In this new episode of the Mastering CS podcast, Irina Cismas, Custify’s Head of Marketing, sits down with Kasia Laugenie, Customer Success Director at Jacquard, the generative AI platform helping global brands produce on-brand messaging at scale.
Kasia shares her 15-year journey from marketing and account management into senior CS leadership, why strong human relationships still win in an AI-powered world, how she runs a high-touch enterprise CS function across global time zones, and how her team connects product adoption directly to revenue impact.
Let’s dive into Kasia’s career path, her leadership philosophy, and the high-leverage processes shaping Jacquard’s customer success engine.
What You’ll Learn
How to structure a high-touch CS team for enterprise clients
The role of onboarding specialists and why Jacquard separated onboarding from CS
- Best practices for Sales → CS → Onboarding handover
- How to build a health score that’s simple, actionable, and tied to value
- Identifying value for different stakeholders inside the same account
- Multi-threading strategies to prevent single-champion risk
- How to manage global CS teams and prevent burnout
- How CS leaders can scale with AI, automation, and process redesign
- The right way to measure CS impact internally beyond GRR
Key Insights & Takeaways
- Value starts in onboarding. The first six months determine long-term adoption and renewal outcomes.
- Simple health scores beat complex ones. Focus on usage, performance, relationship depth, and workflow integration.
- Adoption is the revenue engine. Strong attribution and clear KPIs reveal both expansion and risk signals.
- Multi-threading is non-negotiable. Relying on a single champion poses major renewal risk.
- Different stakeholders = different values. AI performance, efficiency gains, and content workflow improvements must be mapped separately.
- Scaling ≠ hiring. Automating reporting, QBR prep, and note-taking creates capacity before adding headcount.
Podcast transcript
Intro
Irina (0:00)
During CS Candid Leader Insights, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of customer success with industry leaders. I’m your host, Irina Cismas, and today I’m joined by Kasia Laugenie, customer success director at Jacquard, a company helping global brands use generative AI to create on-brand messaging at scale. Kasia, I’m really happy to have you here.
Thanks for joining!
Kasia (0:27)
Absolute pleasure. Good to be here. Thank you, Irina!
Getting started in Customer Success
Irina (0:31)
Let’s start from the very beginning. How did you first get into customer success? And how do you think that start shaped the way you lead today?
Kasia (0:45)
Great question. So I originally come from a marketing background, and I straightaway joined the technology space. And from there, I started my journey in SaaS, MarTech in sales, but I very quickly realized I liked the post-sales journey more.
About 15 years ago, I started my journey in account management. I think when I first started account management, customer success was not really a term that was very heavily used in the UK. It was predominantly grown in the US at the time.
I started my journey in account management, which was kind of 360-degree renewals and customer success. And I knew that was the career for me, because you get the best of both worlds, being on the agency side, you work on the tech side. You get to work with a lot of brands, so you feel part of the extension of their team, but you also work on technology, which is what I’ve always enjoyed.
And from there on, over the years, I went into key accounts and pretty much been in customer success for the last 15 years or so, with the last three years in leadership here at Jacquard. And how I lead today is based on my experience so far, because I’ve always been in this space. I’m a very strong believer that people buy from people, and we should be strategic advisors. So I think that it’s a very heavy kind of human role, which I really enjoy.
I always make sure to build very strong relationships with customers, because everything else, especially now, can be fixed with technology. But I still believe this kind of human contact is very important in what we do.
Irina (2:42)
I totally relate to your story. And even if being on the marketing side of things, I’ve always been working with the agency model. And I totally appreciate the account management and the whole support and the whole implication.
I know what you mean when you say that this human connection counts a lot. And people buy from people. It’s the foundation of everything that we are building on.
I want to find out more about the Jacquard organization and what the CS function looks like now.
Kasia (3:36)
Yeah, we’re a relatively small function. We’re a team of five globally. I serve on this side of the pond, and we have some team on the US side of the business.
We are very much pure-play customer success, but also very high touch. We operate in a hands-on model that covers everything from onboarding analytics to reporting and training. We act somewhat closer to how agencies manage some of their customers because our product can be quite hands-on in how we support them.
We predominantly have seniors in our team, and that is due to the caliber of customers we work with. We work with many enterprise brands, large complex organizations that require a lot of experience to manage. Within that org, we have somebody who specializes in onboarding, and that person does a hybrid role between onboarding and looking after some customers.
To us, that was a very important role from the start, to have somebody who specializes and evolves that process, because I’m a big believer that success starts from the beginning of being with the company. Your experience at the beginning determines the success of the customer.
Now that we’ve established a lot of those processes, that person also manages accounts. But overall, we are a very high-touch function, very hands-on, and with not that many accounts per head. So that’s the overview.
Customer success and onboarding
Irina (5:33)
You mentioned onboarding and the success part, and I’m curious: why do you have them separate? Why do you have them separate under the same umbrella?
Because the models at other companies I’ve talked to have one person who has an overview of the whole customer journey. I’m curious what made you separate them into two teams.
Kasia (6:08)
Yeah, very good question. At the moment, we have a specialist who helps us document all of our processes for onboarding.
We started with customer success doing the onboarding and then managing customers. When we got somebody who specializes in this, an internal person who moved into the onboarding role, the decision we made was based on realizing that our product success and customer success depend heavily on customers having the right start and using our product in the right way.
You get the most engagement at the beginning of the relationship, sometimes more than later when the business goes into business-as-usual mode. We found the first six months crucial, and we needed to revamp our processes and give them a lot of attention to make sure that as we grow the business and get more customers, we have that process nailed down. But that’s not to say we don’t still have CS pairing up from the start with that person.
The handover is very smooth. And as the business grows, now that we’ve established processes, CS will probably continue to do some onboarding for their customers as well. But we’ve managed to establish good processes because we found that really important.
Sales to CS handover process
Irina (7:47)
Speaking about the processes, do you also have a process between sales to CS handover and how does this look like? Because I know that it’s not necessarily a pain point but let’s call it inflection point when the transition happens. I’m curious, how did you manage to sort it out?
Kasia (8:10)
Yeah, and I can imagine this is a pain point that has never been fully solved in this type of world. It really depends on how well that process goes or not. In our setup, we work very closely with account executives.
Our sales team sells the business. They bring the new business in, but they stay on the accounts. The benefit is that whoever sold the business stays on as the account executive and supports the customer success leads in the QBRs and in the renewal.
So it favors sales because they can’t just hand it off. They know they’ll stay with the account, so it has to be right.
In terms of processes, we also have sales engineers, and they are probably the ones tasked most with ensuring everything is kept in check and documented. We have recently been revamping our process, which has a scoping document led by the sales engineers. They keep the salesperson in check, make sure we get all the information, and bring us in early from an onboarding perspective to ensure we have everything we need. It doesn’t always go perfectly to plan, which is the nature of it.
But we have created a template with the must-have items. Unless we have this scope properly defined pre-sales, it’s difficult to make it a success, and that’s adhered to. But I agree, it’s a difficult topic at all times.
Because we have a very documented process, I like to think we do a pretty good job at it. But customers do sometimes shift things. Our sales cycles can be quite long, so sometimes from scoping to signing, some of the scope may have changed, but those things you can’t really avoid.
The customer health score journey
Irina (10:22)
And once you have the transition between the teams, you also need to make sure the processes are working. You need a calibration check. You need data to show that what you’ve built and put in place is actually working. And I know that you redesigned some customer frameworks and the health scoring.
I’m curious, how did you end up doing those? And when did you know that it was time to tweak some of the things?
Kasia (11:10)
Yes, and I think our health scoring for customers has gone on a bit of a journey. We originally had a very simplistic way of doing it.
Irina (11:25)
Can you tell me what you mean by simplistic? Because in some cases, simplistic is better than nothing.
Kasia (11:34)
Yeah, and I think that is what happened to us. We started simple, then we went really complex, and then we simplified the process again because we realized there were too many variables we were trying to track, and they weren’t enough. The key aspects for us, as you heard me mention at the beginning, are the relationships.
So it was the relationship and the alignment of the customer. How strong is the relationship you have with your top stakeholders and your champion? Do you really understand the buying cycle of your champion?
One part is the true relationships, and two, you have to find a data point that you can’t argue with. You’ll get subjective opinions of the health of an account from CS or sales. Some people get happy ears.
You need to find a data point you can’t argue with. And if you have a platform or a product that is measurable, such as adoption, usage, or performance – we are in performance marketing, so we can measure the performance of the tool – you have to find metrics that matter.
For me, it’s: what’s the usage and what’s the performance of the tool? And from there, we identified two or three items, such as whether we are fully integrated into the customer’s workflow, yes or no.
We know that the more we integrate into the customer’s workflow, the more successful those customers are. Some of those primary metrics are always there, and there are a couple that are directly related to our product. But I think adoption, which you can’t argue with, the relationship, and the status are the key buckets.
Otherwise, you can overcomplicate it.
Irina (13:32)
I can second that. Usually, and it’s not only in CS, it’s also on the marketing side of things, we want to have so many data points that the data points no longer tell a story and you don’t know what that data actually tells you. I also go through the same loop: start simple, and then with all the slicing and dicing the data becomes too complicated, and you throw everything away.
Let’s go back to the simple things and then build complexity step by step. Going back to the frameworks, I know that one of the pain points that CS teams usually have is the way they connect what they do to revenue outcomes. A lot of things end up on the CS plate and it’s very easy to get very busy and overwhelmed.
And in the end it’s like, okay, but how did that impact the revenue? How is this in your case?
How is customer success impacting revenue
Kasia (14:54)
Yeah, so I think for us the biggest metric is the adoption of the product and understanding the value that is delivered to the customer. That then informs us of any revenue risks we might have or the upsell or renewal opportunities to grow that account. If we have very good attribution, we know exactly the value we’re delivering, and the adoption is at 100%.
From that, if we know we’re only in 50% of the pie of what the customer could do with us, that should be a clear signal for upselling that account. This is where I talk about metrics that are measurable. Once you know the customer has clear attribution and very good adoption, you can work with that.
Similarly, on the metrics tied to revenue risks, one of the key things in customer success is multithreaded stakeholders. If we have a customer whose relationship depends entirely on one stakeholder and that stakeholder moves on, that poses a lot of risk. It could even outweigh the other metrics.
So for us, the weight of the stakeholder metric is very important. The moment a stakeholder leaves, it can pose significant risk. And from the adoption front, if we know adoption is low, we try to figure out as quickly as we can what risk that could pose.
From a revenue outcome perspective, we have the adoption piece and the stakeholder piece, and we try to weigh those to determine the actions we should take throughout the lifecycle.
Delivering value through customer success
Irina (16:55)
How do you identify the value your product and your team deliver to the customer? How do you do that?
Kasia (17:07)
Yeah, it’s a very good question. We’re in a lucky position in terms of the space we’re in because we are in performance marketing, and the bottom line of what the team and the product can deliver is an increase in campaign performance. So the team needs to spend a lot of time understanding: if our tool increases the performance of their campaigns by X, what does that mean to the business?
This is where you need strong people skills and stakeholder relationships to understand what that actually means. How does it impact their business goals? How does it impact their team goals? How does it affect their KPIs? Our product is very measurable, which puts us in a fortunate position, but it’s still about that measurement.
The biggest part of our job is understanding what that actually means. Is it good, bad, or indifferent to the business? Sometimes you might see that our product is outperforming and performing above the averages we typically see, but you have to know if that’s actually good for the customer.
So going back to your question about attribution, we do have clear attribution, but the biggest thing is understanding what that actually means rather than making an assumption.
Irina (18:31)
And do you usually discover this value? First, let me ask you: do you have situations where your product delivers different types of value to different stakeholders under the same account?
Kasia (18:45)
Yes, and I think a lot of that comes from experience and understanding how that value measures out. In the space we’re in, with AI, customers look not only for revenue or an increase in campaign performance, but also for efficiencies in content production.
You can speak to any C-suite at the moment and there are massive mandates around how to use AI for efficiency gains in the business. So there will be certain types of stakeholders to whom you deliver that additional value from an efficiency perspective and translate it into better workflows, not just campaign revenue, which is usually the target of the immediate teams we work with. But the CFO might also care about other metrics, such as how much more efficiently we make the business operate.
The impact of multiple stakeholders in terms of perceived value
Irina (19:48)
That’s super interesting. Because you are data-driven and you have the numbers, plus the stakeholder management component, do you see that accounts with multiple stakeholders who receive different types of value are more likely to renew and stay with you compared to those where you only have one champion or one use case or one value?
Do you do those types of correlations?
Kasia (20:27)
Yes, I think that’s one of the biggest parts of the job: making sure that you are multithreaded. One part of my job that I try to do with the team on accounts is to connect with different types of stakeholders in the business.
The AE, the sales executive, will usually go after a different stakeholder. But there’s the nature of any business, and in SaaS you will sometimes end up with just one champion. I do think that poses a big threat because if that person moves on, you get a new person who might have a different agenda. But if you find an additional two stakeholders in that business who also understand the value, they can vouch for the success and what it means to the business.
So I think one of the biggest parts of the job in CS is making sure you have a minimum of three or four stakeholders, depending on the size of the business, who really understand the value.
Team dynamics and capacity planning in CS
Irina (21:31)
Let’s go back to the team, because none of the things you shared would have been possible without the team behind it. You mentioned that you are managing a team of five and they are distributed globally. It’s not easy to manage Europe, North America, and different time zones.
How are the team dynamics, and how do you plan capacity? How do you make sure the team spirit is there and you avoid burnout in this setup?
Kasia (22:15)
Yes, I think for a global team we’re in luck, because all our team in the US is on the East Coast, so we still get a good five hours of overlap. The majority of our team is very senior and experienced. They’ve been in the business for a long time and are quite self-sufficient in the way they work. Where I come into play is understanding where I can remove blockers, checking in with the team, or bouncing ideas.
You need to be strict about the boundaries you create, and I think we have a good dynamic. One of the things I don’t like to do is have a meeting for the sake of a meeting. If you can send an email or a Slack message, do that. If it can be done in two sentences on the right app, don’t put in a half-hour meeting.
The nature of what we do means 80% of our time should be spent with customers rather than on a ton of internal meetings. As long as you’re strict about that, you can handle it. The team is also aware of the different time zones when it comes to call times. Here and there you might need to stretch, but that’s okay.
Speaking of burnout, I went to a Women in Customer Success meetup last night, and there was a presentation on burnout, technology, and women in the workplace. One of the key points was making sure you allow the team time to work around their calendars. If you like to run and want to start half an hour later, no one is going to micromanage you. You might take a shorter lunch or finish a bit earlier or start earlier. Make sure you do those things to avoid burnout and give yourself space to do what makes you better overall.
It’s about treating each other like adults. But there will be times of year when things get stressful. For us, it’s this time of year, especially around peak, because we work with a lot of retail. Black Friday and the holidays are always very busy periods with our customers.
You just need to be mindful of boundaries.
Keeping quality and consistency while scaling
Irina (24:58)
We talked about processes, we talked about teams. I want to address another repeated theme in customer success: scaling and doing more with less. I think it’s the department where everything ends up on customer success. It’s very easy for boundaries to be ignored regarding what falls into which team.
I want to ask you: how do you handle the scaling part? What helps you? And what are the things you do that help you keep the quality and consistency while you grow?
Kasia (25:59)
Yeah, good question. I think in any growing business, especially in customer success, you can never finish the job. There’s always more you could be doing, and that list keeps growing.
I think it’s about having the tools to know what to prioritize and when. As we scale and get more customers before adding any headcount, we need to be very mindful of how we assign new accounts. I let the team decide who takes on which account most of the time, not just based on their book of business but on their knowledge of how much time their customers require right now. They’ll know about any new projects going on. I work with the team to understand where the new accounts should go before we add headcount. That’s the capacity planning front.
The second part is technology. Being a business in AI, I’m currently working on how we as a team can better use AI to make ourselves more efficient. One of the things that takes us a lot of time right now, which shouldn’t, is reporting and preparing QBRs for our customers. So I’m working closely with other teams to challenge ourselves to automate this process. The solution isn’t always to add headcount. If you do that, you haven’t challenged yourself to make things better; you’ve just patched the problem.
We’re also trying to improve note takers—how we use them and how we use our internal tool that helps summarize notes and make us more efficient. So to answer your question: work closely with the team on capacity rather than just telling someone they’re taking on more work.
And also, to keep people excited, give them the opportunity to be involved in projects and in creating new processes. When you get so busy with the day-to-day job, it can become daunting, so having a project they’re excited about is always great.
The third part is the technology front and challenging our processes. You can always do things differently if they take too long. So it’s: how do we do that? And if something works, how do we roll it out for everyone else in the business to benefit from?
Proving the value of customer success internally
Irina (29:03)
Super. Now I want to find out how you manage to prove the value of the team internally. You mentioned that understanding the value you contribute to customers is very important.
I can only assume it’s also important for the team you’re managing to prove that value internally. I’m curious how you tell the story internally of what your team does and how you use the numbers and data to promote the team you’re managing.
Kasia (29:55)
Very good question. I think this is very challenging to do without micromanaging or over-reporting on everything you do. It can be difficult because predominantly what I’m responsible for is our GRR, the renewal pound for pound.
Essentially, that’s the bottom-line metric we care about as a business. So you need to tell the story and expose the business to the activity happening within the team. Likewise, something we’re trying to figure out and do even better is how we escalate the information we get from customers further into the business.
That’s actually the biggest thing we’re working on at the moment. We’re trying to match engineers with customer success leads to work in pairs and share more information. As a knowledge center, customer success has the most insight into what customers are saying. You can deliver that value to the business.
From a GRR perspective, I report on that. And something we’ve done recently, which was probably the most useful exercise in years, was an external survey handled by someone who interviewed many of our customers as we planned next year’s roadmap. Some of the questions were not just about the space but also about our customer success team.
It was phenomenal to get non-biased results from customers about the job we do and what we could do better. The consensus was that we provide very good customer service and understand the value we bring to the business. We haven’t done much NPS or surveying in the past, and having that data was probably the single most valuable point for us to show the business: this is what our customers said. It was a non-biased interview piece, and it really helped us elevate the job customer success does.
In addition to your standard GRR metrics, meetings with customers, and sharing knowledge with the wider business also help with the roadmap and product development.
Leadership lessons for those building their first CS team
Irina (32:37)
I love how intentional you are about connecting the top people strategy, and it really ties everything together. Looking back, what’s one leadership lesson you wish you’d learned earlier – progress and action?
And if someone is building their first CS team right now, what’s the one thing you’d tell them to focus on?
Kasia (33:10)
Consistent reporting to the business and sticking with the metrics. I think as teams, we can do so much. You could do so much. But if you try to do too much, you’re not going to do any of it well. So if you’re trying to build a CS team, decide what the one or two things are that really matter to the business. If it’s improving GRR, churn, growth, satisfaction, or adoption — what are the two key metrics you can measure?
Define how you’re going to measure them, and then go from there. Don’t try to do too many things at the same time, because you won’t know whether what you did worked or not when you’re doing too much at once. Looking back, as you grow, you probably want to stick to a couple of metrics and over time really see how they perform.
Of course, this is in addition to your classic GRR and NRR.
Irina (34:20)
Kasia, this was such a great conversation. I really love how you connect structure, data, leadership processes in a super practical way. Thanks again for joining and for sharing your story with us!
Kasia (34:36)
Absolute pleasure. Good to be here. Thank you very much, Irina!
Irina (34:40)
To everyone listening, thanks for tuning in. And until next time, keep mastering customer success.
