#72 Construire une équipe et une culture CS avec 3 équipes très différentes, avec Souphaphone Ortega, CS Director chez LexisNexis

Key Points

• Customer Success is defined as focusing on client goals, helping them achieve them quickly and sustainably, while creating a long-term partnership based on trust and quality.
• The CS team at LexisNexis was recently created to transition from product excellence to relationship excellence, aligning both for better client experience.
• The team was built from diverse profiles (trainers, sales, customer service), requiring a structured integration and cultural shift.
• The leader conducted individual interviews with each team member to diagnose strengths, weaknesses, and expectations, then used collective workshops to define the team’s purpose and values.
• A playbook was developed to clarify roles and processes, ensuring a consistent client journey and preventing silos between sales and CS.
• External coaching was brought in to accelerate skill-building, validate methods, and foster team engagement during the change management phase.
• The entire transformation took about six months, emphasizing the importance of taking time to build a strong foundation.

Summary

The transcription is a podcast interview where the guest, a Customer Success Director at LexisNexis, shares her experience in building and transforming a Customer Success (CS) team from scratch. She explains that Customer Success is about focusing on clients’ objectives, helping them achieve these goals quickly and over the long term, while ensuring the best possible experience and fostering a lasting partnership built on trust and quality.

LexisNexis, a legal information and analytics company, has a long history of product excellence through digitizing a vast database of legal documents. However, the creation of the CS direction marked a strategic shift to align product excellence with relationship excellence, ensuring the client’s success is central. The team was assembled from various backgrounds, including legal trainers, sales representatives, and customer service agents, which required a deliberate integration process.

Upon joining, the leader conducted individual half-hour interviews with each of the nearly 30 team members, asking three key questions: what works well, what should not change, and what they would change with a magic wand. This diagnostic helped identify pain points, expectations, and priorities. Based on this, she worked with managers to create concrete plans, such as reassigning non-CS tasks to support teams, freeing up the CS team to focus on their core mission.

Next, she organized collective workshops to define the team’s raison d’être, values, and how they wanted to be perceived both internally and externally. Through brainstorming, the team identified values like empathy, proactivity, and expertise, which helped build cohesion and a shared vision. These values were then translated into a playbook that outlined specific actions and standard operating procedures for everyday tasks, such as onboarding and business reviews, ensuring alignment between daily work and the team’s aspirations.

To communicate the CS role across the organization, she held leadership sessions to explain that CSMs act as internal advocates for the client, risk managers, and value amplifiers, clarifying their distinct role from support. The entire transformation process took about six months, emphasizing the need to take time for change management to ensure lasting impact.

Finally, she chose to bring in an external coach to accelerate the team’s skill development and validate their methods. The coach helped design workshops on methodology, posture, soft skills, and analytics, and facilitated role-playing for business reviews. This external support allowed the team to learn from an expert, share doubts, and adopt best practices, all while maintaining a positive and engaging atmosphere. This partnership was crucial in quickly building competencies and reinforcing the team’s confidence during the transition.