What's your best customer success 30-60-90 day plan to make a big impact at a new company?

My focus is on learning, optimising, and driving impact. Here’s my structured 30-60-90 day approach:

30 Days – Learn & Align

Deep dive into company goals, customers, and key metrics (ARR, GRR, NRR).
Meet stakeholders (CS, Sales, Product, Support) & assess CS playbooks.
Know your team - Listen & Learn
Identify quick wins—engage with top accounts & address renewal risks.

60 Days – Optimise & Engage

Strengthen customer health monitoring & playbooks for onboarding, adoption, outcomes and renewals.
Build alignment with Sales & Product for expansion and feedback loops.
Empower the CS team with training & automation to improve efficiency.
Carve out initiatives and boost morale in the team.

90 Days – Execute & Scale

Implement data-driven engagement strategies to boost retention & expansion.
Establish a Customer Advisory Board (CAB) & enhance VoC programs - leverage Community
Present a long-term CS roadmap with measurable business impact.
Evaluate and Recognise.

Success in CS isn’t a one-time plan/change...it’s an ongoing cycle of learning, improving, and evolving with customers!

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)