In this episode of Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas talks with Arek Czarnecki, Head of Customer Success at Gridaly, an all-in-one event management platform that helps organizers run virtual, hybrid, and in-person events end to end.
Arek shares how he moved from Sales into CS, then rebuilt the entire CS function from zero inside a fast-growing startup. The conversation explores what it takes to scale customer delivery in an event-driven business with seasonality, tight timelines, and high customer expectations, while also building processes, choosing tools on limited budget, and introducing AI-enabled workflows without losing the personal touch customers value.
What You’ll Learn
- How Arek moved from Sales into Customer Success
- What building CS from scratch looked like at Gridaly
- The 3 early priorities: people, process, tooling
- Why Gridaly hired junior talent first
- How seasonality reshapes CS resourcing
- How Sales → CS handover works today
- Why Success and Support were split
- The 5 AI and automation workflows they use
- The scaling tension: efficiency vs personal touch
- Arek’s leadership philosophy for retention
Key Insights & Takeaways
CS design followed delivery pressure: Gridaly built its CS function while live event projects were already running.
Hiring junior talent accelerated growth but increased leadership load: Early hiring focused on potential, which required heavier coaching and QA.
Tooling choices reflected constraints, not perfection: Task management and ticketing systems became operational anchors under budget limits.
Seasonality created structural resourcing challenges: Peak demand required balancing staffing, workload spikes, and overtime.
Splitting Support and Success improved scalability: Support handled self-service and end-user speed. Success owned project outcomes.
Sales handover prioritized scope clarity over automation: Structured project details reduced friction but revealed replication inefficiencies.
Podcast transcript
Intro
Irina (0:05 – 0:32)
The Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights is the podcast where we dive deep into the world of customer success with industry leaders. I’m your host, Irina Cismas, and today I’m joined by Arek, Head of Customer Success at Gridaly, an all-in-one event management platform helping organizers run virtual, hybrid, and in-person events from A to Z. Arek, I’m really happy to have you here.
Thanks for joining!
Arek (0:33 – 0:35)
Yes, thank you. Hello, everyone!
From Sales to Customer Success
Irina (0:36 – 0:45)
Let’s start with the beginning. How did you first get into customer success, and what pulled you towards the event tech world?
Arek (0:47 – 2:24)
My beginning in this field was not in Customer Success. I started as a Sales Manager, and I was deeply focused on understanding our customers’ needs.
Very often, while preparing for sales or handing projects over to the Customer Success team, I stayed closely involved with customers and cared a lot about quality. I frequently supported tasks directly with them because I was responsible for those projects and always expected the highest standards.
After about one to one and a half years, I made the decision with our founders to switch fully into Customer Success.
At that time, we rebuilt the entire team from the ground up. I didn’t have prior CS experience, and my academic background was in mechanical engineering. I had worked in different areas throughout my career, but I’ve always been drawn to ambitious projects.
When we restructured, some team members moved on to different paths, and others left the company. We decided to build the function from zero.
In the beginning, it was just me. I started developing the team from scratch. That was the true starting point, driven largely by an inner motivation to create success for our customers.
Irina (2:26 – 2:39)
And so you were the first, let’s call it, hire in the customer success team. And you had the chance to basically build the team from scratch. Did I get it right?
Arek (2:40 – 2:41)
Right. Yes, that’s right.
Building CS from Scratch in an Event-Driven Business
Irina (2:41 – 3:07)
I want to deep dive into that process, because you are, I would say, not the only one who has been the first hire, and every journey for the head of CS is a bit different. So now I’m curious, how did you tackle this role from the very beginning? Or what were your first priorities into this role?
Arek (3:08 – 3:45)
In the beginning, we already had active projects. There was a lot of daily work. The train was running, and we had to do our jobs like setting up events, managing registrations, building landing pages, and more.
At the same time, I had to plan and think about the future. We aimed to scale the business, growing roughly twice each year. That created many goals we needed to achieve while ensuring we could grow without simply doubling the team, because that isn’t the most efficient way to scale.
Irina (3:45 – 3:48)
Yes, being the best means doubling the team, for sure.
Arek (3:48 – 6:04)
Yeah. So in the beginning, my focus was on maintaining the quality of our work while building the team. This was part of an important mission for the company – selecting the right people.
We approached this a little differently. We didn’t target people with extensive experience in that area. Instead, we hired students and very young people. Some team members were 18 or 19 years old, just starting university. Many were not working full-time, especially in the beginning.
That made things more difficult because I was on the front line, directly in front of customers. The team handled their tasks, while my role was to support them, help build the team, and ensure quality and service.
At the same time, we were also thinking about tools, building a knowledge base, defining processes, and choosing an environment for ticketing and project management.
We work with customers largely in a classic waterfall model. We start projects well before the event, sometimes six months in advance. We operate around milestones such as the start of registration, website launch, or app setup.
We built processes and chose tools, but the budget was limited. There was no option to simply select the best or most expensive solutions on the market. We use ClickUp for task management and have our own ticketing system. It was always a balance between budget and operational needs.
It was very different from what we have now, but the story is not that long. We’re talking about roughly two years. We moved very quickly to where we are today.
Scaling Challenges: People, Process, and Seasonality
Irina (6:05 – 7:01)
I’m hearing that there were several phases into the scaling process. So initially it was just you, then you focused on building the team around you. They want to properly scale.
The team was not there, and people were not enough. You also introduced processes and technology to help build this foundation. You mentioned that the budget wasn’t unlimited and that you weren’t managing a huge budget.
So you had to make trade-offs. How did you decide? Was it between hiring and investing in tools? How did you build the business case for upper management to secure approval for the resources you needed?
Arek (7:02 – 9:36)
This was very difficult. Very often, we worked more than we were supposed to, both me and parts of my team. In our industry, we have seasons. Right now, for example, it’s the low season. Then we move into the high season, typically in April or June, when we can have even 20 events in a single week.
Sometimes those events take place in different locations or even different countries. That makes it challenging to find the right balance, how large the team should be, how to prepare for the season, and how to handle unexpected situations. For example, starting a new project tomorrow. It’s not a problem, we simply make it work.
At the same time, we must remember that we’re working with a tech product. Especially in the beginning, we constantly dealt with fixes, bugs, and customer-requested improvements. This wasn’t just routine daily work. A significant part of our job involved working closely with customers, understanding their needs, identifying system limitations, and contributing to fixes or further development.
Much of how the product looks today comes directly from what we’ve learned from customers. We stay very close to those needs. This is actually one of the things I love most about my job like having a highly supportive and open product development team. Seeing the product evolve week after week, and watching customer needs translate into improvements, is incredibly rewarding.
I’ve also heard from many candidates during recruitment that this dynamic plays a major role in their decision to join. They value being close to customers, providing feedback, and seeing tangible product changes over time. From a customer perspective, this level of responsiveness is still rare.
That’s what I appreciate about our team and our company. We are still a startup. We are growing fast, but we remain a small organization. Nearly half of the company is my team.
And yes, I tend to talk a lot, so feel free to stop me sometimes.
Irina (9:37 – 9:57)
No, not at all. So you mentioned that you grew from a team of one to now having one of the biggest teams in the company. What roles do you currently have?
Is it the traditional Customer Success Manager role, or how do you divide responsibilities within the team?
Arek (9:57 – 12:45)
Good question. In the beginning, it was funny because my bosses called me Head of Customer Success, but actually, head of what?
We were doing everything in a small team, all at the same level. But now we can finally say that it means something.
About half a year ago, we started thinking about splitting Success and Support into separate processes. In the beginning, everything was handled by the same team. Customers, and even customers of our customers, were reaching out to the same people who were responsible for helping them succeed with their apps. In the end, everything was in the same hands.
Half a year ago, we changed our thinking. We are growing, and we realized we need people with more focused responsibilities. It is not yet a classical division of roles.
Part of the team is more focused on building the help desk and improving support processes. They work on creating self service tools and providing very quick answers for end users. Our customers are mostly companies, but they also have their own users, so we provide services for both groups.
This is the structure. We have people focused on support, but most of the team works on projects as Customer Success Managers or junior team members. Of course, it depends on how long someone has been with us.
We are also thinking about roles dedicated purely to process development. Process improvement is a big part of our work. We always try to develop what we are doing to become more efficient and avoid repeating the same tasks.
But when the train is running, it is difficult. We often have many internal initiatives. Maybe 20 or 30 at a time. For example, this week we are updating names in the panel. We prepared a large list and provided feedback to development. We are also building a new welcome email for platform users after finding some inspiration for improvements.
These are important projects, but not always the highest priority because daily customer work continues. That is why we are thinking about separate people who will focus only on developing such internal projects.
Cross-Functional Collaboration and Handover Design
Irina (12:47 – 13:20)
You mentioned that you function in a startup environment. You are still a small team and the collaboration between the teams is actually the biggest advantage that you guys have. I’m curious, what’s the process?
What’s the handover process between sales to CS? How do you interact with product? How often is the process?
Arek (13:20 – 16:13)
Good question. Of course, we have a sales team. As you already know, it is quite small.
We are recruiting right now. When we have good projects, we do not need a very large sales team because the product is selling itself. The role is mostly about preparing quotes, but of course, we can do more. That is why we are hiring.
We have a process for when a project is confirmed. We have a defined way to hand over the project to our team. We prepare quotes, and if it is not an easy project, we conduct interviews and gather additional information.
We have our own Excel file where we put all the information. This includes when the project should start, when registration is supposed to start, links, and what kind of features the customer has chosen. This becomes our base from the beginning.
From there, we create the organization in our system and start the project in our task management tool. This is the beginning of the process.
We are very close to making a small switch because we want to introduce automation. Some of these things are currently done in multiple places, such as entering the organization name, event name, and basic project scope. We see this opportunity, but it is not the highest priority right now.
This is how it works from sales to our team. We then work directly with customers.
Sometimes sales is still part of the process, especially when we are doing upsells, for example, additional hours or new features. Sometimes new products appear during the project lifecycle, and sales reconnects with customers to explore those opportunities.
In the end, we deliver the event. After the event, we conduct summary meetings, and sales comes back into the conversation. First, we gather feedback from the cooperation period, and then it is naturally the right time to discuss future projects.
Many customers run more than one event per year. Since we mostly work within project based budgets, cooperation often follows a start and end cycle. However, we have a growing group of customers running many events. Some run dozens, some a few, and some even hundreds of events, both smaller and larger.
AI, Automation, and Operational Efficiency
Irina (16:15 – 16:30)
Let’s change gears a bit. I want to ask you, how are you using AI and automation today with your events in onboarding, event preparation, or maybe providing insights for share out in the bridge automation?
Arek (16:30 – 21:18)
Not very hot topics. We are doing events, so we naturally follow daily trends and what people are talking about. Of course, AI is still a very big topic.
In our work, we use AI in different areas. The first one is very interesting for me. It was not my idea or my team’s idea, but our development team uses AI for coding. They use Copilot, and it feels like a virtual part of the team.
AI supports coding, checking, testing, and more. I am not 100% involved in that process, but I can see the impact. They also introduced tools that help us create articles for our knowledge base.
Sometimes we already have prepared articles for the help desk, and we simply verify and adjust them. Occasionally, AI suggests things we did not initially consider. This works because AI understands the system structure from the code. This was a very strong use case for us.
We also use AI within tools like Intercom. We use their AI agent and Copilot features. Adoption is still growing because we are actively encouraging customers to use chat as the primary communication channel instead of calling or sending emails.
For new customers, we clearly define chat as the main communication tool. Email remains important for project management, but for quick questions or tickets, we guide customers toward chat and AI supported workflows.
Adoption is improving, but not always easy. Some long term customers still prefer calls and emails. We continue educating them on the benefits, especially faster responses and better tracking.
Our systems are also connected with the IT team. When a ticket is created, it goes directly into Jira. Development can respond faster compared to traditional email flows. Even if someone is unavailable, the issue can already be addressed.
This is one of the reasons we push toward these tools, although change takes time because customers are used to previous communication standards.
In daily operations, we also use AI for time tracking. I recently started using a tool that tracks my work automatically in the background. I no longer manually start or stop timers. AI handles this across projects.
We only implemented this recently. In the past, we estimated time spent on customers. When customers asked how many hours remained, we often relied on assumptions because we lacked precise data.
In the beginning, our focus was purely on customer success. We did not strictly measure how much time we spent. Now we are in a different phase where time visibility is necessary.
We compare workloads, analyze how long tasks take, and evaluate customer effort. If a customer requires significantly more time, additional hours may be required. This improves fairness and operational clarity.
We also use AI for meeting and email summaries. This is extremely valuable. Having structured summaries allows us to revisit discussions from months ago when questions arise or details are unclear.
This gives us better visibility, stronger documentation, and more fact based conversations.
2026 Priorities: Scaling Without Losing Personal Touch
Irina (21:18 – 21:32)
So for sure it does. Do tell me, what are your biggest priorities for this year, for 2026? What do you want to achieve and how will success look like for you?
Arek (21:32 – 23:41)
Yes. Okay. When I was starting, I was very idealistic.
For example, my idea was to switch off phones and emails from our communication process with customers. I did not expect that this would not be possible in the beginning. Now, I am not that idealistic.
I understand that we have projects and initiatives that move us closer to that vision. After two years, this remains an important direction.
One of my biggest priorities is preparing the team to support twice as many customers without doubling the team. That is both the challenge and the opportunity.
We have several things we need to improve. Processes, further development of our knowledge base, and shifting the team’s role. We want to operate more as guides and experts for our customers, and less as people clicking through the system.
This is the change we want to drive. We want to be experts. We want to focus on more valuable work as a team.
I like my job, and I want my team to enjoy their work as well. It should not always feel like repeating the same actions. That is part of our goal as we grow into a bigger company.
At the same time, we do not want to lose the personal touch. This is where things become more complex.
Our customers work with us because they value the people behind the product, not only an AI chat. On one hand, I want strong support powered by self-service tools. On the other hand, customers must still feel that there are real people behind the experience.
They should feel supported by actual Customer Success Managers, even if they do not interact constantly or communicate through traditional channels like phone.
This is one of my main focuses this year.
Leadership Philosophy and Team Retention
Irina (23:43 – 23:55)
For someone stepping into their first CS leadership role, what’s the one thing you would want them to focus on? What’s your piece of advice for someone?
Arek (23:55 – 23:56)
In leadership?
Irina (23:57 – 23:59)
Yes, a leadership role.
Arek (23:59 – 25:49)
Yes. In my point of view, the most important thing is to be yourself and to talk with people as equals.
When you work with your team this way, people are more involved. Communication becomes easier, and we stay honest about what we are doing. It helps avoid situations where discussions happen, but nothing is clearly understood in the end.
I see that when we are authentic and build the team on trust and equality, the team dynamic becomes much stronger. We support each other. We operate as a true team.
Looking at the results today, we do not frequently replace people. We mainly add new team members. When someone leaves, it is often for personal reasons. For example, one person from my team started his own startup, which we understood from the beginning as part of his journey.
Otherwise, when someone joins as a Customer Success Manager, they typically stay with us long term. I hope this continues because having a stable team is extremely important.
When you build trust, openness, and strong collaboration, you create solid foundations. People who understand the product deeply become a major advantage.
Even with the best tools, if you constantly change the team, performance can decline. In my view, people are the most important element in this process.
Irina (25:50 – 26:21)
This was such a great conversation. I really appreciate how you broke down the realities of Customer Success in a startup environment, especially within event tech, where your team supports customers through the critical moments their entire events depend on.
Thank you again for joining and for sharing your story with us.
And to everyone listening, thank you for tuning in. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning, and keep mastering Customer Success.
Arek (26:22 – 26:24)
Thank you. It was big for me.
