“I’m known for asking a lot of questions”: How Our Head of Customer Success Keeps Projects On Track

Every business is different, and no two DAM onboarding sessions are ever the same. Here’s how our Head of Customer Success, Sonia Gannon, keeps Aetopia’s client projects running smoothly, from implementing the system to post-launch check-ins.

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Tell us a bit about your role within the Customer Success team. 

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My role involves working with our customers at every stage of their journey with Aetopia— this makes every day incredibly varied, which I love!

I’ll become a familiar face to any client when they begin onboarding with us, as I work alongside the team from the word “go” to get projects up and running. You can often find me leading requirements workshops, documenting requirements, configuring the DAMS, working with our technical team on new features, and training new users on the system. Even after we’ve gone live I remain in contact with our customers, scheduling regular calls to make sure everything is going well with the DAMS.

My ultimate goal is to ensure customers know how to use the system to its full potential—I love enabling their success.

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What’s the secret to ensuring complex projects run smoothly?

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Communication. Communication. Communication.

It might sound straightforward, but some organisations get this horribly wrong. I actually think it’s one of our USPs as a business, we’re a small team and are always in constant contact with each other so things don’t fall through the cracks. 

It’s so important to ensure that everyone is kept informed of any changes relating to the project that we are all involved with. It’s also important to ensure that the correct language is used. And before you ask, I don't mean French or English, I mean terminology.  

I’m known for asking a lot of questions in the team, but it’s definitely necessary, so no one gets annoyed! I make sure to probe and check all aspects of the solution so I know we’re providing a really great service for our customers. 

The team has a close working relationship, and we’ll have regular internal meetings to check progress and raise any potential issues. We also maintain regular communication with our customers, who are kept fully up to speed on project progress. Implementing a DAMS can be a big deal for businesses, especially smaller teams, and I find that keeping everyone in-the-loop keeps any potential anxieties at bay.

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What’s the biggest challenge you face in your role?

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We work with a variety of customers, some are small, with few formal procedures, and some are large with many procedures in place. There tends to be more documentation, more meetings and more people involved with larger clients. I don’t see these as being negative though. I enjoy building relationships with our clients, understanding their processes to ensure that we are progressing with the implementation according to expected timescales.

Using the word challenge almost makes it sound negative. I don’t think challenges are negative. I like to embrace each challenge, learn from it and move onto the next one, whatever that might be.

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Is there a project that you’re particularly proud of the Customer Success team for running?

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We onboarded a client about a year ago from an industry that was pretty alien to me, that was initially a challenge. They required a bespoke feature for their DAMS we hadn’t implemented before, and also needed assistance importing a huge amount of metadata.

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Whilst this might sound quite daunting, I actually really enjoyed it!  The customer was a real pleasure to work with, and I enjoyed learning more about their industry. 

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We worked as a team to develop a solution that the client was happy with, having lots of check-ins along the way to understand what they really needed out of the platform. We even added sample data into the DAMS and asked them to give feedback, as often people find it easier to see something working in practice rather than just listening to theory. This is the kind of thing I love doing for clients, we really go the extra mile to make sure they’re happy as possible with their DAMS.

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Finally, what’s your favourite part of your job?

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The people, the customers, the Aetopia team, making people happy. I love that each customer is different and I enjoy learning about what each customer does and why they need a DAMS. We are blessed in Aetopia because all our customers are genuinely lovely!

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