Do you need additional support for your high growth, high volume business? Customer Success Managers are available on Thinkific Plus!
In this article:
How does a Customer Success Manager differ from Thinkific’s standard Support?
What services do Customer Success Managers provide?
How much time do I get from my Customer Success Manager?
When will my Customer Success Manager be available?
Is there anything my Customer Success Manager can’t/ won’t do?
What can I expect with a Customer Success Manager?
When should I work with a Customer Success Manager?
What if my Customer Success Manager goes on vacation?
How does a Customer Success Manager differ from Thinkific’s standard Support?
Thinkific is proud to have one of the best Support teams in the business, having won several industry awards. But it is a team, made up of 15+ awesome Customer Champions. This means that when you submit a ticket, it’s highly likely you’ll receive responses from a variety of different people, who are new to your business, and will need to understand the context of your request before assisting. The average response time is within a day, usually around 5-8 hours. This generally works great for smaller businesses who can continue with their project regardless, but can cause frustration for larger, complex organizations operating a unique business model, and need answers fast.
In contrast, a Customer Success Manager is a centralized contact for your Support needs whether it be feature questions, escalations or feedback. Having worked closely with you, they are familiar with how you use Thinkific and can advise accordingly.
What services do Customer Success Managers provide?
Your dedicated Thinkific Customer Success Manager will act as your guide through the Thinkific system, and can act as your conduit to the Thinkific development teams. They will be your direct point of contact via phone and email, a voice that can lend itself to you and your team when you need it.
They will work with you from the outset, and provide the following services:
- Course Launch and Onboarding
As part of the onboarding service provided by your dedicated Customer Success Manager, they will work with you to create a launch plan and timeline for launch. Your Customer Success Manager will provide advice and best practices around how to create and launch your course successfully, and will be available to help ensure things go off without a hitch. - Project Success Criteria and tracking
Your Customer Success Manager will also do everything they can to ensure you achieve your business objectives with Thinkific, and that begins with identifying measurable, quantitative objectives as success criteria for the project. After launch, your Customer Success Manager can provide advice and suggestions based on best practices of other Thinkific Plus Customers. - Connecting You With the Right Information at the Right Time
Even for the most straightforward projects, technical roadblocks can happen, particularly when working with a new API, SSO language or HTML/CSS within a platform. For fast moving, high growth companies, it’s important to know that you can get an answer to remove that roadblock in a timely fashion. Your Customer Success Manager knows our support material inside-out and can provide you with relevant articles or guides., If in doubt, you can always email or schedule a call to get your answers quickly. Unlike our standard support channels, your Customer Success Manager is not just an expert in Thinkific, but will also have the context around your business and your objectives. - Recommendations And Best Practices from Thinkific’s Most Successful Customers
Your Customer Success Manager can’t run your business for you, but they can share best practices which they have seen work for similar business models on the Thinkific platform. Brands like Hootsuite have seen incredible success using Thinkific and have benefited from working with a dedicated Customer Success Manager. Knowledge sharing around specific use cases is a big part of this success. - Account Services
Thinkific is a self serve platform with most functionality available at your fingertips, but there are some things which we know you need help with, such as duplicating courses, bulk student imports and beta testing of new features.
How much time do I get from my Customer Success Manager?
- Average 2 hours/ month Customer Success Manager time (as specified in your contract)
- Direct email address of Customer Success Manager
- Implementation call (1 hour)
- Kickoff call (30 minutes)
- Adhoc syncs based on your requirements (30 minutes - 1 hour)
- Launch Preparedness Review call (1 hour)
When will my Customer Success Manager be available?
9am- 5pm Pacific Standard Time, Monday - Friday, considering national and provincial holidays.
Is there anything my Customer Success Manager can’t/ won’t do?
Your Customer Success Manager is your Thinkific guide and will go above and beyond wherever possible, but there are some lines that we cannot cross. Code or Theme customizations, technical set up for API or SSO or specific marketing/sales advice are areas where you should seek out other experts who are more familiar with your industry and business. We are the experts in our education platform, but you might have very specific needs or questions which would be better answered by professionals in those fields.
What can I expect with a Customer Success Manager?
To begin with, your Customer Success Manager will want to understand your business, ask a lot of questions and provide you with quite a few options with the ways you could set up Thinkific. We try to provide a few alternatives with set up recommendations so that you can find the right solution for you, considering other factors that we may not be privy to.
Usually, most communication will be through email where we will provide instructions, references to different knowledge base articles and blog posts so that you can reference it and review it in your own time.
As needed, we can jump on a call to narrow on specific questions/needs on your side.
Your Customer Success Manager will want to know about any feature requests, bugs, bulk student imports that you have.
As time goes on and Customer Success Managers have a better understanding of your business and set up, we will be better able to provide advice and best practice.
When should I work with a Customer Success Manager?
Typically, we have clients sign up to Plus during a migration to Thinkific. We recommend setting up your Thinkific Plus account and engaging with a Customer Success Manager up to three months before launch. This will give you and your Customer Success Manager enough time to understand your intention and use case for Thinkific so that we can provide the best support during implementation planning, content creation, migration and onboarding. In our experience, it can take some time to migrate content and students and learn the platform. Your Customer Success Manager is a great asset while you learn the ropes of the platform and discover the set up that works for you and your business.
What if my Customer Success Manager goes on vacation?
Everyone needs a little rest and relaxation, including our Customer Success Managers! They will communicate their leave schedule with you in advance and ensure that we have another Customer Success Manager for you to connect with, who knows your account so you won’t face any disruption. For one off days such as sick days or holidays, your Customer Success Manager will catch up on any emails upon their return or introduce another point of contact in more time-sensitive situations.
Book a call to chat with our team more about our Plus plan features!