AMA: Confluent Director, Customer Success EMEA, Conor Holmes on Scaling a Customer Success Team

Having been the first EMEA customer success hire at a couple of high-growth companies, I recommend several steps to tackle the priorities ahead; 1. Ask why the company requires a customer success manager and function, including how your experience can support that. This should be clarified in the interview process and help define your short-term focus areas. 2. Understand the install base - How many customers, what they spend with the company, plus what segment and geography they fall into. Once that view is understood, overlay the current team alignment to understand the existing customer engagement framework. 3. Analyse how your customers engage with you, leveraging whatever available data sources. Some examples may include support ticket usage, login's, no. of meetings, marketing case studies, 4. High-level customer journey mapping - it's good to understand the steps the customer goes through to become classified as a customer. Understand this, plus what happens immediately afterwards. Is there a clear path for how customers will derive value from their investment? Is that consistent across customers, or does it vary by customer cohort? 5. Historical and forward-looking views- review the trends. What's the retention rate currently and like historically? (go back years, if possible, can be helpful), what's the expansion rate? Is the company tracking NRR, or can you get a view of that? What is the forecast for the current quarter plus two next quarters? 6. Interview as many customers as you can, asking what's working, what's not and how you can improve 7. The trends will then give you an initial view of focus areas and recommendations for what the business and customers require you to do in the near to medium term. Next, leverage the customer journey map you did earlier in the process to layer on people, process and technology initiatives to improve the areas of the business you wish to impact. This should allow you to design the blueprint for the proposed customer engagement framework.

Scaling customer success doesn't necessarily mean adding more CS headcount, at least not immediately. Before that, some foundations and a solid go-to-market framework should be implemented. * Seek alignment from executive leadership on the metrics and KPIs the business wants to deliver upon and how this team will be deemed successful, or if that doesn't exist, provide a recommendation. * Create a detailed view of the customer journey and what the engagement framework should be, i.e. what exists today and what should exist in the future, including where there are gaps in documentation and process. * A point to note here is to be agnostic of who does what when going through this process, putting the customer first and focusing on what they need vs defining the roles that will support the customer can provide flexibility around role definition and alignment. * Once the gaps around what's missing are understood, see what resources are available internally to start building processes and documentation. * I would then work through the following steps to determine the next customer success hire or hires. * What gaps in customer onboarding do you have, and will the next hire need to focus on that area? * What are the most important customer segments that need coverage from a CSM? Look at the number of customers per CSM. * Which roles will typically engage with the customer? * How technical do they need to be? * What will the responsibilities of the CSM be (this can vary wildly from company to company) * What does the employee onboarding process look like, and what do you estimate their ramp time to productivity? What do you need to do to condense that process? * Understand your budget in the near term, set expectations around what you can do with that budget, and be explicit about what you cannot do. * Run scenarios based on the company's performance over the following quarters and years, and start planning what you would need for that. Think about customer segments and how to serve them, scaled CS and digital touch points.

This will depend on how fast the team is expanding. 1 to 3 people will need a different approach than 1 to 10+ Generally, you will want enough processes to quickly get a team member up to speed. Yet, if you are adding only one more in the near term, onboarding could be done via shadowing and close collaboration rather than a heavy process. Here are some recommended processes; * Team member onboarding checklist - description of what the new members need to get started. This should include introductions to all the functions and people relevant to the role. * Set up a buddy system so that the next team member can ask questions * Customer assignment - clarify who the customers they will engage with initially * Design a how-to-work with a new account team and customer process * Create monthly, quarterly and annual expectations and goals * Think about the future roadmap for the team, run scenarios around new customer acquisition and what that means for the specific processes covering segmentation, compensation plans, additional processes and documentation * The future state will have many detailed playbooks for scenario-based customer and internal interactions

I would suggest that this is done in two ways. 1. Organically by the CSM team - ensure your team understands what success looks like outside standard metrics. Examples could include a meeting where the team engaged with a new senior stakeholder, successful joint marketing activity with a customer, identification of new use cases or value drivers, a successful customer on-site etc. Then, encourage your team to share these smaller wins internally to demonstrate progress. 2. Align with the formal company readouts, or if they don't exist, create a forum bringing in cross-functional representatives to provide a readout of what's worked and what hasn't in the previous period (I would recommend this to be monthly or quarterly).

This is undoubtedly a challenging scenario. Here are recommendations for smaller customer success teams to follow in this situation. 1. Understand the highest priorities for the business and how that translates to positively impacting customers. There are typically many tasks that CS teams can be doing, yet only some that drive significant internal and external (customer) value. Therefore, focus on those high-value activities that align with your business objectives. 2. Look for friction points in the customer journey and how to solve them. For example, you work on ways customers can self-serve on requests frequently coming to the CS team. 3. Leverage the teams around you to lighten the load and look for ways to automate some of the repetitive requests. 4. Segment the install base so you understand which customers to focus on in the short term. 5. Work through a weekly, monthly and quarterly plan around how to engage your customers. Typically there are a smaller number of customers that will de-risk your business by focusing on them initially. However, if you work in a higher volume, more transactional business, time would be best spent on understanding what touchpoints your customers require at a minimum to ensure they are getting value and building them out by leveraging digital where possible.

The first customer success hire (especially if you are more junior) is both daunting but equally an excellent opportunity to impact the business. As a more junior hire, you will most likely get more flexibility to ask and learn, so embrace that opportunity. Here are a few steps I would take; * Learn as much as you can about the industry in that your company is operating in * Get a deep understanding of what the product does and, more specifically, how that drives value for customers. * Understand the book of business. Are they renewing, expanding or churning? Then, try to figure out why each of these outcomes is occurring. * Once you understand the why, clarify what your manager expects of you in terms of influencing this. * Speak to and meet as many customers as possible, especially your largest ones (ideally in person). * Listen carefully to their experience, capture this and send this feedback to the business. * Track your performance against the KPIs and metrics set forth, and be proactive with your performance against them. * Volunteer to take on new opportunities as they arise.

A champion changing regularly is a challenge and risk factor, but over-reliance on one individual is the problem. In an ideal situation, there is a clear, mutually agreed-upon value-driven reason why the customer purchased the product. I would suggest finding a way to capture this early in the opportunity close process. One of the core responsibilities of the CS rep is to be able to multi-thread within a customer account, i.e. interacting with more folks than just the champion. My suggestion to manage this issue would be on multiple levels; * Capture the problem you are solving and the value statement the solution is solving for early in the engagement process and ensure this is made aware to multiple customer contacts. * Introduce an executive sponsor from your organisation into the customer to bridge above the champion as a connection point (more relevant in Enterprise CS vs Commercial or PLG) * Have a valuable cadence that brings multiple stakeholders from the customer organisation together to understand the value of the solution of your offering. Is there a regular readout you can provide that demonstrates this? * Work with marketing on the campaigns you could run to drive additional engagement advocacy within the account.

There are many signals of potential churn; at scale, that's the inherent problem with data points; there are so many. Nothing replaces speaking to your customers regularly and digging into what's happening in their environment. Yet as a guide, you could look at the signals/question below, put a score against each and create a simple weighted risk or engagement score against each customer to identify where you need to focus, i.e. healthy vs at risk. There are CS tools out there to optimise this, but it can be done in-house manually without investing in a tool if you want to quickly get something off the ground. * Has there been a successful onboarding? * Has a ticket been submitted in the last x amount of days? * Is the customer expanding? * Are they using specific features? * Has there been a portal login during the last month? * Was there QBR or value-driven engagement held in the previous three months? * Is there an upcoming meeting scheduled with the customer? * Has the champion changed in the last six months? * Has the customer confirmed (verbally or in writing) that they are receiving value from their investment?