AMA: Eightfold Director, Customer Success, Rebecca Warren on Developing Your Customer Success Career

I’ll share 2 questions – one is behavioral based, and one is situational. One of our core values is Extreme Ownership. I ask candidates to “Tell me about a time when you had to convince someone to do something in order for you to meet a goal or deadline. Why did you need to convince them? What was the goal/deadline? What was the result?” What I like about this question is it embodies all things CS - accountability; influence (usually without authority; partnership and teamwork; creativity… I look for an answer that helps me understand the what, the how, and most importantly, the why. Influencing someone because you missed something and now are in a crunch is very different than your new leader assigning you a nebulous project with a clear deadline, but not much direction. One of the best answers I’ve gotten was around a ‘still in development' product that was sold to a customer prior to the CSM taking the account. The customer was frustrated with the length of time it was taking to go GA - and with 2 missed delivery dates already. was asking for specifics to bring to their senior leadership regarding the 3rd promised delivery date. The candidate talked about the challenge first of understanding what the use case was as well as what was promised in the sales process. The candidate had to help the customer define the use case and then went back to the AE to understand what was sold. They then went to the product team to understand the product functionality and engineering to get timelines, which were still a ways out. They went back to the customer with the updated information and the customer was extremely unhappy. The candidate held a cross functional meeting internally - they were able to get alignment internally to prioritize the product to get within 2 weeks of the 3rd deadline, which was much improved from 6 weeks. The customer was cautiously optimistic, and when the vendor was able to deliver on the newly agreed upon timeline and the product worked as expected, over a period of weeks the customer moved from a detractor in sentiment to a promoter. The other question I’ll talk about here is “If you were to join us, what would you do in the first 90 days to build trust with your peers, leadership, and cross functional team members? (NOT CUSTOMERS) What I am looking for here first is whether their instinct is to lead by process or by people. Some candidates say they schedule meetings to understand the product, and some say they want to know what makes the team tick. I also listen to see if they tend to ask for help or go it alone. Neither are right or wrong; it helps me understand how they tend to work. I then look for them to share specifics on ways they would engage, and if it would be different for each group or more of a cookie cutter approach. This is really important for us as all of our CSMs are fully remote, and they need to be able to work with a variety of people at different levels in different ways.

Our current path goes CSM - Sr. CSM - Principal CSM - Mgr, CSM - Dir, CSM - Sr Dir, CSM. I think there are options along the way as well to move into or come from pre-sales, sales, marketing, product, ops, or talent acquisition, depending on how your organization is set up.

It depends on the level, but the main ones for us are retention (making renewal a non-event), increased customer usage and adoption/engagement, connection to the company values, strong, multi-threaded relationships with customers, and upsells/account expansion which increases product stickiness.

Some things to consider: * Able to influence internally at all levels of your organization * Able to build rapport with customers at different levels in their organization * Look at problems and solutions from a “outcomes” viewpoint first (what are we solving for) * Break problems down to bite size pieces and systematically solve * Use data to back up hypotheses * Create questions/draw conclusions from data * Proactively lead projects/process improvements, be a resource to others

* I think customers will continue to expect quick yet complex answers - our products and platforms will need to be able to keep up by offering more access and self-service options. CSMs need to be able to respond with speed and accuracy, which means they need to know the product themselves. * I see CS moving to a multi-support model using chat (both chatbot and live-hosted), AI, and large language models, with CSMs for some accounts, pod support for others. * In my opinion, for CS to remain a highly valued function to the customer, we have to make sure products are stable, data is accurate, systems are integrated, access is easy, and privacy is protected.