If you're looking for productivity tips, you're in the right place! Customer success experts talk us through their hacks. Read their thoughts here.

The irony of becoming more productive is that it often takes some trial and error, how can you know if something will make you more efficient without trying it? And if it doesn’t work for you, has that been unproductive?Well, don’t worry about any of that for now, because we’ve collected productivity and development tips from customer success leaders.

With the context and real-life examples of their tips, you should have a better idea of whether it’s something you’re more likely to benefit from.

Dan Farley, Vice President, Customer Success at Seenit

There’s no favouritism here, but we’ve included two tips from Dan: one on personal productivity and one that relates to team development.Personal: “I read as much as I can, not just regarding the customer success profession, but also psychologically and about the SaaS industry to stay in touch with the key trends.

Jason Lempkin is the perfect person to look up and read from.”Team: When discussing how they improve the customer success performance of Seenit’s CS teams, Dan reminded us of the importance of open and regular collaboration. “In order to improve performance, we have regular/open one-to-ones, where we challenge each other and work together to help increase our overall Health Score as a team by learning from each other.”

Emma Tiegan, Head Of Customer Success & Operations, SmarterQueue

Like Dan, Emma shared some personal and team advice on productivity and we just had to share both with you!Personal: “I write down what must be done by the end of the day before I open my inbox or Slack. Looking through my inbox or Slack messages puts me into reactive mode, at the beginning of my day this is a productivity killer for me!”Team: “As our customers are looking to have an effective social media presence, our Customer Success Team [at SmarterQueue] are subscribed to social media influencers YouTube channels, newsletters and are on the pulse of the latest trends and market news.”

Lauren Cumming, Head of Customer Success at Fixflo

In true productive style, Lauren provided us with eight short tips for productivity, listed as bullet points.

Now that is productive! You can read the full list in our interview with Fixflo's Head of Customer Success, but here’s some of the highlights.Lauren limits distractions by using Gmail snooze and not looking at her phone throughout the day. With ‘do not disturb’ mode on, it’s time to plan the tasks for the week ahead.“I always write a list of my top goals of the week (and include any I didn’t do the week before) and try and block out appropriate time in the calendar to get them done and tick off as I go.”Lauren adds a great tip to: “break down elephant-sized tasks into bite-sized chunks so you can better prioritise/feel less overwhelmed and feel accomplished quicker.”

Troy Pratley, Head of Customer Success (EMEA) at Amplience

At what point is your to-do list to-doing too much?

As Troy indicates below, it’s when your number of tasks becomes unrealistic or unachievable, at least in the short-term.“If you have a list of five things you want to do, then do one of those things very well, even in your personal life. Don’t try to lay it on thick and try to improve 100% over 2 days, it’s much better to do it incrementally and do stuff properly over a year, rather than quickly.”“I think there’s a pressure to self-improve overnight and everybody thinks there’s a quick fix, to be an expert on stuff. It’s not going to happen overnight… If you’ve got a gap that’s 10 metres wide, and think you can get over it in one day, you’re always going to fall down the gap, but if you can train yourself to do a 30cm leap, a metre leap and then a two-metre leap over time, there’s more chance you’re going to do it as you’ve trained yourself to repeat that over and over again.”

‍You can learn more about Amplience here.

Nuno Paiva das Neves, Head of Customer Success (EMEA) at SafetyCulture

Sometimes, you just need some time to yourself to focus or learn something new. Whether you achieve that goal or not is another thing, but hopefully Nuno’s tips might guide you to success.“In terms of getting the work done, I Slack myself several times a day, and I try to book-in time on my own at least 60 minutes a day — away from my desk — maybe in a meeting room, maybe in a café. I try to have my own space within the working hours, even if it’s 5-10 mins looking at LinkedIn, or watching a video about customer success or trying to address specific business challenges.”You can learn more about SafetyCulture here.