Meet Christina Kosmowski, CEO at Cloud-Based Monitoring Platform: LogicMonitor

What was your journey to becoming CEO and how has Customer Success played an essential role?

 
I have always been passionate about finding new ways to bring the worlds of technology and business together and have spent nearly two decades holding leadership positions in the enterprise software space. Prior to joining LogicMonitor, I was the Global Head of Customer Success and Services at Slack. I also spent 15 years at Salesforce, where I oversaw functions including renewals, consulting, support and customer success management.

My passion guided my journey as a pioneer in customer success during my nearly 20-year tenure at Salesforce and Slack. This is where I helped elevate the customer to the heart of everything that we did and helped Salesforce grow from 20 million in annual revenue to ten billion, and Slack grow from 90 million to one billion in annual revenue.

I continue to prioritise customer success in my current role as CEO, where I am responsible for accelerating the company’s hypergrowth and delivering on its brand promise of helping C-level executives and their teams thrive through transformation.
 

What are the best practices to develop a CS program?

 
We have several best practices in place at LogicMonitor. To give customers the best possible user experience and service, some of the strategies I would recommend to other business leaders would include:

• Put the customer at the centre of everything you do and understand what value means to them. This strategy allows you to fully understand how they are using your product and allows for constant innovation. By building a product that has the customer at the centre, you will have a product that solves their true pain points and works exactly how they need it to.

• Assign executive sponsors to each of your accounts. Having a high-touch executive tied to key customer accounts allows both parties to build strong relationships with each other and ensures customers have a direct line to your C-suite.

• Offer a comprehensive customer training program. Giving customers access to the information they need in real-time provides them with the opportunity to truly learn the ins and outs of your product and how to best optimise your product within their organisation.

What are you doing at LogicMonitor to transform how everyone from sales to engineering thinks?

 
Modern enterprises are under constant pressure to deliver productivity – not just for the benefit of internal stakeholders, but also to enable continuous improvements for their customers. They are also expected to deliver in a highly complex and competitive environment.

To make matters worse, when I talk to CEOs and CIOs, something I inherently hear is that they have a lot of information locked inside their business that both internal teams and users are unable to access.

LogicMonitor plays a crucial role in helping IT teams unlock those hidden insights trapped within enterprises, across all departments, to give their business a competitive advantage. Our technology has fundamentally changed the way IT is viewed by the C-suite.
 

How are you embracing authenticity in your leadership with both employees and the company’s customers?

 
As a newly appointed CEO, I’ve done a lot of reflection on how a leaders’ actions and words set the tone for an organisation.

Firstly, it’s important to me that everyone, not just the leadership team, brings value to the table to create future growth and innovation for our organisation. To unlock this value and be successful today, I strongly believe all employees need to feel empowered to bring their authentic selves to work – only then will they be able to do their best work. This isn’t an easy mindset to implement or adopt; being authentic also means sometimes making yourself vulnerable. It means going outside your comfort zone, taking risks and redefining what “workplace culture” means.

My authentic self starts with being a mother. My teenage daughter is on my “personal board of advisors.” We talk about everything, work included. She knows what I’m struggling with in the office and what I’m excited about. And as my colleagues know, it’s not uncommon for my family to pop up in Zoom meetings!

Following the pandemic and the global rise of hybrid work, it’s essential that organisations acknowledge important aspects of their employees’ lives outside of work – such as significant others or children. Understanding and caring about what’s important to employees plays a huge role in both personal and professional success which will ultimately ensure business resilience and success.