In stepping into the Customer Success domain, it's crucial to prioritize KPIs that align with the role's core responsibilities. A strategic approach involves mapping KPIs to the customer lifecycle stages, fostering a sense of purpose and confidence in your efforts. For instance: * NPS Over CSAT: While CSAT often leans towards support, NPS serves as a robust starting point, eventually evolving into a Customer Effort Score (CES) to gauge the efficacy of minimizing customer effort. * Onboarding Success Rate: Measure the effectiveness of onboarding in delivering value, thereby nurturing customer confidence and satisfaction. * Health Score and Adoption: Evaluate the overall health of customer relationships, considering both depth and breadth of engagement to ensure sustained success. * Engagement Cadence: Tailor engagement frequency across various customer personas, fostering meaningful interactions at every touchpoint. * Retention Monitoring: Continuously assess customer loyalty and satisfaction, providing insights into the overall customer experience. Each KPI serves a distinct purpose: to analyze customer feedback, mitigate risks, and strategize ways to enhance the customer journey. While specific metrics like Expansions, Qualified Leads, and Net Revenue Retention (NRR) may not be initially owned, mastering foundational KPIs lays the groundwork for influencing these metrics. Go Rock!

The Customer Success and Account Management relationship is critical to the overall health of the business, especially if Net Revenue Retention is a key metric. Often times, for this relationship, Customer Success can help identify sales opportunities in the form of CSQLs for the Account Management team to close and Account Management can spot potential risk for Customer Success to get in front of to prevent churn. Ensuring the team's scorecards are aligned to a common goal is necessary to foster collaboration. In terms of missing KPIs, although Customer Success often is left with NRR, it's truly a business metric. If you have a bad product, even heroic efforts from a CSM will not save a customer. For those KPIs within a CSM's control, I find that QBRs can be hard if you don't prioritize them early in the quarter.

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. 

I think the most frustrating thing about Customer Success is that without agreement across the organization about the importance and role of Customer Success, it can become a catch-all. As the quarterback of the customer relationship, that means all things can fall to the CSM. If there are not very clear swim lanes, paths of escalation and role definition, this means the CSM may soon find themselves as; * Customer Support * Collections Specialist * Renewal/Contract Manager * IB seller * Product Specialist * Escalations Manager While a great CSM possesses skills that can help in each of those categories, they cant be all of those things without burning out quickly.

Early in my career, I didn't. I was at a larger company with many functional and department heads. Not everyone will/should work directly with the C suite, but if the work you're doing has a high impact on the entire company, you will. My first real work with the C suite was when I was building a new Customer Success function at a mid-stage company. We had built our first churn/retention forecast and our CFO needed to understand our projections and have confidence in them before taking it to the board. We walked through my model, which varied from our tops-down Finance projections. Every month, we would review recent churns, top risks and our quarterly and annual churn forecast with the CRO and CFO. This became a rhythm they depended on. As time went on, I was tasked with more strategic initiatives because of the confidence I built with them.

This can vary wildly. Areas It depends… 1. CSM/Pooled CSM 2. Digital 3. Renewals 4. Support 5. Professional Services 6. Implementation 7. Education 8. Operations/strategy 9. Enablement So when you look at all those, a CS org structure could be complex even with a small team! My recommendation is to start small, ensure your definition of success and annual strategy is clear for where you need to go based on your product/service, is aligned with other teams, avoids the errors of 1) being overly complex, 2) being non-ambitious (thinking small), and 3) shooting for the moon and demoralizing yourself and the team. The biggest piece of advice I can give is to: 1. Establish your long term strategy 2. Seek wise counsel around you for what you should pursue and how to organize it given your long term strategy If you're looking for general org structures, there are many images on the internet that you can use to get started.

It's really important to be prepared for any interview you take the time to do, both out of respect for the hiring manager's time and your own. That said, I view an interview as a conversation and opportunity for both parties to learn about each other. Here are two tips for being prepared and showcasing yourself in the best way: * Any presentation or demonstration project should be done explicitly for the hiring company. Many Customer Success roles will require candidates who advance multiple rounds to prepare a presentation, written project, or sample QBR. Though interviewing multiple rounds for multiple roles is time consuming and often downright exhausting, it's critical that you make sure what you put forward shows preparation and willingness to do the role. I often give candidates a prompt with sample scenarios that are unique to the skill sets the job requires or situations we're experiencing and trying to solve for. The interviewees who stand out most are those who take the time to prepare as the prompt requests. We often get candidates who say "oh, this is a QBR I did at my old company, does that work?" While I totally understand that doing presentations for multiple roles in an interview process takes a lot of time, those who prepare specifically for us send the message that they will do the work and want the job. * Do your research... but don't make it weird. It may sound silly, but it's true! Candidates should be as versed as possible with what the company does, their target market, ideal customers, etc. Likewise, candidates should have looked at the hiring manager's LinkedIn to be familiar with their basic background and any known mutual connections. The critical part, however, is that the candidate uses the background information they've researched as part of their answers to questions. Resist the urge to say something like "Hey, Go Eagles! ... I saw you went to North Olmsted High School." Fun fact: a candidate really said that to me. The awkward conversation that followed highlighted that no, we didn't go to school together, nor did we have mutual acquaintances, but they found it on social media and thought it would be a cool fact to share.

The most important aspect of communicating customer success activities to the company is identifying what each department cares about. The update provided to a Sales team looks very different than what would be delivered to a Product team. This ensures the updates have value to the people consuming them. Once you've determined what each department cares about, you then decide on the method of delivery. I prefer to provide updates in a meeting forum to allow for discussion and better understanding. Many other teams may opt for an email or newsletter that goes out on a specific cadence. A lot of this depends on the size of the company and the importance of the updates. Lastly, don't forget to ask for feedback! If something isn't working or could be better, make sure to iterate.

Here are the most problematic KPIs to commit to, especially as CS leader: 1. Pure Satisfaction Metrics * Raw NPS/CSAT targets * "Customer happiness" scores Why: Too easy to game, often doesn't correlate with business outcomes, and heavily influenced by factors outside CS control 2. Zero-Tolerance Metrics * "0% churn rate" * "100% renewal rate" * "No escalations" Why: Creates a culture of hiding problems versus addressing them. 3. Activity-Based Metrics Without Outcomes * "X QBRs per quarter" * "Y customer touches per month" * "Z training sessions delivered" Why: Drives busywork instead of value; teams hit numbers without impact. Without specific outcomes, check-in meetings have zero value 4. Metrics Without Context * "Increase product adoption" * "Improve time to value" * "Reduce support tickets" Why: Too vague to be actionable or measurable 5. Metrics You Can't Influence * Product development timelines * Sales cycle length * Engineering bug fix rates Why: Sets you up for failure when you lack control over outcomes 6. Lagging-Only Indicators * Annual churn rate without leading indicators * Lifetime value without progress metrics Why: By the time you miss these, it's too late to course-correct Better Approach: * Choose metrics with clear line of sight to influence * Include both leading and lagging indicators * Set realistic ranges rather than absolute targets * Establish baseline for each metric that you are trying to improve. If you don't know where these metrics stand now, how will you know if you have improved it. It is common sense but you will be surprised at how often this happens. * Focus on trends over time versus point-in-time goals

* I think customers will continue to expect quick yet complex answers - our products and platforms will need to be able to keep up by offering more access and self-service options. CSMs need to be able to respond with speed and accuracy, which means they need to know the product themselves. * I see CS moving to a multi-support model using chat (both chatbot and live-hosted), AI, and large language models, with CSMs for some accounts, pod support for others. * In my opinion, for CS to remain a highly valued function to the customer, we have to make sure products are stable, data is accurate, systems are integrated, access is easy, and privacy is protected.