CCO Online Recap: Scaling Customer Success with Kim Peretti

On October 24, 2024, the CCO Online Forum featured Kim Peretti , who shared her insights on scaling customer success during hypergrowth and the evolving role of the CCO in today’s business environment. Hosted by Omid Razavi , founder of SuccessLab , and Gregory Walker from DevRev , the session offered attendees an inside look at Kim’s leadership journey across top tech companies, including Klaviyo , Adobe , and Docusign .

Kim’s insights revealed how a robust customer success strategy becomes a cornerstone for companies navigating rapid expansion. This session was packed with lessons on managing growth, building cross-functional alignment, and making customer success integral to a company’s overall mission.

Session Highlights

1. Kim’s Career Journey and Core Principles

Kim’s journey began with a passion for understanding the link between customer satisfaction and business success, and she has since transformed that passion into actionable strategies. Reflecting on her roles at companies like DocuSign during the pandemic, where she supported healthcare and government sectors, and Klaviyo leading up to its IPO in 2023, Kim shared how data, customer insights, and strong partnerships have driven her success.

Her approach to leadership includes scaling customer success while ensuring a personalized experience and integrating customer insights throughout an organization. This makes the CCO role crucial not just post-sale but across the entire customer journey.

2. Strategies for Managing Hypergrowth at Klaviyo

Klaviyo’s hypergrowth leading up to its IPO challenged Kim and her team to maintain a high standard of customer service. As CCO, Kim was tasked with onboarding thousands of new customers, both large and small, per month. She emphasized the importance of “going back to fundamentals,” focusing first on customer support basics—such as response times, quality of engagement, and the overall support experience.

Kim implemented tiered support for Klaviyo’s free and paid customers to balance growth and service quality, introduced self-service options for smaller clients, and strategically outsourced support components. This, combined with an investment plan for long-term efficiency, enabled Klaviyo to scale efficiently while continuing to deliver excellent service. From the beginning, including her finance and operations team was critical to achieving the investment in the scaled strategy.

3. Customer Empowerment Through Simplification and Integration

Kim’s approach to empowering customers focused heavily on simplifying integrations and making it easy for users, even those without technical expertise, to succeed on Klaviyo’s platform. She advocated for building guidance directly into the product, enabling customers to navigate the platform independently and reducing dependency on support teams. This customer empowerment was further enhanced by introducing a partner program to assist clients without technical staff.

Klaviyo’s commitment to simplicity extended into building product features that improved self-service and user experience. This “art and science” balance between product design and customer experience allowed Klaviyo to create a scalable customer success model, which was especially valuable as they moved into the mid-market and enterprise segments.

4. Building Long-Term Customer Relationships and Advocacy

Kim described Klaviyo’s early growth as heavily influenced by word-of-mouth and strong partnerships, particularly with Shopify . Due to the platform's robust capabilities, Klaviyo’s customers saw a direct revenue impact from using the platform, creating a viral effect and increasing customer advocacy. Kim emphasized the importance of partnership programs and dedicated customer success teams in cultivating long-term trust and advocacy, noting, “It’s a success multiplier when your customers can directly see the outcomes the platform is having on their business.”

Klaviyo’s success team leveraged these relationships to demonstrate the platform’s benefits. This later played a role in Klaviyo’s IPO by providing credible, enthusiastic customer references for analysts and investors.

5. Outcome-Based Customer Success: Shifting from Traditional Metrics

A standout element of Klaviyo’s customer success strategy was its shift from traditional marketing metrics, like open rates, to outcome-based metrics focused on customers' revenue growth from the platform. Kim described the importance of framing success in terms of customer outcomes rather than standard metrics or internal KPIs. Klaviyo’s platform offers customers transparency in their business, encouraging a results-oriented focus between the Klaviyo Success and Support team and the customer, improving customer retention and satisfaction.

Kim shared that her team tracked indicators such as segmentation to revenue outcomes to help customers understand Klaviyo's impact on driving results. The Customer Success organization works closely with customers to help them leverage critical features and functions and then review the results of using these to drive a specific business goal or outcome. This approach allows Klaviyo’s customer success team to position themselves as strategic partners for their clients.

6. Evolving Role of the Chief Customer Officer (CCO)

Kim says the CCO role is evolving beyond its traditional focus on post-sale activities. Today’s CCOs advocate for the customer across all journey stages, bring valuable insights to the C-suite, and align departments toward shared customer-centric goals. Kim illustrated how her role at Klaviyo included a cadence of cross-functional collaboration, from marketing to sales to partnerships to pricing and billing, ensuring the entire organization reflected a cohesive approach to customer experience and satisfaction. She credits the incredible collaboration across GTM for both customer and company success.?

Kim advised CCOs to bring data-driven recommendations to executive and board meetings proactively. “It’s crucial to show the financial impact of customer experience improvements,” she said, noting that this approach helps solidify the CCO’s strategic role within the C-suite.

About CCO Online:

CCO Online is a monthly forum uniting leaders to exchange insights, practical strategies, and innovations shaping the future of customer engagement and success. This dynamic space fosters thought-provoking discussions, live collaboration, and an open exchange of ideas. With expert speakers and fresh perspectives on emerging trends, CCO Online empowers leaders to refine customer-first strategies and drive impactful change.

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