If you ask Benji, Customer Success is best played as a team sport - and best initiated as a player-coach.

Masha

Hi Benji! Let’s talk a little bit about you, your current role, your background.

Benji

Sure. So my name is Benjamin Orlansky. I’m the head of Customer Success at Agora. Agora is a materials procurement software for commercial electrical subcontractors.

A lot of $5 words for saying that we are a platform that helps construction teams order materials, among other things, that’s our primary focus. I came on pretty early at the organization, about the 17th hire.

We had 20 customers at the time, and now we have about 140 customers and are growing out our CS team or are in the process of continuing to grow out our CS team after our series B raise, and about 80 employees total across the board so it’s been a cool year of growth. This for me personally was like my earliest stage startup coming along, just after our series A raise. 

Prior to this, I was at Shipping Easy, and then kind of shifted over to our sister company Ship Station for a couple of years. That was in the kind of e-commerce shipping logistics space, so still b2b but for small for SMB e-commerce sellers.

Prior to that, I was at an email marketing company called OutboundEngine. Doing customer success at all of those different spots.

At OutboundEngine we focused on a, to put it delicately, a high volume inbound retention team.

[Sarcasm] The most fun possible environment you could ever be in [Laughs]

Masha

So super high pressure?

Benji

Exactly, exactly. It’s a bunch of guys walking around with battle scars and stuff like that. [Laughing]

But with Shipping Easy and Ship Station, there is a much larger customer base. So slightly more transactional, you could say but also a lot more in-depth, tactical on-boarding process. And then Agora has got this really cool thing where we’re discovering the market, we’re learning slightly disruptive technology, it’s newer to the space. And so there’s a lot of education on both sides, where we’re teaching how to do part of your job on a device that you’re not used to using or in a structured, shared environment that you’re not used to using. And we’re obviously learning a ton about the industry because there’s not a lot of domain expertise or domain knowledge in the materials procurement space, in particular the endpoint for the electrical subcontractor industry.

Masha

Wow, you’ve really touched all the different kinds of customer books of business. You mentioned that you were the first CS hire into Agora. How big is your team now?

Benji

Right now... Let’s see. I have five CSMs—a couple of them starting next week. So five CSMs who manage—basically the cradle to the grave account management. Deal closes, they handle kick-off call, on-boarding, training, QBRs, adoption, renewals, upsells, the whole deal. 

Masha

I love that you called it the cradle to grave!

Benji

To infinity. Whatever you want to call it. [Laughs] Farm to table. 

Masha

Yes! That’s it.

Benji

I guess that would be if you’re doing your sales too. 

But anyway, we have a Solutions Architect on staff as well, who helps with the more technical side of implementation. So we do a lot of deep integration work between our system and our customers' accounting systems. I don’t know if you’ve ever worked with construction accounting systems, which I imagine you haven’t.

Masha

Nope.

Benji

They’re not necessarily built to play nice with 21st century software. So, that integration/implementation process is very hands-on. That’s its own special role that works in parallel with the CSM. And then we have a Support Specialist on staff as well to handle inbound chat, email, that sort of thing. It’s going to be amazing looking back at this group, a year or two from now when there will be full teams of each of those different functions and more specialization built out. It’s been this really interesting challenge of thinking how or if, and when do we start segmenting roles and responsibilities. Because I assume you’ll probably ask a question to this effect at some point. But our company was born essentially into COVID. We went to market in March of last year.

Masha

Oh my gosh! 

Benji

Our entire operation has had to figure out how to be remote and how to be remote with our customers? So modeling around site visits just wasn’t part of the plan. 

Masha

Wow.

Benji

We just haven’t thought about that. But now as things are theoretically starting to open up a little bit, our customers have learned how to handle their business via Zoom and over the phone to an extent. But it’s still a handshake business. They still want people to stop by and bring pizza and shake their hands and look over their shoulder and help guide them through things, right? So that’s gonna be an interesting thing that we need to start layering on and modeling.

Masha

Right!

Benji

I’m rambling at this point. [Laughs]

Masha

No, that’s super interesting.

Benji

We didn’t hire with the expectation that you’re gonna have to travel for a certain percentage of your role. We didn’t train our customers to expect that. We’re not selling our customers to expect that. But it would be really valuable to be able to do site visits down the road. So anyway, it’s gonna be a really interesting couple of years from now, as we continue to grow, and these kind of generalist roles start to become more specialized and there's more hierarchy built out of the organization.

Masha

Yeah, totally. OK, this is maybe the first controversial question, as I promised. How is the Customer Success function organised at Agora and what in your mind are sort of the best ways to organize your Customer Success team? In terms of like, reporting organizational structure?

Benji

I report directly to the CEO and co-founder.

Masha

Okay.

Benji

Okay, now I see why you mean this is a controversial question.

Yeah. [Laughs] 

Benji

I’ve had this work in a number of different ways, right? So when I was at OutboundEngine, we had a 75 person Customer Success team.
With a director, five managers and team leads and all of that rolled into the VP of Operations.

Benji

Which is to say—and I think that’s what you’re getting at—a very large organization, the second largest personnel wise in the org behind Sales, no direct seat at the executive table. All filtered through the Vice President of Operations—who is great. He was awesome. He got it. But ultimately wasn’t getting the signal we needed at the table from a customer voice standpoint. 

At Shipping Easy, a similar situation where a large group, second largest in the organization, that rolled up into our VP of Operations as well. So very similar structure. At one point, the VP of Operations left and then I started reporting to the CEO. So basically, it was a kind of change of heart of this org as it’s gotten bigger. It’s become more complex. This no longer needs to filter up into a different part of the org. But also we did a different restructuring, we didn’t backfill a VP of Ops role. That no longer needed to be its own category. 

And when I moved over to Ship Station, they didn’t even have the concept of Customer Success. It was still an Account Management group that rolled into Payables and a Customer Support group that was entirely support with just inbound, to the point where we would get all these NPS responses coming in and I would say like, “Shouldn’t somebody be calling these NPS respondents? That makes sense for the Support Team to do that.” And the responses were like, “That’s not a ticket.” So it’d be gone. Just this very kind of horse blinders perspective on what a relationship to customer is and which direction it needs to go. Fortunately that organization has evolved quite a bit beyond that to bring in this concept of a tech touch customer experience role. And I believe that they have since brought the Account Management group and elements of the Support group into kind of a combined Customer Success team. So that was a learning experience that came late two years ago, but with what is otherwise a very forward thinking organization. 

Here at Agora, I was the first hire for CS. I came in at an executive level as the Head of Customer Success. And the idea was “Benji, you’re going to do this job for six months, and then you figure out what’s needed and you build your team accordingly.”

Masha

Exactly.

Benji

Which I would recommend that to any organization that is looking to build out their organizational structure across the board. That’s how we built out all of our teams. Head of Sales started out, he was the person selling the product. I started out, I was the one supporting it and in on-boarding it and renewing it. Our Head of Product came in and was our only Product Manager and has been building out a Product Team around that. So on and so forth through out the org. So I’d recommend that for an org standpoint, because nobody’s going to know what the org needs more than—

Masha

The person doing it! [Laughs]

Benji

Yeah, exactly. Somebody with some domain knowledge.

But then also, I recommend it as an incoming leader in any of those spaces, because truth be told, I’ve been at other organizations where I was there for a year or two, I could not have on-boarded a customer. I would not have known enough about the product, because I came in strictly at a leadership level. And it’s like, alright, here’s the playbook I’m gonna run. Here’s what I know success looks like, so let’s go do that. And I couldn’t answer questions. [Laughs] You feel pretty helpless and stupid like that.

Masha

So what does Customer Success mean to you? And how do you know it’s “working”?

Benji

Yeah, it’s a great question. I often cite this webinar I watched from this Israeli marketing company called AppsFlyer. I have no idea even if they’re considered to be experts in the space. But I watched a thing once and it made sense to me. They described Customer Success as a sum product of Customer Experience and Customer Outcomes. So Customer Experience is the combined experience of my product experience, the support experience and the on-boarding experience. And the Outcomes are a combination of efficiency and ROI—especially if you’re thinking about b2b, it doesn’t quite translate to a b2c. 

Masha

For sure.

Benji

I’ve only ever been b2b personally, so it makes more sense to me. I don’t think I ever will go b2c for a wide range of reasons. So breaking it out that way, it’s basically the Customer Success apparatus, from a staffing, from a personnel standpoint are the human version, the human face of representing those two concepts of Customer Value and Customer Experience. I am the one who is facilitating your onboarding experience. I am the one who’s facilitating your support experience. And I’m also the one—and when I say “I”, I mean us—we as a collective are facilitating your relationship with the product. 

Now, this is where another controversial question you might bring up later is where do you allocate churn? Because I mentioned product experience, that’s a combination of how were you trained on the product? And how were you brought to view the product? But also, how great of an experience is the product provide? And how clear is it? Theoretically, products should be so great that Customer Success isn’t necessary, right? I don’t want to talk myself out of a job but that should—

Masha

Should!

Benji

In an ideal world, that’s the case. In practical terms, there are very few companies for whom that would actually work. But in lieu of the perfect product that reads your mind, you do need some kind of synthesis between the Customer Success team and the Product team to provide that shared great Customer Experience. And then on the other side of the Customer Outcomes of the ROI and is that ROI being delivered efficiently and effectively—the primary driver of our life is going to be, “does the product do what they signed up for it to do?”

Masha

Yup.

Benji

So it kind of begins there, but it doesn’t end there. Because, as we all know, the product could be delivering in exactly the way it was designed to but the customer doesn’t know. There is ROI, but there’s no perceived ROI. It’s the Customer Success team’s job to make sure the customer knows what they’re getting. And to make sure that we know as an organization if the customer isn’t getting that ROI, so we can convey that back internally and figure out how we can deliver on the ROI the customer was expecting. 

Masha

Do you have a story from your previous life or in your current life, where that kind of was the case? What does that look like? For the customer there is ROI, but there’s no perceived ROI. 

Benji

So a long time—I have examples from every company I’ve been at—but a really good one is when I personally was Account Manager at cars.com a long time ago. We had this product that was an inbound lead generating product. So you pay per lead that comes in. This is a stupid example. But it’s the difference between Product and CS. So the inbound leads would come in and they pay I think it was $50 per lead that they get. And I got a call, it was like, “Hey, I’m getting charged like 300 bucks for something and I don’t even know what’s happening.” And I had to explain to this person, your lead comes in, you have to call that person. And then if you call that person, you can make the deal. [Laughs] 

Masha

Wow!

Benji

But that happens!

Masha

“What do you mean, you didn’t make the sale for me?” [Laughs]

Benji

Exactly! So you bought the thing to tee up your sales organization. And we did that. We served you a bunch of leads. I have no idea if they’re good. And neither do you because you didn’t call them.

Masha

Apparently. Yeah. Wow.

Benji

So that’s a good example of mine.

Masha

Yeah, that’s a great example. Thank you for sharing that. How have you seen the role of, I guess, Customer Success change over the last couple of years?

Benji

So as a slight caveat, I entered the workforce with Customer Success existing as a concept, which I take for granted sometimes. You talk to people a generation removed, and it’s hard for people to wrap their head around this not being Support.

Masha

Right!

Benj

Or that it’s not—

Masha

Account Management.

Benji

Yeah. Account Management, which is still a fuzzy thing, the difference between Account Management, CS, and in many ways, they’re the exact same thing, and in many ways, they’re different. And so what I’ve seen as a big difference in the past couple of years—A, the tooling that is specifically for customer success, it was once a very nascent idea. It was always just do everything out of Salesforce. It’s designed for sales, but you can pretend that an opportunity makes sense for you. With the right Salesforce admin and ops team, of course you can build up a very rigorous Customer Success System. You know, the Gainsights and the ChurnZeros of the world have come along with—and those two products specifically and I’m sure there are other competitors out there are on a sliding scale, successfully nailing this concept. But there are now products in the space that tell you there’s things that your product team needs, there’s things that your sales team needs and there’s this other thing that your CS team needs, which is a need to understand what is happening when you’re not looking. And you need to understand what’s happening underneath the surface to tee you up to do your job well. There’s been this kind of sliding scale of like, well, people will stick around if we provide great service and we make people happy. Ultimately, the point of customer service is—sorry, not customer service, well kind of customer service—but the point of Customer Success is so that your LTV exceeds your CAC. [Laughs] 

Masha

Right!

Benji

That is the only reason we exist as a discipline. But what has evolved is kind of more alignment on what behaviors, what practices, what kind of frameworks lead to that LTV being greater. It started with if we keep people happy, if we keep them keep people liking us, and having kind of reputational loyalty to us as a brand, then they will stick around for a long time. And that makes sense much of the time. 

But then there’s this other idea of “we need to deliver value”. And people don’t buy your product because it looks cool like they do with an iPhone. They buy your product because their business needed something fixed and then they rely on you to do that. The CSM role has—and I think as CSMs and CS organizations have kind of taken more of a ‘I’m not your assistant here, I’m your partner’ approach with customers. Customers have started viewing us more that way as well. Like, “Hey, let me spitball some ideas with you. Let me strategize with you about how I can be doing this better.” Anytime you hear that kind of question or feedback from a customer, we know things are working. I’ve changed roles, I’ve changed companies a few times. It’s hard to read a trend globally. [Laughs]

Masha

Yeah, but you feel it. You’re in it every day. 

Benji

Sure, sure, sure. But the fun thing about going from SaaS org to SaaS org is that you get to be a minor expert in a lot of things every time you change jobs. So all these different industries work pretty differently. But I will say one of the things that has changed is the way that our customers view us is less as support and more as a partner. And that I think leads to more lasting relationships and more valuable relationships with customers.

Masha

Yeah, makes total sense. And then if I asked you to pull out your crystal ball, how do you see it changing in the next five? What do you see coming down the pipe?

Benji

You still see a lot of the questions people are asking themselves about customer success is like, does this revenue stream sit with CS or does it sit with sales? A is going to do our renewals or is CS going to do renewals? And does this kind of support work go to CS or does this kind of support work go to the Support team? Should our technical writers or documentation team—or the team that’s building out our self-paced learning module, live within CS or is that over with Support? CS kind of picks up responsibilities from a lot of other orgs. Not a dumping ground, but just a hub of weird funky roles and teams, because people still don’t really know what it is, where this stuff lands. And I think what we’ll start to see more and more—not necessarily this idea of like a Chief Customer Officer, I think you see a lot of that prognostication, but I don’t think one person being in the C-suite really matters much. But instead, what you’ll start to see is CS, rather than being a division within a company, will be an organizational philosophy that drips down into all of the other departments. So it’ll still be its own discipline.

It serves a very specific and practical function, which is we are the ones who are the first point of contact for your customers who have already signed up with us and depending on the complexity and size of your product and customer, that looks different for every organization. There will be a Customer Advocate on the Product team, or at least if not in a role that is customer focused, there is a customer mindset and a customer-centric rigor to how the Product team has developed and organized. Same thing with the Engineering team and the same thing with the Sales team. The sales structure and the sales incentives are devised around LTV rather than initial contract value. And so that, I think, is where we can take all the learnings of those of us in the Customer Success organization have been doing over the last decade, which is saying like, “Hey, when somebody churns, that’s not Customer Success’ fault, it’s everybody’s fault and let’s figure out how this happened. We just heard about it and attempted to save it.”

Masha

Don’t shoot the messenger. Right? [Laughs]

Benji

Exactly. Let’s figure out how we can spread that out. When I was running a Retention team, that was the biggest problem. It was like, “We had low churn this month, good job Retention team!” It’s like no, no. We’re the last resort. “Low churn this month, good job Sales team eight months ago! Good job Product team for the past two quarters for making a better experience.” Does that make sense?

Masha

Totally. I mean, we’ll see, I guess. I’ll check in with you in five years. [Laughs]

Benji

But if I’m thinking about how I’d like to see things evolve, I guess is the way to put it. That makes sense to me.

Masha

We hear a lot about Customer Success folks talking about having superpowers and wanting to save the day for their customers. If you had a superpower, what would it be?

Benji

A Customer Success superpower that I would like to have would be—especially with my current company, we have so many different users at our orgs. We’ve got people in the office, people that are in the field, accounting folks, executive sponsors. So if I had a superpower, it would be to be in eight places at once. Because that would be a really great training experience. Because everybody’s on the same page at the same time, in language and value props that makes sense for everybody, rather than a singular outbound experience.

Masha

Omni-presence. I love it. What is the most controversial opinion that you hold about Customer Success that other folks need to hurry up and catch up to it already?

Benji

I already hinted at it. But CS is the canary in the coal mine on churn, we’re not the arbiters of churn. And some folks do it really well with a good debrief. At Agora we do a good job with this, where when a customer churns, we’re still small enough that we can hold a session like, “Alright, Product, Sales, CS, let’s get in the room and talk about it. Let’s go through their entire history, see where things went wrong, what can we learn from this? Sales, how can you set better expectations? Product, how can we build a better experience for folks? CS, how do we train people better and deliver and reinforce those value props in a more meaningful way?” That to me is the healthy, right way to do that. And so as a result, I would say when you’re building your comp plans, and your bonus plans, never build a CS comp plan around gross or net churn unless you’re also doing the same thing for Sales and for Product.

Masha

Right. I love it.

Benji

And everybody across the board.

Masha

Literally everyone in the company. 

Benji

Yeah. So that’s my semi-controversial opinion. [Laughs]

Masha

I love it. Thank you, Benji.