In this episode of Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas sits down with Kiko RodrÃguez Moreno, Customer Success Manager at Wazuh, an open source security platform helping organizations detect threats, monitor their infrastructure, and stay compliant. Kiko comes from a linguistics background and found his way into one of the most technical industries out there, and that combination shapes everything about how he communicates with customers.
He shares what customer success looks like in a cybersecurity company, why technical customers are harder to communicate with than most people expect, how he learned to navigate a product he didn’t technically understand at first, and what advice he would give to anyone stepping into a technical CS role without a technical background.
What You’ll Learn
- What customer success actually looks like inside a cybersecurity company
- How to measure success when enterprise projects can take years to complete
- Why technical customers communicate differently and what CSMs consistently get wrong
- How Kiko learned to navigate a highly technical product without a technical background
- Where AI is making the CS job easier and where it’s adding complexity
- What tools and automations are saving the most time in day-to-day CS work
- What someone without a technical background needs to know before stepping into a technical CS role
Key Insights & Takeaways
Education and discovery are the core of the job. In cybersecurity, customers often don’t fully understand the capabilities of the product they’re using. The CSM’s job is to make sure they do.
Success timelines in cybersecurity are long. Some projects take two years or more before you can say they’re fully working. That changes how you think about measuring outcomes and building relationships.
Technical customers don’t over-communicate. They expect you to already understand the context and give minimal information. CSMs have to ask more questions, be more direct, and never assume a short answer is a complete one.
You don’t need a technical background to succeed in a technical CS role. You need curiosity, the willingness to ask questions, and the patience to learn. The company already knows you don’t know everything on day one.
AI is a 50/50. It saves time on monitoring, summarizing, and routing. But it also takes time to implement correctly, creates questions from customers, and requires adaptation from everyone involved.
The click moment is real. At some point, the product stops being abstract and starts making sense. Getting there requires asking questions without fear and leaning on the technical team around you.
Great things happen outside your comfort zone. Stepping into an unfamiliar field is not a risk to avoid. It’s an opportunity to build a rare and valuable combination of skills.
Podcast transcript
Intro
Irina (0:04 – 0:26)
This is the podcast where we dive into the world of customer success within the stream leaders. I’m your host, Irina Cismas, and today I’m joined by Kiko Moreno, Customer Success Manager at Wazuh, an open source security platform helping organizations with best threats monitor the infrastructure and stay compliant. Kiko, I’m really happy to have you here, thanks for joining!
Kiko (0:26 – 0:28)
Thank you, Irina, for having me!
What the CS Role at Wazuh Actually Looks Like
Irina (0:30 – 0:41)
Before we get into your approach, help me understand your role today. What does your role at Wazuh actually look like? And what kind of customers are you working with?
Kiko (0:41 – 3:41)
As Wazuh is a cybersecurity company, we provide software and support services for our customers, along with other types of services such as compliance. My role in day-to-day life is to take care of customers, but not from a technical perspective, which might be what someone expects from a customer success role in a cybersecurity company. It’s more from a commercial and relationship quality standpoint.
My daily tasks are essentially taking care of all the requests that customers open in our support system, such as reviewing how the process is going with the support team, the time the support team is taking to resolve requests, because we have to follow an SLA with customers, and checking if the goals we set together from the beginning of our journey are being achieved. I also make sure that customers are using our support services and our software as much as possible, because sometimes they don’t really understand the whole value of having a dedicated team. They just rely on us whenever they need help with things that are not working as expected.
We work with a SIEM and XDR software, which is a very specific type of cybersecurity tool. Cybersecurity is not a very well-explored field yet. It’s something relatively new, so even technical people and engineers are not fully aware of all the capabilities that a SIEM software has. In my daily tasks, I always want to make sure that customers understand the full potential of the SIEM and XDR software we offer and that they are aware of all the capabilities we have. Even though a lot of technical things are involved, I don’t focus too much on that because we have a whole team dedicated to it. My focus is making sure the customer is having a good experience with us and using our services as much as possible.
Education and Discovery: The Core of CS in Cybersecurity
Irina (3:43 – 4:02)
Would it be correct to assess that basically you try to educate your customers and do a combination of discovery with adoption? Or making sure they understand the value behind your product.
Kiko (4:03 – 6:05)
I would say it’s not necessarily a problem, but it’s something I’ve been facing since I joined the company: I deal with very technical profiles. All of my customers have a very technical background and they don’t like spending time on things that are not directly important for them. If they have a problem, they’re going to contact the support team, and that’s it.
My role is to make sure they are not using our services just as something to rely on when they have a problem, but as something to actually benefit from. Not just reaching out when things break, but also when they have doubts, or when they have projects going on and want to understand how they can get more value from the services we offer.
I’m always making sure that they are using the services and the software in the best way possible, and educating them to reach out to the team not just for problems, but also whenever they want to understand how our software can adapt to their needs and goals.
Even though it takes a lot of time, because dealing with very technical profiles is quite complicated, and it’s not easy to get them to think outside the box, it’s one of the main challenges I face. But it’s part of my role and part of my responsibility to the company.
How Success Is Measured When Projects Take Years
Irina (6:05 – 6:12)
How do you measure success with customers like this? What thing shows you that an account is genuinely doing well?
Kiko (6:13 – 8:16)
From the very beginning, we have to make really clear what the needs of the companies are and what their objectives are with us. If we don’t get that clear, we will never know if we are succeeding or doing well with them.
During the onboarding process, which is something I take care of along with the support team, we have to know why the customer is using our services, why they decided to go with Wazuh, and if they need to be compliant with any regulations, because sometimes they come to us specifically because Wazuh helps them comply with regulations imposed by the European Union or local governments.
Once we understand why they are using our product, that’s when we can measure the objectives and whether we are succeeding or not. And for cybersecurity projects, it really takes time to see if we are meeting their goals. To have a project fully working, it can take more than a year because they have to integrate the software with certain tools, do integrations, and be compliant with regulations. That takes time. It’s not something that can be done in two or three months. For some customers, it takes years to have a project fully working.
So sometimes we can say we’re being successful with a customer after six months. In other projects, we need at least two years. It’s a complicated world in terms of understanding if we are succeeding or not. It depends a lot on the project.
The Hardest Part of the Role
Irina (8:17 – 8:23)
Speaking of that, it’s a bit complicated. What’s been the hardest part of the role so far?
Kiko (8:25 – 10:05)
As I don’t come from a technical background, the most difficult part for me was understanding the projects and the customers. It was really complicated to understand what the customer was trying to achieve, what they meant by having an SLA with a certain integration, how regulations actually work for them and for companies in general, and what they needed from us.
The most difficult part was diving into the product itself. But I have a whole team around me, and it was key for me to realize that I could go to them and say, I don’t understand this, can you explain it to me in simple terms? And once you start understanding, something just clicks in your brain. I remember that happened about three months after I joined the company. Something clicked and I said, okay, I need to understand this. I need to get answers. I need to ask questions.
It wasn’t until I realized that I needed to actively seek that understanding, even if I had to ask for very simple explanations, that I started succeeding in my role, doing a better job, and really understanding customers. That’s when I started acquiring the knowledge.
What CSMs Get Wrong When Talking to Technical Customers
Irina (10:07 – 10:25)
Speaking of when you come from a technical background or you don’t have a technical background, I know that you studied language. And now you are activating work where precision matters. And speaking from your experience, what does CSM get wrong when they talk to technical customers?
Kiko (10:28 – 12:37)
When dealing with very technical customers, what we get wrong is thinking they are going to be as communicative as someone from HR or a commercial team, that they are going to express their thoughts and needs easily. It’s not like that. There are customers who have great language skills and are very communicative, but that doesn’t really happen often.
One thing people get wrong when dealing with technical customers is expecting them to communicate as much as we think they will. When they give us an answer, even a very simple one with very little information, we tend to think, okay, it’s not much but at least I have something. I did this at the beginning too. But then I realized it doesn’t work like that. I need to ask more questions and get more information from them.
Once they realize they can’t just give me one simple sentence and say, we need this, and I push back with, okay, but why do you need this? What for? Do you have an SLA? That’s when things shift. We cannot rely on the little information that technical people give us, because they don’t really like to communicate. They just prefer to get the job done. They assume we have the background and don’t feel the need to explain themselves.
So we have to be very assertive in our communication and not beat around the bush. We need to be very direct: what do you need, when do you need it, why do you need it, what for, what are you expecting from us? We have to be very direct with them, because otherwise the project might not succeed.
AI in Cybersecurity CS: Easier or More Complex?
Irina (12:38 – 12:53)
I need to tackle the AI topic because it becomes a big part of cybersecurity and not only. Do you think this is making the CSMs job easier or more complex?
Kiko (12:54 – 15:46)
I think it’s 50/50. We’ve been implementing AI in our product and in our daily tasks for a while now, and at some point it really does make our lives easier.
For example, about a year ago, we would have to go through a dashboard to check the metrics of customer environments, such as data capacity. If there were red flags, we would have to go to the customer and say, we’ve seen these numbers, we should be working on it. Even though it’s part of our job, it really took time to go and look at the dashboard. With an AI we recently implemented, a document is now sent directly to the customer informing them about that data, and we can see those documents as well. That really helped us because it freed up time to focus on other tasks.
On the other side, implementing AI tools takes time to understand. If the AI hasn’t been correctly implemented, there are errors, and then it takes time to fix them. Something might not be working as expected and you have to wait for it to get fixed. And then there’s the adaptation: understanding how the new tool works and how it’s going to save time in the long run. It’s not the worst part, but it does take time.
Also, when we implement AI into our products, customers need to understand how it’s going to affect their daily tasks. We need to explain that to them, along with the support team. And when customers have technical questions that I can’t answer from a technical perspective, I need to bring in someone from the support team. So again, it takes time.
It’s a 50/50. Sometimes it’s really good. Sometimes it takes a lot of time to adapt, it creates a lot of questions, and some customers just don’t like it. They prefer the old way.
The Tools and Automations That Save the Most Time
Irina (15:47 – 16:21)
You mentioned the example with the dashboard that now it’s basically automated and you are sending it directly to your customers. This triggered the following question. What other tools or processes help you automate your day-to-day work so that you feel productive?
Or to be able to be out more of your time so you can talk and spend more time with your customers?
Kiko (16:21 – 17:49)
One thing that has really helped is our ticketing system. Customers use it to get in touch with the support team, and in each ticket you can see the whole conversation between the customer and the support team. We implemented AI on that, so whenever you open a ticket, there’s a box where the AI summarizes the whole conversation. You don’t have to go through message by message. There’s simply a box that explains everything that has been done, what the customer’s needs were, what kind of answers we gave them, and the timeline.
That tool really helped me. It saved me a lot of times, because maybe I was in the middle of a meeting and a customer brought up a ticket. I’d go to the ticketing system, look at that ticket, and right there was this box that explained everything. I didn’t have to go through the whole ticket and waste the customer’s time during the call. I just read that box and had everything I needed. I really like the AI tool implemented on the ticketing system. It really made our lives easier in customer success.
Advice for Non-Technical CSMs Stepping Into Technical Roles
Irina (17:50 – 18:12)
Our last question. If you are non-technical and if you have a non-technical background, What do you need to name first? What would be all about for someone who is willing to step into your shoes?
Kiko (18:12 – 20:02)
If a company hires you to do customer success and you don’t have a technical background, the company already knows that. They will give you the time to learn. That’s something I was really afraid of at the beginning, thinking that if I didn’t learn everything in one or two months, I was going to be fired or doing a bad job. But that’s not how it works. You have to be calm.
The company gives you the opportunity to learn from the technical team, and the technical team already knows you don’t have that background. They are going to support you. You don’t have to be afraid of asking questions. There are no silly questions, there are no simple questions, they are just questions. You need to get information to get your job done. Don’t be afraid to message the technical team constantly. The company knows you’re going to do this. The company expects this kind of behavior.
So ask questions. Don’t get anxious for not knowing everything from the very first day. It’s going to be a long journey. But after two years, you realize you know a lot of things you would have never thought you’d be dealing with in your life. I’m very proud of myself for that, because I come from a very different background.
People shouldn’t be afraid of stepping into different sectors and different fields. If the company gives you the opportunity, take it and learn from it. It’s a very good experience.
Irina (20:03 – 21:04)
I actually like to say that great things happen out of your comfort zone. And most probably, if you would have remained in your comfort zone, you wouldn’t have been here where you are today. It was a really interesting conversation.
And I loved how you managed to bring together, because of the conversation that we had, two things that don’t usually fit in the same role. The linguistic and the cybersecurity, it’s a rare combination. But I’m sure that this combination actually shapes the way you think about customers and communication in general.
And there was a lot here that people can generally take back into their own work for sharing your story with us. And for everyone listening, thanks for being here. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning and mastering customer success.
