From Account Management to Customer Success: Becoming the Partner Our Customers Deserve

At Justworks, we're constantly pushing ourselves to better meet the needs of our customers, and to serve more of them. As a software company, we look at solving for scale with technology first. Sometimes that means building a new tool that allows a small business to self-serve or, depending on the task at hand, automating a burdensome process for our internal teams.

But entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey, and we know that software can’t play the role of partner alone. So, we spend a lot of time thinking about how technology can improve access to our human support, too.

Last year, we modeled what we consider to be “one-touch” inquiries that typically only require a single response to resolve. By using AI to manage these inquiries via chat and email, we reduced our customers’ live support wait times by 80% year-over-year, dropped average hold times for phone calls to under one minute, and brought our number of open tickets per human team member to an all-time low.

Today, any customer who wants to speak to a human on our team is better able to do so — despite us serving more customers than ever before.

Account Management Evolution

If you meet someone who’s used Justworks for a while, chances are they’ll tell you about the people who work here. Often, this is their company’s Account Manager or someone on our support team who made a lasting impression.

Because our software makes self-service possible for many of the complex aspects of managing a workforce, it also empowers our team to focus on the more specialized topics and challenges that come up. This means that the conversations our customers (and their employees) have with our people are typically high-value. As partners, we aim to help them navigate their company’s growth and the life events that come with it.

This approach has served us well. But as the capabilities of our software have evolved by leaps and bounds, the structure of our Account Management function remained mostly the same. The breadth of this team’s responsibilities grew to a point where it was getting in the way of what makes Justworks special — their ability to serve as true partners to our customers. As we’ve dreamt about how we can do even more for small businesses in the years ahead, it became clear that we needed to evolve Account Management at Justworks.

That's why I’m excited to announce some changes to our Customer Success Organization that will take our service to the next level — now and well into the future.

What's changing?

We're moving away from a model of "Account Management" and toward a new model of "Customer Success.” In doing so, we’re introducing two new roles that will be taking the place of our current Account Managers:

• Customer Success Managers (CSMs) will be empowered to provide more complex, personal, and strategic guidance to help our larger customers run their businesses successfully. CSMs will become an expert in individual customers and have a responsibility for ensuring that they are getting the most out of Justworks as their needs change over the long term.

• Customer Success Operations Specialists (CSOps Specialists) will continue to provide the quick answers that our customers get today. They will address day-to-day requests and provide the responsiveness that businesses and their employees need. By separating the day-to-day requests from strategic support, larger customers will have access to the answers and specialized help they need, when they need it.

These changes will allow our current Account Management team to further specialize, provide new development opportunities to our employees, and provide a better service experience for our larger customers. While there will be some changes and disruption in the short term, this evolution will give our customers access to the partnership they need without sacrificing the quick answers they've come to love.

Why are we making these changes?

Creating these two new roles is the first big change in our award-winning approach to service in years. Years ago, we pioneered 24/7 omnichannel support, and we're committed to continuing to lead the industry as a partner to small businesses.

To scale this partnership, we needed to set our Customer Success Organization up to help our larger customers every step of the way and in new ways moving forward. With a dual CSM and CSOps Specialist structure, we can provide more personalized and strategic guidance, help customers get the most out of our products and services, and focus on driving their long-term success.

How will this benefit Justworks customers?

With these new roles working together, larger customers will experience higher-touch support with less friction, a better service experience, more meaningful proactive engagement, and opportunities to utilize new Justworks products and services.

CSMs will be able to provide more personalized and strategic guidance, helping customers navigate the ever-changing landscape of small business regulations, attracting and retaining talent, and setting themselves up for growth.

At the same time, our CSOps Specialists will continue to provide the responsiveness that our customers have come to expect from us. By automating routine tasks and streamlining our workflows, we’ll be able to provide even better and more accurate support. And we're using advanced analytics to identify trends and patterns in customer requests so we can proactively address their needs before they become problems.

In parallel, thanks to technology-driven efficiencies, customers of all sizes (and their employees) have better, faster access to our 24/7 human support than ever before.

How will this benefit the Justworks team?

When our employees succeed, our customers succeed, and we want each of our employees to have a path to realizing their full potential at Justworks. By moving to this new model, we'll be able to provide even more growth and development opportunities for our people.

CSMs will be able to specialize further and provide more proactive guidance to our customers. They'll have the opportunity to develop deeper relationships with our customers, help them navigate complex challenges, and become subject matter experts in their fields.

Meanwhile, our CSOps Specialist team will be able to focus on what they do best — providing quick answers and best-in-class service levels. With a clearer scope, they'll have the opportunity to become even more efficient and effective in their roles, provide better service and support to our customers, and hone their skills and expertise.

Justworks as a Small Business Partner

At Justworks, we aspire to be the partner small businesses have always deserved but never before had access to. We want to help our customers build better businesses, better lives for themselves and their employees, and have a positive impact in their communities. These changes to our Customer Success Organization will bring us one step closer to that goal — and this is just the beginning!

Thank you for being a Justworks customer. As always, don't hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions or concerns.