In this episode of Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas talks with Abdul Momen Khalid, Head of Customer Success at Avaza, a platform that helps professional services teams manage projects, time, and invoicing. Momen joined Avaza as a customer success associate and worked his way up to head of the department, where he now oversees both retention and new business.
He shares candidly how an automation-heavy account management setup backfired, turning customer conversations transactional, and how his team went back to the drawing board to focus on meaningful interactions instead of fixed outreach schedules.
What You’ll Learn
- How newsletters and in-app messages can bring customers to you
- How to handle churn with confidence and without friction
- Why customers who leave to build in-house tools often come back
- How AI handles tier one support, call summaries, and product testing
- Why curiosity is the trait that sets high performers apart
Key Insights & Takeaways
Build processes, not dependencies. Sales calls, handoffs, kickoffs, and onboarding should follow clear, trained processes so the team isn’t reliant on one person.
Trial and error is part of the job. There’s no common playbook, and what worked for another company may not work for yours.
Too much automation can hurt quality. When the team couldn’t keep up with automated tasks, conversations became transactional and results dropped.
Admin overhead kills momentum. Tools that don’t talk to each other force duplicate work and pull time away from customers.
Don’t reach out uninformed. It’s better not to contact a legacy customer at all than to show up without knowing their pain points and needs.
Podcast transcript
Intro
Irina (0:06 – 0:28)
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 Abdul Momen Khalid, Head of Customer Success at Avaza, a platform that helps teams manage projects, time, and invoicing. Momen, I’m really happy to have you here.
Thanks for joining.
Momen (0:29 – 0:31)
Same here, Irina. Great to meet you.
Irina (0:32 – 0:41)
Let’s start with the very beginning. Paint us a picture of your world at Avaza. Who are your customers, and what does the work actually look like day to day?
Inside Avaza and the PSA Industry
Momen (0:43 – 1:36)
Yeah, I’m glad you asked. So you define Avaza as something of a tool that helps you manage your day-to-day projects, time, this and that. To be honest, it’s just become a conglomerate.
It’s becoming way more than that. It’s workforce management, it’s project management, it’s time management, it’s finance management. And now with the way that things are moving, especially with the advent of AI and having that kind of speed behind your development teams, we’re moving towards CRM capabilities and having native AI.
So it’s a really exciting space to be a part of. And what I like the most about it is that we’re dealing with the PSA industry, so professional services agencies across the world, which allows you to work with all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds and different regions of the world, so different cultures, different traditions, different styles of working. And that’s really exciting.
Q4 Priorities: Getting the Product Ready for 2027
Irina (1:37 – 1:49)
Okay. And right now we are almost at the end of the year, the last quarter. I’m curious, what’s your biggest priority and what do you want to achieve until the end of the year?
Momen (1:50 – 2:47)
Well, I think especially with the position that I’m in right now, and we’ll talk a bit more about that as we further along, but right now I’m thinking broad strokes rather than just focusing on certain niches or certain getting certain projects across the line. Right now it’s very much about the product, making sure the product is somewhere where we need it to be before we step into 2027. And in Q1, 2027, the aim would then be shifting towards making sure our processes, our workflows are in place that are converting all that effort that is going into the product at the end of the year right now.
We’re developing at a very rapid speed, just trying to improve on all the functionalities that we have and add to it so that all our clients who are with us, they’re happy, they get what they need. And then there’s a bunch of new clients that would be attracted towards Avaza in that space as well. So that’s where the main focus is right now.
Stepping into the Head of CS Role
Irina (2:48 – 3:01)
I know that you were running accounts before you moved into the role of header. When you stepped into the seat, what was the first thing that you built? How did you approach the new role?
Momen (3:02 – 5:23)
I’ll tell you about it. So it’s a bit of a fascinating story. I joined in as an individual contributor.
At Avaza, I was a CSA. Anybody who’s familiar with the CS industry would know that’s just an associate position. You’re just getting your foot in the door.
I wasn’t really familiar with what the space would look like, but I worked my way towards leading a team, then managing that team, and then moving into the more on the operational side, becoming head of the entire department. And what’s a little interesting about this role specifically is that I don’t only look at retention. I also look at new business.
So I’m managing both sides of the coin here. It’s not just keeping the customers that we have happy, but also making sure that we’re in a place where new customers are coming in. They’re having great discovery calls with us.
They’re having great onboardings with us. That handoff is smooth, right? And there’s no gaps.
Those leaks are usually the biggest problem that any company can have. And when I stepped in, everything was everywhere, right? It wasn’t really organized, structured, because everyone comes in with their own vision, their own style of working.
And my style of working is you need to have foolproof processes in place. You need to have systems help you manage things. And then your team needs to act on those and make sure that they’re getting you across the line.
So you can’t really be human dependent completely, or this person will handle that. This person will handle this now. You need to have foolproof processes in place.
Make sure there is a very nice, outlined, trained team that knows, okay, this is how a sales call will happen. This is how the handoff will happen. This is how a kickoff will happen.
This is how an onboarding will happen. What does that process look like? How does that fit into a system?
How does management have a bird’s eye view on what’s happening? That kind of a thing. So there were a lot of things to figure out, a lot of things to figure out in terms of having a process in place, making sure that these things were there.
Of course, introduced a lot of things as well, like newsletters, G2 review campaigns, that kind of thing to make sure that you had a nice profile for the company. And whenever you’re having good interactions, that’s converting into reviews, that’s converting into feedback that we can actualize and make sure that we get the most out of it. So yeah, that was where I had to do a bunch of work from ground up.
Trial and Error with CS Processes
Irina (5:24 – 5:32)
I want to know more about those processes and systems and frameworks that you put into place. We’ll start with this and then we’ll continue with the team.
Momen (5:33 – 5:55)
Sure, absolutely. So I think with everything, there’s obviously going to be a phase of trial and error. And we went through that at Avaza as well.
And there’s no shame in admitting because you try a few things and you try a few strategies, you try a few systems even, and then you figure out what you need to do, how you need to do it. And that’s just how, you know, that’s a pretty- You cannot nail it.
Irina (5:55 – 6:39)
You cannot nail it from the very beginning. And actually, if you do not mind, because there are not a lot of leaders who basically admit that, okay, I failed and I learned from it. So let’s talk about also the things that we’ve tested and they didn’t work out because this is how progress happens.
You can’t nail it from the very beginning. And there’s no common playbook. What worked for a company doesn’t work for others.
And even if you copy it from another account, from another business, no, it doesn’t work. So it’s normal to test, fail, and continue. It’s fail fast, learn fast, and adapt.
From Automated Outreach to Meaningful Interactions
Momen (6:40 – 16:31)
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I agree with what you just said, a hundred percent.
So I’ll tell you a bit of a story here. So initially when we were trying to figure out the account management strategy for Avaza, we knew we had a few really great clients that we needed to connect with. We were getting new clients that we needed to build a rapport with.
And then obviously we need to have a process in place where new clients would come in and we would be able to catch them, make sure we are building a relationship with them. Avaza’s been in business for about 12 plus years. You had some legacy clients that were through and you needed to have a system in place to have a relationship with them.
We tried to map it all out on paper. And on paper, PyPribe at the time was a great tool that we could use for defining workflows, having tasks in place where a team member will get their list of tasks and activities that they need to do on a day-to-day basis. And accordingly, they act on it, they record all that they’re doing, and it all seemed great.
It all seemed perfectly fine. We did a bunch of research and we tried out a couple of tools, but PyPribe looked like a great solution. We took a good month and a half to try and put it in place to make sure that, like I said earlier, having a foolproof system, right?
So we were just trying to think it through, make sure everything was good, every workflow worked beautifully. It was in place. But now what happened was in real life, you may be working with different tools and then not all of those tools may be able to talk to each other.
That becomes a bigger problem because when you have to duplicate efforts to record your meeting notes, let’s say your note taker is recording your notes, placing them in one place, and then you have to copy them, maybe add action points to another, and then copy them and add to another. That’s just adding way too much admin overhead that that’s time that could be utilized in other more fruitful activities, right? Our team started struggling with that quite heavily because even though Pipedrive at the time seemed like a great tool, but when we started working with it, we were noticing that the team members would have huge backlogs of tasks because the workflows would be checking out tasks every recurrence, they would be created, they would be placed there, but then no action was happening on it because the team members, they were trying to catch up to it. And that was becoming a bit of a problem rather than solving a problem. And I felt that in that, trying to match up with the quality of automations and the frequency of the automation, we started losing the quality of the interaction that we were having.
It started to become transactional in nature. It started to become just, here’s a question, here’s an answer, or maybe we’re trying to reach out and then we’re getting no response as well. These were issues that were obviously demotivating for the team, demotivating for management because there’s a pull, there’s a cost associated with this whole process, there’s time being invested, and then there’s not really a lot of results that are coming out of it.
That was the time to not really just try and make it work, push through, instead, go back to the drawing board. And that’s exactly what we did because the idea of account management was to have interactions with our clients that were meaningful, so meaningful interactions. And it’s okay if someone’s, and this may be true for a lot of industries out there, if your clients are there, they’re legacy clients, they’re using you for a bunch of years, they know the product, they understand the product, they know how to use it for their workflows.
Even if you don’t talk to them, they probably will stay there for some time until they start running into issues. You’re better off not reaching out to them uninformed, then it would be much better that you don’t reach out to them at all if you’re not prepared, if you’re not informed, if you’re not really across what the actual pain points are, what their actual needs are. And when you’re trying to catch up to your internal automations, your internal frequency of reach-outs, everything looks great on paper, 60-day reach-out, 90-day reach-out, but in reality you may want to talk to somebody every week, you may want to talk to somebody every month, or you may want to talk to somebody every six months, depending on their, how busy they are or their level of interest.
So that’s where we went back to the drawing board, and we said, okay, that’s fine, we can pause the strategy and we can start it all over again. And so what we did was instead, we started going back to Avaza. In Avaza, what has happened in that duration is we’ve now had custom fields created as part of a system.
We’ve got some custom views, we’ve got some custom fields, things that weren’t there before, and we have to figure out other tools to try and map out data that we needed to see. Your MRR, your number of licenses, last seen, this kind of information. We generally use a tool called Intercom that I’m sure you’re familiar with, and we were trying to have that all mapped across a nice format so we could see, okay, this is a person that I need to reach out to, this is a person that’s at risk, or that kind of a thing.
We had beautifully designed pipelines, right? We had different statuses, tags, everything happening, but then you have to work with the cards that you’re given. And in that, we went back to Avaza, we started destrategizing, and that has been fruitful because now those interactions aren’t following a frequency, it’s following a chain of communication.
So there may be clients that we’re interacting with that we reached out to, for example, a recent example is, so I’ve introduced newsletters in Avaza. There were a bunch of features that were coming, a lot of features that already existed were getting optimized or updated just to match up with all the requirements and feature requests that we had over the past few months or years. And in order to communicate that effectively, we started using in-app messages, we started using banners, we started using newsletters.
We got a lot of positive feedback from clients that we weren’t really interacting with, but they reached out to us because they were interested in what they saw in the newsletter or the in-app messages. So in this way, we started getting people who really wanted to talk to us, and I’ve made sure that the team is capitalizing on those opportunities. Those aren’t going to waste.
When somebody’s reaching out to you, knocking at the door, you make sure to answer it, and that has proven very fruitful. In terms of an outbound reach, we are trying to keep an eye on a few different things that are indicators, just to make sure that if there’s someone who may be sliding towards not using the product or sliding towards not logging in in a little while or whatever those different indicators are, and we can get into all of that, we try and approach it with a very, so this I think now ties into kind of how we deal with churn as well, because churn is a very real part of CS that we try to oversee and overlook, and we try to say, oh, we don’t have churn and it’s fine. Every company has churn.
Every tool has churn, and that’s just the reality of the world that we live in. It’s perfectly fine. You can’t cater to everybody’s needs at all times.
However, we have a very different strategy to it. We try to make it extremely frictionless, and we approach it with a level of authority. When we’re having that conversation, we are confident, I am confident in the product that we’re offering.
I can ask you, if you’re wanting to move away or if you’re sliding towards not using it, what seems to be the problem? Is it specific features or is it the pricing? I already know in my mind that those features are exactly how they need to be.
I know that we’re very competitively priced. So what is it that’s causing that problem, right? And right now, it’s honestly, it’s people’s need for wanting to have an inbuilt tool with the fast pace of AI.
People are trying to mirror that strategy that enterprises used to have previously, where they would want an inbuilt tool. Obviously, they had a budget for a dev team, time for a dev team that could develop a tool just specifically for their needs. Everybody’s thinking along those lines.
However, what they seem to forget is it comes with a loss of cost and a lot of maintenance that they need to really take into account that they don’t really do at the start of the project. And so we’ve seen a lot of boomerang customers in that regard as well, where they’ve left, they’re wanting to go build their own tool because they have certain workflows, certain things. For example, PO needs to carry over this and that, this format.
Fine. And then come back because they weren’t able to maintain it. They weren’t able to sustain the cost associated with it.
And that’s perfectly fine because the way we’ve made that churn management processes, we’ve made it frictionless. We’ve made sure we’re having that interaction in a way where they feel we’re here to help. And when they feel that they need help, we’re the first person that they think of.
That’s been a forte for Avaza. It’s really been a very useful strategy. Even if you’re losing customers, we’re going away on very nice terms.
I’m still connected with a lot of people on LinkedIn that used Avaza at some point, but aren’t using it anymore. But they’re still asking me a bunch of questions about how to structure their workflows in their new environment that they’re working in, their new industry that they’re working in. Because I worked with them in a consultancy role and they still reach out and they still ask questions.
And that’s a beautiful thing that having that kind of a relationship.
Running CS on Avaza
Irina (16:33 – 16:53)
So if I got it right, now your team lives basically in Avaza. So that’s the central tool and everything. So basically you’ve built or you developed your own tool as an in-tool house.
So basically you did exactly what your customers are trying to do.
Momen (16:53 – 16:54)
That’s exactly right.
Irina (16:55 – 17:11)
You managed to do it right. Besides Avaza, what are the, and you mentioned Intercom, besides that, is there any other tool from which you connect the data so that Avaza becomes the unique source of information for you and the unique source of truth?
Momen (17:12 – 18:39)
Yeah. Our tech stack was pretty expensive. We’ve kind of reduced a bit now so that we know, and we have a pulse on each thing.
We have Intercom. Intercom is used for, used as a bit of a CRM right now where we have all our clients there. We have all our communication with those clients there.
Any outbound, inbound activities happening. We have the MRR, everything tracked in there, number of licenses, all of that lives there. And then that is speaking to Avaza.
That’s connected to Avaza. And then for our CS interactions, for our interpersonal interactions, we have Fathom. Fathom’s been a life saver.
We have Fathom team, which is great. I love that because you, it allows you to get a library of all your team’s calls in one place. And you have the ability to ask Fathom, that’s an inbuilt AI that they have.
So if you need a quick summary, two, three lines, oh, what happened with this client? What’s going on? It would just give you that.
And instead of you having to maybe pull in Claude.
It’s fantastic in understanding what Avaza does, how it does it, how we interact with our clients. But at the end of the day, when there’s a tool that’s recording your call, recording the summary, and you can ask that specific tool some questions, it gives you very on point answers. So that’s, that’s where we live right now.
We’re trying to reduce it, but that’s, that’s more, more or less the CS text tag.
How the Team Uses AI
Irina (18:40 – 18:55)
And you mentioned, you mentioned Claude. Are there, is your team basically leveraging it on top of Avaza where everything is basically implemented and they don’t need a Claude license on top of Avaza?
Momen (18:55 – 20:42)
Yeah. So we’ve got a couple of AIs that are working with us. So I’ve introduced Fin in our company.
Fin is an AI offered by Intercom. Okay. And Fin is fantastic.
I’ve attended a couple of their conferences that happened in the UK when they were introducing these features and I was really mesmerized by the product offering. And it’s really smart. It goes and reads your knowledge base, reads your conversations and understands that kind of context.
So it’s really customer heavy and it takes care of that piece completely. Right now, tier one support is completely Fin and that means instant responses, instant feedback. It gives us customer satisfaction, customer experience score.
It gives us a bunch of things, which is fantastic. It really helps us. And then when there’s a human handoff happening, it’s very seamless.
It takes that conversation, lets them know, Hey, we’re here to help. Somebody will step in five minutes, six minutes, somebody steps in and then they can take over. Other than that, Claude is something that, a tool that we’ve been using religiously.
And it’s because it really helps you work through challenges, work through problems. In fact, what I’ve also been using quite a lot recently is their Chrome extension. It just so in where, because the position that I’m sitting in, there’s a bunch of hats that I have to wear.
One of them is product testing at times. And there’s certain features or bugs that may be happening that I need to go in and test while I have to do other stuff. I ask it to do it.
I give it what it needs to do. It goes in, it tests that it comes back to me. It helps me interact with my clients based on their feedback.
It’s really great in that regard. And it’s something that I’ve made sure that the entire team is also using, also capitalizing. So yeah, Claude has been a lifesaver too.
From Support to Strategy
Irina (20:44 – 21:01)
You’ve been in support in marketing ops, in data research, and you’ve also built a business on your own on the site. 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 run CS today?
Momen (21:02 – 25:03)
Absolutely. I think if I were to kind of summarize my entire journey so far, it’s been support to strategy. I started off in support.
It was a customer support role, just kind of in the customer success umbrella, but very much niche support and retention. And that’s kind of stuck with me. The retention piece has stuck with me all throughout these years.
In my experience with formerly Keepraken, now Motive, I was in their marketing ops division as well. And that happened because of complete chance. So essentially, I didn’t really have a marketing background at the time.
And I was working in a support role, in an associate role, and they needed to establish an ops division for Keepraken in Pakistan and in Islamabad. And they needed to have people who were process oriented, who understood how to create things, how to get into systems, who liked being on different screens and understanding how to do things. And I was selected for that department and I set up that team for the Pakistan office.
I worked with Salesforce, PowerDot, MailChimp. I’m sure you’re familiar with all these tools, being the head of marketing there. I got to really work with a lot of these kind of tools, understand how segments are created, understand the nuances of all of these outreaches, email marketing, that kind of a thing.
And that’s stuck with me. So even now, when I am working on, let’s say, a pre-launch campaign, where I’m just trying to notify our clients, I know how I need to avoid spam. I know how I need to make sure our emails are landing in the right inboxes.
We’re getting that kind of response. And our open rates, our click-throughs, our response rates are amazing. And it’s because I had some experience while I did a lot of screw-ups in key trucking.
My manager there, he was very polite. He worked with me through those and he taught me how things work and how segments work and what we needed to avoid and what we needed to do in terms of strategy. But that’s been the key.
I think the other thing, honestly, and this segues into it is my relationship with my, whoever direct report is, whoever my direct report is, my manager. It’s always been fantastic. I’ve tried to make it into a mentor-student relationship rather than just a manager and, or a team lead relationship.
Right now, Dharam Khan, who’s the CEO of Avaza, he’s the co-founder. He’s been a fantastic mentor. And it’s not just things related to Avaza or customer success.
It’s across life. It’s across his path and his journey and what he’s learned from it. And what I try to do is I try to be a fly on the wall in all of these conversations.
I try to just sit there and I try to absorb as much as I can to try and learn from these people who have developed these businesses, these products, who really, and you’ll find this amazing thing across all these kinds of personalities. They love pixels. They don’t just look at a screen and they go, oh, there’s a bunch of options.
They like to look at each one of those pixels. They like to understand why those options are there, how they’re placed there, what’s the strategy behind it, how it’s working. And that kind of process, that kind of thinking is really needed.
If you want to be successful at whatever you do, it’s not just, oh, I will clock in 95, I’m done. It’s you being curious, the curiosity to learn about a tool, about a workflow, about a process, whatever industry it might be, whatever job it might be, job title. This one aspect is what will get you to really break through that glass ceiling.
Irina (25:04 – 25:15)
Well, this was a really interesting conversation. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for the level of details and the practical aspect that you put on the table.
Momen (25:17 – 25:21)
Absolutely. I think the pleasure is all mine. I’ve been doing most of the talking.
I do understand.
Irina (25:21 – 25:38)
This is why you’ve been invited here. I usually ask the questions and then I go silent. Thank you for once again for sharing the story with us.
And to everyone listening, thanks for tuning in. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning, and mastering customer success.
Momen (25:38 – 25:39)
Bye-bye.
