Get answers from customer success leaders
Stephen O'Keefe
HubSpot Senior Director, Customer Success • February 22
I've found two KPIs to be difficult to commit to: 1. Customer Health. If you have a robust algorithm to measure customer health (influenced by a number of inputs ), it can be hard commit to a certain outcome. To frame this another way, I've often observed customer health scores as being a bit of a black box where it's hard to tie the actions you take to specific outcomes when there could be a number of variables outside of your control that influence the ultimate score. I much prefer to commit to lead measures that are directly within the control of the team. KPIs related to customer engagement are a good example of things that are more directly within the team's control. 2. Upgrade rate. Many CSM teams are measured on Net Revenue Retention. As part of this, your CSMs may be responsible for identifying growth opportunities within the install base of customers. I find it's effective to measure the team on how many growth opportunities the team identifies but not the close rate or upgrade rate, especially if the Sales or Account Management team owns the closing motion.
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Manil Vasantha
Information Technology Consultant • January 18
Some essential hard skills that are considered must-haves for a customer success leader include: (must have does not necessarily mean now - you can and should be trained on the job) • Analytical skills: the ability to analyze customer data and metrics to identify trends and opportunities for improvement, as well as a deep understanding of customer behavior and the ability to create actionable insights from that data. • Project management skills: managing customer projects and initiatives effectively to ensure timely delivery and customer satisfaction. • Technical skills: navigating technical tools and software used in customer support and engagement. • Product knowledge: a deep understanding of the product or service can help customer success leaders effectively troubleshoot and provide solutions to customer issues. • Problem-solving skills: the ability to quickly and effectively identify and resolve customer issues is crucial for maintaining customer satisfaction and loyalty. • Knowledge of Tools (soft and hard skills): CRM (Jira/SFDC/HubSpot/Zoho etc.), CSM (Gainsight, Einstein, Totango, ChurnZero), and Analytical Tools like (Tableau, SAS/ PowerBI, and Google Analytics). You should get some training as part of your onboarding; however, self-help is the best help. As for nice-to-haves skills: • Industry knowledge: the ability to stay current on industry developments and trends, as well as an understanding of best practices in customer success management. • Financial analysis skills: the ability to evaluate and analyze financial data, such as customer revenue, churn rate, and lifetime value, to identify opportunities for growth and improvement. • Business Acumen: the ability to understand the company's goals and align customer success strategies. • Leadership skills: the ability to inspire, motivate and lead a team of customer success managers and associates to achieve their goals. • Communication skills: the ability to clearly and effectively communicate and collaborate with customers and other stakeholders/inter-department and intra-department are essential for building and maintaining positive relationships.
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Georgia Glanville Harrison
Braze VP Customer Success, EMEA • January 26
Unlike a lot of Customer Success departments, we’ve chosen to align our team to customer KPIs rather than commercial/upsell targets. As such, we have less overlap in goals between CS and Sales. Of course, we’re both targeting Gross Renewal Rate and ensuring we maintain the customer base, but we don’t extend that to upsell targets in the same way as commission-based CS teams. Currently, we’re focused on exploring how we can share “time spent” efficiency and reach KPIs to help keep us accountable for spending as much face time with our customers, tech, and agency partners as we can over the course of many key city hubs whilst being mindful of the cost of trips.
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Brett Milstein
Narvar Director, Customer Success • February 8
In my experience there are a few characteristics/skillsets that the best CSMs I have hired all have in common: 1. Organizational skills - This is #1#1 for me. I have never seen a CSM who was not organized be successful. As a CSM requests are being thrown at you left and right, and you are being pulled in a million different directions. The best CSMs are organized/proactive and know exactly what action items they need to complete and how to prioritize them. 2. Ability to showcase value - This one might sound simple but I can promise you it is not. A large part of a CSMs role is to retain customers and to do that, they need to articulate and justify the price of the service. This is challenging for two reasons. 1. Not all customers justify value in the same way, so a CSM needs to make sure they truly understand how the customer is determining this. 2. The majority of the time the day-to-day contact is not the ultimate decision maker. Therefore, the CSM needs to articulate the value in a way that the day-to-day contact will be able easily to go back and relay this to their boss (or decision maker). If a CSM is having a tough time explaining the value, it's going to be even more difficult for the day-to-day contact to explain it. 3. Charisma - Customer Success is all about relationship building. CSMs spend a ton of their time on zoom calls with their customers and valuable/engaging conversations are what help build strong and trusting partnerships. The CSMs I typically see with the most success (especially regarding renewals and upsells) are the ones who have built the best relationships with their partners.
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Jessica Haas
Appcues Chief of Staff & VP of CX • April 27
The two areas I would recommend are 1) Sharpening your Sales skills and 2) Adopting some Product Manager mindsets. When working with customers and the further upmarket you go, the more enriched these conversations need to be and the immediate areas for many customers are to understand their contracts, how they can scale with your product, value alignment, and ROI. Supplementing this, customers want to know how your product will be evolving and how their feedback can influence the roadmap. Being able to cut right to the value of a product, requirements, outcomes, and how those align with the customer's values will set your customer and Product teams up for mutual success!
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Rebecca Warren
Eightfold Director, Customer Success • January 18
As with any time you join a new company, listen, listen, listen, and THEN ask, ask, ask! I highly suggest driving those 1:1s if they aren’t already scheduled for you, and then spend time understanding the internal processes (and why they were built the way they are). I would stay away from “well, in my former company we did xxx and xxx and it worked great” – instead ask “do you know why this is done this way?”. Get all the info on interactions with clients that you can as well – your internal folks, especially implementation teams, usually have quite a bit of “behind the scenes” information that can help you as you start interacting with clients!
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Meenal Shukla
Gainsight Senior Director of Customer Success • March 24
As the Head of Customer Success in a startup that did not have Customer Success Managers before, your primary objective would be to establish a successful customer success function. To do this, you must take a phased approach in the first 30/60/90 days to develop a foundation for success. Here are some possible goals you could set for the first 30/60/90 days: First 30 days: 1. Understand the company's products/services, customers, and their pain points. 2. Meet with key stakeholders such as sales, services, marketing, and product teams to understand their goals and align customer success strategies. 3. Analyze the current customer journey and identify areas for improvement. 4. Hire a team of Customer Success Managers (CSMs) or identify existing employees to fill these roles. 5. Develop a customer success playbook and define the key performance indicators (KPIs) to track. Next 60 days: 1. Establish a scalable customer success process and standard operating procedures. 2. Create a customer onboarding program that ensures new customers receive a seamless and successful onboarding experience. 3. Define and implement a customer health score and identify at-risk customers to address any issues proactively. 4. Launch a customer advocacy program to drive customer referrals and positive reviews. 5. Provide coaching and training to CSMs to improve their effectiveness. Next 90 days: 1. Implement a customer success technology stack to automate and streamline customer success processes. 2. Develop a customer feedback loop to collect customer feedback and use it to improve products and services. 3. Analyze customer data to identify trends and insights that can be used to improve customer success. 4. Create a customer success roadmap to guide the team's efforts for the next six months. 5. Establish a culture of customer success across the organization, emphasizing the importance of customer-centricity in all business decisions. By focusing on establishing a strong foundation in the first 30/60/90 days, you can set your team up for success and build a strong customer success function that drives customer satisfaction, retention, and growth.
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Jessica Broderick
Asana Head of Vertical Solutions Engineering • April 13
The best customer success candidates possess the following traits: * Relationship Building Skills. The ability to develop positive, trust-based relationships while adding value to the client and team. * Intellectual Capability & Curiosity. The desire to proactively seek out and learn about the unfamiliar or unknown. * Communication Skills. The ability to express themselves clearly and engage others verbally and in writing; can determine the effective means and frequency of communication to keep all parties on the same page.
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Ben Terrill
Brex Senior Director, Customer Success • October 10
My philosophy is that I want everyone on my team to be eligible for a raise, so it’s my job to help them understand what they need to do so that I can make the case to the business. Just as they are the advocate for our customers, I am the advocate for them. It’s not just about the quantitative - there are many qualitative things I consider when recommending a pay rise. Some of the most common pieces of advice I give to my team are: 1. Make sure you are a master of your business. Exceed your metrics or have a clear explanation of where and why you fell short. It isn’t essential that CSMs are always over 100% on everything, but you should have a clear plan that addresses why you are behind. 2. Are you having an impact outside of your specific book of business? Are you helping others when you can? Are you seeking out and taking on additional projects and opportunities when they come up? 3. Are you upholding the values of the team and organization? Are you having a net-positive effect on the morale and engagement of your peers around you?
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Christine Vienna Knific
mParticle Senior Director, Customer Success - North America • May 3
To gauge autonomy of Customer Success Manager candidates, I like to ask: * Describe what role the CSM plays with the customer, in your experience? This helps me see the candidate's willingness to be strategic or tactical (hopefully both, when necessary!), how they work with internal cross-functional teams, and how they view ownership of commercial responsibilities. * Provide an example of a customer escalation and how you turned it around. In this question, I'm looking for a candidate to both show ownership over the ultimate resolution of the issue and the ability to navigate difficult internal and external situations. The best answers are those that demonstrate collaboration and use of resources without placing blame on others or an over-reliance on executives. * How do you work with the support team for defects or other issues? Success of the customer is a team sport, with CS driving proactive results and support working to resolve problems when they arise. The best CSMs understand that one doesn't work without the other and demonstrate that in the answer to this question. * What are some things you've done to drive success that aren't directly related to your book of business? In other words, I want to learn about the other projects a CSM has done in the past to keep the business moving forward. Some examples I've seen in my own experience are working with marketing to create an industry-related podcast, driving a customer advocacy and review program, and creating shared materials to save time and help the business scale.
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