In this episode, we have Melissa Jeyaraj, a seasoned Customer Success Manager at LinkedIn with extensive experience in customer success management. With over eleven years in the field, working both at established companies and various startups, Melissa shares practical tips and learnings from managing customer success in both large enterprises and small businesses. 

How do you define Customer Success? What does it take to make a customer truly successful?

It comes down to four key elements: 

1. Helping customers understand the product and its basic functionality
2. Supporting them with change management to enhance their business outcomes with your technology
3. Acting as a consultant to understand their needs and how tools can be effectively integrated into their organization
4. Ensuring they derive value from what they're using—whether it's the software or your overall customer success approach. 

Ultimately, the goal is to tie this value back to their organization's success, ideally through revenue impact.

Can you recall a time when you went above and beyond the call of duty for a customer?

I led a large implementation for a major tech services company two years ago. We rolled out LinkedIn Learning across their entire organization of around 130,000 employees.  The implementation took approximately nine months given the scale of the project and the need to consolidate their entire learning ecosystem. 

But it gave us the time and opportunity to build trust with the customer. 

We prioritized frequent meetings and  I partnered with internal stakeholders – the implementation consultant team, sales, customer success analysts, insights teams, etc. –  to develop a comprehensive project plan that also included other vendors.

The idea was to bring them everything they needed at the right time, and as effectively and efficiently as possible. We were able to preempt what the customer needed, and deliver it to them in advance. 

That way, we were able to build a strong foundation of trust. 

Today, their program is now one of the most successful among our clients, with nearly 100,000 employees actively using LinkedIn Learning. One of their main goals was to improve internal mobility. They've achieved this, with employees moving and getting promoted within the organization.

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Any tips, tricks, or hacks you'd like to share with fellow CSMs that helped you or your team?

Build trust in every customer success relationship. 

It's one of the core tenets I prioritize. Sometimes products break or things don't work as well as they should. But if you have established trust with the customer, it makes the communication process much easier to manage during those times.

What are some of the tools you use to make customers successful?

Zoom and Teams for video calls, especially since we’re not meeting customers in person as frequently. I also use Gong to record and summarize our customer calls and all the summaries go into Dynamics, our CRM tool. That helps me stay organized 

Unlike many others, at LinkedIn, we don't use Gainsight or an external CS platform. Instead, LinkedIn has a suite of internal tools, including an insights-generating tool for reporting. This data is compiled into Excel, and our insights analysts turn that into slides for customer presentations. 

Most of my work involves emails, video conferencing, and Excel. I spend a significant amount of time analyzing data, though I’m lucky to have much of it pre-formatted, which isn’t the case for many other CSMs.

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How are you leveraging Gen AI across your work as a CSM? 

I've started using Gen AI for change management recommendations. I input details about the customer and ask  ChatGPT for suggestions on what might work best for them or to help create ideas for a communication campaign. 

I spend less time worrying about the types of emails I'm writing to customers because AI drafts them for me. It also writes my notes, follow-ups, and summaries, reducing the time I spend on administrative tasks and allowing me to focus more on consulting with customers.

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If you were to wave a magic wand to do your job better or provide more value, what would it be?

I'd want something that handles all my admin tasks. It would track our CRM activities, put my notes in, and update the CRM automatically so I wouldn't have to think about it. 

Also, it would be great to have all our metrics in one place. We currently track a lot of metrics, but they're not easily accessible. Having everything consolidated would give a good snapshot of the client, making it easy to make recommendations and figure out what needs to be done to get them to the next level.

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