Growth and Challenges in Customer Success at OakMega: Inside a Role at a B2B Software Startup
Customer Success plays a key role in retaining customers in the software industry, but what does the job actually involve? OakMega creates value for brands through Social CRM. Over the past decade, Customer Success has been a rare role in Taiwan: it helps customers succeed with a software product, spanning training, customer service, upselling, and scenario-based marketing.
Wayne ChungCustomer Success Specialist
SparkLabs TAIPEI DEMO DAY
After finishing my military service at the end of 2020, I once again chose a startup, OakMega, for my first full-time job and the starting point of my career. Uncertainty and pushing forward through chaos are challenges every startup software worker faces, often and unavoidably. As a newcomer, messing up is a given, reflecting on it is routine, and gratitude is the mindset I try to keep as I grow.
I joined JANDI Taiwan in 2018 and worked on everything from content marketing and customer relationship management (designing messages in Intercom) to supporting all kinds of projects. That was the first time I heard of a “Customer Success” role, and my first reaction was pure confusion: “What exactly counts as success?” I vaguely assumed it meant helping customers do big things. Only later did I realize that serving customers isn’t limited to handling support tickets; it’s about maximizing communication and enablement. Of course, once you put it in fancy terms, the job sounds like something people want to peek into and understand.
This is a record of what I’ve observed and learned in a Customer Success role during my limited career so far. A startup’s customers aren’t giant enterprises running projects worth millions, but serving them has still taught me lessons about Customer Success that deserve a place in my career notes.
In the sections below, you’ll find an introduction to OakMega, an introduction to Social CRM, my take on the Customer Success role, and one important message I have to share: OakMega is hiring a Customer Success intern. We can’t wait for new teammates to join, and after reading, we hope you’ll invite anyone you think would be a good fit.
OakMega Is Hiring a Customer Success Intern1. Help run customer projects, understand customer plans, review and analyze data, and deliver complete, clear solutions. 2. Regularly organize and analyze customer feedback, pin down pain points, and help the team build products that meet customer needs. 3. Periodically compile customer success stories and co-author full reports so the team better understands existing customers.…https://www.yourator.co/companies/OakMega/jobs/3577Learn more about Customer Success
Who is OakMega?
OakMega was founded in 2019. Two years isn’t long enough for many people to know us yet, but as a software company offering Social CRM, there’s a chance you’ve already used our service. If you’ve joined a marketing campaign on a LINE Official Account, our work may well have been behind it.
Across sales, marketing, and customer service scenarios, our customers’ needs have pushed OakMega forward over the past two years. Through them, we’ve also seen the potential of our own product. With a complete tagging system, we solve customers’ social media management challenges and strive to make our software cover customer relationship management scenarios as fully as possible.
Find out more about OakMega
What can Social CRM actually do?
We integrate social platforms with customer relationship management systems. But what can such a system actually do, and where can it be applied in practice?
Precision marketing and remarketing
After a brand campaign wraps up, marketers often struggle to track how friends behave on their LINE Official Account. Social CRM uses a complete tagging system to record different customer behaviors, making it easy to follow up with remarketing campaigns.
Integrating member management and social management
A brand may already have its own member management system but not know which of those members are active on social media. Social CRM integrates both sets of data, extending customer relationship management from existing channels to social networks.
Beyond use cases on LINE Official Accounts, OakMega is expanding to more social platforms. Social has never been just a gimmick, and CRM isn’t just a platform. We want to build every kind of relationship more effectively and with more warmth.
OakMega BlogThe all-in-one OakMega Social CRM platform connects LINE Official Accounts, Telegram, and more messaging apps to meet your customer service, marketing, and sales needs. Automated tags power targeted broadcasts and engagement, web behavior tracking shows every user action, and a full range of campaign modules is ready to go.https://oakmega.com/blogBrowse and follow more industry insights
What is Customer Success?
Over the past decade, Customer Success has been a role few industries in Taiwan really understood. In short, it means helping customers succeed with a software product, spanning training, customer service, upselling, and scenario-based marketing. To put it more bluntly: a customer has paid for your product, and it isn’t a one-time purchase, so you’d better hire people to serve them. Otherwise, they’ll leave it sitting idle and soon try a competitor.
What Is a “Customer Success Manager”?According to LinkedIn, customer success manager ranked second among the most promising sales roles of 2019. Yet customers often feel customer success managers care more about selling than about driving customer success. Customer success managers must therefore balance three sets of conflicting interests: customer success vs. company success; sales…https://www.hbrtaiwan.com/article_content_AR0009353.htmlRead more about the Customer Success Manager role
Unlike a large organization, our startup doesn’t have senior teammates with eight to ten years or more of experience leading the team. Instead, we keep learning and growing from our experiences with customers.
The Customer Success role is really about winning customers the chance to get to know the product: how to make a campaign hit its KPIs smoothly, how to make customers feel a real improvement in results after paying for the service, how to get customers to believe our recommendations create value, or how to help our contact person win more internal support and grow with us. Most of our time actually goes into making sure customers enjoy using the product, because that’s what gives us the chance to guide them toward success.
What sets Customer Success apart?
A bridge that delivers product value
Software is static, but the scenarios it solves are alive. The same feature can add far more value as long as it solves a real-world problem. For example, we built a multi-page message interface with a color picker at a client’s request. On its own, it’s just color customization, but paired with card background colors, it improves CTA performance in multi-page messages. A feature originally meant for matching brand colors became a tool for “designing CTA buttons” and “extending card visuals.”
Here’s another example: redirect links that track clicks. Beyond tracking regular traffic, they can serve as a topic analysis tool. By broadcasting on specific topics, you can see which kinds of content spread further among friends on LINE.
A helper for every kind of customer problem
Customer needs are endlessly varied, from bug fixes to feature wish lists. Before any request reaches our product team, the first step is to find the right solution for the customer. The most important tactic is to “share a workaround using existing features” so we can clear the problem right away. That buys the product team time to fix things and builds customers’ trust in our team. What sets Customer Success apart from customer service is turning a single-point issue into broader product adoption, becoming the go-to helper for customer problems.
The face of the company’s service
In B2B, once sales closes a deal, the follow-up team has to maintain the customer relationship. Otherwise, you’ll soon face cancellations or non-renewals and be replaced by a competitor.
In Customer Success, the job is to deliver tangible value after customers buy the service and to keep showing up. Discussing new ways to use the product or the state of the customer’s industry all counts as serving the customer. And while serving them, you also need to look after stakeholders beyond your main contact, earn their trust, and build relationships. Only by digging in deep can you sustain the account over the long term.
What Is Customer Success?It's no secret your business needs exceptional Sales and Marketing to be successful. But in a world where customers…https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-successRead more about the Customer Success role
What does Customer Success do?
Building the training process
How software gets used varies by industry. Early on, the top priority for Customer Success is planning training so customers quickly understand how to use the product, while learning about their industry’s needs through ongoing conversations.
Answering customer service questions
A flood of customer questions is part of the daily routine. When a ticket comes in, the first step is to reproduce the problem. Next, figure out whether it’s a configuration mistake or a system bug. Finally, come up with a workaround quickly and report the issue to the team at the same time.
Helping projects get delivered
Beyond teaching the existing product, many needs can’t be solved by it, and custom projects fill that gap. Some companies split project management into its own role, but at a small company, Customer Success still acts as project manager, coordinating communication so projects actually get delivered.
Analyzing customer results
Because OakMega’s product is built on LINE Official Accounts, part of the job is helping client companies produce social data reports, whether so our contact can report up the chain or to help them optimize their workflow each time.
Upselling and renewals
Beyond growing alongside customers as a partner, Customer Success sometimes steps into a sales role, offering existing customers the latest solutions and content. That lets existing customers create more value for the company while going deeper into the many ways to use our product.
A corner of the Customer Success team in Gather Town
🐘 OakMega Customer Success Intern
🤟 What we’re looking for
We hope our intern brings imagination to helping customers, and we want teammates with a problem-solving mindset to join us and help the CS team reach its next goal.
💪 What you’ll do
- Help run customer projects, understand customer needs, and deliver complete, clear solutions.
- Regularly organize and analyze customer feedback, pin down pain points, and help the team build the product.
- Periodically compile customer success stories and co-author full reports on existing customers.
- Help answer user questions as needed, maintain customer relationships, and promote OAKMEGA products.
👂 What you’ll learn
You’ll get hands-on exposure to marketing technology use cases and take your first step into the software industry. You’ll learn how to bring a product to users on the front line and help OakMega’s product create more value for customers.
OakMega Is Hiring a Customer Success Intern1. Help run customer projects, understand customer plans, review and analyze data, and deliver complete, clear solutions. 2. Regularly organize and analyze customer feedback, pin down pain points, and help the team build products that meet customer needs. 3. Periodically compile customer success stories and co-author full reports so the team better understands existing customers.…https://www.yourator.co/companies/OakMega/jobs/3577
