Conor Holmes

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

May 18 @ 10:00AM PST
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Confluent Director, Customer Success EMEA, Conor Holmes on Scaling a Customer Success Team
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Conor Holmes
Conor Holmes
Confluent Director, Customer Success EMEAMay 18
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 ......Read More
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Conor Holmes
Conor Holmes
Confluent Director, Customer Success EMEAMay 18
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 upo......Read More
508 Views
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Conor Holmes
Conor Holmes
Confluent Director, Customer Success EMEAMay 18
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 clo......Read More
639 Views
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Conor Holmes
Conor Holmes
Confluent Director, Customer Success EMEAMay 18
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......Read More
432 Views
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Conor Holmes
Conor Holmes
Confluent Director, Customer Success EMEAMay 18
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 ......Read More
623 Views
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Conor Holmes
Conor Holmes
Confluent Director, Customer Success EMEAMay 18
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; ......Read More
470 Views
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Conor Holmes
Conor Holmes
Confluent Director, Customer Success EMEAMay 18
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 op......Read More
463 Views
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Conor Holmes
Conor Holmes
Confluent Director, Customer Success EMEAMay 18
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 s......Read More
582 Views
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