In this episode of Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas sits down with Erik Törnblom, Customer Success Manager at PLAYipp, a digital signage platform that helps organizations manage what shows on their screens across multiple locations. Erik has been involved in football since he was 11, first as a player and then as a coach, and that background shapes how he thinks about teams, problems, and customer relationships.
He shares what good onboarding looks like when your customers range from single-screen shops to enterprise organizations with thousands of screens, how PLAYipp uses AI note-taking to build a monthly sentiment report from customer conversations, why conflict in a team is not something to avoid but something to build on, and why saying no to customers is one of the most valuable habits he has developed.
What You’ll Learn
- What PLAYipp does and what the CSM role looks like across a wide range of customers
- What good onboarding looks like when customer complexity varies this much
- How PLAYipp measures customer health and structures follow-ups for different account sizes
- How the CS team handles renewals and the relationship with resellers
- What skills matter most in a CS team that serves both enterprise and smaller customers
- Why saying no is one of the most important habits in customer success
Key Insights & Takeaways
Compartmentalization is a CS skill. The ability to focus on one problem at a time, solve it, and move on, rather than getting overwhelmed by the whole, comes directly from Erik’s experience in American football.
Onboarding success looks different for every customer. For some it’s screens online and publishing frequency. For others it’s the depth of feature adoption. The metrics need to match the customer’s complexity.
Conflict in a team is not a problem to fix, it’s a phase to move through. Teams that are too uniform don’t develop. Disparities and disagreements are what push a team to the next level.
You can only be yourself. Being comfortable in your own skin, direct and honest, is what makes relationships with customers sustainable over the long term.
Podcast Transcript
What Football and CS Have in Common
Irina (0:06 – 0:31)
Welcome to Mastering CS Candid Leader Insights, 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 Erik Törnblom, Customer Success Manager at PLAYipp, a digital signage platform that helps organizations manage what shows on their screen across multiple locations. Erik, I’m really happy to have you here.
Thanks for joining.
Erik (0:32 – 0:33)
Thank you for having me.
Irina (0:34 – 0:47)
Erik, before we dive in, football has played a huge role in your life since you were 11 and you are now CSM at PLAYipp. What do football and CS have in common?
Erik (0:49 – 1:45)
Some things I surely take away from that part of my life, being a football player and a coach, is that we work as a team. I think that team element and my ability to compartmentalize tasks is something that I’ve learned from sports. I like to structure things a certain way, and when I’m attacking a problem, I sometimes have the ability to focus on that problem and view it in compartments rather than as a whole.
Often when attacking something in that world, you solve one thing, you focus on your job, and then you move on, especially in American football, which is a very rigid and compartmentalized sport in a way. Bringing that into my work, I think, is very beneficial.
What the Day-to-Day Looks Like at PLAYipp
Irina (1:47 – 1:54)
Paint us a picture of your day-to-day as a CSM at PLAYipp. Who are your customers and what does the work actually look like?
Erik (1:54 – 3:06)
In digital signage, a customer can be anyone, from a small shop that wants one screen to enterprise-level companies with thousands of screens. It can vary a lot from day to day. I personally work more with enterprise-level customers or customers in the public sector, so they tend to have more complexity than just setting up one screen.
Digital signage is a very flexible tool that fits well into both large and small businesses in their communication mix. As I said, I tend to work more with the slightly larger customers, but my day-to-day consists of teaching, guiding, and supporting existing customers, but also onboarding new customers or being part of the early pre-sale process when we are delivering our products to new customers so we can implement them in their company.
What Good Onboarding Looks Like
Irina (3:07 – 3:18)
Speaking about the onboarding, what does good onboarding look like at PLAYipp? What are you aiming for in the first few months? And how do you know when you’ve got there?
Erik (3:19 – 4:53)
I think that’s one of the key questions that all customer success managers struggle with. The onboarding process has a standard structure, so to speak, where we have three sessions set up for our customers. That’s the general process we have. If you just purchase our product, that’s what you get, and we feel it’s very sufficient to learn and implement our product and get going. It consists of training sessions and follow-ups.
It’s a technical product that also involves communication, so you have to learn both the technical side of it and the communication part. If we have customers that are more technical, we focus more on the communication, content, and creative part. But if we have customers that are very good at the communication part, we might have to focus more on the technical administration side of the tool.
More complex onboarding structures can take months, depending on the scale of the customer and what they want to implement, so it varies a lot. But success in a standard onboarding looks at the number of screens that are online, the frequency of publishing, and whether they are using the tools in our platform that we discussed during the onboarding. We can evaluate those things during follow-ups.
What Healthy Actually Looks Like Post-Onboarding
Irina (4:55 – 5:05)
And once they are past onboarding, how do you measure whether things are going well? What does healthy actually look like in your case?
Erik (5:06 – 6:27)
I think it’s a hard data point to find out sometimes. It’s so many parameters. But we look at how our product structures.
We have licenses. So are all licenses being used? Are they at 100% capacity?
Or are they dropping? Are they not using 100%? So we can look at that health score.
Are the screens online? So we can see that offline screens do not display the most current information. So that’s a key health score to us.
We can see frequency of logging, frequency of publishing, and those type of health scores that we can pull out. And also here, depending on the customer, often onboarding, we have certain follow-ups. How we structure it that we have larger customers, get a dedicated customer to access manager.
We try to set up at least monthly or quarterly meetings where we can have discussions with customers. And often when we release something, a new feature, that’s also when we have a conversation with our customers so that we can follow up them. Because we will likely show a new feature, and then we can likely take a little discussion about the overall feeling right now in the platform.
Renewals and the Reseller Relationship
Irina (6:28 – 6:36)
Are you also handling the renewal part? Are you also responsible for the renewal communication? Yes.
Erik (6:36 – 7:06)
Yes, we are. So that’s on our department. We work together with our resellers since we very seldom sell the product directly.
So here, that relationship also needs to work with them. In the end, it’s often that the reseller is where the customer purchases. But we act as a bridge here to help the customer to resign a contract or to renew their deal, but also anti-sharm work and such.
Irina (7:06 – 7:12)
So you also need to manage the relationship with the customer, but also with the resellers?
Erik (7:13 – 7:49)
A little bit. How we have structured it is that we have a sales department that works more with the resellers, and we are focused on the customer parts. But there are some times where we bridge it.
So I will take a sales rep into a meeting, or they will bring me so we can co-work on it. Because our sales reps are focused on, they are assigned certain resellers, so they are experts on their resellers and how they can produce good deals for our customers. And I will be the expert on the customers and how they can use our platform.
So we do different things in that part.
The Operational Infrastructure Behind CS at PLAYipp
Irina (7:51 – 8:02)
What is the operational infrastructure behind all of this? What platforms are central to how CS actually runs day to day? What do you need in order to be up and running from a CS perspective?
Erik (8:03 – 8:30)
We are a HubSpot based, almost moving more and more. We have dabbled in different platforms, trying to weave away in the jungle of tools that you can use. But there’s also a recent strategic choice by the company to move more of the company into HubSpot.
So we’re merging other tools that we have into the platform now.
Irina (8:31 – 8:33)
Out of curiosity, what are you merging?
Erik (8:34 – 8:37)
Mostly we have a CS tool that’s called StartDeliver.
Irina (8:39 – 8:43)
And you are basically migrating from StartDeliver to HubSpot?
Erik (8:44 – 9:34)
Yes. We have another tool connected to our platform where we measure customer satisfaction.
And we are also moving that into HubSpot now so we can have more data in our customer cards. I can see the value in it. Before there was a lot of compartmentalizing or silos.
So we would have one silo. Marketing, they would have one silo. Our product team, they would have one silo.
Sales would have one silo since we were all almost working in different programs. So now we can gather in a more general silo so we can all help each other out a little bit more efficiently.
Irina (9:34 – 10:03)
So basically HubSpot becomes the central hub. And all the teams, be it marketing, be it sales, are living in one central tool.
And do you also have support from HubSpot? Okay, so basically everything lives in HubSpot. Do you add an AI layer over HubSpot?
Do you leverage your cloud Gemini that stays on top?
Erik (10:03 – 10:59)
We are Claude-based in that part, so we use Claude as our AI tool. I mostly use it for my project management. I can bring projects into Claude very efficiently. It’s a very good tool for that. It can produce project plans. I have a way that I want to structure my onboardings or projects, so I can create that plan, pull that information, and then drag in my customer feedback from the first meeting or what they want to do. Then
Claude can recreate my plan for me with dates and tasks and everything. I have already created the rules for it, but then I can just drag in the customer feedback for each project and get my project plan. And it’s very easy for me to display it for the customer and we can make quick changes to it. So it’s a very good way to use it, I think.
How Erik Uses Claude and AI in His Day-to-Day
Irina (10:59 – 11:11)
And besides this use case, what other use case do you have in the CS team? How are you leveraging the AI for your day-to-day operations for improving efficiency?
Erik (11:13 – 13:15)
Well, one thing we have that I think really enhanced our efficiency is that we have an AI note-taker. And it’s also more than a note-taker. We record all our meetings, and that’s in part in two senses here.
One, we need to make sure that we deliver on what we promise in meetings and we can, in a good way, bring in information and then just deliver on it. And also that we are all on the same page. But also, when we all in the company, all CES, all meetings with customers are recorded, we can get a very good census of our customers.
How and what they are feeling when we are having conversations with them. Just by then asking questions in that tool, we can then very efficiently find out what part of our… Is it several customers that have the same problem regarding integration?
Then my department can go to the product department and say, here we have five key customers this month that have said the same thing. That is a very good way also, because then we have something concrete to bring, rather than just me having a lot of meetings during the week. And I just say, so-and-so is saying this and this.
Because then, of course, they will trust me, but they will trust me even more when I have it in text, when it’s structured, it is recorded and so on. So they can follow up on it as well. So that is a very good tool.
We run that report monthly. So we have prompted the report from our department or my department had asked. So we get that report as a team every month, so we can have a status on what are they saying?
How are they feeling right now? And that has been really beneficial for us.
Building a Team That Actually Performs: Lessons from Football Coaching
Irina (13:16 – 13:54)
I want to switch gears for a second and take you back to the football chapter of your life, particularly on the coaching side of things. And you mentioned at the beginning of our discussion how the sports basically helped you create compartments into the whole thing. So boxes split a big problem into smaller ones and tackle it one by one.
Now I’m curious, when you are trying to, because you also coached, when you are trying to take a group of people and turn them into a team that actually performs, where do you start?
Erik (13:55 – 16:02)
That’s a really good question. And there’s always a saying that there is no I in team. But I always, I don’t agree with that because the individuals make a team.
Therefore, we have to create a team of these individuals. And I don’t want to have the same individuals because that will not make an efficient team for us. We need to have different people and start by, if I’m assembling a team or hiring, we need to have different individuals with different opinions, with different backgrounds.
So that you don’t hire the same people to save, to solve the same job and so on. Because constructing a team of different ones, then they will solve the same problem in different ways. From my experience or from what I believe in.
So that there is more development, there is highly chance of developing a team in the long run and gaining more efficiency. Because having different people of different opinion or different experiences are very beneficial because there must be conflict in a team. And this is something that most people don’t realize, I think.
Because having conflict and having some disparities, that is what moves people forward in the next phase of building a team. So you have to move forward with that. And that takes some people in the team to have opinions, to be outspoken, but to be able to push to the next level.
You cannot maybe have 10 people that are exactly the same and all of them want to push. Because then you get a lot of pushers and that will not work. But you have to build a balance of these individuals.
But one must have some type of conflict. One must have some type of disparities in a team to reach the next phase. That is my opinion when building a team from start or from starting any teamwork process in that sense.
Irina (16:03 – 16:17)
And speaking about building a CS team in the current setup and with the AI hype that we have around us, what are the skills that you would need into a CS team in order for the team to perform?
Erik (16:18 – 17:39)
That’s good. I think from our point of view and how we work, since the span of customers is so wide, I think that’s very good of the team I work in. Our skills are very different.
Some of us are, and I include myself here, maybe like project management, come from that type of experience. Some come from even more of a sales background. And some have grown from the support side and grown into our customer success side.
So that we are taking all the people from that span with different experiences and having that. So those three skills are something that I think you need to have, at least working here. Because we have large companies that need project management.
We have that sales part or upselling, I should say, at least having a business sense and seeing business opportunities. But also seeing when the customer is not happy. I think that’s somewhere in here, the risk of churn, for example.
And the last part here, the customers, the true support player. We could say people pleaser or someone that always wants to do everything for the customer, like that part. So those three things are, I think, very important in that role here, I would say.
The Habit That Still Shows Up in How Erik Runs Accounts Today
Irina (17:39 – 17:50)
And the last question, is there a habit, way of thinking or something that you learned the hard way early on that still shows up in how you run accounts today?
Erik (17:52 – 20:05)
Yes, I’m fairly comfortable in my own skin, so to speak, and I can only be me. That’s the thing that I want to push. And that sounds easy in a way, but being comfortable in your own skin and how you are as a person here to reach that.
I think there can be a tough experience on that or the road to it. What I really, I can be quite frank and straightforward as a person, even in both in my business role in my work life, but also in private. And that is, it’s a great skill in one way, being very, very straightforward.
But also there’s two sides to this coin. Sometimes it’s a good, it’s a gift to be straightforward and working very efficiently and moving on and being very honest with people. But also you can probably see the other side there.
Sometimes it can go the wrong way in a way there. But the ability to say no is something that I value as saying no to things. That’s not in my, that’s not something that I want to do now.
But also saying in my role, saying no to customers. I think it’s because I have working in a very customer based businesses, basically all my life. Very, I feel that many just say yes, maybe, or we’re trying to work it out or we’re just finding ways to keep the customer interested or feeling that we are doing something for them.
Sometimes it’s better to just say no and be very honest with them and say, no, we’re not going to do that right now. This is what we’re going to do instead. It’s going to be better for you right now if we tried this.
Your idea is very nice. It’s good, but it’s not something that’s feasible right now. Maybe in six months when you have landed in our platform, so to speak.
And that is a hard conversation to maybe have with a customer that is new or maybe hasn’t even signed a full contract yet and so on. So, yeah, I think that’s something that I can bring to the table a habit there.
Irina (20:06 – 20:09)
Erik, this was a really good conversation.
Erik (20:09 – 20:09)
Thank you.
Irina (20:10 – 20:21)
Thanks for joining me. And to everyone listening, thanks for tuning in. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning and mastering customer success.
