AMA: Braze VP Customer Success, EMEA, Georgia Glanville Harrison on Customer Success KPIs

Technical Support response targets! We’ve all been there, and being the first Success Hire is super exciting. You get to wear many hats, get involved all the way through the customer lifecycle and be scrappy to get customers what they need. For us at the beginning, that meant taking on a lot of Technical Support tickets for our EMEA customers, especially in the morning before our then US-based tech support team was online. On the one hand, this gives you a lot of valuable product knowledge that can help you be an impactful CSM, but on the other hand, it can mask the business need to expand technical support teams and can hurt your focus in the long term. If you can, explain early the difference between CS and Tech support KPIs and ensure that anything you take on is temporary!

Unlike a lot of Customer Success departments, we’ve chosen to align our team to customer KPIs rather than commercial/upsell targets. As such, we have less overlap in goals between CS and Sales. Of course, we’re both targeting Gross Renewal Rate and ensuring we maintain the customer base, but we don’t extend that to upsell targets in the same way as commission-based CS teams. Currently, we’re focused on exploring how we can share “time spent” efficiency and reach KPIs to help keep us accountable for spending as much face time with our customers, tech, and agency partners as we can over the course of many key city hubs whilst being mindful of the cost of trips.