In this episode of Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas sits down with Kevin Andrews, Product Engagement Manager at BombBomb, a video messaging platform. Kevin spent eight months leading CS and support earlier this year, having previously worked in sales and CS before moving into product. He also trained as an actor and spent over 20 years on screen, and that background shapes everything about how he thinks about video adoption, customer confidence, and human connection.
He shares what it was like to step into an interim CS leadership role, what he looks for when hiring a CS leader, how product data and customer feedback come together to create a real health picture, and why perfect is the villain of done.
What You’ll Learn
- What BombBomb does and what the CS and support team structure looks like
- Why Kevin was asked to lead CS as a product person and what that transition taught him
- What he looked for when hiring a new Head of CS and why empathy and systems thinking came first
- What metrics actually matter when video count alone tells you nothing
- How BombBomb started tying video usage to deal outcomes rather than just recording volume
Key Insights & Takeaways
A 360-degree view of the company is the most underrated CS asset. Ten years across sales, CS, and product gave Kevin the context to lead the team through transition. No single role gives you that.
Video count is a vanity metric. One person who recorded one video and used it repeatedly could love the product. Someone who sent hundreds could be ready to churn. The real signal is integration depth, not recording volume.
Tie usage to business outcomes, not usage for its own sake. Getting permission to connect video activity to closed deals gives managers and VPs the story they actually care about.
Perfect is the villain of done. The mistakes, the ums, the kid running into the frame: those are the moments people actually connect to. Give yourself grace and ship the human version.
Podcast Transcript
Intro
Irina (0:06 – 0:25)
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 Kevin Andrews, Product Engagement Manager at BombBomb, a video messaging platform. Kevin, I’m really happy to have you here.
Thanks for joining.
Kevin (0:26 – 0:33)
Oh my gosh, it’s such a pleasure. I feel honored that I got asked. So hopefully I’ll be able to impart a little bit of wisdom.
Why a Product Person Was Asked to Lead CS
Irina (0:34 – 0:45)
Your title says product, but earlier this year you spent eight months leading CS and support. Why do you think they asked the product person to run the team?
Kevin (0:46 – 1:53)
That’s a really great question. So I’ve been at BombBomb for almost 10 years, I’ll be 10 years in the next couple of weeks here. So I’ve been through a lot, I’ve seen a lot, right? And I think as much as it was the product title, I think that honestly had less to do with it, and it was more of just I have such a swath of experience here and knowledge. I’ve worked on the sales team for a couple of years, I was on the CS team as a CS member for a handful of years, and then I’ve been on product for the last couple.
But I think it really had to do with, one, I know the product really well. So whenever you’re jumping on any sort of CS call and they need some leadership and they need some of that expertise, I just have that kind of breadth of knowledge underneath there. And then I think a second part is we’ve been in a good amount of transition with our CS team here at BombBomb. And so I think I knew the team really well, I knew the people really well. And knowing that this was not a full-time jumping into I’m taking over the CS, it was more of an interim kind of role, I think the people were a really important part of that decision of how do we support our people through this transition. And because of my relationships, I think that made it much more of a natural fit as well.
Irina (1:54 – 2:00)
Speaking of this, what did the team look like when you walked in? And tell me more about your customers.
Kevin (2:01 – 4:31)
So the first part of that question with our team specifically: we have gone back and forth on whether our customer support team is part of CS or separate from CS. They’ve gone hand in hand a lot of different times in my years here at BombBomb. When I jumped in, we had them grouped. We had, let me see, I want to say four support members and then five CS members. We have a couple of CS specialists, which would classify more of our mid-market range of customers. And then we had a couple of CSMs as well, which are our larger enterprise type managers. One of the funny, interesting things is because of a lot of the transitions and leadership changes and people moving in and out, the lines had blurred a decent amount, if I’m being honest. So our CS specialist team, some of them were helping teams that were beyond their normal numbers and vice versa. We had our CSMs filling in just because of some transitions.
To answer the second part of that question with our customers specifically: with BombBomb, we really built our ground in the home space. Real estate agents was the first industry we got into, geez, 15, 16 years ago, and we went, wow, this is a tool that’s really powerful for them. It was great because we could go in and it was a much quicker sales cycle. You could get on one call, it was one person, they could make that decision for themselves, and we could move on. From the CS side though, there’s a lot of churn in that. Unless you get in with each individual person and really build that groundwork and framework, especially with realtors, there’s a lot of turnover. People are a realtor today and not tomorrow. So that started to cause a lot of chaos.
That’s allowed us to branch out. We work with a lot of mortgage teams now and we’re working a lot in the new home builder space as well, working with the actual home building companies. What’s great about those is they want to buy for their whole sales team, for their divisions, for their regions. So it allows us the opportunity to get in at a much larger level, and then we’ve got manager buy-in, VP buy-in, the champions we need to really help build that groundwork. I’ve talked to anybody in any sort of sales field. Anything that’s a sales field, I’ve sold to or talked to at some point, but our ICP and bread and butter is definitely in that home space for sure.
Irina (4:31 – 4:32)
That’s a lot.
Kevin (4:33 – 4:34)
Was that enough information for you?
How CS and Support Are Now Structured
Irina (4:36 – 4:48)
That’s a lot to process. Tell me more. And now is the support separated by the CS? You have two different teams?
Kevin (4:49 – 5:25)
Yes. A little while ago, we did hire a full-time Director of CS, which is wonderful. He’s got a really cool history and the jobs he’s carried are so interesting from just thinking of the customer first perspective. So he’s jumped in and is going to take over our CS team specifically.
And then we actually had one of our support members move up to a support lead, so they are sort of taking over and running that support team as well. So they are now separated teams run by different people. Of course, we’re all reporting up to the same person at some point, but yes, they are separated at this point.
Irina (5:26 – 5:35)
Based on what you told me, I think it’s just an assumption. You were involved in the hiring process of this new head of CS, correct?
Kevin (5:35 – 5:36)
Yeah.
What Kevin Looked for When Hiring a Head of CS
Irina (5:36 – 5:46)
What were you guys looking for and what was it important for your organization? What type of skills? What were you looking for when you hired?
Kevin (5:47 – 8:16)
I’ll speak for myself in the process. There’s obviously a lot of people involved, but for me, when I was starting to go into these meetings, there were a couple of things that were really important. I’m a people first person at all costs. Knowing some of the complexities and some of the adjustments that our employees have had to make over the last year, I really wanted somebody that was going to be able to come in and support them well. Now that means a lot of different things. I think one part of it is I didn’t want somebody that was going to come in and be like, we’re changing everything, we’re ripping it up and we’re moving in my direction. So for me, the word that came to mind a lot was empathetic. I wanted somebody that was going to come in and listen and understand, and not only get to know our product, but get to know our people, get to know their strengths, and know how to support that. From a leadership perspective, that empathy was a really important piece for me.
The other piece that I just couldn’t let go of was systems. Everybody wants systems and tools to help manage this stuff so we’re not all juggling it in our heads all the time. And yet I feel like time and time again, whether it’s CS or any department, you jump in with these really big hopes of a new product and then you realize, oh, we’ve got three months to set this up and our data needs to get cleaned up before we can get that working. So long story short, I think our CS team has felt like we’re not being as proactive as we want to be because we’re just trying to keep all the balls in the air without a really good central system to support that.
I’m not saying it has to be a certain software or a certain thing, but something that allows us to know basic customer health stuff, usage metrics, who have I not reached out to in a while, right? Just those general things. We’ve had elements of those, but a central place that can really support our CS team from the ground up so that they don’t feel like they’re just reacting all the time. They’re actually able to be proactive and find those solutions before problems arise. Those were some really big things for me in looking at a leader, and not even necessarily that they had all the answers, but that they had some history in providing those things for their teams. It felt like really important things with bringing somebody new in.
What Metrics Actually Tell You Something at BombBomb
Irina (8:19 – 9:54)
You are right that tools and systems are only as good as the data that comes in. And that’s something that nobody can solve for you. I have a way of saying it: garbage in, garbage out. Regardless of how you want to position it, a tool cannot solve this problem. Plus, I think some people get this wrong: a tool does not sort out your strategy. You have to build the why, you have to provide the input, and you need to know how you want to design it. Because it’s like with AI, if you don’t train it right and if you don’t set it up correctly, it doesn’t help you in any way. And that’s why I think a lot of companies fail to implement it correctly.
Speaking of this, I’m interested because you had access to product data, and besides the product data, being 10 years in a company and having visited product, sales, CS, and support, you basically have a 360 view. What data points would you bring together in order to have that 360 view? What metrics, what numbers or data points did you take from each of the departments you visited along this long journey?
Kevin (9:55 – 10:03)
Yeah, it’s such a great question and a complex one as well, right? As much as I would like to say, oh, it’s this number.
Irina (10:03 – 10:03)
I know.
Kevin (10:04 – 14:56)
That’s hard to get to, right? What I can tell you is some of the thought process that went behind that. For me, there’s a term, I don’t remember exactly where I heard it years ago, it’s nothing fancy, but it’s that aha moment for a customer. I always think customer first. I’m never thinking, how do we make our product prettier or how do we make it look cool? It’s what does this solve for our users? How does this make life easier for them? What solutions are we providing? I always think from that mindset. So when I’m meeting with engineers and developers and they say, hey, here’s a new thing we wanted to roll out, I’m like, cool. What does that do? What’s that going to solve?
With BombBomb specifically, we are a video platform. We allow people to record and deliver videos. What’s really easy to get into from a sales cycle standpoint is, great, we do videos, we make video easy. But that’s not really the problem or the solution our people are looking for. So we’ve had to really dive in and start to understand what is the pain point of our customers, what are they needing, and what are the steps they need to use it.
When I first started, we used to measure video count really heavily as a usage metric. Is that a usage metric? For sure, right? You can’t be successful with our product if you’re not recording videos. However, we would have users that would come in and record one video that they could use time and time again, loved our product, and their video count was one. Then we had people who had sent out hundreds of videos and they’re like, it’s not working, I don’t like it. So we had to dive a little bit deeper. We have to listen to our customers and understand what they’re trying to solve so that we can show them here’s where you can use it, here are the effective places. It’s just like with anything new: if you give people a hundred different things to use, they’re going to get overwhelmed and not use any of them. If you give them one or two really specific areas, that’s a lot more effective.
One of the metrics we have started to measure a lot from a product side, but that has really influenced the CS side, is how is it getting integrated into their systems? Are they using it within their existing tools? We have integrations that connect to CRMs, emails, and all sorts of different providers. So rather than just measuring video count, we’re starting to measure, are they accessing it within Outlook, Gmail, Salesforce, or wherever they may be living? Once they get those set up and get it ingrained in the system they’re already living in, that’s a much stickier thing than having to log into a separate system. So we started measuring where they’re recording from, rather than just whether they’re recording. That was a big piece that helped us understand if our teams are actually healthy or if we’re leaning on vanity metrics that feel really good but don’t tell us much.
The other thing we’ve been working on is not just, are you recording videos, but how do you tie video usage to the success of a sale? Sales is kind of that nucleus. So we’ve been working within our integrations and with our teams during the initial setup and onboarding process to get the permissions to tie those things together so that you can look at a dashboard in your CRM and see, of these deals closed, this many included a video message in the process. Because recording and sending videos is nice for a manager to see, great for a VP to see, but they want to see deals closed. They want to see money coming back in. Is video part of what’s bringing those deals in or are we just sending videos that aren’t turning into anything?
I think it’s also been huge for me, the product and customer feedback loop: how are we hearing something from a customer, how are we giving them opportunities to tell us things, whether it’s live conversations or in-app, and then how is that getting fed up to product, to engineering, to the people making decisions on what actually gets built? That was just a natural place for me to fit when I took this on because I’m already living in both places. So I was able to bring some of that back and start building that process as well.
How to Weight Loud Customer Feedback Against Everyone Else
Irina (14:56 – 15:14)
It answers and it fits perfectly to my next one because you mentioned feedback coming from the customers. I want to ask you, CS usually shows up with the loudest customer. How do you weigh one account against everyone else?
What’s the process?
Kevin (15:15 – 19:23)
I think it’s twofold. It’s really important to listen to the loud customers because they feel really strongly about something. When I was on CS years ago, I actually worked a lot on internal training, training our team on how to be on calls, how to work with clients, how to adjust. And one of the things we’ve learned time and time again is the most upset customers are rarely only upset about you and your product.
So we started getting really curious. Our support team, the people we have on support, are God’s gift to this earth because that is a hard job, dealing with complaints and issues all day long. What we started encouraging a lot is how do we ask more questions? The more upset they are, the more things are probably going on in their life. And what was great is it allowed us to understand the complexities, that this is a human with a lot going on. We would start to hear things like, I’m so sorry, I’m getting so frustrated with you, my mom’s in the hospital right now. You start hearing these things when you give the space for it. And that gave us space to understand their actual concerns and complaints versus the anger. So that gave us real feedback of, yeah, I’m sorry I got really upset, this was frustrating to me, this was an annoyance, but here’s my actual concern, the thing that if it could get fixed would make my life a lot easier. Real feedback versus high emotion feedback.
That’s where the CS team specifically has come into play. When you have a good proactive cadence with the people you’re managing, it gives you a lot of opportunities during meetings to start asking questions and being curious. A QBR, for example. If you’re just doing a, hey, here’s where we’re at for this quarter, here’s the metrics we’re seeing, here’s the health of your team, that’s not enough. It’s about giving space every time you meet to go, how are you guys feeling about this? What do you need from us? What’s missing that would be helpful for you? And what’s great is now you’re not having those conversations when the person is upset or when they want to leave. You’re having them in the middle of a contract, which gives you time to improve the health of an unhealthy team. But it also gets you real feedback from a manager, a champion, a user perspective of what they actually need, because you’re asking when there’s nothing really at stake other than we want to help.
One other piece that’s been really helpful is in CS, a lot of times you get your contact, your admin for the team, the person you’re talking to a lot. And it shocked me how often that wasn’t really the person we should be talking to. Maybe it was an IT person or somebody that was just there to set it up and make sure the system worked. It wasn’t the people actually on the ground using it. So as we started getting curious and talking to more users rather than just managers, getting a handful of different people in conversations, that was really impactful. We started getting a manager perspective of here’s what I care about for managing my team, and then a user perspective of what would actually be helpful for you in the product on a daily basis. You’re starting to get these different levels. And of course you’re feeding that up to your engineering team. You can’t make decisions based off one person or one piece of feedback, but the more of that you get, the more themes you start to see and the more you go, oh, here’s an issue we need to fix, or here’s something we’re hearing from a lot of people that we need to add.
So it’s having those good meeting cadences, getting curious about whether you’re talking to the right person, and giving space when there’s not a lot on the line. Those have been really important pieces for us.
What Product Enablement Actually Means
Irina (19:29 – 19:43)
About product enablement. Because you’ve been building it at BombBomb. And I’m curious, what makes the difference between a program people use and one that dies in a folder?
What does enablement mean for you?
Kevin (19:44 – 23:07)
For me, the short answer of what’s the difference between a product that is used and a product that’s forgotten is, does it solve a business need? And so there’s enablement in that. How do we help them get to the places where they know how to use it?
From an adoption and onboarding standpoint, there are always two pieces in my brain. There’s the technical component: can I actually use the tool? Which from that standpoint is actually a pretty simple tool. It’s not hard to get in. The complexity from a technical usage standpoint is, oh shoot, I’m in real estate, I’m in sales, I don’t really like being on video that much, I’m nervous to be on video. That is a huge hurdle we have to overcome with a lot of our users, especially when their manager has purchased this and told them to use it. They didn’t sign up or opt into any of this, right? So now we’re starting to work on real human things of, I’ve got stuff about myself I don’t like, I feel vulnerable, this feels nerve-wracking. Those are the things we’re overcoming.
The other piece is, why am I doing this? And if somebody doesn’t understand the why, the how doesn’t matter. The tool doesn’t matter at all. A salesperson, for sure, the fact that I was in sales for a handful of years gives me a good perspective. Just because my manager hands me something new to use, I’m not going to use it unless I see how it’s going to affect my number. How is it going to help me hit my quota at the end of the month, quarter, year? That’s what I care about. And if it feels like it’s slowing me down or not providing that why, I’m not going to lean in at all.
From an enablement standpoint, there’s a lot of live training and onboarding that goes on early in the process, which I do think is important with a tool like BombBomb because we want people to feel confident and comfortable. We push people hard on that during our live sessions. The other part of enablement is not just feeding up generic content all the time. People start to get really numb to that. It’s having trigger-based content of, maybe I clicked on this tool but never used it, so the next time I hop in, we show me that and give me some resources on why it’s beneficial and how to use it.
Whenever I’m doing live trainings or in-app content, it’s never just, here’s how you get to the tool, here’s how you record a video. It’s, hey, find a sales process right now. Find a new lead that just came in that you haven’t met yet or who has ignored your emails and calls. How awesome would it be if you were able to get your face in front of that person? How awesome would it be if they were able to get to know you? What are the cornerstones of sales? Trust. How do we integrate trust in just black and white text, right? And if those things are not in there, regardless of how I feed it up or how cool it looks, if they don’t see where this fits, why it’s impactful to them, and how it’s going to make a difference in their flow, they’re not going to use it. I don’t care how easy it is. That to me is the cornerstone.
What Acting Taught Kevin About CS and Video
Irina (23:08 – 23:25)
Last question. You trained as an actor and spent over 20 years on screen before any of this. Is there a habit or a way of thinking or something you learned the hard way early on that still shows up in how you work today?
Kevin (23:27 – 26:41)
The beauty of all of my acting training is that I’ve spent so many years on camera. This is very different than what I was trained, right? One of the cornerstones of acting is you never spike the lens, which means you never look at the camera ever. Well, guess what? I’m training people every single day to look at the camera. That’s the person you’re talking to, right? So with Zoom and those sorts of things, there are definitely some differences in habit.
But I think the biggest thing I’ve learned, and it goes back to something I said a little bit ago, is something I talk to every single person about because we all have elements of it: it feels weird to sit and stare at myself. It feels uncomfortable to record something and send it out into the world. There are a lot of unkind things that happen on the internet, unfortunately. So is this just going to be another one of those things? There’s an insecurity there.
The habit I learned really early on in acting is I don’t rewatch myself a ton, but when I do, I watch it with a grain of salt. You have to just be so kind and graceful to yourself. As funny as it is, when I got my first set of headshots, I knew I couldn’t pick that headshot because the things I’m looking at that I care about are not the things that anybody else cares about, right? I’ve got this gap in my teeth, I’ve had it since I was nine. Who cares? But it’s one of the first things I notice. My hairline’s going back as I hit 40. And that’s a little nerve-wracking for me. When I say that stuff in live trainings, I tell people, maybe you even saw those things, but I guarantee you didn’t go, I’m not going to trust that guy with the gap in his teeth. We want humans. We want real people.
There are a million techniques I could tell you from acting, but I think it’s more about be kind to yourself. Give yourself a lot of grace. Because one of the amazing, powerful things we’ve learned with BombBomb is that the mistakes, the ums, the uhs, the I forgot what I was going to say, the kid who runs into your video unexpectedly, those are really human moments and that’s what people connect to more than perfection. A way that I usually condense it for my clients in live trainings is: perfect is the villain of done. We’re never going to have a perfect video. You don’t even want a perfect video because people don’t connect and relate to that. Allow yourself to be you. You have intrinsic value. You have so much more value than we ever see in ourselves.
Acting gave me a really good perspective of, if I can feel like I did that take well, if I can feel like I nailed that shot, I’m going to trust that feeling more than I’m going to trust my eyes when I rewatch it, because I will pick apart and find the things I don’t like. But you have to lean on that feeling and give yourself grace.
Irina (26:42 – 26:49)
Kevin, this was a really useful conversation. Thank you very much for taking the time to speak to me and share your story today.
Kevin (26:50 – 26:56)
It was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. It’s such an honor to just be a part of the conversation.
I really appreciate it.
Irina (26:56 – 27:03)
To everyone listening, thanks for tuning in. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning and mastering customer success.
