Here’s a new episode from our podcast – Mastering CS, Candid Leader Insights. Irina Cismas, Head of Marketing at Custify, discussed with Ellie Yates, the Head of Customer Success at Signable.
In this podcast, Ellie shares amazing insights about her journey in CS, the challenges she overcame, and the strategies she implemented.
What You’ll Learn:
- How to structure the CS team
- How to maintain a good relationship with sales
- Crucial skills for customer success professionals
- What to prioritize in customer success
- The importance of the right tool stack for CS
Key insights and takeaways for CSMs based on the interview:
Curiosity is Key: Cultivating and maintaining a genuine curiosity about your customers—understanding their needs, challenges, and industry—can significantly enhance customer relationships and lead to better solutions.
Flexibility and Proactive Communication: Offering flexible options, such as moving customers from monthly to annual plans, and proactively addressing their needs through data-driven insights, helps build trust and reduces churn.
The Power of Silence in Customer Interactions: Embracing silence during customer conversations allows customers to share more openly, fostering deeper, trust-based relationships.
Comprehensive Onboarding and Team Integration: Including shadowing of the support team in onboarding for all new employees ensures a unified approach to customer interaction, reinforcing a customer-centric culture across the organization.
Harnessing Data for Strategic Decisions: Leveraging data from multiple sources and integrating it into tools like dashboards enables teams to anticipate customer needs, inform strategy, and drive growth effectively.
Podcast transcript
Intro
Irina 00:00
Welcome to Mastering CS candid Leader Insights, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of customer success with industry leaders. I’m your host, Irina Cismas and today’s guest is Ellie Yates, Head of Customer Success at Signable. Ellie, welcome and thanks for joining us today.
Ellie 00:17
Thank you! Hi. Thanks for having me!
Working in CS
Irina 00:20
I usually like to start by getting to know the person behind the role. So I want to ask you, how did you end up working in customer success?
Ellie 00:29
Well, I worked in retail throughout my early teens and 20s, so I’ve always gained enjoyment from interacting with customers. My first B2B role was as an account manager for Hiring Hub, which is an online recruitment marketplace. I discovered how much I enjoyed building rapport and relationships with customers in a much less fleeting way than I suppose the retail space allows for.
So, I continued to build on this and progressed through to senior relationship management and onward. It all started with understanding that I loved interacting with customers and making sure they were getting the most out of their experience.
Irina 01:08
Tell us more about your role at Signable. What are your main responsibilities as Head of Customer Success?
Ellie 01:16
Yeah, of course. So I currently oversee both a Success and Support Division here at Signable. There are a total of 10 people under my care. I’m also part of a strategy team made up of other heads of departments. As well as managing the teams, I directly support two managers in their development and oversee the strategic and procedural direction of the customer-facing team.
I am involved in the planning and execution of company-wide objectives and the overall strategic direction of the company by being part of this strategy team. It’s my job to ensure that the bigger-picture goals are communicated to my team and that our initiatives and objectives align with the company vision as well.
Structuring the Customer Success Team
Irina 02:01
I want to discuss about your team. You mentioned a few things about it when you described your role and responsibilities. But I want to go deeper. How do you structure it? You mentioned also sales, and you mentioned support and also customer success. How did you split the role and responsibilities to ensure maximum efficiency and impact?
Ellie 02:30
Yeah, no, of course. So, you mentioned support there, and one thing that sets Signable apart from other e-signature platforms is our real, UK-based support team—your real human, UK-based support team, I should say. I think it’s necessary to include support in the overarching function of customer success, but also to have a dedicated team to ensure our customers have confidence in how they’re using our software.
This also enables our success division to focus purely on building relationships, understanding seasonality, anticipating requirements, and ensuring our customers are truly looked after. We also have senior CS managers overseeing partners and bespoke accounts, meaning the consultative approach to relationship management is being used for the higher volume users, while the smaller transactional accounts are also given enough CS attention. So, it’s about splitting the success team into divisions, but also having that support function to really prop everything up.
Irina 03:37
When you mentioned the division and the different roles in in the CS team, did you structure it based on the life cycle of the customers? Do you have roles in the onboarding? You separate the implementation phase, where the onboarding versus renewal and other stages, or is it one senior person who is overseeing the whole journey?
Ellie 04:03
No, it is. It is split. So we split the customer success team into managing the higher volume accounts. Obviously, Signable works like any e-signature platform, so our customers send documents for signature in what we call envelopes. The higher the volume of envelopes, the more that customer is using Signable, and therefore, the more people might be using Signable across their entire organization. So, they require a more consultative, heavier-touch relationship management—kind of like an account manager, if you like.
We have people specifically looking after bespoke accounts and partners who require that level of attention. Then we have our success team that looks after the smaller accounts as well, so they can understand the slightly different life cycles in terms of upgrading for seasonality, downgrading, adding more people to the team, and expanding that team to utilize those features. So, it’s split based on the size of each account, rather than by industry at the moment.
Partners in driving growth
Irina 05:07
And you also mentioned the fact that you are part of the senior management team, I want to ask you, who are your partners in driving the growth of the company?
Ellie 05:21
Well, yeah, that would include representatives from all the other teams as well. We have product, finance, marketing, HR, and operations. All of these heads come together to discuss how we come up with our objectives, goals, and initiatives, and how to achieve them.
We also discuss, through forums and retros, how we would undertake challenges and push through to ensure that we are creating a vision for the company and delivering the objectives and initiatives to achieve that vision.
Sales – CS handover
Irina 05:59
I want to know what’s the relationship with sales, and how you make sure that the sales is in sync with the customer success department. How is the internal handover? How do you make sure that you are working and you have a great relationship between the two?
Ellie 06:18
I think, yeah, that’s a great question, actually. Obviously, we work really closely with the sales division because we have to manage that handover. It’s an ever-evolving process, and the handover sometimes needs to be nuanced. For example, if there’s a more consultative, 360-degree sales cycle for a partner that goes on for quite a long time, you might want to involve the customer success team at an earlier point in that journey. So, we have to treat it on a case-by-case basis, but at the same time, maintain consistency in terms of plan levels, the size of the customer, and who’s going to be looking after them.
I would say one of the key factors in this process is diligence—administrative diligence and CRM diligence, certainly. Our sales team needs to recognize the point at which a customer should be handed over and introduced to their relationship manager or customer success manager. We need to ensure that this transition is as smooth as possible so that the customer feels their journey from being onboarded to being looked after by the customer success team is seamless. They should feel total trust in the people they are corresponding with throughout this process.
It’s an ongoing process, and I think the key elements are diligence, communication, and having a single source of truth for the people who sign up, including what correspondence has taken place between the sales team and that particular customer or prospect.
Irina 07:51
I know that your career journey is quite diverse, and you also have experience in sales operations, product management.
Do you think that the relationship you have now with sales benefits because of the experience that you have from other departments or in other roles? In other words, how did that particular experience in different other teams help you approach the CS function, and how did it help you leverage the relationship that you have with other departments?
Ellie 08:25
Yeah, no, that’s a great question. It’s a good observation as well. I would say, certainly, having worked in both commercial and internal roles gives you a really good sense of the overall picture. But I’d say the number one thing that all of these roles have in common is that you have to act as a true advocate for the customer. Starting in account management means you learn how to put the customer at the center of everything you do.
If you take this approach into operations, ensuring that all the tools and processes are focused on the customer, you’re really looking at customer success with the widest angle lens possible. Similarly, in product management, you’re acting as the facilitator for the customer, translating their behaviors and needs to the product teams to ensure the product’s continued success.
I think coming from a customer-facing role and moving into a more product-related or internal position gives you the unique perspective of being hardwired to consider the customer first, through direct experience of handling their queries on a daily basis. So, I do feel that starting out by putting the customer at the center of everything you do influences how you approach things throughout the organization. This focus on the customer pivots everyone’s thought processes toward building a more successful product.
Crucial skills for CSMs
Irina 09:56
I wanna ask you about roles, responsibilities, and also skills because I know that the CS role is versatile. From your experience, which are the most important skills that a CSM needs to have in order to be successful?
Ellie 10:18
Okay, that’s a great question. Actually, I would say it’s more of an attribute than a skill, but curiosity is really important when it comes to success. I think wanting to understand why customers use our software, what problems it actually solves for them, and what they actually require e-signatures for—this goes beyond the regular “know your client” stuff and helps to build that consultative relationship that’s so important.
Of course, presentation skills, sales skills, tech skills, and CRM administration skills are all critical too. But curiosity is something inherent, and it’s much harder to teach. I’m not sure if it can be taught, to be honest, but I believe that really asking the questions, digging deeper, and building the relationship with the customer through truly understanding what they want and why, requires curiosity. So, I’d put that at the top of the list.
Interview process for CS professionals
Irina 11:18
How do you test it out in your interview process?
Ellie 11:27
Our interview process would start with quite informal questions, asking people exactly what it is that made them apply for the role at Signable. That might sound like a basic, everyday question you’d expect in an interview, but what we’re really looking for in those responses is something deeper. We’re looking for people to say things like, “I love the culture,” or “It seems like you’re doing things quite differently, like having a support function, which I’ve never seen before.”
We want to hear that they’ve looked into our culture page and understand things like our well-being allowance and unlimited holiday policy, and that they think it’s brilliant and want to know what that’s like. You can get a sense of curiosity from individuals by asking them to divulge what has brought them to you, what’s brought them in front of you, because that enables them to tell a story. I think being able to tell a story and have a narrative is also an important part of customer relationship management.
Irina 12:24
I know that we are talking about asking the right questions in order to find the why behind any answer that the customer gives you, but I find this quite challenging. You can ask questions, but you don’t know where. How can you dig deeper? I wanna ask you, what are your questions? How do you phrase them?
How do you frame them in order to find what’s definitely important? Because, in some cases, maybe neither does the customer know the right answer.
Ellie 13:08
Yeah, you know what? I would say keep the questions simple for customers. One of the most basic questions we use is, “What are you looking to use Signable for?” That question gets them started. For example, they might say, “Well, we’ve got an enrollment form that we use for our students, and they need to sign it.” Then you can follow up with, “Okay, so how are you currently getting that form signed? What problem does this solve for you?” They might respond with something like, “Well, we actually have to do it in the office, then we have to file it in a cabinet, and it’s really difficult to locate later.”
I think once you ask questions that bring forth their challenges and problems, it’s much easier to tailor your understanding of what they need and present solutions that fit. For example, they might have issues with filing away their documents, so they might need to use webhooks to bring the Signable documents out and pop them into their own CRM. They might need to use our API to integrate it directly so that they never have to leave their system to use ours. It’s really about digging into their challenges.
One effective question might be, “What’s the hardest thing about your job or what you do?” People aren’t necessarily expecting to hear that on a sales call, an account management call, or an onboarding call, but when you ask questions that really make them think, they’re often more willing to divulge more information.
Working on the right KPIs
Irina 14:43
There are so many demands on the customer success team, and we talked about the right questions to find out the answers and to understand the internal motivation. I want to ask you, how do you make sure that your team is working on the right KPIs and consistently drives meaningful impact, because it’s easy for the CS team to be, I would say, buried in a lot of tasks, and at some point without care boundaries. There’s also an overlap between support and CS, and because the CS team is the one who interacts with customers, a lot of things can fall on the plate of the customer success team, but in the end, they need to have, I would say a clear direction, and they need to have a clear focus. How do you as leader of the CS team, make sure that they are impacting their right KPIs and they are working towards them, rather than keep themselves busy?
Ellie 15:55
Yeah, well, no, absolutely. Smart work is really important, rather than just busy work. I think you’ve touched on it there—it comes down to having the right structure for the team and ensuring the right people are doing the right things. For instance, having a dedicated support team to deal with technical and help queries frees up the success team to focus on getting to know the high-volume customers and understanding their needs.
Another key aspect is the use of data and tools. Being able to understand trends in usage across seasons and identify customers on the wrong plans, for example, allows us to proactively ensure customers get the most out of using Signable. By far, the most important tool we use is Slack. We have an integration set up to alert a Slack channel if a customer leaves a low NPS score or requests a feature. This enables us to respond to customers in real time, educating them on the capabilities of the software and preventing unnecessary churn due to misunderstandings or missing features.
When it comes to retention KPIs, it’s crucial to anticipate where customers might be struggling and come up with solutions to their problems before they even realize there is an issue. Using the right tools and data to inform us is really important because it allows us, as you’ve already touched on, to work smartly rather than just staying busy. Instead of going through a list of customers and manually checking what they’re up to, we can anticipate issues and get alerts directly through integrations with Slack. So, yeah, tools and data are key.
Tools stack for CS
Irina 17:39
What other tools are part of your technology stack as a CS. What other tools do you rely on besides Slack for alerts and notifications?
Ellie 17:51
Our CRM and marketing tool is HubSpot, which is really crucial for us when we need to send out communications. It also records all of our correspondence with customers, so we always know what’s going on. For data, we use Retool, which plugs into our data warehouse and enables us to segment by industry and season, as well as create portfolios for customers, particularly for the CS team.
We use Help Scout for support and chat, allowing us to communicate with customers, and it’s integrated with HubSpot, so everything is in one place. Slack is obviously the most important tool for us because it handles both internal and external communication. Being able to have visibility of a customer issue across the entire organization through integrations with tools like Help Scout on Slack allows us to leverage the collective knowledge of everyone in the organization. This is particularly useful for complex issues that require several points of view to come up with the right answer for the customer.
There are quite a few different tools we use, and this doesn’t even cover all of them. For instance, we run an affiliate program with First Promoter, and of course, there are myriad tools in the infrastructure department of the product team, which I couldn’t even begin to name.
Irina 19:23
Besides retention and churn, what other elements are viewed for making sure that you are on track?
Ellie 19:44
Certainly, expansions and upgrades are key, including annual upgrades. Moving customers from monthly plans to annual plans offers much better value, both for stickiness and customer lifetime value. CLV is important, but when it comes to churn, we break it down into actual customer churn and delinquent churn, where payment failures come into play. This allows us to tighten up processes around the automation of renewal emails and other related tasks. So, nothing too out of the ordinary—just the standard KPIs, I think.
Data Hygiene
Irina 20:23
How do you make sure that the data hygiene is in place? You mentioned that it’s important to have a unique source of information. Is there a data guardian?
Ellie 20:37
Yeah, oh, yeah. We have a data team. In fact, if we require a certain dashboard to be built that would enable our customer success team to view all of their customer portfolios, or if they want to focus on particular customers who are using a higher allocation of their plan then they should be at that time of the month or year, we can easily do that.
For example, we could proactively contact those customers before they realize they’re going to run out of envelopes and say, “Look, at the rate you’re going, you’re going to run out of envelopes soon. Is it a good idea to consider moving you to another plan?” We also take into account seasonality—whether we’re looking at a high volume of envelopes being sent throughout the year or during a specific time of year.
So, yes, we have a whole data team, and we have a process by which we can raise a data request, consult on it, and move it through the process to have a dashboard built. This allows us to pull the data we need and drive growth.
Irina 21:39
What would you say that there are your biggest challenges in this, in this moment, from your role, what keeps you up at night?
Ellie 21:52
That’s a great one. At the moment, what I’m seeing across the board, and in conversations with my team, is price sensitivity. Customers are constantly shopping around to find the best deal they can, sometimes at the expense of meeting all their needs. However, Signable offers incredible value for money with a pay-as-you-go option, and we don’t tie people into contracts, allowing them to upgrade and downgrade to suit their own seasonality. Flexibility is key here, and I think that flexibility is one answer to this challenge.
But also, as I’ve touched on a few times, one of the biggest challenges is harnessing the right data. Delving into data from several sources and creating a narrative of industry trends and customer behavior can really inform strategy, growth objectives, and goals. I would certainly say that harnessing data—getting it from all the right places and trying to amalgamate it into one dashboard—is crucial. We’re well on our way with this, but it’s a constant challenge because the more data you get, the more you need to delve deeper. So, yeah, I think about data a lot.
Proving the value of CS internally
Irina 23:14
Do you think having the right data helped you sell the CS story internally? How do you make sure that the senior management team understands the true value of the CS department? How do you promote your team’s efforts internally?
Ellie 23:41
Well, yeah, I definitely think data is helpful in illustrating that because it’s based on cold, hard facts that everyone can understand, rather than just anecdotes. But at Signable, we put the customer at the center of everything we do, and it’s our job in the success team to advocate for the customer across the entire organization.
One of the things that helps us is understanding customer behavior and our tonality when interacting with customers. To reinforce this, we’ve added shadowing our support team to the onboarding schedule for every single person who joins the business. It doesn’t matter if they’re in operations, people, finance, product, or marketing—they will come and shadow the CS team for a few hours as part of their onboarding so they understand how we interact with customers.
Additionally, we invite all teams across the organization to get involved in customer success immersion days. During these days, everyone is invited to come and shadow the entire customer-facing team, including support and success, for a few hours to see how we articulate the products and interact with customers.
As I mentioned before, we have a senior strategy team with representatives from all departments. As part of that strategy team, I share the goals and challenges of the success team on a weekly basis, and we ensure that we celebrate successes as well in bi-weekly wrap-ups led by our MD, as well as in retros and forums. I think celebrating the successes of our customer team with visibility across the whole organization is really important. So, yeah, a few things: shadowing, celebrating success, and advocating for the customer internally.
Irina 25:29
Before we wrap up, I wanna know who has been your most influential mentor in your career, and what’s the best piece of advice they gave you?
Ellie 25:42
Oh yeah, there’s a lot to name. Currently, my CEO, Ollie, is a real mentor for me. He sees things quite clearly, while I can sometimes be a bit nebulous and ambiguous about things. But he built the software and has a knack for seeing simple pathways to solutions, so he’s certainly a mentor of mine.
I also think back to my first boss at Hiring Hub, where I started out—Sarah Jones. She taught me tenacity and persistence, often using the phrase “get on the phone.” One of the most valuable pieces of advice she gave me was about the importance of silence when speaking with customers. She told me not to fill the silence, to let it be, because it can encourage the customer to open up and share truths they might not reveal if you’re constantly talking or asking specific questions. This approach enables you to build relationships based on trust. So yeah, I’d say that piece of advice—embracing silence—is really important.
Irina 26:53
What else would you advise CSMs, who are in the beginning of their careers? What would be besides silence? What else would you advise them to do in order to keep up with all the changes, with the uncertainty that exists at this moment in the CS industry?
Ellie 27:33
Well, yeah, I would say you’re right. It’s a burgeoning industry in many ways. Of course, everything depends on the customers, and we’ve talked about price sensitivity. But I would go back to something I’ve mentioned before: remain curious. Always be curious. Yes, there are going to be tasks you have to do throughout the day—there will be repetitive things, and admin might not be your strong point. But as long as you remain curious when you’re having conversations and discussing things with your customer, and you’re genuinely interested in them as a person, as an organization, and in understanding the challenges they face and what their company actually does, it will keep your days interesting and make people want to talk to you.
That’s really important. To be a good customer success manager or a good relationship manager, it’s about people being excited to hear from you or having confidence in you when they have an issue to raise. It’s about them feeling they can talk frankly and openly with you about a problem or challenge because of the strong working relationship you’ve built. Curiosity helps with all of that. So yeah, my piece of advice would certainly be to be, or stay, curious.
Irina 28:59
Thank you so much, Ellie for sharing your valuable insights with us, and a big thank you to everyone who is listening to this episode. We hope you found the conversation as insightful and inspiring as I did, and until next time, stay safe and keep mastering customer success. Thank you!
