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Scaling with Purpose: Jeroen Kuiper on Building Customer-Centric Success| Mastering CS – Ep 39

Updated on February 4, 2025 19 minutes read

Summary points:

In our new episode of the Mastering CS, Candid Leader Insights podcast, Irina Cismas, Head of Marketing at Custify, discussed with Jeroen Kuiper, Director of Customer Success at OpenUp.

What You’ll Learn:

  • How past experiences impacted customer success
  • How to scale and grow the business
  • How to keep a customer-centric culture while scaling
  • How to structure your team for success

Key insights and takeaways for CSMs based on the interview:

The Power of Purpose-Driven Customer Success: Prioritizing mission alignment over pure revenue maximization helps foster long-term customer relationships and enhances employee motivation. Success comes from building partnerships with customers who align with the company’s vision.

Personalization at Scale: Implementing scalable yet personalized customer success strategies is essential in a high-growth environment. Cohort-based onboarding and tailored touchpoints create value without sacrificing efficiency.

The Importance of Strong Foundations: A robust implementation phase that aligns with the customer’s needs and goals sets the stage for long-term success. Investing time upfront ensures smoother handoffs and sustained engagement.

Building Relationships as a Competitive Advantage: Maintaining personal connections—through in-person meetings and transparent communication—differentiates businesses, even in a digital world. Strong relationships drive retention and deeper customer impact.

Podcast transcript

Irina 0:02
Welcome to Mastering CS Candid Leader Insights, the podcast where we deep dive into the world of customer success with industry leaders. I’m your host, Irina Cismas and today’s guest is Jeroen Kuiper, Director of Customer Success at OpenUp. Jeroen, welcome and thanks for joining us today.

Jeroen 0:19
Thank you.

Moving from HR to CS

Irina 0:21
To start, I’m curious, how did you first find yourself in customer success? You’ve got a unique path that started in HR and recruitment. What brought you into CS and what keeps you engaged here?

Jeroen 0:36
Thank you, thank you. Yeah, so indeed, I didn’t just jump in at OpenUp in this way. There’s a story before.

So actually, I started my career like you highlighted in recruitment. I think back in 2010 or 2011, I joined a recruiting firm that was part of a large engineering business called Fluor, an American engineering company. And it was a very, very interesting time in my career, just coming out of school, trying to get hold of, yeah, a new skill, and what I really enjoyed about recruitment was that I had the opportunity to get someone a new job, to help someone and impact them and their family.

So learning about what moves someone to actually consider a new job was a big challenge and something that I really enjoyed, but also to really learn about engineering, understand what kind of projects that are out there, how the contracts and these projects are built, what kind of skills are required in order to do so, and especially the scale of it was something that really attracted me to this. So I did that for a few years, and it was a big learning curve for me to, especially in an international environment, to really make an impact.

And then I did that at another firm as well. I had a colleague who moved companies, and how it often goes, people seek each other out if they enjoy working with each other. So I spent some time doing what I’d done earlier for larger scale projects where we would staff entire projects, not specific roles, but yeah, for example, for the offshore industry, the whole platform staff, the entire platform was something that we would do there.

But then I felt like I didn’t want to really be associated with, let’s say, oil and gas or petrochemical industries anymore. That was interesting. I started, everything was amazing.

Amazing. Then we had, of course, this whole disaster with with an oil platform that was leaking. And that really also was a driver for me to say, Okay, I don’t think that this that I’m contributing maybe to that much good for for the world.

So I, I had the opportunity to join LinkedIn. LinkedIn asked me to, to, to work with their customers, which was a very interesting perspective for me coming from a recruitment business to actually helping other companies to attract talent. And that was, that was a great accelerator in my career to be able to join such a company.

It was relatively small scale. Still, when I joined, I mean, there were about 5000 people, I don’t know if you can call that small, but when I left, there were more than 20. So yeah, I got to do a lot of different, different roles at LinkedIn, which I think it all started at the customer success team of the talent solutions business.

So and in talent solutions, it’s all about helping companies attract talent. So that was very, very eventful time where we could actually, we had a small team in Benelux. So we started with a few, few people.

I think we were three of us, or four, four of us. So we had, we had a kind of carte blanche to really work in the way that we wanted to and organize it the way we wanted to. I think that that level of autonomy really shaped me also later in my career.

So that’s really how it started.

How does the mission to help people impact work in CS

Irina 4:51
And somehow up until now, you’ve always been focused on helping people succeed. And it was in their career journey, but now also mental well-being way. And how does this mission shape your work at OpenUp?

Jeroen 5:13
The mission to help people? Yeah.

Irina 5:16
Yes, exactly.

Jeroen 5:17
So I think if you do something, you have to do it well. Right. So that’s, that’s always how, how I look at things.

And at OpenUp, we, we have a mission to make mental well being accessible, right. So it’s, I believe that if you have a team, you want, you’re responsible for your team, right, and for your team success, because you are in control of your own career at all times, you need to try and get hold of it, at least. You can’t say that it’s a linear path, but you definitely are the one calling most of the shots there.

But if you if you’re responsible for a team, you also want to help your team to, to set out their path and to pinpoint what they want to work on, how they would like to develop. And that’s, that’s also not linear for them. So and it’s very important to be able to talk about what you feel that’s happening in your career, right.

So in my team, I try to really do that. And, but we all are mission oriented. That is relatively easy, if you all have a mission, where you want to make impact, you want to do good.

So at OpenUp, the mission that we have is to make mental well being accessible to all. But in order to prioritize your mental well being, you need to have a few elements in place. And in our in the workplace, in our team, we want to remove barriers.

That’s also one of the principles we have as a business is to remove the barriers that are there that people experience to actually work on their, on their mental well being. So if you don’t have a good dialogue, it’s very hard to actually do something about about well being. So we really try to have that dialogue.

And if we then look beyond my own team, we try to create a platform where people feel comfortable, where they want, where they want to actually seek out for help. And so we have, we have a few different options that we offer. But the most popular one are conversations with, with our psychologists.

So we have more than 150 psychologists, we speak more than 30 languages. That is how people really reach out to us predominantly.

The definition of customer success

Irina 7:42
I want to make it more specific. And I want to ask you what’s the definition of customer success at Openup. And how does your team address the well being and mental health to your customers?

Because it’s not a clear cut as goals, those two elements like reducing churn, or so I feel like those type of objectives, I mean, from our company coming from a product are, I wouldn’t say necessarily superior, but more meaningful with an emotional connection addressed to. So now, how does the CS team manage to influence those things through what they do, and how they do it?

Jeroen 8:40
So we have different roles in our team. So at OpenUp, we do, we do that in, in basically three flavors. But I think it going into the flavors is something we might, we might do next.

But I think first, I should mention that we win on the relationship. So at OpenUp, customer success is focused on relationships. And we have very strong relationships, especially if you look into to our type of business.

So a lot of companies out there will offer everything digitally, their complete service level is digital as well. So their offering is digital. But the way that they deal with customers all interacted via email or messaging.

And we actually build relationships with our customers. So that means that we, we also visit them regularly. So of course, we do video calls, but we try to get that face time.

And then you also see that we win because of the relations. Also, we have a good product, but there are a lot of good products out there. And I think that you also know that, at Custify, there are a lot of good products out there, but you can win on the relations.

And that’s what we really focus on. So I think that that is what sets us apart by actually also opening up. So we are very transparent about what we what we do, how we work, how we offer our services, what the benefits are for the customer.

And we also do that in our reporting, we are very transparent. Also, when things don’t look as favorable as they maybe should be in certain situations. Then at OpenUp itself, we we consider the role to be crucial for the growth of of the relationship and also the development.

When you look at revenue, right, so it’s really a revenue driving role. But the revenue, the revenue element is not the predominant decider on the relationship. So there are customers and that’s also what relates to that mission.

There are customers where they really need OpenUp, but we are not making incredible margins on those customers. But that’s OK. We have a mission and our mission is to make it accessible to all.

Also, in my team, we recognize that we need to make sure that we get customers that are very excited about our product, that really love to use our product. And sometimes that has more value than to make the best margins on what we deliver. And I think that that’s not very common in business.

But for us, it’s about doing good business. And you cannot do good business if your users are not satisfied with their services. And that’s where we come into play.

And we have an interesting approach where in the early phase of customer success, we have implementation team who really go deep with the customer. And I think that really sets the relationship up for success. So we have a three month super intense implementation phase where we engage senior leaders in the business, where we get executive sponsors on board, but where we set really clear objectives and goals together with the customer on how would they like to make mental health being accessible and how are they going to see that through.

And that’s in that phase, that three month phase, that’s where we can really set ourselves apart, because we build the foundation to actually build on thereafter. And then someone else will take over after that implementation has been done.

Handover between Implementation and CSM

Irina 12:46
So basically, you have in terms of roles in the implementation role, do you have a role for onboarding? There’s a handover between implementation and the CSM?

Jeroen (13:08 – 14:02)
And we also for the smaller segments, we have someone who is running onboarding in cohorts. So we also bring customers together, which is very interesting dynamic, because our customers have a challenge and they want to address that challenge. And it’s related to well being.

And if you look in business, there are often a few things that have to be addressed in order to make something accessible. And that is something that is not per se very secretive. So our customers are quite happy to talk to each other about how they can engage the right stakeholders and how they can really motivate leaders within the business to be more open and be more in tune with what’s going on within their teams.

And that is actually a very nice dynamic.

Onboarding based on cohort

Irina 14:02
Okay. You mentioned something interesting, and it’s the first time when I’m hearing onboarding based on cohort. Can you expand a bit on the process?

How does this look like?

Jeroen 14:16
Yeah, of course. So it’s not, I think, something brand new, but something that I picked up also, when I worked at LinkedIn, where the focus really is about making sure that people that are going through a similar implementation process, especially in smaller segments, they often don’t have any peers that they can talk to, to kind of discuss what would be the right approach here. And if you look at, let’s say, the larger scale of things, they are revenue-wise small customers, but that doesn’t matter, right?

It is about trying to solve their challenge. So we figured that we cannot give every customer an individual implementation like we do in the larger segment. But we did want to really provide them with something valuable.

And it may be sometimes even more valuable than if you would have one person helping you, if you have multiple people listening along and sharing ideas. So there, it’s a workshop setting, where initially, a consultant is talking to the group and explaining them, okay, what are we going to do? How are we going to set the scene?

And then the interactive element is where they actually collaborate with each other on how can they motivate and how can they engage the right people in their organization? Who would they need to engage? How would the communication look like?

What are the next steps that they could take? When do they believe it’s a success, et cetera, just to be able to also get that conversation going, kind of also opening up about this. So yeah, that’s the whole kind of mantra that we have at OpenUp, is we try to get the conversation going and have people to open up about mental well-being and also how to engage people into this mindset.

How to balance your team’s well-being in a high-growth environment

Irina 16:13
How do you keep your team’s well-being in check, especially in a high-growth environment? Any tips for our audience that help maintain this balance?

Jeroen 16:24
Yeah, that’s a good question. So really, when it comes to well-being, every person is different, right? So you don’t want to have a one-size-fits-all and one-size-fits-none situation.

So I tell my team that they are the ones that know themselves the best, right? So they know where their pitfalls are and where their strengths are. And also, when it comes to well-being, of course, we have a biweekly meeting with my team, where I have a one-on-one biweekly.

We often talk about well-being. So I ask them how they’re doing. I try to have a meaningful conversation with them.

But I also really encourage people to be open also in the team. So when we have a team setting, every meeting, we have also a well-being score. So we literally rate our own well-being, and we call out why the score is what it is.

And that might feel daunting, but for us, it’s very normal to do it. And you see also that, sorry, as time goes, you can see that it’s progressing, and people are becoming more open to that. And if I understand what’s going on there, right?

So in the well-being score, we always give a little talk over. So, hey, my score is low. I had a very bad night.

Okay. And that’s a good trigger to know. Or, hey, the score is low, but it’s not because of my workload.

And those are small nuggets that you can use in order to address. And if someone scores below a six, I always ask them, or below a seven, so a six or lower, I always will ask them, what’s going on? Is there anything we can do to help?

Yeah. And we review workloads. We review, yeah, what we ask people to do very regularly.

And I’m very straightforward about this. So, if there’s something on your mind, then I want to hear it. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have high workloads or high pressure.

And we’ve done quite a big growth over the past two years. And that also means that people join a startup and scale up. They are here for the dynamic environment.

But we also ask quite a lot from our people. So, yeah, that doesn’t mean that because we are doing well-being as a business, we are, let’s say, ourselves in very low pressure environments.

Scaling a business while keeping a personal touch

Irina 19:05
Speaking of this, how do you balance the need to scale from a business perspective with maintaining the personal touch?

Jeroen 19:14
Yeah, that’s a good question. So, of course, you always need to do the concessions, right? And I think also related to the last question, when you, we have our own psychologist.

So, I think we have a superpower there, right? We have 150 psychologists. It’s not maybe the most fair game comparison to when that’s not available.

But still, finding how you can have your own sanity is very important. You’re going for that walk, doing the exercise, and we challenge each other to do so. Now, with the customers, we also challenge our customers to be healthy, right?

And we also call out, we call out what we see. But when you talk about scaling and the need to keep it personal, there will always be concessions that you have to make. So, if you’re going to go into a conversation, and you want to be super prepared, then you’re going to have to spend more time on it.

So, how do we make sure that we maintain this? Yeah, we have tools, we use solutions that help us to create better summaries. So, we don’t have to make the notes ourselves, for example, in our meetings.

That helps us to be much more engaged in the conversation, so that when we have that meeting, that it is way more engaging, and we can have a meaningful conversation also with the customer. Yeah, we re-evaluate our book sizes constantly. So, we always look at, okay, what should the small segment look like?

Do we need to make that smaller? Do we need to make that bigger? Do we go for a cohort approach?

Do we engage customers based on specific topics? Or do we do that based on value, etc.? So, we always will go for the content route.

So, we always try to match on specific topics that are related to them and their business. And we try to ask customers, yeah, what are they trying to achieve? And we always benchmark that again.

So, we always go back to that and see, okay, what can we do different? Of course, when it comes to that personalization element, there are many tools that we can leverage for this. And also, in our newslettering, we are now, for example, overhauling the newsletters to make them more personal.

Initially, we had quite a broad newsletter approach, which works very well. We have very high click-through rates and open rates. But I believe that we can do a better job to get a higher open rate.

And I think you can only achieve that by being more personal.

Managing both the business side and the team side

Irina 22:11
Speaking of work, I want to remain on the business side of things. And I want to ask you if you feel, or at least there was a situation in my case where I feel like in order to grow the business and scale or achieve the business KPIs, I’m somehow needed to sacrifice the well-being of the team and the other way around.

So, now I’m curious, were you ever in a difficulty into picking sides? Where you managed to keep a balance between the business side and the team side.

Jeroen 22:49
I think I believe in the first team and second team principles. So, my peers are my first team. Right.

So, my team are my peers. And with them, I can discuss things in a different level. Then we discuss how we can manage to get to certain results and how we can make sure that we don’t jeopardize anything in our teams and how can we get there without feeling that we are doing something that we shouldn’t.

And we’re all quite principled in that. And I think that’s a very good thing. And then in my team, yeah, sometimes the team that I manage, I dare you absolutely, you sometimes have to be tough.

And you have to, if you collectively as a company decide what your path is and what your OKRs are, then we’re all going to hammer home on in this quarter. And then we will sometimes need to do things that we don’t really want to do at all times or that we sometimes feel are very difficult or maybe so ambitious that they’re not 100% attainable. But I think that that’s OK.

Because we have, we as a team, we also discuss these challenges that we foresee. And also, in my team that I manage, we also are open about if we feel that things are too ambitious or they’re too difficult to obtain or attain. So yeah, I don’t particularly see that we are crushing their ability to deliver or achieve or that we are going so far that we ask things that are unattainable.

Now, we all never do that. We are always ambitious, but we are human. So I think the human element, and that’s also, that’s who is our product.

But anything should be discussable and we always listen to each other. So yeah, it is not really been the case that we had such an unreasonable ask. So no, I really don’t believe that.

The challenges of customer success

Irina 25:10
And as OpenUp grows, what unique challenges do you face in customer success?

Jeroen 25:17
In growth? Well, I think in the current business environment, it’s very important to retain your customers. Maybe even more than ever, ever so.

It’s expensive to acquire a customer. It’s very expensive.

Irina 25:37
So on the marketing side, I know cost of acquisition is very high.

Jeroen 25:43
It is. So you really want to make sure that if you get those customers in, that they are the right fit. I think that that’s where a real, that’s where probably our biggest challenge lies is that we get the right fit. There’s a lot of businesses that come to us and that opt to work with us.

But if the commitment is not really there, then it’s hard because it’s a change process, right? It’s not only a tool that you are introducing. It is really something that you need to want as a business.

You need to want to make sure that people become more resilient, that they are there for a reason and that they want to align better with themselves, so they are better in tune with themselves, that they can really make more impact in the company as well because they’re more engaged with what they’re doing. And finding that fit, that is from a customer success perspective, I think the most challenging thing, of course, open up works for many businesses. It doesn’t mean that we’re looking for unicorns, but I think that’s kind of a never ending challenge when sales teams are eager to sell.

And yeah, that is something that you will see in any company. But I think that if you want to get partners that are there for the long haul, like three, four, five year commitments, because it takes at least a year to really adapt as a business and to be really embedded in their ways of working and in their basically their employee life cycle. So yeah, you want that long term commitment.

And you know yourself that in companies, things can change quite quickly. So not everything is top priority. In order to stay top priority, you need to be embedded.

Customer success strategy in 2025

Irina 27:53
Speaking about priorities, I’m curious, what’s top of mind for your 2025 CS strategy? What are your specific goals? What do you want to achieve next year in terms of CS?

Jeroen 28:07
Yeah, so I think our goals are related to building a simpler framework. So a simpler customer success and measurement framework that customers can recognize themselves in. So building an external communication path, basically, on which customers can identify, okay, where am I on the journey to making mental well-being really accessible?

I think that now what we currently have is a very solid model that we have in place. But we need to make sure that it’s very clear for customers what they’re going to get. And that’s something that we are now working on to make sure that the people that we are intensively working with have an easier job to transcend what the impact is that we are making together on the business and on the people.

Sometimes that is still difficult to convey. Because we are not always talking about very tangible things. If you have a conversation with a psychologist, by default, that isn’t very tangible.

What is tangible is there was one conversation. But the impact that has made on you as an individual, that that is something that we are now developing further to be able to show that there are multiple angles to that. And it’s absolute no brainer from an investment perspective, to invest in a solution where you can address the mental well being of of talent in your business, right, retaining talent longer, and not having to replace them, making sure people don’t go on a sick leave, their engagement on the productivity itself, and business results.

It is absolutely no brainer. There’s so many studies, but to make that more tangible, and not only a numbers game. Yeah, that is something that we are working on.

And that will be our challenge for 2025, including the growth that we are going through. So still hiring more talent and refining the way that we operate.

Irina 30:28
And in a nutshell, what do you think you need? What kind of support or resources does your team need in order to achieve those ambitious goals in 2025?

Jeroen 30:38
Well, I think for the measurement framework, we need real close alignment internally, actually. But we also need a few very dedicated customers that would like to test that for us. So that that is one of the first steps.

And while we are we are closing in on this, so I’m confident we’ll manage. But then working very closely with customers, with a few customers would be something we absolutely need to get that voice of customer heard. And then from maybe more of a tools perspective.

I think that’s what you’re hinting at. Yeah, there we will most likely take steps in our BI side of things so that we so we actually we done a mega project on improving our BI literacy in the company. So we have a very strong data analytics team that builds reporting for us on let’s say aggregate level so that we can now really see like what is the movement of that is being generated through our actions.

So we can really see what impact we are making from a customer success perspective on activation numbers, etc. And I think then the next challenge is to then translate that further into building a more personalized approach also for that scale customer. So that every customer can have a very personalized approach based on their activity and their maybe action or inaction.

So we can keep them accountable also on the objectives they set and then keep that very personal. But I think for that we will need to tie some things together to be there. But I do believe it will happen in 2025.

So I’m very excited about it.

Predictions for CS in 2025

Irina 32:39
Awesome. If there’s one prediction you have for CS in 2025, what would that be? What do you think would happen in the industry?

Jeroen 32:53
I think that it will be all about personalization.

Irina 32:58
Okay.

Jeroen 32:58
Yeah. So managing more workload, managing it smarter, triggering automation, kind of like a conductor. So I think the CS teams will be more conductors than orchestra players, so to speak.

I think that’s my prediction. I do believe that there will still be an incredible need also for that personalized touch, but really managing time I think will become more important than ever.

Irina 33:31
Before we wrap up, that’s my last question. I’m curious who has been a big influence in your career and what’s the best advice they’ve given you that stuck with you up until now?

Jeroen 33:46
That’s a very hard question, because there are so many people. There’s actually so many people.

Irina 33:53
You can drop them all.

Jeroen 33:56
First of all, my parents. My parents have been very influential because they all, both of them always worked. And every evening we would sit at the table and talk about our days.

And I would hear so much about their lives and their careers. They both had very, very good careers. So I heard a lot about decision-making, about conflict, about solving and resolving conflict, how to hire people, how to fire people, the whole story.

So I think definitely from them. And also advice there was when you do something, do it well, do it good, see it through. So that’s definitely from them.

And I think, yeah, throughout my career, my first manager, I learned so much from him. My mate Guido van der Linde at LinkedIn, we worked together. Also Simon Patterson, my manager then.

He was definitely someone who did very good in stakeholder management. So I think that’s something I learned from him. And I have so many people that I’ve worked with that I don’t believe in having one person, right?

That is your like mentor. I have many people that I would consult and listen to. And I think you can learn something from almost anyone and everyone, as long as you ask the right questions and you listen carefully.

And I work now with Melanie Lahn, who is a very, very good coach. And she’s a fractional CRO. So she’s a CRO in many companies.

And she has given me incredible advice, especially around making sure that when you create plans, and you scope your plans to really involve the right stakeholders, to make sure that you see those plans through, and you never let go. So you always come back to why did you want to start? Why are we here today?

And does it still align? Yeah.

Irina 36:18
Jeroen, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today. And a big thank you to all our listeners. Until next time, stay safe and keep mastering customer success.

Nicoleta Niculescu

Written by Nicoleta Niculescu

Nicoleta Niculescu is the Content Marketing Specialist at Custify. With over 6 years of experience, she likes to write about innovative tech products and B2B marketing. Besides writing, Nicoleta enjoys painting and reading thrillers.

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