On this month’s episode of The Customer Success Channel Podcast, brought to you by Planhat, I chatted with Matt Myszkowski, VP of Customer Experience for EMEIA at Cision about why mental health should be prioritized in Customer Success.
In his role at Cision, Matt looks after the Customer Success, Customer Support and Onboarding & Training and CX Operations teams. Prior to Cision, he was the VP of Customer Success at SAP leading a team of 100s of CSMs. Matt has worked in several leadership roles within customer experience and enjoys creating business value by aligning technology, education and data analytics.
For the last couple of years, Matt has spoken a lot about mental health and how “it is ok to not be ok”. After sharing his own story on social media, he has become a mental health advocate for people working in Customer Success.
In our discussion Matt helps answer some of the tricky questions when it comes to mental health in customer success:
- Customer Success is sometimes called the everything department, how do you prevent yourself from being the everything guy? Where do you find the balance?
- As a CS leader, your team is looking to you to share work-life balance, how do you make sure you team has balance and that they share when things are too much
- For our listeners out there, what are some of the first steps a CSM or CS leader can take in making sure there is a work life balance and that it is actually ‘ok to not be ok’
Some key takeaways from this discussion:
- We are victims of our own success. Most CSMs are people that want to please other people, who want to please customers and their internal stakeholders. And therefore, it is quite easy to take on too much both as an individual contributor and as a CS leader. You need to be stronger around managing boundaries, expectations and your time. And your business needs to clearly articulate what the CSM role is, but most importantly what it isn’t.
- COVID came, and I think the last two years have really challenged us in terms of our mental health and our mental wellbeing
- “it is ok to not be ok” and to share this with your team and your managers
Make sure you listen to the full episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments!