VP of Customer Success

Introducing Centra

Centra is delivering a direct-to-consumer (B2C) and wholesale (B2B) Software-as-a-Service “SaaS” ecommerce platform for brands. In other words, we make cloud-based software used by consumer brands for selling their products online, both wholesale and directly to consumers.

Centra is a so-called “headless” system, meaning data is exposed through APIs, consumed by Centra’s implementation partners, for creating online webshops, mobile apps and other shoppable experiences.

We're building our company and our products with the ambition to be the very best in the world. While we are a startup (founded 2016), we are already working with some of the strongest brands in the Nordics and have clients throughout Europe, in North America and in Asia. We are around 40 colleagues today and we are growing rapidly.

New Customer Success role at Centra

Centra has a typical SaaS business model where our customers pay us over time and a go-to-market strategy that relies on a strong product and satisfied clients. Given this, customer success is absolutely vital to Centra’s long-term success.

We have so far been successful at retaining customers, and we are now looking to even more improve our efforts and become more systematic in the field of customer success management.

To lead, coordinate and accelerate this work, we are recruiting an executive with an exceptionally strong passion for customers to join our management team.

The role as Centra’s VP of Customer Success

As VP of Customer Success, you will lead our Client and Partner Success department, report to our CEO and be part of our management team.

The role includes responsibilities for all of Centra’s customer success activities (e.g., onboarding, training, solution architecture, increasing feature usage, professional services, customer support, customer success management, up-sell, cross-sell, advocacy, retention and churn prevention) and the financial outcomes of those activities. The role also includes responsibility for partner success, i.e., indirectly ensuring the success of our customers, by ensuring the success of our solution partners implementing Centra for them.

You will lead a department of initially 5-10 people (we are in the midst of a reorganization). You will be setting the right culture, defining ways of working and processes, refining and defining roles and organization and leading day-to-day work. You will ensure we recruit, retain and develop top-performance colleagues to work with all aspects of customer success. You will work hands-on to ensure the success of our most senior clients and lead our most complex onboarding and professional services projects.

In the role as VP of Customer Success, you will work closely with Centra’s other departments, Product & Engineering and Marketing & Sales.

Key responsibilities

- Increase customer lifetime value and net retention rate through higher product adoption, customer satisfaction, up-sell/cross-sell and overall health score management
- Drive new business growth through greater advocacy and referenceability
- Manage Centra’s customer success activities on a daily basis: onboarding, training, solution architecture, feature usage, professional services, customer support, partner support, customer success management, partner success management, up-sell, cross-sell, advocacy, retention and churn prevention


Role description

Organize, build and lead Centra’s Customer & Partner Success department

- Define and promote the right purpose, values and culture for the department
- Create clear roles and responsibilities for all department team members
- Promote existing colleagues into the right roles
- Attract high potential new colleagues into the department
- Create learning plans and promotion paths for department members
- Coach team members and ensure department members get coaching
- Manage the performance and performance reviews of department members


Define how Centra creates a world-class experience for customers and partners

- Define a categorization for Centra’s customers and use it for segmenting Centra’s customer success offering for different categories of customers
- Map out the ideal customer journey for each customer segment
- Develop and implement listening points in the journey (e.g., feature usage, satisfaction, etc.), collaborating with Product & Engineering as needed
- Identify the best actions to be taken by customer success at each point in the journey (e.g., host a specific solution architecture workshop, deliver a specific end-user training, invite the customer to an in-person event, suggest the customer to watch an instructional video…)
- Drive the creation of playbooks, codifying the best way to execute actions throughout the journey, starting with the first meeting with the new customer
- In the same way, segment solution partners, map their journeys and define listening points and action playbooks for solution partners, taking into account the different natures and capabilities of different solution partners


Enhance effectiveness and efficiency through continuous improvements

- Promote fast-paced innovation and continuously run a portfolio of change initiatives to improve the customer experience
- Eliminate or automate recurring customer success actions/tasks that don’t add value, by enabling self-service. Scale customer success impact by rolling out one-to-many models complementing current one-to-one models
- Explore how remote service can be leveraged to scale customer success impact in a post-covid delivery model
- Ensure recurring support issues are eliminated by systematically improving documentation and bringing product improvement suggestions to our Product & Engineering department
- Make work easier by implementing appropriate technical solutions (support ticket systems, phone systems, customer marketing systems, …)


Measure effectiveness of Customer Success

- Define operational metrics for the team and establish routines/systems for tracking the metrics regularly as needed
- Create the right formats and cadence for reviewing and following up on operational metrics within the department
- Expose a subset of metrics to the executive team, company and board


Inspire Customer Success across all of Centra

- Create a company-wide culture of Customer Success
- Drive a company-wide cross-department definition of our ideal customer
- Act as a key stakeholder for Centra’s product roadmap, interacting with our Produc...