Jean discussed her experience leading and growing the customer success team at Greenhouse, a startup that provides recruiting software. She outlined the evolution of Greenhouse's customer success approach over three phases: (1) figuring out processes during initial growth, (2) specializing roles and scaling as customers increased, and (3) focusing on working smarter through data analysis and targeted outreach. Key developments included introducing specialized roles for support, renewals, training, and data operations to allow account managers to focus on strategic customers. Greenhouse also invested in tools to track customer data and health to improve support and reduce churn.

1. Work-Bench Workshop April 2015
How to Customer Success
the Heck out of Them
1

2. 2
Introductions

3. • Director of Customer Success at
Greenhouse
• Customer successing in the SaaS space
since 2004
• Previous experience at National Council
on Aging and eChalk
3
Hi, I’m Jean.

4. One woman’s journey (mine) leading and
growing a customer success team at a
startup.
4
We’re here to talk about …

5. • Quick background on Greenhouse’s
approach to customer success
• Deep dive into the evolution of customer
success at Greenhouse, including team
structure, tools, and lessons learned
• Misc. sharing
• Q&A
5
Agenda

6. • Greenhouse, as a company, is customer-
focused; Customer Success is just the
team that specializes in it
• We have an ambitious – but not ridiculous
– goal to get better at providing service
and support as we grow
6
What we’re trying to do

7. • Be helpful
• Be human
• Be honest
• Be humorous
7
Our approach

8. • 2 Strategic Account Managers (1 NYC, 1 SF)
• 5 Account Managers (2 NYC, 3 SF)
• 3 Customer Support Specialists (2 NYC, 1 SF)
• 1 Customer Training Specialist (NYC)
• 1 Manager, Customer Data Operations (NYC)
• Other customer-facing roles outside of Customer
Success:
• Renewals Manager – Sales (NYC)
• Solutions Engineer – Engineering (NYC)
• Customer Marketing Manager – Marketing (SF)
8
Current Team Structure

9. Phase I: Figure it Out
Phase II: Specialize & Scale
Phase III: Work Smarter
9
How did we get there?

10. 10
Phase I: Figure it Out

11. • January 2013 – April 2014
• 0-150 customers
• 2 Account Managers (1 NYC,
1 SF)
11
Phase I: Overview

12. • Figured out what the onboarding process
should look like for our product and our
customers
• Experimented with various tools with the
goal of keeping track of customer info,
providing robust support to our
customers, and starting to build scalable
workflows
12
Phase I: Summary

13. Account Managers
• At Greenhouse, Account Manager role = Product Expert
• Leverage creativity and mastery of the product to lead
customers to solutions that fit their needs
• Inform product roadmap by advocating internally for
customer feature requests while managing expectations for
future releases
• Lead efforts to evangelize Greenhouse as a larger platform
for org change
13
Phase I: Team Structure

14. Account Managers were responsible for:
• Customer onboarding (kick-off, training, data
migrations, etc.)
• Managing support chat and email
• Engaging directly with engineers to
troubleshoot technical issues
• Sending release notes to customers
14
Phase I: Team Structure cont’d

15. • join.me
• Olark
• Pipedrive è Salesforce
• Intercom
• Zendesk
15
Phase I: Tools

16. • Investing in a support platform with a hosted
knowledge base / help center was a really
good move
• Repeated 1:1 training sessions for existing
customers is in demand but not scalable
• No longer possible for Account Managers to
also manage support chat and email
16
Phase I: Lessons Learned

17. 17
Chats Per Day January ‘13 – April ‘14

18. 18
Phase II: Specialize & Scale

19. • April 2014 – March 2015
• 150-490 customers
19
Phase II: Overview
April
–
Dec
2014
• 3
Account
Managers
• 1
Customer
Support
Specialist
Jan
–
March
2015
• 2
Strategic
Account
Managers
• 5
Account
Managers
• 3
Customer
Support
Specialists
• 1
Customer
Training
Specialist
• 1
Manager,
Customer
Data
Ops
• And
…
• Renewals
Manager
• Solu@ons
Engineer
• Customer
Marke@ng
Manager

20. • Recognition that certain tasks call for attention
and expertise that wouldn’t be scalable for an
Account Manager to fully own over time, including
basic support, renewals, data migrations, and
training beyond onboarding
• First attempt to use data to understand customer
health and stay ahead of churn
• Begin to align customer need with type of Account
Manager
20
Phase II: Summary

21. Customer Support Specialists
• First point of contact for all support communications across multiple
channels to answer questions, provide guidance, troubleshoot and
escalate issues, and route product feedback appropriately
Renewals Manager
• Focused solely on upselling and renewing existing customers
Customer Training Specialist
• Ramping up training program to deliver 1:many trainings on a regular basis
Manager, Customer Data Ops
• Works with customers through the data migration process, beginning-to-
end
21
Phase II: Team Structure

22. Strategic Account Manager
• Assigned to work with large, complex
customers that require deep engagement,
regular check-ins, project plans, etc.
22
Phase II: Team Structure Cont’d

23. • Bluenose
• Wootric
• Confluence
23
Phase II: Tools

24. • Attributes of best Account Managers
• Product-oriented
• Empathetic
• Creative thinkers, problem solvers
• Hire Account Managers before you need them
• A third-party customer success management platform doesn’t make sense
for us. We decided to dedicate internal resources to help us use our data
to get a status of customer health
• Customer love talking to each other! Really successful first-ever customer
summit. Trying to figure out how to bring customers together on a regular
basis
24
Phase II: Lessons Learned

25. 25
Chats Per Day April ‘14 – March ‘15

26. 26
FAQ Views May ’14 – March ‘15
16,687
help
center
views
in
March
2015

27. 27
NPS

28. • April 2015 - ?
• 529 customers
28
Phase III: Work Smarter

29. • Obtain account balance and roll out
specialized training and data migration
services that will enable Account Managers
to focus more on existing customers
• Use data to target customers for outreach
and then use data to gauge success
• Nail down more concrete metrics
29
Phase III: Summary

30. Onboarding Specialist?
• In an effort to align customer need with type of Account
Manager, we would like to introduce a 3rd type of role that
would work with smaller customers who don’t necessarily
care to have a dedicated Account Manager. Instead, they
can turn to general support after onboarding.
Management
• Leads on the specialized teams that have grown quite a bit,
namely Customer Support and Account Management
30
Phase III: Team Structure

31. • Home-built tools that compile and analyze
our customer data to assess health and
risk for churn
31
Phase III: Tools

32. • TBD
32
Phase III: Lessons Learned

33. 33
Misc. Sharing

34. “Thank you for having a chat
service with such helpful folks on
the other end. Saves me a ton
of time”
“Being able to text/IM with you
on the spot with an intelligent
response is awesome”
34
Customers. Love. Chat.

35. “I'm a current customer of yours and have
noticed that your team is exceptional in follow-
up and answering questions in general. I've
always had a fantastic experience. That being
said, I'm heading up the build of our Customer
Excellence Team and need to hire ~100
people. I'd love to pick your brain on how you
qualify or vet your customer service folks.”
35
Not So Humble Brag

36. • Phone support?
• Tiered support?
• Feature request loop
• Customer community?
36
Things we still need to figure out

37. 37
Q&A