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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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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Jessica Haas
Appcues Chief of Staff & VP of CX • April 27
Scenario-based questions are my favorite but I especially like this one as it breaks the ice and allows the candidate to show their personality & you can have fun with the scenarios. Three emails hit your inbox, which do you answer first, second, and last and why? No wrong answers here! 1. You ordered lunch and the delivery person is running an hour behind and asks if you still want your order. (symbolizes a higher-value downgrade scenario) 2. Your friend wants to reschedule your plans for the evening and is asking for a confirmation (symbolizes a mid-value cancellation scenario) 3. You were given an Amazon gift card that needs to be claimed (symbolizes a lower-value upgrade scenario)
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Brett Milstein
Narvar Director, Customer Success • February 8
This question is a bit subjective as going "above and beyond" can mean different things to different people. If a candidate truly wants a role, in my opinion, they should do whatever they feel puts them in the best position to receive an offer. I cannot remember ever walking out of an interview and thinking to myself "that candidate was overprepared." With that said, there are a few areas, I would recommend a candidate focus on: 1. Know the company/product: I highly recommend learning everything you can on a company. Some examples include reviewing their product offering, reading case studies and watching a demo on their website. 2. Know the role you are interviewing for: You should know the job description inside and out. Understand the experience the company is looking for and the day-to-day responsibilities of the position. Practice speaking about your background and how it is a fit for this role. 3. Learn about your interviewer: It can never hurt to know more about or find something in common with the person interviewing you. For example, learn about their previous companies/positions, where they went to college or some of their interests. Most of this information can be found on Linkedin or on the company website. Find a way to work this into the interview as it can make for a much better conversation and shows the interviewer you have done your research. 4. Prepare questions for the interviewer ahead of time. If you are not good at coming up with questions on the spot, it is best to have 3-4 questions written down ahead of time. Asking questions shows the interviewer you are interested in the position and want to learn more. Any candidate truly interested in joining a new company should have plenty of questions to ask.
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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 • January 20
Operational Rigor: ‘The buck stops with me' * Understand, follow and contribute to processes * Deliver on metrics * Ownership of customer situations Problem-solving ability: 'I am knowledgeable about my business, my product and our use cases' * Product knowledge * Knowledge about your industry and best practices * Technical: Not many people agree to this but at the end of the day we are selling software in most cases as a CSM and therefore you need to be good in technical knowledge to answer level 1 questions. If you don't do that, you will become a glorified meeting scheduler Building Relationships with your customer and internal teams: ‘I am a trusted advisor for my customer and I know where to find help OR who to ask for help’ * Understand your customer’s business and build a plan to achieve success * Understand the functions and roles of your internal teams and foster relationships
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Nicole Alrubaiy
Jellyfish Senior Vice President, Customer Success • March 1
Whenever there are customers you need to retain (psst... that's pretty early!). I've found that we in the industry are quite liberal in what we call Customer Success, particularly in early-stage companies. You'd likely start with a CSM as the person who helps onboard/implement the new customers, answers how-to questions for them, and does whatever it takes to make their product dreams come true. The role is broad and a catchall for post-sale needs. Who would do it otherwise? You probably don't want your sales rep taking time away from growing the company, nor do you want every customer question and complaint hitting the founders. Over time, you'll mature and specialize the CS function as you introduce other specialists in Implementation, Technical Support, etc. and beef up customer resources like in your knowledge base and community. For that first hire, consider someone who is a product expert, customer-obsessed, and a pro at getting things done cross-functionally. A high-potential hire could go on to lead a team of CSMs as you grow.
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Ben Terrill
Brex Senior Director, Customer Success • October 10
Some of the things I would focus on to up level my CS career: Sales Skills - Developing your sales skills will really elevate you as a CSM. Your ability to influence and strategically drive a conversation to mutually beneficial outcomes is the key to your effectiveness as a CSM. Understand How You Are Measured - You need to fundamentally understand how your individual performance is measured and be able to effectively tie that into your day-to-day activities. Leadership Skills - Leadership skills are not just for formal managers! Your ability to lead others through your influence and expertise is key to your advancement in your career. Product Expertise - This goes beyond just understanding how the product works, but you should fully understand how the product solves your customer's problems. The better you understand both of these, the better you can advocate to the product team about the features or product changes you need.
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Jessica Broderick
Asana Head of Vertical Solutions Engineering • August 2
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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Jeff Beaumont
Customer Success Consultant • February 9
This become highly complex based on the user persona, the complexity, of the product, and the time to adoption, among other things. However, a few things to consider are: 1. Knowledge Base: Do you have a solid, robust knowledge base? Is that knowledge base actively referenced in your product, website, by Support, by Sales, etc.? 2. Identify the ideal path: If you could meet with a user face-to-face and walk them through that adoption, what would that look like? What does it look like currently for self-serve? What is the delta between the two? 3. Identify 1-3 critical use cases: After identifying your top use cases, what does "great adoption" look like? Then build analytics, documentation, training guides and videos, and other content around ensuring those use cases are clear, capable of being easily adopted, and aligned with Marketing. Then track their adoption to ensure what you designed is, in fact, working in the world. 4. Support team: Does your Support team engage with self-serve customers? What is their process? Are they geared and ready for a high volume? Are they well-trained to respond with a friendly, thoughtful approach? 5. Insights to drive product improvements: Do you have analytics and insights on what customers are doing so you can improve the experience for the next cohort of onboarding customers? 6. Executive buy-in: This is off the beaten path, but are your executives bought into self-serve AND the support and onboarding required?
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