Where do I even start...If you are serious about working at this company, I implore you to read this entire thing
This CS role is account management and customer success combined. You are constantly dealing with client issues which they say the company’s values and want you to respond within 24 hours but then ask why your sales metrics are low when you have no time to prospect. Basically, they are asking you to do two jobs for the low price of 1 and you must work long hours just to keep up.
Knowing they are asking a lot out of you; they make it even worse by micromanaging the hell out of you. They say they won’t when you start but as time goes on you ask about it and get hit with “this is what is expected of you in the role.” They don’t take any ownership and deflect to “this is our system” BS. You will spend HOURS repeating work, updating accounts on everything you do throughout the day and filling out what they call deal reviews. Basically, you must show your manager what you’re doing on almost every account, fill out multiple excel sheets of the same product allotment list and its infuriating.
The biggest red flag is that their products have a VERY HIGH technical learning curve and there is NO REAL TRAINING aligned for customer success. The training they give you to start is 90% geared towards new sales and is basically a waste of your time. Once you’re in the role your only support is to bother your peers and your designated "buddy" who walks you through different aspects of the job in the beginning but then have their own job to do and eventually drop off. You are stuck having to ask a million questions with no real process for anything as everyone does things differently. The hardest part is their product is so technical that it is hard to understand fully and difficult to pitch. When you have meetings with clients you talk to a lot of engineers and developers so as soon as you bring up a product and get two sentences in you are completely lost.
Example-It took 6 months before we got a training session on the main platform and how to walk through a basic demo with a client-6 MONTHS!! That should be something we do in the first week
Also, datadog charges their clients 10’s of thousands of dollars for training of their product lol. So very little clients actually pay for that and then it all falls on you to figure it out for them (but you have no clue either because you had no real training so it becomes chaos and very time consuming-something you have very little of to begin with) So many of your clients don’t understand the products they are using, how to properly navigate the basics of the platform or how they are billed. What this translates into is almost every time you try to upsell or expand their account all they care about is optimizing and bringing their price down. They bought the product for $50k two years ago and because they didn’t know how to use the products correctly, they are now renewing for $200k and don't know how it happened. So, hitting your sales growth number is very difficult and half of any success is just luck of a company consolidating. I have communicated with so many people in the customer success department during my time there and there are employees 2-3 years in who are still very lost and rely on luck to hit their sales numbers
If you have made it this far into this review, then props to you. You really care about how you are going to be supported in a new role and what I would say to you is RUN. Do not take this job, they will not train you and it’s less than a 50/50 shot that you figure it out or get let go in 4-6 months because you couldn't cut it. My advice to you is to find a more established customer success department that has a real training system and products that aren’t extremely difficult to grasp.
