When I tell people I'm in customer success, I get one of two reactions. "So, sales?" or "So, support?" Honestly it's a bit of both and neither, which makes it a tough one to explain at a barbecue. If you ask my wife, she'll tell you I look at people's FarmVille data and then tell the carriers how people are experiencing their network. Which is also way wrong!
Here's my version. I'm the person a customer calls when they need our data to answer a hard question, and the person my own company calls when it needs to know what that customer actually thinks.
My customers are some of the largest phone and internet companies in the US. They use network performance data to decide where to build, what to fix and how they stack up against the competition. My job is to make sure that data turns into decisions they're glad they made, the kind that drive their business forward.
A day, roughly
Morning: checking the pulse. First question of the day: what changed overnight? Did something break? Was there an outage? Did a new phone drop, a new OS roll out, or a software stack update go live? Any of those can move the numbers, and my customers will want to know why. Once I know what kind of day it is, I check how each account is using the data and what questions are waiting on me. If a customer's numbers don't match what they expected, that's usually the first fire to put out. The loud accounts will always find me. The quiet ones are the ones I go looking for.
Midday: the data work. A lot of questions show up as "why does this say X when our internal numbers say Y?" I'll reproduce it myself in SQL or Python, check how the metric is defined, and figure out whether it's a real difference, a definition difference, or a mistake somewhere. These are worth chasing down fast. This is my favorite part of the job. Every one of these is a little puzzle, and I love the moment the pieces click and the number finally makes sense. Getting there myself, without waiting on a specialist team, makes it even better.
Afternoon: people. A call with a customer's engineers about one project, then their leadership about the bigger picture, then my own product team to pass along what customers keep asking for. Lately, a lot of those conversations are about how we measure in the first place. We've been exploring moving from aggregating by device to aggregating by location or tile. Users move, the network doesn't. So as convergence picks up, how do you measure someone hopping from Wi-Fi to cellular and back again? Where does satellite fit in? Those are the questions we're working to answer, with a ton of help from our customers' feedback.
Somewhere in there: an RFP response, prep for a webinar, or a business review deck.
The parts nobody tells you about
Multi-threading. Knowing one person at a customer is a contact. Knowing their engineers, their product folks and their executives is a relationship.
Translating. Engineers want the method. Executives want the decision. Marketing wants to know what they can say out loud, and finance wants to know what it's worth. Same data, four very different conversations. Turning a network finding into ROI someone can take to a budget meeting, or a claim a marketing team can actually stand behind, is where most of my value lives.
Escalations. Something will break eventually. The job is being the calm person on the call with a plan. My favorite: a customer called me at 2:00 PM on a Saturday because they couldn't log in to get what they needed. Come to find out, they were on the wrong website! Not every escalation is a five-alarm fire, but you still pick up the phone.
Being the customer's voice inside. Half the job happens with my own team, making sure what customers need shows up in the roadmap. Here's the tricky part. I'm responsible for delivering for the customer, but nobody on the product or engineering team reports to me. I can't make anyone build anything. So the voice of the customer has to carry weight without a title behind it. That means bringing the right data, telling a clear story about why it matters, and building relationships long before I need a favor.
What makes someone good at it
- Curiosity about the customer's business. Your product is only one piece of their world.
- Comfort in the data. You don't need to be a data scientist, but you should be able to check a number yourself.
- Telling the story. A finding nobody acts on might as well not exist.
- A little stubbornness. You won't always know the answer, but you're pretty sure you can figure it out.
Why I like it
I spent years as an RF engineer making networks better one site at a time. Now I get to help the people who run those networks see what their customers actually experience. It also blew my perspective wide open. When you work for one carrier, you mostly see your own network. Now I get to see the big players and the small ones, and it's way more than cellular. There are Wi-Fi offload strategies, satellite filling in coverage gaps, and even how people actually use their devices day to day. Getting to work on that bigger picture is a ton of fun!
If you're wondering whether you need an engineering background to do this, you don't. Ella Cullen at PostHog came in from sales and wrote a great piece on how she got there.