On this month’s episode of The Customer Success Channel Podcast, brought to you by Planhat, I chatted with Emmanuel Malanda, Global Head of Customer Success at Calypso, about data driven workflows and scaling CS Operations. Emmanuel leads a growing team of CSMs and CS Ops teams dotted around the world. He is extremely passionate about customers and equally passionate about aligning the whole organisation in meeting customer’s desired business outcomes.
As your Customer Success team grows, there comes a point when your CSMs are spending more time doing some of the administrative work rather than focusing solely on what drives value to your customers. So, how do you build effective CS workflows to help save CSMs time and optimize their processes both internally and externally? And how can a dedicated CS Operation role help scale your business?
There comes a time when hiring more CSMs becomes unsustainable, and you need to decide whether you are going to continue on your current CS path – or if you are ready to scale to operations.
In our discussion Emmanuel helps answer some of the tricky questions when it comes to scaling customer with operations:
- How can systems and tools empower your customer teams? What sort of tools should a CS team be looking into as they are scaling?
- What sort of data should a CS operations person be reporting on in order to build effective data workflows for CSMs?
- CS operations are primarily focused on data, how are your CS ops sending value to your customers using data?
- Why should a company or CS org have a CS operations role?
Some key takeaways from this discussion:
- A CS Ops is much more than just an administrator for your tool. It’s someone who’s there to drive value, strategic data-driven, who’s going to be able to put those processes in place and really know the customers and the customer life cycle in and out
- The main reason why we have a CS Ops function at Calypso is around operational efficiency and how much time it saves us.
Make sure you listen to the full episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments!