How to design CS for a mature organization

An enterprise software company has plenty of functions fighting for priority. But growing your existing customers is just as important - or even more important - at large-scale organizations as at SMBs. So how do you ensure CS is seen as a crucial business function in an enterprise environment? And how do you handle internal change management in order to build a global CS team?

In this episode, our host Anika Zubair chats with Marco Carrubba, Director of Customer Success at Microsoft about how to design customer success for a mature organization.

Marco Carrubba has had decades of expereince at a number of large organization like VMWare and Vodafone, and is today the Director of Customer Success at Microsoft. He believes in the power of differences on a mission to nurture growth and inspire others to envision new ways. Marco also had a non traditional route into customer success and has always had customer facing roles, but not aways customer success.

When customer success became more important a couple of years ago, the movement became infectious and everyone wanted to jump onboard. But when you think about larger companies they are often older and more traditional in a way. So, how did customer success actually start at the organizations that you've been at?

“You do it with a number of tactics. They can be formal tactics, for example, you change the compensation plans of people. You go around and you have those conversations to try to sell the value of customer success internally. And then there's a movement of refreshing people because obviously some people may not get it and may feel uncomfortable in a new world.”

The value of customer success is sometimes not clearly understood at enterprise organizations. For example, what have you done to make that internal change management towards CS to be understood to the wider organization?

“Customer success is not about a department. Customer success is about the whole company. So you need to have support from the executives. You need to have support from the people that drive the conversation in the company. So it's not something that you can do alone. Now, provided the environment is fertile, then it's about helping the movement.”

Listen now to the full conversation with Marco and Anika to learn more about how to design customer success for a mature oragnization.