Silos to Synergy: A Playbook for CSM and CS Ops Collaboration
In today’s competitive market, the dual goals of delivering exceptional customer experiences and achieving operational efficiency are crucial to driving a company’s success. The linchpin? A dynamic and effective collaboration between Customer Success Managers (CSMs) and Customer Success Operations (CS Ops). This session explores the transformative power of bridging these pivotal teams to unlock seamless customer success and scalable growth. Dive deep into strategies that optimize their synergy, streamline workflows, and leverage combined insights to enhance both customer satisfaction and business outcomes. Join us to learn how to harness this collaboration to propel your organization forward.
Well hello everyone as we continue on with track one I'm excited to introduce
our next speakers
Prior to getting into this I wanted to recommend as well or encourage everyone
to please continue to engage via the app
We've got a couple of slido poles in here as well. We're going to be engaging
in q&a towards the end to that point as well
I know that we've been seeing a lot of engagement via via q&a and this room is
really full relative to a lot of the other session
So I'm anticipating a lot in terms of volumes of questions as you're navigating
the output in your questions through if you see other ones
And there that that you would like to also see answered make sure you're upv
oting those so we can prioritize those whenever we get to this
But thanks again for joining us for scaling cs working smarter not harder
In this case we're going to listen to a couple of
I'm very interested in hearing this because it sounds like they're going to be
covering a lot of the challenges that I face as an enterprise csm
Trying to coach up a lot of my customers and how to bridge the gap or in this
case kind of kind of mend that silo
Disenergy if you will, um, so my pleasure in in welcoming diana park and tim
palmer
From uh from adverdi and uh, please welcome them as we talk now about silos dis
energy a playbook for csm and cs ops
Collaboration join me and welcoming them to the stage
All right, everyone
Welcome and thanks for attending
Hope you've had a fabulous time here so far here at pulse. I know what tim and
I have for sure
Um, we're pretty excited also to share some insights with you all
Um, but before we get into it just a little introduction. Um, I'm diana the
Director of cs ops at adverdi. I've been in sales and customer success for just
over eight years now
Um and currently driving the operational strategy behind scaling and optimizing
customer success initiatives in adverity
And hi everyone. I'm tim head of key account management and account automation
at verity
I'm responsible for both our largest and smallest customers as well as building
processes that work for our account managers or
CSMs as well as senior stakeholders in the business to contribute to our
customer success
And just a little bit about adverity. It's an integrated data platform allowing
our customers to improve their marketing performance
By integrating and automating their government and management of their data
And at verity we're using gain site in order to track our customer renewals and
upsells
Ensure clean data generate health scores and risks customer marketing and much
more
And adverity is an Austrian company and I like to justify my ridiculously long
job title by pretending it's translated from german
Right. So these pictures that you're seeing um are from when tim and I came to
paul's last year for the first time
Uh, and this year we've felt pretty inspired to share our methods for success
Um, so we're pretty grateful to be able to share with you guys all
Um how we at adverity have gone about collaborating on some initiatives
So ps we know uh, it may seem obvious
Like collaboration right everyone knows how to do it
Um
But we feel that sharing with you the structured uh approach to collaboration
will help you train your muscle memory
Um instead of having to reinvent the wheel every single time
Um and help you tackle and help you optimize and scale easier
And in case you can't tell that lady on the left isn't Diana. She was taking
the picture
I honestly have no memory of who that is if you're in the room give us a wave
um, but yeah
So there might be a few sore heads in the room with us today from yesterday's
party
So to make sure you're all alive and awake
Um want to make sure that you're paying attention get your phones out and I
wanted to ask you a question
So we know who's in the audience. Does your business have both a cs ops team
and a csm team?
And let's see
Super curious
Okay, it's kind of neck and neck. Oh
Come on cs ops come on cs ops
Wow. Oh
We've got wow there's a lot of people in the audience today and yes
Is winning?
Cool
Okay, so 60 40. Oh, it's still it's still rising. Come on. We have a chance to
see a stop
anyone not answered then
Yeah, okay, I think think we're there about 60 40
so um
Yeah, first of all, it's really good to get an idea of who's in the audience if
you
Do not have a cs ops team in your organization
Then don't worry. Hopefully there's still something to take away from today's
presentation
Just in terms of collaborating with different departments different teams
different colleagues in general
Um, so hopefully you do get some takeaways and for those of you with both
organizations like us
You probably feel pretty privileged and and know that it's a luxury to have
those teams
And with that in mind, we know we have to make the most of that privilege
So we'd like to get your idea of why do you think it's important
Um to have good collaboration between these two teams for a business
Uh, so again phones out. We've got a mind map. Let's see what comes up synergy
Efficiency definitely
alignment
Yep
Efficiency winning big time, but a lot of these
Makes sense and align with what we're going to talk about today parts minds and
process. That's a nice one
Money
Friendship
um
Yeah, there is a lot on there and as we said quite a lot that matches with what
we want to talk about today
All right, so
I'm loving these
It's all coming in cool
So
I mean efficiency is definitely the winner there
And in terms of being efficient. I think we couldn't
move on
Yeah, so you've all given some really good examples of why good collaboration
is essential to a business
Um, and if you look at that in combination with what every business wants
um
Collaboration can actually help you get there a little bit easier
So what does every business want? Uh, of course someone said it money. Yeah, we
want to increase revenue for sure
Number two, cause a consistent customer experience
improved problem solving and innovation
Enhanced efficiency productivity adaptability and agility
And lastly, of course it increases employee engagement and morale
Um, and hopefully hopefully hopefully by the end of the session your csm and cs
ops team will have a playbook you can follow
Um for a structured consistent and synergistic approach
Uh to drive change and reach your business goals
And here's a couple of examples as a preview
I'll come back to it later, but a couple of examples of how the change we've
driven together has had positive results at ad verity
As I said, this is a preview and we'll come back to it later, but as you can
see it's positive results
So with that in mind, let's have a look at the agenda for today
So our playbook centers around three key areas of collaboration as a strategy
Which we recommend as it's worked well for us
We'll be looking at understanding and compromise because like all relationships
. This is definitely a requirement to successful collaboration
Structuring a roadmap. We're not here today to tell you exactly what we've
built and what we're going to build
Although we will have some examples
We want to talk to you about how we've found a method in structuring our
roadmap and how that contributes to success
And then change management and communicating that change and why it's important
throughout any initiative
And of course, we'll summarize all of that at the end with an example and have
some time for Q&A as well
So let's get started with our first topic which is understanding and compromise
So when collaborating
These are the kinds of questions you want to be asking yourself as they'll help
guide the process and keep you on the right track
Something we feel is crucial to collaborating successfully is first being able
to map out your responsibilities
Who your stakeholders are and what their responsibilities are as well
Whoever you're working with may have a completely different perspective than
you and may be looking at situations through a different lens
But what's really important to remember is when planning for success
Who within your organization are you ultimately trying to build and improve
processes for?
And if you're using a system like gain site for example, who needs to
demonstrate that ROI internally
And if you're building something from scratch or you're trying to improve a
process
There's always the elements of time and resource
We can't always have the ideal outcome that we want
So compromise on what is achievable and will have the outcome for all
stakeholders within the required time frame
In ensuring you're collaborating for the good of CS ops and CSMs
We need to make sure we're aligning with company values and making sure we're
unsilowing other teams as well
While taking control and ownership of what you're enabling and when
Remembering your core stakeholders of course at any given time
And try not to get distracted from your roadmap, which we'll come on to later
But first just to give you an idea of our teams as you can see we have some
different responsibilities
But we also have some crossover
Both of our teams have a shared overall interest in customer retention adoption
Scale and efficiency and expansion and because of these shared interests of
course
It's going to mean that we're going to have similar perspectives, but we also
have different perspectives as well
The way I like to look at it we use these differences to our advantage and not
to our downfall
We have our collaboration superpower and it's not a struggle
It's really important to be able to share and communicate our ideas in an open
format
So at the end of the day we're able to carry out the vision for the business
And now that does not mean that every suggestion from both sides makes the
final cut and often
One or the other of us has to put their foot down, but by compromising we're
finding the best of both worlds
Right to summarize
Why should you guys consciously commit to having a mutual understanding and
make compromises?
Of course, it builds trust and respect
It improves decision making
It enhances team cohesion and reduces conflicts
It promotes adaptability and
Lastly, it boosts productivity and efficiency
Okay
Still with me topic number two
Another area you will want to think about when effectively collaborating is in
the way you structure
Your roadmap between your CSMs and your CS ops team
Right, so what you're seeing on the right are our seven stages
Each project goes through at our Verity and that scope scope resync build test
communicate and enable
deploy and close
In your company this might be slightly different
Or the same but regardless of what your stages look like
Just remember to attack any initiative
You need to actually mutually understand the stages each project goes through
together
And what initiatives you're actually tackling and when
And also who actually owns each task within the project
So these three things are really important to think on when it comes to stages
All right, so
Another aspect our teams need to take into consideration is that we need to
mutually understand that we're going to be working together
In a specific in a certain way
So our project management method
needs to be understood
between us both and
Maybe you might be working in different ways
but
Like a waterfall method where each stage of a project is always one after
another or maybe you're working in a little bit of more agile way
Which means you have an ever evolving way of working through the stages and you
're adapted to change
Or maybe you're like us we're mixing a little bit of the both
But regardless of what method you're using your stakeholders
Need to know and agree how you will be working together and that's the most
important part
Okay, another thing that is important to us when structuring the roadmap is
thinking about
When thinking about successful collaboration is having scoping documentation
Of course you need to discuss and scope
And agree on what's needed together with your stakeholders before actually
starting the build
But documenting is actually equally important here as well
Documentation really allows you to visualize and understand and agree the next
steps easily
It also allows you to optimize processes later
More efficiently and this is what ours looks like here
The other thing by the way that scoping documentation allows you to do is
clarify or explain logic
To stakeholders who are disputing or showing resistance. We don't know that
happens. So that's also really helpful
I'm personally very glad that one of us loves scoping documentation
But there we have it. That's how we like to structure our roadmap and this is
why
So it allows you to align goals and expectations ensuring that all teams
understand the priorities timelines and objectives
Reducing misunderstandings and aligning everyone towards shared outcomes
It improves coordination consistency and efficiency with a clear roadmap and
structure teams can better coordinate their efforts
Plan resources effectively and avoid duplicated work, ultimately speeding up
project type nights
Enhancing accountability a shared roadmap clarifies responsibilities making it
easier to track progress hold each team accountable and make adjustments as
needed
And facilitating communication and transparency
It creates a common framework for updates. So everyone is informed of changes
challenges or new dependencies
fostering transparency across departments
And lastly it supports strategic decision making by laying out the big picture
teams can make more strategic decisions
Priorize high impact work and adjust plans with the overall vision in mind
Okay, and to finish up this roadmap topic. I have a rhetorical question for you
. So no need to get earphones out at this point
While on a road trip who has asked this question before are we there yet?
I know I definitely have
There's a lot of hands up as well. Yeah
Yeah, definitely a popular one
And
Like most people on a road trip
You and other stakeholders are inevitably going to ask the same question when
revamping processes data or systems
Um, but just remember what the answer to this is
Never
You're never going to be um finished. So, um roadmaps are in a constant state
of evolution and iteration
Uh, so it's important to regularly align on your objectives
As well as well as creating them in the first place
So in going back to our earlier point on compromise when you release
It doesn't actually need to be perfect or perfection
It just needs to suit the main objective for the business and you can always
iterate on it later
um
And if you have mutual understanding like we do your stakeholders and
colleagues can build into the fact that version two
Will build on what's already been released from before
And nothing another thing that you might have heard throughout your sessions
Just remember
simple is best
You need to walk before you can actually run
Okay topic number three change management
So
Let's face it
We all have a very strange relationship with change
We often know we need to change or we want to change
But we only want to do this on our own terms and conditions
Especially when it's unprecedented change. That's when it's completely out of
our control
Um, that's when we want to actually resist the most
So it's important here when working with other teams
And stakeholders, um, it's really important to anticipate and plan ahead. This
is where uh change management comes in
I think a lot of you probably had have heard about change management throughout
some sessions here
Uh, I know I have and some of you may have not so i'm going to give you a
little bit of a definition here
Uh, but change management is a structured approach to effectively transitioning
individuals
And teams and entire organizations from a current state to a desired future
state
So, uh by applying these uh principles seen here on the right
Um, change management can actually help guide you through some complex
transformations
So let's go over these in a little bit more detail
Starting with clear objectives before we start any initiative we set a clear
objective in a kickoff
And then looking at sponsorship and leadership engagement stakeholder
participation
The leadership team is a whole need to champion the change and process from
their end by having syncs with their teams setting an example
And providing the necessary support they will be the sponsors endorsing the
change and legitimizing the process
And giving transparent continuous communication with tailored messaging to help
manage the team's expectations
Reduce resistance and keep everyone informed
We identify all other stakeholders affected by the change and involve them in
the planning and execution
We try and do this to help generate buy-in address concerns early and create a
sense of ownership
But of course there may be that resistance and we need to assess and address it
To be proactive the responsible stakeholders will need to outline what the
current process is and what the new process will look like
And discuss and document how the change might affect people
We then try and outline the timelines resources and steps for implementation
At the same time there's a need to be reactive
The responsible stakeholders will address concerns as and when they arise by
showing empathy and addressing any misconceptions
And of course we need to offer training and support
So the responsible stakeholders equip everyone with the skills knowledge and
tools needed to adapt to the new way of working
And once the new process has gone live
We're also going to be offering short-term wins and recognition
So celebrating and rewarding those short-term successes help demonstrate
progress build momentum and keep motivations high for the team
And the sponsors and responsible stakeholders also need to make sure they're
monitoring and taking on board feedback
This ensures that people are not reverting back to old practices and that the
new
behaviors become habitual as well as taking on feedback for future iterations
All right last two
As changes that never linear as you've seen in what i've said earlier
All stakeholders need to make adjustments and be able to be flexible
Along the way
At the same time though you need to actually consider the existing
organizational culture
And and how that that change might align or not align with the current values
and behaviors
Okay, so
overall
Change management is a key component as you've seen
To communication for organizations who want to effectively adapt grow and
improve like anything
So just to summarize why you should consider change management
In your approach when communicating with other teams
Of course it increases adoption
Encourages greater engagement and productivity
Minimizes resistance
achieves a desired business outcomes quicker and lastly it creates a lasting
impact
So we've gone through our key pillars of collaboration and to finish off
We wanted to give you a concrete example of a project that diana and i launched
at adverity using our playbook for success
At adverity we had an issue with opportunity management
Historically we'd built a basic op management report in gain site
But it was very manual and only covered upsells or downsells
Whereas we wanted the ability to see every renewal as an opportunity
And without this in place we had for years been working on spreadsheets quarter
after quarter with potential for human error
It also meant forecasting was difficult to do and again relying on manual
calculations
So what was the solution?
In order to mature as a business it was integral that we could provide our c-su
ite with regular and automated forecasting
timely results and encourage us asms to work far more proactively with renewal
management and upsells
And diana and i were very excited to be tasked with launching
Gain sites renewal center which fulfilled all of the needs
But of course knowing the problem and knowing the solution
It's not enough to just get you from a to b. So how did we do it?
Of course we considered all of our change management principles of course
from making
Making sure we had clear objectives
To mapping out a release and educate release an education calendar to also
planning out how we were going to monitor feedback and be
flexible post launch and all while documenting
Using our scope being document following our structured project management
approach and assigning tasks and deadlines
All of this required mutual understanding of our objectives making compromises
and then confirming agreement
So
One small example very small
Example where understanding and compromise
Specifically came into play was when i wanted to bring in an approval process
on all closed one or closed lost renewal opportunities where
Tim
He didn't prefer this because he thought it might be a little bit of overkill
But i was able to show him how this small change would actually help the
behavior
Change the behavior and the thought process for csm's
Encouraging them to truly see every renewal opportunity
As a tangible contribution to the customers to the company's retention success
And put an effort into accurate opportunity management keeping that data clean
And looking back on this today, we can say this small change has actually
slowed things down
It's actually made efficiencies in many other areas
So just so little summarize at this point
Overall implementing renewal center
Using our playbook has meant we had a good adoption from our csm's
With the least amount of resistance
And now we're in a better position to retain revenue
Enhance efficiency and have accurate reporting
And here's a few examples of other initiatives that we've completed together
and a few more on our road map for 2025
Which as always is subject to change a couple of my personal favorites are
customer health scores
Giving us the confidence to know where we should be spending our time and
attention
Looking at next year. I'm really keen to increase the amount of digital and
automated communication
We have to make our csm's lives easier. They're work more efficient and of
course improve our customer relationships
So, um, I know this approach
To some may feel a little bit rigid
But actually having haven't taken this approach ourselves
We have found it has allowed us to be much more flexible actually
Um, so this structured approach has, um, allowed us to be more consistent
Uh consistency has allowed us to identify and understand areas of optimization
And optimization has allowed us to drumroll
Have exactly what all businesses want, which is what I said at the very
beginning
And at the beginning I gave you a little bit of a preview
Uh, but again, I wanted to share a couple of results
Which highlight how the collaboration between diana and I have increased
efficiency and driven revenue for ad verity
We introduced the csm's function in the second half of 2022
And the amount of processes and efficiencies we have been able to introduce
together since then
Far exceed anything that was happening before
You can see on the left that the portfolio size that each csm is able to handle
has increased dramatically over the years
Um up 34% and not only that but on the right you can see the amount of upsell
driven per csm has also increased substantially
By 43%
And we're really proud of what we've been able to achieve and definitely
ambitious to drive this further with more initiatives using our collaboration
playbook
All right, so you've seen the results
Uh, and here's our full playbook to get you there too
So please feel free to take a picture
Um here so you have something to take away from our session
Um because this structured approach
Will help train your muscle memory as I said earlier
Instead of having to reinvent the wheel every single time you tackle an
initiative
Um and by having a method that you follow every single time it'll help you
identify areas of optimization actually a little bit faster
So with that we have some time for some q&a
Thank you both very much. Thank you both very much
Um, oh my dear goodness as anticipated a lot a lot of questions coming through
Um all right very well. I'm going to pose these to each of you. Um, no pressure
for either to answer
I want to sign I I know y'all will uh y'all will be able to handle this one
But um first and foremost can you define what cs ops means in your context?
It's a really good question because I know this can mean different things in
different companies
I'll take this one by the way. I'm assuming
um
Yeah, so for us what it really means is that we're a cross functional team
Um, we within our department have
Um csms. We have account management. We have uh, was it support team? We have
solutions consulting sales
All of these different teams. I'm probably missing one. Uh, but all of these
teams. Um, we help process
Uh, um, where we help operate their processes their data their systems and
making sure that the customer success
Uh vision is kind of realized. So my team operates those teams if that makes
any sense
Does that answer whoever's question?
Very well very well. Yeah, oftentimes a tough one to nail down, right? Yeah, um
, all right
This is fantastic. This is a very similar rally cry to I hear this quite often
So how do you justify the need to create a csm ops team to your management?
So in this example here currently there's csms and oh, it's an honest. Okay, uh
, currently the csms do both customer facing activities and
And scaling csm processes so a lot
I think it's really about, um
The fact that it's not efficient and you've told me you you've previously
worked in a role where you were doing both of those things
And it should become clear that you can't be stretched in too many places
So as I said, we introduced cs ops in the second half of 2022
Um, we'd introduced gain site before that
It wasn't really getting to where we needed to be. It's just not efficient
So I think if you
Really feel the need to be pushing for a cs ops team member or team by itself
You really have to put the evidence together. You have to say look we're being
split across too many areas
Um, we're not focusing on the customers in the right way because actually by
having a cs ops team
Ultimately, you will be driving initiatives that help you focus on the
customers
But that can't be on a group of csms. That's just not fair
Um, so yeah, I would suggest get the evidence together
Um, make a case
And um, yeah, if you want to come and find us at lunch, we can talk about that
a little bit more as well
On good point. Yeah, having those proof points to be able to manage back up
Especially to the ones who would have the budget who would be able to help
create the said team
Yeah, um most certainly, um, all right very well, uh, what kpis should cs ops
be measured on?
Oh
Heavy question. Yeah
I've bad i'm going to take this one again. I'm assuming but um
Yeah, so we've gone through a few different iterations of this
Trying different things out, you know, naturally ab testing, uh different ways
Uh, we've done it where so mind you if we are for context of new team
We've only been here since the latter half of 2022
So testing different ways hasn't actually been that long
but one of the different ways we did it was um looking at
CSm adoption
and having a target for a certain level of um
active healthy users
Um in our system depending on what we were implementing in that quarter at that
specific time
So for example, we gave you a renewal center
um for after we implemented renewal center for you know for a six months after
that even
Till now we still monitor adoption of renewal center to for our kps
So I hope that answers a little bit
So next up for a company that is just introducing cs ops as a function
What would be the key areas to focus on in the first six to 12 months?
So i'd actually ask that back and ask yourself what are we struggling with why
have we introduced this function
and start with the areas that are
causing the most friction
um
I think for us the idea was always to um automate more processes
But the the biggest thing was the the reporting and it's taking us quite a
while to get there
But we didn't have a clean database
So we actually had to start from scratch when diana joined
Um, you know, we had c-level telling us they wanted this and that but it's
really important as we said
Don't run before you can walk if you don't have the basics in place
How are you going to successfully do all the exciting stuff?
So something really really simple that we did is um
A lot of people find this very boring
But we actually had to read every single customer contract and make sure we had
an applicable field in gain site
Um and record all of that data
So that never again would we be speaking to a customer and talking about maybe
contractual limits
They have or renewal dates that are wrong. We took power away from
uh
CSMs to be able to edit that data themselves
And we ordered it all between us and locked those fields now a lot of them of
course thought
Why are you doing that?
You know, I should have the ability to correct the contract blah blah blah
But once we cleaned all the data
It allowed us to have that foundation to really start scaling other processes
And if you don't have that data in place
Yeah, don't try and do all the exciting stuff because it's gonna go wrong
basically
That's what I would say
And just to add just a little bit to that
um
Tim just talked about like a foundation. Yes, that was our foundation that may
not be yours. Yeah, so I think it's really important to
Sit back. I know this sounds really counterintuitive, but actually sit back and
listen
Listen to what your CSMs are, you know, watch what they're doing. Listen to
what they're doing
um
Really listen to their pain points for at least would know however long your
company will allow you
Um, you know for us
It I really did come in for three months at least just having interviews with
all these different stakeholders
Not just CSMs but other teams as well to understand really what were their pain
points
And then you build the foundations from there
Yep
Listening not recreating the wheel
Yeah, on the inefficiencies that you already have that would be the reason for
an ops function
These these are great and oftentimes too as well. That's something that I'll
get asked um by you know
Customers of mine who are struggling with this specifically and in that that
initial ask of a kind of like the expect
Expectations that there's a one size fits all answer
Sometimes the ideal state seems so far away whereas to your point
Making it very simple say well, let's flip this over and see well
Where are our current inefficiencies and let's let's begin there and then from
there
Change management and all the other things you've been doing so well with um
all right moving along
Um, can you walk us through a daily calendar or the to-dos of a cssops
specialist?
Cool. Yeah
I did allude to this earlier
um a little bit in that
every cssops
Team in different companies means different things so you may focus on
different things
But for my team in adversity
The things that we focus on highly wolf in the last year for sure was retention
retention retention
so therefore we were trying to
make sure that our
Reporting was at least showing the right numbers. I know that sounds really
simple
But uh, it's hard to get there if we don't have proper clean processes
So we were understanding where we can optimize those processes
Better and then now also forecasting um like nrngr
Uh much more cleanly um, but a day to day if I had to answer like going through
a day to day
Uh, we have a ticketing system. We um have like, you know, ad hoc requests
Um that need to be dealt with which is not so fun
I guess the fun stuff is the processes and the data and the systems right but
yeah
We also process like uh tickets from like other teams
Maybe it was to-do with the customer data or updating the customer data
Um, we also go through like reporting requests doing reports for the what we
call the customer unit our department
Um, we sync with all the other teams to make sure the projects that we're
projects and initiatives that we're implementing
are um
Being implemented but also gathering that feedback afterwards. So that's really
important
Um, what else Tim what else do we do?
Um, I think what's also important to mention is the the function was originally
brought on at ad rarity
To kind of power the the csm's or the count managers
Um, but now we're in a place where your team actually has a much more far-
reaching
Influence, and that means working with a lot of different people and like, you
know
We've brought on customer marketing into gain site. Um, and so they'll be
working with customer marketing
Our customer market product. Yeah, it's a we're actually trying to make gain
site the one source of truth for everything
So that rcsms don't have to go anywhere and that does involve working with a
lot of different people across the business
Um, I think you're also acting as gatekeepers in a good way because sometimes
people can get very excited and say like
Oh, we want to be able to do this and we want to do that
But as we said earlier, don't get distracted from your roadmap if it doesn't
align with
Your stakeholders essentially so we report into the chief customer officer
Um, ultimately what she says goes, right? So if we have the VP of product
trying to ask us for something, you know
It might be that we should do that
Um, it might also be like let's do it later or it might be like no, that's not
your job
So bear that in mind as well like focus on your road map doesn't mean don't
help other people
Um, but yeah bear that in mind
Ratio of csm to cps ops so diana's got two two cs ops specialists in her team
And on the csm side we are about 14
Yeah
So having said that our whole customer unit is a hundred people so
As I said, they're not just there to support us anymore. It's to support the
whole club. So I would love more people
Yeah
If the budget allows
Commonly heard commonly heard
Oh, all right next up. Um, how do you know if or when you need a cs ops
function and how do you distinguish the role of cs ops?
And what cs managers should do as standard
Okay, it's a deep one
Yeah, it's multilayous. Yeah
um
How do you know if we if when you need a cs ops function? I think we already
kind of touched on I think yeah
Yeah, going back to the first question if you feel like you're being stretched
too thin
um
is definitely a
A reason to have a cs ops function
Um
What cs managers should do as standard? I don't feel that we actually have a
lot of overlap in terms of what we're
Working on in our daily
Environment you could definitely I've worked in teams where you know you kind
of like oh what will do they do that or do they do that?
But we've like have a pretty straight like yeah, I think in our organization.
There's definitely
its flexibility in terms of like
Us cs managers saying we need this kind of reporting
But also the cs ops team being proactive and saying like you should be looking
at this
So it works in both directions, but um, I would describe it as cs ops enabling
How we service our customers that's the ultimate end goal. So everything that
you do basically enables us to work better with our customers
It's basically like unsilowing all the teams
If you wanted to have a way like if you wanted to distinguish whether you need
cs ops or not
Just ask yourself. Do you have siloed people? Do you have siloed data? Do you
have siloed processes?
Well
I think this is your chance to unsilow them have a team that is looking at
specifically these things
And helping you operate those well, hopefully well
Got a good segue into this next one as well. Really whenever we're talking
about solving for that the
Individuals that would actually comprise the teams to do these things when
recruiting for cs ops roles
What do you look for from a background perspective?
So
Of course
There's a bit of subjective and objective as well. Um in this for me
Uh first and foremost you just have to be a people person. You're working with
people at the end of the day. So keeping in mind
I'm not talking about a specialist role. I'm talking about a generalist
Um, so someone who is able to understand listen
And capture the needs of people is really really important, which is a skill
Uh that can be learned, but some people just have it or don't
um
And then also from a technical of course we need the technical experience
We at at Verity were looking at the time
When we first started the team because of the initiatives we needed a tackle
and see level really really wanted things done
Um certain things done
We were looking for quite experience like technical
See us ops specialists. I think as well. It's like we see you come from
Sales then customer success background. So you have that understanding, but so
do ios. Yes
Ops specialist although they might not have been CSM's. Yeah, it's really
important and they actually understand what we're doing as a team
Um, so that's very important to me that they're when they're actually building
out processes and working with me to build out a process that
They get it they get there actually and this is where it comes to you know
Sometimes me putting my foot down or you putting your foot down if we're
building something out
And they're they're trying to suggest something to me. I'm like that just won't
work for for CSM's
They also get it and they're like, yeah, actually that won't um and vice versa.
So that's really important. I think that understanding
And I then what I didn't believe we have what just a time for just one more
here
But I like this and just kind of solving for the age old right uh the question
here is how flexible is your roadmap right solving for that challenge of
putting
So much work into it and then needing to based on a litany of reasons change
course at any given time
Perhaps putting forethought into that as you're creating the roadmap. Oh, it
happens. Yeah, like change is inevitable as I said
Um, I think you have to be flexible with your own map. How much? Oh, I don't
know it kind of is up to you and how you feel
Um, you can be flexible and the capacity is of your team of course
But I know how easy it is you have a road map you've made your structure and
then suddenly someone comes in and it pals like
Uh something on top just like your you know your letters when you get from home
One after another kind of feels like that sometimes
Um
But it's always important to take the time like I have a weekly reminder in my
calendar to look over the the roadmap and go okay
Yes, this came in as a new
suggestion or a new process that they want to um look at but
I've made sure that weekly i'm looking at
Reprioritizing or looking at if it makes sense if the roadmap actually makes
sense for my team
Yeah, and I think to add to that if we look back
um
We did sort of like okay, well, we know we need this and this and this but now
in the situation that we're at today
We can release things much quicker because of the things we've talked about in
this session
Um that it feels less overwhelming
So once again going back to that what are our basics that we need and then how
do we start building on that?
And actually it allows us potentially to be more flexible because we've got all
of the
Hard stuff out of the way and also bearing in mind like is this a quick win?
Can that be slotted in there bear all of that in mind?
It doesn't have to necessarily be one or the other sometimes it can be can
these two things be worked on in conjunction or
Is it the case that yeah actually this should be worked on later because this
is more important?
Um, so yeah, it's not that we're completely rigid, but we also know where we're
going. I think that's the most important thing
Yeah, that framework really does help doesn't um
It helps you like understand what you need to do later. Mm-hmm
Wonderful points. Thank you all so very much. Um, diana, tim, thank you
everyone. Thank you again very much for joining us
Thank you
[APPLAUSE]
