Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down with Alexandra Ardelean , Senior Customer Success Manager at BigTime, a professional service automation platform for project-based businesses. Alexandra brings a uniquely diverse background to Customer Success, combining a design degree, Lean Black Belt certification, and years of operational experience—includin...

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down with Silvana Prodan , Team Lead Customer Success at Bloomflow, a platform that helps large organizations deploy and manage their innovation programs. Silvana brings a unique background to Customer Success, combining a PhD in communication, a career in conference interpreting, and experience working across German...

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down with Anne LiCata , VP of Customer Success at Huma. AI, an AI-powered analytics platform for pharma and life science teams. Anne shares what it takes to drive adoption of AI in highly regulated organizations, why traditional SaaS metrics often fail to capture AI value, and why she believes AI may transform custom...

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down with Vlad Zholnerchuk , CS Team Lead at Health Samurai, a platform that helps healthcare organizations build and scale interoperable clinical data systems. Vlad shares what Customer Success looks like when your customers are engineers building clinical systems on a highly technical platform, why he restructured...

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down with Kiko Rodríguez Moreno , Customer Success Manager at Wazuh, an open source security platform helping organizations detect threats, monitor their infrastructure, and stay compliant. Kiko shares how he transitioned from a linguistics background into cybersecurity, what Customer Success really looks like in a h...

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down with Dylan Berno , Head of Customer Success at Coast, a fintech company helping businesses control and track fleet spending. Dylan shares how Coast built a signal-driven CS function powered by AI and automation, what the CS team focuses on when systems handle the operational layer, and why data accessibility rem...

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down with Sarah Chipps , Manager of Customer Success at FMX. They discuss how Customer Success teams scale through specialization, operational efficiency, stronger systems, and leadership development. Sarah also shares lessons from growing through multiple CS roles within the same company and what it really takes to...

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down with Mark Rocklin , Director of Success Management EMEA at CloudShare, a platform that helps software companies run virtual labs for product demos, training, and technical enablement. Mark shares how Customer Success and operations work together at CloudShare, why responding to every NPS score made a bigger impa...

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down with Beatriz Toledo , Customer Success Manager at iRaiser, a digital fundraising platform for charities and nonprofits. Beatriz shares what customer success looks like in the nonprofit fundraising space, why rebuilding trust with an existing account is often harder than building it from scratch, and what the ear...

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down with Ebba Klementsson , Customer Success Manager at Refapp, a platform that helps companies streamline their reference checking process. Ebba shares how her background in recruitment and HR shaped her approach to Customer Success, what it was like building a CS function from scratch in an early-stage company, an...

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down with Agathe Nivet , Customer Success Manager at Spendesk, a platform that helps finance teams control and automate company spending. Agathe shares why onboarding should focus on delivering value rather than completing checklists, what an effective Sales → CS handoff actually looks like, and how to scale onboardi...

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down with Alex Frunza , Head of Customer Success, Enablement and Support at Otera, a company automating complex enterprise workflows across systems. Alex shares why Customer Success can’t operate as a silo in enterprise environments, what ownership really means when delivery happens through partners, and how to balan...

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down again with Porter Williams , Head of Customer Success at BrightHire. One year after his first appearance, Porter returns to share what has changed—from evolving their adoption framework to navigating BrightHire’s acquisition by Zoom. He offers a candid look at what it takes to build and scale a CS function in a...

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down with Hana Gruzman , CS Operations and Enablement Lead at Agora. They discuss what it takes to build CS operations from scratch while scaling a team from 4 to 30+ people, how to structure a CS department into specialized mini-teams, and why health scores alone are not enough to predict churn. Hana also shares how...

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down with Advi Bishnoi , Head of Consulting and Customer Success at SocialPlus. They discuss what customer success looks like when the product is a set of building blocks that each client assembles differently, why infrastructure-as-a-service requires a more consultative approach, and how to define success when every...

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down with Dominik Nenicka , CS Team Lead at Resistant. They discuss what customer success looks like when your product’s job is to prevent problems before they happen, how to prove value when success means silence, and what it takes to scale a CS team in a company doubling revenue year over year. Dominik also shares...

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down with Pietro Restivo , Manager of Customer Success at Mia Platform — a company helping enterprises scale their digital platforms across APIs, microservices, and DevOps environments. Pietro shares how his background as a product owner shaped his transition into Customer Success, how he built a CS function from the...

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down with Daniela Shikova , Manager Customer Success at TrialHub, a platform helping pharma and CRO teams plan smarter clinical trials. Daniela shares how she built a Customer Success function from scratch in one of the most regulated industries in the world, and what makes CS in clinical research fundamentally diffe...

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down with Andrea Zen , Customer Success leader at Fairly Made. Andrea breaks down how CS operates at the intersection of sustainability, complex product data, and evolving regulations in fashion traceability. He shares how his background in fashion shaped a deeply customer-centric mindset, how his team manages divers...

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down with Cameron Hogg , Customer Success Manager at OneTrace, a construction technology platform that helps subcontractors track work, maintain compliance, and gain visibility across projects. Cameron shares what surprised him most when moving from licensing tech into construction SaaS, how CS teams drive adoption a...

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down with Gillian Stringer , Senior Client Partner at Enrich. They discuss how Customer Success evolves from platform enablement to true business partnership, why protecting the relationship can sometimes backfire, and how CS teams can align with Sales to drive retention and growth. What You’ll Learn: ☑️ Why change m...

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down with Catalin Petre , Customer Success Manager at Several Nines, the company helping teams deploy, manage, and operate open-source databases in production. Catalin shares why he left a seven-year corporate career to join a scale-up, how CS operates when accounts are shared across Account Executives and technical...

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down with Arek Czarnecki , Head of Customer Success at Gridaly, an all-in-one event management platform that helps organizers run virtual, hybrid, and in-person events end to end. Arek shares how he transitioned from Sales into Customer Success and rebuilt the entire CS function from scratch inside a fast-growing sta...

In this episode of Mastering CS Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas sits down with Ellen Quirke , Head of Customer Success at IRIS Audio, the AI audio company helping teams remove background noise and capture clearer conversations at scale. Ellen shares how her years as a high-performance athlete shaped the way she leads, prioritizes, and builds systems, then breaks down what it looks like to cre...

In this episode of the podcast, Irina Cismas , Head of Marketing at Custify, sits down with Simon Montgomery , COO at ID-PAL, the identity verification platform helping businesses confirm who their customers really are in seconds. Simon shares how his journey from traditional banking into fintech and regtech shaped the way ID-PAL built its customer operations, how identity verification became a cu...