Speaker: Melissa McMillan, VP of Customer Success, Screencastify
Please could you introduce yourself?
Melissa McMillan: Hello, my name is Melissa McMillan. I am the Vice President of Customer Success at Screencastify, and I'm located in San Francisco California, where I've been living for a little over 10 years now.
What will you be discussing at the upcoming Customer Success Festival in San Francisco?
Melissa McMillan: My niche expertise is in building and scaling customer success teams for early-stage startups. So I'm gonna be spending my time talking about how to mature a customer success department really from its inception until it's a well-oiled machine. I have a model that I like to use where I move the department really through phases of maturity and development until we arrive in good place, that I think will be useful to folks in customer success – really in any industry. I'm also going to spend some time talking about how to operationalize that in conjunction with a really good career development tracking and skill tracking program for your Customer Success Managers. This is something that is very rare but really important that we want to make sure we're providing for our CSMs.
Why do you think it is important to shine a light on customer success?
Melissa McMillan: I think customer success is absolutely vital to anyone in a SaaS or a subscription-based business. In SaaS, the sale is never really closed. The deal is never really fully won because we need people to constantly renew year-over-year-over-year and of course we want them to expand as well. So everything that happens past that initial, sale lands under the umbrella of customer success, meaning the vast majority of the customer's experience with your business is under the umbrella of customer success. So customer success is really getting the attention that it deserves. And I think it should be a major priority at every subscription-based business.
