In this episode, we have Anna Caruso, with extensive experience in providing white glove service to global Enterprise customers at ProcessUnity, CyberGRX, ShortCut, and WealthBox. Anna began her career in customer support, transitioned into implementation, and eventually found her niche in customer success. 

Join Anna as she shares her CSM journey, insights, and key learnings.

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

Product adoption is the biggest indicator of customer success – whether that means the product is integrated across the board with APIs or it becomes essential for customers’ daily business operations.

Customers might seem engaged or the sales team might think they're happy because they're renewing. However, without proper implementation and adoption, issues are bound to arise in the long term. 

What is the most difficult part about being a CSM?

Being the team's quarterback.

You often have instances where you need to involve other departments to address customers’ needs. Getting their time and attention is tough – especially in larger companies. It might sound silly, but coordinating everyone's schedules can be surprisingly difficult. 

You also need to have the right resources who can speak to the customer's needs and are also receptive to the customer. Picking the right people for those calls requires a certain finesse.

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

Prioritize regular engagement with customers. 

This can look a bit different depending on your company and product, but maintaining regular contact with the customer is key. This could be through adoption conversations, or more value-driven discussions like, "Look at what we've achieved for you in the past quarter," or "Here's what you could be doing that you're not currently leveraging." 

These are great ways to highlight your expertise as a CSM and build trust with the customer.

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

Some of the key CS tools include Gainsight, ChurnZero, and of course, Salesforce. 

I also love Gong for its AI capabilities. It does a great job of transcribing calls and providing a nice synopsis, saving time on follow-up emails. For collaboration, I use Teams and the Google Suite.

On a more personal level, I rely heavily on OneNote and notebooks. I keep a dedicated notebook for each enterprise customer to track their progress, individual tasks, and project plans

How do you think AI can impact Customer Success in the long term?

There are a lot of good uses for AI in customer success. For instance, it can help create emails and overviews for customers more quickly. That's the most straightforward use. 

On a more complex level, I hope AI can help create visuals for customer workflows. They are such a big part of many adoption cycles, especially for more complex products like those in cybersecurity. AI can develop better visuals, workflows, and visually stimulating project plans that go beyond a follow-up email or spreadsheet.

I also see AI being useful in creating interactive knowledge bases for CSMs. When CSMs get specific questions, AI could help translate general KB articles into more tailored responses for the customer's unique environment. This would reduce the need for lengthy calls to explain best practices.

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

I use Gong’s AI functionality to analyze calls and extract key points. I also use ChatGPT for summarizing info in executive reports. For example, if my VP needs a quick overview of why a customer is risky, I prefer creating detailed reports. 

Gen AI is really handy for those situations. Using a natural language processing tool helps me highlight the top points that matter most to them.

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