Why I left my career in Media and Consultancy to enter Customer Success

I started my career as a strategy consultant specialising in media at Ingenious Media, then ITN Consulting. This was a unique and interesting job - the rigour of consulting meant I developed my financial modelling, business planning, and presentation skills, whilst being focused on TV meant I got to travel internationally and work with some very cool clients. From there, I moved to All3Media, the biggest TV production company in the UK, which produced some amazing shows like Gogglebox, Fleabag and Undercover Boss. I worked closely with the CEO and Group Director of Corporate Development on global strategy and investments, before moving to Los Angeles for three years to grow and transform All3Media’s US business. During this time, I learnt a huge amount about stakeholder management, operations, M&A, and cultural change - as well as TV!

Outside of work, my biggest passion has always been volunteering with young people through mentorship roles, helping them to gain access to career opportunities. It was always a question of ‘when’ not ‘if’ I would move into a career with more of a social mission, but I wasn’t sure how I’d manage to do it given my previous roles. When I came across Multiverse, I couldn’t believe it was real. Multiverse is genuinely creating systemic change and impacting the lives of thousands of young people through its mission to create a diverse group of future leaders. What is even more amazing to me is that it’s also a well-funded, incredibly fast-growing commercial business led by exceptional leadership to partner with the top companies in the world.

I applied for a job through LinkedIn, then interviewed with our President Jeremy Duggan(opens new window) and VP of Go-To-Market Steve McCluskey(opens new window), who have previously taken 4 different companies to billion dollar valuations. The interviews were completely different to anything I’d ever experienced before - I loved how they pushed me outside of my comfort zone to think on my feet whilst supporting me with live feedback. I knew immediately that these were the people I wanted to work with and learn from next. In my final interview with Jeremy, rather than the job I’d applied for he asked “what about Customer Success?” Truthfully, I had no idea what that was but he told me that if I wanted to learn the most, I should take on the biggest challenge. So I took the risk and said yes! I started one week later as the Global Director of Customer Success, and credit to Jeremy, it was the perfect role for my skills and I love it.

Our goal as a Customer Success Team is to drive the retention and expansion of our customers, such as Morgan Stanley, WPP and the NHS. We work post-sale with very senior stakeholders at these organisations, to drive ‘health,’ ‘value’ and build champions.

We’re a very data-driven organisation. To drive account ‘health’, we monitor and analyse information about how our apprentices are progressing and their sentiment, then work with the client and Multiverse stakeholders to creatively problem solve, if needed. ‘Value’ is particularly unique to Multiverse - it's our job as a customer success team to demonstrate the bottom-line impact of apprenticeships on our clients' businesses through things like productivity gains and revenue generated. There’s no other education provider that takes the complex and commercially driven approach that we do to this. I’m particularly passionate about it because if we can effectively demonstrate the financial impact of our apprentices it’s a no-brainer for clients to take on more apprentices, meaning we can change even more lives, year after year. As a direct result of the customer success team’s work, 60% of our clients launch more apprentices with Multiverse within the first 6 months of partnering with us.

Our team is also the glue that binds the whole Multiverse business together. We’re the only team that works closely with sales, coaches and clients, giving us a unique viewpoint into the operations of a hypergrowth business and a lot of input into how it keeps on developing. Alongside our client work, we also work cross-functionally to influence processes and operations by acting as the voice of the customer.

Outside of Multiverse, traditional customer success roles tend to be in SaaS businesses, where they’re focused on retaining subscription revenue and upselling. Our apprenticeships are driving the digital transformation of the biggest and best companies in the world, so they’re also not sold on a subscription basis and there’s no such thing as a simple upsell. Instead, we act as trusted advisors, working alongside the sales team as consultative partners to help clients solve complex business challenges. Ultimately, our product is people so every day the work that we do is impacting people’s lives. This makes what we do harder than traditional customer success, but at the same time much more interesting and rewarding.

Our development culture is also unique to Multiverse, with Customer Success Managers managed by leaders whose full-time job is to coach and mentor them, rather than looking after any of their own accounts. We all spend a lot of time reflecting on what we’ve learned each week, sharing feedback and figuring out how we can keep on getting better. One of the things I’m most proud of is the huge amount the team has developed and grown as a result. On average every person is promoted more than once per year!

Finally, we also get the added benefit of working closely with the sales team, led by Jeremy Duggan and Steve McCluskey, to learn from the sales playbook that they have spent 25 years perfecting. At the same time, the Customer Success team is relatively new to Multiverse so we’re still in the process of developing and refining our own playbook. We’re a super collaborative team and everyone has a say in the direction we’re taking our strategy. It’s really the best of both worlds.

Like every hiring team at Multiverse, we care much more about you as a person than what your previous job was. We look for people who demonstrate our hiring characteristics: Intelligence, Character, Coachability, and Track Record, and who have excelled both inside and outside of work.

Specifically in Customer Success, we’re after people who are great at managing complex projects alongside senior stakeholders, commercially-minded, passionate about our mission and up for a challenge! There are 3 different personas that we’ve seen make great Customer Success Managers before, but we are very open to other backgrounds too.

1. Former Customer Success Managers or Sales professionals - like Jacob(opens new window) who was previously in go-to-market at Google and Twilio, or Theo(opens new window) who was a top Account Executive at MVF.

2. Project or Program Managers who may work externally or internally to manage stakeholders - like Luci(opens new window) who was on the networks planning team at BT, Raluca(opens new window) who was a branch manager at Barclays, or Iman(opens new window) who was a project management apprentice.

3. Former Strategy or Management Consultants - like Cami(opens new window) who used to work at Deloitte, or Harriet(opens new window) who studied law before entering financial consultancy.

Diversity is also a key focus of ours when hiring. By hiring people from a wide range of career backgrounds and training them to progress from entry-level right through to Senior Customer Success Manager roles we’re working to create a genuinely diverse team, where everyone can bring their true selves to work. Our team is one of the best things about this job, it is an absolute privilege to get to work with so many smart and ambitious people every day, all of whom constantly go above and beyond to support each other to develop together.

Are you interested in joining our dream team? Apply today to become an Enterprise Customer Success Manager in London(opens new window) or New York(opens new window).