Over the last year, Gainsight has produced one of the most successful and engaging online television programs called Net Retention TV. NRR-TV is hosted by Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta, and each episode is explicitly geared to topics that are top of mind of the CS industry. Right now, there is a topic at the forefront of every part of business: the Great Resignation.
According to a recent release by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people who quit their jobs in December 2021 alone was 4.3 million. In the whole of 2021, the trending voluntary separations came from the tech industry and healthcare, especially with many mid-career workers choosing to seek other work environments.
In a February Human Resource Executive article, those who leave their current jobs look for fairness and equity, flexibility in work, geographic salary considerations, compensation of new versus established employees, and investments for different employee segments. This surge in job transition has some companies prepared for up to a 40% change in staff. But why now?
With so much emphasis on employee change, organizations and businesses, especially tech and customer success, are scrambling to find CSMs, grow them, and keep them on their teams. As a result, companies are turning to one another to share insights on how to drive net retention on their teams with one of the most challenging and most competitive labor markets possibly in the history of the world.
That is what brought Nick together with Thomas Hansen, Chief Revenue Officer at UiPath, and Justin Greenberger, Vice President of America’s Go To Market at UiPath, to have a candid discussion surrounding the process of recruiting hiring, and building a CS team in 2022.
Who Is UiPath and What Do They Do Best?
UiPath is dedicated to delivering the Fully Automated Enterprise™. By offering an end-to-end platform for automation, UiPath combines their Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution with a full suite of capabilities and techs like AI, Process Mining, and Cloud to enable every organization to scale digital business operations rapidly. With such strength in automation, they can transform companies, unlocking unlimited growth opportunities.
“We set out to fundamentally reshape how people work, and we do that using automation,” Thomas Hansen shared. “What our technology does is allow people to get the freedom to do things they enjoy as opposed to the boring, mundane stuff. The technology helps companies tackle big complicated problems, like claim processing, as an example”
Thomas explained that none of their work would be possible without a centralized approach to customers. The purpose of automation requires the use of customer success that concentrates on people and processes. Automation aids in simplifying those processes and tasks to allow humans to perform less busy work and focus on creativity and innovation.
For most companies, customer success ideology and technology are something new. For UiPath, it was a well-established discipline due mainly to their current CFO, who was their first Chief Customer Officer.
UiPath began to help customers scale through the use of automation. Over time, they built teams that could relieve their customer success manager’s time, allowing CSMs to spend longer duration with customers, solving complex problems. As a result, they built an advanced Total Addressable Market (TAM) organization that drew on the specialty of the CS team and incorporated various touch model segmentations.
Unlike other companies, UiPath relied heavily on their own created technology, like Gainsight, to automate as much of the business as possible. This ability has enabled their other teams to focus and address customers’ needs. However, it is not automation alone that has enhanced the CS ability. It is also the charter that UiPath developed to support all customer success motions.
A CS Charter that Addresses Success and Value
Every customer success team or organization is a bit different at every company. It can be malleable and transformable, addressing company needs at any one moment. For UiPath, customer success is always foremost about customer centricity and identifying their actual needs. They do this by incorporating three things: adoption, usage, and value realization. Because UiPath stresses automation to alleviate the burden of the end-user customer, they find that companies don’t take long to find value in their product.
“Our time to value is extremely quick, and so it’s really about finding what is most important to that customer and driving that as quickly as possible,” Justin Greenberger revealed. “We have over 10,000 customers now, so doing it at various segments and different touches and all of that, and we do that all through success planning, value metrics, customer value reviews. Making sure we’re on the same page with our customers over time, and we’re sticking to their true north.”
UiPath wants its customers to be the heroes in their own stories. Internally that means broadening not only automation but intelligent automation and its reach. It must extend across the enterprise and into their community of practice. That entails that CSMs help identify each customer’s success plan and how UiPath’s automation will accomplish their goals and attain value. That value ensures that customers get the most from what UiPath provides through people, products, and processes. And those people at the center of creating success are the employees.
The Creative CS Team You Build
Due to the swift curve to get a customer engaged and experience time to value (TTV), UiPath’s CSMs must be highly qualified. Consequently, the evaluation process for their candidates is rigorous. Every customer-facing individual must be intensely focused on what the customer wants and needs. So, UiPath evaluates each applicant beyond customer-centricity. They include creativity as an essential trait and look for it in applicants by incorporating situational and empathetic questions in the interview process. They must realize that every customer is different. CSMs should dial in their ability to read situations and customers to deliver the best experience. They also need to evolve to understand their place in the revenue life cycle.
The whole revenue lifecycle should incorporate every department and team— everything pre and post-Sale. And it needs to be in a continuous, synchronous relationship. UiPath has done an incredible job of integrating each part. But what does that mean for a CSM to join their team? That was the question Nick asked, and it should be one that everyone in CS should be asking about their own companies and their potential CS professionals.
UiPath has created a team of CSMs from every educational and experiential background possible. They believe CS is a unique domain and deserves unique personnel. Even Justin came from IT as a CIO!
“We have helicopter and airplane pilots. We have former musicians. We have lawyers. We have athletes,” Justin explained. “You know, you have the kind of people from all these backgrounds, which makes a unique culture and environment. But I think what we’ve tried to do is curate a career path within UiPath which allows people to grow into bigger opportunities and bigger situations that they can hold themselves accountable and grow in their own skill sets.”
UiPath’s CS network is so vast that a CSM will see a wide array of customers from different domains and backgrounds. To help the onboarding CS professional acclimate to this type of work environment, UiPath has established a new associate CSM program that pairs new CSMs with coaches and mentors to gain experience in every type of account. That is why they have curated a career path for anyone wanting to enter customer success.
This type of intense infusion of customer success creativity into every part of your company, especially your CS team, makes Gainsight excited for the future of CS, especially in the recruitment process. To watch the other revelations that UiPath made to Nick about CSM enablement, including CS strategy, onboarding CSM content, and their compensation, watch Season 2, Episode 1 of Gainsight’s NRR TV.
