Customer Success: Part of Albert's Company DNA

Liz Smith brings a wealth of experience as Customer Success Leader at Albert. She has been instrumental in building our customer success team and shares insights on how we ensure our customers achieve great results with the Albert R&D platform.

After spending the last several years as a Customer Success leader helping biotech and pharma companies digitally transform their R&D operations, Liz Smith was excited to discover Albert and bring her expertise to the chemistry and materials science industry. As she saw an opportunity to help some of the biggest R&D labs in the world make a transformational shift from pen and paper and/or legacy, single-purpose solutions to a more data-driven, end-to-end solution. A shift that empowers them to capture and leverage the data they need at every stage of the journey to remove inefficiencies and accelerate innovation.

A key factor in Liz’s decision to join Albert was the emphasis we place on Customer Success; it’s part of Albert’s DNA and a critical point of emphasis in everything we do. All team members strive to ensure our customers’ ongoing success because it is critical to innovation. In that vein, Albert itself is perpetually innovating our platform so that organizations can make more data-driven decisions.

Additionally, Liz saw a challenge. While biotech and pharma have advanced digitally, the chemical and materials science space– an industry that touches everything we touch– has been a bit further behind. At Albert, Liz promotes widespread change through digital transformation, not just within an organization, but across the entire industry in a way that no one’s done before– and at a very fast pace!

“There is no greater reward than seeing someone’s face light up after you’ve helped them figure out how we solve a huge inefficiency in their workflow,” she notes.  

Enabling True Customer Success

We view Customer Success as a user’s window into Albert and all that the platform can unlock, which is why it is one of our fastest growing teams. The team is focused on four key pillars: enablement, which includes training, onboarding, and making sure that customers have access to all the right materials, including the online Albert Learning Lab (coming soon!); implementation, which involves getting customers up and running and providing hands-on training and guidance; technical support, to enable the continued growth and mastery of all of Albert’s features; and true, measurable Customer Success which results in ROI and quantifiable business value.  

Customers chose Albert to empower their R&D organizations and are achieving greater results and desired business outcomes in a fraction of the time, whether it is gaining new insights into materials, figuring out a new high-performance formula, or even creating an SDS in a single click. The Customer Success team collaborates closely with customers as an extension of their own team to ensure their success.  

Part of Albert’s secret sauce for Customer Success is the breadth and depth of talent on the team. There are team members who are more technically adept. Others come directly from the industry and know the day-to-day challenges that affect the lab all too well. Some members of the team have a background in regulatory and EHS. “We’re building an army of people with all of these distinct skill sets in order to meet every user’s unique needs so that they can have the best possible experience and outcomes,” explains Liz.

She adds, “Many of our team members have been in the exact role that our end users have been in, and so much of Albert as a whole has come from those same lab coats, so we always have someone available who can relate to customers on a level that no one can match in this industry.”  

What Customer Success Looks Like at Albert

Because the Albert Customer Success team works so closely with customers, they add tremendous value at every stage of the customer journey; from drafting project plans, through implementation and reviewing metrics, to making recommendations on best practices and change management that can be game-changing. Team members also identify future needs and work closely with Albert’s product team to support customers’ business priorities. The entire process is highly personalized for each organization and team structure.

“Each company has its own workflows, and rather than saying, ‘You’re going to have to change everything and it’s going to be a massive ordeal,’ we’re really assessing what their processes are today and how Albert will integrate into those processes,” shares Liz. “It’s wonderful to be able to identify inefficiencies in those processes and let them know that with Albert, what they were previously doing in five or six steps is now going to happen in one or two. You can literally see the excitement. It turns some of the most change-resistant people into evangelists of our platform.”

Our agile structure also enables our product teams to regularly roll out requested capabilities and features as part of the ongoing innovation of our platform. We know how our customers’ business works from the inside out, we know their workflows, so when they ask for something– be it some type of insight or something product related, we can cater to them. We don’t put them in a box. Put simply, we are a partner in an organization’s digital transformation journey, rather than your typical software vendor.  

To ensure the ongoing success of our Customer Success team, we will continue to add talent (particularly internationally) and ongoing learning programs and opportunities in the days to come. Whether it’s through workshops, ongoing customer outreaches, or roundtable discussions, Albert Customer Success is always providing opportunities to foster best practices and innovation.  

The Best Thing About Albert

Successful digital transformation is incredibly rewarding, but Liz confesses the best part of her job is the people. “Internally and externally, I have daily conversations with some of the smartest people in the world. I get to see how their brains work when they’re figuring out a problem and developing solutions. There are no ivory towers. We lift each other up– and this ultimately translates to better experiences that help teams bring products to market faster and easier than ever before.”