In this episode of Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas sits down with Evgeniya Ioffe, Head of Customer Success at Bites, a training and communication platform for frontline teams. Evgeniya joined Bites as one of its earliest employees, wore many hats across CS, product, support, and sales, and now leads a CS team of three while managing the company’s highest-touch enterprise accounts.
She shares what good onboarding looks like when your goal is to show value from day one, why Bites decided to build their own CS platform instead of buying one, how AI is being woven into every part of the CS workflow, and why speaking outcomes instead of features is the most important mindset shift in customer success.
What You’ll Learn
- What Bites does and what the CS role looks like at a fast-growing L&D startup
- How Evgeniya splits her time between managing the team and running enterprise accounts
- What good onboarding looks like when the goal is showing value from the very first interaction
- What wearing many hats across different departments taught Evgeniya about client relationships
- Why speaking outcomes instead of features is the most important habit in CS
Key Insights & Takeaways
Onboarding makes or breaks the customer experience. Understanding the customer’s KPIs from day one and customizing the onboarding plan around their specific goals is what separates a good implementation from a forgettable one.
Show value from day one and every day after that. Every email, every QBR, every call should connect back to the business results the customer is getting. This is the basis of every customer conversation.
Building your own CS platform can be the right call. When the existing options don’t quite fit your needs, and the AI tools available today make building accessible, it’s worth exploring whether a custom solution serves your team better.
A central knowledge base unlocks AI at scale. When all your knowledge, playbooks, and customer data live in one place, AI can surface answers, generate QBR decks, and help CSMs get to information faster without digging.
Champions don’t always see the value that’s right in front of them. Being proactive, communicating results, and asking how things are going is not optional. It’s how you make sure the value you’re delivering is actually felt.
Podcast Transcript
Intro
Irina (0:07 – 0:46)
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 Evgeniya Ioffe, Senior Account Manager at Bites, a training and communication platform for frontline teams. Evgeniya, I’m really happy to have you here.
Thanks for joining! Really happy to be here. Before we dive in, you’ve worked across different worlds, and you are now Senior Account Manager at Bites.
Paint us a picture of your day-to-day there for your customers, and what does the work actually look like?
Evgeniya (0:46 – 1:51)
Bites is a platform for training and communication with employees, with a very big focus on frontline employees, but not just that. The idea is that we’re bringing a very modern training experience, both in terms of the content that we’re creating, the tools around it, and everything surrounding that. This overall is a very learning and development-centered world. We work with L&D, with operations, with HR, basically focused on creating the training, distributing the training, and just making the experience very nice and seamless for all of the sites.
I personally have been at Bites for over three years. Working at a startup, you get to wear many hats. I started helping out in CS, but since then I’ve had a chance to branch out to product, to support, to sales a little bit, and currently I’m in CS, managing a CS team of three. This basically means overseeing the team, overseeing the processes and the playbooks, mentoring and coaching them, and of course managing the high-touch enterprise customers as well.
How Evgeniya Splits Her Time Across the Team and Enterprise Accounts
Irina (1:52 – 2:00)
And with so many hats that you are wearing, what do you spend most of your time on? How do you distribute between all of them?
Evgeniya (2:00 – 3:47)
That’s a great question. At the moment, the main hat is definitely CS, after I’ve had a chance to touch many departments. Overall, I would say the main focus usually, day-to-day, is mentoring the team and strategizing the customer processes.
When I started at Bites, the department was a lot smaller, working with a lot less people, but the core focus has always been very simple. It’s delivering the best possible service to the customers and basically making sure that they see the value in the product and that we’re a partner in this learning transformation journey that they’re undergoing. The idea here is that we want to fully understand what is the goals and KPIs that brought them to Bites?
What do they want to achieve here? Then what is the best course of action to implement the tool and bring most value to the customer and help them reach their goals? With all of that being said, with the company growing and the team expanding and definitely the customer basis growing as well, it is very crucial that every player on the team knows how to conduct these processes and that each customer that comes in still receives the same level of service, the same level of partnership, even though I’m not there personally to manage each account.
Therefore, I would say I spent a lot of the time working with the CS team and with each CSM personally on ensuring that this is the case and that they’re able to have these conversations and manage these accounts in such a way that will bring them to success and to hitting the goals and so on. Of course, I would say the other big part is strategizing for the enterprise customers and ensuring we’re building a good plan going forward, that everything is all set and we’re leading them to success and hitting their goals as well. Overall, I would say it’s with Bites specifically.
It’s really interesting to see the really amazing learning transformations that kind of these organizations undergo when implementing this tool.
What Good Onboarding Looks Like at Bites
Irina (3:49 – 4:23)
I want to do a deep dive into one of the most important processes in customer success, which in my perspective is onboarding, because it’s the one that puts the foundation and basically determines the success or not of the customer that is joining. So I’m curious, when a new client comes on, what does good onboarding look like? What are you aiming for in the first month and how do you know when you’ve got there?
Evgeniya (4:24 – 6:37)
Onboarding, as you said, makes or breaks the experience for a customer. It’s crucial that it’s done properly. Without going into details, I would say the goal here is very simple and it’s not very Bites specific. It’s understanding the KPIs of the customer, what brought them to the product, what they’re being measured on, what their goals are, and what the current workflows are. Based on that, we take the onboarding playbook plan that we usually have and customize it to ensure that it’s something the customer is reaching, that it aligns with their goals. This can be all kinds of things: maybe connections that we’re going to make to their tools, or maybe changing a specific training workflow that they have, or doing a custom integration. It really depends and it’s very account specific. But the goal is that we’re onboarding them in a way that they will reach their goals and KPIs.
In addition to that, it’s crucial to show value to the customer in terms of what the tool is bringing. And it’s important to do it from day one and every day after that. This is actually always what I tell the team: this is the basis of every conversation they need to have, whether it’s an email they’re writing, a QBR they’re conducting, or a call they’re hopping on. It doesn’t matter who the person on the other end is. It’s always important to show the value that the product is delivering and what the business results are that they’re getting from that value.
Once we’re able to show that, translating it into training terms, it could be optimizing the training workflow, saving time on training they’re conducting while still improving results, improving success rates, improving the output of the teams being trained, or shortening the time it takes to create and implement training. There are many measurements you can go into here. But the idea is that once you’re able to show this value, it’s a really great indication that the onboarding is going well and that the implementation and usage are on track. And of course it doesn’t end there. We’re going to keep working with the account, but the goal is to show this as a success story.
The Operational Infrastructure Behind CS at Bites
Irina (6:39 – 6:56)
What is the operational infrastructure behind all of this? What do you need in order to be able to provide this level of service to your customers? What platforms are central to how you run your account’s day-to-day advice?
Evgeniya (6:56 – 7:03)
I would say that this is probably more of a company-wide thing, not CS, but we’re very big on Notion. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the platform, but it’s like a workspace too.
Irina (7:04 – 7:04)
We know.
Evgeniya (7:04 – 8:35)
It’s a document and database tool. The idea is that we’re storing all of the knowledge in one place and building a database, and this is not just CS, this is support, customer handover, basically anything that goes into that. It’s a very versatile tool because you can get very technical if you want to, there are many cool features you can utilize, or you can keep it very high level. And the AI layer that we have on top of that with Notion, where you can ask questions and it goes through the whole knowledge base, is super cool and it’s been working very well.
Other than that, we have HubSpot for managing and tracking clients, for quotes, for sales notes and communications. We have BI for dashboards and a great BI team that manages that. And Slack for internal communication.
I do want to mention one more tool. It’s not a very typical tool, but it’s something that we’re implementing, which is a CS platform. The time for it has come. We noticed that there is a need for a very centralized place that is very CS specific, where all of the customer measurements and so on are stored. The usual process for this, and I’m sure this is something you hear a lot, is that the organization will go out and buy a CS platform. That’s what we considered in the beginning. We got on a few calls, talked to a few companies, explored the options, spoke internally, and actually came to the conclusion that we want to build our own.
Irina (8:36 – 8:36)
Okay.
Evgeniya (8:36 – 9:11)
If we want to build our own, that’s going to give the exact answer to the needs that we have, both in terms of what it does, the workflows that you can build, the reports that are on it, what view we have for each CSM or leader or C-level that kind of, that, with the AI tools out there today, it’s definitely something that you can do. And actually I had a chance to sit down and fully plan this out and understand and really deeply think through what is the need? Like, what are we missing?
What would be helpful? And kind of plan that out. And this is actually in the works right now.
And I’m super excited for the result. I think it’s going to be a really good tool for the team.
How the Team Leverages AI Across CS Workflows
Irina (9:12 – 9:38)
I want to dig into the AI side of things, because you mentioned that AI sits on top of Notion. What are the use cases? How do you leverage it? Is it only for automations, or is it also for insights, customer data analysis, one-offs? Did you build agents? Tell me more about this.
Evgeniya (9:39 – 11:08)
There’s a lot of work being done with AI, and rightfully so. First of all, in the tools that we have, like Notion, we already use the AI layer. The idea is to build a central knowledge base with many tools connected to it. That allows anyone in the company, not just CS, to use it like an agent: you have a question, you ask it, you get a response on how to do something, what is the workflow, what is the playbook, maybe certain stats that you’re trying to pull.
This directly connects to the CS platform that we’re building, because the idea is that it’s going to work like an agent for the CSM team. Whether you need a specific usage stat or want to know what’s going on with an account, instead of going and digging for it, you’re just going to be able to ask a question, get a response, and move on with your day. It really helps optimize and improve CS workflows and helps the team get to information faster.
And also, if someone is making a QBR deck or an executive review deck, with the way that we’ve set it up and the knowledge in the central knowledge base, they’ll be able to say, build me a QBR deck, and they get it. It’s already something that we’re fully implementing with ChatGPT and Claude. But the idea is to make it as simple and straightforward as possible, which would save everyone a lot of time and help us deliver better results to the customer.
What Wearing Many Hats Taught Evgeniya About Client Relationships
Irina (11:10 – 11:45)
That’s awesome. I’m curious how it all works out for you guys, so I’m already planning a follow-up session. Let us know how the deployment of your own solution goes.
You mentioned that you’ve been wearing different hats, and I know that you did that previously as well. I’m curious, what did wearing every hat teach you about managing a relationship that still shows up in how you work with clients today?
Evgeniya (11:46 – 13:37)
First of all, I think it’s about having a very good relationship with the champion that you’re working with and ensuring that you’re listening to them. You’re not just pushing what you know from the product, but really listening and understanding the client’s needs, the goals they came with, why they bought the product and what they want from it, and ensuring that everything you do connects to that and helps the customer move it forward.
This is not Bites-specific. I think with every product that you buy or use, this is very important. And I actually got to experience this firsthand. When we went to look at different CS platforms, I got to be on the other side of the process, where you’re the buyer and you’re sharing your goals. And you can feel such a difference when the person on the other end is listening and really understanding what you want from them, versus when they’re like, yeah, okay, this is great, this is what the platform does.
I think that’s definitely the biggest one. And I know I’ve said this a few times, but definitely showing the value. With any process, customer success, sales, product, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, this is what they care about: that the product they bought is bringing them results and helping them get what they need. If you’re not doing that, the customer is not going to stay.
It’s very important that you’re bringing value, and with a good product that’s pretty easy to show. But it’s also important that you’re showing it to them, because champions don’t always see it and understand it, even when it’s right in front of them. It’s very important to be proactive, to communicate this, to ask them how it’s going, and to make sure that the process is working for them, because this is something they want and expect.
The Habit That Still Shows Up in How Evgeniya Runs Accounts
Irina (13:38 – 13:46)
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?
Evgeniya (13:47 – 14:54)
I would say it’s really important, and it took me a long time to realize this: you shouldn’t speak features. You should speak the outcomes that the features bring.
This is something that comes up when I speak to my CSMs, when we teach them, and when we work with different accounts and unpack what is going on and how we should present things, whether it’s the process, the QBRs, or anything else. This is the most important thing at the end of the day, because you can say we released this very cool feature and it does this and that, but the customer is not going to care unless they’re able to connect it to what that feature is going to give them. What is the outcome at the end of the day? How is it going to help them reach their goal? How is it going to simplify their life? How is it going to give them something to show their boss?
It’s a bit of a mindset change in terms of how you think, speak, and present things, but it’s a really important one to make, to ensure that you’re bringing customers to success and speaking in a more executive language as well.
Irina (14:55 – 15:12)
Evgeniya, this was a really interesting conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today.
To everyone listening, thanks for tuning in. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning and mastering customer success.
