AMA: Clari Vice President, Customer Success, Nicole Alrubaiy on Establishing the Customer Success Function

There's no magic bullet here, but I've found a few key ingredients to retaining great talent. 1. Care deeply about the people on your team. Get to know them on a human level. Celebrate their wins. Understand how they want to grow, and be intentional about supporting that growth. 2. Orient everyone around the mission. It's hard to push through the tough days if you don't connect with a reward or benefit. It's even harder if you think you're the only one fighting. The team needs to know that they're all in the same boat (you included!) and that you're moving toward something great. It could be a brighter future for the team (we're fixing this process), or it could be a great accomplishment (we'll hit quota). Put that goal front and center and keep all eyes on it. Make sure to celebrate wins, however small, along the way. 3. Bring people along. Change is hard, and also constant in CS. Give your team space to share ideas, voice concerns, and help craft the program. We hold brainstorms and debates to make better decisions and the team appreciates the trust and transparency that we extend to them. Open-door policies are great, but if you're not willing to adjust tack, what's the point? 4. Be humbly human. You don't need to be right all the time, and you don't need to be emotionless. Admit to your mistakes, seek feedback often, and let your humanity show. It creates a safe space for your team members to bring their whole selves to work as well.

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.

What a wonderful opportunity- to start a fresh org! I see the Customer Success org as playing a key linking role between departments in your company to bring continuity to the customer journey, and with customers to make their voices heard within your organization. The first few weeks are about learning: * What are the gaps your company is trying to address by adding a Customer Success function? * Ask your customers: What have been the moments of truth (make or break moments) in their journey with your company so far? Where have they struggled? What has gone well? * Ask your coworkers: What opportunities do they see to make improvements in customer experience and cross-org partnership? Then you can turn to planning: * What are the key objectives of the new Customer Success Organization? How will you structure the team to meet those? * What should the new Customer Journey look like and what role does each team play in it? * Socialize these plans with your business partners, executive team, and some customers to get feedback and make them better. Then it's about doing: * Start with a few processes and metrics you can impact within a quarter. Get some quick wins and build from there. * Ensure you have a feedback mechanism for customer input and that you check in frequently with your business partners.

Working from personal experience here (I can't speak for everyone), what I've seen in small Customer Success teams is that they're scrappy. They've started as the "do anything to help" team and have had success in that. So much success, the org wants much more Customer Success. The downside, there's very little consistency or boundaries in their role. I recommend you start with taking an audit of the various roles/responsibilities that the CS team is owning or getting involved in. Chances are, you will find some opportunities to standardize and get the CSMs out of certain tasks/workflows through better internal partnerships and tooling. A great way to plan for what CSMs should be doing is to seek tons of feedback (internally and from customers) and build a Customer Journey from it. Clearly spell out the CSM role and expectations through that journey, and add tools where required. Also- consider the segments of your business. Should all customers be treated the same? Or would you want different CS motions for large vs. small customers, customers in different regions, industries, product lines or other? With very small teams it may not make sense to segment immediately, but having some thoughts on this early on can make the growing process smoother. All of the above helps you grow the team thoughtfully. As we're learning in today's market, we can't afford to overinflate headcount.

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.

We have a leader over post-sale who rolls into our Chief Revenue Officer. We call this org Customer Value and Adoption. Within this umbrella, we have Support, Services, and Customer Success. Within Customer Success, I oversee: * Customer Education (Community, Knowledge Base, Training) * Digital Adoption (In-app Engagement) * Product Success (Technical Specialists, Liaisons to Product) * CSM Having all of these teams aligned under Customer Success allows us to drive product adoption and value realization at scale and maximize the value of one-to-one CSM time with customers. Our CSM team is split by Region and Segment (EMEA vs. NA and Enterprise vs. Commercial). We don't have dedicated enablement or operations under our team, since we have centralized teams that support us (and do it well!).

Let's think bigger than just Sales here! Customer Success is the glue between all of the customer-impacting departments in your company (note: that's pretty much every department). Your job as a CS leader is to build partnerships with all of the business leaders that will drive the best outcomes for your customers and for your company as a result. Here are a few tips: * If your company has a framework for cross-departmental goals, make sure you study those. How does serving customers better impact the high-level company goals? How about each department's specific goal? * Craft your narrative for how your team's work impacts the other departments. Will you boost Sales productivity? Will you produce referenceable customers whom Marketing can leverage to grow the pipeline? Will you make the Customer to Product Management feedback cycle easier? Will you reduce the noise and burden of escalations on the Support and Engineering teams? * Sign up for goals that benefit both teams. An example we used recently was driving customers to use our new Support Portal rather than opening cases by email. CSMs talk to customers frequently so they were a natural choice to get customers registered and trained on how to use the new Portal. Both CSMs and Support benefit from the reduced email noise, and we strengthened our partnership with Support leadership as a result. KPIs for the sake of measurement are fun but useless. Zero in on the ones that are making a real impact to your company's top and bottom line and ask for partnership in helping to drive those. When you're establishing a new CS department, you might have the luxury to point to customers who are in the CS program vs. those who are not and compare churn and growth rates in those cohorts. Sales will perk up if you're showing them faster and larger expansions in the accounts managed by Customer Success. A real win I've had with Sales specifically was to have the Head of Sales add churn into the Sales Leader comp plans so a dollar saved was as good as a dollar earned (wildly unpopular with the sales leaders at first but it drove real change in the churn fight for our company).