Speaker: Carine Gursky, Head of Strategic Customer Success at Stripe
Please could you introduce yourself?
Carine Gursky: Hi there, my name's Carine Gursky and I'm based in San Francisco, and I lead our customer success team that's dedicated to the strategic segment at Stripe.
What will you be discussing at the upcoming Customer Success Festival in San Francisco?
Carine Gursky: In September, I plan to talk a little bit about how companies that are more consumption-based – where you don't have necessarily your typical SaaS business model with a fixed license and a per-head fee and you're trying to drive utilization of what people are already paying for – how consumption businesses instead are like... you use it or you don't, and you only are paid if your customers are using your product and how that leads to differences in the way we think about customer success and creating models for CSMs to be successful working with our customers and these sort of slightly differing environments.
Why do you think it is important to shine the light on customer success?
Carine Gursky: I think there's something pretty special about a function and a role whose sole purpose is to make customer relationships really successful and really healthy and to have this group, this group of CSMs, probably not have sales targets or goals that would drive sales motions. The very fact of these people making the relationship so successful, inevitably, leads to very strong and stronger commercial outcomes for those relationships. I think there's this special magic in that, and it's important to shine a light on the possibilities of customer success because I think there are a lot of people who really aren't aware of this function, and many companies might benefit from this role.
