The voice of the customer : introducing Gomo Customer Success Manager, Simon Waldram

Gomo Customer Success Manager, Simon Waldram, acts as your advocate within our team. In this intro to his role, Simon reveals how he’s helping the team tackle your feature requests, bug reports, and other inquiries. Also featured: read all about our upcoming training tool, Gomo Academy.

A 2019 LinkedIn survey named Customer Success Manager as the second “most promising” sales job for the year. That so many businesses are creating the role is no big surprise: the skills a customer success manager like Simon can bring are a real advantage for any business that needs to incorporate client feedback into its products. So, what does it take to be the “voice of the customer” at Gomo? Read on to find out.

Q: Tell us a little bit about your background and your time at Gomo

Simon: I joined Gomo in mid-2019, but for the last 15 years I’ve worked within the learning technology sector, within commercial and education environments. This has given me experience with the majority of industry authoring and delivery tools, from eLearning to virtual reality.

Why was I drawn to Gomo specifically? It’s continued investment in the learning technology space was a big factor. Gomo really engages with the industry-wide movement towards empowering subject area specialists with industry-leading, multi-device tools.

Q: What does being the Gomo customer success manager mean?

Simon: I see it as being like the glue or interface between the internal teams here at Gomo and you—our customers. My goal is to support the process of moving our customers towards your ever-evolving desired outcome, whilst maintaining excellent customer service.

Customers inevitably have specific questions or you might have stumbled upon an obscure issue on the platform and I’ll help you get the answers or resolutions you need to get back to creating engaging learning content. However, it’s also important that I make regular contact to keep our users informed about areas of the product they’re not aware of, or to get a general sense of customer needs and to provide more tailored support.

Q: In a typical day, what are your priorities, and how do you help provide tailored support?

Simon: So a working day could involve a number of things:

• Right now, I’m working on the customer success strategy that includes consolidating our support service into a single portal. I’ve been reviewing the customer journey to understand where we can improve efficiencies for all users. The goal is to reduce the number of steps, save you time, and simplify your pathway to support.
• I naturally have a busy comms schedule, with meetings scheduled with our enterprise customers throughout the month to get further feedback and insights. I’m also regularly emailing our users, letting everyone know about the latest feature releases and maintenance updates. There may also be reports on known issues and advance warnings for maintenance downtime to send.
• I assist in capturing and prioritizing feature requests on our product board. Customer feedback on the platform is hugely important for us, and these requests help us shape the roadmap for future Gomo developments.
• I also work closely with the development and support teams to jump on bug reports when they come in. We take a blended approach to support via telephone, video calls, and the Gomo Knowledge Base to reduce resolution times.

Q: A lot of your work is focused on platform enhancements. What can Gomo users expect in the near future?

Simon: One of our biggest upcoming features—something that we’re very excited about and we’ve had very positive initial reactions to— is the Gomo Academy. The products and services we’re investing in elsewhere provide us with great new ways to deliver Gomo’s own training resources. We’re building Gomo Academy along with new training and refresher materials to support users with designing beautiful eLearning content.

Q: What will Gomo Academy provide over and above what is already in the existing Knowledge Base?

Simon: Firstly, we’re developing the Academy using our sister company Instilled’s technologies and structures. Instilled is built with a ‘two-click search’ design goal: we want to provide answers to questions about Gomo within just two clicks. Users will also benefit from featured learning resources, a granular structure, chapters, and closed captions.

We’re also planning to produce YouTube-style microlearning for Gomo customers! Expect refresher, bite-sized modules with multi-language support. We’re also going to take a blended learning approach. We understand that learners require options to include learning paths with support for videos, PDFs, and eLearning to increase competency.

Our goal with this is to help users get answers to some of the more common questions as quickly as possible, so that we can bring you into a position of expertise with the platform. We’re planning modules covering:

• Initial training on how to use Gomo, including top tips
• Content on advanced techniques
• Example courses and other content illustrating great ways to use these techniques
• Introductions to new features as they’re added, and guides on how to use them

In turn, this will keep us focussed on the more challenging inquiries you have, the stuff that really pushes the tool and your learning content forward. The Academy will also be a place for you to interact with us. If there’s something you see and like, you’ll be able to request adding content into your account.

Q: When can we expect to see Gomo Academy?

Simon: We look forward to rolling out Gomo Academy around January 2020.

I think that developing this content on Instilled, with all these features to add and augment content, really helps us emphasize that this is a collaborative effort. Once it goes live we’ll have another way for Gomo users to approach us with their feedback. We can continue to have these great conversations about your needs and to help us shape the platform.

Of course, you don’t have to wait until we put Gomo Academy live to let us know what you’re thinking. If you have a question about using Gomo, or if you feel like there’s something we could improve on, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!