Customer Success Conferences
The very first professional conference focused on the profession of Customer Success was the Customer Success Summit by Totango in early 2013, and Mikael Blaisdell was a keynote speaker. The second CS conference was Pulse 2013 by Gainsight — and Mikael Blaisdell led the largest breakout session of the event.
Since then, he has been a frequent speaker at a variety of events on all aspects of Customer Success, as well as designing and leading the Customer SuccessCon series of industry conferences.
Customer SuccessCon
Customer SuccessCon began in the fall of 2013 as the first (and so far the only) non-vendor industry conference specifically focused on knowledge exchange and networking for the leaders of the emerging profession. It was rapidly followed by Customer SuccessCon West/San Francisco, and then by the very first Customer Success event in Europe (Customer SuccessCon London 2014). Now in its sixth year, there are five Customer SuccessCon events each year: Boston, Seattle, Denver, London, and West/San Francisco.
Customer Success Webinars
Extending the benefits provided by the conferences, there have been hundreds of webinars on a wide variety of Customer Success topics. These events are often recorded, so even those that couldn’t attend the actual event can benefit from the content.
The Customer Success Association is intending to add links to the best of these recorded webinars in the Customer Success Library later in 2019.
Customer Success Local
The Customer Success Association had its beginnings in a series of local meetings in the San Francisco area, starting in the spring of 2012. These were evening gatherings of CS execs, and the topics were focused on key issues for team leaders and their companies.
It soon became apparent that the need for knowledge exchange was far greater than what could be handled in an evening’s program and discussion. The focus was accordingly shifted to the online resource, The Customer Success Forum on LinkedIn, and the creation of the Association website. Available 24 by 7 worldwide, TCSF began to grow rapidly in membership and contents.
Local Groups may be listed in the Customer Success Local page of the CSA website, and their events in the Customer Success Calendar page and emails.
About Customer SuccessCon
The first thing you might notice about Customer SuccessCon is that it’s one day and limited to 100 attendees. While it might seem short, the length of SuccessCon was one of my favorite things about it. … I can personally attest to the value of a shorter and smaller conference – the speakers I attended were highly effective communicators and presented content that I found incredibly useful (and still remember two weeks later). From a networking perspective, I was able to connect personally with a good number of attendees and spend some time with speakers 1:1, which is not something that happens easily at larger conferences.
Another difference is that the content of SuccessCon is not driven entirely by its sponsors. It’s run by the Customer Success Association and the talks are all about the profession, not about selling you the latest Help Desk Holy Grail.
In all, I would definitely recommend attending Customer SuccessCon to anyone in working in the field. It’s a great first-time conference, too, given its focused size and manageable timespan. They have them all over – on the East/West Coast, in Europe, and in Seattle every year. If you get a chance to go to any of them, it’s definitely worth the time and cost to take off work and travel.
Read the full Review here.