AMA: LinkedIn Head of North America Customer Success, LinkedIn Talent Solutions, Steph Gerpe on Establishing the Customer Success Function

A successful first 90 days breaks down to focus across three key areas: (1) Deep learning and curiosity around the product and the experience of the customer within that product; relationship building, (2) Hypothesis based experimenting and feedback collection and (3) Planning and alignment of go-forward motions 30 days: * Dedicate ample time to learning about your product - both internally and directly with customers. Why do customers purchase the product? How does the product function within a larger tools ecosystem? What are the barriers to success in using the product? What's the value narrative or ROI in the customer's language? How does the product influence outcomes that customers care about? How is the product priced? How is it viewed in the competitive landscape? * Build relationships internally - meet with cross functional partners to orient yourself to their priorities and OKRs, and how their teams drive customer success (we all own this job collectively). Develop perspectives on how you can best partner with these cross functionals - how can your goals ladder to their goals, which ladder to customer goals and outcomes. * Consider how you will spend your time. Set initial and ongoing goals for time spent internally and with customers. Make it a priority to stay close to the customer either personally through customer advocacy or sponsorship programs, through customer call shadowing or listening strategies, or through skip level/team 1:1s. * Build a bi directional, prioritized relationship with sales. Understanding the organization's pre-sale strategy will be critical to building an effective post sales experience. * If leading an established CS function, assess current processes and measurement strategies 60 days: * Leverage learnings to begin building hypotheses around your ongoing strategy. If setting up a CS team from scratch - you might start building the customer journey and determining the most effective touchpoints for successful product optimization and adoption. If leading an established CS team, this may look like assessing where changes can be made to optimize customer and team outcomes. * Involve the team in priority setting or priority refinement - generate energy around shared goals * If possible, choose a 1-2 key areas of investment to test your perspectives and strategy * Gain buy in from critical cross functionals (sales, marketing, enablement, product/engineering) * Build perspective around a metrics and measurement strategy - how will you know the team is successful? Does the team have the right "skin in the game"? Are you influencing things both within the circle of control for a CS org (for example, team activity targets), but also extending beyond that into circle of influence metrics (customer use of product, value optimization)? 90 days: * Begin synthesizing your learnings from your ongoing internal and external engagements, coupled with anything you have piloted or tested. Refine your strategy across key areas: the customer journey, how other teams will contribute to this journey (marketing, digital teams, services teams), metrics and measurement for the CS org, team culture & morale * Focus on team morale and strategic alignment - host team conversations around how the CS strategy drives customer results, which in turn drives business results. Create clarity in R&R and how results will be measured * Spend time socializing how you are investing your time and focus - this can help to build trust with cross functionals and anchor initiatives to broader business goals (ex: retention, churn mitigation, customer ROI, etc)

I think one of the biggest 'surprises' was that regardless of the maturity level of the CS organization, some of the same considerations held true in both cases: * The role of CS is constantly evolving alongside other customer facing roles. Even if you have the ability to build a strategy at the start, the need to commit to regular check-ins on how CS strategically fits within the broader organizational goals remains present. Examples include: Are the measurements and incentives the right ones to drive behaviors that lead to ideal customer and business outcomes? Do we have the right skillsets within the CS team to drive results? How quickly will we be expected to scale? * Cross functional relationships were very key in both places to maintain a value-based customer journey and agility in creating value for the customer - across product, engineering, sales, marketing. One notable difference in this respect is the proximity to which CS teams find themselves with these other teams in each scenario. For example, when a CS team is being built, there's often a necessary and natural deep partnership between CS and product/engineering to understand customer response to product features, gather continuous feedback, iterate on that feedback, and maintain product quality. This often creates a much more nimble and fast feedback-to- action process than you might find in a more established organization where CS is one input in a more complex feedback collection network. * Consistently investing in building and refining the CS impact narrative is key in both cases - when establishing a CS function, it's critical to think early about how impact and value will be measured so you can build perspective around headcount modeling and resourcing, so you can talk confidently about how the team contributes to business outcomes, and so you can think in the right ways about scaling outcomes. When moving into an org where CS is already established, you often have to consider these same things, but for slightly different purposes and within different constraints. In this case, you are working within the bounds of existing processes and measurement models, so it becomes important to assess current state, determine where gaps in impact and potential exist, assess the ideal pace of change, and build step-work plans to evolve.

There are many facets of CS that may differ based on the size of the organization. With differences in organizational size, come differences in priorities, growth strategies, cost measures and balance for scale, as well as customer journey architectures/needs. A few specific areas to note: * At least initially, the size of the CS org is likely to grow based on the expanding customer pool. In the early days of an organization, more customers may equal more customers success managers until a balance of scale is introduced. * The skillsets of CSMs may evolve. Small companies may start with CSMs who are versatile in nature - technical, yet consultative, able to work well and closely with engineering and product teams, leadership capability for player/coach models. This agility allows an organization to flex to determine the ideal longer-term skillset of the customer success persona based on the needs of the customer. * Organization priorities are likely to shift, impacting how customer success teams are measured. In small companies, building brand and retaining customers at all costs may be key; therefore, customer success deliverables may be more extensive with less of a focus on ability to scale. CS teams may be measured on retention/churn. As companies grow in size, the need to balance cost and ability to scale likely becomes more prominent, so there's a need to assess scalability of what a CSM delivers. CSM orgs may be measured based on cost to serve or other margin-related factors. * In larger organizations, there may be more teams contributing to the customer journey - including services organizations that may have point-in-time deliverables (either for fee or included in price of contract). Examples may include onboarding or implementation specialists, technical consultants, insights analysts, etc. It becomes more important to align on a holistic customer journey when there are multiple points of interaction.

This is one of the most critical components of customer success leadership both when establishing a CS function or joining a team with an already established CS org. If a CS team sits within the sales organization, there may be a natural alignment already anchoring the full team to joint business-based KPIs like churn reduction or retention/renewal outcomes. In this case, it's important to recognize how each team contributes to those shared outcomes - while the KPIs may be shared, the path to achieving the KPIs can (and likely should) differ by team. For example, CS may lean more into product adoption and customer value assurance in service to retention or renewal outcomes, whereas sales is responsible for growing the customer base or growing the renewal. If the sales and CS teams are managed separately within the organizational structure, it becomes even more key to have conversations around how CS incentivization and measurement models serve the broader organizational and business outcome goals. For example, showcasing how boosting customer product adoption through well-timed customer engagements leads to customer value and stronger renewal outcomes. One of the most effective ways to anchor teams on commonly shared KPIs is to be very specific about how the actions (inputs) lead to results (outcomes) - ensuring this narrative is reinforced consistently through the organization. It's also important to be transparent on each team (sales/CS) around how team members are measured if there are differences in accountability structures - this builds trust and confidence that while actions may differ, 'skin in the game' is present for all teams in service to business outcomes.

I'd recommend starting with these key areas when creating a CS function: * Defining customer success - what does successful use of your product or platform look like? When a customer in successful in your platform, what are the outcomes? What is considered optimal use of your product, gathered from a variety of perspectives (product, leadership, marketing, beta customers)? * Defining the customer journey - considering how customer success is defined and what outcomes successful customers should strive for, what are the key touchpoints in the customer journey to promote that success? Examples include the onboarding experience, product adoption at certain time intervals, objective setting, progress check-ins, value-based discussions, renewal/commercial milestones. How does each customer-facing role engage in this journey? * Consider the overall team structure and the roles and responsibilities of CS - Based on the customer journey, what role will CS play in promoting customer success? Will CS train/enable customers on the platform or will this be done digitally/self-service? How will CS onboard/implement customers? What customer engagements/moments will CS own? * Establish team onboarding/training/upskilling - How will you ramp your CS team members? How will you ensure they maintain skills necessary for the job? * Consider necessary tools - What tools/internal platforms will be needed for the success of the CS function? How will customer outcomes be tracked? How will CS manage day to day responsibilities? How will CS stay connected to internal functions such as engineering and support? * Define measurements, reporting, and accountability metrics - Which customer metrics (adoption, health, sentiment) will best predict outcomes (churn, retention, renewal growth)? Which inputs (activities, customer engagements) promote those customer outcomes? How will your report on customer wins and risks? How will you hold the CS team accountable to these inputs/outputs?

This is a great and timely question, especially considering that most product/feature sets are evolving at an extremely rapid pace in a technology ecosystem becoming more expansive by the day as well (thanks, AI). One of the most important places to start is to consider what business objectives your product helps to serve, even if not considered critical to the customer's business. There's a reason your product is purchased across your customer base. What sets your product apart in the marketplace? Why are customers inclined to buy your product? How does your product drive business results in their organization - what is the value narrative? What happens when customers optimally use the product - what results do they see? Being able to effectively articulate this can allow you to then create measurable criteria to showcase progression against those objectives, thus proving customer ROI. Having a clear view into customer objectives also allows you to work with your product and marketing teams to align products and feature sets to these objectives, enabling your CS team to build success plans with customers anchored in these objectives, build strategies to drive product adoption/stickiness based on these use cases, and co-create a value narrative.