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

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 toda ...Read More

Having been the first EMEA customer success hire at a couple of high-growth companies, I recommend several steps to tackle the priorities ahead; 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. Understand the install base - How many customers, what they spend with the company, plus what segment and geography they fall into. Once that ...Read More

I would suggest that this is done in two ways. 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. Align with the formal company ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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, ...Read More

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 introduct ...Read More

This is undoubtedly a challenging scenario. Here are recommendations for smaller customer success teams to follow in this situation. 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. Look for friction points in the ...Read More