AMA: SurveyMonkey Sr Director of Customer Success, Cormac Kelly on Scaling a Customer Success Team

We structure the organization into four distinct pillars: 1. Portfolio Management (The Core CSMs) These are the owners of the commercial relationship and the customer strategy. We segment them based on customer complexity: Key Account CSMs: Dedicated to our largest, most strategic customers. They carry a smaller book of business so they can focus on deep relationship mapping, executive alignment, and capturing the Voice of the Customer (VOC). Scale Account CSMs: Responsible for the broader custo ...Read More

Honestly, This is such a great question. Too often, leaders feel they have to choose: you either run a lean, efficient machine that quite honestly can feel robotic to the customer, or you run a high-touch, white-glove model that make lead to burn out in your team and impacts your margins. For me, it’s not an 'either/or.' It’s about structuring for Relevance. Here is how I approach it, focusing on three specific layers: 1. Prioritization: Moving from activity to impact, lets be honest, the bigges ...Read More

In my experience, the biggest mistake is ambiguity of purpose, or lack of clarity of purpose. A founder shouldn't hire their first CSM to figure out how to make customers successful. The founder should do it themselves first and then hire someone to execute and improve it. Founders often feel the pain of managing customers and hire someone just to make the noise stop. They write a job description that includes technical support, onboarding, renewal management, upsell, and I've even seen some QA ...Read More