In this episode of Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas speaks with Sarah Chipps, Manager of Customer Success at FMX, a platform that helps teams manage facilities and operations.
Sarah shares how growing through multiple Customer Success roles inside the same company shaped her leadership approach, why communication evolves at every stage of a CS career, and how FMX scaled its Customer Success organization through specialization, stronger systems, and operational efficiency.
She also breaks down the realities of scaling a CS team, implementing a customer success platform, balancing efficiency with customer experience, and what it actually takes to move from an IC role into leadership.
What You’ll Learn
- How communication changes across different CS roles
- Why specialization becomes necessary as CS teams scale
- The signals that show a CS organization needs structural change
- How FMX approached scaling without creating burnout
- The reasoning behind implementing a new customer success platform
- How automation improved operational efficiency during handoffs
- What helped Sarah transition from IC to leadership
- The first steps to building a Customer Success organization from scratch
Key Insights & Takeaways
Communication evolves with seniority: Each stage of Sarah’s career required a different communication style, from frontline support to executive stakeholder management.
Specialization improves scalability and efficiency: As FMX grew, separating implementation, retention, and support responsibilities helped improve customer experience and protect team bandwidth.
Scaling requires constant iteration: Processes rarely stay fixed during growth. Teams need flexibility to adjust systems, workflows, and structures continuously.
Operational efficiency matters as much as customer satisfaction: Simplifying the tech stack and automating repetitive workflows created measurable time savings across the CS team.
Leadership requires more than IC excellence: Moving into management came from investing in leadership skills, solving organizational problems, and helping teammates succeed.
Customer Success starts with leadership alignment: Strong CS organizations depend on leadership teams that prioritize customer outcomes alongside business growth.
Podcast transcript
Growing through multiple Customer Success roles
Irina (0:07 – 0:45)
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 Sarah Chipps, Manager of Customer Success at FMX, a platform that helps teams manage their facilities and operations. Sarah, I’m really happy to have you here.
You’ve grown through a lot of CS roles in the same company. Looking back, what did each step teach you that helped you move to the next one?
Sarah (0:46 – 2:16)
Yeah, absolutely. I would say overall, the biggest one is going to be effective communication. So the frontline support was all about learning to communicate in a way that our customers understood.
Moving into the CSM role, it was a lot more of communicating or learning to communicate in a way that allows me to deeply understand the customer, whether that’s asking the right questions or listening for the things that the customer is not saying that can inform our next steps. In the enterprise CSM role, it really changed to learning to best communicate priorities to larger groups that have lots of stakeholders that may be competing or competing priorities. Working in the B2B space, the people that we’re working with, especially I have an implementation lens, especially during implementation, working with our software is a small part of their job.
It’s not a big part. Usually, it’s supportive for them. So oftentimes, they have a lot of competing priorities, especially in that enterprise space.
What I found was that it was incredibly important to be able to hone the way that I presented information to customers in order to generate that buy-in throughout implementation as well to engage stakeholders and executive stakeholders, executive sponsors specifically.
What a CS manager actually spends time on
Irina (2:18 – 2:30)
Today, you are managing the customer success team at FMX. If someone followed you around for a week, what would they actually see you spending most of your time on?
Sarah (2:30 – 2:56)
That’s a great question. It’s really variable, to be totally honest. I would say about half my time is spent working directly with my teammates that I oversee, whether that’s coaching or checking out on accounts. Occasionally, we’ll do some kind of escalation call where I’m reaching out to customers just to seek their experience and see what next steps we can align on.
Sorry, I think I’m frozen. Can you hear me okay?
Irina (2:57 – 2:59)
Yes, I can hear you. All good, all good. Okay, perfect.
Sarah (3:00 – 4:07)
So outside of that, I do administer our customer success platform that we use internally. We just implemented that platform and I helped with the implementation kind of side of things with that.
So I am, as of right now, diving into that platform a lot of the time, just making sure that the rollout is going well. Outside of that, I do spend a lot of time seeking, I don’t want to say seeking problems, but maybe seeking solutions. I really love the strategy side of things.
As a manager, not necessarily director or VP level, it’s not quite as much of my responsibility to look towards strategy and things like that, but it’s what I find the most fun. So I’m always trying to find something to improve either for my team or across the company. So I would say a fair amount of my time is spent seeking those solutions as well as attending things like webinars, just to make sure that I am at the top of my game and able to make as big of an impact as possible.
How FMX structures its Customer Success organization
Irina (4:08 – 4:16)
Tell me more about your team. How is it set up today, and what roles and responsibilities do you see inside?
Sarah (4:18 – 5:50)
So my team specifically works with implementation. So we have a pretty complex software. The end user experience is really simple, but getting it set up and configured can be quite a task.
And we work with state and local government and K-12 or higher education customers. So they are super busy. So a lot of what we’re doing is wrangling our customers, getting them involved in the implementation process.
With our implementation team, we’re working on a 60-day schedule with our customers. Once we’re finished working with them, we hand them off to what we call our customer account manager or customer outcome managers. These guys are our retention team.
They work with our customers for the long term. And then outside of that, of course, in our CS department, we do have our frontline and technical support as well. So what I found, especially for the age of our company, we tend to have pretty mature systems.
As we’ve scaled, we’ve specialized the team, which each time has come with efficiency improvements. Of course, I think that there is a right time to start that specialization. It does come with, it really came out of necessity as we scaled, but we found that specialization has really helped in our managing our customers, making sure we’re staying efficient and really protecting that gross margin.
The signals that pushed the team toward specialization
Irina (5:50 – 6:02)
Tell me more about that specialization and what were the signals that it’s time to move into this direction? What were the things that pointed out to this?
Sarah (6:03 – 7:11)
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think oftentimes it was finding that either our customers needed a different level of support within the different phases of the journey, that our teammates didn’t have the bandwidth for. In those instances, then we needed to find a way to specialize so that we could offer that great customer experience at each part of the journey in order to make sure that they are getting what they need out of the team that they’re working with, while still allowing our teammates to be effective and not burn out.
I think that some of it comes with the team size. If you’re still working with a really small team, it’s hard to specialize without really getting siloed. But what we found was that once we were unable to gain more efficiency just through process change, as we scaled, usually that was the time when we needed to specialize so that we could silo those responsibilities in a way that is the most effective for the customer and for our team.
Scaling challenges, burnout, and operational maturity
Irina (7:12 – 7:34)
Tell me more about the scaling challenges, because somehow everybody wants to start the scaling process, but they don’t know how to tackle it. What do they need to implement first? What was it in your case?
How did you prepare for the scaling phase? And what are the things that, even with a lot of preparations, took you by surprise?
Sarah (7:36 – 9:31)
That is such a great question. I think that starting with the surprise, what I found is you’re always going to have to make iterations. And so being comfortable with allowing yourself to make changes and not just pick something, stick with it, and say, this is going to be how it has to be.
We are, of course, still in the middle of scaling. I would say we’re no longer a startup at this point. We’re in that scaling process. And for us, I think that the challenges come with just kind of availability and what our team is able to do with the team we have.
So what we noticed with scaling and how we needed to do it, was that a lot of it comes back to bandwidth and effectiveness, as well as our customer success. If we’re finding that our customers, their success level is dropping, or our teammates are really pushed to the limit, getting burnt out, or things like that, those are the times when we needed to implement something new. I think that headcount, of course, helps, but we have to be careful about who we bring in and how we do that.
You don’t want to just throw more people at a problem. I think that understanding our processes is incredibly important. As we scale, good documentation and an understanding, little more of a black and white.
There’s not always black and white in customer success, but a little bit more of an understanding as to the processes we follow so that as we bring more people in or we expand our business, we’re able to still provide the same level of high satisfaction customer experience while still being able to manage across the organization as it’s getting bigger.
Building the business case for a new CSP platform
Irina (9:32 – 9:50)
You know what? I’m curious. You mentioned that you just implemented the CSP solution.
How did you get the internal approval for the budget? How did you convince the senior team, the senior management team, to invest in this? What were your arguments?
Sarah (9:50 – 11:55)
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think, first and foremost, one of the biggest problems that we saw in our previous system was that it was too involved for us as a CS team or CS leaders to be able to administer it ourselves. We currently don’t have an ops, a CS-specific ops person on our rep ops team.
We were leaving a lot on the table as far as being able to actually see what’s going on and leverage the system to the best of its ability, as well as being able to even bubble up those insights to our higher leadership team. It was definitely, I would say, an easier sell in that our rep ops team and our leadership team can understand that we could be more effective, but they don’t necessarily need to add headcount to a CS ops person if we went with something that our CS leadership could administer. Thankfully, also at FMX, our CEO is very dedicated to customer success.
So while we still do have to advocate at times for ourselves or for the needs of the customer, it’s, I think, a lot easier at our organization than some organizations may find just because our upper-level leadership is so invested in the customer experience. I will say part of what allowed us to get that investment was being able to give the upper-level leadership an idea of what goals we’re looking for in the new system, not just, oh, it’s hard to look at this, or we want to be able to see things a little bit better or be able to administer it a little bit better. It was helpful to be able to pick out specific processes that we want to be able to improve using a new software in order to show that outcome outside of just an investment and being able to see a little bit more into what’s going on.
Simplifying systems and improving efficiency with automation
Irina (11:56 – 12:04)
Can you tell me what the goals were and the things that you would measure against?
Sarah (12:04 – 15:04)
Part of it was simplifying our tech stack from an implementation lens, since that’s what I’m overseeing. We were utilizing a project management software outside of our CRM and our CSP. So our CSMs were having to go to lots of different areas to gather information, to prep for meetings, to make sure that they have everything they need for the customer.
And we were really looking for something that was going to allow us to have one singular, maybe two accounting sales for us, sources of truth for our customers, especially from the CS perspective. So part of it was looking for that kind of source of truth and to cut down on that tech stack. Part of it was also looking for improvements in efficiency.
So right now we’re really focusing on efficiency in our gross margin as well. So trying to find ways that we can build efficiency, utilizing our tech stack better with what we were using before, which was Gainsight. We were not, since we were not able to administer it ourselves, we weren’t really able to utilize the more in-depth processes of the software to build efficiencies.
So for example, our CSM team does handoff documentation at the end of implementation to hand off the customer to their customer outcome manager with all the information they may need. We work really closely together. We’re always there if the COM needs some help or needs a little bit of context, but we want to have really great documentation for the long term.
We found originally that it was taking us about 20 minutes per customer to fill out that documentation because they were going to so many different places. My goal, pie in the sky, outside of being able to manage our project, our implementation projects within our CSP, was to be able to automate that process. So we, as part of the evaluation process, we’re looking for systems that have AI capabilities and not just like we have AI, but it doesn’t actually build any outcomes.
So with our CSP, we were able to use their AI automations to automate a big part of the handoff documentation process and gathering all the information since it was all in one system and not multiple systems. And the AI automation has saved us about 15 minutes per customer. So we now have over, we rolled it out about three weeks ago and we’ve saved 14 hours in handing off our customers across the team.
So it’s really looking for that, the leverage of what we could use our system for rather than just a repository for information that gave us something to look for in our next system.
Moving into leadership
Irina (15:06 – 15:26)
Indeed. I want to switch from processes and tools to the team. And I want to ask you, what did it actually take to become a manager?
Was it more about the mindset, the earning trust internally, learning to coach? What was it in your case?
Sarah (15:27 – 17:47)
Yeah, absolutely. I think that a common misconception in moving from an individual contributor role to a leadership role is just that you need to excel at your IC role first. I think that’s important, of course, to become an expert in the role you’re in currently.
And it’s helpful. I might be biased because I came from essentially every CS role we had before going into management, but it’s helpful to have that frontline experience. But what I find is that where people get stuck is getting, becoming excellent in their current role without investing into either themselves leadership wise or the company and finding kind of those extra projects or extra solutions that you can offer.
I have, my goal when joining FMX was to go into management. I love leadership. I love strategy, and I love making sure that people are empowered to do their best work.
So my whole time here working at FMX was looking towards that leadership role. And I spent a lot of time in webinars, both for like individual contributors, but also webinars about the CS industry in general and going to even like the CCO webinars, even though I was an IC and now I’m a manager. So it was a lot of investing in myself and my leadership qualities in the industry itself, outside of my IC responsibilities.
And I, when I have teammates who are looking for that next step, they want to move into management, always recommend seeking out those solutions that you can provide to the team, finding ways that you can make an impact across the organization, as well as your team, just to, because that’s so much of what a manager does, it’s proof of concept. If I’m looking at someone and trying to see if they are ready to be a manager, and they’re just telling me I’m ready for the next step. I’m great at what I do now.
What do I do to get there? Nine times out of 10, it’s an investment in the team and helping teammates grow or seeking projects where you can bring solutions to the table.
The first priorities when building Customer Success from scratch
Irina (17:51 – 17:59)
When you walk into a company that says we need to build customer success properly, what’s the first thing you actually look at?
Sarah (17:59 – 20:01)
I would start with deeply trying to understand the existing leadership’s philosophy on customer success and evaluate if that’s something that we may need to adjust a little bit. I find, and I think we’re all biased in the customer success space, but I find that the success and outcomes of the customer are what drive, of course, the company. If our customers aren’t happy, if we’re churning our customers, then we’re paying more for our customers than we’re bringing in.
I think that buy-in from the top down as to what’s important to us in our lens of our customers is incredibly important. If I joined an organization where it seemed the customer wasn’t one of the highest priorities, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the highest, but one of the highest priorities, I would start by trying to level set with leadership as to how we need to prioritize the customer experience. After that, I would look next into the product, try to deeply understand the product, both from the end user perspective, but also from the internal perspective, what it takes for a customer to be successful within the product, what it takes to get them there so that they’re actually getting value out of it.
Then from there, I would want to deeply understand our current customers as well as the ideal customer profile. Once I understand, have the context essentially of the leadership goals as well as the way the product works and how the product adds value to the customer, I think I would start after that by interviewing customers to see where their value comes from, what their experience has been so far, and then how they would see us improving in the future. Once I have that deep understanding as to the context, then it’s time to start building processes.
But it does take, I think, a deep understanding as to the customer, the product, and then alignment with leadership as to how high of a priority the customer experience is.
Irina (20:03 – 20:17)
And the last question before we wrap up, if you had to rebuild a customer success organization from scratch tomorrow with a team of only three people, what roles or capabilities would you prioritize first?
Sarah (20:18 – 21:32)
Great question. With a team of three people, you’re not quite at the point yet where you can totally specialize. I think first and foremost, an incredibly important amount of support is that frontline support.
So I want to make sure that our customers have somewhere to go if they have questions, if they need something, break five quickly to make sure that they’re successful. Outside of that, again, I’m biased, but I do think a strong implementation is incredibly important. If they can never get that first value, then they’re not going to continue to get value from us.
They’re not going to renew. So I would want to make sure that we have a strong implementation process in place. Likely, what it would look like is the person doing implementation is also doing the retention work at that point, just due to headcount, essentially.
Ideally in the future, I’d like to see the team specialize so that we can have people that focus specifically on retention and people that focus specifically on getting the customer set up for success. But early on, I would want to make sure that we have that direct frontline support as well as support throughout the customer journey. So I do think that likely at least one person would be just on that frontline support while we’d have one to two people on the full customer journey.
Irina (21:34 – 22:05)
Sarah, this was an insightful conversation and I enjoyed hearing your perspective on growing through different CS roles and what it actually takes to move into leadership and how you handle this part. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me today. And to everyone listening, thanks for being here with us.
Until next time, stay curious, keep learning, and mastering customer success.
