In this episode of Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas sits down with Victor Romijn, Customer Success Manager at Runner.ai, an AI chatbot that helps hotels and holiday parks communicate with their guests. Victor came into CS from a background in marketing and community management, and brings an unusual additional dimension to the role: years of experience as an improv coach and trainer.
He shares what it’s like to be a one-person CS team at a fast-growing startup, how he manages enterprise accounts alongside smaller ones without losing anyone in the process, how he uses Claude to rewrite WhatsApp templates and prepare for tough client meetings, and what improv theatre taught him about running customer relationships.
What You’ll Learn
- What Runner.ai does and what the CSM role looks like at a fast-growing hospitality AI startup
- What good onboarding actually means when your customers range from boutique hotels to large European chains
- How Victor manages a full portfolio of accounts as the only CSM on the team
- What a healthy customer looks like in the hospitality SaaS context
- What operational infrastructure keeps a one-person CS team running
Key Insights & Takeaways
Onboarding is a trust hurdle, not just a technical setup. Getting a customer live in two weeks is one thing. Understanding what they actually want to achieve and configuring the product around that is what onboarding really means.
Starting small with enterprise clients is a feature, not a compromise. Running a pilot with one or two locations, proving value, and then rolling out across the chain is a repeatable and effective expansion motion.
Healthy customers use new features. If a customer isn’t adopting the latest releases, that’s a red flag worth investigating.
Quick adaptation is the core skill in startup CS. The product changes constantly. The ability to pivot without resistance is what keeps relationships intact.
The post-go-live meeting is one of the most important meetings you’ll have. Checking in quickly after launch, while things can still be fixed, is where real onboarding value is created.
Podcast Transcript
Intro
Irina (0:06 – 0:30)
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 Victor Romijn, Customer Success Manager at Runner.ai, an AI chatbot that helps hotels and holiday parks communicate with their guests. Victor, I’m really happy to have you here.
Thanks for joining!
Victor (0:30 – 0:32)
Thanks a lot for inviting me!
From Marketing to CS: What Victor’s Day-to-Day Looks Like at Runner.ai
Irina (0:33 – 0:51)
Before we dive in, you came into customer success after years in marketing and community management, and now you are a CSM at Runner.ai. Paint us a picture of your day-to-day there, who are your customers, and what does the work actually look like?
Victor (0:51 – 2:11)
I have a background in marketing and community management. I’ve done it for around 10 years, but after that time, I felt it was time for something new, and customer success came into my path.
Currently, I’m working at Runner.ai as a customer success manager. We are a startup, we’ve existed for three and a half years now, and we are growing very fast. So most of my daily work goes into onboarding new customers and doing support. I would like it to be more proactive, focusing on our clients, but sometimes the business asks something different and you do what’s needed. So certainly a lot of support and onboarding.
The customers we work with are, as you mentioned, a big range, going from boutique hotels with 12 rooms to big chains with hotels of 200 rooms and more, or holiday parks with up to 100 objects, as they call them, or holiday houses. Some names that you might know are Van der Valk in the Netherlands, Center Parcs, which is a big holiday park all around Europe, Westport Hotels, Amrath Hotels, Bilderberg, just to name a few.
Irina (2:12 – 2:14)
Because onboarding is your specialty.
Victor (2:16 – 2:35)
Yeah, onboarding. In my previous job, I did onboarding for a SaaS company that makes an app to onboard new employees.
And what I’m currently doing is onboarding new customers, which is the same, but also different.
What Good Onboarding Looks Like at Runner.ai
Irina (2:36 – 2:48)
I want to ask you, what does good onboarding look like at Runnr?
Because you mentioned this difference. What are you aiming for early on? And how do you know you’ve got there?
Victor (2:49 – 3:21)
Part of onboarding is the setup. That’s the technical process part of it, which can be really easy. On our end, it usually takes up to two weeks, but then it’s live.
But onboarding to me is also a trust hurdle. Really getting to know the client, what are their goals, what are they aiming for in using the product? Because if you know that, then you also know how to change the setup to their needs to make sure that they actually achieve the goals they want.
How Early Is CS Involved in the Sales Process?
Irina (3:23 – 3:43)
Tell me one thing, in order to be able to understand your customers in this matter, are you part of the sales conversations? Are you guys involved early on and brought by the sales team early? Or basically it’s a post-sales handover once everything is set it up?
Victor (3:44 – 4:45)
Usually it’s a post-sales handover, except for the larger deals. For the big chains, the deals that involve a rollout of 15 to 20 different locations, we are at the table in the earlier talks as well, because we need to plan it and work together to make sure the deal is won.
With those larger deals, we usually start out small. We do one or two hotels first, they test it out, they give feedback, we improve. After that they believe in it, they see the value, and then they roll out to multiple hotels. We’ve done this trick, I call it a trick, already multiple times.
Amrath is a great example. We tried it with two hotels, had great contact with the team, I talked to them every week, and after that they made the decision to roll it out across all their hotels. And that’s amazing.
Irina (4:45 – 5:02)
It’s basically like a pilot where you have the chance to gain and earn the trust of the client. And then everything that happens afterwards has a strong, strong foundation.
I can totally relate to this.
Victor (5:03 – 5:03)
Yeah, exactly.
How the CS Team Is Structured
Irina (5:04 – 5:34)
You mentioned enterprise customers, which makes me think you are serving a vast range of customers, from the smaller ones you mentioned at the beginning to bigger accounts. Is the CS team split between smaller accounts and bigger accounts, or does each CSM carry all of them? How are you guys structured?
Victor (5:34 – 5:37)
Well, I am the CSM team. Okay.
Irina (5:37 – 5:39)
You are the one CSM.
Victor (5:40 – 6:08)
I have every account, but of course we look at how much time I invest in every client. The larger enterprise clients get a bit more of my attention than the smaller clients, but we don’t forget them. We set up webinars and other ways of communication, and we have our support, which I’m also managing. With the larger customers, I talk to them every week, every two weeks, or more often.
How One CSM Manages a Full Portfolio
Irina (6:09 – 6:24)
This changes the flow of the conversation a bit, because now I need to ask you: how do you manage as a one-person team? What did you do in order to be able to handle the whole portfolio on your own?
Victor (6:25 – 7:36)
That’s indeed very difficult. I want to do more proactive work as I’ve done before. What I’m doing currently is trying to manage larger accounts at headquarters level. So really having two or maybe three contact persons instead of one contact per hotel, which already solves a lot. Instead of managing 27 hotels, you only need to manage five people, which scales things down a bit.
For the smaller accounts, I don’t have recurring check-ins or I speak to them only once every six months, so I can manage it better. And with our tool, it’s not needed to talk to them every week because it just works on the backend, which makes it easier.
Also, in hospitality, you have a big flow of peak season and low season. Currently we’re in low season, so this is usually the moment to talk more to the clients. In peak season, we talk less to the clients because they’re working all day and going hard.
What a Healthy Customer Looks Like
Irina (7:37 – 7:46)
Now, speaking of this, why the hotel is fast onboarding? How do you measure whether things are going well? What does healthy look like?
Victor (7:47 – 8:36)
Healthy is multiple things. Of course it’s having good numbers, high engagement, a lot of guests using the tool and being happy with it. We can answer a lot of the guests’ questions, but I also think a healthy customer is one that uses all the latest features.
We keep developing and releasing new features at a very high pace, and if I see that some hotels aren’t using them, that’s a red flag and I need to get in contact with them. And I think a healthy client is also an engaged client, which means that whenever we cannot answer a guest’s question, that hotel actually picks up and takes over where needed.
Irina (8:39 – 9:01)
Because you are a one-person team, I have to ask: what is the operational infrastructure behind all of this? What tools, what processes, how are you leveraging technology to be able to handle all of this? Because if it’s not manpower, it needs to be technology.
Victor (9:02 – 9:54)
We use HubSpot for our onboarding processes. We use HubSpot services for each client, and that goes through a pipeline showing which stage of onboarding they are in. I do that together with one of my colleagues, she’s the head of onboarding, so we manage that together because there are so many new clients coming in.
We also use Confluence for internal documentation. We have Slack internally, as a lot of startups do, and we also use Slack with some of our largest clients and partners. We use Fireflies to record all our meetings, make transcripts, and help us with follow-ups. And of course Claude to help out sometimes with emails, translations, and some strategic things every now and then.
Irina (9:55 – 10:06)
And basically also you live in HubSpot and that’s the central piece for documenting everything at the customer level, right?
Victor (10:07 – 10:29)
We use HubSpot for the onboarding, but also for the help desk. I’ve written all the articles that we use for our knowledge base for the clients. Our support is in HubSpot. Our health scoring is also in HubSpot, which we use to see which clients are in the red and need some extra attention and which clients are doing well and can go their own way.
How Victor Uses Claude and AI Day to Day
Irina (10:30 – 10:45)
You mentioned Claude. How are you leveraging AI? Is it only to help you write messages or is it also to run deep dive analysis and connect several data sources?
Victor (10:46 – 12:29)
We have connected a few data sources. One example of what I use it for is to help craft templates for WhatsApp conversations. Our customers use their own WhatsApp numbers to send messages to guests, and those WhatsApp messages are categorized by Meta as service-oriented or marketing-oriented. A marketing-oriented template is a bit more expensive than a service-oriented one, so we use Claude to rewrite the templates so it gets cheaper. That’s adding value for our clients and saving them money.
We also connected it to HubSpot, so it knows which knowledge base articles we have. I connected it to Fireflies as well, so it knows our conversations and can identify which topics we still need knowledge base articles on and write drafts for those. That’s really useful to see what we can add and what things we’re talking about.
Personally, I didn’t know a lot about BigQuery data analysis, so Claude helps me rewrite queries to get the right information, which I then reuse.
That’s all pretty operational, but I also use it for strategic things like preparing for tough meetings with clients and how to approach certain issues. I had a really tough meeting with a client, I explained the situation to
Claude, and it really helped me: you should make a slide deck with these slides and this is how you should set it up. That gave us the right direction. In the end we still tweaked here and there, but it was really helpful to point us in the right direction.
Irina (12:30 – 12:47)
You mentioned it at the beginning because by the end of your journey with them, you weren’t just doing the onboarding, you were basically teaching it. And what do most teams get wrong about onboarding?
What’s your take on that?
Victor (12:47 – 14:24)
As I said, onboarding has multiple meanings. You have onboarding a client and onboarding employees. Onboarding new clients has multiple facets. Listening to what they want to achieve, learning the style they’re in. We work across a lot of different cultures, from a hostel in Rome to a high-end five-star beach resort in Curaçao, a camping in Germany, and every culture is different. So one part of onboarding is getting to know the client.
Our customers are really hospitality focused, so they expect the same from us. That’s also something you really need to learn in onboarding: give the right information at the right time. Managing expectations is something that’s the same in onboarding employees as in onboarding clients. Tell them the process, at which point in the process they are. Make milestones. We’re now at step one, now at step two, now at step three.
And going live is not the end. Keep checking in after going live. The post-go-live meeting we have is one of the most important meetings I think we have. Checking in on how they use it, what their experiences are, and doing that quickly so you can still solve things. Actually, within our product, we also have a post-first-night message to the guests. One of my clients told me that’s the best message we have, because we can still fix things while the guest is still in house.
Scaling: People, Technology, or Both?
Irina (14:26 – 14:54)
As the business scales and the number of customers is basically doubling, where do you want to focus your attention? Are you planning on expanding the team and hiring, or are you investing into technology and remaining the person that handles everything but living through technology? What’s your view?
How are you planning?
Victor (14:54 – 15:35)
I think it should be a combination. Technology, always use it and use it to help you. But we are also coming to a moment where I see that I do a lot of onboardings because we get a lot of new clients, and I don’t have as much time to do proper CS work with my clients as I’d like to.
So I think we need to scale in terms of people to make sure we can handle this amount of onboardings. We try to optimize where we can. One meeting less out of six is already a 25% win. But at some point I think we’ll get close to needing extra hands.
The Signals That Tell You It’s Time to Hire
Irina (15:36 – 15:54)
You said you’re almost at that point. What are the signals you are looking for that tell you it’s time to go and have the discussion with senior management?
Victor (15:55 – 16:27)
Two weeks ago, my colleague went on holiday for a week and the support inbox basically exploded. Colleagues needed to take over, and usually I handle that by myself, but there just was no time. That brought some insight to management: it is really busy, he is doing a lot on his own and managing a lot, so maybe we should look at expanding the team to make sure the workload gets handled a bit better.
What Improv Theatre Taught Victor About Customer Success
Irina (16:28 – 16:44)
Last one, Victor, alongside CS, you’ve spent years as an improved coach and trainer. Is there something from that period, a habit, a way of thinking that still shows up on how you run accounts today?
Victor (16:45 – 18:18)
I’m still doing improv training and improv for me is a way of life. I also took some courses in applied improvisation because you can apply it to everything in life.
Especially in startup life at Runner.ai, the product keeps changing all the time. Quick adaptation is super important, being able to make a 90 degree turn or adjust direction. That’s something you really need to stay open about. Improv also means don’t try to control everything, because you cannot. Yes, I want the product to be A or B or C, but sometimes other people have very good reasons to do something else.
And also, feeling first, reacting second. Don’t over talk, keep open space. I have a lot of meetings where you try to talk because you’re scared of silence, but sometimes silence is okay. Just wait for the customer to make up their mind and respond. You don’t need to fill everything in.
Another thing I learned: try to have fun along the way. Sometimes you just need to go for it and figure things out after. Trust your instincts. Your instincts are usually right. If it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t right.
There’s so much improv that you can use in work and in daily life. I would suggest everybody should take a course at some point in their life.
Irina (18:19 – 18:29)
Victor, this was a really interesting conversation. It’s not often you’ll get to talk onboarding with someone who’s actually studied and taught it as a craft.
Victor (18:29 – 18:29)
Yeah.
Irina (18:30 – 18:40)
Thanks so much for joining me. And to everyone listening, thanks for tuning in. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning and mastering customer success.
