Women in Customer Success Podcast

150 - Building Customer Success Skills That AI Can’t Replace

• Marija Skobe-Pilley • Season 5 • Episode 150

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What if the fastest way to elevate your career is to get more human as you get more technical? 

We sit down with Tamara Kempf, Regional Director, EMEA Customer Success at AppDynamics (a Cisco company), to unpack her career built on curiosity, grit, and the kind of EQ that technology can’t replace. 

We trace her journey from science student to landing a first job at Bloomberg to now Cisco Customer Success leader, turning setbacks into growth, and using AI where it counts without losing the human edge. You’ll hear practical stories of how to save days of work, coach teams with empathy, and hire for skills that last.

In this episode, we talk about:

  • Lessons from Bloomberg on customer advocacy without authority
  • Integrating a startup culture into Cisco's Customer Success team
  • Pragmatic AI use cases that compress a full day's work into minutes
  • How to create a safe culture to experiment and share failures
  • Redefining productivity as making time to be human
  • The secret to being a great leader

If you’re navigating customer success, leadership, AI adoption, or all three, you’ll find tactics you can try today and a mindset that lasts. 

Subscribe, share with a teammate, and leave a review to help more people discover conversations that move careers forward.


💚 This episode is brought to you by Deployflow: https://deployflow.co/


___________

👉 Follow Tamara: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tamarakempf/

👉 Learn more about AppDynamics: https://www.linkedin.com/company/appdynamics/

👉 Learn more about Deployflow & P-Suite by Deployflow and get a quick squad estimate at: https://deployflow.co/p-suite/


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About Women in Customer Success Podcast:

Women in Customer Success Podcast is the first women-only podcast for Customer Success professionals, where remarkable ladies of Customer Success connect, inspire and champion each other. 


Follow:

Women in Customer Success 

Host Marija Skobe-Pilley

Check out our Courses:

  • The Revenue CSM  - https://womenincs.co/the-revenue-csm



Making The Most Of Hard Moments

SPEAKER_01

You can be in a situation that feels bad, but you have to look around yourself and figure out how do you make the most of it. There's always something you can do. There's always something in your control, and there's always a way you can grow. AI can do a lot of things and it's evolving rapidly, but you still need people who can be very human, people who know how to read a room, people who can take like all of this change and information that's happening around them and kind of know how to link that together and give that to a customer. It's not a one-size-fits-all. So much of leadership is EQ and there's IQ too. But your ability to like meet your team where they are and your ability to meet individuals where they are, I would say that's the most important trait of being a leader.

SPEAKER_00

Hi everyone! Welcome to the new episode of Women in Customer Success Podcast. It's a wonderful Friday morning, actually, in the UK, where I am hosting my wonderful guest today, and I really can't wait to introduce her to you. She is Tamara Kemp, Customer Success Leader at Cisco. Tamara, it's so nice to see you again and catch up. And welcome finally to the Women in Customer Success podcast.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you so much, Maria. It's amazing to connect with you and to be a guest on your podcast. I love it. I've been listening to it. And also, I know we go back, and it's amazing because I remember meeting you when you were starting all of this. So thank you so much. It means a lot to me to be a guest here.

Origins And Early Ambitions

SPEAKER_00

It means a lot to me as well because Tamara and I used to cross paths in the same company where we worked for a little while. So we share history and we share love for joyful type of life, and life in which we enjoy being in tech, being mothers, being so many different things at the same time, also being leaders, having people to coach, to manage. And as you can see, that's probably some of the things that we will be talking about today. But Tamara, I'm sure that people are dying to get to know you a bit better. Tell us, uh, where are you calling from? Where are you based?

SPEAKER_01

I'm based in London. So we live quite central. I'm not far from places like London Bridge and Borough. And yeah, I'm originally from New Mexico in the US. And I moved to London back in 2011. So I've been here for some time and still love it. Yeah, that's where I'm calling from.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, that's also 2011. I came in 2010. It was supposed to be just one year and go back home. Uh, but then as you know, life happens, and yeah, 15 or so years after, you're still here enjoying it.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Oh gosh, it's awesome to change places and just be able to be a global citizen and live everywhere. Which brings me to an interesting question that I love asking my guest. Going back to your teenage years, out of a sudden, would the 16-year-old Tamara be surprised to find you in this current role?

SPEAKER_01

I think so, actually. Yeah. I think 16-year-old Tamara thought she was probably going to be a doctor because I loved biology and the science so much. And I was always labeled uh by teachers as like a reserved person. So I kind of took that on and just thought, oh, I'll probably end up as like a researcher or doctor. But I'm obviously doing something very different from that.

SPEAKER_00

Tell us a bit more about your actual career journey. Like, what would you say? Where did you start your career journey brought you to customer success?

SPEAKER_01

I've been working for a long time. Like I officially probably got on a payroll when I was about 10 years old. I was volunteering in a camp that I used to attend as a kid. So I was a camp counselor in the summers and I loved helping out. I was always very proactive. People would always say, Oh, like, wow, you get you anticipate and you you start like making the snack and just getting things done before people ask, and you just know when it needs to be done. And it was a great way to like meet other people who were volunteering, who were young, and it was fun and we got to play with kids outside. And then I also did an internship that started in high school where I interned in a genetics laboratory, which was like very much like a nerdy science-y thing, but it was a great way to earn money for college. And throughout college, I would come back in the summer back home and continue to work there. I had uh what we call in America work study jobs. So while I was back in college after the breaks, I would be doing a work study where I worked for the PR arm for Columbia Business School, uh, because I was going to college in New York. And I would also babysit. And then I got my first real full career when I graduated from college, and it was to work for a company called Bloomberg. Uh, and I was hired into sales.

SPEAKER_00

You kind of know what it is. Like, that's an awesome company to work for after college.

Pivot From Science To Business

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, it like lots of really great training and such a great culture, such great people, and a lot of rigor in terms of customer experience, especially at the time when I joined. And it was really great, but it was surprising because again, like I went into college thinking, oh, I'll I started pre-med, thinking I'm gonna be a doctor, I'm gonna go do something with science, with medicine. But once I took college-level chemistry, I was just like, this isn't for me. Ended up going into the political science track because I took some courses in that field, and I really loved the professors. And for me, coming from, you know, I came from New Mexico, I'm American. What I liked about being in this particular college and studying political science was I I broadened my understanding of the world. And I met lots of other students in these classes who came from all over the world, professors who were from different countries. And I realized my strength is more in writing and reading and probably speaking. So yeah, then I just didn't know what to do with myself when it came time to graduate, and it was like maybe law of school, but I didn't really feel particularly drawn to that. And anyway, I had a friend who was already at Bloomberg, and she was like, look, it's a really, it's a really intense company, but it's a lot of fun, and you'll just learn a lot. So it's like you feel like you're still continuing in school. So I managed to get into Bloomberg, and it very much was that. And my key thing, I would say, I spent a lot of time uh building my career within Bloomberg. I learned so much from it, but really great things was just around how to engage with people and how to be in front of people and how to be proactively in front of people and advocating for your customer and how to collaborate with people that you only can influence because you don't lead them. So, yeah, learned a lot of great lessons. I started in San Francisco and then I relocated to London, covered the major European banks as their account manager, and then got into app dynamics. Also did a part-time master's degree.

SPEAKER_00

Just just a master's degree. By the way, would you like to tell us what was the master's degree? Because I do think that you're a very analytical person, also from the educational background that I think that masters helped as well. What was it about?

Bloomberg Lessons In Customer Focus

SPEAKER_01

I did a part-time master's degree in business analytics. And at the time, this was I think kind of like a newer offering. It was back in 2019. And I did that because I had moved into a new role in Bloomberg, which was selling data. And I was having to talk to Quantz and Stratz. So these are people in the banks that are data scientists who build algorithms for trading platforms. And I thought, look, to make myself more credible and to just grow, this seems like a good degree for me to take. And then I can learn more about like the value of data and why it's important to have clean data and how you actually have to prepare it to be ingested and to make meaning of it and do analysis and discovery. And then then you build on that. And so then it was about the analytics, which is machine learning and AI, and all of that being applied to business. So I brought into my network by doing that program. I got to go to Shanghai, I got to go to New York. Uh, we had a session here in London. So I know you're doing an exec MBA right now, too. And it's these kind of modular programs are really great for doing just that and meeting people from other industries. But in doing that, I was surprised because I thought maybe I'll I'll try to go into like an analytics role, but a recruiter found me uh as a result of doing that program, and that recruiter was helping to recruit for App Dynamics. Yeah, it's all ended up where I wasn't expecting.

SPEAKER_00

And then the history was made. I want to now like tap into App Dynamics a bit more, but just before that, studying. I mean, obviously, yes, amazing topic. We love it. It's so much personal growth and development. When you were in those situations of thinking, oh, shall I get for like shall I get another degree or so? Because obviously you were already very well educated by that point. Did the whole idea come from you because you wanted to develop yourself, or did it come from the company? I'm asking because you know, sometimes it feels like people think that development later on in career comes from company and from what they should be doing.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

So I want to hear your stance on it.

Why A Master’s In Analytics

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, it's a thoughtful question because I myself often forget as well. But the reason I did it at that point in time was because as I was uh applying for this other role within Bloomberg, I was originally applying for a particular more senior position. And there were things that happened that were outside of my control, and that position was no longer available. So they had to offer me a more junior position. And I was, I wasn't happy, but I I knew where I wanted to go with it. I knew it was the right place to be. So I took it and I thought to myself, because I have more bandwidth, I should do a master's degree. I knew I always wanted to get a higher degree, and this one, it just made the most sense because it was all around making use out of data to improve your business, your operations, or how you make decisions. And so, yeah, the decision to pursue a master's degree in this technical topic came from me actually originally feeling like very frustrated with the situation I was in, but trying to say, how do I make the most of it? Like I could be, you know, annoyed, or I can use this time to develop other skill sets because I've got time, I don't have as much pressure now that I've been given this other role. And with with Bloomberg, I worked out as well an agreement that I would still move into that more senior role. Nice and, you know, make sure that there's a you know, there's a a finite timeline for that, which did work out in the end. I think one of my big things, it's always you can be in a situation that feels bad, but you have to look around yourself and figure out how do you make the most of it. It's there's always something you can do, there's always something in your control, and there's always a way you can grow. And uh yeah, that was that moment.

SPEAKER_00

This is absolutely fantastic and wonderful because you are first, you were saying it was kind of the moment that maybe you wouldn't have chosen 100% if it was all in your control. And then you felt, oh, kind of have extra time. But Tamara, people, when they have extra time, they you know go home, watch Netflix, they scroll on social media. But you decided, yeah, I'm just gonna do a master's in business analytics. It's really inspiring. I'm a big proponent of of education. I think there is such a huge value still in those kind of traditional ways of learning still on traditional paths and universities, although, of course, we have you know two minutes videos on everything, but there is something special about still doing the course. Uh, and it's really commendable that you use that to again build the next step, negotiate with a company and massively, massively develop your your skills and in a new way, uh, which obviously helped a lot in culturally in up dynamics and where you are at the moment. So we are coming to that part of you being an app dynamics, uh, and that's where we met at some point. And I believe that's where actually your customer success journey started, right? Because at some point then that it the role became available as a customer success. So tell us more about your app dynamics and how did that journey look like from starting app dynamics to where you are now? Because there have been changes.

Turning Setbacks Into Growth Plans

Entering AppDynamics And Sales Realities

SPEAKER_01

There have been a lot of steps on that journey as well. So I joined App Dynamics and it was still an exciting time. It it was it is an unforgettable experience going through what I went through at the time that I didn't. And when I talked to other like App Dynamics alumni who did it all at the same time, it's very much like a thing that kind of bonds us. But I originally was hired as a salesperson because at Bloomberg, you know, we call ourselves salespeople, but really we're account managers with targets. So I went for this sales role and learned a lot through the interview process, which is I won't get into it now because it's like probably a whole separate conversation. But great experience, got in. Basically, it became very clear I'm not a new business salesperson, but I learned a lot of great things. I did so much cold calling. I would be in at 7 a.m., making a hundred calls a day, learning all about that, learning how to get meetings with CIOs and CTOs with no introductions except calls that you make to their mobile phones, and learning medic. Uh, so that was really key. And learning just how to be more effective with people, how to have meetings where you can demonstrate to the other person that you value their time, that you've done your homework, you know what their pain and their problems are and what you can do to solve it. So I learned a really great framework from that period of sales that I did in App Dynamics. I then moved into a renewals role, knowing that the long-term final resting place of that role would be customer success, because at the time, App Dynamics were starting to grow the customer success team because they knew retention was very important. So their plan at the time was we'll finish out this fiscal year with our renewals team, but then we're going to convert them all to customer success so we have a larger customer success team. So I had an amazing time doing renewals. I had this amazing leader, and it was just great exposure in a different way. It was actually a highly analytical role. You had to do a lot of analysis of commercials and licensing. You still had to be the salesperson and be in front of the customer. And it lasted a short period, but I learned a lot of useful operational things from doing that and just had a very like make complex information simple for your customer before you go and try to negotiate. Then I moved into customer success and they were growing the team and they realized they also needed more leaders. And so there was an opportunity to apply for a leadership role in the UK, Ireland, and Northern Europe team. So I applied. I completely didn't expect to get it, but I went through the interviews and I managed to get this leadership role where I would be leading the Northern European customer success team while having customers. So that was how I guess I got my start in leadership, but also in customer success. So the two things happened at the same time.

SPEAKER_00

And if I'm correct, during that time, that's also a special point of point in time for Abdynamics, right? Because Abdynamics then got acquired by Cisco for magnificent 3.7 billion, if I remember correctly. So it was a completely new start of a company or a complete evolution of a company from highly, highly, highly successful startup coming into a family of what 40,000 employees and beyond.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah. So App Dynamics, it it had already been acquired even before I joined. But you're right in that it was the period where they were starting to look at integrating us in finally into the wider Cisco teams. So I think we had my first year where I was, you know, a leader in customer success. I also had great leaders too. And we did a lot of building, we figured out how to try to scale the team, we brought in processes, we did really great boot camps and training for everyone. Then about a year later is when the Big Bang happened, where we got finally folded into Cisco customer success. So we had a year of having a lot of like this kind of startup feeling still, where you can just change things really quickly. And then there was a big transition period after that.

Renewals To Customer Success Leadership

SPEAKER_00

Today's episode is brought to you by DeployFlow, your partner for digital transformation. Do you need to build an MVP fast? Whether it's a new product, APIs, configuration for your CRMs, or modernizing your cloud apps. P-Suite gives you a team, senior squad of full-stack engineers who plug into your team and hit the ground running. Designed for founders and CTOs who want to move fast with AI-powered tools and clear sprint-based outcomes. No more long-term log-ins. So if a sprint doesn't deliver, you can just walk away. For a cost and squad estimate, head over to deployflow.co slash p suite and take the quick quiz. Deployflow.co. I just love hearing this story because I love hearing about people's career journeys and different companies. I mean, you've been in some amazing companies at Bloomberg, of Dynamic Cisco. You've been through so many different types of roles, different experiences, different people. You changed multiple teams, many more leaders, bosses, had really loads of different kinds of role models, or maybe even lack of some role models that you wanted. And here you are now being a customer success leader at Cisco. As a leader of a team, I'm so interested in so many aspects of your leadership, but also something that's very related to even your previous master's degree, business analytics, everything that is so relevant today, AI, machine learning, what do we do with it? I know by fact that you are actually using a lot of AI with your teams and that you're experimenting a lot. And I really wanted us to tap more deeper into the actual use cases and how you work with AI with your team. So maybe we start with your overview because if we are on a scale from zero to ten, like zero being, oh, we're just kind of trying to see what is Chat GPT to 10 if all our workflows are already AI automated and AI powered. Like where would you place your team in terms of AI usage and adoption?

SPEAKER_01

I think I would put us at a four or a five. And the reason is that they're I I would say they're very proficient and aware of you know tools like Chat GPT, but we're definitely not we don't have AI embedded in our processes and driving, you know, let's say certain tasks and activities that that we could be doing, but it's very much part of people's day-to-day. And it's very narrow, very narrow use cases and task-specific things.

SPEAKER_00

Let's talk about those use cases. Uh uh, what are the very particular use cases that you have decided to do with your team or maybe even start experimenting with? Yeah, I'm all ears.

Integrating Into Cisco’s CS Organisation

Sponsor Message: DeployFlow

Framing AI Maturity And Adoption

Practical AI Use Cases That Save Days

SPEAKER_01

So it's I I guess to provide context, what Cisco's approach has been is very kind of ground up approach. So we had uh some training, and that was all mandatory. And what I liked about it, what I took away from it is there's this kind of framework, which is we want to get everyone to a point where they're highly mature with using AI and highly knowledgeable, and they're aware of the risks and the tools and the policies. So there's a kind of maturity journey, and then after that, it's kind of like everyone, you know, find ways to use it. And what's been really great to see in my team is there are people who they are covering entire regions of Europe by themselves single-handedly, and they might have 30 plus customers. I shouldn't even say might, because they they do actually have 30 plus customers, and so out of their own personal like pain or just being really busy, they have found ways to hack certain situations by using our internal version of Chat GPT. And one person in particular, she I think what's helped her is it seems like her default is I'm really stuck. How can I just use Chat GPT to help me through this? And there are other people on the team who've done the same when it's kind of like, gosh, I'm really time crunched, and something like you know, XYZ would take me potentially a day to do, and they use Chat GPT, the internal chat GPT instead to do it within maybe 10 minutes. So some examples are escalation emails when we have product escalations where we've got an angry customer who now has had, you know, a support ticket open for I won't give days or time frame, but it's a long time. And now, you know, let's say a bug has been identified and we know it's now a thing with product, and product are very busy and they have lots of projects. And it's how do we let product know what the impact is and what we need them to do and why? So historically, going through all of this and coming out with a very effective escalation email with all the right people in it, people in our line of leadership, people in product, people in support, people in sales, that could literally take a day just to refine it and make sure the points are all crystal clear and the ask is very clear, and the summary and the history and the tickets and like all the receipts of everything that's happened. So a person in my team, English isn't even her native language, as well. She was in that situation. And I'll never forget, I had a new email. I looked at it and I opened it, and I'm like, this is obviously it's an escalation email. I didn't hear anything about this, but it was so well written. And I gave her the feedback in my one-to-one. I was really impressed because we've been through this plenty of times before together. And I was like, How did you like you just really pulled that together? And she said, I actually just I used Chat GPT to, you know, she obviously gave it all the inputs because now we know after years of doing this, what the inputs are and what people need to hear, but it just cleaned it up so nicely for her. That's one example. And she did get a reaction that she needed from product leadership. Another one would be we have enablement that we help our customers with, and our product's very complex and it depends on the customer's environment and it's always changing, and there's always new features and upgrades. So enablement planning it needs to be tailored to the customer. And so there are people in my team who've started to also use our internal Chat GPT to help recommend enablement plans, as opposed to kind of like sitting there and going through your own all your notes and messing around with things. They have put their information into Chat GPT and it has helped recommend a sequence of offerings that we have, again, saving them time. So other places that we've used it is with we have account plans that we do, which is basically like a one-pager strategic overview of our customer. And we'll use these often for exact briefings, escalations, a way to demonstrate where we are with the customer. If we have like a new salesperson coming in, we've had people use the internal Chat GPT as well to help clean that up or just make it quicker and easier to get the content onto a page. Like it used to take some people weeks to get that. Another person, she had, you know, talking about new salespeople, she had a new sales team come in for a particular customer, and they had a meeting. And I think they gave her like a two-day notice and said, Hey, we're meeting the customer in a few days. What were their use cases of dynamics? And so she took two years of notes that she had taken over time, and she dropped all that into our ChatGPT, and it helped surface the use cases, which she then sent on to the team. It's a really nice story, too, because this customer in the end not only renewed, but they expanded. So it was just uh it's a good concrete example we have where someone, you know, leveraged an AI tool. Uh, and then we had in the end the customer renewing and expanding. And then I think for me as a leader, I use it as well for emails. We have to deal a lot with other other teams, other departments, and trying to always check myself and make sure that like emotion is being removed, especially when you're in intense situations or ensuring that even like as a female, that your response still has this like tone of leadership in it, as opposed to like apology and being apologetic, or you know, so I use it personally to correct and find those.

SPEAKER_00

That's such a good point. I I also love using AI for kind of sounding executive, which means you know, you've given prompts as to make my ask very clear, very specific, you know, describe situations very clearly specifically because I could I could ramble around, like I could, I could write a lot. Uh or over-explaining, right? Yes, we do.

SPEAKER_01

Give the facts, give the answer.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

I love that. Obviously, some of the things that you you you speak about is internal chat GPT, which means you have to create a good environment for the team where they can safely use it for their data, which means, of course, your kind of enterprise, either native chat GPT or enterprise package of any AI tools, so you're not giving any potential data outside. I guess you all know it already. The audience might be wondering how do you come to the point of having people like experiment a lot? It seems like they are doing it from their own pains, but like, did it come at the top of the uh the company-wide enablement, or was it you? Like, how do you even create that environment that they all can feel yes, I'm now empowered, let I can do whatever I want with with agents, like I can really go and experiment. There is no limit. How do you come to that point?

Internal ChatGPT For Tailored Enablement

Summarising Years Of Notes In Minutes

SPEAKER_01

I like to highlight what other people in the team have done. So in my team meetings, I actually haven't been consistent about it, but I introduced a section in my team meeting deck where we just talk about the latest AI use cases that people in the team have done. And I think it just helps other people realize like, oh, either like I I have been using it, but I haven't been really talking about it and sharing my ideas, and they can help other people, or it makes other people realize, like, oh, I don't like like I should just try to remember it's always there and it's something, it's like an assistant or like a I like to think of it like an intern. It's a thing I can just if something is kind of you're procrastinating on it, it seems like it's something you don't really want to deal with. Usually it's because there's like a lot of other steps, right? So it's like then use don't forget the chat GPT is there to use that. So there's that, and I think just letting people know like it's okay to experiment. So there was someone in my team, it is a thing we look for when we do performance evaluations, not tied into like how we rate them or pay them, it's just like a developmental area. So I do in all my performance evaluations, I touch on AI and acknowledge the person for leveraging it or kind of encourage the person and say, I think you could be doing more. Here's some examples. And then I reinforce that in one-to-ones. So there was someone in my team where they had brought up a point and said, look, we every month, you know, leadership release what we call manager packs. And there's a lot of information in there, and they're meant to be shared with customers, but there's also a lot of internal information in there. Can we not just get only a customer-facing one? So I actually challenged her and said, Why don't you uh try uploading it into our Chat GPT and ask it to remove all the internal content and just give you the external, uh, the customer-facing content in a new deck? And she did that. And we went through the results and they were poor. The content was really awful, the slides looked really awful. It's just bullet points, like there's no life to it. It's not great. But I I gave her a lot of support and encouragement for trying it and said this is how it will be. It's just about trial and error. And we try it again when the next version's released, and maybe when it gets a little better at making PowerPoints. And so I think it's just making sure that it's there's this mindset of like there's no such thing as failing with it. You can only just learn from it, and it takes trial and error before you get some wins.

SPEAKER_00

And that's so important because just because you're trying it a few times and maybe you don't see great results doesn't mean that it won't become better simply because you have to use it to train it to improve it. You mentioned a few times, like, oh, those are the things that would take the team a few days and then it happens very quickly, which is some obvious evidence that usage of those types of tools is saving your people's time. Now, time with customer success is always just so important because they can do so many other things with the time that they save. Which brings me to another thing I wanted to ask you the skills of being adaptable, trying something new, getting into AI usage, and so many other skills that we can't even envisage now that we will see in the future. Like what are or what is the skill set that you're seeing now that you want to have in CSMs versus maybe a few years ago when you were hiring, maybe probably in the context of AI, because it seems that the AI environment is really changing the requirements of our roles and the skill set.

Using AI To Sharpen Executive Tone

Creating A Safe Culture To Experiment

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the first things would be a level of business acumen and testing for that, because AI can do a lot of things and it's evolving rapidly, but you still need people who can be very human, people who know how to read a room, people who can take all of this change and information that's happening around them, change that's happening on their customers' end, and staying aligned to their goals and their outcomes, and change that's happening internally in our company and our strategy, and like kind of know how to link that together without it always being spelled out because the change is so rapid now. It's coming in shorter cycles, and just knowing how to give that to a customer, but equally still being able to be very technical because in Cisco and customer success, our focus is adoption and we are meant to be technical, but you do need a level of business acumen so that you know how to stay aligned to the customer and to the company and know all the change that's happening around you. So business acumen is really important. You can't afford just to like say to focus on your lane, and that's all I'm gonna do, and that's all I care about. Like, no, you there are so many other people now that you have to work with just to get things done for your customer, and you need to understand their goals as well and what's impacting them and how to influence them. So being a customer success person now is a lot like being an account manager, but you've got to know the product really well. The other thing I would say is I think it's still really important. This was an F-Dynamic thing, but a trait is to be coachable, and that's because of all the change. So being someone who's able to take feedback and act upon it and like know to drop your ego or be aware that you have an ego or be aware that you might be feeling defensive, these are important because we have a lot of, I guess, like serious, I shouldn't say serious because our one-to-ones are generally like really enjoyable, but sometimes you have to have tough conversations. And if you are with people who can be comfortable and able to have a tough conversation and and also give it back to you as a leader, then that really like elevates the team together and the that individual and their performance. So the coachability is still really important. Yeah, I would say those are those are the major things. And just as you said, being adaptable, like just this knowing things are gonna change. I guess a fourth one too would be like a resilience, because you need to always stay focused on like things around you might be frustrating, but what can you do? What can you still do about it? Because if you start to get into this kind of victim mindset or feeling like you're going down a dark into a dark place, you're gonna burn out. So a level of resilience is also key.

SPEAKER_00

I love that. Most of the skills that you're mentioning are kind of very human, very soft skills that we all have to learn. And no AI will help us with that. So I really love how from one hand we are moving so rapidly in in automation and just loads of different help with AI and other types of you know, languages and tools. But on another hand, yes, what we need is that humanity, understanding the actual person, that business acumen and resilience, coachability. I love that you are recognizing how that is incredibly important moving forward for CSMs.

Time Savings And Human Time

SPEAKER_01

It's a quickly changing world and the people, like just from what I've observed, the people that thrive, you know, they they obviously have their down days, they have their down periods. And I talk openly about that with them that you're meant to. It's cyclical and it's kind of like ride ride the high and then know when you're in the low and know that you need to take a break. And again, like with AI, people talk about like, okay, you have more time, so you have more time to be productive. But with my team, I think of it like, yeah, that's nice, but they have more time to be human. Maybe they have time to take a lunch break, they have time to go out for a walk, and they have time to go to the gym, they have time to do whatever they needed to do personally or connect with someone. And we as CS, we get so much dumped into our bucket, people forget that too. That's it.

SPEAKER_00

And that is so crucial. I am so happy that you said that. Yes, people need to have life as well, which includes going to the gym, taking out the dog for a walk, uh, or or eating lunch, because for many years it was all about efficiency, efficiency, productivity, CSM. Oh, you have free time, like let's fill it in. It was always that constant rush of uh you constantly have to do something. No, you will be much better off and much more productive and more capable if you have life and if you if you just manage to kind of have a healthy, not even balance, but healthy approach to your work and life. So I'm really glad that you are talking about it from the leadership perspective because when it's coming from the leader of a team, it has a particular weight. And and I hope that everybody can kind of feel that they have permission to just do that. Leave, leave while you're working.

The New CSM Skill Set And Resilience

SPEAKER_01

And that's how they show up with customers, too, right? You don't want your CSM to be drained and exhausted all the time. They'll be in a mindset that's probably not the best for the customer either. You want them to feel that they can tap into all the human parts that they need to to relate to the customer, to hear the customer and be present for them. And they can't do that if it's always go, go, go, which that's the reality. That's that's how it is right now, even with us using AI. We haven't hit this point, right, where we do have all this time and a great balance. But that's something that I hope we can achieve instead of always just looking at like, well, what did we slot that time with instead? That's work-related.

SPEAKER_00

So Tamara, this has been so enjoyable. I'm really grateful that you you joined me today that we spoke about your amazing journey in many different companies through various roles into customer success, and then you as a leader. As you're wrapping up, I I would like to hear from you what based on your leadership journey so far. Is there one message or advice that you would give to the aspiring leaders in customer success?

SPEAKER_01

I would say it's like it's not a one size fits all. So much of leadership is it is EQ and there's IQ too. But your ability to like meet your team where they are, and your ability to meet individuals where they are, I would say that's the most important trait of being a leader because everyone's different. And customer success is like a very endurance heavy role. And to keep CSMs going, you have to be able to know when they need, like maybe a little push and a reminder that they can do what they need to do, because maybe they their confidence has been hit or something's happened and it feels like a setback. But also knowing when to tell them, like, actually, you've done all you can here, or I think you need a break and you you're not where you should be right now in your you know, your headspace, or knowing like when you're running a team meeting is sometimes you have to you just have to be able to adapt, adapt your messaging. Are are people with you? Are some of them lost? You need to change how you're delivering the messages, and that would be my greatest advice to people who want to be leaders. It's it's a people job.

SPEAKER_00

What a wonderful message for the end. Meet people where they are. Tamara, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us today.

SPEAKER_01

Thanks, Maria. Thank you. It's been great. Thanks for the great questions.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you for listening to today's episode. I really appreciate you taking time to learn something new and propel your career in customer success and beyond. If you like this episode, share it with your colleague, with your team member, with someone you know needs to hear it today. We appreciate your support, so please follow us and subscribe to our channels so many more women can hear about it.