On this month’s episode of The Customer Success Channel Podcast, brought to you by Planhat, I chatted with Marco Carrubba, Director of Customer Success at Microsoft about how to design customer success for a mature organization.
Marco Carrubba has had decades of experience at a number of large organizations like VMWare and Vodafone and is today the Director of Customer Success at Microsoft. He believes in the power of differences on a mission to nurture growth and inspire others to envision new ways. Marco also had a nontraditional route into customer success and has always had customer-facing roles, but not always customer success.
When customer success became more important a couple of years ago, the movement became infectious and everyone wanted to jump on board. But when you think about larger companies they are often older and more traditional in a way. So, how did customer success actually start at the organizations that you’ve been at?
In our discussion Marco helps answer some question on how to build customer success at a larger and more mature organization:
- When thinking of big enterprise software companies, customer success doesn’t come to mind right away – how did CS start at the organizations you have been at?
- How have you trained team members that you have inherited to understand the values of customer success?
- At larger non-cloud native companies customer success is not always clearly understood, what have you done to make sure internal change management towards CS is understood?
Some key takeaways from this discussion:
- Customer success is not about a department. Customer success is about the whole company. So you need to have support from the executives.
- You go around and you have those conversations to try to sell the value of customer success internally.
- It may feel uncomfortable in a new world but you have to continue the conversation to make the change happen.
Make sure you listen to the full episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments!
