we spoke with him.

For the newbies in the team at Amplience, peer learning is the tool that connects them with internal experts and hands on training. “So [as part of] the onboarding, they’ll sit with a CSM and look at emails, see what’s coming in from Slack, see how they respond to problems, and the most important thing is for the CSM who is training them, to explain why they’re doing something.”

This shadowing not only shows how the existing platform works, it provides an understanding of customer questions and how they’re phrased. After all, “questions from customers will be phrased in completely different ways, so there’s no machine to tell you: ‘For question A, give answer B’ it doesn’t work like that.”

“The other way is when new functionality comes out, and that’s coming down from our product team. We do releases every two weeks, and we have to find a way to distribute that knowledge, so the product team will send out videos and upload documentation. It’s really for the CS team to access that and look at it, but we also have open-forum meetings where the product team will show how it all works, and give people the opportunity to ask questions as well.”

Then, it’s up to the Customer Success team to put that in practice, test it all out and get hands-on with the new features.

Violaine Yziquel, EMEA Customer Success Management Team at Box

If you live by the mantra to work smarter and not harder, we’ve got a feeling you’ll like the tips Violaine from Box shared with us. She understands the importance of learning from others and gaining perspective from different areas of your business.

“Hearing from other people in that space, what they have done, what has been successful or not, what assets they have created is music to my ears—[the] main reason being that you are then able to leverage those learnings and apply those at your very own organisation. Be lazy in a way.”

While the above is more about networking and learning from those in your industry, the below quote from Violaine highlights the importance of harnessing knowledge from your internal experts.

“Identifying experts in some areas can also help spread the good practice—think of SMEs or gurus on use cases framing, success plans building or even competition! Look outside your team too if you can. I am trying to get external speakers into the team meetings, even outside the CS space to change the perspective as well.”

Nuno Paiva das Neves, Head of Customer Success (EMEA) at SafetyCulture

As you can read in our full interview with Nuno, he is a huge advocate of using Slack and even checks it ahead of his email! What this alludes to is the fluid and frequent communications used across channels at SafetyCulture, although they ensure there are still regular catch ups and check-ins.

“We try to make it as interactive and exciting as possible, because we need to have immediate communication and collaboration, and also to keep track of outcomes and to share information. We use Confluence a lot as well. We also value the engagement among peers and the team, having weekly, bi-weekly, and bi-monthly meetings, across regions, among ourselves and other stakeholders within the company.”

Looking for a learning platform that can facilitate your knowledge sharing needs? Get in touch with our team today.