In this episode of Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas sits down with Alexandra Ardelean, Senior Customer Success Manager at BigTime, a professional service automation platform for project-based businesses. Alexandra has one of the most unconventional paths into CS: a design degree, a Lean Black Belt, and a background in operations, including time spent as a customer of the very platform she now supports.
She shares what it’s like to navigate a post-acquisition integration on the CS side, why localizing CS playbooks to Polish culture required more than a ChatGPT prompt, how her operations background shapes the way she frames value with customers, and why patience is the one thing she’s still working on.
What You’ll Learn
- What CS looks like inside a post-acquisition integration and what the role actually involves day to day
- Why localizing CS playbooks to different cultures requires human knowledge, not just AI prompts
- How cultural differences between the US, Eastern Europe, and Poland show up in real CS interactions
- Why being a former customer of the platform you now support is a competitive advantage
- How Alexandra uses call transcripts and AI to aggregate insights for product conversations
- What the principle “form follows function” means in a CS context and what most teams get wrong
- How Alexandra approaches building CS processes from scratch using lean philosophy
- What patience actually means as a professional skill and why it’s still something she’s working on
Key Insights & Takeaways
Playbook localization is not a prompt. Adjusting CS workflows for Eastern European clients requires knowing the cultural context first. You have to know what to prompt.
Transparency is currency in Eastern European cultures. Where US communication often wraps feedback in softness, Polish and Romanian clients tend to value directness. Knowing the difference changes every interaction.
Being a former customer is a superpower. Knowing intrinsically what success means for the persona you’re serving lets you move from product mode into value framing mode, which is a completely different conversation.
Form follows function. Most CS teams build newsletters, relationship maps, and content before they’ve defined what value they’re actually trying to create. Start with why.
Call recordings free you to actually listen. When you’re not anxious about taking notes, you can be fully present in the conversation. That changes the quality of everything that follows.
Ask why five times, then ten. Whether you’re building from scratch or reassessing an existing process, getting to the essence of why things are done the way they are is where real change starts.
Patience is a functional skill, not a spiritual one. Things happen for a reason. Getting curious about the stories behind them, and connecting those stories to your goals, is where the magic is.
Podcast Transcript
Intro
Irina (0:06 – 0:26)
The Mastering CS Candid Leader Insights is the podcast where we dive into the world of customer success with industry leaders. I’m your host, Irina Cismas, and today I’m joined by Alexandra Ardelean, Senior Customer Success Manager at BigTime, professional service automation platform for project-based businesses. Alexandra, I’m really happy to have you here.
Thanks for joining!
Alexandra (0:27 – 0:29)
Hi, Irina. Thank you so much for having me!
What the Role Actually Looks Like During a Post-Acquisition Integration
Irina (0:30 – 0:44)
Let’s start with where you are right now. BigTime went through an acquisition, and you are right in the middle of the integration work on the CS side. What does the role actually look like today?
Alexandra (0:45 – 1:56)
It’s a bit like being an orchestra conductor, there’s a lot going on. As you mentioned, the company I work for went through an acquisition two years ago. I am still serving the book of business of the product that existed before the acquisition, because we haven’t discontinued supporting the platform.
But at the same time, we want to integrate not only the product and the experience, but also the customer experience. So I am taking a lot of the workflows and habits of the CS team from the US and adjusting them to the European market, to the Polish realities. I am based in Poland and most of my book of business is based in Poland, so there are cultural aspects that need to be adjusted, and there are also a lot of change management aspects that need to be adjusted. From unifying subscription models to introducing a new way of working with the support team and with myself as CSM.
Localizing CS Playbooks: Why a ChatGPT Prompt Isn’t Enough
Irina (1:56 – 2:39)
You proactively mentioned adapting to Polish culture, and I think you are one of the few people who brings this up unprompted. So I have to ask: are the realities so different between the US and Europe, and even within Europe, that they require playbook localization? Where the way you do things in CS needs to be adapted to the local culture? And are those differences quite significant compared to the US or other European countries?
Alexandra (2:40 – 3:47)
Totally, there are a lot. Some of our listeners might have experienced it themselves, and some might be as surprised as I was when I started experiencing these cultural differences. I grew up with American movies, I worked with American customers, I had different interactions with the American mindset, and most self-development books are written by US authors. So I thought it would be no big deal.
But then when you actually, tactically, need to work with customers and adjust, even just the language, even just emails, you see all these tiny details that add up to quite a lot of adjustments. And you need to already know how to adjust. It’s not just a matter of putting a prompt into ChatGPT to adjust it to Polish culture, because it doesn’t work like that.
Irina (3:47 – 3:56)
You don’t have a dedicated prompt in ChatGPT. So those are the things that you should know about Polish customers now.
Alexandra (3:57 – 4:24)
Do the email first. Do the thing. To be honest, now that you mentioned it, I recently started challenging myself at the beginning of March: could I prompt it? Could I take the playbook of my colleagues and adjust it to my reality? And yes, it is possible. But no, it’s not possible to just do it automatically. You need to know what to prompt.
Beyond Communication: What Else Changes Culturally in CS
Irina (4:26 – 4:37)
And besides communication, are there any specific things besides the way you communicate? What are there other things that you have to adapt from a CS perspective?
Alexandra (4:38 – 6:43)
I would say it’s this managing discomfort. Being Romanian, being Eastern European by education and mindset, and Poland is very similar in that aspect. We value and trust when someone tells things straight without wrapping them, because transparency, even when it’s ruthless, is a sign of honesty for us.
Whereas in the States, it’s almost like they wouldn’t say no. Even to customers, we feel it’s a dance, like a word salad. What are you trying to say? That this won’t be done? It will be done, but it will be prioritized in a certain way. There are a lot of words where for us it would just be: rip the bandaid.
I experienced this when I started to introduce the QBR flow, the quarterly business review, with my key customers. I already had a relationship with them and would speak very informally, but then the big change was that I brought in slides, just a short presentation with an agenda and some product items. And I could see their eyes rolling, almost like, Alex, what are you doing now? Are you going all corporate?
I asked my colleagues from the States if they experienced the same and they were like, no, it’s just normal to do a sales pitch and have slides to anchor your speech. I do see the benefit. But after that first call when I saw the eyes rolling, I always add an intro now: I’m still here, our relationship doesn’t change, but I have some new things I want to try and I want your feedback on them. And then they were like, okay, let’s go.
Irina (6:46 – 8:22)
Two days ago I had a conversation about scaling together with our CEO, and we had a CS leader from a big corporation in Poland. We were discussing Eastern European culture versus German, and also versus US. I remember our CEO, who is German, saying to both of us: you Eastern Europeans are so pessimistic, you always base things on the negative side of things. And I was like, no, I’m not pessimistic, I’m realistic. Prepare for the worst, hope for the best. But let’s address the elephant in the room.
Being the third person I’ve discussed this with, I realized that it might indeed be a cultural thing that you have to acknowledge, plan around, and adjust your day-to-day work accordingly.
Now, I want to go back to your background, because most of the CSMs I talk to come from account management or sales. You come from operations and process design. Does that show up differently in a customer conversation? What does that background teach you? What do you do differently?
Coming from Operations and Being a Former Customer
Alexandra (8:23 – 8:46)
I will surprise you a little bit more, because I specifically landed in this company and this job from being a customer in the past. I was a customer of this platform myself as an operations manager. And right now I am in customer success, essentially serving the persona that I was before.
Irina (8:47 – 8:58)
This is an advantage. This is a competitive advantage because you understand both words. It’s a double-edged sword, I would say.
Alexandra (8:59 – 9:40)
It’s totally not a typical path. I would say that I’m an operations manager first, and then customer success by evolution, specifically in this field for operations managers. Do I think my customer success skills would be replicable in a different industry or a different product? Probably by now. But I don’t think I would have made the transition into CS if I didn’t have the specific knowledge in this vertical and this industry.
Does Vertical Industry Experience Make a Good CSM Great?
Irina (9:40 – 10:01)
Let me ask you this. Do you think that vertical industry experience is what makes a good CSM great? Does it help to have been in the customer’s shoes first and understand it from that side? And if yes, why? If no, why?
Alexandra (10:02 – 11:56)
I’m biased here because I will say definitely yes. In the customer journey, it’s the same as in UX research. There is always this phase of empathizing, understanding the value, putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and asking: what is value for you? How do you define success?
Being a true partner to a customer sometimes means challenging them, shaking their world a little bit, challenging them to question their own questions. The fact that I was in that role helps me a lot because I know the challenges they are facing, and I know intrinsically what success means for them.
So I can confidently ask, wouldn’t you want to see your team utilization in one click? And they say, yes, but can you do that? Yeah, let me show you. And then you go into the product from a totally different level. It’s not someone who only knows the product and goes into sales mode, into features mode. You go into value framing, and that’s above the product.
And product can change. With AI, I think we are all so deep into this revolution right now. Everyone asks, how can I leverage AI with your product? And I turn it back to them: how do you see that? How would you want to leverage AI in my product?
How Alexandra Uses AI Without Losing the Human Side
Irina (11:58 – 13:18)
Since you brought it up, I’ll facilitate that question as well, because everyone is talking about it. In my experience, I see two sides: the adopters who embrace it and are super hyped, and on the other end, let’s call them the haters.
The truth is in the middle, like with most things. I don’t think you can succeed 100% on the AI part in customer success. It definitely helps and automates a lot of things, but there’s also the human touch that you cannot hand over to an agent. I’m curious, how do you leverage AI? Is it more than transcribing calls, doing discovery, and preparing for the next QBR?
Alexandra (13:19 – 15:00)
I’m more on the conservative spectrum of using AI. Call transcripts are something I’ve become quite addicted to. Two years ago, I was quite reluctant to record every call because I felt that having an agent taking notes on everything would erode the trust and relationship I have with the customer. But now I record 98% of the conversations I have and nobody is actually objecting to it.
The quality of data aggregation I can get from the calls is significant. Obviously there are low-hanging fruits like generating a nice follow-up or next steps. But what I see as a real game changer is using transcripts as insights and data points when I speak to product. Product always asks me, okay Alex, what is the top objection, the top use case, and how does it break down by ARR? I always had a problem before aggregating use cases because people talk in stories, and then aggregating those stories into use cases by ARR or by client size was difficult. Now I can take a bunch of transcripts and search for the particular use cases I want to aggregate. That’s how I think about it.
Why Call Recordings Changed Everything
Irina (15:00 – 17:07)
I prefer to record so that I can focus on the quality of the conversation and where it leads us. A couple of days ago a customer called me and I said, let’s not do this over the phone, let’s use something I can record, because I want to focus on the conversation rather than taking notes and worrying about what I might forget. Let the conversation flow, capture everything, the debate, the pros and cons, and then analyze it with AI afterwards. What are the implications? What are the different angles I can use?
And as a marketer, I’m more interested in how a particular customer speaks, how they describe a certain use case or a certain phase, so that I can mirror it and speak with other customers using their same tone of voice and language, rather than what we assume or think would resonate.
Call recordings are, I would say, mandatory. Another head of CS I spoke to told me that the backbone of their entire CS infrastructure was a call recording and transcription tool. That was the thing they needed in order to build everything else on top of. It’s becoming a pattern I hear more and more often in conversations with heads of CS and CSMs in general.
Alexandra (17:07 – 17:39)
And if you think of it, it’s actually more humane. I’m surprised by myself saying that, but it really is. In all kinds of sales coaching and communication coaching, step one was always: listen, active listening, how to take notes, how to aggregate, how to listen at the same time. And now I think I’ve gotten rid of that notes anxiety. I have free hands and I can just listen.
Form Follows Function: What Most CS Teams Build Before They Should
Irina (17:39 – 17:52)
And I can actually listen. I want to ask you about one of your principles, one follows function. What’s the form most CS teams build before they figure out the function?
Alexandra (17:54 – 19:21)
What a question. So what form do I see CS teams build before they figure out the function? Let me try this.
Thinking of the last team event we had, I was surprised that my colleagues were very focused on understanding industry news. So I would say that’s a form: newsletters, digesting context from customers, LinkedIn news, relationship mapping. A lot of content, a lot of form, almost like painting a picture, when the function they’re trying to build is simply value. How do you build value? Those forms are different lexicons, different words for value. Tell me what you do and I’ll tell you what you care about.
Building CS Processes from Scratch: Where to Actually Start
Irina (19:21 – 19:50)
You’ve built a lot from scratch: health scoring, customer segmentation, playbooks. When you are starting from zero inside a company, where do you actually begin? What do you need in order for the foundation you are building to be solid? And do you have the confidence that it will last when you scale, when you double the portfolio of customers?
Alexandra (19:51 – 21:03)
What I’m always interested in is why. When I heard you ask the question, I was tempted to say it depends: are we building a process from scratch for an existing living organism, or are we building on a blank canvas?
Regardless, we need to focus on why. Following that why, asking it five times, ten times, gets you to the essence of it. It explains, in an existing process, why people are doing what they’re doing at the moment. And then: does this still serve us? Is this something we can scratch away and change?
I really love the lean and Japanese philosophy of taking things into smaller pieces and then putting them back together. That’s how I would say you reassess or build processes from scratch.
The One Thing That Still Shapes How Alexandra Works
Irina (21:04 – 21:35)
Alex, last question, because I have to be mindful of the time. This conversation could have easily gone on for an hour or more. You have a design degree, a Lean Black Belt, and now you are in CS. Is there something from one of those worlds, a mindset, a habit, something you learned the hard way, that still shapes how you approach the work today?
Alexandra (21:38 – 22:34)
Yes, it’s something I’m actually planning on designing as a tattoo. It would be my first one. And that is patience.
I’m the red type. I see a spark and I run and I do. I’m a doer. What I think is key, what I’ve noticed throughout my career, and I’m still working on it, I’m far from there, is patience. This is why I want to tattoo it on myself, to be reminded of it. Things happen for a reason, and I’m not saying this in a spiritual way, I’m saying it from a very functional way. These things that happen tell you stories. And if you get curious about the stories and connect them with your goals, magic happens.
Irina (22:34 – 22:56)
Alexandra, thank you. You don’t meet many CSMs within Black Belt, the Google chapter and all the other things that you have on your resume.
And the way that background changes, how you build things was really interesting to get into. So thanks so much for joining and for accepting my invitation.
Alexandra (22:57 – 22:59)
Thank you so much. It’s been an honor, Irina.
Irina (23:00 – 23:07)
To everyone listening, thanks for tuning in. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning and mastering customer success.
