Conor Holmes

Director, Customer Success EMEA, Confluent

Content

What hard skills are must haves to be a customer success leader? What are nice to haves?

Conor Holmes

Confluent Director, Customer Success EMEA • February 24

As a CS leader, it's critical to have the ability to analyse, interpret and understand data. Most organisations have various data sources to understand what is happening in the customer base. What's important for a CS leader is to combine these data sources to get a complete picture of what's hap......Read More

1612 Views

When joining a new team, is it better to have the right soft skills and have to learn the hard skills of the job? Or vice versa?

Conor Holmes

Confluent Director, Customer Success EMEA • February 24

Generally, when hiring CS team members, for me, it's all about soft skills; * Deep customer empathy * Great communication skills * Strategic thinking * Time and project management * Active listening * Problem-solving The hard skills are more related to domain knowledge, which can primaril......Read More

872 Views

What are the key processes you'd set up when expanding the customer success team from 1 to multiple people?

Conor Holmes

Confluent Director, Customer Success EMEA • May 19

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

859 Views

As a hiring manager, what do the best customer success candidates have in common?

Conor Holmes

Confluent Director, Customer Success EMEA • February 24

The best candidates can relate their experience to how they will be successful in the role. They will have thought about scenario-based questions and be ready to describe how they have tackled specific problems and scenarios. I have found that having a reasonably open presentation brief in the in......Read More

847 Views

If your customer success team has only one or two people responsible for covering multiple products with complex features, how would you recommend dividing workload in the short-term so as best to support long-term growth and expansion of the team?

Conor Holmes

Confluent Director, Customer Success EMEA • May 19

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

709 Views

What are the most important customer success skills or perspectives that others inside an organization could benefit from that would improve their day to day work?

Conor Holmes

Confluent Director, Customer Success EMEA • February 24

What I enjoy most about the customer success role is the lens of seeing customers grow from their initial commitment to successful renewals and expansions where the customer achieves their goals. Throughout this journey, many teams often engage and work with the customer to support this motion. H......Read More

696 Views

How do you retain good customer success talent?

Conor Holmes

Confluent Director, Customer Success EMEA • February 24

Every company is on some form of journey. Whether you are at an early-stage start-up or have been around for decades, your team needs to understand how what they do daily relates to the journey the company is on and how their daily interactions contribute to the company's goals. For me retaining ......Read More

693 Views

What are the best ways to get ahead of potential churn, to see the signs and stop it from happening?

Conor Holmes

Confluent Director, Customer Success EMEA • May 19

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

675 Views

What advice do you have for recent graduates that want to go straight into customer success?

Conor Holmes

Confluent Director, Customer Success EMEA • February 24

1. Learn about the role. I have included some links below that can help with this. 2. Network (don't be afraid, I've found the majority of people are more than willing to offer guidance and advice) 3. Ask for a mentor 4. Look for internships https://www.csinfocus.com/community htt......Read More

618 Views

What's your framework to prioritizing needs/deliverables when you're the first customer success manager at a company establishing the function?

Conor Holmes

Confluent Director, Customer Success EMEA • May 19

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