Global Head of Customer Success

Your job

Assaia is a Series B vertical SaaS company building AI-powered turnaround intelligence for the aviation industry. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Zurich and a strong presence in Germany, Spain and the United States, we are a team of around 125 people across Europe and North America.
Our two products, ApronAI and Assaia RMS, turn live video and operational data from the apron into real-time insight, alerts and predictions that help airports, airlines and ground handlers run safer, more punctual and more efficient turnarounds. We work with more than 25 leading aviation organisations worldwide, including New York JFK (JFKIAT), United Airlines, London Heathrow, Dubai Airports and Singapore Changi Airport. See details and demos on our website and LinkedIn.
Aviation is a small industry where everybody knows each other. From day one, our Customer Success team has been essential in making sure that every customer we win turns into a live, well-adopted deployment and a partner who is happy to vouch for us. As we scale, we are making Customer Success an even more commercial function with clear ownership of customer expansion and contract extensions.

The Role
We are looking for a Global Head of Customer Success with a strong operational aviation background and a commercial mindset working in a player-coach setup. You will lead our global Customer Success team of four, three Customer Success Managers across North America and Europe plus yourself, while personally owning a portfolio of our most strategic accounts. We are looking for someone who is based in North America, on the East Coast. You can work from wherever you are based, as long as you can travel to our customers and spend time with a team spread across North American and European time zones.

The role has three layers: 

• leading and developing the team and its way of working; 
• being the senior customer-facing owner of outcomes for your own accounts;
• building the engine that turns customer value into references, renewals and growth.

You will work closely with Sales, Delivery and Product and be part of Assaia's extended leadership team.
Ultimately, the Customer Success team exists to ensure:

• References. Happy customers who are willing to share, or let us share, the story of what we achieved together.
• Retention. Customers who see value every day, renew at the end of their initial term and regard us as an essential part of their business.
• Revenue. Additional revenue through extensions, increased scope, new use cases and new sites, as a direct result of the value we have proven.

Responsibilities

Lead the Customer Success team

• Lead, coach and develop a global team of Customer Success Managers; set clear goals and make sure every customer has a named owner and an active success plan.
• Own the CS operating model: playbooks for onboarding, adoption, health monitoring, executive reviews and renewals, plus the tooling and metrics to run them consistently across regions.
• Review account goals and health across the team and step in personally on escalations or at-risk customers.
• Define and report on the team's KPIs, such as time-to-value, adoption and usage, customer health, net revenue retention and referenceability, and represent Customer Success in the leadership team.
• Grow the team as Assaia grows, including hiring, onboarding and capability building.

Own customer outcomes for your own accounts (roughly 50% of your time)

• Build a deep understanding of each customer's operations (airport, airline, ground handler) and translate it into use cases and concepts of operations that define how Assaia's products will be used and where the value comes from.
• Prepare customer organisations for implementation and the new way of working; run workshops with our Delivery team to define product configuration so every customer receives a system built around its intended use cases.
• Manage user training and onboarding, and design and execute adoption strategies together with customers so Assaia becomes part of their daily routines and Standard Operating Procedures.
• Track usage, detect adoption problems early and act on them; analyse and report on the operational and financial impact we create, and make that impact visible to customer leadership.
• Build and maintain trusted relationships with both frontline operational staff and senior leadership, and stay close to the customer organisation even when there is no immediate requirement to do so.

Drive expansion, extensions and renewals

• Own the health and growth plan for your accounts, and ensure one exists for every account across the team: identify expansion opportunities and turn proven value into a compelling business case.
• Develop these opportunities together with the customer and hand them over to Sales in a qualified, well-prepared state.
• Prepare renewals and contract extensions well ahead of time.
• Turn successful customers into references: case studies, joint conference presentations, peer-to-peer introductions and site visits for prospects.

Be the voice of the customer

• Consult customers on how to further improve their operations and bring back structured feedback, requirements and roadmap input to Product, prioritised by customer value and commercial impact.
• Facilitate the sharing of best practices between customers to drive further value creation across our customer base.

Support Sales

• Support pre-sales campaigns with best practices, key use cases and achieved results, and run pre-sales workshops with prospects to map use cases, scope and required features.
• Make sure prospective customers understand how our solutions are used in daily operations and the value they can expect, based on real results from existing customers.

What success looks like in the first 12 months

• Your own accounts are healthy with high user adoption, proven impact and renewals secured.
• Every customer has a named CSM, a success plan and a health score, and the team works from shared playbooks across regions.
• Customers that are not yet live have a clear path to go-live and adoption, and time-to-value is measurably shorter than today.
• A visible, qualified expansion and renewal pipeline exists for the customer base, jointly managed with Sales, and net revenue retention is trending up.
• A growing set of referenceable customers is actively supporting our sales efforts worldwide.

Requirements

• In-depth experience in the aviation sector, preferably from a ground operations, APOC or OCC perspective, so you can relate to how our customers work and speak their language.
• Several years in customer success, account management, consulting or an operational leadership role in a B2B software or aviation environment.
• Proven experience in leading a global team in a player / coach setup. .
• A commercial mindset: you understand how value turns into renewals and growth, are comfortable building business cases and discussing scope and commercials with senior stakeholders, and enjoy working hand-in-hand with Sales.
• Experienced in business- and behavioural change management, and able to get frontline staff and senior leadership equally excited about a new way of working.
• Strong understanding of corporate hierarchies and proven ability to successfully maneuver in complex matrix organizations.
• Strong analytical skills; you like working with data and turning it into insight and action.
• Highly ambitious, self-confident and loves to engage with customers; likeable and highly empathetic.
• Comfortable and able to work with people from different cultural and professional backgrounds, and leading a distributed team across time zones.
• Works independently and proactively in a remote setting.
• Ability and willingness for extensive international travel to customers across North America, Europe and beyond, and to work flexibly across time zones.
• Very good command of English; any other language skills are a bonus.

Why Assaia

Assaia is a unique place where you can work on a technically advanced and innovative product, built with novel technologies for an exciting and important industry. You will be working in a diverse international team of smart people who learn a lot from each other, and you will shape how a scaling company treats its customers. Additionally, we offer:

• Participation in making important decisions, your ideas will be heard and implemented.
• A leadership role with real ownership of a function that is central to how Assaia grows.
• Remote work with a flexible schedule, and the chance to travel the world for us.
• A great company culture based on honesty and mutual respect, with live team events.
• Paid relevant conferences and online education.

We are a team of around 125 people today and we are looking forward to growing it with you!

About us

Assaia International AG provides AI-based software solutions for global airports and airlines. We were founded in February 2018 in Switzerland, headquartered in Zurich and New York and we have a fast-growing team located across Europe and North America.

Assaia offers AI-based computer-vision solutions that monitor and analyse aircraft turnaround processes from video streams. Assaia’s solutions help airports and airlines improve on-time performance, efficiency, safety, and sustainability metrics, helping them get their passengers to their destinations on time. We work with aviation companies across the world including New York JFKIAT, Toronto Pearson, United Airlines, British Airways, London Heathrow and more. See details and demos on our website and Linkedin!