Customer success can make or break a company, but what does it take to deliver truly exceptional customer experiences? In this exclusive Q&A with Barry Blassoples, Head of Customer Success at timetoreply, you'll gain insights on how to turn customer success into a strategic advantage.
From key strategies to unlock hidden features in timetoreply, to expert predictions for the future of customer success, Barry shares actionable tips you can apply to elevate your team's performance. Plus, discover the one critical skill every CS manager needs and the customer success trend you can't afford to miss in 2025.
Let’s dive in...
Barry Blassoples, Head of Customer Success at timetoreply
What’s one book that’s changed the way you think about customer success? (Bonus points if you’ve got a podcast recommendation too)
Almost everything a business does feeds into customer success (CS). So the real question is, which book has changed the way I think about business. The answer would have to be The Infinite Game (Simon Sinek).
I have several podcasts that I listen to regularly, but they’ve got nothing to do with CS. I find podcasts most useful for broadening one’s interests and discovering new ideas. One I'm enjoying at the moment is Confessions of a B2B Entrepreneur (Tom Hunt)
If you had to pick just one superpower for a Customer Success Manager, what would it be? (No, X-ray vision doesn’t count… but it would be cool, right?)
Empathy. It’s not some touchy-feely, new-age nonsense. It’s the key to deeply understanding your customers, viewing the world from their perspective, and helping them achieve meaningful results.
What’s the most slept-on feature that can help customers crush their goals?
There’s not one particular feature that everyone is overlooking, because everyone doesn’t need to use every feature in our product. The biggest missed opportunity I see, however, is to combine key features to unlock massive performance gains.
The Optimizer, combined with contact groups, alerts, and views forms what I like to think of as timetoreply’s ‘performance stack’. The stack creates a multiplier effect that has helped some of our customers elevate their customer experience, and take their teams to the next level.
(As a bonus tip, if you’re using Hubspot or Salesforce, connect it to your timetoreply account to create and sync your contact groups with your CRM data. It’s like putting your performance stack on steroids.)
What gets you the most hyped about the future of customer success? (Any wild predictions for the next big thing?)
The rate at which change is accelerating makes it hard to predict how the CS function will evolve over time.
One thing that’s certain is that the market is not ever going to lower its expectations of how businesses will help customers solve problems and leverage opportunities.
In the short term, however, we’ll continue to witness the rise of tools designed to alleviate ‘busy work’ through intelligent automation. Hopefully, that’ll mean CS teams will have more time available to deeply examine their customers’ needs and find creative ways to fulfil them.
What’s the biggest 'uh-oh' moment you see companies make with customer experience?
Forgetting that their company’s ‘customer experience’ includes every single interaction a customer will have with their organization. Including every call and every email.
One of the hardest things about delivering a superior customer experience is ensuring that every experience is consistent.
Failure to maintain consistency leaves the customer feeling uncertain and can erode their trust in the business they’ve chosen to give their money to.
If you could give one piece of advice to someone just starting out in customer success, what would it be? (Think of it as your “what I wish I knew” tip.)
Forget B2C or B2B, you’re in the Human-2-Human business. Make sure you’re actively working to consistently improve your non-technical skillset.
Your ability to make people feel heard and understood, synthesize their ideas and concerns, and then articulate exactly how you’re going to help them achieve the outcomes they need, is critical to your success.
Got a quirky talent or fun fact about yourself that no one would expect? (We’re all about showing off the human side!)
Nothing that I’m at liberty to disclose in this article… that’s the answer my lawyer said I should stick to.
Customer success can be a pretty demanding job—how do you keep your balance and avoid burnout? (Share your secret recipe for staying sane)
Exercise. It’s the ultimate hack for managing stress, feeling good, and living a longer, healthier life.
What’s the one customer success trend people should be keeping an eye on in 2025?
Customer enablement is already big, and it’s only going to get bigger. Customers want to feel empowered to achieve their goals, and it can be hard to achieve that at scale.
AI has, and will continue to create huge opportunities to give customers what they need to feel confident in their ability to maximize the value they’re extracting from the tools they’re using on a daily basis.
If you could trade jobs with anyone in the company for a day, who would it be—and why? (Yes, even if it's the virtual office dog.)
No one. I enjoy what I do too much.
How do you spend your time when you’re not busy helping customers succeed?
As the father of a two year old, most of my free time involves dinosaurs, Lego and trying to get kid’s show songs out of my head.
Curious about how timetoreply can help your customer-facing teams? Book a demo here.