Game-Changing MURAL Uses for Customer Success Professionals

With all that goes into product implementation, a key challenge for Customer Success Managers is maintaining customer happiness without stifling ongoing strategic conversations. Visualization is a key tool for understanding the entire customer experience. It enables CSMs and customer stakeholders to align more closely and quickly than traditional, creative problem-solving methods.

Internally, we use MURAL to enhance our ability to operate as an extension of our customers’ teams.

Here are 7 ways MURAL can be your Customer Success super power. (We also talk about 5 more use cases in our 5 Everyday Uses of MURAL webinar recap.)
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STRATEGIC MAPPING

Our Customer Success Managers perform various mapping exercises to determine the lay of the land and uncover opportunities to increase company-wide efficiencies.

1. Stakeholder Maps. As customer teams begin gaining value from their partnership with MURAL, it’s often discovered that other teams across the organization can solve key challenges with the aid of a digital collaboration tool. To assist stakeholders with identifying the most efficient path to scaled collaboration methods, we perform an account-mapping exercise akin to what an Account Development Representative completes for prospective accounts.  
   

Completing the activity in MURAL offers a more accurate outline of where key contacts sit in the company, as well as within their business units, than one would find in tools like Excel. Adding LinkedIn URLs to murals along with a deployment success strategy puts faces to names and generates excitement and recognition among current customer stakeholders.

More often than not, these exercises lead to an introduction to a new team stakeholder. Similar exercises can be completed to map customer journeys, services, and general thoughts and ideas.

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2. Paths to Common Problem Solving. As we identify barriers to use, we map out the most common user challenges and the steps our Customer Success team members should take to most effectively resolve the issue. This not only helps our team to meet quarterly customer satisfaction goals, but also ensures we stay on brand with high-quality and efficient responses to our esteemed users.

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CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

Until recently, one-way presentation tools have stunted creative collaboration, as it has been ingrained in facilitators to talk at attendees rather than encourage group brainstorming. MURAL’s intuitive and aesthetically pleasing interface encourages the creativity of even the most reserved collaborators.

3. New User Guide. Using MURAL to teach MURAL– this is a philosophy we think is extremely useful for our new users. While navigating around the New User Guide, folks are able to onboard others while simultaneously getting acquainted with things like keyboard shortcuts and navigation.

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4. Weekly Demo. This is another example of our mural ‘inception’. We believe in teaching by doing, so during our weekly demos we exhibit the features of collaborative work in MURAL by simulating them. We take attendees through a brainstorming exercise, cluster trends and review other common use cases we see among our customer base.

5. Success Plan. Any Customer Success Manager knows that understanding their customers’ definition of partnership success and consistently reflecting progress against goals is key to ensuring retention and growth. We start this process as early as possible.

By creating a customized Success Plan during our first kickoff call with our customers, we’re able to identify team goals, desired outcomes and set action items for stakeholders on both sides of the partnership. Action items and key milestones are reflected in a timeline format at the bottom of the mural so customers and CSMs can better orient themselves around the time they have to complete their objectives.

As conversations evolve, external links and files, stakeholder profiles and any other helpful resources can be included in a References section of the mural. Maintaining this mural when meeting live and working asynchronously ensures that customers and their Success Managers hold mutual ownership of success outcomes.
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TEAM COLLABORATION

6. Weekly Stand-Ups. During our weekly team stand-up, our CSMs use an XL mural to track our goals, as well as ongoing and completed tasks. As we speak to each other on our video conferencing tool, we follow each team member as they present within the mural, add stickies to each other’s area if we want to follow up on something offline and put important dates in a calendar at the bottom. This system helps with workload management and ensuring our quarterly goal progress is kept top of mind.
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7. Empathy Building. Last, but certainly not least, what kind of CSMs would we be if we didn’t work hard to build customer empathy across our organization?

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Our power users group, nicknamed MPRO, gets together for video meet-ups on a bimonthly basis. As a way to increase collaboration and best practice sharing, our MPRO users created Impact Story murals following a similar format, but tweaked them to represent their business’ unique MURAL use case.

By sharing their business challenges and solutions with each other, we’re not only able to inspire innovative use cases across leading enterprise organizations but also co-create new product features along with MURAL’s Product and Engineering teams.

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PERSONALIZED AND EFFICIENT

MURAL is a tool with a million uses still to be discovered, even outside of Design and User Experience teams. Our Customer Success team uses MURAL to plan engagement strategies, build empathy, increase team collaboration, deepen the learning experience during a demo and draw up user case stories. It’s the one browser tab we all always have open because it serves the dual purpose of ensuring that we know the tool like the back of our hand, and providing a shared tool for close collaboration with our customers, even if we’re not always conveniently located nearby.

Visual collaboration allows us to be efficient enough to customize each and every customer engagement we take part in and humanize relationships typically at risk for being replaced by automation and technology.

Learn more about mapping user experiences on our blog.

To keep the conversation warm, don’t hesitate to reach out to your Customer Success Manager or support@mural.co, and join us for a demo every Thursday at 9AM PST/12PM EST/17PM UK.