In this episode of Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas talks with Melanie Faye, Senior Customer Success Manager at Vidyard, a video platform for sales and marketing teams. Melanie ran her own business for 12 years before stepping into customer success, and today she manages a book of around 140 inherited accounts.
She explains how she is segmenting her book into high-touch and low-touch, how she delivers value without monthly check-in calls, and why she does her homework before discovery so customers never have to repeat themselves.
What You’ll Learn
- How to segment a large book of business into high-touch and low-touch
- How to deliver value without relying on monthly check-in calls
- How to prepare for discovery calls on inherited accounts so customers don’t repeat themselves
- What goal-based onboarding looks like at Vidyard
Key Insights & Takeaways
Not every customer needs a monthly call. Long-standing customers often get more value from targeted touch points than recurring check-ins.
Nudges can replace meetings. Prompts about missing integrations, “did you know” feature tips, and relevant case studies keep low touch customers moving toward their goals.
Test what works. Finding the right low touch program takes A/B testing to see what gets opened and what drives action.
Do your homework before discovery. Use past call history to understand why a customer bought and what changed, so discovery doesn’t feel like an interview.
Onboarding should follow customer goals, not a script. Focus on the features that will make the most impact in the first 30, 60, and 90 days.
Set expectations on both sides. Tell customers what they need to do to adopt the tool and what you’ll do on your side, or they’ll slip back into old habits.
Podcast transcript
Irina (0:06 – 0:43)
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 Melanie Faye, Senior Customer Success Manager at Vidyard, a video platform for sales and marketing teams. Melanie, I’m really happy to have you here. Thanks for joining! I know that you ran your own business for 12 years before you even had a CS title, and you are now a senior CSM. What does your day-to-day actually look like, and who are your customers?
A Day in the Life of a CSM with 140 Accounts
Melanie (0:43 – 2:07)
Oh, great question. Our customers are a mix of sales teams and marketing teams. If you think about the GTM motion at a lot of larger companies, or even SaaS tech companies, we work with marketing teams who need a place to host their video content, and sales teams who are doing prospecting and outreach and using video to reach out. And then we have a lot of support, onboarding, and implementation customers. So really, anything in the GTM motion is a good ICP for Vidyard when it comes to video.
My day-to-day right now: I support about 140 customers, which is a big book. So my day consists of a lot of one-to-one calls, especially as I’m starting to get to know these accounts, because I inherited every single account. None of them have onboarded and then come straight to me.
So it’s a lot of one-to-one discovery calls, learning what their priorities are, why they purchased the software in the first place, how we fit into their workflow, and then determining how we’re going to work together. So lots of calls, lots of admin, lots of emails. And I know we’ll get into this a little bit later, but AI plays a big role in how I spend my time during the day. I have a lot of tasks set up to cut down on the admin work I have to do.
Segmenting a Large Book of Business
Irina (2:08 – 2:25)
We’ll definitely get into the AI part and how you manage to optimize your day, because you have to with 100-plus accounts.
Melanie
Yes.
Irina
But now I’m curious, what’s the one thing you are trying to move the most besides getting to know your customers? What’s your main focus?
Melanie (2:26 – 3:10)
Yeah. Getting to know my customers is still a big part of it. But on the other side, I know that meeting with them needs to be sustainable and scalable.
So what I’m trying to do right now is segment my book, so I can decide who falls where in a high touch or low touch environment, and what building out programs that deliver value to those customers will look like.
We have a lot of customers who have been with us for years, and they don’t necessarily need frequent monthly calls or one-to-one touch points. But I still believe that delivering value is key. So if it’s not going to be in the form of a call, how else can I make sure they’re still getting the most from the platform?
Delivering Value Without Check-In Calls
Irina (3:10 – 3:21)
I’m super curious: what are the criteria you use for this segmentation, and how do you make sure you are providing value without regular touch points?
Melanie (3:22 – 4:25)
Yes. That’s where I’m playing around at the moment. I think it takes a lot of A/B testing to figure out what works and what doesn’t, and what gets opened and what doesn’t.
But there are nudges that we send out. If we notice that a customer has not set up a certain integration, we can nudge them and share a case study or explain why it’s beneficial for them to set it up. There are also new features that don’t necessarily make it into the newsletter. If I know it’s one of our hosting customers, I can send out a “Hey, did you know?” or a hot tip on how to use it.
So it’s things like that, where we’re still letting customers know about valuable features or things I know will move the needle towards their goals, without having these check-in calls (and I hate the word check-in) where we sit there and go over new features and then there’s nothing more to share or discover. I think there’s a lot more value in this than having someone join a call with me every single month when it’s not necessarily the best use of their time or mine.
Doing Your Homework Before Discovery
Irina (4:25 – 4:39)
And now I want to ask you about the process of discovering your customers and their needs. Why did they buy? How can you help them? Do you have a structured playbook around this? How do you run those discovery calls?
Melanie (4:39 – 4:40)
Yeah. That’s a big topic.
Irina (4:41 – 4:54)
Or how do you keep them consistent, so you can extract patterns, draw conclusions, and know how to act on the insights you get from those discovery calls?
Melanie (4:55 – 6:26)
Yeah. That’s where AI has come into play for me too, because a lot of times I can go back to 2023, 2024, 2025 and have it analyze the last calls that were held with the customer. Of course, going back that far, those priorities have changed, and a lot of key team members are no longer at these companies.
So I spend a lot of time trying to figure out why they purchased in the first place. What were the drivers for purchasing Vidyard? What were their initial goals? Did we actually get there, did the goals change along the way, or did we just not get there, so they’re not seeing full value from the platform? So there’s a lot of that.
And then I try not to interview customers. I heard from someone who had a call with a CSM who left, and then I inherited the account. She was really struck by that call with the previous CSM, which felt very much like an interview, almost like they wanted to find out too much about their business, and she just wasn’t really happy to share.
So I try to be a little bit careful too, doing as much homework as I can and not making customers repeat the same thing every time they meet someone new. I think it can be frustrating when you don’t go into a call knowing as much as you can, and customers have to rehash the same thing over and over again.
So yes, AI plays a big role in talking points, the history of the account, the goals of the account, all of that. It gives me a framework, a bit of knowledge to go in with, and then I can do a deeper dive.
Goal-Based Onboarding at Vidyard
Irina (6:27 – 6:34)
What does good onboarding mean at Vidyard? And how do you know when you’ve got it right?
Melanie (6:35 – 7:27)
Yeah, we’re lucky because we have a really good implementation lead who has been here for years. And then we have another great person on implementation. She’s a digital CSM, so she onboards the smaller accounts.
They have a great playbook set up. I think we’ve all seen onboardings that are like a script, where you go through and everyone learns the same thing. This is not set up that way. It’s based on customer goals, their priorities, and which features are going to make the most impact in the first 30, 60, 90 days of using the software.
Then some customers need a little bit more and some need a little bit less, so they go with the flow based on customer needs. And then it gets handed off to a CSM to continue the customer journey.
Setting Expectations to Drive Adoption
Irina (7:28 – 7:47)
Okay. Let’s stay on the customer journey. Once they are onboarded, how do you make sure they actually adopt the solution? I know that you taught adults before you came into SaaS, so I think you inherited some things from that era.
Melanie (7:48 – 8:39)
Yeah, definitely. One of the things I did not do early in my career was set expectations with the customer about what was expected on their side. I just wanted it to go so well that I would almost put too much time into helping them adopt post-implementation.
But I think it’s about setting expectations and letting them know: this is what you’re going to need to do to make sure you’re adopting and really leveraging the tool, and here’s what I’ll do on my side. So I do try to meet with them on a regular basis, look at their metrics and milestones, and make sure they’re meeting those milestones.
Because without expectations, they’ll just start showing up to calls without having anything done. It’s so easy to fall back into what you’re comfortable with or your old ways and say, oh, I’ll learn this later.
Irina (8:40 – 9:09)
I’ve seen that a lot. And I think this becomes harder in the current setup, with all the AI around us. The expectation is that everything happens in a second, everything is one click and done, and we don’t have to do anything. We just write a better prompt. And if we can’t do it, we expect someone else to do it for us, because if it’s not AI, it needs to be people.
Melanie (9:10 – 9:45)
Yes. That’s where I think it can get frustrating too, because customers expect something to click, be fast, and be usable right away. And that’s not always the case.
Sometimes we work with people who aren’t necessarily tech savvy, so it’s going to take them a little bit longer than other customers for something to click and to see the value, to be able to say: okay, this is a tool I need, it fits into my workflow, I know how to use it. And then they’re ready to take off. Those are the dream customers.
The Playbook Behind 100% Renewals and Expansion
Irina (9:45 – 10:15)
Of course. The ones that buy, are basically on their own, renew year after year, and also do a bit of expansion. Let’s talk about this, because I know you have a successful track record here: you closed 100% of renewals three quarters running, plus six-figure expansion. What’s your playbook? Where does that expansion come from?
Melanie (10:16 – 11:47)
Oh, this took me a while to learn as well. But I think as a CSM, the most important thing you can do is be curious about your customer: understand their business, understand why they purchased the software, and understand exactly how the software is going to help them. What features are they going to use? How are they going to get to the outcomes they need to move the needle or see a difference within their business?
I think if you’re not curious, that’s probably going to set you back in this role. So always ask questions, always understand what’s new, and follow the trends in the business. That’s another thing AI has helped me with: where are there changes in the customer’s business, and how does that fit into how they’re using our tool?
So yes, curiosity is the first one, and then I think everything else will follow. Oh, and the other thing is being a product expert. When you’re a product expert and an industry expert, and those two things are combined, that’s where you really understand: okay, this is what the customer needs, and here is how we’re going to help them get there.
That can result in an upsell, expansion, new teams coming on board, or new features purchased and adopted. I think all of that comes afterwards, but you can’t expect it to happen within the first couple of meetings with a customer. Once you become that trusted strategic advisor, everything else will follow.
How AI Landed in Melanie’s Work
Irina (11:49 – 11:58)
That’s a lot to hold across a book of accounts. Where has AI landed in your own work as a CSM?
Melanie (11:58 – 13:47)
Yeah, we’re really lucky at Vidyard, because we’ve been encouraged to use AI in our roles for a long time, and we have internal enablement sessions to help us use Claude. We’ve been really lucky to have leaders helping us build out how we can use it, rather than being left to our own devices to figure it out.
A lot of the things I have set up are on the admin side. I have scheduled tasks that go through my email, and if I’ve missed responding to an email or I’m still waiting on a response from a customer, it surfaces all of those emails for me. These are things that would normally take time, or wouldn’t necessarily be on my task list to get done by the end of the day. The time-consuming types of things.
I have call prep set up so that every single day it sends to my Slack: here’s what you need to know before your call, here are some talking points, here’s what happened on the last call. Things like that just make my life easier.
And then on the flip side, there are the deeper analytical things. For example, I’ll have it look at a customer’s performance compared to our benchmarks and what they’re doing differently from other customers in a similar industry. It can even give me case studies based on what we’ve published and ideas for how we can guide them more towards success. So I’m using it quite a bit.
I think I started out like a lot of other people, unsure of how to use AI, and used it for basic tasks like drafting emails. But I’m excited about where I am now and how it’s helping me in my role, because I don’t think I would be as efficient otherwise, especially with a book of business this size.
The CS Tech Stack
Irina (13:48 – 13:55)
And what is the operational infrastructure? Besides AI, what platforms are central to helping you stay organized?
Melanie (13:55 – 14:45)
Yeah, we’re still finding our way with that. We use Salesforce, which I have a love-hate relationship with, like a lot of CSMs, I think. And then there’s the other big platform right now. I used to use tools similar to Custify, but we don’t have access to a CSP right now. So we’re using a tool called Statisfy, which is an AI tool that surfaces information. It’s connected to Gong and to Salesforce, so I can go in there and ask it questions. Right now it acts as a little mini CRM and filters out everything from Salesforce that I don’t necessarily need to look at on a daily basis. So it’s a way to keep up to date with my book.
I’m still learning how to use it, but hopefully in the future we’ll have a tool like Custify to make things easier.
Remembering Your Customers Are Human
Irina (14:46 – 14:58)
You’ve run your own business, you’ve built training programs, and now you are a CSM. Is there a habit, a way of thinking, or something you learned the hard way early on that still shows up in how you run accounts today?
Melanie (14:59 – 16:26)
Yes, that’s such a good question. It’s something I think about on a daily basis. I’m always asking myself: what can I do to be better for my customers?
And I think the thing we forget is that everyone we deal with is human, just like us. Our software is not always going to be top of mind for them. They have other priorities. They have a hundred other tools they use.
So don’t take it personally if they’re not responding to emails, or if usage isn’t what you would expect or goes up and down. It doesn’t necessarily mean something bad is happening or that they’re looking at a competitor or somewhere else to move to.
I think you just have to put in the time, and I’m always going to come back to staying curious, because I think it’s still so important to ask questions, read between the lines, and understand the customer’s priorities, so you can guide them to the best use cases and best practices for the software. That, I think, results in success.
That’s a very simplified version, and I acknowledge that our job is really hard and it’s not always going to go that way. There are a lot of cases where working with customers is difficult, or there are edge cases and different scenarios. But the goal is always that curiosity leads to success, which leads to expansion and renewals.
Irina (16:27 – 16:41)
Melanie, thank you for your time. It was a really interesting conversation.
Melanie (16:42 – 16:44)
Thank you. It was so nice spending time with you. Thanks, Irina.
Irina (16:44 – 16:48)
To everyone listening, thanks for tuning in. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning, and keep mastering customer success.
