In this episode of Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas sits down with Kate Panasenko, Customer Success Manager at Raccoon Gang, a company that builds and customizes e-learning platforms.
Kate’s path into CS is anything but conventional: she started selling apples at a market at age eight, worked in sales at a glass factory, and now manages customer relationships across Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas.
She shares what customer success looks like when every client gets a fully customized product, why onboarding in a software development company means something completely different than in SaaS, how she tracks health scores and drives renewals across five distinct customer segments, and what a glass factory taught her about forecasting, accountability, and keeping your word.
What You’ll Learn
- What CS looks like when every client gets a unique, customized product rather than the same platform
- How Raccoon Gang covers five different customer segments across multiple regions and time zones
- Why onboarding in a software development company is about aligning stakeholders on process, not just product
- How Kate identifies a healthy customer and what drives renewals in a custom development context
- What the operational and AI infrastructure behind the CS function looks like
- Why data hygiene is the foundation for any meaningful AI use across the company
- What a career in industrial sales taught Kate about patience, forecasting, and accountability in CS
Key Insights & Takeaways
In custom development, onboarding is about process alignment, not product adoption. Clients need to understand how software gets built before they can be meaningful partners in the process. That includes knowing the vocabulary, the development lifecycle, and who to contact when something goes wrong.
Happy customers generate more revenue in multiple ways. A client whose product is running well will come back for enhancements, refer others, and expand their engagement. Renewals and upsells are a natural outcome of genuine success.
AI is now embedded across every department. From estimations to proposals, meeting recordings to sales and CS work, it’s hard to imagine operating without it.
Being proactive is a habit formed under pressure. When you can’t stop the furnace, you learn to forecast, budget, and anticipate. That mindset is now central to how Kate manages customer relationships.
Podcast Transcript
Intro
Irina (0:03 – 0:24)
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 Kate Panasenko, customer success manager at Raccoon Gang, a company that builds and customizes e-learning platforms. Kate, I’m really happy to have you here.
Thanks for joining.
Kate (0:25 – 0:30)
Thank you, Irina! Thank you for this opportunity to join, and I’m happy to share my experience.
Irina (0:31 – 0:42)
Let’s start with a bit of context. Help me understand your world today. What does your role actually look like, and what kind of customers are you working with?
Kate (0:43 – 4:04)
I actually want to start with a bit of background on the company, because I think it’s necessary to mention that Raccoon Gang is a software development company. We don’t deliver one product to many clients. We deliver unique, customized products to different clients. That means every client is unique, every product is unique, and we work with every single client according to their own requirements.
The great thing about this is that we work with open source products. When a customer has their own flow, their specific business, and the existing platforms don’t match their requirements, but they don’t have the time or budget to build a complex solution from scratch, that’s where we come in. We work with open source products like LMSs, CRMs, and reporting tools. There are a lot of them on the market with code that has already been open sourced, so you don’t need to build the basic functionality. On top of that, we customize, make integrations with other solutions, and build additional modules to meet the customer’s needs. That’s why no two clients or LMS platforms we work with are the same.
I work with clients from different countries. My day starts with clients from Asia, China, Australia, and Indonesia, then moves to the Middle East, then Europe, and in the evening I work with the Americas. That allows me to share experience that worked well in one region with another. For example, what worked well in China can sometimes be applied with e-learning platforms in the US, because there are a lot of Asians in the United States. It’s great to share that experience across regions and clients.
We have around 200 people on board: developers, business analysts, QA engineers, tech leads, architects. We can do any kind of solution, especially in e-learning, because we have that expertise. And I’m the one responsible for the relationships and the revenue generation.
Irina (4:06 – 4:33)
Oh man, that’s a lot. And I was under the impression that I had a lot on my plate. But listening to everything that you said, do you ever get a break?
Or what happens when Kate is on vacation? Because it seems like you are connected 24/7. You are starting with APAC and ending up with US.
Hopefully you have a team that helps you out there, right?
Kate (4:34 – 5:05)
Of course we have project managers on each project. And fortunately, I don’t have time limitations for my work. I can arrange my schedule as appropriate for the client and the team. I manage my own time and the final focus is the result. As long as I deliver the result and generate revenue, it doesn’t matter when or how I work. I can work at night or during the day.
How the CS Team Is Structured Across Five Segments
Irina (5:06 – 5:33)
As long as the results are coming in, it doesn’t matter what you do or how you do it. I hope you’re not alone though. I hope there’s a CS team in place, not just you on your own. I mean peers in terms of marketing, sales, product, project management. So you are part of a CS team, not a lone wolf.
Kate (5:34 – 8:35)
Yes, absolutely. It is not possible to do it alone. We have a lot of clients, but we came to an approach where there is no division into one CSM focused on one segment or one region. We can substitute each other and we are capable of jumping into any project and speaking with the client in their own language.
We cover five main segments. The first one is K-12 education, which are schools. The second one is universities and institutes. These two segments are more focused on instructor-led training. There are two ways of learning: instructor-led and self-paced. K-12 and institutions are organizations where learning takes place under instructor recommendations and in classes, so the learning management is more for delivering supplementary content or courses for teachers or parents.
Then there are three other segments. The first is training and certification centers, where most of them earn money by delivering specific courses in a specific industry. For example, if you want to be a real estate agent, you need to pass a course and get a certificate, so that’s for compliance purposes. The second is nonprofit or governmental organizations that deliver specific courses. These are free of charge but cover topics like water consumption or human rights in Europe. And the fifth segment, which I think is the most interesting and most in demand, is corporate, because all larger corporations have e-learning platforms and internal learning programs for their employees, for onboarding, skill development, and enhancement.
We cover all those different segments. And because they want something different and they are in different regions and cultures, it is necessary to take into consideration the way they deliver content, the type of content they deliver, and of course the way they work. Building relationships, which is the key in customer success, looks very different across cultures and requires patience.
What Good Onboarding Looks Like in a Custom Development Context
Irina (8:39 – 8:48)
A lot. What does good onboarding look like for you guys? What are you aiming for?
And how do you know when you’ve got there?
Kate (8:50 – 12:13)
In our software development world, onboarding doesn’t look like the standard onboarding in the SaaS industry where you know the product, you have the processes, and you are talking about how to use and implement the platform. We consider onboarding to mean getting the client aligned on the first scope of work we are going to implement and connecting the dots between what was sold, what is expected, and what is going to be developed, tested, launched, and implemented for them.
The next important thing is to onboard the client into our processes, because there are different kinds of stakeholders. When a stakeholder is aware of the software development world and lifecycle, that’s great and they understand the process easily. But when the stakeholder is not tech-savvy and has not developed a product before, it is crucial to get them to know at least the basic terminology: what does deployment mean, what kind of testing we will be doing, what is CI/CD, things like that. We use these words very often and we found that people simply don’t understand them. So we need to create a glossary and make those universal software development concepts accessible.
The client also needs to know how our internal processes work, because delivering a feature is not just a developer sitting and writing code. It’s the full cycle of planning, requirement elicitation, time estimation, and verification. Then development, where front end, back end, and DevOps all work together. Then testing. Then communication with the client. These internal processes and dependencies on the client have to be clear and transparent. Once it is in the client’s and stakeholders’ minds and on paper with a shared structure, then we consider them onboarded.
One more thing onboarding includes is introducing the client to our support chain and the people on our side. The client needs to know where, how, and to whom to reach out when they have an issue, a question, or any request. They need to feel comfortable working with me.
How Kate Identifies Healthy Customers and Drives Renewals
Irina (12:14 – 12:44)
Okay, and once everything is in place and the client is onboarded, what happens next? Once everything is set up, how do you know that that customer is there to stay with you?
How do you identify a healthy customer?
Kate (12:46 – 15:37)
The health score, which I’m responsible for, and the NPS are metrics tracked throughout the development process. I’m interested in having a healthy and happy customer because by the end of the contract, once we deliver the product, a happy customer’s business will run, they will get revenue from delivering courses, and they will require further enhancements or more learning seats, for example. That means infrastructure changes, which is additional work for our DevOps and development team. At the same time, a happy customer will recommend us to their community, partners, and vendors, and that happens very often.
Our customers have their own specific customer journeys. Once we deliver the scope, whether we continue with a renewal depends on whether there is a necessity or whether we delivered an MVP that is enough to go to market and enough for the client to run their business. Once they get feedback and need enhancements, improvements, or integrations with other software, that’s where we make the upsell.
For revenue generation, I work in two areas: upselling and cross-selling by reference. Upselling means a new scope of work, or putting the platform on support and maintenance, because any product has to be supported and maintained or it will not survive. If the customer doesn’t have their own development team, they need that support. The other business we have is instructional design and course development. Once the client has the platform, they need to build courses. If they have internal content creators, great, they can do it on their own. But if they need help building courses, that’s where we step in as well.
The Operational and AI Infrastructure Behind the CS Function
Irina (15:41 – 15:57)
What’s the operational infrastructure behind all of this? Before, or in other words, what are the platforms, the tools that are critical for the CS operations to run day-to-day?
Kate (15:58 – 16:02)
Actually, you mean the software tools for customer success?
Irina (16:02 – 16:27)
And what’s the layer on top of that? Let me go one question further: what’s the role of AI? How does AI fit on top of the operational infrastructure you need in order to be productive and deliver the KPIs you are responsible for?
Kate (16:28 – 19:40)
That has changed a lot during the last year. Before, we didn’t need a lot. We had the CRM and a customer success tool that we built in-house because we have developers here. We started with everything in Google Spreadsheets, but then we implemented it in our own software. It wasn’t very complicated because we just needed customer journeys, success paths, and the things to track the health score, the pipeline in the CRM, deal tracking, and a few more action items.
However, the issue is having the CRM or customer success tool in good hygiene, with clean data, with everything that was stored, spoken during a meeting, or noted in other documents all in one place. Because only then can AI tools analyze and simplify what you’re doing. If you don’t have structured data in one place, AI can’t help you.
For example, we had clients where we had issues, and no one wanted to document those issues in detail. It was solved and everyone was happy and that was it. But when we later made estimations for the next scope, we needed to take all those details into account because they are critical for further estimations. And if they’re not noted, AI doesn’t know about that.
That’s why we made sure that every single person understood that data hygiene is not only for customer success, it’s for everyone in the company. Clean data helps everyone use AI effectively and get good results from it.
We implemented AI functionality over the past year across every department: in marketing, in the pre-sales team, in the development team, in sales and customer success, for estimations, proposals, call recordings, meetings, and a lot more. I can’t even imagine how we would cope without AI now.
What a Glass Factory and a Market Stall Taught Kate About Customer Success
Irina (19:42 – 19:58)
Kate, you’ve taken a path most people wouldn’t predict. You worked in industrial trade, then in sales, and now you are in customer success. Is there something you learned the hard way that still shapes how you show up for customers today?
Kate (20:00 – 24:52)
My sales academy started at the age of eight or nine when I sold apples from my garden with my grandmother at the market. That was the best experience I ever had because at an early age you had to know how to communicate with customers, how to package and display those apples, and how to make discounts at the end of the day because you don’t want to carry those apples back home. That’s something that stayed with me.
A lot of people switch to customer success from onboarding or support departments. I switched from sales and from the industrial world, from a glass factory. However, I have never distinguished customer success from sales or sales from customer success. While making sales, I was always thinking ahead to the customer’s success in business and building long-term relationships, because working in industrial enterprises is not about building a relationship in two or three months or within a couple of meetings. It takes a long time, sometimes two or three years or more, because you are working with corporations that have their own budgeting cycles and established suppliers. To break through that wall, you need persistence and time. I learned that any relationship requires time and patience.
What is also important is that I worked in glass factory production, and the furnace melts glass constantly and cannot be stopped. As a salesperson, I had no option to not have clients or orders, because stopping the furnace took a couple of months and restarting it took up to six months. It is very expensive and time-consuming. We lived and worked in an environment where you had to forecast, budget everything, and predict the unpredictable. That’s where I learned to be proactive, think ahead for the customer, and make forecasts based on historical data and market understanding. We supplied glass bottles for alcoholic beverages, so I had to know everything about that market and follow governmental regulations. A lot of information, and you always need to stay on top of it and be ready to adjust to changes.
And the last thing worth mentioning is operational accuracy and accountability. You cannot say you will do better next quarter when you are supplying jars for cucumber production. Those cucumbers will not wait. They will spoil and you will not have the chance to supply in the next quarter. That level of responsibility and accountability taught me that in any industry, in any role, it is essential to keep your word, follow the contract, and be transparent with the client if anything happens.
Irina (24:54 – 25:16)
Kate, this was a great conversation. I really enjoyed hearing how your background shaped the way you think about customer relationships. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me today!
To everyone listening, thanks for tuning in. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning, and mastering customer success.
