A few weeks back, I completed my first year in LoginRadius as a Customer Success Manager (CSM). When I look back, 2020 was an exceptional year—the excitement of starting a new job, new office, new colleagues, breaking out of COVID-19 lockdown, work for home, and adapting to the new normal.
Regardless of all these changes, I had the chance to grow, learn, and be exposed to different challenges. The fun that came along the way made the journey enjoyable.
CSMs have a bunch of responsibilities with day-to-day activities that can vary quite a bit. On my side, I have the chance to manage different accounts/customers (small, medium, enterprise) from various industries (Broadcast, Beauty, Hydro, Market index companies ...), which is truly enriching.
Each customer is unique, with their challenges, priorities, budget, and lifecycle stage. My end goal is to ensure they get a great experience, maintain their happiness, and give them the maximum value out of LoginRadius from the moment the sales team hands over the customer to me.
Managing customers successfully takes time, and my first month was dedicated to getting familiar with the LoginRadius admin console, understanding our value proposition, learning about the different processes and tools before starting to engage, and taking ownership of some accounts.
I have great memories of that time; it’s like the honeymoon period, where everything is new, exciting, and smooth.
My manager and teammates made sure everything was in place to get me started.
I had the chance to meet all my colleagues and enjoy the super lovely office. After all that overwhelming onboarding and ping pong hours bonding with my colleagues, it was time for me to jump into the real stuff!
So, what real stuff? Well, it included customer onboarding, account management/ escalations, customer health checks, business reviews, renewal, upsell, customer advocacy, and similar responsibilities.
Let’s start with customer onboarding, which is one of the most important tasks CSMs have. The process involves:
- Offering an overview and basic dashboard training
- Focusing on the features that will help customers gain early value of the LoginRadius platform
- Pointing at the different support documentation, and resources
- Most importantly, establishing trust
The base of the relationship moving forward often starts at this stage. The stronger, the better. After all, CSMs are the go-to person and the first point of contact for any questions or support the customer may have/need during the implementation and after going live.
I remember that my first customer onboarding was for a Panamanian customer. At the POC stage (Proof of concept), there were some language barriers that I had to overcome as the stakeholders from the customer’s side were not that fluent in English and my Spanish is rusted.
It was a great experience and made me more confident about delivering onboarding and helped me get familiar with the whole process.
Another important responsibility is the quarterly business review (QBR) meetings preparation and presentation.
I realized that customers’ business reviews are critical to us as they give us a chance to engage with a different audience (Management level/ executives) and discuss their LoginRadius journey.
It is a time dedicated to generating conversation and post-go-live, understanding from all angles what worked well, what features were used or what wasn’t, what went wrong during the last months, and what will be different in future quarters, re-emphasizing the value they can get from us.
The reviews help us keep our business on track, stakeholders aligned. It fosters the relationship between both parties and opens up more opportunities for improvements and future collaborations/upsells, and that’s what we want!
In terms of preparation, QBR requires collaboration and inputs from the different internal team:
- The support team has an overview of the number of tickets raised and several escalations.
- The implementation team has a better view of the customer’s feature usage/ integrations/technical use case.
- The product team has visibility on what’s in the roadmap.
- The billing team to make sure the customer invoices are all cleared.
- The marketing team to help in pushing for customer advocacy/testimonials.
It can sometimes be challenging to sync up with all these different teams from different time zones, but so far, I feel that the collaboration has been pretty smooth.
I just have to tag the right team member on Jira (that’s the project management tool we use) and follow up accordingly to get all the inputs for the QBR meetings. With all the responsibilities CSMs have, I’ll admit that our days are definitely driven by prioritizing the customers’ needs, goals and requests.
CSMs are considered the voice of the customer where they have to make sure their customers are heard. It is our job to balance and defend both the customers’ and company’s interests.
It’s not an easy task! But throughout the many experiences CSMs are exposed to; they eventually learn to navigate the different parties' interests to benefit them successfully.
That’s where I realized that these CSM responsibilities form the pillars of “growth” within LoginRadius. Being able to contribute to it is rewarding :)
