In our new episode of the Mastering CS, Candid Leader Insights podcast, Irina Cismas, Head of Marketing at Custify, sat down with Mio Mattsson, the Head of Customer Success at AlexisHR.
Mio tells us more about his journey in CS, the challenges he overcame, and the strategies he implemented.
What You’ll Learn:
- How to help customers with their challenges
- The importance of data hygiene
- Key metrics for customer success
- How to keep your team focused
- The role of AI in customer success
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Key insights and takeaways for CSMs based on the interview:
Proactive Customer Success Focus: Mio transitioned from customer support to customer success because of the proactive and strategic elements of the role. He emphasized the importance of cross-functional collaboration and focusing on helping customers achieve value through long-term engagement with the product, rather than only solving immediate issues.
Customer Success Process: Mio’s team at Alexis HR splits customer success into two phases: onboarding and adoption. Onboarding focuses on data migration and product familiarity, while the adoption phase emphasizes driving usage and value from the product. Success plans are co-created with customers early on, and proactive follow-ups ensure customers stay on track toward their goals.
Tailored Customer Approaches: Alexis HR tailors its customer success strategies based on customer needs—whether they prefer a “white glove” approach with personalized meetings or a more self-service experience with digital guidance. Adjusting the approach to fit customer preferences ensures better engagement and outcomes.
Data-Driven Customer Success: Mio highlights the importance of tracking leading metrics, such as customer health scores and goal achievement, over lagging indicators like churn rates. Focusing on proactive measures allows the team to anticipate issues before they impact retention. Additionally, Mio emphasizes the importance of employee satisfaction (eNPS) as a core metric for driving customer success outcomes.
Adoption of AI and Technology: Alexis HR integrates AI into its operations, using tools like ChatGPT to enhance communication, structure processes, and support customers more efficiently. Mio sees a lot of potential in AI to personalize customer journeys and optimize the customer success workflow, with further utilization expected in the future.
Podcast transcript
Intro
Irina 0:00
Welcome to Mastering CS Candid Leader Insights, the podcast where we deep dive into the world of customer success with industry leaders. I’m your host, Irina Cismas, and today’s guest is Mio Mattsson, Head of Customer Success at Alexis HR. Mio, thanks for joining us!
Really glad to have you here. How are you today?
Mio 0:20
I’m super good. I’m really honored and it’s going to be super fun to talk a little bit about customer success with you today.
Choosing customer success over customer support
Irina 0:27
Of course, to kick things off, I’d love to hear your story. Your career seems to be a mix of support, sales, a bit of analytics. What made you choose customer success over support?
Mio 0:39
I mean, I think it’s a super good question. I love the proactive parts and the strategy of customer success. And as I started my career, I was always happy to help and serve people and I loved working with customer support.
It really gave me this joy helping people with their problems and going home and feeling like, wow, I really did great work today and made some people happy. Then later when transitioning into customer success, I think I could bring that part as well, but also in a proactive way with working cross-functional with other teams and making sure that our customers get the right value and results that they wanted of using our product or service. Then later when I stepped into a leader position in customer success, I was really happy to work more with the strategy, building and optimizing processes and following trends to achieve the results that really made the difference on the bottom line.
I truly love working in customer success today and it’s a joy getting up out of bed every morning and feeling like, wow, now we can really affect some good stuff.
Irina 1:56
We’ll speak a bit later about the cross-functional things and about the transition from CSM to the role of head of CS. Now I want to know, what’s a typical day look like for you as head of customer success at Alexis HR?
Mio 2:13
Yeah, my day usually starts with making sure that we are on point on all the things we need to be on point with. I work really closely to my team to always find out if there’s anything that we need to make clearly when it comes to the processes where we’re working, where we try to have a balance between the simplicity and effective structures in the ways we’re working. So in our success team, it’s also all about the customers, the customer’s outcome and how we can get them to reach the targets with our product.
So it’s a lot about sitting down with the different CSMs in my team and making sure that we can see what type of customers they have in their portfolio and what they are struggling with at the moment. And then we can follow up on it and try to always keep track on what is the customer’s targets. And if we can see what the customer’s targets are, we usually build our day around that.
So if we have a specific customer that is not reaching a target, we sit down and we talk a lot about it and try to see what type of proactive actions we have to reach in order for them to achieve the targets that they need to achieve.
How to overcome customer challenges
Irina 3:31
Tell me more about your customers. Who are they and what kind of challenges do they usually run into and why do they need Alexis HR?
Mio 3:43
That’s a good question. Our customer is usually someone who needs help organizing their employee data. So we provide an HR software where they can do all of the stuff they need to do within each HR.
So onboarding new colleagues, handling the time off and employee reviews and all that stuff that involves being a head of HR or an HR representative. So our customers is usually a HR representative. The stakeholders of our customers are usually an HR person who needs help with organizing their HR data and be more effective when it comes to their challenges they have every day with keeping track on onboarding and everything around HR.
Irina 4:38
And how do you help your customers to overcome the challenges that you just mentioned from your CS role? Let’s pick some concrete tactics that you use to help them.
Mio 4:57
Yes. So one of the biggest challenges that they have is usually they come from not using an HR software. So they have all their employee data and all their processes around HR in spreadsheets.
So that challenge is solved by our product. And I think we have a mindset where we believe that the product solves their main problem and challenges. And what we do in our customer success department is to focus on making sure that they get the outcomes they want and reach the targets they have.
So their biggest challenges are connected to reaching their targets that might be connected to usage and adoption of our product. And we need to truly understand how do they get the value out of the product and why they should use a certain feature. And here we try to keep a really close eye on their goals and targets and follow up on it to make sure that our customer is always on track with that.
Product adoption playbook
Irina 6:00
You mentioned about making sure that your customers are adopting the tool. You focus a lot on the adoption of it. How does this adoption playbook look like in your case?
And what’s more important?
Is it the onboarding or is it the adoption? How do you split the roles or the focus? More on the onboarding?
More on the adoption? Is it equally? How do you transition from one phase to another?
Mio 6:37
That’s a super great question. I think we have it pretty divided today. So our onboarding, we see it more as an implementation phase, making sure that the customer gets all the data, that they understand the product and that they know how to use it.
So for us, our first time to value metric is when the customer has invited all their employees into the HR software. Then we can say that, okay, that is the onboarding or the implementation phase. Then we go into the adoption phase for maybe the coming three months, where we make sure that they get the usage out of the product and get the value out of the product.
So that is the second part of the customer journey for us. It’s making sure that, okay, number one, they get everybody into the product. And then the adoption phase is more about following up on how do they use the product.
And usually when we have our first onboarding meeting with the customer, we go through their targets. So we create kind of a success plan with them where we say, okay, what is the most important things that you need to get out of our product? When we have done that, we follow up on that, on adoption.
So we create more of a plan where we can say, okay, this is the task that needed to be done to reach the goals. And then we keep a really, really tight look on when they are doing this task, if they’re doing the task. And as soon as we see that, oh, maybe they are not in phase with where they should be right now, we try to book a proactive meetings or do digital outreach to them to make sure that they keep on track.
Because we strongly believe, or I strongly believe that as long as the customer knows their targets and what they want to achieve with the product, and they achieve that, the retention will always be high.
The importance of data hygiene
Irina 8:34
You mentioned that data is one of the important things for your customers and in your case as well. Tell me, what do you do when your customers do not have this data hygiene, and do not have their data in order, so they cannot make the most out of your tool? How do you overcome this data challenge that is more on the customer side?
They want to use your tool, but they don’t have the input.
Mio 9:10
Yeah, I think that’s one of the biggest roles of us to make sure that they reach that. And it is sometimes the way that you mentioned that they want to achieve a target and they’re pretty clear with what they want to achieve. But then you see after the onboarding or in the adoption phase that they are not really doing what maybe we talked about on the first onboarding meeting.
In that phase, it’s really important that we keep a tight contact with the customer. And I mean, all customers are different. Some wants to have more of a personal touch where you hold their hand through the whole adoption phase, and some want more of a self-service type of solutions.
So what we do during the onboarding period is that we try to decide how does this customer like to be handled. So for us, it’s like if it’s a customer that have a lot of implementations that they want to have self-service, then we try to build a customer journey with them where we send out tips and tricks on how to get started as soon as we see that their health metrics are not living up to the expectations. And then we proactively follow up on that and always try to make sure that we talk about the targets that we decided on the first meeting and what they need to do to get there.
Self-serve customers vs white glove
Irina 10:35
So I’m guessing it’s just a matter of setting up the right expectations and the foundation of the relationship that you want to build. And depending on what the customer wants, is it the white glove approach? Is it the more self-serve you adapt?
How do the CS strategies differ? What do you do differently if you are talking with a self-serve customer versus a white glove? What are the processes that you adjust in your approach?
Mio 11:03
Yeah, that’s a super good question. I mean, with the white gloves type of customer, we try to always make sure that when we have a meeting with them and we know they are very eager to get another meeting, we always try to end the meeting with deciding a new time. And that has been something that we tried after a while when I was starting here.
Before we didn’t do that, we could send an email and try to get a meeting, but sometimes you wouldn’t get the meeting. So what’s important with those customers is that you always, when you have the last meeting, you decide the time for the next meeting. In that way, you never fall out of the loop.
And I think it’s been pretty successful with those type of customers that need to have more meetings. When it comes to customers that want more self-service, we have more of a digital customer success journey with them where we look at their data and make sure that if they’re not on track, we send out emails and guides and sometimes video material where we try to nudge them in the right direction. And then we follow up and say, okay, did this work or did this not work?
And we try to iterate and discuss with the customers how they would prefer that we do outreach.
Customer success tech stack
Irina 12:24
In both cases, either that we are speaking of a white glove approach or a digital one, I’m guessing that you rely on technology. What does the CS Tech look like in your case?
Mio 12:40
Yeah, for us, the most important thing is, of course, that we have a customer success platform. This is definitely the bread and butter in our operation. We need to have a place where we can have all the customer data and make sure that we have all the internal notes and the contracts and everything collected in one place.
What’s also very important with this customer success platform is that when we work with onboarding, we work a lot with self-service. So in the customer success platform that we have today, we have a shared workspace type of solution where we, together with the customer, have built a really nice onboarding journey with all the tasks connected to getting onboarded to the platform where we have built a task list with also a lot of help articles and videos that they can use in order to self-service and self-onboard themselves.
Key metrics to track
Irina 13:49
Because of your data-driven approach and your analytics role, I’m guessing KPIs are a big deal. What are the key metrics you’ve always been keeping an eye on and how do you make sure that they are actually driving the right results?
Mio 14:11
Yeah, definitely. I’m really a big data guy, so I really love keeping track on different metrics and see where we are and always trying to be data-driven. But when it comes to, I think we talk a little bit too much about NRR churn rate and renewal rates and these other lagging metrics when we talk about customer success.
We really want to, we really emphasize for the team to look more at the leading metrics and more on the individual customer metrics like the health scores and everything around their targets. So for us, it’s more about keeping a close eye on the customer’s health and making sure that they are doing their tasks and the CSAT, of course, because we see that looking at these lagging metrics, they are affected by the leading metrics, of course, and we would rather focus on the leading metrics and then me in my role maybe might look more on the lagging metrics to see are we on track or do we need to iterate something?
But I think as a team and as a customer success department, we talk much, much more about the metrics on the individual customers and where we are on that. But then also one of the most, most, of course, important metrics for me is the eNPS, making sure that our team is happy and feel that they are in a great state and that they are being treated well, because if we have happy and good CSMs who loves their work, then they will also make the customer happy as well. So the eNPS is the most important metric for me personally, I would say.
How to keep your team focused
Irina 15:55
With everything going on in customer success, how do you keep your team focused on those KPIs that really matter the most? Things can get very busy in your case and you can end up with a lot of things on your agenda. So how do you keep your team focused?
Mio 16:15
That’s a good question as well. I think like every CSM at Alexis has a portfolio of customers and we look a lot on the individual metrics and the segmentation on where do we need to do the proactive actions. So the type of metrics that we look on together is how is the customer’s feeling in your portfolio and making sure that we decide our proactive actions and what we do and what we prioritize based on those customers.
So it goes back to also like segmentation of customers and so on. We don’t segment our customers on like ARR, the individual ARR of the customer. We segment and decide our actions based on how the customer is feeling and what we need to do to get them to reach their targets.
The role of AI
Irina 17:09
I guess that we’re not sure, I might be wrong. Does AI play a part in how you are running things at Alexis HR? Do you use it to boost the efficiency into your team?
Mio 17:28
Yeah, definitely. I mean, since I started on Alexis, we were the first HR software that were early on AI. So we were the first one who had an AI bot implemented in our system.
And our CEO, Nima, he’s really into AI and has always been. So it was really important for him that every employee has like a premium version of ChatGPT. And we use it a lot.
We use it every day when it comes to writing email to a customer and sparring different type of processes and how we structure work. And so we use it a lot, but I think we could use it even more and utilize it better in the future.
Irina 18:16
Do you think it will become a bigger deal down the road, this AI part?
Mio 18:22
Yeah, definitely. I think there’s a lot of untapped potential. And I think like the customer success community is very good at like picking up this trend and finding good use of it.
So I think there’s a lot of things you can do more of like personalizing the customer journey or generate tailored success plan or things like being more effective in presentations for QBRs and stuff like that. So there’s a lot of things I think will be seen in the future. And there’s a lot of potential there.
Irina 18:59
Speaking of the power of the community, I’m curious, how do you keep yourself up to date with all the things that are happening? What are your go-to resources when it comes to customer success?
Mio 19:12
I would say definitely LinkedIn is one of them. I think there’s a lot of good people that post a lot of valuable information. I also really love listening to podcasts in different type of leaders of CS and hearing how people work and the trends that are going on.
So I’m really trying to always catch up with that. And that is done usually by looking at LinkedIn or listening to the podcasts that I follow. So it’s always a nice format with podcast.
I think it’s really interesting, like the podcast that you are running as well with interesting guests and getting inspirations on how other people work with customer success and everything. I think it’s all beneficial for us who works in this space to get even more space in the business industry.
Biggest challenges for a Head of Customer Success
Irina 20:13
Definitely. Indeed. And I do trust that where I feel that the CS community is super strong and by sharing all the stories and the learnings and the experience, we can learn a lot from each other.
Hence the series and the episodes that I’m running as we speak. But now let’s go back to the present. And I want to ask you, what are some of the biggest challenges that you are dealing with as head of customer success right now?
What keeps you up at night?
Mio 20:47
Great question. It’s a lot. But yeah, I think I have a pretty good view and vision of how I see like the overarching stuff that you need to do to be successful when it comes to retention and reducing churn and all that stuff.
But I think what’s really the biggest challenges for me right now is getting a little bit down to the nitty gritty when it comes to finding the structure in the everyday life of a CSM, like balancing the proactive actions and high touch and low touch that we discussed a little bit and like finding the sweet spot between digital and personal outreach and self-service and also following up on this and making sure that we get better every day in this field.
I think that will be the biggest challenge and something that I’m trying to like getting better at, at the moment, at least.
Irina 21:49
What about getting the senior management on board with your customer success goals? A lot of CSMs with whom I’ve been speaking lately did mention that it’s hard to sell internally the CS value. In some cases, if they have a revenue target associated, maybe it’s easier.
But in your case, you said that it’s important, the NPS. So what’s your CEO view on this? Is it the NPS as well or is he focused more on the revenue side of things and he would want the CS team to focus on renewals and on upselling and maybe on a more sales-driven approach rather than consultative approach?
He wouldn’t be the first one. Not sure if that’s the case. In your case, do let me know.
Mio 22:47
Yeah, for me, it’s since I have had a lot of like head of type of roles, I usually report to the CEO. So then you have to be a lot on the financial side and how can we impact the stuff we need to impact? And I’m really happy doing this whole journey, being in this space for around 10-15 years.
But what’s exciting is that people are starting to understand what customer success really is and what type of impact it has. But we still have a long way to go when it comes to like acquisition being more prioritized than retention. I think that is something that is amazing with the customer success community is that we are all a big army working to try to make this C-level people understand that retention is, if not as important as acquisition, then more important than acquisition.
So what I always try to affect when it comes to these things is that the impact on customer retention that customer success have. And then it’s great to have this type of people in our community, which are really strong, like Greg Danes, and people that do this big, big research on like, how can we affect with our actions, the retention, because in the end of the day, retention is something that’s on the bottom line. So I love to come into a company where they say, Oh, we have this high churn and this high retention.
And then you can set the financial targets for that. And with a good framework of customer success, you can highly impact that on a short, short, in a short, short time. So I think that’s the most exciting thing with customer success is that you can see that if you do this XYZ type of things, and you do it good for six months, then it will definitely affect the retention.
And like, so I’m a strong advocate for talking a lot about like, retention, and how it affects the overall bottom line.
Future goals for the CS team
Irina 25:01
What’s next for you and the CS team until the end of the year? Do you have any big projects goals? What are you trying to what are you trying to achieve?
Mio 25:10
Yeah. Right now, Alexis was acquired by another company, a bigger company in the in the beginning of the year.
Irina 25:19
Congratulations.
Mio 25:20
Thank you. So we’re a part of a company called Simployer today. And we are still having a little bit of a standalone period, but then will be integrated in the bigger company.
So what I’m excited about seeing is taking this, this customer success framework that I have, and that worked very successfully in Alexis, and applying it into the Simployer organization, and make sure that with with with those type of actions, I’m, I’m very positive that we can bring up the retention and increase the churn. And I’m really excited about this whole project. So that is something that’s going to be super exciting this way.
Irina 26:06
A lot of merger and opposition. Alexis HR is not the first company I’m hearing about that it was it was acquired. I’m actually planning on discussing this, this topic, in maybe another podcast episode, or maybe in a webinar series about what does it mean, from a CS perspective, the merge and merge and acquisition, because for sure, things change when you are acquired when or when two companies are merging, and some of the processes are becoming redundant, some of those things do change.
So I’m curious, what are the roadblocks and the bumpers that you encountered along the way? But I’ll let this for another discussion, because now we need to wrap up, but not before asking you, who has had the biggest influence on your career? And what’s the best piece of advice they given you that still sticks with you today?
Mio 27:11
That’s a that’s a really good question, actually. For me, I’m not sure of an advice that I’ve gotten that’s relative to this role and space. But there are a lot of influences for me when it comes to customer success.
And I love these people that like are loud and proud about customer success and the impact it has on businesses and trying to always raise the status of customer success, which I think is super important. So I love Nick Mehta, who talks a lot about this. Daphne Lopez, who has a lot of good, good stuff and good content on customer success. And also Greg Danes that I mentioned earlier, who does a lot of things that you can, that you can back up with facts.
And I really love that. And that’s inspiring me every day to work with CS and, and following these type of people. So I have a lot of, a lot of good, a lot of good material and a lot of good thoughts on how, how customer success can can elevate their status and making sure that we do great work every day.
Irina 28:25
Thank you so much, Mio, for sharing your insights with us today. And a big thank you to all of you who listened to this episode. Until next time, stay safe and keep mastering customer success.
