Anwar
Let's start off with you describing I guess your role right now at Centrical as a Customer Success leader?
Rohan
Yeah, sure, definitely. So I'm a Director of Customer Success for Americas at Centrical. Centrical is a startup based in Israel, founded in 2013, by our current CEO, Gal Rimon, and in last seven or eight years, our product has evolved drastically, right. So it was formed on the basis of a gamification platform and wanted to ensure that we provide companies a tool through which they can manage their most important resource, which is their employees. So the tool was leveraged for performance management, personalized micro-learning, and with the gamification elements,. As the product evolved over the last seven, eight years, we have added additional elements to it. So since COVID, people decided to part ways from a brick-and-mortar environment, everybody's working remotely. We decided to have a solution for frontline managers, to empower them to ensure that they have a tool to keep a tab on the direct employees, understand their workload, their well-being and so on. So our platform brings all these elements together, microlearning, performance monitoring, manager, dashboards, coaching, and manager insights as well. I joined Centrical about two years ago, just before the pandemic hit, I joined as a Customer Success leader, a senior manager, and then recently, I was promoted as director for Americas. So I'm managing a team of 10 resources. My team includes Technical Support specialists, who are more like level two support. So we have a ticketing system. And then these technical support specialists, respond to customer queries based on the criticality of the ticket. I also have Technical Account Managers. So Technical Account Managers work closely with Customer Success Managers to implement the solution, but work on the technical aspects, where they are focused on loading the tenant, creating the database, configuring the API's, integrating with customer, HR systems, and so on, and then helping customers with the technical issues. And then I have a few Customer Success Managers as well, who are truly the customer success strategic advisors for our customers to understand their problems and carve out the right solution for them. I personally manage the biggest portfolio here in America. So I have customers in North America and Latin America. But now I'm taking more and more of that mentor,coach kind of role, I’m looking after the bigger customers, providing that strategic advice, rather than doing the operations work or keeping the lights on kind of stuff. So that's where we are in a journey. And I'll take a pause here. We'll see if you have any questions.
Anwar
Fantastic. So I guess, can you elaborate on how is the customer success team structured or where in the organization do you guys live?
Rohan
So our CEO has five VPs who report to him. So there is a VP of Product, a VP of Solutions, a VP of Sales and Marketing and a VP of Customer Success. And so I report to a VP of Customer Success. She manages all the customer relations with our 100 plus customers across the globe. And we have two different teams. So we have a team based in Israel that takes care of EMEA and Asia Pacific customers, whereas my team looks after North America and Latin America customers. So we report to the VP of Customer Success who reports to the CEO directly.
Anwar
I see. Were you guys organized differently before? Or has this always been the structure that you guys have had?
Rohan
It has always been the case because traditionally, for SaaS companies, if you'll notice, there's only a Customer Success Manager, there is no term called Technical Account Manager. You will very rarely see that (Technical Account Manager) or the CSM person is Jack of All. That person, that Customer Success person manages the technical part, customer relationship, and so on. Our product is a little complicated, right? It's a gamified app that customers use. There are a lot of configurations, we have 100 plus features. So Technical Account Manager is an important entity, right? And then again, if you're selling the SaaS product to a customer, on day one, you're not going to enable 100 features. It is a journey, it is an evolution. So that's why when we decided to develop our Customer Success team, we had this unique combination of Customer Success Manager and Technical Account Manager. The Customer Success Manager was more focused on relationship, account farming, expansions, being that trusted advisor and Technical Account Manager was more focused on technical aspects like setting up tenant and developing the API's and stuff like that. So that's how we evolved that model. And it has changed. Going back to your question, Anwar. So in the past, we used to have only a Customer Success Manager and a Technical Account Manager. This is about two years ago. And then we brought in Technical Support Specialists, like a level two support. Otherwise, it used to be all via email and just like a startup, customers used to shoot us an email saying, “Hey, this is broken, this is not working, this is a bug, help us.” And then we used to jump on it. Technical Account Manager, then Customer Success Manager, and then we used to escalate. But then we realized that it was consuming a lot of bandwidth, energy. So then we formed this Technical Support Specialist group, we hired somebody who could manage these Technical Support Specialists, Zendesk. So we set up our Zendesk and now we have a ticketing system, in which customer can submit request, and Technical Support Specialists works on that. So this happened two years ago. And that's how the Customer Success has evolved from Customer Success Manager and Technical Account Manager to CST, which is CSM, and TAM, and the support mechanism with Zendesk and technical support specialists.
Anwar
Fantastic. On that note, what does Customer Success mean to you? How would you define it?
Rohan
Sure. So that's a great question. And everybody asked, like after doing management consulting, when I joined Customer Success, my friends asked me, So what are you going to do? And I was like, yeah, I'm just striving for my customer’s success. That's what I do. So when you say striving for Customer Success, what I mean by that is truly devoting to Customer Success, I call it as a journey where you are helping your customer to adopt the platform, absorb the knowledge and own the platform, successfully, right. And Customer Success team are these strategic advisors, who help customers in that journey, to understand their business problems or their requirements, and translating them into solutions, which fit their requirements. So carving out the right solution based on the business needs. That's where Customer Success plays an important part. And of course, the most important thing is ensuring that customer is getting the return on investment or the value for what they’re paying or the costs they incur for buying these licenses. So it's not only carving out the right solution, but helping customers realize value or making our stakeholders heroes in front of their management. That's our job.
Anwar
Okay, I see that. Now, organizationally, now that we've spoken about how you guys are structured in over the last few years. In your mind, what would you say is the best way to set up a Customer Success team? Who should they report to? And also how would you say is the worst way to set up a Customer Success team?
Rohan
When we set up a Customer Success team, we have a unique approach. My team is a bunch of individuals who are top performers, but they also bring in a lot of diversity as well, cultural aspects. So particularly in my team, just to give you an example, I have a person reporting to me pretty much from every single nationality from Latin America, so I’ve people from El Salvador, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, a person from Mexico as well. And then, of course, US- born nationals. I myself being an Indian national, ultimately a green card holder in America. But the point is, it's very important to understand your customer, right? So when we do the sales handshake with the Sales team, first of all, it's important to understand what's the use case. So there could be different different use cases, different stakeholders, It is also important to understand the culture of the company, the cultural fabric of the customer, like what are they aspiring to be, what problems they have, and what kind of personality will match with their project management team. So in order to set up the right Customer Success team, I look at these elements. What is the use case? What's the cultural background? What kind of problems they are trying to solve. And then I think it's always important to have the Customer Success under a separate department, and not being part of teams like Product, Solution, Marketing, having their own sort of vertical, which is responsible for things like account farming and expansions and renewals. The worst thing would be, without knowing really what the customer requirements are, you're just deploying the resources that are available for you. Okay. Anwar is available, Masha is available, and they are going to be Customer Success Manager, Technical Account Manager. No, right? So it's, it's a fine balance of like I said, understanding customer requirements, cultural fabric, as well as the use case, and then making sure that you are assigning the right resources. And even if that requires managing or adjusting your existing accounts, so be it, righ?. So we are always looking forward to do that. So if we think that a particular Customer Success Manager is a good fit for a particular customer, but he's already occupied, then we see if his workload can be transferred to somebody else, and can be made available to this particular customer.
Anwar
I see. How then do you know if it's working?
Rohan
Of course. So there are a few milestones in the SaaS product adoption journey, and they are very important for us. For us, there are six to eight weeks of customer onboarding. This is the time where we do a lot of workshops with our customers, starting with the business discovery in that we’ll try to understand what are the customer’s problems, and then try to probe them. This is our opportunity to understand all about their environment, so that we can carve the right solution for them. So then before we go live, we also have like UAT(User Acceptance Testing) to ensure that the ducks are in a row, and then users will have a seamless experience when they launch the platform. This is a major milestone, right? That's the UAT, even if that includes giving the flavor of the solution to some of the change agents or early adopters to see how the platform is working. And once they go live, I think it's very important to have those monthly check ins or quarterly business reviews. So one month after the launch, have we met all our goals or not? If we need to change certain things, we have to pull certain levers. So we work on that. And then absolutely quarterly business reviews where you need to understand—like the customer is looking for a return on investment. So what have we achieved based on their business objectives? Have you met any targets? If their priorities have changed, if we need to change the course of action, do certain things differently. That's how we work on it. So I think it is a continuous journey, from go-live to monthly to quarterly business reviews.
Anwar
Interesting. That's a very interesting post that you guys have. I do have one question. So you've seen your company or your team essentially changed in the last two years, right? Going from just the Technical Account Managers and the Customer Success Managers to building out the support functionality. On a grander scheme, how have you seen Customer Success evolve over the last two years?
Rohan
Oh, drastically. So when I joined my team, we were like only five, six resources. And we are now 20 resources. So as you can see, it's like 400% growth already. As I had mentioned, in my previous answer, our platform is a little complicated. So it used to be a lot of effort from the Customer Success team to support customer, to do hand holding, to share the leading practices, best practices to make them go live. One of the biggest transformations that we have done is not only Technical Support Specialists where we have a dedicated Zendesk where customers’ tickets can be answered quickly by 24/7 support. But we also developed something that was developed by our solution team, which was the self paced journey to onboard any customer admin. So, it's, again, a gamified platform where you join as an admin participant, and you're learning courses. And you can do it based on your self pace. And once you learn more about the platform, you start developing expertise in certain areas, whether it's user management, whether it's KPIs configuration, whether it's certain microlearning solutions. And that has helped us drastically because we used to spend, I would say, at least 20, 30 hours in on-boarding, coaching the customer, making sure they understand every piece of it. Now our approach is a little different, where we are empowering our project managers or admins to learn about Centrical at their own pace using our platform, and once they learn everything and then they complete their assignments, then we are having more collaborative workshops where we are just addressing if they have any questions, or some things that were not clear, rather than doing that hand holding, doing two, three hours of workshops, taking them through the entire platform. So that has been a really, really efficient process that we have brought in.
Anwar
Interesting. Would you say that's something that's unique to your company as an individual or are you seeing more companies trying to bring this on?
Rohan
It is a unique solution for our company, I would say. Because ours is a gamification platform. And a lot of focus was on end user experience. But we tend to forget from the Customer Success side, like the people who are going to run the platform, manage the platform, own the platform, they're also important stakeholders, and their journey needs to be as smooth as possible. Again, going back to your question, how do you define Customer Success? Making our project team or admin teams live a little easier, efficient, is also an important aspect. So since we had the ecosystem, since we had that foundation on which we could build on, we just decided to open that particular game to our project managers and admins, so that they could get these trainings at their own pace. Making them self sufficient, and ensuring that we are saving a lot of time from the Customer Success side as well.
Anwar
I see. How then do you see the world of Customer Success changing in the next five years?
Rohan
I think it's going to be—I mean, I'm at least expecting a lot of changes in the next five years. And then the biggest element, or the biggest area where we'll see a lot of improvement is artificial intelligence, and then growing the knowledge articles and collaterals to empower the end users. Because a lot of startups are coming up, all the tech companies. Their products are ever-evolving. And then the features change, the configurations change, there is always new collateral. So keeping up to date with that, and then ensuring that you have a lot of technology that could assist you to take customers forward is going to be important. So our platformsolution is, again, similar to that. Making sure that customers can own the platform. And they work with Customer Success Managers or Technical Account Managers, who are like strategic partners to see what solutions they could provide, rather than just working on the operational piece, deploying things. Being those trusted advisors. I think it's also going to evolve in terms of the way Customer Success provides services to their customers. So it's more about the product knowledge, product expertise, versus as I was mentioning, the strategic advisor, somebody who can understand your problems and carve out the right solution for your needs. So that's where the evolution is going to begin, rather than just providing the support for the product. It's more about understanding your problems and providing the right solutions.
Anwar
I see that. What would you say is your most controversial opinion about Customer Success that you feel like other folks just need to hurry up and catch up with? [Laughs]
Rohan
Mine?
Anwar
Yours. [Laughs]
Rohan
Ah, I think it's the approach, right? What we take with the customers. Sometimes it's the approach we take is no matter what customer is always right. But then, sometimes we put unnecessary pressure on our teams so that they're trying to always say yes to everything that customer says. But again, going back to that point of being that trusted adviser or strategic partner for your customer, you should have the ability to say no to your customers as well, or convince them like okay, this is a good feature. But we are focused on certain areas at this point of time. So let's focus on that. So rather than giving them too many solutions, and promising yes to everything, navigating them through this process, and coming to the right solution is the most important thing. I think that's where Customer Success team fails a lot, where they're trying to please customers, rather than finding the right solutions for the customers.
Anwar
Okay, I want to be mindful of your time. I've got ,I guess, two more questions before I open it up to you to ask us any questions.
Rohan
Let me check my calendar, just in case. I don't have anything after this for 30 minutes. So if you go over a few minutes extra, I'm fine, unless you have some commitment.
Anwar
Alright. You good Masha on time? Okay, fantastic. So just on that note that you just brought up, what is the one story that you wanted to tell us about the life in Customer Success that we didn't ask you about? What would you like to share about the life of a Customer Success?
Rohan
I think the one thing you didn't ask is, again, when there are outages or major technical issues, or bugs, and then the customer is angry, right? Upset and they're like, what's going on? This is important, this is critical for our business, and your solution is not up and running. And it's costing us a lot of dollars or whatever. Right? I think it's always difficult, right? Because there are certain things which are in your control. As a Customer Success team, there are certain things you could work on, you could expedite a few things, you can escalate a few things. But at the end of the day, if there is a product related stuff you need to rely on the Product team, the Dev team needs to work on it. And having that synergy, right? Working closely with your Product team, your Dev team, also your Marketing, Sales teams to set up the right expectations is an important aspect. So for the Customer Success team in order to be successful by its own is difficult. They need to bring the power of all the resources in their company to make the customer successful. That's an important aspect. I think that's something which we tend to forget, Customer Success strives to solve certain problems, which are not under their territory. And that's where we made the biggest mistakes. I think it's very important that you go to Product, you go to Solutions, you go to the right teams, and see if this is something we could think about, or bring them to those meetings with the customers, try to understand customers problem and then giving them right guidance, rather than promising things. So I think it's the balance, and then harmonizing the operations within the company is also important.
Anwar
I see. I love that answer. With that in mind, this is one of our controversial questions, but also cheeky. If you had a superpower, what would it be?
Rohan
Ah, in terms of Customer Success, right?
Anwar
Yes, in terms of Customer Success. [Laughs]
Rohan
Knowing the customer’s problems in advance. The customers are going through a lot of transformation, all these days. I think we live in a world where technology becomes obsolete, in let's say, six months or a year at the max. There are always new upgrades, new versions coming up. And then customers are also battling with a lot of challenges internally. So understanding what the customer is really looking for, rather than they telling us you know, “This is something we were looking for, do you have that solution.” Rather than that understanding customer’s problems outright in advance. Oh, a customer is struggling with attrition, maybe that's the main issue. Or a customer is struggling the most with generating new leads. Or a customer is struggling the most with loyalty to their brand, right? All these things. So if we could know all these problems in advance, it will help us carve out the right solution that fits their needs, rather than just doing the patchwork, that okay, you came to us to do this. And now we are going to work on a particular thing to solve your current problem. But what's the bigger problem? What are you trying to achieve? In a long term, What's your vision? If we’ll get to know about it (in advance), that will be awesome. I think that will make every Customer Success Manager successful.
Anwar
Okay, last question, with this in mind. How then would you describe value? What does value mean to you right now?
Rohan
We actually did a workshop last week with our team where we were defining something similar. What does value mean to our customers? How do you define the success criteria? There are several answers to this question. Value, of course, is quantifiable, or it could be qualitative as well. When you talk about quantitative measures, like seeing drastic improvements, like things like I mentioned. If you bought our platform licenses to improve your sales or improve your learning engagement by X person, delivering that; delivering on those metrics is extremely important. That's the quantitative approach. Qualitative could be more on employee satisfaction, building loyalty, making sure that we are providing the right solution for our customer to transform their technologies, like digital transformation. It's very important. And then gauging the right feedback at the right time is also important. Whether the end user is really satisfied with our solution or not. Or do they think that this particular product is indispensable in their environment? Or they think that they are the biggest fan. When end users start seeing you as an integral part of their ecosystem, I think that's where you add the maximum value. Otherwise, you could have hundreds of different tools and could be providing the same solution. But from the journey of becoming a digital tool to the indispensable product that they use on a daily basis. That's where I think you add the maximum value.
Anwar
I see. Fantastic. I've got no more questions for you. I guess at this point, I'd like to open it up. Do you have any questions for us? This has been very helpful. This has been really great.
Rohan
Yeah, no, I was looking at Masha's actually, when she pinged me or when she sent me an email. I was looking at her profile. Seems interesting. So I just wanted to know more about you guys. Like what are you doing? And what's your ultimate goal? And what's your vision? Where do you want to take your company?
Anwar
Fantastic. So I guess my background, I'm a full stack developer by trade. I was previously at Bronto interactive, which is a YC back company, where I scaled back end infrastructure and shipped product from series A all the way to IPO, eventually on the NASDAQ in 2019. Marsha and I actually met at Entrepreneur First, an incubator, last November. And we've been working in—we bounced around quite a bit, actually. But what we're really looking at right now is we're looking at ways to use, I guess, our term is durable AI in order to improve or create continuous value for customers and users through feedback mechanism decisions. How do we leverage feedback mechanisms as durable AI in order to prove and deliver on value for end users and for end users and increased value of solutions. So this is how we ended up in the Customer Success space. And we're just playing around with a couple of concepts right now in the space that we're trying to bring up off the ground.
Masha
Yeah, I think Rohan, you mentioned that you saw a little bit about my background. My immediate background before joining Entrepreneur First, I was at Element AI doing some research work in human AI interaction. So this is actually why, you know, Anwar and I bonded over that sort of feedback mechanism for AI models. But what we realized was, it's actually Customer Success folks who are collecting that feedback, like at first we started targeting, and I don't know if you've gone through this journey at Centrical. It sounds like you joined maybe when the team was already ready to kind of scale. So maybe product market fit, but we're definitely pre-product. I mean, we're proof product. So I guess yet fundamentally, so but we at first we started targeting machine learning teams. So we were like, hey, you're building models, you know your models are gonna suck, you're gonna need feedback from people using them, right? Is there a way for us to build tooling for that? And they were very excited. But it's not their job to collect feedback from users or customers, right? And so when we started asking the question of like, okay, why did they find this so valuable, but yet not do it? We realized that there's this function that actually is kind of tasked with figuring out how to make the customer successful. And I don't know if Anwar and I have just been completely sheltered on our like, fancy product side, because my background is in design, and his is in development. So we've always lived on the product side. We've never been really on the commercial side. So we were like, whoa, a function exists whose job it is to do this? Anyway, I told you we were new to this this. We're really new to this space.
Rohan
Absolutely, absolutely. No. And I think that's how a lot of companies are now seeing it because I have a management consulting background. I have been in management consulting field for 17 years. And then when I was bored with traveling every single week, and providing solutions for C-level executives, looking for a change, and I was surprised that a lot of companies actually pushed me for Customer Success. So that's when I actually started looking at like, what does Customer Success do? Really? I realized that it's not much different than what I do in management consulting. In management consulting, you're basically working with the customers to identify their problems and provide the right solution. The difference in management consulting, it's more like high level strategic roadmaps, where in a technology company, you're actually providing a solution as well. There, you're just giving the high level roadmap strategy. And you're never going to see what's happening. But here, you're actually bringing your product along with you and saying, okay, this is your problem, this is our product. This is what we can offer, let's meet in the middle somewhere where we can solve some of your problems. But it's important now, I think with a lot of SaaS companies, that it's becoming more and more important specially this particular department. Because it's not just selling to your customer, but it's also retaining that customer, understanding how they're using our product, and how ultimately it shapes your product. That's important! That's where Customer Success makes a bigger impact, bringing that feedback as you're saying, Masha, from the horse's mouth, back to the Product team, back to the Dev team, so they can work on it, and then develop the right solution based on customer needs.
Masha
Yeah, that's exactly it. And I think like your management consulting background is probably what makes you take this more strategic view also, right, it makes it so much easier for you, because we've heard a few of the other Customer Success leaders that we spoke to say, Hey, we'd love for our organization to be part of those more strategic conversations. But that's not where CSMs necessarily are kind of coming from. They're either much more tactical, which like, God love them. That's important. But they're also if you think about it, it's a bit of a freaky environment to be in. If you're sitting there your Customer Success Manager, and you're like, okay, I'm compensated for keeping this customer on. Am I really? Do I have to, like, go honus to say, hey, what about our product sucks really bad? Like, what do you hate about our products? Like, should I be over that conversation? Anyway, so this is where I think—my original background is also in user experience research. And so this is kind of where we think we might be able to help with tooling that allows leaders like yourselves to essentially scale your ability to coach your CSM to be able to ask those questions.
Rohan
I think that's a great point. Because then you asked me, how do you see the evolution and I mentioned the same thing, right? Rather than just being the keeping lights on or providing the tactical solution, trying to solve the bigger problems at the companies, that's where Customer Success is gonna get involved. It's important, right? And it depends on the product as well, how mature your product is, if you're a startup and just launched two years ago, you're not going to be a strategic advisor. But as your company grows, somebody like us, who are trying to be that unicorn, next unicorn. We need to understand how we build that relationship with our customer, so that customer trust starts. So if you are providing a solution for a particular problem, or particular industry or particular domain, you need to be exporting that. Not just your product, but knowing what's happening, and then providing the right solutions to your customer. So that they rely on (you), they trust you and then they see somebody like Customer Success, who can provide solutions to all their issues or concerns.
Masha
Yeah, we've heard this evolution also echoed with the leaders that we've spoken to. So it's great to hear you say that as well. Rohan, I really want to be respectful of your time and let you go. This has been extremely helpful for us, as we said, so thank you so much for taking the time.
Rohan
My pleasure. And then one last question I had was, do you publish this? Or how does it go? Or it's like your blog post? Is that something where I could see what my peers are also saying?
Masha
Absolutely, yeah. So like, the next step of this is I will go through, we have a little bit of a backlog now, which I'm like, so fortunate to be able to say, but I'll go through our interview transcript, I'll clean it up a bit, and create essentially the text of the article. And then I'll send it to you just to make sure you're cool with us kind of putting it live. And then once you are, we will publish it on the blog post. We'll promote it through our social channels and all those kinds of things. And also just to pre-empt it, one of the things we love to ask the leaders that we speak to is if you have an ask that we could share, please let us know because we would love to be able to elevate this, because this is really the goal. Obviously the number one kind of selfish goal for us is to learn from folks like yourselves and just absorb it. But the the goal that we really have with publishing this is elevating the voices of Customer Success. Because we're really seeing as well, as you mentioned, right, becoming that strategic partner becoming much more important in the SaaS world. That's really true. So I'll definitely, I'll be in touch with that. And then I'll definitely let you know as we publish the other ones as well.
Rohan
Sounds good. So looks like you're gonna provide a collaborative space for all the Customer Success Managers. So that'll be awesome.
Masha
Yeah, that's what we're really hoping for. And yeah, I would just love to kind of keep this conversation open because it's super helpful for us.
