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A Day at Sea as a CSM on the S.S. PagerDuty

by Hayley Neal December 16, 2019 | 4 min read

Tuesday isn’t exactly the most exciting day of the week—unless you’re a taco devotee—but we Customer Success Managers (CSM) at PagerDuty always have something exciting going on, whether it’s helping our customers get the most out of their PD instance or preparing behind the scenes to help them achieve their desired results.

But that’s just skimming the surface of what CSMs do. Jump aboard and I’ll share some tips on how to work best with our CSM team!

The Work to Ensure Smooth Sailing

Weekly Crew Check-Ins

Once a week, our team participates in a peer mentorship program, where a more seasoned CSM meets with a newer team member to review PagerDuty’s product offerings and discuss what products would be best-suited for particular customer use cases.

These weekly check-ins are important because our customers all have different needs, preferences, and ways of working—for example, when onboarding new clients, some like an “all-in” approach while others prefer a more prescriptive approach. Having a regular cadence of scheduled meetings ensures our CSMs are equipped with the ability to create and maintain a working plan via project planning and host strategically scheduled training sessions based on the needs of the customer, which help streamline the onboarding process.

Account Review

Hosting account reviews is a vital step in working with a customer to highlight areas of opportunity within their existing account and to check in on goal progression. Reviews don’t happen every day, but once a customer is up and running, we always set a regular cadence for account review meetings.

A metric-heavy entry to the review immediately gives us information like operational maturity, as well as recommendations that often lead to action items. Based on past data and the customer’s experience, we then determine how we can help them continue to evolve their digital operations maturity by setting future goals and milestones.

Internal Training Sessions

We have regular training sessions at PagerDuty to ensure everyone is up-to-date on the value our products offer because we believe adopting the approach of continuous learning is critical to better servicing our customers.

For example, we recently held a training session about PagerDuty’s integration with a popular IT Service Management (ITSM) tool, where we learned the best way to approach the integration when starting out and best practices surrounding functionality, as well as how we can create a smooth transition while using the two collaboratively. This type of training is very beneficial for the team since we specifically discuss how we can leverage new and advanced features to create additional value for customers..

How You Can Make the Most Out of PagerDuty

If you work with a CSM, never hesitate to reach out to them with your questions! CSMs are partnered with you to ensure you get the most out of your PagerDuty investment, but also to provide best practices and thought leadership around the incident response and digital operations management. The challenges you and your business face are exactly what we’re trained to help solve.

There are also other opportunities to get involved with training and the community. Our PagerDuty University (PDU) program allows you to bring an instructor on site to provide a customized learning experience for your team(s). You can also visit the PagerDuty office nearest you for our brand new Public Training Sessions! These sessions will allow you to take part in one of our sold-out PagerDuty Summit series on managing incident response teams and managing alert noise, in addition to our popular incident commander training.

Curious to learn more? Reach out to your CSM today and join our Community forums to learn best practices and tips from industry peers.