Well let me explain..

Customer Success is a relatively new function that is becoming increasingly popular with XaaS businesses (XaaS stands for Anything as a Service).  With any XaaS product, it is no longer the case that you make a significant investment in a perpetual license and are left to figure out how to implement it, how to use it and what else it can do. XaaS businesses operate a subscription model whereby if the product is not actually solving your problem, you can just stop the subscription and move on. Businesses operating a subscription model need to ensure that there is continuous and even increasing value for their customers. This is what Customer Success teams are responsible for.

As Success Managers, we help customers make the most out of their contracted products and we operate on the assumption that if the products are helping customers solve problems, while delivering ROI, then there is a good motive to renew the subscription. Internally Customer Success performance should, in theory, be easy to measure because customers vote with their wallets. Compound that, as XaaS companies mature, the revenue from existing subscriptions exceeds revenue from new sales (explanation), and there is a good reason why you will meet many, many Customer Success Managers in the foreseeable future.

Cloudflare is on a mission to help build a better internet and we do that partly by replacing hardware with similar capabilities in the cloud. We are no strangers to subscriptions and Customer Success.

Cloudflare Enterprise customers get allocated a named Customer Success Manager (CSM) to help with, amongst other things: on-boarding, project and resource management on the Cloudflare side, customer training, configuration recommendations, ongoing insights, sharing best practices, point of escalation and more. Going back to what the title is, it’s not easy to come up with a name for a jack of all trades.

Our CSM team is dispersed across multiple offices and time zones. It’s no coincidence that we happen to be physically located next to (literally, a few meters away from) our colleagues in the Solutions Engineering team and Customer Support team. From this perspective, we are quite privileged that we can access resources cross-functionally and pull them into customer meetings. It’s not unusual that we show up at a customer meeting with Jen Taylor, our Head of Product, or one of our C-level execs or even a founder! It’s good for the overall business relationship and good for our senior leaders to see and hear first hand what works and what doesn't.

Cloudflare’s engineering team release changes multiple times each day so there will always be new functionality that is relevant for our customers. While we do keep customers updated via our blog, regular Enterprise features webinars and the monthly Enterprise newsletter, wouldn’t it be good for someone at Cloudflare (say like a Customer Success Manager) to filter through all this information and provide customers with specific use cases for their specific needs? If you haven’t already, make sure that emails from @cloudflare.com addresses can reach your inbox as we tend to email you from time to time with tailored recommendations and invitations to regular Business Reviews.

And it doesn’t end there..

Your Customer Success Manager will become your advocate and will coordinate internally in an attempt to influence the road map. It may sound like I am talking about double agents here, but it’s true. It is important that we continue to innovate and also work towards delivering our most requested features and product requests. The more problems we can solve for our customers, the more useful our products become. Liaising with the Product team is something that we do very well at Cloudflare but given the broad product offering, we will sometimes have specific requests backlogged.

One of things we are working on improving is our ability to be closer to our customers. We want to see customers where it’s convenient for them and we want to have the opportunity to understand the specifics of different regions in the world. It does make a difference (by an order of magnitude) when we can sit down at the same table and work together towards our customers goals. Internally we’ve been able to map regions to CSMs, but it wasn’t until recently that we have rolled out a solution that scales.

Meetups, we found out, are a great medium for our customers to meet face to face with our team, within their regions and with minimum effort. While organised by the CSM team in collaboration with our Marketing team, it’s not just CSMs that make the trip to various different countries of the world. Product Directors, Product Managers, Engineers and Solutions Engineers typically attend as well as speak at these meet-ups. In addition, we also encourage customers to share use cases and tips. If you haven’t attended one yet, lookout for an invite as we do organise a few every month!

My name is Valentine, and like Cosmin, I am part of the CSM team in London! As a CSM, the most exciting part of my role is to meet our customers face to face, shake their hands, and actually meet the people that always sat at the other side of the screen. Meeting customers in person is not only exciting, but also vital to building a strong interpersonal relationship with your customers, getting to know them and their company’s goals better. Customer Meetups are not only a great setting to further foster these relationships, but also to help customers get more value from Cloudflare, because it is a great environment for customers to get to know more about Cloudflare too.

During a recent EMEA meetup, organised in the vibrant city of Berlin, two different customers presented their story with Cloudflare. One customer shared how their Cloudflare use-case changed focus from security to scalability and how this transformation was thanks to Cloudflare Logs’ integration with their preferred visualisation partner, Datadog.

The second customer presentation was more code oriented, and they did a deep dive into their use-case for Workers: how they migrated their front-end to the Edge with Workers. This helped other customers grasp the power of Workers when integrated within their business logic, especially because Workers is a product with so many endless opportunities. Sharing how they are using Workers helped make use-cases more concrete and helped attendees understand the true added-value. Both customer stories enjoyed an enthusiastic session of Q&A, where customers could ask questions to each other directly. As a CSM, it is exciting to see how customers with the same goals and pains can relate to and learn from each other. Meetups are a great environment to give customers the opportunity to meet each other too, and discover other best practices.

During the Berlin event, Alex Cruz Farmer, Product Manager for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall, joined us. This was another occasion for customers to get more first hand information and knowledge on what happens behind the scenes from a technical perspective, and also a look into the WAF road map. During the networking session, customers could also reach out to Alex in person and get more details on topics they were particularly interested in. It is important for us, as CSMs, to make these PMs accessible and give customers the chance to give their feedback too.

So, in a flexible nutshell, this is how a Customer Meetup format usually looks: an exciting mix between customers sharing their Cloudflare stories, Cloudflare Product and Engineering team members doing demos or sharing what they are working on, followed by a networking session to make sure everyone has a chance to speak to everyone. And, in a successful Customer Meetup, the outcome hopefully is that relationships have flourished, customers have learned from each other and Cloudflare, that Cloudflare has learned from its customers, and that everyone had a good time.

So far, we have organised meetups in EMEA in locations ranging from the UK to Armenia, stopping along the way in places like Malta, Sweden and Russia. Our North America, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific teams have organised more than 11 meetups since the beginning of the year!

The CSM team are by no means professionals at organising events, but as the saying goes “Practice makes perfect”, and with each meetup we continuously iterate and learn from past obstacles to make the next one even better. That is why it really means a lot to us that you join us in our future events that will be coming up this year! We’d also like to invite you to present at our events, if you are keen to be a speaker one day. Also, regardless of where you are in the world, do let us know whether you’d be interested in hosting a Cloudflare Customer Meetup. We would be happy to hear your interest and collaborate with you!

We'd also love to see you at one of our upcoming meetups coming in Johannesburg or Paris.

Hope to meet you soon!Cloudflare Customer Success team

If you want to know the best mince pie to buy in 2018 right now, skip straight to the bottom of this post where we reveal the winner. If you want to understand more about what makes a mince pie great and how we can learn this at Cloudflare’s scale - read on.

With a very short amount of time to get this research out to a discerning and demanding public, we engaged the entire Cloudflare London team to help. Team members diligently went out and purchased mince pies from all over the South East of England for everyone to taste.

On Monday the team assembled for a “Mince Pie Jam”, where we would taste & consistently review each pie:

As we can see from even the most cursory Internet search, there are a lot of questions surrounding mince pies. After some confusion relating to our 2017 edition of the IMDB we should clearly state: modern mince pies do not contain meat. A Mince Pie is “a sweet pie of British origin, filled with a mixture of dried fruits and spices called mincemeat, that is traditionally served during the Christmas season in the English world.” - Wikipedia for Mince Pie

We reviewed the mince pies in terms of its characteristics as well as overall. Each mince pie was given a score of 1 to 10 for each of the following:

• Innovation

• Booziness

• Pastry to Filling Ratio

• Pastry

• Mince

• Overall rating

The top 3 categories there are somewhat objective measurements compared to the more subjective ones below. During analysis, this created some exciting opportunities.

With this combination of 3 subjective & 3 objective metrics and a total of 214 submitted reviews by our team, we had a lot of data. To break this data down Nela quickly settled on the Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC).

Wikipedia describes the PCC as follows:

The correlation coefficient ranges from −1 to 1. A value of 1 implies that a linear equation describes the relationship between X and Y perfectly, with all data points lying on a line for which Y increases as X increases. A value of −1 implies that all data points lie on a line for which Y decreases as X increases. A value of 0 implies that there is no linear correlation between the variables.

By setting our X Value as the Overall Rating, we were able to plug in each of the other metrics from our reviews as the Y value, to understand how important each of these characteristics are in producing a high quality result.

2018 Internet Mince pie Database evaluation criteria coefficient. Explore the full dataset

From this data we can conclude that satisfaction with a pie’s mince filling is the most likely criteria for overall pie satisfaction with r=.841, while innovation creates a negative correlation implying that traditional mince pies are favoured, and straying from this will only lead to dissatisfaction. Alcohol content had a minor positive correlation while pastry, pastry to filling ratio, and aesthetic had an average positive correlation.

Along with scores, our reviewers also left tasting notes which gave an insight into how they arrived at their scores. Taking the reviews which scored a mince pie from 1-5 we’re able to see the terms most associated with poorer performing pies:

Pies scoring between 6 and 10 points had the following terms used the most in tasting notes:

Before we get to the final overall rankings, there are a few categories we wanted to mention.

Unsurprisingly, some of the most expensive mince pies come from London’s fanciest Restaurants & Bakeries. The 3 most expensive mince pies did not rank highly enough to feature elsewhere - which goes to show you that money doesn’t necessarily buy you the best mince pie.

A Dickensian-styled thing of beauty, I expected a pie-seller to appear muttering "gawd blimey guv'nor thems good pies". Good bite, alcohol was raw and overly pungent, tasty but I needed a quiet lie down afterwards.

Deeelicious and moist. A little citrus and Christmas on the finish.

In a word, dense. Dense filling, dense pastry. A bit too heavy all round.

Below are the 3 lowest scoring mince pies in 2018. We publish this not to humiliate but in the hope that these bakers will learn & improve for 2019.

The 10 on "experimental" here means ... experiment gone badly wrong. If ratings allowed for complex numbers, this one would score an overall '10i'.

A bit dry and what on earth is all that air doing there?! Get out and put mince in!

BANG average from Aldi. I don't know where Holly Lane is but if I were to guess it would be firmly in the middle of somewhere. Slightly chalky, pasty pastry and sweet uninteresting mince.

Nela’s impressive Pearson Correlation work showed that there is actually a minor negative correlation with mince pies that are highly innovative. During tasting we observed that innovative pies drew people in but they most definitely divided opinion. Here are the 3 most innovative mince pies (as ranked by their innovation score).

Bad.

Interesting but this is not a mince pie.

Absolutely amazing taste however questionable as a mince pie. 😱😱😱😱

Here are 2018’s top mince pies as stringently tested by the Cloudflare mince pie QA engineers:

2018 Internet Mince pie Database Rankings. Explore the full dataset.

I tried it twice. Will probably try to grab another one. Even with 14 others in-between the first and the second sampling, my preference hasn't changed. To me this is the star of the show. Yum!

Tasty filling, with a solid pastry. A great all rounder, if a little sweet with extra filling peel and topped sugar on the pastry.

Iceland are a dark horse here - the mince here elevates the fairly pedestrian pastry - which is pale and a little bit chalky in texture. But that mince - full of complexity - there's a hint of banana in here despite there being no actual bananas. HOW DID THEY DO THIS? DELICIOUS.

Thanks to everyone at Cloudflare who took part in this extensive research. If you’re inspired by some of the questions answered in this blog post, and you like spiced fruit and intense pastry debates then Cloudflare is hiring in London and all over the world.

Happy Holidays!