Pitango Growth Academy- Customer Success Special Edition: How to Scale Your Customer Success Team from 1 Generalist to a Team of 10+

Yael Haloutz: How to Scale Your Customer Success Team from 1 Generalist to a Team of 10+

“Customer Success goes way beyond a department, it is a company philosophy. At the heart of the program, CSMs are here to ensure that customers are able to achieve their desired outcomes while using your product and technology.” - Yael Haloutz, VP Customer Success at PayEm

PayEm has 125 SMB and enterprise customers, and is a subscription based company with a? freemium offering. The Customer Success organization within PayEm is a fusion of CS and Finance experts. CS owns renewals and expansion pipelines and partners with their Sales team throughout the customer journey. But a successful CS organization does not simply grow overnight. For early stage companies looking to build their CS infrastructure, the main question is: how can you build a CS org that scales as your company grows? In this session, Yael dives into the solution.?

In the early days, CSMs are almost like a jack of all trades. They are semi-product managers, they bring value to clients, give feedback to the product, they do tech support, they build relationships, renew accounts, and enable their customers. The first CSMs at PayEm took the customers from 10 to 60 clients. But does this model scale? The answer is no.?

When building a team, you need to think about what framework you need to put in today that can officially support both the company and the CS organization. Consider time zone or physical proximity to the engineering and product teams. CSMs play a significant role in compensating for product shortcomings in early stage companies. The ability to connect with product teams and keeping feedback loops as short as possible is key. Sometimes when the product market is in a different territory than the engineering teams, you might even consider hiring a local CSM that speaks the language of the clients and knows their culture, but is located in the same time zones as the technical teams.

The next step in scaling your CS org from the early days onward is to shift the CS makeup from generalist to specialist teams. Determine the structure of these specialist teams by analyzing what your customers need to be successful and what your company needs to be able to quickly onboard and retain clients. As a business matures, you need to have the right infrastructure in place and build an organizational setup that can replicate itself as the install base grows. For PayEm, this means having a tech support team, professional services team, CS ops team, and of course, your CSMs. The structure of your specialist teams may differ depending on your company’s needs and your product. With roles split amongst specialist categories, you will be able to build a CS organization that scales as your company grows.?