Question: What does customer success mean to you? What is it, what is it not? Why it's good: It's open-ended, and gives the candidate a big opportunity to talk about CS as a field, the success of a customer on an individual basis, and more. Example of a great answer: "To me, Customer Success is the driving of client business outcomes by providing value through our product and services." From there, the best candidates talk about being able to do this at scale (do more with less!), using technology and data to drive results, and give examples of how they actually prove ROI to customers. 

I think the single worst KPI is 'customer touchpoints.' Customers don't want to be bothered unless you have information that is valuable to them that commands them to stop what they're doing and spend time with you. It's not enough to go about talking to every customer every month in a 'check-in.' It's much better to hold off for 3 months until you can have a value-driven conversation. Additionally, I find certain CS SLAs to be sub-optimal KPIs. If CSMs are supposed to be proactive, that means they can't live in their inbox responding to customers. So if they have a KPI that dictates how quickly they should respond to customer outreaches, you're giving the team conflicting information on where they should be spending their time.

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!

There are two questions I always like to ask during an initial interview with a candidate: 1. Tell me about a problem you have worked on and how you solved it? - In full transparency, I actually borrowed this question from an article I read about Elon Musk's interview questions. I found the reasoning behind this question to be extremely interesting. First, you gain insight into the types of challenges the candidate has come across and their thought process for overcoming those challenges. Second, Musk says that this question shows him if the candidate truly worked on resolving this problem. Someone who was integral in the solution of a problem will know all the details and be able to explain in length what they were thinking was during the process. I have found a lot of success in asking this question. 2. I ask candidates to share with me a time they had to articulate value of their product/solution to a customer. As I mentioned in another question, showcasing your company's value is one of the most important responsibilities of a CSM. If a candidate does not have experience with this, how can I expect them to articulate value to our customers?

This is a tough one. I generally view these as “lite sales cycle” which it sounds like you do as well. If the account is large enough - a multi-level engagement strategy extending 1-2 management layers above your main champion would help. I would also ask why these champions are changing - is the position being passed around in the organization because no one wants to own it? If so, why? Is it too time consuming? If so, perhaps there’s a way to reduce how time consuming it is or advocate for a dedicated role.

This is a tough one! In this situation, I would do my best to flex my diplomatic skills. Draft up communication that includes both Execs (with some other relevant stakeholders if possible) and do your best to lay out the pros and cons of both options, doing your best to appear as neutral as possible and then push these execs to make a decision one way or the other. If you feel very strongly that one option is the correct one, and you have facts to back this up, do not walk away from an opportunity to appear decisive and in control. I would much prefer to be fast and wrong (and then course correct) than taking too long to make a decision, or even worse never making one at all!

My journey was the other way around. I started at a company where CS was brand new, and then came to a company where CS was established. Looking back, here are some interesting findings. * Perceptions of what Customer Success is/isn't vary widely, even if the function already exists at the company. When CS doesn't exist yet, there's an explicit need to educate the executives, sales reps, product org, etc. on what the team will do and the results they will drive. At a company where CS is established, that need for ongoing education still exists-- it just takes a different flavor over time. * When there's no Customer Success (and even when there is), information on customers can be scattered all over the place. That's why we prioritized getting a CS tool early on, so if nothing else, we would have one place where customer documents, interactions, health, etc. were kept. It takes time to manage that change (put info here, not in your notepad) but it's worth it. * If Customer Success hasn't existed, the company may be getting its first taste of churn (what prompted them to create Customer Success anyway?). That first taste of churn is bitter, and chances are the data and workflows around risk mitigation and learning from churn aren't well built out. This is an area to invest early- capture the reason codes, build a churn forecasting process, and educate everyone on churn and risk. Moves you make today may take 6+ months to have an impact so make sure to set expectations.

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.

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.

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.