Meet our team: Samantha Benson, Manager of Support Services

Samantha Benson recently joined Centage as Manager of Support Services and leads our Customer Support team. Samantha brings a strong background of almost a decade in customer success, support, and client services, specializing in the SaaS B2B industry. This includes a variety of roles at local SaaS companies such as PG Calc and Profitero. Most recently she served as a Customer Success Specialist and as the Global Customer Support Manager at Profitero where she built and led a brand new Customer Support team in Boston, greater London, and Shanghai.In her spare time Samantha enjoys hiking, running, international foods (hoping to try every country someday!), cooking, and watching Boston sports. A fun fact about Samantha is that she is a classically trained French horn player and she looks forward to attending concerts and music festivals again sometime soon!We sat down with Samantha to better understand her perspective of the Customer Support function and what makes it successful; as well as her vision for the Centage Support Services team.What makes a successful Customer Support organization?Customer Support is the voice of the customer. A successful Customer Support organization strives to go above and beyond to ensure customer satisfaction and collaboration through offering a variety of communication methods. In addition, empathy, listening, and effective problem solving skills are key for a meaningful customer experience.Is the customer support function different in a B2B SaaS organization? How? B2B SaaS is all about knowing your customer, as your software is providing each business with a unique service to satisfy their own internal processes, procedures, and efficiencies. And because of this model, each client is unique and has a particular use case. For example, a non-profit customer of ours may implement a certain set of financial planning and budgeting reports - a technology customer’s reporting needs would be different. The Customer Support organization needs to know how to treat and problem solve for each unique client - which can be done based on best practices they have gathered from experiences with similar customers or thinking creatively to problem solve for any scenario.How does the Customer Support function interact with Product Development? Sales? There may not be another case for cross-team collaboration as strong as in a SaaS organization. I like to think of an organization like ours as a wheel and each individual team is a spoke and customer experience is at the center. Our Customer Support team interacts frequently with our Sales, Consulting, and Integration teams as new customers come onboard to help with the software installation, setup and integrations with their other systems. We also work quite closely with our Product Development team to influence prioritization and share product enhancement ideas based on what we are hearing from our customers. In the end, all of us have one goal - ensure our customers are up and running and satisfied with the solution.How does Centage approach customer support and foster a customer-focused culture?Our goal is to ensure the best possible experience for all Centage customers, keeping a pulse on customer needs and identifying areas to help customers receive increasing value from their relationship with Centage.We put customer success first to ensure that you are receiving valuable timely and helpful support. We are a big advocate for servicing our clients in one cohesive platform that incorporates the opportunity for client self-service, submitting Support requests and interacting with our team, and building our Maestro Help Hub Knowledge Base and Training Portal, all-in-one!We have found that the Zendesk software solution has enabled our Customer Support team to not only respond to tickets in one streamlined location, but also helps to link our relevant Maestro Help Hub articles by topic and provides cross-team collaboration to best service our clients. We are also able to incorporate Zendesk’s powerful reporting metrics to track client usage trends and common Support requests to further enhance our product, processes, and procedures.Centage continues to grow and evolve in ways that meet customers most pressing business needs - we are 100% committed to our customer’s happiness and we are continually making investments in the organization so we can help each customer solve their most important business needs.Centage Corporation’s Planning Maestro is a cloud-native planning & analytics platform that delivers year-round financial intelligence. With Planning Maestro, Centage offers the sophisticated features needed by small and mid-market organizations to integrate budgeting, forecasting, and deep data analysis within one easy-to-use, scalable SaaS solution. For more information on how to modernize your office of finance with intelligent planning, view our product demonstration video, or call 800-366-5111.