Career Change - From Tech Support to CS

Are you contemplating a leap into a customer success role or pondering a career shift within the tech landscape?

This episode is tailor-made for you! We're thrilled to feature Imro Budhoo, Director of Customer Success Europe at Basware, and Waseem Shaikh, Manager of Customer Success at BrowserStack. They're here to unfold their transformative journeys and impart crucial strategies for smoothly transitioning into customer success.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

- Mastering strategies for a frictionless move to customer success.

- Cultivating essential skills that are vital for success in this evolving role.

- Fostering strong customer relationships and enhancing ROI.

Click here to watch the episode for additional slides and templates! 

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Waseem Shaikh, currently serving as Manager of Customer Success at BrowserStack, boasts a diverse background in software testing, with over 12 years in the Software Tech/SaaS industry. Born and raised in Mumbai, India, his journey from a Manual Tester to Automation Tester, and then from Technical Support to Customer Success Representative at BrowserStack, showcases a unique blend of technical expertise and customer success acumen. 

🔗 You may connect with Waseem via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/waseem-shaikh-a0b3a5198/

Imro Budhoo, the Director of Customer Success Europe at Basware, boasts 19 years of dedicated experience in customer support and success management, having climbed the ranks from a support consultant to leading a team of Customer Success Managers across Europe. Born, raised, and currently residing in Amsterdam, Imro is recognized as a driven CS professional with a strong emphasis on building relationships and delivering the outcomes customers seek through products and services. 

🔗 You may connect with Imro via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/imro-budhoo-b7b56497/

#CustomerSuccess #CareerChange #TechCareers

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ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

📑 Read: The Customer Success Manager Capabilities Model
https://www.csmpractice.com/csm-profiles

🎥 Watch: From Retail to Customer Success - Career Change
https://youtu.be/MayAhWHVQJo

⏬ Download: Customer Success Acronyms and Abbreviations Every CSM Needs to Know

👉🏻 Whenever you’re ready...If you're an 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘥 𝘦𝘹𝘦𝘤𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘣𝘶𝘪𝘭𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘊𝘚𝘔 𝘱𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦, there are 3 powerful ways I can help you fast-track success while avoiding common pitfalls:

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 Track key KPIs to boost CSM performance. Grab my cheatsheet to focus on metrics that matter—scale smarter & grow revenue. Click here to download.

2️⃣ 𝙅𝙤𝙞𝙣 11,000+ 𝘽2𝘽 𝙀𝙭𝙚𝙘𝙪𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙨 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙇𝙚𝙖𝙙𝙚𝙧𝙨
I share strategic insights & practical tools to help you hit your quarterly goals faster while scaling your CS operations efficiently. Don’t navigate this alone - tap into a thriving community of leaders who are optimizing their CS strategies & driving serious impact. Click here to join.

3️⃣ 𝘽𝙪𝙞𝙡𝙙𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙤𝙧 𝙇𝙚𝙖𝙙𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙖 𝘾𝙎𝙈 𝙏𝙚𝙖𝙢 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙁𝙞𝙧𝙨𝙩 𝙏𝙞𝙢𝙚?
Building a CS practice for the first time doesn’t have to feel like an uphill battle. With the right frameworks, you can achieve results faster than you think. I help experienced executives build a proactive, high-performing CS team—without the guesswork & costly missteps of figuring it out alone. Learn more.

📌 Visit our Website - CSM Practice  

Transcript

00:00 Hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining another podcast episode from CSM Practice. This podcast episode is sponsored by CSM Practice.
00:11 The customer success strategy consulting firm, the first one in the world. In this podcast, we talk a lot about things that relates to customer success.
00:20 And one of the things that I love doing is Shatter misbeliefs like customer support is so reactive. It should probably not have people from support migrating into customer success, and even if we did that mistake, then it never be successful.
00:34 I have two people that can attest to how different that could be. They're going to share about their journey moving from support to customer success.
00:42 Why did it make such a great move for them from a career standpoint? And if you're in that same place where you work in technical support, and you want to switch over to customer success, they're gonna share some tips to tell you how to do it, what work for them, and what's the situation where this is
00:59 recalled for and you could be super, super successful with that move. We'll see you in the email. Thank you so much for joining me.
01:07 Maybe you could share. Which company are you currently work for? What kind of clients do you help? Thanks for that.
01:13 So currently, I'm associated with a novelization called browser stack. So we are basically assessed startup. We are heading away from magical land of India and currently I am a manager customer success catering to majorly customers from Asia-Pacific region.
01:30 What kind of business problems do you help your customers solve? Majorly technical in terms of implementing the brush tech solution that these guys have got the license for.
01:41 And then I also have in-road bidoo, Emo. Thank you for coming to the show as well. You also transitioned from a technical support role and you're now a director of customer success.
01:51 Maybe you can tell us a little bit about 20, 30 seconds. Where do you work, what kind of clients do you help?
01:56 Thank you for having me. Indeed, I started out as technical support for a company named Basware. It's a finished based SaaS company, which recently went into private equity owned.
02:07 And basically what we do, we are all about true automation and going paperless. So, we basically arrange in-voice traffic, biotrific between organizations worldwide, and what problems do we solve?
02:21 Well, effectively, we ensure that our customers can send business documents, pay them on time, and make it as touchless as possible, and also have an efficient workforce.
02:33 How long ago have either of you transitioned from support to customer success? So, I started at BASER about 19 years ago, And in the first couple of years, I was on the support desk, then we started into surface management.
02:48 And that was about four years into my journey in the company. So I've been working in surface and success management for about 14 years now.
02:57 Wow. So it's been a long journey since you've done a pure technical support role. What about you, O scene? So I started my journey with the stack as technical support.ing members.
03:09 So, I learned the product and worked with the supporting with 2018 months and post that. I transitioned into custom success and now I just completed six years with browser stack.
03:21 Let's see, maybe you can share what has dramatically changed since you switched role. Like if you had to compare a day in the life of a support agent versus a day in a life of a customer success manager, what are the main things that changed with that transition?
03:37 The one thing that stands out for me is the approach here. So back in the days from technical support point of view, we only had transactional interactions with the customer, if there's a support ticket, we try to solve it, then try to close the ticket as fast as possible and then move on.
03:56 But when I moved into question success alone, it's more like a partnership plus a strategic advisor to the opposite of being a reactor and in this sphere of life it's more proactive.
04:11 When you look at a typical day or a typical week, you have a customer support agent versus a customer success manager, what are the key things that change in the day-to-day in terms interactions with customers but maybe even with internal teams.
04:30 Do you see a big difference? Yes, also the audience that we would speak to will change. So in the support days, you're very much talking to people operationally.
04:40 On the day today, ensuring that, hey, my system broke down, we need to get it fixed troubleshutter. So very much an individual contributor.
04:49 In the move to the success management, we often change who we talked with in the company because we're more the topic of objectives, return on investments, which KPIs do achieve.
05:00 Also, that changes our dynamic within the company. We often also have different goals, if we talk about renewals, upsells, which is also more often in success management.
05:11 So whereas a technical support you may be talked to R&D product management, we also engage a lot more with our sales colleagues.
05:19 So this is one of the main differentiators that I would say from tax support to success. What's in your memory if your compliance structure changed meaning bonus or incentives or the way they measured your performance did they look at different metrics as you switch from world to world if so can you 
05:38 talk about that? So from support it moved from a reactive approach to a proactive approach. So of course your what are dynamics also change here and we are looking forward to more on customer ROI, focusing on our renewables, like a customer life cycle licensed renewables.
05:57 So our overall component is majorly focused on these KPIs primarily, and being in SaaS, the overall user adoption or the product adoption, how good the end user team is in terms of consuming the license that these guys have opted for.
06:14 So that is also We made a recent change in organization, in terms of KPIs and bonuses, that across support up to success managers, we had one target now, which is our retention because if you would have individual goals as support, you would stay in small silos, you would have done your job, but in the
06:36 end it's about the customer. So we have basically removed about 50 KPI's, reduce them to about five. So what are the five you're used to for both support and CS that are the same for both teams?
06:51 Obviously renewals, what else? Yes, so we actually focus on two for this year. Mainly is the net retention. Basically, and it's also indeed our customer satisfaction.
07:04 So both combined will have a number. Effectively, the net retention rate is something that we didn't measure effectively before, but it's quite tangible for the people that, hey, this is what we're all working towards, is this renewal.
07:16 And then of course, happy customers will be the second one. Well, seam, is it the same case for you? You talked about the metrics that as a CSM, how your performance is being gaged.
07:26 When you were a customer support agent, did you have different metrics that you were being reviewed on or maybe you want to share is the same in your support team.
07:36 Do you share the same metrics for the current organization? No, we had different metrics back for our support team. And even that holds true right now.
07:45 The overall focus is to make sure the support team member results the end user query and with minimum possible replies.
07:54 That's like the overall of how we conduct and interactions with our customers. You both switched. What made you make the switch?
08:02 Why not staying in support? I was a couple yesterday in the support and of course helping out the customers. But I got an opportunity to join a meeting with one of our executives to present a long-term plan to act as a surface manager at the time, working more on a strategic level.
08:19 So initially, I did not know much about that role but I did know that I wanted to contribute a little bit more the relationship, then just focusing on the individual tickets.
08:30 That role gave me the opportunity to not only work on the ticket side of things, but take it to the next level, basically elevating the relation, but also helping the customer in a long term way, instead of the short-term solutions.
08:46 Let's poke to me a lot. This is why I made that decision. What about you a scene? What propelled you to move away from support and into customer success?
08:54 You usually have monthly meetings with the entire team, the technical support team and manager, back then we had a common manager because our team was quite small, technical support team and initial phase of customer success I brought the stack.
09:08 So during that meeting I just pointed out one fact that certain type of queries are quite repetitive. So what is the customer facing team doing for it?
09:18 You guys can try to award this. So my manager turned to me and he simply ask me, why don't you try to do it?
09:26 Yeah, tag your it, what a great idea, then did you step into it? Not at the very instant, but it did bring a bell if I understand the product and if I can see a pattern, I was not aware of the solution right there, but I did acknowledge there was a trend around here.
09:43 So then I took some time and had a world with my managers. We'll see, you took this on at some point, you became a customer success manager.
09:52 Was it like a gradual transition or did it happen sort of like overnight? It was gradual. In the initial days I carried my baggage of being reactive.
10:04 So I would say on the first 60 days or maybe an entire quarter, I was still in the reactive mode.
10:11 Any query, I used to answer over the email or directly invite the customer for a quick zoom we think. So that I addressed it and then I used to forget it.
10:21 That was not good, but it was good start at least for me. Okay, so did they give you the title of a CSM while keeping you on as a support agent part time or what you're saying is no, no, no, I actually transitioned to be a CSM, but I kept on doing things as if I'm a support agent.
10:37 No, no, it was actually senior customer success specialist. The role was actually a student success. And what you're saying is it took me about 60 to 90 days to fully transition mentally because I was going to ask you what was one of the most challenging things in making that transition because it's 
10:52 a completely different way of thinking even or like interacting or prioritizing have to teach yourself how to prioritize the system is not going to do it for you.
11:02 So that was a bit of a challenge with changing a mindset. I feel the same. So when I transitioned, it meant thinking a lot differently because I was still in the mood as of because you can do the work but you have to also trust the support team which you're no longer part of and this is the transition
11:21 that I had to learn because often in meetings when I knew the answer I also should keep in mind I have to give room to the support agent and not interfere with their work so this was something I learned gradually it took some time.
11:39 But in the end, I saw it's better for me, better for the customer and better for the support agent. Okay, so learn your swim lane and how to interact with other functions in the organization because you're no longer in that team.
11:52 You now have your own team and then also learn how to change the way you learn how to prioritize and learn how to be proactive.
12:02 That's a big transition. Do you think that in general, what would you recommend for those who do choose to do the move.
12:09 They make the move from support, a reactive role, fast, break fix issues, to let's talk about business needs and be more consultative.
12:20 What are some of the things that, a hand side, you would have recommended yourself as you were making this transition.
12:26 So it'll be faster and smoother. There are any classes you eventually take in or blogs you've read or what would you do differently, I suppose.
12:34 Yeah, that's a very good point, actually, because I had some thoughts lately about my journey in the company. I had to present something, and what I would have done differently is some courses that I have taken later on, which I mean, either if I have done it a bit earlier, asking more advice, because
12:52 I was under the impression that sometimes I knew everything, but as we went to the journey, I asked more advice and support as I went from my colleagues, also on my own performance.
13:03 So, in hindsight, I could have done it a little bit more in the first months, but it ended okay. But I would give that back to the audience to be open for feedback and ask feedback.
13:16 What are some of the good questions that you actually were very happy that somebody knew asked you when they just joined and just made that transition?
13:26 And hence, if you asked those a little earlier, you would have actually gotten the feedback and got a lot better.
13:31 Something that you would just mention. So for me this would be around transparency. So when I was a support agent, you always had to be quite clear precise.
13:41 This was the issue. This is why it happened very straightforward. But what I learned being in success is fine, but you also can word it a bit differently because you have a different audience.
13:52 So what I would have asked more often or earlier in my translation from support agent to success is how would you phrase or reply to the customer in this way?
14:04 Because there are two different replies possible on different levels. And that's something I have asked a lot in my journey becoming a success manager on how to communicate properly.
14:14 Anybody's listening? You're just moving to a new role. Don't be afraid to ask for feedback. Actually, it's almost like you're so comfortable with your own skin that you don't mind asking for feedback.
14:25 It's just way for you to get better. And that is super appealing. Ask for feedback. And then you said, I read some books.
14:31 Maybe did some training that helped me out. And I wish I did those earlier. Can you mention a little bit like what those are and what would you recommend somebody that's just transitioning to take on either as classes or books that you've read?
14:43 So actually, I've done a lot of linked in learning classes. These were offered throughout our organization. Plus I did a couple of hard work studies to online certifications.
14:53 It was the organizational leadership and strategy execution and basically this was later on, but it helped me focus with other people from other parts of the world on how are you doing these things.
15:06 So learning from each other, this was my goal. So one part was learning from the textbooks, but the other part for me was finding other people around the world and engaging with them and asking advice, how is their journey, how did they, you know, become who they are at the moment.
15:21 So mostly those two channels I have used, plus I have read a lot of blogs, for example, subscribing to your channel as well, through all these interactions and posts, I got to learn a lot more.
15:34 So I would advise the audience to be present, be online. There's a lot of information out there on the blogs and the websites.
15:41 Please do read up on this. Read up on what is customer success, join a community with your peers, do some classes.
15:48 So the Stanford classes, the certifications that you've done on leadership, on strategic maneuvers. I think those were helpful. What about you, Oseem?
15:58 What have you taken on that you thought helped you propel and become a lot better than what you were in those first 90 days?
16:04 Right before transitioning to my customer success, there was a quick workshop over the weekend from daily community university. So that helped me a lot.
16:14 It was over a lot of four weekends that we were allowed to roll into. So it was basically two weekends each for business communication and for world class customer service that helped me a lot because when I started implementing it into my day-to-day life it's when I understood that okay small things
16:35 to matter how you without being rude to you just need to understand and investigate for that you need to sugarcoat yourself and be more persuasive in terms of understanding what the exact use case of problem is.
16:54 So that helped me or not. So I would recommend that to all of the folks. So the first one you two was about business communication and what was the second one?
17:03 World class as to the service. World class customer service and email you two. Strategy execution and organizational leadership from Harvard and on linked and learning effectively dozens.
17:16 Do you think that the transition from a technical support role into customer success can work more easily? The probability of doing a successful transition works well in certain types of companies, meaning where the product is super technical or maybe the work with the is super transactional because 
17:38 we have a lot of them or do you think there's certain characters where you would say, yeah, if you're going to do this transition, do it in this type of organization first, then you can try something else.
17:49 Is there like something that I should know about, you feel like, yeah, probably in this environment, the transition is more likely to be successful?
17:56 I would feel, and this is, for my own experience, is that the incident that we are operating in is all about customers that looking for an investment to get a certain return to be more efficient and here you can make a difference.
18:10 So it's not only about product usage or have the most users for your app, for example, but creating momentum with the customer and adding the value.
18:19 So I would say any type of business where the customer would invest in your product or surface with the intention of a specific return, whether it's efficiency, FTEs, monetary, that all would be a good because you can work with these customers towards those goals given the investment that they have made
18:39 . What kind of organizations don't have customers invest in their product and hoping to get value out of it? If you're purely looking at, for example, an app for a specific need, okay, everybody would want to have as much usage of the app.
18:52 So maybe your sole intention is as much usage as possible on the platform, which is fine by itself. But if you're more strategically looking into helping the customer reach a specific goal of their organization, I would see that as a bit different depending on the industry that they are in.
19:11 Listen, when you transition from technical support to customer success, you're better off doing it at a company where the customer success manager is in a consultative role, where the customer wants to hear your feedback as to how you're going to get the most from the solution to meet your business goals
19:30 , whereas if you work for a company that all they want to do is increase usage or your role is about adopting features and function and to less consultative role or maybe it's more of a salesy role kind of like, you're in charge of 300 customers and your job is to do the renewal transactions and probably
19:47 it's not the right fit. Well, interestingly enough, we want from our success managers to own upsell renewals across cells. Right.
19:56 So if you come from technical support, how the heck are you going to do upsells and manage their renewal transactions?
20:01 We have actually created a whole program that you have to pass a certain certification, coming from whatever all you're coming from, where we outline these elements, plus we have partnered up with the specific customer success platform, through gain site, we also have certifications as the customer success
20:18 manager. So with those two combined, we will then have one track for the sales part because we as the customer success team want to own relation with the customer that contains also sales elements.
20:32 And we do overtraining for that. Do you find that the ones that come from support are better at upsell and renewals and the ones that are actually coming from a sales background?
20:41 Now, while the best role to jump into customer success, I think from history, coming from a totally different role would be a teacher.
20:49 If you're on technical support, we have seen hidden gems, because often people find their way throughout their journey. And if it would appeal to them, the sales element, obsales cross-cells, renewing contracts, you have to have this internal spark.
21:07 And if you don't, it's a sink or swims. So I would say it's probably not the right fit. If you want to kind of like bulls I 80% chains, you're going to be successful in this transition.
21:20 Your type of organization is probably more of a hit on this because the team does own the renewals and upsells.
21:27 The scene is actually doing a role that I would think would be very beneficial if you did some board before because customer success manager does need to have super technical skills.
21:36 So I thought the answer would be when the solution is super technical. It's highly customizable. It has a lot of widgets, it's not a simple solution like, okay, you just configure it a little bit.
21:46 You do have to have deep technical expertise. Most likely, whatever you learned as a technical support manager will be very, very helpful for you in being successful in your next role as a CSM.
21:57 What do you think? I totally agree on that friend. One precursor for that, the product should be quite technical. That's where technical expertise something to picture.
22:06 I would want to dial back with your earlier query regarding upsets and crossels. I believe technical expertise does help because since the customer success already has hands-on experience.
22:18 So here she can hand hold the customer and guide him or her given the entire ecosystem of products solutions that are out in the market.
22:29 So it's up to consultative approach as you write the mention to share the highs in the loose the pros and the cons with the customer and post that it's up to the customer how they would want to take it because nobody's here to waste their time.
22:43 They're looking up to us as an trusted advisor. So that's what we ought to be. If I had to translate that in customer success terms I would say they'd be graded up tilling the client.
22:55 Not necessarily upselling but up tilling and where that works well is either where you work for somebody like Emero that gives you all the certifications and all the tools in the world to catch up on those skills.
23:07 Because sometimes you're just like dropped into an organization that doesn't and then they think or swim, right? Like, what am I going to do now?
23:13 Or if you don't have awesome certifications and classes and employee enablements so much or like in Emero's organization, then you would hope that you work in tandem with an account manager or sales rep, so whenever you do have an uptail conversation with a client, and the client says, yes, I want to
23:33 do that. You just loop, bring the financial transaction to somebody else, and then you don't have to necessarily write off the bad.
23:41 Your first time as a CSM deal with these new skills, it's quite intimidating. That being said, I've seen new CSMs rise to the occasion many, many times.
23:51 So if you feel like you have it in you to learn quickly and master that and be comfortable with that, go for it.
23:57 I mean, if this was your brother or sister, it was their first time transitioning from support to an organization, one of the things that they would want to look for as a home for their first CSM job to make sure that they're super successful.
24:10 So one, either on our organization that has all the training in the world availed to you so that you could step into it as easily as fastly as possible.
24:19 And if not, be prepared to take some online classes, either on LinkedIn, or Stanford, or whatever is available in your community, or like, we'll see, take on a role where you feel like you naturally fit and brace as much as your consultative skill set as possible, and before them as fast as you can.
24:37 Thank you for your time today, coming in sharing about your own personal journey. I'm sure it'll help a lot of other technical support managers or agents that want to move into customer success to kind of see what's in it for them and what it does that takes to be successful in this transition.
24:53 Thank you, thank you, Assim. That's been great. Likewise, thank you, Bro. Thank you, Edith. All right, everyone. If you enjoyed this conversation, you found it useful and valuable, give us a like, subscribe to our YouTube channel.
25:07 Reach out to Assim and Imro and tell them what a good job they did on LinkedIn. I'm sure you can find them very easily.
25:13 And with that, I'll see you at the next interview. Thank you for joining our podcast today. Have a beautiful day.
25:21 Thank you.