From Travel to Tech: Veronica’s Journey into Customer Success
Veronica joined Funnel as a Customer Success Manager, bringing her experience from both the travel and property management industries. In this blog post, she shares how she transitioned into customer success, what attracted her to Funnel, and the structure of Funnel’s Customer Success teams. Veronica also discusses the challenges customer success teams face in the ever-evolving SaaS industry.
Tell us about yourself and how you discovered Funnel.
My name is Veronica, and I have a pretty diverse background when it comes to my career. I studied business management in college, and after graduating, I moved to Boston and started working at a travel company. My role was a hybrid between sales and customer retention, but as time went on, I realized that the retention and growth side of things was what I enjoyed most. When the pandemic hit in 2020, the travel industry went through a tough time, so I eventually started looking for new opportunities where I could focus purely on customer success. That's how I initially transitioned into the SaaS world. After about a year and a half, I decided to look for other opportunities.
Funnel wasn’t on my radar when looking for new jobs. I had been exploring new roles when I reached out to my old manager for advice on my resume. He was working at Funnel at the time and encouraged me to apply for a Customer Success position. When I decided to check it out and once I looked into the company and spoke to my former manager, I knew it would be a great fit. The company’s culture and focus on employee development really stood out to me.
What drew you to pursue a career in Customer Success?
My previous roles in sales and customer retention helped me realize that my strengths lie in building strong, long-term relationships with clients. While I initially started in a sales role, I found myself more drawn to helping customers succeed and grow within the company. That’s when I decided to focus exclusively on customer success.
For me, customer success is at the core of a company’s growth. While sales are crucial, without strong customer retention and satisfaction, it’s challenging for any business to sustain itself. I’m driven by the goal of creating value for customers and ensuring they feel supported throughout their journey. It’s incredibly rewarding to know that you’re not only helping clients stay but also thrive with the product.
Funnel has different Customer Success teams in place. Could you walk us through how those teams are structured?
Our Customer Success teams are divided into three main areas, which recently evolved through a reorganization.
- Customer Success Team: This team works with customers on Business or Enterprise plans. Their focus is on customer onboarding, ensuring clients are set up for success from day one, as well as providing ongoing support and value to customers. They manage business reviews,consult customers on best practices , and collaborate closely with account management on renewals and expansion discussions.
- Strategic Customer Success Team: The team that focuses on managing our largest and most complex customers. These clients often have more technical needs and require a higher level of support, so they ensure that these customers are getting the most out of Funnel. This involves more proactive and structured account management.
- Scaled Customer Success Team: This is where I currently sit. We work with a large volume of customers on our Starter plan, so we can’t provide the same one-to-one engagement that the other teams do. Instead, we focus on a mix of one-to-one interactions and digital customer success initiatives. This means using webinars, educational content, and automated processes to support and manage these customers. It’s a growing field known as digital customer success, where we create scalable resources and processes to supplement one-to-one engagements and support many customers at once.
What do you see as the biggest challenge for customer success teams in the SaaS industry today?
One of the biggest challenges in customer success as companies grow is scaling efforts effectively. In SaaS, you often have a mix of large enterprise clients and smaller customers, and it’s difficult to provide the same level of support to everyone without overwhelming the team.
This is where digital customer success plays a crucial role. As SaaS companies acquire more customers, especially through freemium models or lower-cost plans, they need to do more with fewer resources. One-on-one calls with every customer aren’t feasible, so they must find efficient ways to provide value through digital engagement. It’s a delicate balance between maintaining a personal touch and using technology to scale the customer experience.
That’s why I think digital customer success is going to become even more important in the next few years. It allows us to provide meaningful support to a large number of customers without sacrificing quality, and it’s something I’m really excited to be a part of as it evolves.
