Traits such as listening, staying calm under the storm, building trust, motivation, and empathy, and being a better conversationalist are needed by one and all. Although from a bird’s eye view, this might not look like a blog on customer success, here is a round-up of 11 Ted talk customer success speeches for the ones who wish to prosper and emulate as a customer success leader or a customer success manager.

How to have a better conversation

To begin with, avoid multi-tasking. Be present at that moment. Don’t be half in it and half out of it. You need to enter every conversation assuming that you have something to learn. Everyone you will ever meet knows something that you don’t”, says Celeste Headlee.

How to train employees to have difficult conversations

Another glimpse of Ted talk customer success is given by Tamekia MizLadi Smith as she adds, “How great it would be you were graced to collect data with compassionate care?

G: Getting the employees involved and letting them know, R: the Relevance of their role as they become, A: Accountable for the accuracy of data while implementing, C: Compassionate care within all encounters by becoming, E: Equipped with the education needed to inform people of why D: Data collection is so important.

Whenever you engage people in the ‘why’ of any given situation, it challenges their perspective, and it changes their attitudes. Teaching people transitional change instead of shocking them into change is always a better way of implementing change. People are more likely to share information when they are treated with respect by knowledgeable staff members.

The Listening Bias

Tony Salvador shares, “Listening to both customers and colleagues to gather insights and information is a key ability that successful people possess. These strategies for being a better listener: to lose preconceptions, be vulnerable and open to new ideas, and to not be afraid to hear what we’d rather not hear.

How to build and rebuild Trust

Trust is the foundation for everything we do, and that if we can learn to trust one another more, we can have unprecedented human progress. So here is the prescription, identify where, when, and to whom you are likely to offer your distraction. That should trace pretty perfectly, to when, where and to whom you are likely to withhold your empathy”, says Frances Frei.

How to motivate people to do good for others

To add on to the ted talk customer success, Erez Yoeli elucidates, “When we’re trying to get people to do more good, we harness the power of reputations. First on the list is to increase observability, and make sure people find out the good deeds

Moreover, when we’re trying to eliminate excuses, we need to be very thorough, as people generally never run out of excuses. Be it for donating a little something for the army camp or be it reasons for running late for a meeting. And thirdly, you will need to communicate expectations. Tell people, “Do the good deed right now.”

The Power of Empathy

To make the whole process of learning about empathy easier, Helen Riess shares her bit to the Ted talk customer success. She begins with dissecting the acronym, EMPATHY. Where ‘E’ stands for eye contact, ‘M’ for muscles for facial expression. ‘P’ stands for posture, another powerful conveyor of connection. Similarly, ‘A’ stands for affect, ‘T’ for the tone of voice. ‘H’ stands for hearing the whole person, and ‘Y’ for your response. Hence, it is empathy that matters in every corner of your life.

How to stay calm when you know you’ll be stressed

So the idea of the pre-mortem is to think ahead of time to the questions that you might be able to ask. Unfortunately, one of the things that go out of the window in such nervous situations is rational, logical thinking. We need to train ourselves to think ahead about these kinds of situations.”

Working Backward to Solve Problems

As a Customer Success Manager, the first steps should always be to set goals with your customer. And to define success – why did your customer buy your product in the first place? Now, look at the journey backward, and re-evaluate your strategy to get them there”, adds Grandmaster Maurice Ashley in his Ted talk customer success speech.

What Consumers want

“Everyone has this desire for the authentic. And authenticity is therefore becoming the new consumer sensibility. The buying criteria by which consumers are choosing who they are going to buy from, and what they’re going to buy. Becoming the basis of the economy. In fact, you can look at how each of these economies developed. Each one has their own business imperative, matched with a consumer sensibility”, quotes Joseph Pine.

How to make choosing easier

A recent survey was taken with over 2,000 Americans. And the average number of choices that the typical American reports making is about 70 in a typical day. To reduce the choice overload, you can follow the 4 C’s – cut — get rid of the extraneous alternatives; concretize — make it real; categorize — we can handle more categories, less choices; and condition for complexity, denotes Sheena Iyengar.

How to usefully lose control of your brand

As Tim Leberecht quotes, “Hyper connectivity and transparency allow companies to be in that room now, 24/7. In fact, they have more control over the loss of control than ever before. Companies are the makers of their fortunes, and like all of us, they are utterly exposed to serendipity.

That should make them more humble, more vulnerable and more human. For the true selves of companies to come through, openness is paramount. But radical openness is not a solution, because when everything is open, nothing is open.

Final Take

A tad bit of inspiration is all what we, as human beings need in each of our lives. In our cut-throat business of customer experience, this is something that renders us with a valuable insights. These Ted talk customer success speeches are like those magical pills, which when taken as per prescription is definitely going to give you the best results.

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