On this month’s episode of The Customer Success Channel Podcast, brought to you by Planhat, I chatted with Fran Beckley, Head of Client Services at SourceBreaker, an AI-driven search and match technology made for recruiters, about how to keep CSMs engaged at work and career development.
Over the last 5 months, remote working has now become the new normal. Being distant from your team means it is harder to gauge how much work each CSM is doing, how much they are enjoying their job, and if they are even interested in career development or just looking to move on. Now more than ever, it is so important to really check in with your team and understand if they are really engaged in their current role or not. Employees usually feel more engaged when they believe that their company is concerned about their growth and provides avenues to reach individual career goals while fulfilling the company’s mission. Developing and sustaining a CSMs engagement is mission-critical for both your customers, the growth of your CS org, and of course the growth of your company.
Today on the Customer Success Channel Podcast we will be speaking with Fran who comes from a recruiting background but for the last 4 years, she has held a few different customer Success roles which has landed her in her current leadership role. We will be speaking to Fran so that she can share her wealth of knowledge on how focusing on career development and employee engagement from day 1 in a business can lead to massive growth within a CS organization.
Fran believes that the director’s ambition was to be the best in the recruitment industry, so they had an aggressive growth plan and any profit was farmed back into the product. But the directors also believed in customer success and were happy to invest in it, believing that if the customers understand how to use the product they will get value from it.
n our discussion Adrian helps answer some of the tricky questions when it comes to keeping CSMs engaged at work:
- That last 5 months of remote working has been hard to adjust to, how has the team at Sourcebreaker adapted to WFH? How often is the team coming together?
- When a CSM starts at SourceBreaker what sort of career path can they expect?
- What are some different career paths a CSM can have at SourceBreaker?
Some key takeaways from this discussion:
- Start each morning with a meeting to discuss what happened the day before, what was successful, and what people wanted to shout about – positive news from clients, renewals, or upsells – and she found it a great way to get the team up and running and excited for the day.
- Implement a clear target structure with different targets and challenges depending on the role
- Implement a CS book club to find new ideas and discuss new ways to implement solutions and processes
Make sure you listen to the full episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments!