The Beginnings of Navigating the Triumphs and Trials in Building Scaled CSM Foundations (Pooled Model)
In the wake of a comprehensive customer re-segmentation, a dynamic new Scaled Team has emerged. This session will explore the challenges encountered in establishing and nurturing this team from the ground up. Discover how prioritizing action over perfection, developing a culture of continuous learning, and emphasizing the human element drove remarkable outcomes. We’ll dive into KPIs, governance structures, and technologies employed to evaluate the impact and success of this Scaled Team.
Thanks again for joining Track 2, Building Foundations of Customer Success.
I'm Paulina Rodriguez and I'm a CSM here at GainSight and excited to talk about
today's session.
So, we're here to talk about the beginnings of navigating the triumphs and
trials
and building-scale CSM foundations, the pooled model.
So, a few housekeeping items, if you have question 2,
upvote the ones that you want to learn more about so that we can talk about
those first during the Q&A.
We will be sending the recording and the deck after polls, so be on the lookout
for that.
Alright, without further ado, please welcome
Aste Fousster, founder of Atamafai, in Fabian Oronmans, global manager of staff
base.
Let's give them a warm round of applause.
[applause]
Thanks.
That was good.
Hi everyone.
Yes, this is working right.
Perfect.
This is working.
Can everyone hear my voice?
Oh, good.
Perfect.
Welcome for joining the session.
My name is Fabian.
I'm the manager for Skatesia's Emmett Stuff Base.
And I've been working in SIPT, the opportunity to basically drive and start our
skate motion
at Stuff Base.
And today I'm from the last couple months with you and I'm super excited to do
it together
with Aste, who's been supporting us quite some time.
So, give it up for Aste.
[applause]
Yes.
Applause already.
It should be at the end.
Thank you.
So, hi everyone.
My company, Atamafai.
So, all my life, I worked in various technology companies and my latest was
GainSight, where
I spent five years being a solution architect and done over hundreds of GainS
ight implementations
of seeing beautiful, the ugly and anything.
I decided to offer certain services which I saw was not available in the market
So, I worked with brands like Starbase and other customers who really want to
derive
the value of GainSight, whether that's running discovery design sessions,
building product
roadmaps like 12 to 18 months, what use case we're launching and one, and
straight.
So, whether that's building custom APIs from various data sources into GainS
ight, rules
engines, so on and so forth.
So, I've been working with Starbase in Smey and I'm so proud to present this
beautiful
learning together with Fabian.
Let's go.
Exactly.
So, just to give you a quick overview of what we're going to cover, I'm going
to give
you some context of where this all has been happening.
I'm going to talk a little bit about a new customer segmentation that we have
introduced
earlier this year.
We've got some engagement or skate engagement that we've developed within the
last couple
of months and also how we implemented it on the technology side together with O
uster.
And then I'm going to talk a little bit more about some learnings from the team
inside
about all of this and some challenges and some first goals that we have
achieved with
this.
And then I'm happy and we're both happy to answer some questions of course.
What is Starbase?
At Starbase, we basically help our customers inspire their own employees by a
communication.
So, really a communications platform and company.
We started off with a very simple product and employee app back then, roughly
10 years
ago and since then we've seen a lot of growth, especially in the last couple of
years.
And the platform has grown quite a lot so we now call it, "Starbase
Communications Cloud."
Many different products, many different channels that our customers can use to
communicate
with their employees.
And with that growth, obviously we also had to adapt our customer success
approach several
times actually.
And earlier this year, we basically launched this on a very high level.
So we obviously still have a classic named approach.
So CSMs for the fixed portfolio, mostly large enterprise customers that are
working with
these customers in the long term.
But last year and of last year, we also started focusing more and more on a
digital approach
on automations, triggering communications to our customers in the right moment
during
the customer journey.
And the digital approach here, I think it was mentioned also in one of the
previous talks
in the keynote today, is really supposed to.
It's also a motion that we want to deliver on both the other segments as well.
So with all of this, we really want to focus more on giving our CSMs the time
to focus on
important customer discussions.
And I've been working basically on the scale approach this year.
And scale for us really means basically a pool model.
So we have a team of five CSMs globally working on several hundred.
We want to bring in a human touch, but we also of course want to benefit very
much from
our digital programs as well.
And the way we started this basically was, for instance, with one to many
motions like
the office hours.
So office hours are really a way for customers to engage directly with CSMs via
a drop in
session.
So they can register for the session.
The CSMs are hosting that session as well.
And then they can ask questions around best practices, use cases.
And also have an exchange with other customers.
What we also do are inbound requests.
So this is a really clear reactive motion.
It's a central email address that our customers can reach out to and
immediately get a response
from a CSM.
We do this via a Zen desk.
So the CSMs can really pick up a request, work on those together sometimes even
and yeah,
just provide value via this reactive motion here.
We also have customer community on the site.
This lifts in Slack and it's more around community building really.
So customers can apply for that.
One makes sure that we really have communicators within that community.
And then they can connect with other communicators via Slack.
And just to give you an idea of one of our digital programs here, our monthly
inside
user reports, these are really reports that we send out to customers on a
monthly basis
and the customer can really understand.
And this is something that we started doing a couple of months ago and yeah,
this is the
kind of stuff that we wanted to do more and more of course with our customers.
So when you look at these offerings, most of them are really more reactive,
right?
So, and we're also missing that piece, the human touch, where we can really
work on more
commerce.
Basically, the big challenge that I was tasked with and we had a name for it,
success engagements.
But we had no idea on how to implement this.
So we didn't have any process, basically blank page for me to work on and
deliver something
impactful here.
I knew that I had many hundred customers, I knew the risk roughly, I know the
challenges
that the customers are facing.
I knew that we had five CSMs, but I had no idea how to do it effectively and,
you know,
without it ending in a tool chaos, basically.
So yeah, many, many questions in my mind, definitely.
So yeah, thank you.
And I guess this is how you felt found beyond like, oh, challenge, big
challenge, but also
big opportunity to create something brand new in your, which you want them to
do that.
Human touch interaction shows some love to the customers, but it had, you have
a few
hundred customers.
Also, not everyone can do everything.
So here, I've had quite a few people reach out to me before the session and
saying they're
trying to get stuck, they'll know which way to go.
So what I would like now to go back in time, slow down, and really zoom in into
this moment,
because I do believe that sometimes we don't talk enough what happens in the
leader's head
that, yes, it's a challenge, it's also in this opportunity.
You can approach this 10 different ways.
You have hundred questions.
You can become overwhelmed.
So from human perspective, it is going up.
So let's do a quick Q&A Fabian on the key questions which audience and the
police share,
why they were important for you and why they were the key questions for you.
Sure.
Let's do that.
So the first question I believe you were thinking about is how would you align
a global
team with different backgrounds and teeniers?
So tell us a little bit more why was this important to you?
Yeah.
This was really also more about how do I show up in front of the team, because
it's something
totally new that we've never done before, something that the CSMs were not
familiar with.
So on the scale of let's get crazy, micromanagement to let's trust the team.
I had to somehow position myself.
I wanted to provide some support for the team, but also I wanted to trust the
ability to really
tackle those situations and the human touch in the scale motion.
So there was definitely something that I was initially struggling with and
trying to
figure out how to deal with that.
It was beautiful.
Thank you so much for sharing.
I think also we see Nick being unstageable, and I do believe that sometimes we
forget
we work with humans and it's okay to not know where to go.
It becomes much more normalized that we all have fears and we all wanted to
show up in
the correct way, whatever correct is.
So thanks for sharing that.
Next one.
How do we support 100 of customers with 5 CSMs?
So what was behind this question for you?
Yeah, that's a classic scale question I guess.
So we had too many customers and not enough CSMs to really do that human touch.
So how do we do this?
How do we touch as many customers as possible within a certain timeframe?
That was one of the biggest questions also from a scaling standpoint.
So simple math question.
5 CSM, 100 customers.
Math doesn't add up.
Yes, exactly.
Very now.
And is this effectively?
Yes.
How do you effectively allocate resources?
So how did you define the word?
It was in that case, I mean it's connected to the scale question but also how
deep do
we want to go and with which customers do we engage and for what reason, right?
We need to understand why and have an intention here.
Otherwise it's wasted efforts.
Yeah.
Otherwise you flip the coin.
Okay.
No, for the outcome.
Makes sense.
And regarding the impact and success.
Was that important to you?
Yes, definitely.
So I was very thankful that I had a lot of freedom in basically developing this
motion.
But at the end I knew of course there's pressure and we need to deliver and
yeah, in order
to prove that I can approve that this makes sense in the long term.
You have to show the people upstairs above that it's worth those 5 CSMs times
and to invest
that.
Great.
Thank you so much.
So drum roll on the solution.
Fabian build.
That's a very underwhelming moment because basically.
So the thing is so I knew what we wanted to do with this, right?
It needs to be intentional.
It needs to be strategically assigned.
It needs to have an impact and we really wanted to give that space for the CSM
to do
proper risk mitigation, expansion, the schedule and all kinds of ways but
because we wanted
to start and we had to have an impact quickly, I didn't want to over engineer
it.
So we basically just defined some general parameters around this like how long
do we
want to engage, right?
So we went for three months.
It initially exactly because we like our reporting cadence is three months as a
SaaS business
and acted with those first weeks and months, right?
So this was the thought behind that but also we learned throughout doing this
first that
three months is quite reasonable to heaven and then I had to structure the
success engagements.
I need to give the CSM some guidance and also to have that intentionally behind
it and we
were going for these three cases which doesn't mean it works forever and it
certainly does
on renewal and on expansion opportunities basically and this also gave me a
structure
regarding the reporting so I could directly connect the dots and the data here
and later
show our impact.
And as I mentioned, underwhelming moment but this was really it so on paper and
the execution
of course is way more complex but these were the basic parameters under which
we were operating
and then let's take a look at the technological side.
Yeah, right.
So let's have a look how CSM start using Gainside for that.
So what we did, we used Success Plan.
Can I see the hands of people who are familiar with Gainside or using Gainside?
Okay, make sure, yeah, make sure I adjust my language and don't use too many
jargon.
Basically to create a plan where you can customize various things and there are
two
parts of it.
First part is basically a landing page.
What is the Success Plan about in Gainside?
It's called Plan Info.
So for those who know Gainside Success Plan Fictional that we created a Success
Engagement
Success Plan, a CSP.
So if I say a CSP that's what I mean, Success Engagement Success Plan.
And the landing page while you had on the Success Engagement Success Plan is
triggered
and assigned to them.
And the landing page has certain sections.
So at the top you have a section description of a Y engaging with a customer,
what a potential
pain post, etc. and so on and so forth.
And then it brings down in three critical sections, renewal section, expansion
section
and the risk section.
In all of those sections, while there are free format fields for CSMs to fill
in depending
on the questions we ask and we want to get out of them, but we also feed in
automated
data.
These CSMs who got deployed on the customers, where they, customer stakeholder
mapping,
anything.
So we try to minimize any effort for them to go and look for that information,
which
means on that Plan Info page we tell them as much as possible about the
customer.
So if we're working let's say on the expansion section, we bring aggregated
data on number
of opportunities closed in the last six months, total value of those
opportunities, the earliest
close date so that you see, okay, when is the earliest we engaged the customer,
as well
as we look for the next six months, how many opportunities are open for the
next six months,
what's the value of that, what is the earliest closing date in the future so
that it takes
literally no more than two minutes for that CSM to familiarize with the current
situation
of that customer.
So that data is being fed at that Plan Info landing page of the Success Plan.
So that's part of expansion, obviously we have a risk section to see if there
is any
risk, chance, CTA's and so on, so that will be easily navigatable between
Success Plan,
risk, CTA and so on.
So then the second part of the Success Plan is the playbook, we call it CTA,
Objective
CTA and Playbooks, those who are familiar with this terminology.
And what a beautiful thing Fabian did when he shared, he was not sure where to
potentially
how much to micromanage versus just let them go and say do whatever you want.
He created this very beautiful simple playbook with certain parameters.
We want you to engage three times or try three times to engage before giving up
in a way
or closing the Success Plan.
These are certain things which you need to do, but then from that point we
trust you.
Human, you have a brain, you know how to engage with the customer, your
customer success manager,
and there was no micromanagement element or too many tasks, too many CTA's to
do, so
that was really beautiful to see.
And the last part is Gainsite reporting.
So when Fabian was saying, when we're talking about the questions about proving
to the managers
and shareholders and VP lay data very nicely.
So on top of operational reporting such as number of Success Plan created,
closed by
type, expansion renewal, we've listed it out with various metrics.
We had a results correlation reporting.
So when we look at the Success Plan, then we marry with the data of the, let's
say if
there is a risk story, we marry with a, as a risk probability drop down, so on
and so
forth.
This is a renewal story, we called it store's renewal, store expansion, store
risk story.
We looked at again, renewal probability, has it increased, renewal value, has
it increased,
or renew lost and so on.
This way we had very good black and white data to correlate between the success
engagement
and the actual other element assets such as risk expansion or renewal.
Anything to add?
Right.
Okay.
So this sounds also shiny and great.
And the reality of course was a little bit different.
So let's talk a little bit about challenges of introducing something like this,
especially
with a team that didn't do it before.
We talked about it a lot already at, at, at, uh, CanSight Pals here, change.
So, um, we came from a phase of change, so I knew the CSMs were a little bit
tired of
it already.
I knew that other teams who obviously are also working on these accounts were
tired of this
as well.
But sales was not super surprised.
So I'm happy about it that, uh, suddenly for some of these accounts who
previously were
named, um, did a huge challenge and something that you need to keep in mind
whenever you
even, you know, introduce just one piece of this and, uh, something that we had
to, yeah,
cover definitely and we'll talk about a little bit how we did that later.
The complexity of customer interactions as well, especially in scale.
When you want to engage with the customer, you might have an intention in mind.
You might have a risk that the customer.
We all know that customers sometimes go, you know, sideways and things can go
into a totally
different direction.
So this is something that we've encountered quite a lot when, uh, starting
these success
engagements and, yeah, every team meeting basically was, uh, definitely, like,
we discussed
one of these cases.
So it's, uh, something that you need to keep in mind.
Uh, the fear of failure.
So I'm not sure if anyone has worked with a German person, any, uh, uh, anybody
in your
life, maybe you are German or you have German customers, we love to focus on
any potential
negative outcomes.
And we had to act very quickly here.
So, um, there was no time to do that basically.
So I could see it in my team.
I could see it in myself.
We had to make sure that we maybe for once, uh, think about the negative
potential outcomes
here, but first start doing and, uh, can go, uh, well and then, you know,
figure it out
later on.
So what did we learn from that?
Um, one piece is definitely over communication, especially for me.
I'm not a person that, uh, uses too many words.
You might have noticed already, but in this case, definitely I had to invest
lots of time
in just explaining the whole approach to the whole organization basically and,
uh, especially
to those teams that are instruments that make sure that, for instance, sales
understands
the, the why behind it.
Um, quite a lot.
And this was not only mentioning, mentioning, mentioning it once, but over and
over again.
And also the, the process and how we're going to do it.
So that sales can adapt to it and really, um, still work efficiently together
with us.
Um, internally it goes the same, right?
Uh, I need to make sure that the team knows where we're heading.
How did you get from point A to point B in this one week?
And we didn't even know like what happened in between, right?
So a couple of times I had to go back and really, um, make sure that we move
forward
in a sense of a way and they understand why we're doing it and they are
involved in the
whole process basically.
The documentation piece, uh, is quite natural as well, but it really, um, well
hit me hard
here.
Um, we basically built a whole knowledge base around the success engagements
just for the
sales, for new account executives that, you know, just join the team.
They need to understand how your team is operating.
I've never thought I would communicate, uh, here because I've been with CSM.
I've seen lots of bad pay books.
And, um, I think Austin, Austin explained it quite well.
Um, we had to find a tool for the CSMs to structure their success engagements,
but not
in a way that it inhibits the way of actually having an impact here.
So we positioned the playbooks as a tool for them to also adjust.
We want them to use them, uh, at tasks, remove tasks.
I sometimes don't even care.
I just want them to be, um, efficient with it, right?
And the playbooks, they are also a tool that is still being changed.
So I want the CSMs to participate in building them, um, so that they make sense
in the way
they're working.
Um, but they really helped, uh, us align the approach also globally.
So, uh, value valuable tool.
Yeah, start simple and I think iterating exactly.
So we had to start simple.
Uh, we were perfectionists, right?
But we cannot be perfectionists.
We have to act fast.
So, um, there were really some moments also in the discussions with Austin
where I realized
I can just start very simple and then also in the gain side adjust processes
very quickly.
So the landing page, for instance, uh, initially was way too complex and I
talked to the team
and they're like, "Doesn't make sense.
I cannot work with this."
So we removed many fields, made it very simple, um, for them to still, you know
, understand
their customers very quickly but also work with it going forward.
Um, so don't over-engineer, start simple, just, you know, try to work it out
later, basically,
if you encounter any issues.
And if I may add here, I could not reiterate.
If there is only one point you take from this talk, simplicity is the highest
form of sophistication.
So, since we, in this day and age, we start thriving on complexity and we
forgot, we forget,
actually everyone, personal relationships and so on.
And that was like, we're trying to, like, "Faby, no, like, yes, we try to
conquer the world."
Or some people say, like, "How did the elephant piece by piece?"
Um, start simple and just go from there.
And you might be surprised.
Maybe that's all you need.
That just quick simplicity is so serving your customer because that what
matters, not spending
hours in the technology, technology just, you should not even mention it.
You should not even think that it's there if it is set up correctly with you.
You only get annoyed, we know when it gets to that forgotten password and you
're like,
"Ahh!"
And you just forget that you're actually using technology, but everything is
going smoothly
for you for the last exmology and that simplicity, actually not even technology
process as well.
And, yeah, so I could not reiterate more that, yeah.
Simple, simple, simple, start simple and you can always build up.
Right.
So let's look at some results, basically, of these first three and a half
months of doing
managed to touch 4.5 million euros in ARR just with these success engagements.
And this on its own, of course, doesn't tell us about the impact that we had
specifically,
but it showed us that we can scale these engagements and it can work, right?
Taking aside all the challenges that we face, but it can work.
But then, with the reporting that we built together with our STIS team, we were
also
reporting a 26 expansion and renewal opportunities directly.
And not only that, we could zoom into.
So this was also a great opportunity for all of us to look at certain customer
wins that
we had and talk about it in the CSMT meetings.
To our leadership, to other CSMs in the other segments, so super powerful to
have all that
documentation.
I have to say, there's also this part where, and we talked about this, also,
where CSMs
do not always have the time to fill out our detail.
They have the success plan and there might be some blanks to fill in later, but
you have
the data and you can zoom into it and understand the interactions really well.
On the other side, we, so basically, with the transition, we were handed over a
couple
of risks within the customer segment here.
>> A couple.
>> A couple, yes.
Some of them actually were able to validate and say there's no risk anymore, it
's all
fine.
So we threw it away.
But we were basically, say, 500K in ARR here as something that we specifically
could
show with this motion.
And here again, you can zoom in, you can understand what have we done.
Also, we have this fear in the success plans closure area where you can enter
and really
encourage them to do it objectively, not in a finger pointing kind of way, but
really
for them to understand what do we learn as a team from a specific success
engagement.
And in our team meeting, for instance, when we're looking back at the quarter
retrospectively,
we could look at all these learnings and basically understand what we have
achieved, which brings
me to the last point from a team-made perspective.
It's a challenge for all of us in the team, but I was super proud of them how
they were
talking about the challenges that they had, the successes that they had.
And just seeing the impact that they had initially was something that they were
really hesitant
to do, reaching out to a customer code hard sometimes.
But I was really proud of the team, how they've gone through with this.
It was great.
It's so nice, again, I've worked with so many customers with different leaders
and so on.
What personally made me a huge joy to work with Fabian, Steve.
I see what sort of how empathetic he is, how he's willing to hear both sides of
the story.
He's so aware what's happening with the team and the trouble.
You can feel it as well.
And he's just created a whole mini culture within the team of sharing those
feedbacks.
Like, you told me, on your weekly meetings, you look at the success engagement,
you discuss
it.
It's like an open forum, Terro.
This is set up maybe a bit too complex.
That's why we're like, okay, let's go very, very simple.
Fabian created a beautiful mini culture within the whole nice, stupid culture.
But like within your team.
And I know your team are highly respected to think of that top down, what sort
of, for
the better word, vibe you're bringing into your team because it's going to
impact them,
how they show up, how they give you feedback, and therefore eventually how
receptive they
are to trying new things.
So any last words before we open for the questions, Fabian?
All good for my side.
One thing, yeah.
Another key thing, simplicity.
Another key thing, I would say, there was the action over perfection.
Again, I've seen so many clients are over analyzing or trying to reach that
perfection
that North start to alien the journey.
Some people purchase a skeinsight and say, right, we want to see value within
day one,
value of what?
How do you define value?
Is it mitigated opportunities?
Is it expansion opportunities?
So being very aware and just trying something and pivoting and adjusting rather
than just
discussing it to try and reach that perfection on day one.
Great.
Well, thank you so much.
I think this is our last slide and we open for questions.
Wow.
What amazing learning from Austin, Fabian.
That was amazing.
I love the action over perfection quote, by the way.
All right.
We're going to start with some questions and please continue to submit those in
the Pulse
app.
I will be helping to moderate and straight for office hours.
Do you have a strategy to get customers to join?
Yeah, it's definitely a challenge sometimes.
So we've seen that we need to really promote the office hours frequently for
customers to
be aware that they can register.
There have been some challenges around putting dates on a landing page and all
that piece.
But generally, it's all about communicating it frequently.
We're also promoting it within our inbound requests.
So it's a awareness thing, really.
There are also some customers who don't really like that kind of type of
engagement, let's
say, or forum to be in.
And the difference was mostly due to the fact how we marketed it.
But we usually have, let's say, a minimum of 10 customers registering for it.
And we had also one, I don't know, with 26 customers even joining the session.
So it's been very mixed, but generally very good.
And we're going to focus on it even more next year.
That's awesome.
It's a good one-to-many approach as well.
All right.
Next question for evaluating the effectiveness of the scaled CSM foundations.
Yeah.
So we're looking at basically how many customers, what kind of percentage of a
portfolio we're
touching in a certain amount of time, which, again, it doesn't tell us about
the depth,
but we need to make sure that we touch pretty much all of them within a certain
time frame.
And at, well, feedback to the office hours, for instance, is that effective to
us.
It was quite positive to feedback for those customers who join, but we also saw
that attendance
rates can be higher.
This is something that we're currently working on.
We're looking at, of course, stuff that I just mentioned, really expansion.
We're looking at risk mitigation as well.
So all of this gives us quite good understanding of the overall effectiveness
of different
motions that we have and, yeah, the general impact on the portfolio.
And just to reiterate, I'm not sure what this question appeared before we
presented that
slide on gain site reporting.
So these success engagements are triggered at specific moments in time.
They're very intentional.
It's not just like we are looking at, is there is created?
OK.
That is potential candidate in the pot.
Is the expansion opportunity open?
Potential candidate in the pot?
And is there renewal upcoming very soon, renewal opportunity, I think, like 90
days
or so?
So that we can relate with the KPI of that risk record, expansion record, or
the renewal
use probabilities, which we mentioned during the gain site reporting slide.
I love that.
Very intentional and easier to correlate.
Yes.
Yeah.
All right.
So how do you differentiate between inquiries or tickets for--
Very good question.
I have to say we have a really strong customer care approach that our support
team does a
great job in really answering just how two questions, technical questions.
So maybe that's if you have some-- that kind of organization within your
company, what
these emails touch the customer care team.
So they basically that these questions for whether they are more technical or
actually
use case and best practice related.
And if they are, then these emails are for-- worded to us.
We might switch it at one point and really open our scaled email address just
also in
collaboration with your support team on where you want to draw the line, you
know, what
kind of questions are really for support only and which questions are more for
us.
It's a CSM team to tackle.
Amazing.
All right, so how do you send monthly usage reports from game site and can you
enter any
usage at data or analytics into the state to achieve this?
Yeah.
Sure.
If the person is willing to elaborate on the second part.
But yes, we send monthly usage reports which means usage data flows into game
site by the
BigQuery connector.
And we have our high volume object tables built in game site.
And that's in tokens calculations.
So let's say average email open rate, average registered users rate as well as
we build some
bar-- or show some bar charts.
So in game site there is this functionality who is not familiar that we can
embed reports
into email templates and it pre-filters directly to the customer's data.
So Sarah from Company X will receive her monthly usage report, how they're
using staff-based
cloud with only her team's data.
She would see how her data is trending throughout the last 12 months on the
average email open
rates, average registration, so on and so forth.
So that can be embedded into game site and it's automated via journey orchestr
ator.
Does that answer the question?
If not, feel free to elaborate.
OK.
Per
cases, but the SCASE CSMs are also involved in running office hours, building
scale content,
which we do more and more now. And what really helped me understand how many
success engagements
CSM can tag is talking to your CSMs. But also the reporting around it. So I
just knew how
many success engagements are currently going on for each CSM and success
engagement. So
what I also did in the beginning was I didn't scale it up immediately. We
started with a certain
number and now we sort of found a middle path of let's say 10 to 12 success
engagements
that the CSM can take. Working with, right, it's when you think about a fixed
portfolio
for name CSM you have to also, I wouldn't just go for a specific number. I
would talk
to your CSM, understand the experience level and also the customers that they
're working
with. That's probably not the perfect number of success engagements that CSM
can take.
To the quote unquote loose, they're dedicated CSM.
So when we moved to this new approach, we sent out of course a meeting to our
customers
and I was surprised how few answers we received to that and that was not only
due to the open
rate, customers were reading that. But most of them, which of course, yeah, is
probably
due to the fact that we did proper filtering before. So we knew these customers
, some
of these customers are not the ones that always wanted to see us around.
Sometimes
they were skipping business reviews, right? So they were mostly coming to us
when they
had questions and requests. So there were definitely customers that were
devastated
and we found ways to...
I think that's a great example of meeting customers where they are. Yeah,
exactly.
And what I want to add is kind of going a bit on the side but this gave me an
idea
because when I talking with a few of networking with the people yesterday,
obviously this
success engagement with the staff base, segments name, scale and digital. But
this success
engagements can work in a different scenarios. For example, if you are starting
your customer
success department or maybe there are some redundancies and you have less
people and
you need to reshuffle anything, just taking out that wide glove treatment named
CSM model
for good because maybe you don't have enough people to serve that and launching
something
like success engagement as your tier one. So almost you have two segments
rather than
assigning all certain customers to CSM, since CSM work on your customers with a
foreseeable
future, you actually deploy your CSM on a temporary basis to show the value.
Another idea, I was talking with someone as well, it could be if you are trying
to commercialize
customer success and potentially want to or if you pay extra, you will get
dedicated
CSM. You can use this model as some sort of upselling opportunity for the three
months
we are going to deploy this high caliber CSM and you are going to feel what it
is like
to be in that other segment. So then they can feel it is like, "Okay, I want
this, right,
I would like to be upgraded and therefore you can generate extra revenue from
then going
to that traditional named CSM."
That's what we have done as well. It works quite good, of course you need to
keep in
mind that it doesn't go into the other direction and you want to make some
space for all the
customers by the additional support.
One more question here, how did you iterate your success plans and playbooks
based on
complex customer interactions?
I'm sorry, because we have the process in place to have these success
engagements but
the actual value that we provide is still a topic that basically praises our
whole customer
success management organization. So they provide that value with customers.
This is, I think, not entirely a way regarding the impact that we want to have.
Later on,
you might want to, let's say, put some of those strategies into the success
plans but
this was not something that I was bothering too much within those first months
of doing
this. But definitely, like it's a discussion with CSMs, it's understanding your
customers
and the impact that you want to have and then you can think about how to
implement this
in case I later on.
Amazing. Anything you want to add, Azteh?
No, I think that for me, again, coming from technology perspective, I think so
many examples
customers dig well, getting frustrated versus being happy, is remembering that
nowadays
technology is a bit living and breathing thing. The moment you say, "I'm not
going to touch
it, I'm going to touch it, I'm going to touch it, I'm going to touch it, I'm
going to touch
it, I'm going to touch it."
So, I think that's the best way to do this.
I think that's the best way to do this.
I think that's the best way to do this.
I think that's the best way to do this.
I think that's the best way to do this.
I think that's the best way to do this.
The customer interactions, customer scenarios, which might be changing in this
economic
climate as well.
So not forgetting and always checking in, reiterating, trying again that action
over
perfection.
I love it.
All right, well that concludes our session.
Let's do another round of applause for Fabian and our scale.
Thank you everyone.
Please feel free to pick their brain after and enjoy the rest of Pulse.
