I’m a Customer Success Manager for Cisco Cloud Security, and I love what I do. Apart from having an amazing title, being a CSM means I work with customers to help them achieve success with Cloud Security, and I manage that process end-to-end.
I want to say that we take Customer Success very seriously here at Cisco Cloud Security, except that paints too droll a picture for the kind of organization we are. Our global Success team is not a room full of serious people doing serious things. Connecting customers with what they need to be successful is demanding work, sure.
But we’re here because we enjoy being CSMs and because we believe in our product and in our customers. Our Success team and the resources we provide are an essential part of our customers’ experience with Cloud Security– so much so that I wrote this whole blog post about it for you.
Customer Success Managers: The Role
Ah, to have a role where Success is literally part of your title. It’s pretty awesome.
“I get it, Shannon, you like your job. Now tell me what you actually do.” Yes, with pleasure!
CSMs unlock doors for our customers. We guide users from onboarding through deployment and beyond, and we do so through digital resources and personal connections. We work hand in hand with our Service Delivery team to make sure all customers are successfully deployed, and we extend our expertise to our smallest mom & pop shop customers via our Success Hub and weekly deployment webinars.
Yeah, it’s pretty rad– we go to work and geek out over our ever-developing security solution, and then we get to share what we learn with our customers. So my daily interactions are opportunities to impart really beneficial information and guidance. I get to funnel my natural curiosity about what our product does and how it’s changing into conversations with my customers that teach them, open up possibilities for them, and help them get value out of the things they already have.
In the CSM world we call this “optimization” and “driving value” and even “return on investment.” Yes, yes, very pretty words that make for pretty presentations.
But it boils down to an ongoing conversation of “Ooh, hey! Did you know that you can…” regardless of how big a customer you are or how long you’ve been with us. Being a CSM is like when you got to show your best friend the Konami code, or when you teach your kids how much better Oreos are when you dip them in milk, or when you show your dad how easy life is when you use talk-to-text… every single day.
“Being a CSM is like when you got to show your best friend the Konami code, or when you teach your kids how much better Oreos are when you dip them in milk, or when you show your dad how easy life is when you use talk-to-text… every single day.”
Shannon Kelly
Customer Success: The Team
The CSMs are just one part of our global Customer Success team that spans all of a customer’s post-sales needs. Our Onboarding team makes sure every single customer is connected with the right post-sales resources. The Service Delivery team guides customers through technical aspects of deployment, and their expertise is digitally anchored in our Deployment Hub and our Deployment Documentation for everyone to access.
Once customers move out of deployment, they can rely on our world-class Support team for troubleshooting. This incredible group of smarties is dedicated solely to Cloud Security, and some of our organization’s biggest brains live here, as evidenced by the Knowledge Base articles they write for our customers. They wisely remind customers to subscribe to our Announcements and Release Notes for the latest product changes.
Our eLearning team expands on all of this, ensuring customers who want to grow their knowledge have access to a dynamic library of intelligence through the same simple access to their Umbrella dashboard.
The Digital marketing team hosts webinars to boost customer knowledge on hot security topics and product functionality, and they provide a regular newsletter to keep everyone up-to-date on the latest resources and events.
And our Advocacy team rounds out the full customer experience by generating case studies, use case videos, and connecting our enthusiastic customers with one another.
Cisco Cloud Security: The Product
Obviously I admire this role and our organization, but I’m also here because I drank the Cisco Cloud Security kool-aid. It’s a genuinely special thing to get to work for a product that I really believe in. We’re security at the DNS layer for fast and reliable visibility and protection, we protect users on and off the network, we’re built on unmatched threat intelligence, and we offer a cloud-based proxy for full URL inspection and application controls.
Customers have access to a deployment that is tailored specifically to their security and networking needs and really powerful insight into their networks and endpoints. We’re even proven to be the most effective security solution by a third-party test (you know, so it’s not just me gushing here).
Cloud Security Customers: Our End Users
So we have excellent CSMs, a mature Success organization, and our product is the best. But I truly believe that our customers are the most valuable element in all of this. Yes, it’s my job to connect them with all the resources to make them successful, to always update them on What’s New.
But it’s their insight and feedback to us that rounds out our interactions. It’s their use cases and questions that keep us on our toes and help drive the innovation that fuels our solution. It’s their willingness to partner with us in creating something amazing that makes such a special relationship.
And yes, we take that relationship and the responsibility of fostering that relationship very seriously.
But we are more than serious people. We are many teams working together to take our customers to the next level, because we are excited about what we’ll find there together.
Which is pretty much what Customer Success is all about, and why Success at Cisco Cloud Security is such an essential part of our makeup.
