In this episode of Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas sits down with Sarah Young, Customer Success Manager at Hoptroff, a precision timing platform for financial services and other regulated industries. Sarah has worked across sales, go-to-market, customer success, and performance coaching, and that combination gives her a perspective on CS that most people in the field don’t have.
She shares what customer success looks like when your product is invisible but absolutely critical, why she believes energy management matters more than better processes or tools, how her coaching background shapes the way she builds teams and customer relationships, and what she watches for when a customer goes quiet.
What You’ll Learn
- What Hoptroff does and why precision timing is a compliance and risk management requirement in financial services
- What customer success actually means when your product operates invisibly behind critical infrastructure
- How a coaching background changes the way you build CS teams and manage performance
- Where teams blame process when the real issue is habits, behavior, or communication
- What Sarah would prioritize first when assessing a CS team she just joined
- What three roles she would hire if building a CS team from scratch
- How to tell the difference between a customer who is genuinely fine and one who is quietly drifting toward churn
Key Insights & Takeaways
Timing is a utility everyone takes for granted until it fails. When something goes wrong with time synchronization in financial markets, the implications for regulators, governance, and operations are significant. CS in this space is about preventing that from ever happening.
Customer success is about enabling confidence. The goal is not just adoption or renewal. It is future-proofing the customer’s ability to operate with certainty in a high-stakes environment.
Energy management comes before process. When people are overwhelmed or unfocused, no amount of tooling or process improvement will fix the output. Clarity of thought and positive energy enable good judgment.
Silence from a customer is never neutral. A customer who stops engaging could be quietly unhappy, underusing the product, or building a case to churn. That silence needs to be investigated, not ignored.
Communication is the root of most CS problems. When teams blame process, the real issue is usually that someone doesn’t have the full picture, internally or externally.
Podcast Transcript
Intro
Irina (0:03 – 0:40)
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 Young, Customer Success Manager at Hoptroff, a precision timing platform for financial services and other regulated industries. Sarah, I’m really happy to have you here.
Thanks for joining. You’ve worked across sales, go to market, customer success, coaching, and now fintech.
What’s the one thread that ties it all together for you?
Sarah (0:41 – 1:58)
For me, having worked across the various specialisms you’ve mentioned, it ultimately comes down to helping people make decisions in high-stakes environments. I’ve spent my career predominantly in financial markets, and there is nowhere greater a high-stakes environment than financial markets.
So whether it’s a customer under regulatory pressure, a sales team navigating a complex deal, or an individual from a coaching perspective trying to build resilience, the work is around cutting out the noise and creating clarity. I’ve always gravitated towards roles where you can help people make that connection and add value, whether it’s to a customer through insight, helping them navigate the outcome they’re trying to reach, or with an individual in terms of how they can build resilience, increase motivation, and manage what I think in the current working environment is, again, high stakes.
Irina (2:00 – 2:11)
Today, you are a customer success manager at Hoptroff. For people hearing that name for the first time, what does the company actually do and who are you helping?
Sarah (2:11 – 3:38)
Hoptroff provides secure, traceable, multi-resilient time synchronisation across critical infrastructure. Timing is a utility that everyone takes for granted, but everything runs on time, whether it’s your trading platform or, taking it into another industry, catching a train, and so on.
It’s a compliance requirement and also a risk management requirement. We support financial institutions, financial exchanges, payment providers, and critical infrastructure operators. We help them prove that their timing is accurate, that it’s resilient to GNSS disruption, and that it’s fully auditable.
Essentially, we’re keeping everything as tightly controlled as it needs to be. It’s about avoiding outages and being able to explain to regulators, to internal governance and risk management, how they are reporting time. And ultimately, it’s giving the end users, the trading teams, the operations teams, and so on, the confidence that their timing is as accurate as it possibly can be.
What Customer Success Actually Means in This Environment
Irina (3:40 – 3:55)
From an outside view, it sounds complicated. In that kind of business, what does customer success actually mean? What does a strong CS conversation focus on?
Sarah (3:55 – 6:45)
It’s a high-stakes environment that we’re operating in. We’re behind the scenes, we’re invisible, but we’re absolutely critical to our customers’ business and beyond. Customer success for me and for our team is ensuring that customers can rely on us, that they can operate with confidence. The implications within their organisation and beyond, if they can’t do that, are significant.
It’s enabling them from a technical, regulatory and operational perspective to run their timing infrastructure. A customer success conversation covers a number of different things. It’s the outcome: are they getting the service they need, the resilience and the auditability they need, their compliance reporting, for example, to keep governance, risk and compliance teams, and ultimately the board, comfortable with how they are operating.
It’s also about risk. You can’t manage what you can’t measure, so it’s enabling them to do that. It’s also helping them with their readiness. We work very closely with our customers on the annual due diligence, the cyber security assessment. There’s that cadence of process they need to go through and we help them with that, but also looking forward at how we can help them scale across the organization. Where they need to scale their timing infrastructure, perhaps not just for regulatory requirements but from an operational efficiency perspective as well, we can help them prepare for that and look at how that project will play out. Typically this could take months, and we’re a very small part of a firm’s broader transformation projects where timing fits in.
How a Coaching Background Changes the Way You Build CS
Irina (6:46 – 7:20)
I don’t often speak with the CS leaders who also have that coach lens and you also coach on performance and resilience. I’m curious and what I want to ask you comes from this angle. When people say we need to build customer success properly, what does that actually mean to you?
And where do you start? Because you have something that others don’t.
Sarah (7:20 – 9:51)
I chose to go down the coaching route, and to give a little bit of history, it’s actually a process that was used at my son’s school when he was at senior school to help students and teachers build up their resilience, motivation, and performance. It’s a strategy that translates into the corporate world and the personal world as well. Getting the best out of your day, managing your time, excuse the pun, managing how you’re going to do your best work and looking at all the factors that may play into that.
It goes back to preparation, planning your day as best you can to do your focus work, knowing that other distractions and priorities will come in. That’s really how coaching plays into looking across the team. What do we need to do today? What’s our first priority? And particularly in the world I operate in, things can change very quickly. If there’s a technical issue that needs addressing, clearly that needs addressing immediately. But at the same time, there’s a lot of project work ongoing and customer onboarding ongoing.
Building a successful function and team is about ensuring you’re building good relationships with customers, really getting under the skin of what they’re interested in and what’s driving their decision process, having that understanding and empathy as to what’s going on in their world, what’s important to them, the outcomes they need to reach, and adjusting as needed, while also giving them the confidence that we can help them on that journey. It’s having that self-awareness, but also awareness amongst the team as to how we each interact and work together to help that customer.
Where Teams Blame Process When the Real Issue Is Behavior
Irina (9:53 – 10:01)
And where do you see teams blaming the process when the real issue is habits or behavior?
Sarah (10:02 – 11:38)
It goes back to communication. In the environment we work in, there are lots of tools, processes, automations, and AI that can be very helpful, clearly. But ultimately you’re dealing with people. It’s going back to that individual or that team, and quite often with a company or client, we may never know who the ultimate key stakeholder is because of the expansive nature of that organization.
But it’s remembering that ultimately it is about people and communication. Whether it’s internally within Hoptroff, do we have as much information as we can, have we surfaced all the information we need, who do we need to speak to internally to make sure we’ve built up that strong view, whether there’s a particular issue or we’re looking to onboard a customer and the different components we need to ensure are in place. And the same goes within the customer: have we given them the full picture as best we know? Have we got the information we need from them? For me personally, it always goes back to helping our customers, and it’s through communication.
What to Prioritize First: Process, Judgment, Tools, or Energy
Irina (11:39 – 11:54)
And what would you prioritize first? I’m curious, is it better processes, better judgment, better tools, a better mix of all of those, maybe better energy management?
Sarah (11:55 – 13:02)
I think it’s actually having good energy. And that goes back to communication. The two are hand in hand. If people are overwhelmed or haven’t got that focus, the lack of energy can be both negative and positive.
Having that positive energy management enables individuals to have clarity of thought and ultimately good judgment.
And perhaps it also means that on occasion you need to go walk around the block for five minutes to clear your head, just to bring things down a bit and think through a situation you’re trying to deal with, rather than sitting at your desk and letting it build up and become distracting.
How to Assess a CS Team Quickly
Irina (13:05 – 13:19)
And if you joined the CS team and had to assess it quickly, what would you look at first? How they run the work, how they measure success, or how they show up with customers?
Sarah (13:20 – 15:27)
It’s a combination. First and foremost, going back to people, it’s looking at the customer base. Who are they? What are their requirements? What are they using? Getting a good understanding of the current status with that customer is really important.
Then overlaying that with the technical requirements. Who do we need on a call, for example? There are different aspects: is it a technical call, does it involve commercial aspects, are they looking towards the future in terms of what they’re building and wanting to surface that with customers. So do we need the product person on the call? It’s going back to that clarity around what’s the agenda, what’s the outcome we want to achieve, but more importantly, what the customer wants to achieve. And working back from that basis.
But also making sure you’ve got the documentation that can be followed up as needed, capturing the conversations, and if there’s a particular issue, making sure you’ve got all the components of that. Within Hoptroff, that can be quite technical, so it’s having the right people in the room. And at any given moment, you may have to pivot into a different dimension as well. It’s about reading what’s going on, but also pre-empting what may be coming down the track and ensuring you’re capturing as much as you can in that moment.
Irina (15:29 – 16:10)
You mentioned technology and a bit of AI earlier, and what I realized is the exposure to it changes the dynamic of the customer success manager’s role. What would you, if you would have to put a team in place from scratch, and you only have three positions, what roles would you want in the room first, and why? What’s important for you to drive and help your customers?
Sarah (16:12 – 19:06)
It covers different specialisms. Drawing from my experience and the organization I’m currently in, I think having someone who can strategically manage those customer relationships, the outcomes, and the commercial aspect as well is essential.
Customer success has changed a lot in recent years from being purely a support function where you’re fixing problems, which is still very important, to also looking at keeping the customer in place, reducing and ideally eliminating churn, looking at expansion opportunities and new products, and hearing what the customer might be interested in or has surfaced as a new requirement that hasn’t been thought about from a product perspective. So that strategic mindset, a strategic customer success manager to own the various aspects of the customer relationship, is the first role.
The second, and probably equally important, is the technical specialism. Within Hoptroff, I wouldn’t be able to do my job as a commercial and strategic customer success manager without the technical knowledge needed to resolve a customer issue as part of the onboarding process and so on. Those two go absolutely hand in hand and there’s a very strong cross-functional relationship between technical and the strategic nature of customer success.
And then there’s the project management and operational lead. As a customer success manager, it goes back to being able to manage what you can measure. If you aren’t aware of various different outcomes or issues, how can you ensure the right processes are in place, not only for that customer but going forward across the organisation? It’s looking at the data and understanding what good looks like. The fact that you may not hear from a customer is not necessarily a good thing, because that could be surfacing discontent or the fact that they may not be using the product as well as they could. So it’s a combination of all three: strategic, technical, and operational.
How to Tell When a Customer Is Quietly Drifting Into Risk
Irina (19:09 – 19:26)
The last question, you’ve worked in environments where clients may not complain loudly before something becomes serious. How do you tell the difference between a customer who is generally fine and one who is quietly drifting into risk?
Sarah (19:27 – 22:23)
Sometimes customers have a different dynamic, but what I would look out for is why is that customer not engaging? What might be the reason behind that? In any event, it’s having that regular cadence of communication, providing insights, providing value, and putting those quarterly business reviews in place. They will vary from customer to customer. There may be a customer with a much broader relationship with you because they have a much broader, scalable service, versus perhaps a smaller, more localized customer, but equally both are really important.
It’s having that discipline internally to think, okay, we haven’t heard from XYZ for a little while, why might that be? And it’s also trying to offer some insight that will give them reason to have that regular dialogue. The alarm bell is certainly the customer you don’t hear from. How can we improve that, what do we need to do, and why is that?
Going back to Hoptroff, we work with channel partners, so we may not always have a direct relationship with the customer. It’s having that good relationship with the channel partner and understanding how we can work together, because it’s in both our mutual interests to have a happy customer.
And quite often, looking back at experiences last year, we had a technical issue across the network. That’s the nature of technology, and we had some very difficult conversations where there was a technical issue that needed resolving. When you have those difficult conversations where something isn’t going the way it should, the outcome can actually be really positive. Although at the time they can be stressful or difficult, they can also surface other factors that are positive. So it doesn’t always have to be the good, happy conversation. Quite often opportunity comes out of those difficult discussions.
Irina (22:26 – 23:08)
Sarah, I really enjoyed this. You brought such an interesting perspective to the conversation. And I think this is because you’ve seen customer success from so many different angles.
And I think there was a lot in here for anyone trying to build stronger teams, manage stakeholders better, and think a bit more carefully about what good customer success actually looks like. Thank you so much for being here.
And to everyone listening, thanks for tuning in. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning, and mastering customer success.
