Customer Success Meetup 21.3.2018
Tal Arabov, Director of Customer Success at WhiteSource (https://www.whitesourcesoftware.com/), shares the unique story of building a customer success organization at WhiteSource. How to gain retention and growth while working with some challenging customers. And the important contribution the customer success team had in driving company’s phenomenal growth.
4. The WhiteSource Story
Always staying one step ahead of the market since 2011
2011 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
Founded
4 Employees
Inventory &
Licenses
7 Employees
Security
10 Employees
Quality
15 Employees
Shift Left
25 Employees
Growth!
$10M Funding!
75 Employees
• US office
• Executive team
6. The Start
• Joined to WhiteSource on Sep 2016
• Responsibility: Customer Support & Customer Success
• ~ 130 customers
How to approach?
Learn the product
Prepare a HL plan
Visibility on current status
7. HL Plan
Customer
Segmentation
Prioritization
• Contract Size
• Growth Potential
• Rand Reputation
Health Report
Visibility
• Map data sources
• Define a tool
(Automatic report in
Excel)
• Define KPI’s and
Thresholds.
On-Boarding
Successful deployment
• Define process
• Monitor
QBRs
Deepen relationship
• Customer-WS
Activity-Value
Review
• Deployment
Optimization
• Roadmap
• …
11. On-Boarding Plan
➢ Silver Customers
➢ Gold Customers
➢ Platinum Customers
‘Welcome to
WhiteSource’
letter
On-Boarding
Session
Offline
monitoring
‘Welcome to
WhiteSource’
letter
On-Boarding
session
Milestones
follow-up with
customers
Summary +
Signoff
‘Welcome to
WhiteSource’
letter
KO meeting
On-Boarding
session
Milestones
follow-up
with customer
Summary +
Signoff
12. Pre Kickoff Kicked off Integration Configuration Signoff
Follow-up
meeting after
a month
On-Boarding Phases
13. Customer Success Team
➢ 3 CSMs in IL (May 2017)
➢ 2 CSMs in US (Jan 2018)
➢ Training plan, accounts transferring, scalability, monitoring,
escalations…
➢ Team goals, individual goals and additional KPI’s:
➢ Renewal rate (accounts)
➢ Renewal rate (Value)
➢ Time for On-Boarding
➢ Average health