In this episode of Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas sits down with Lee-El Lewinsohn Primo, former Head of Customer Success at LayerX, a browser security platform that protects companies from web-based threats, and current Senior Manager Service Solutions at Akamai. Lee-El leads both the CS and technical support teams, a combination she believes gives CS leaders a more complete and powerful view of the customer.
She shares why the whole business needs to align around being customer-first, not just the CS team, how LayerX measures time to value for a security product, why she keeps CS and technical support under one roof, what she would hire first if building a CS function from scratch with three people, and why a growth mindset is the one habit she keeps coming back to.
What You’ll Learn
- What the Head of CS role looks like when it spans both customer success and technical support
- Why cross-functional alignment with product, R&D, and marketing is a core part of the job
- Why keeping CS and technical support under one roof gives CS leaders more impact
- What good onboarding looks like at a browser security platform and how LayerX measures time to value
- How to structure a new CS function: customers first, then knowledge, then processes
- Why a growth mindset is the most important habit in CS leadership
Key Insights & Takeaways
Being customer-first is a company-wide commitment, not a CS team responsibility. If the product roadmap is driven entirely by customer feedback, the whole organization is aligned around the customer, and that’s where real customer satisfaction comes from.
The 360 view of CS and support together is more powerful than either alone. Seeing where customers want to go strategically and what tickets they’re raising tactically gives CS leadership a clearer, more complete picture of what actually needs to change.
Time to value is a metric worth measuring precisely. For LayerX, it’s the days from first kickoff call to 75% deployment. Knowing that number and tracking it gives the team something concrete to optimize around.
If you have three hires, start with CS, then support, then an analyst. Data and actionable insights are where you deliver disproportionate value to customers, and most teams underinvest in that capacity.
Map the customers before you build the processes. When joining a new organization, understanding the customer base, the feature requests, and the gaps in knowledge comes before designing any playbook or process.
Podcast Transcript
Intro
Irina (0:07 – 0:50)
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 Lee-El Lewinsohn Primo, former Head of Customer Success at LayerX, current Senior Manager Service Solutions at Akamai, a browser security platform that protects companies from web-based threats. Lee-El, I’m really happy to have you here.
Thanks for joining! You are now Head of Customer Success at LayerX (Akamai), where you lead both the CS and the technical support side.
Paint us a quick picture. What does the role look like day-to-day and what kind of customers are you working with?
Lee-El (0:51 – 2:52)
So day to day, my main focus is setting up my teams for success. While managing both the Support and Customer Success teams, each has separate goals, but also shared goals, which ultimately means supporting all of our customers. Whether it’s answering technical questions, deploying the platform, integrating it with an existing tech stack, or helping customers get the value they’re looking for from the platform, which is, of course, the browser security aspect of what we do.
Day to day, I’ll probably be dealing with escalations, whether that’s support tickets or customers who need my involvement.
My day-to-day also includes training for the teams. I’m a strong believer in continuously learning and enhancing our skills. For example, today we’re having a CS best practices training session. We recently had a department-wide workshop on communicating success and developing a growth mindset.
We also run internal training sessions on new features and different use cases, making sure we’re all becoming browser security experts, know the platform, understand our customers, and share knowledge internally, which I think is really important.
I handle renewals for most of our customers, so I’ll be having renewal conversations, reviewing renewal reporting, reporting to senior management, and managing everything around that process.
Another big part of my role is working with senior stakeholders across the business. Whether it’s our VP of Product, VP of R&D, or Marketing, we work together to improve collaboration across teams, escalate feature requests, and make sure bugs are addressed.
I spend a lot of time improving our processes, deciding what they should look like, documenting them, sharing them with the team, and tracking them. I think that’s a big part of my job: clearing the path and making sure my team has what they need to be successful.
Why Cross-Functional Alignment Is a Core Part of the Job
Irina (2:53 – 3:13)
I think you are one of the few leaders that describe this as being a big part of the role. Why do you think it’s important to reach this alignment between and have a common vision with your stakeholders and not only?
How does this help you?
Lee-El (3:14 – 4:20)
I think it helps our customers. LayerX is one of the companies I’ve worked for that is probably the most connected to its customer base.
Our whole roadmap is based on customer feedback, which shows how strong the alignment is between our customers and our product team. I think that’s one of the reasons we’re so successful.
We listen very closely to our customers, their needs, and their expectations. We bring that feedback to our product team, who works closely with the development team. Then we go back to our customers with the product and the features they’ve been asking for.
I think it’s a must. If you want to be customer-first and customer-centric, it’s not enough to have a Customer Success team. The whole business needs to align around that.
I think that’s something we excel at in LayerX. The Product team and the Customer Success team work hand in hand through customer calls, roadmap sessions, and escalation meetings.
Ultimately, I think that’s what drives our success with customers and increases customer satisfaction.
How CS and Technical Support Feed Each Other Under One Roof
Irina (4:22 – 4:27)
How does CS and technical support feed each other when they sit under one roof?
Lee-El (4:28 – 6:50)
Yeah, I love that combination. I’ve worked like that before, and I know that in larger companies it changes a little bit. But I really like having the 360-degree view of a customer.
First of all, you’ll usually have a segment of customers that don’t have a dedicated Customer Success Manager, so they’ll only be in touch with you through support tickets.
But there are also two aspects to customer care. One is the day-to-day technical side: “How do I do this? This isn’t working. Where can I find this?” Those are the technical questions, escalations, investigations, and other issues that come up.
On the other hand, I’m always encouraging our Customer Success Managers to be strategic. They don’t get on a call to answer questions that customers can find in the Help Center or solve by opening a ticket. Instead, we talk about their business goals, security assessments, challenges, recent incidents they’ve experienced, and how they’re using LayerX to investigate, block, and prevent those issues in the future.
As a Customer Success leader, bringing those two perspectives together gives the business much more value. We’re able to understand where our customers want to go, what their biggest challenges are, what they love about the product, and have interesting conversations about browser security, AI usage, and where the industry is heading.
At the same time, we can bring back trends from support: the most common ticket topics, the biggest issues customers are facing, and the three areas of the product that, if improved, would have the biggest impact.
Having all of that knowledge together under one department gives us much more impact within the business.
If I could have it my way, I would always have Support and Customer Success working together in the same department. I think we learn a lot from each other.
One last point is that when Support is part of the Customer Success department, they hear customer stories, understand when renewals are coming up, and know what customers have been saying. They’re much more connected to the customer. It’s no longer just, “Thank you, we’ll get back to you,” or, “Our technical team will look into it.” They understand the customer’s pain, and I think that makes them even closer to customers and ultimately better at their job.
What Good Onboarding Looks Like at LayerX
Irina (6:54 – 7:04)
When a new customer comes on at LayerX, what does good onboarding look like for you? What are you aiming for? And how do you know when you’ve got there?
Lee-El (7:05 – 9:36)
That’s a really great question. I think it’s really important because, as a startup, you’re trying to get customers onboarded and using the product as soon as possible.
We started measuring time to value, which I think is a very important Customer Success metric. It’s measured differently across industries and platforms, but for us, I would split the value of our platform into two parts.
The first is visibility. We give customers visibility into their browser activity. They can see what all of their end users are doing in the browser and identify risky behavior. That’s a whole world in itself. We provide a level of visibility that many other security products don’t offer.
The second is enforcement. If someone performs a risky action, like copying sensitive data into ChatGPT, we can warn them, prevent them, or block them. Again, that’s a whole world of enforcement capabilities.
When we decided to measure time to value, we believed the biggest initial value we provide is visibility. And visibility is achieved once the product is deployed.
So we measure the time from the first kickoff call, which usually happens within a couple of days after the contract is signed, until 75% of the purchased users have been deployed.
Today, that timeframe is somewhere between 30 and 40 days. I think that’s really incredible for a security product. It’s something we’re very proud of because we’re a lightweight product that’s easy to deploy, with fast ROI and a quick time to value.
That’s the first thing I would measure during onboarding: making sure deployment goes smoothly.
The second part comes after onboarding and is reflected in our health score. We look at product usage, and one of the best indicators that customers trust us is when they start using the enforcement capabilities.
They’re no longer just monitoring activity through visibility. They trust us enough to say, “I want LayerX to block risky behavior or phishing sites. I want to make sure corporate accounts aren’t being used in the wrong places.”
Once we see enforcement usage increasing, that’s a strong health signal for us. I think that’s another good measure of a successful onboarding.
How to Measure What Actually Matters in CS
Irina (9:36 – 10:20)
Besides the metrics you’ve already shared, what else do you measure and monitor to make sure the team is performing well and staying on track?
I think the more important question is, how do you differentiate between being busy and actually having an impact? Between working on what’s important and what’s simply urgent?
It’s very easy for Customer Success teams to get involved in all kinds of initiatives and end up being swamped.
So how do you make sure your team is focusing on what really moves the needle, rather than just what shouts the loudest?
Lee-El (10:20 – 14:12)
Yeah, that’s a really important question because Customer Success Managers can get very busy, even with admin work like scheduling meetings, writing meeting summaries, sending follow-up emails, opening support tickets, creating feature requests, or reviewing support tickets before customer calls.
One thing we’ve done to make sure they focus on the right things is implement a Customer Success platform that we’re very happy with. The implementation was pretty straightforward, especially compared to larger platforms like Totango or Gainsight, where you almost need a full-time admin just to get everything up and running.
We implemented it ourselves with a little help from Salesforce and our Solutions team. It was easy to integrate, and it already has a lot of AI built in. There’s a copilot that helps structure meeting agendas, meeting summaries, emails, and a lot of the day-to-day work. It also comes with built-in dashboards, so I don’t need to build everything from scratch as a leader.
That really frees up the team to focus on the actual customer conversations rather than preparing for meetings or sending emails.
In terms of measuring what matters, one of the things we’ve built over the past two years is a clear KPI structure for the team. Everyone knows what they’re being measured on, and of course that’s also tied to compensation.
The classic metrics are GRR and NRR, and we have very clear goals for both. We own renewals within the department, so a successful customer ultimately leads to a successful renewal.
NRR measures growth. We’re always looking for expansion opportunities. One example is M&A. If one of our customers is acquired, are we successful enough to get introduced to the acquiring company? Can we grow from supporting 300 or 5,000 users to ten times that number?
We also measure customer success qualified leads, meaning expansion opportunities identified by the Customer Success team.
Another important KPI is our health score. We’ve invested a lot of effort into building it, and we want to see Customer Success Managers moving accounts from orange to green. If there’s risk, we expect them to address it proactively.
Beyond KPIs, we constantly focus on product adoption. I train the team to know the product, understand the browser security space, and stay up to date on every new feature.
Internally, we discuss each new capability and ask, “What can this do for our customers?” Then we take that to customers, not as a list of new features, but in the context of their use cases and success criteria.
Instead of saying, “Here’s what’s new,” we explain why a specific feature matters to them and how it helps them achieve their goals.
I think that’s how we move the needle: by creating successful customers who renew, grow with us, and continue seeing increasing value from the platform.
I hope that answers your question.
How the Team Leverages AI Day to Day
Irina (14:12 – 14:39)
For sure it does. And I want to ask you, you mentioned Copilot and the AI functionality that stays under the CSP that you are currently using. But besides that, do you also leverage other use cases on the AI that your team is basically leveraging it?
Or is it only the function that the CSP has?
Lee-El (14:40 – 15:34)
It’s the main functionality. Before implementing our Customer Success platform, we were also using AI within Gong. We have an internal AI feature within our product called Ask LayerX, which customers and the Customer Success team can use to look for policies that need fine-tuning, identify risky users, and get different recommendations.
But I would say AI has become part of every Customer Success Manager’s day-to-day work. I don’t know a single CSM who doesn’t use ChatGPT to write emails, Claude to analyze customer growth opportunities, or NotebookLM to help build a presentation.
I think we’re all using AI in one way or another every day. But if I had to choose the tool that’s had the biggest impact for us, it would definitely be the AI copilot.
If You Had Three Hires to Build a CS Function from Scratch
Irina (15:34 – 15:47)
You’ve hired from the ground up across your roles. If you had to build a CS function from scratch tomorrow with just three people, who do you hire first and in what order and why?
Lee-El (15:47 – 17:31)
So I would say if I’m building a department, I would want a customer support lead, a customer success lead, and an analyst, which is what I don’t have today. And that’s my dream hire, to bring in a security analyst just for our department and do lots of interesting things for our customers. I think that hiring customer support would probably be the first step or just someone that does both roles and eventually we grow.
That’s what we’ve done here at LayerX, by the way. We brought in someone as a customer success manager. Today they’ve grown tremendously in the company.
We’ve had several grow internally at LayerX because of where they started with customers in the trenches every day. So someone to be able to speak to our customers, that’s number one, right? So someone who would either do training and onboarding and answer their questions.
We can call it customer success. We can call it technical support. It would probably be a customer success role.
And then the second role from there would be customer support to enhance that and give a balance between strategic and technical. And the third role would 100% be an analyst. It really doesn’t matter what space you’re in.
I’ve worked in marketing and HR and now I’m in cybersecurity. Customers want insights and customers want data and they want actionable insights based off of that data. That’s where you provide a ton of value.
So anytime I’ve been able to work with a dedicated analyst to look at customer data, to build insights and dashboards and leverage the product with those insights, I’ve achieved so much more. So those would be my three hires.
Where to Start When Building CS Processes and Training
Irina (17:32 – 17:47)
And besides the team, you also build the processes and training that makes teams perform at every step. When you put that kind of structure in place, where do you actually start and what do you need in order to build the right processes and the training materials?
Lee-El (17:49 – 21:06)
So I’ll start with the customers. The first thing I do when I join a new organization, and I think this is exactly what happened at LayerX, is get to know the customers. It wasn’t starting completely from scratch because there was already a good foundation.
First of all, I make sure I have accurate customer data, whether it’s in Salesforce or even an Excel sheet, depending on the stage the company is at.
I map out the customers, their renewals, their ARR, ideally their success criteria or the use cases they bought the platform for, who the main point of contact is, what we’ve achieved with them so far, and what their next steps are.
Even before we had a health score, we would go through the customer list together and ask, “What do you think?” We’d mark accounts as red, orange, yellow, or green.
So the first step is really mapping out the customers and understanding your customer base.
The second part is looking at your internal platforms, whether it’s Jira, Trello, Asana, or something else. I focus mainly on feature requests rather than bugs, because bugs are handled day to day.
I look at the feature requests to understand what customers are asking for and what’s missing in the platform. Alongside that, I join customer calls and ask the best questions I can.
I’ve found that when you ask the right questions and get customers talking, you learn so much more. You understand where to take the conversation next, uncover things that maybe CSMs weren’t comfortable asking about, or that simply hadn’t come up before.
Being Israeli, we have a word for it: chutzpah. We’re not shy. We say things as they are and jump right into the conversation.
I’ve combined that personality trait with my Customer Success experience, so I’ll ask straightforward questions. I’ll make sure management is involved, ask customers about their biggest challenges, what’s keeping them up at night, and if they had a magic wand, what they would want LayerX to do.
I have a whole talk track that helps me gather as much insight from customers as possible.
That’s one part of building a Customer Success department: really understanding your customers while learning the product and reviewing feature requests.
The second part is looking at the team. What do they know? What do they know how to do? What training do we have? What’s the customer journey?
Once you understand those things, you can look at documentation, enablement, Help Center articles, and internal knowledge sharing.
The third step is processes. Once I have the customers mapped out, understand the product, and know what internal enablement we need, I start looking at the processes.
Which processes are missing? What isn’t working well? What can we improve?
That’s pretty much the approach I took when I joined LayerX.
The Habit That Still Shows Up in How Lee-El Runs CS Today
Irina (21:07 – 21:24)
And my last question, you’ve got a Master in Organizational Consulting and a decade climbing every layer of CS. Is there a habit or a way of thinking or something you learned the hard way that still shows up in how you run CS today?
Lee-El (21:25 – 23:38)
It was the topic of the department workshop that we had today, I would say, and that’s a growth mindset. Having my MSc in Organizational Development, you really learn about how to manage change. Change is inevitable.
It happens all the time, whether you’re a startup, whether you’re being acquired, whether things happen in your personal life, whether there’s a rotation of a book of business and you now have new customers, change happens all the time. And I’m a really big believer of a growth mindset, looking at the current reality, looking where are the opportunities? What can I learn?
What can I contribute? What can be done better? How can we work together with more departments?
How we can achieve more? And even when there’s changes or unclarity or just things happen all the time, it’s hard to anticipate change. And that’s probably the biggest thing I’ve seen is anytime someone throws a curveball at me, we were acquired by private equity.
My boss is leaving. I am now managing a new team that I didn’t hire. You need to hire a department from scratch, like anything that I’ve had to deal with over the years, approaching it and thinking, OK, how do I make the best of this?
How can I make this succeed? And to be very honest, what’s in it for me? What can I learn?
What can I take away from this? What can I contribute? What skill can I learn now and then take to my next role?
And I look at my team the same way. I want their careers to be developed just like mine is on the job training. So, yeah, I would say approaching challenges with a growth mindset, collaborative and being sensitive and understanding that change is very hard for people.
And a new boss that you didn’t choose for yourself or, again, an acquisition, something we’re going through now and I’ve been through before. Once you have a sensitivity to those people and you’re able to understand the wide range of emotions that people come with, then you’re also able hopefully to lead them also into a growth mindset as well.
Irina (23:39 – 23:57)
Lee-El, this was a really interesting conversation. So thank you so much for joining me and for speaking to me. Thank you so much! To everyone listening, thanks for tuning in. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning and mastering customer success.
