In this episode of Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas sits down with Noémie Tosser, Customer Success Manager at Simundia, a digital coaching platform helping organizations move from ambition to action. Noémie came from a background in complex account management and translation before landing in a role where success can’t be measured in clicks or logins.
She shares what customer success looks like when the product is human behavior change, how she helps HR teams understand the value of coaching without breaking confidentiality, what she learned from working in an industry disrupted by AI, and why taking a step back is one of the most important habits she has developed.
What You’ll Learn
- What Simundia does and what the CSM role looks like when the product is coaching
- How Noémie measures customer success when the outcomes are behavioral, not transactional
- What the hardest part of the job has been and why understanding HR challenges takes time
- Whether industry-specific knowledge is actually necessary when joining a new CS role
- What complex account management at Acolad taught her that still shows up today
Key Insights & Takeaways
Success in coaching CS is behavioral, not numerical. Satisfaction scores, concrete actions taken, and patterns across a population are the closest things to a KPI in a world where outcomes are deeply personal and confidential.
Industry knowledge helps but is not mandatory. Knowing HR vocabulary might give you a small head start, but every company’s context is so specific that you will always be learning regardless of your background.
AI is changing what coaching focuses on, not whether it matters. Helping a new generation that over-relies on AI to build self-confidence and communication skills is now a real coaching use case.
Use AI to improve your work, not to do your work. Summarizing notes, identifying next steps, and creating slides faster are legitimate uses. Replacing judgment and human understanding is not.
CS is not platform support. The job is deeply human: constant client calls, stakeholder management, and helping organizations understand what their people actually need.
Podcast Transcript
Intro
Irina (0:06 – 0:44)
Welcome to Mastering CS Candid Leader Insight, 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 Noémie Tosser, Customer Success Manager at Simundia, a digital coaching platform helping organizations move from ambition to action. Noémie, I’m really happy to have you here.
Thanks for joining! Before we dive in, help me understand your role at Simundia today.
What does your role actually look like and who are you working with?
Noémie (0:45 – 1:46)
So I’m a Customer Success Manager at Simundia. I started almost a year ago now, and my role is basically to make sure that the companies working with us today have access to what they signed for.
My main contacts are the HR teams from those companies. My role is really to help them have access to our platform, but also make sure that they have the analysis they are looking for in terms of who is doing what in their coaching sessions, even if coaching is, of course, confidential, so it’s always just the bigger picture, let’s say, to help them and answer any of their questions. I am also in contact with the coachees, the collaborators from those companies who are starting a coaching journey with us, helping them with my team and making sure that everything goes smoothly on the platform from the very first login until the end of the coaching path.
How a Day at Simundia Actually Looks
Irina (1:48 – 1:54)
And in that setup, what do you spend most of your time on? How does a day at Simundia look like for you?
Noémie (1:55 – 3:09)
There are no two days that are similar, of course, but if I have to explain my day, I have a list of tasks for each client that I try to set up as soon as possible so that it goes well over time. I’m reaching out a lot by email and I have a lot of client meetings as well.
What takes the most time is making sure I understand the expectations of our clients. Coaching is not something that is always measurable with KPIs. It’s a little different. They will use coaching for a lot of different reasons. It could be for promoting certain elements within their companies, but it could also be to help people who are in a transitional environment. So really making sure to frame as much as possible what the expectations of our clients are and making sure that we are answering those expectations.
That is what I spend the most time on, and also trying to give results and concrete analysis of what is going on in the coaching journey of their collaborators and give them some elements of how coaching is working for their populations.
How to Measure Success When the Product Is Coaching
Irina (3:10 – 3:30)
You already mentioned it, Simundia’s product is coaching. So that means helping people genuinely change how they work.
How do you actually measure whether a customer is succeeding or not? That’s a great question.
Noémie (3:30 – 4:59)
It’s a question that we ask ourselves as well. We have some elements first around satisfaction. I think this is the first really concrete thing we see: at the end of a coaching path, the coachee is able to give us feedback through our platform. How much did they like their coaching experience? How much did they like the coach they were in touch with? But also what concrete actions did they put into place thanks to coaching? And in a more general way, what would they say about this experience?
Even if everything is always confidential, when we have a big population it gives us really concrete ideas of what are the most common actions that have been put into place following the coaching journey. Those elements, I think, are the most concrete values that we can bring to our customers.
And sometimes it could be that across most of the coaching paths of their collaborators, we see something that comes up a lot. For instance, the struggle of going from collaborator to manager. Becoming a manager is an issue. And we can tell them, we think your population would really benefit from more training on this subject. So this also helps us give recommendations to the HR teams and suggest something they could do in the future to help their populations, based on what we learn during the coaching journey.
The Hardest Part of the First Year
Irina (5:00 – 5:18)
You know what I’m curious, besides defining how does a successful coaching journey looks like, what has been the hardest part to figure out since you joined? What were the hardest moments during this one year journey with the team?
Noémie (5:19 – 6:16)
I would say understanding the HR challenges, because I don’t come from an HR background at all. This is something that, as I said, is not really tangible. It’s not like working with numbers, KPIs, or margins, which I was used to in the past. It’s working with people. So it’s really different.
And I think there are as many challenges as we have different clients. That was the hardest for me: getting to know my clients, understanding the challenges they’re facing, and also becoming a real advisor on what they could do to evolve. It’s something that I’m not struggling with today, but I’m still learning a lot, because as I said, there are a lot of different contexts and a lot of different clients.
Does Industry Knowledge Actually Matter in CS?
Irina (6:17 – 6:44)
You mentioned the fact that you had to pick up on industry specifics in HR. Do you think that the industry-specific elements is something that every CSM should basically make sure that he or she has when he joins a new role?
Do you see it as an advantage of the industry-specific elements?
Noémie (6:45 – 7:24)
I really don’t think so, because it really depends on the people you are in touch with. Even if you have a good experience in HR, you might be a little more familiar with the vocabulary, but the situations are really specific from one company to another, so you will still have to learn a lot. In the end, the HR context comes from the company you are working with. So even if you have an HR background, you also need to know about the context of that specific company. It can be a small advantage, but it’s not mandatory to do what I do today.
What Complex Account Management Taught Noémie About CS
Irina (7:26 – 7:41)
Now I want to deep dive into your background because before CS, you spent years managing complex accounts and the team at Acolad. What did that world teach you that still shows up in how you work with clients today?
Noémie (7:42 – 9:21)
A lot, as it was my first experience and one in which I evolved a lot over time. The first thing would be organizational skills. I was working with a lot of complex clients on a lot of complex projects, so I developed a way to organize myself that works really well today and helps me a lot to know what I should be doing in my CS life. Also how to prioritize, because as we talked about earlier, there are a lot of unexpected things that come up daily in the life of a CSM.
It also taught me how to work with several stakeholders. I work with HR and our collaborators, but internally I’m also working with our commercial teams, our sales team, our product team, and a lot of different people from different backgrounds. I loved it in my previous experience and I still really enjoy it today.
And finally, with AI changing a lot of things in the world today, my previous experience helped me embrace those changes. At Acolad, it was a translation industry that was really impacted by AI, and not always in a positive way. So today I think I have a much more positive approach to AI thanks to what I went through during my last professional experience.
Irina (9:21 – 9:32)
Speaking of this, for sure AI is changing how people work every day. Does that make coaching more important or does it change what coaching even means?
Noémie (9:33 – 10:22)
I would say both. We had a very interesting discussion with one of our clients a few days ago about how to address AI through coaching. For instance, you have a new generation today who would always go to AI for anything and everything, and not always in the right way. So how, through coaching, can you show them that they don’t have to use AI for everything? It ends up being a lot about self-confidence and how to communicate. So I think it’s more about shifting the focus of coaching rather than replacing it. Coaching is still really important, even in an industry where AI is taking a lot more place today.
How Noémie Uses AI in Her Day-to-Day
Irina (10:23 – 10:38)
And now I have to ask, how do you leverage AI in your day-to-day work? As the CSM, what are your practical use cases? When is AI your go-to and when is it not?
Noémie (10:38 – 11:46)
On a very practical basis, we are working with AI on a daily basis. This is something that we also offer to our coaches, giving them access to AI agents to help them in addition to their coaching journey. In my case, I use AI to improve my work, but not to do my work.
For instance, if I have a meeting with a client and I took a lot of notes, I would use AI to say, okay, based on my notes and on the recording, if we have one, can you sum it up for me and help me identify what the priorities and next steps are? Always checking the AI results afterwards, of course. And one thing we are trying to use more today is also to help us create content, for instance slides that we need to present to our clients, to have more detailed analysis a bit quicker thanks to AI. But it’s just an improvement, not a replacement of what we were already doing before.
What Most People Get Wrong About CS
Irina (11:48 – 11:57)
I’m curious, when you look at CS from the outside and now also from the inside, what do you think most teams get wrong?
Noémie (11:59 – 12:36)
In my personal case, none of my friends had ever heard of a CS job before. When I explained what I was doing, their understanding at first was that I was basically always behind a computer, not talking to anyone, only doing platform support and things like that. Whereas it’s very different. I’m always calling clients, always in meetings with clients. So yeah, I think that’s what strikes me the most about the conception people have of what CS is.
Where the CSM Role Starts and Where It Ends
Irina (12:38 – 13:06)
Staying on this, where does the CSM job in your particular case start and where does it end? Because your customers need their people to actually change behavior, not just log in to the platform. How do you actually help them achieve that? Where does the job start, where does it end, and where does it fall outside the CSM’s responsibility?
Where does the job start? Where does it end? Where doesn’t fall under the CSM responsibility anymore?
Noémie (13:07 – 14:26)
Yeah, it’s a really interesting question, I think. I would say the limit is when our clients say they want someone to change completely, to do a 360 change. That’s not something that is possible because coaching is only, we define coaching as a way to identify your strengths and your areas of development.
But the coach is a facilitator. It’s not a therapist, it’s not a trainer. He’s here to help you get an idea of today, what can you work on to evolve in your professional way?
Because we are focusing on the professional, of course. So when you have a client that said, today I want to offer coaching to a population who is close to burnout and all those elements, we often say that’s great to do, but coaching is not a solution for people who are in close to burnout or who have other issues than professional issues and all those elements, we try to always make a boundaries and the coach we are working on also are aware of that and they will let us know if tomorrow they need a collaborator, who they feel coaching is not what they should do today, but something else maybe.
Irina (14:27 – 14:32)
So you are also saying no to customers, I would say, or maybe redirect them.
Noémie (14:33 – 14:54)
We redirect them. Actually, I never had the case, so that’s great. I would say in this case, we will tell them that it’s more a psychological accompaniment that they should do instead of really a coaching journey with trying to focus on bettering your leadership, your communication, etc.
This cannot answer to everything, of course.
The Mindset Shift That Changed How Noémie Shows Up at Work
Irina (14:54 – 15:10)
You’ve been in environments where mentoring others was a big part of the job. Is there a piece of advice or something someone told you or something coaching taught you that generally changed how you show up at work?
Noémie (15:11 – 16:19)
The first thing I think would be to trust yourself and believe in yourself in terms of you are the expert today. Today in front of my clients, I know that I am the specialist of the platform. I am the specialist of coaching.
I am here to advise them. And I think in the past, that was something I had tendencies to struggle with, saying the client should always be right, which I think shouldn’t always be the case. And another thing that I learned a lot through mentoring and managing people is that we are not working on open heart surgery.
So any emergency is really relative. We don’t need to drop everything in front of an emergency, even if sometimes it needs to move quick, of course. But I think that we should always try to take a step back to see the biggest picture instead of always being in a rush to answer any needs that our client might have or any questions, etc.
For your own sanity, I would say this is really important to be able to take a small distance.
Irina (16:20 – 16:46)
Noemie, this was great. Not every CSM works in a world where success means people actually changing. And I think that came through really clear today.
So thank you so much for joining me. Thank you very much. And thank you for your questions.
They were very interesting. To everyone listening, thanks for tuning in. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning and mastering customer success.
