On this month’s episode of The Customer Success Channel Podcast, brought to you by Planhat, I chatted with Shannon Nishi, Director of Customer Success at Customer.io about sustainable growth in Customer Success.
Times are tough and the “big hiring days” when scaling a SaaS business are long gone. In today’s economy, you have to think about sustainable growth rather than growth at all costs. So, how do you do that in Customer Success? How do you ensure your CSMs are strategic and not just support? And how do you measure sustainable growth?
Shannon Nishi has seven years of experience in SaaS and Customer Success, including implementation services and technical project management. Her experience working across e-commerce, data collection software, and marketing automation software has seeded a love for complex problems and an appreciation for simple solutions on distributed customer-facing teams. As a leader, Shannon is passionate about enabling personal development and collaboration amongst team members, using iterative processes and open communication to achieve customer-defined business outcomes.
In our discussion, Shannon helps answer some of the tricky questions when it comes to scaling customer success quickly but sustainably:
- How did you segment? Do you have a pooled model? How does the CSM interact with the customer during the customer journey?
- With PLG does the product team get involved more in the customer journey?
- In an economy where CSMs are doing more with less and scaling quicker like you have, how do you ensure your CSM team doesn’t burn out?
Some key takeaways from this discussion:
- I don’t think it’s ever too early to start thinking about scaling. It’s just a matter of figuring out the biggest impacts on the customer journey and what we can reasonably accomplish with the team we have today.
- We decided to move to a Pooled Customer Success model, as most of our mid-market customers were only leveraging the CSM during the initial onboarding period.
- It was becoming more expensive and more taxing to continue hiring CSMs. And there was no longer the same need of strategic support after the onboarding. Instead, we now have a group of CSMs that are focused on opportunities and seeing what we can do to impact customers on a broader scale.
Make sure you listen to the full episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments!