Get answers from customer success leaders
Stephen O'Keefe
HubSpot Senior Director, Customer Success • February 21
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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Georgia Glanville Harrison
Braze VP Customer Success, EMEA • January 26
Technical Support response targets! We’ve all been there, and being the first Success Hire is super exciting. You get to wear many hats, get involved all the way through the customer lifecycle and be scrappy to get customers what they need. For us at the beginning, that meant taking on a lot of Technical Support tickets for our EMEA customers, especially in the morning before our then US-based tech support team was online. On the one hand, this gives you a lot of valuable product knowledge that can help you be an impactful CSM, but on the other hand, it can mask the business need to expand technical support teams and can hurt your focus in the long term. If you can, explain early the difference between CS and Tech support KPIs and ensure that anything you take on is temporary!
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Brett Milstein
Narvar Director, Customer Success • February 7
Here are a few mistakes I see most often: 1. Not doing their research on the company/role they are interviewing for. It is surprising how many interviews I have participated in where the candidate had clearly not reviewed our company's product offering or job description. One of the keys to interviewing is to showcase why you are the best fit for the role. The best way to do this is to fully understand what the company does and what they are looking for, and to articulate how you meet those needs. 2. Not asking enough and/or not asking the right questions. I tell candidates all the time it is just as important that we interview them, as it is they interview me (the hiring manager) and our company. Accepting a role at a huge company is a huge commitment, and as a candidate, you want to make sure you know exactly what the role is, the expectations and what you are walking into. 3. Talking for too long and over-explaining. While I want to make sure a candidate has sufficient time to answer questions, it becomes concerning if they tend to ramble on for a long period and have trouble directly answering the question. When I am interviewing a candidate I am always picturing myself as one of our customers and what the zoom experience would be like for our customer, if we hired this candidate. Our customers are looking for CSMs who can provide clear and concise answers to their questions and candidates must showcase that skill during the interview process.
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Ben Terrill
Brex Senior Director, Customer Success • January 18
One of the most important responsibilities of CS is to ensure that we are sharing the stories and insights we hear from our customers with the rest of the business. To do this, I like to hold monthly presentations where CS presents our feedback from customers. These events are attended by product and marketing leaders, and CSMs present insights from their specific customers, with a theme for each session.
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John Brunkard
Sitecore Vice President of Customer Success APJ | Formerly Red Hat, Symantec, Blue Coat, Intel, Dell, Dialogic • April 28
I have many different questions and always include some scenario based questions to see how they would handle those. Often I start with a very fundamental question along the lines of; "Tell my why you want to be a Customer Success Manager? What motivates you for this type of role? A good answer to the question would be one that demonstrates a genuine passion for helping customers achieve their outcomes and a desire to be part of a dynamic collaborative team that strives to make a positive impact on our customers (and internal stakeholders). The candidate should explain how they enjoy working with customers, learning about their needs, and developing solutions to help them overcome challenges / pain points / needs / business objectives...by working across internal and external stakeholder. They should also be able to highlight their ability to build strong relationships with clients and be empathetic towards their concerns. Furthermore, the candidate should talk about how they enjoy working in a fast-paced environment and that they are driven by the challenge of meeting and exceeding customer expectations. The answer should also highlight how the candidate's skills and experience make them an excellent fit for the CSM role. They should be able to show how their previous experience in customer success or even a non-customer success role such as customer service, account management, or sales has prepared them for the challenges of being a CSM at my company.
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Christine Vienna Knific
mParticle Senior Director, Customer Success - North America • May 2
* Show that you're a team player! It's a huge red flag when a candidate demonstrates a lack of willingness to work as a team. The ability to work cross-functionally to drive customer results is critical. If a candidate conveys the message "that's not my job," they aren't a good fit for our team. * Not understanding support vs success. There are a lot of definitions of Customer Success, but I need CSMs who work proactively to drive results. Using "support" and "success" interchangeably in a resume or interview discussion raises a concern. * Lack of metrics. Customer Success is often more difficult to measure than, say, a sales role because our metrics are not all quantitative, but that doesn't mean we aren't focused on showing results. Demonstrating a combination of qualitative and quantitative results in your experience set is important.
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Manil Vasantha
Information Technology Consultant • January 17
Core skills are a combination of both soft and hard skills. Communication skills, analytical skills, problem-solving skills, product knowledge, and inter-departmental and intra-departmental relationship building. Emotional intelligence is something you must have and believe at your core. This is the only thing that will bail you out when all else fails - your gut! Trust it! Adaptability, as I said, change is the only constant. Be fluid and nimble to customers changing landscape. Empathy puts you in the customer’s shoes. Active listening skills do give you an edge tom building trust. If you are new to your job, even more so. Remember, two ears and one mouth for a reason. Live in the zone, a customer-centric culture. You may need to play an instrumental part in influencing this change within the company.
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Caoimhe Carlos
Udemy Vice President Global Customer Success • February 13
No technical skills are not always necessary to be an effective CSM, however having a basic understanding of technical concepts can he helpful particularly if working in certain subsegments of the tech industry. The level technical skill required is also to a degree dependent on the company and the scope of the role. Some CS roles in deeply technical companies may require you to have a level of familiarity with technical concepts however for many CS roles this is not the case. However in either scenario familiarity with the product or service being supported can be beneficial as as a CSM while you may not be responsible for technical troubleshooting you will be required to have a good understanding of the product offering and will need to be capable having conversations with customers about the products features, functions and capabilities.
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Jessica Broderick
Asana Head of Vertical Solutions Engineering • August 1
The CSM is an internal and external advocate for the customers they support. Because of this, it is important for them to collaborate with internal teams to ensure clients have everything they need to be successful and adopt the product. As an example, customers will often make feature requests for an enhancement to the product that helps them improve a specific use case. By working with product development teams, CSMs can drive innovation to the product roadmap that directly aligns to how their customers want to be using it. There are many ways to enable this kind of collaboration but I find that creating a process around it helps streamline the efforts. This can be accomplished by creating a workflow to submit feedback/ideas/requests with various teams in Slack, JIRA, SFDC, CSP, etc in combination with a forum where the feedback can be openly discussed to identify deliverables.
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Rebecca Warren
Eightfold Director, Customer Success • April 17
It depends on the level, but the main ones for us are retention (making renewal a non-event), increased customer usage and adoption/engagement, connection to the company values, strong, multi-threaded relationships with customers, and upsells/account expansion which increases product stickiness.
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