What's your customer success personality

I love personality tests and archetypes. I think they can be especially useful for team building, where you and your co-workers and managers have a shared language to discuss how to you approach your work. Also, I just think they’re fun!

I got to thinking recently about the different types of personalities I’ve encountered when working in Customer Success and I’ve come up with four:

• The Builder

• The Scaler

• The Champion

• The Expert

Below I’ve created a detailed personality profile for each, and then there’s a quick little quiz at the end so you can find out which one YOU are.

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The Types

The Builder

You want to be the one that makes something from nothing.

You want to provide order to chaos. You want to create new processes. You want to find the way of doing things.

You want to build a workable house, and have little interest in it once it’s built.

You’re afraid of becoming a cog in a machine. Things get less interesting to you when they are solved by 80-90%.

The Builder Personality Profile

Thrives in: early stage, chaotic environments with scarce resources

Bored by: solved problems, too much research and means testing, delayed decision making or moving too slowly

Motivated by: opportunity, bigger problems to solve, more decision making power

Feels accomplished when: creating a process or playbook, completing a special project, recognized as the architect of something

What they need in a leader: trust, autonomy, creative freedom. A manager who is more big picture focused and delegates whole projects.

Career development: Thrives as an individual contributor with power, or a leader with no people management requirements. Will likely pursue leadership roles for more impact over decision making, vs desire to manage people.

Pitfalls: 

• can be coached toward being a Scaler as the company matures, which won’t be a good fit

• can find it difficult to stay with companies after they hit a certain stage of growth

• can be difficult to find perfect fit companies as smaller, early-stage require more of a network to get in the door

Jobs:

• “first” role on any success team – first CSM, first onboarding, etc.

• CSM on a newly developed team

• early Ops, Scaled and Pooled Teams

Jobs to avoid: Program Management, Enablement, Professional Services, Technical/Specialist or Analyst roles

The Scaler

You want to be the one that gets things right.

You want to fix a broken process. You want to find the best way of doing things. You love efficiency and problems of scale, not problems of starting.

You want to improve the house to be the best house it can be. You want to operationalize and improve. You want to smooth out the rough edges or cut corners.

You don’t work well with a blank page and zero direction, and are afraid of apathy — no desire to make things even 1% better.

The Scaler Personality Profile

Thrives in: hyper-growth environments, particularly where leadership wants to make data-backed decisions based on business cases.

Bored by: dreamers, philosophizing, means testing or anything other than just doing it

Motivated by: problems that come with big growth: too many customers, inefficient processes. A mountain to climb.

Feels accomplished when: the data matches the hypothesis

What they need in a leader: someone who challenges them and delegates real problems, a manager who can clear the road for them to do their thing.

Career Development: can thrive in both individual contributor or leadership roles, though better suited for leadership roles with operational responsibilities rather than people management.

Pitfalls: 

• a track record of success can place them in a Builder role, which won’t be a good fit;

• can find it difficult to stay with companies that hit a certain stage of growth;

• can be difficult to find perfect fit companies as companies can often mis-identify their needs, especially when in a scaling situation

Jobs: 

• Series B or C startups

• operational roles

• Customer Success Analyst

• some early-ish stage Customer Success Manager roles can work, but will often be frustrating when they have to focus on customers vs scaling.

• onboarding

Jobs to avoid: Enablement, Professional Services, Customer Success Engineer

The Champion

You want to be the one that makes your customers happy.

Far from being a people pleaser, you are just most interested in the work that creates customer outcomes. You are happiest on your customer calls, advocating for the customer with the product team, collecting feedback and solving problems.

You want to understand how the homeowner actually lives. You want to help tweak the house and their routines to make sure they are as happy as they can be.

You’re afraid of environments that only pay lip service to the customer.

The Champion Personality Profile

Thrives in: post-scale environments where there’s less to operationally figure out, most stuff is cleared so they can focus on the customer, but can work in any environment

Bored by: project and process work, admin tasks, anything that isn’t focusing on the best thing for the customer

Motivated by: an angry, disappointed, or happy customer, a customer right in front of them

Feels accomplished when: a customer problem is resolved

What they need in a leader: someone who supports them, who can be a strong coach willing to go over individual customer situations, who will back them up in decisions and encourage them to set boundaries  

Career Development: Makes an excellent people leader but can have trouble being seriously considered for the role, and may find it distressing having to balance team care with business needs.

Pitfalls: 

• more susceptible to burnout as they lead with their empathy

• can sometimes miss the forest for the trees

• has trouble prioritizing as an unhappy customer can come in and upset their plans

• can struggle in more early-stage environments where things are less figured out

Jobs: 

• Customer Success Manager

• Manager of Customer Success

• Onboarding

Jobs to avoid: Customer Success Engineer, Program Management 

The Expert

You want to be the one that knows everything.

You want to know everything there is to know about your customers, about the product, about their use cases. You might get stuck on a problem for too long because you have to understand how it works and why it’s happening. Your team will come to you with questions about how things work, because you just always seem to know.

You want to understand exactly how the house works, fix things that can go wrong, and be the go-to if people need to know what’s possible to renovate or add-on.

You’re afraid of an environment that rewards anything other than merit.

The Expert Personality Profile

Thrives in: later-stage environments where things are changing less often, with technically complex products and services 

Bored by: admin work, meetings, same old playbooks

Motivated by: understanding why and how something works

Feels accomplished when: solve something “impossible”

What they need in a leader: someone who sees their impact on the team and balances it out with other styles, someone who lets them go on little expeditions

Career Development: knows exactly whats required to get leadership roles and thus will be unlikely to pursue them. Wants to be recognized and celebrated on merits, not politics.

Pitfalls: 

• can focus too much on technical, hidden features and workarounds vs actual customer needs

• working with a product that is unstable or too simple

• is often absolutely essential to the team but does not get enough credit   

Jobs: 

• Customer Success Engineer

• Technical Account Manager

• Customer Success Manager

• Professional Services

• Solutions Engineer

Jobs to avoid: Leadership, Onboarding