CSEs

View the CSM Handbook homepage for additional CSM-related handbook pages.

Overview

At GitLab, we take customer success seriously, and our Customer Success Engineer (CSE) team plays a pivotal role in ensuring our global customer base receives unparalleled support and assistance throughout their journey with us. As a team, we oversee key processes (listed below) that are designed to empower our customers, enable our sales counterparts, and drive overall customer satisfaction. This aligns perfectly with the common pattern of being customer centric across our company strategy.

1. Customer Enablement Webinar Program:

Informative and interactive webinars for customers.
Empowers customers with GitLab knowledge and skills.
Live Q&A session providing immediate answers to customer questions.

2. Customer Enablement Hands-on Lab Program:

Help customers gain practical experience with GitLab’s features.
Interactive sessions with Live Q&A.
Enhances adoption, productivity, and business goals.
Direct interaction with CSEs fostering trust and collaboration.

3. Pooled CSE Model:

Collaboration with Account Executives and Renewal Manager on how the customer is adopting the platform, including any potential risks or areas for improvement.
Offers technical expertise and support for high-risk or expansion accounts.
Ensures top-tier attention, leading to retention and expansion.
Drives ultimate customer success.

4. Automated Email Campaign Process:

Timely automated emails at key customer lifecycle points.
Provides valuable insights, tips, and resources.
Supports customer success and keeps customers engaged.
Enhances communication and customer satisfaction.
Email Content - GitLab Internal Only

CSE Operating Rhythm

The CSE operating rhythm outlines procedures CSEs use to engage with customers as well as how account owners can request CSE engagement outside of the normal operating rhythm during the customer lifecycle.

For the ARR thresholds for the CSE customer segment please reference this Wiki page (GitLab Internal).

Customer Lifecycle Journey CSE

The CSE DCI matrix provided below is designed to serve as a guiding framework to improve collaboration across teams. Please note that this is applicable only to accounts interacting with a CSE. For accounts managed by a CSM or CSA, refer to the CSMA’s DCI on Rules of Engagement.

Journey Stage: Pre-Sales & Alignment

Activities	Tasks	CSE	AE	RM	SA	PS	Support	Executive Sponsor	Product and Engineering
Identify Tech Champion(s)	Define and engage key user personas for solution tailoring.	I	C,I		DRI
Sales to Customer Success (CS) Handoff	Ensure detailed information transfer from sales to CS for seamless transition.	I	C,I		DRI

Journey Stage: Onboard

Activities	Tasks	CSE	AE	RM	SA	PS	Support	Executive Sponsor	Product and Engineering
General Advice for GitLab Setup and features implementation	As part of the onboarding campaign, an automatic post-onboarding email is sent by Gainsight. The customer can book a call with a CSE to go through their setup and needs.	DRI	C,I	I
Technical Integration and Setup Support	Provide direct assistance setting up GitLab (for example, architecture and deployment strategies) to fit customers’ needs and goals.		C,I	I	C,I	DRI

Journey Stage: Enable

Activities	Tasks	CSE	AE	RM	SA	Support
1:1 Engagement with the customer, triggered by AE/RM, depending on the needs from the customer	Transactional engagement between the customer and the CSE to discuss a specific topic, which should be clearly defined by the AE/RM before the meeting with the customer.	DRI	C	I
Conduct 1:N Workshops and Webinars focused on customer enablement	Organized workshops and webinar sessions hosted for different customers aiming to enable and help users with key product topics.	DRI		I
Break’n’fix scenarios where there is a bug/the platform not behaving correctly	Cases where the customer expects someone to troubleshoot a bug or help with a specific feature setup. (In specific situations, the Support Engineering might communicate and inform the CSE about the support ticket)	(C,I)				DRI
Measure Primary Use Case Adoption	Track and analyze the adoption rate of primary use cases when associated to requests originated from Renewals Managers or Account Executives.	DRI	I	I	I

Comments: (C,I) - It will depend on the situation.

Journey Stage: Expand

Activities	Tasks	CSE	AE	RM	SA	PS	Support	Executive Sponsor	Product and Engineering
Expansion Discovery	Identify and pursue upsell and cross-sell opportunities.	(C)	DRI	I	C			(I)
Account Health Checkups	Conduct regular assessments of account health to ensure ongoing customer success.	(C)	DRI	C,I	C

Comments: (C),(I) - It will depend on the situation.

Journey Stage: Optimize & Renew

Activities	Tasks	CSE	AE	RM	SA	PS	Support	Executive Sponsor	Product and Engineering
Business Review (BR)	Conduct BRs to review successes, challenges, and future plans.	C	DRI	I	C			C,I
Renewal Discussions	Initiate early discussions about renewal, leveraging insights from the customer journey.	C,I	C	DRI	C			I
Monitor Client Satisfaction	Implement a structured feedback process to capture and act on customer insights, driving continuous improvement.	I	DRI	C,I	C,I	(C)		I	I
Facilitate Product Collaboration	Clearly capture customer needs via feature requests to assist Product Managers with feature prioritisation and product enhancement.	C,I	C	I	DRI			I	C,I
Ongoing Risk Review	Active management of risk in a customer account, quickly turning a customer to red when there is any potential risk of contraction or churn and frequently updating the status.	C,I	DRI	C,I	C			C,I
Escalation Management	Trigger/leading the escalation process (account escalation / STAR) where needed.	C,I	DRI	C,I	C		C,I	C,I	I

Comments: (C), (C,I) - It will depend on the situation.

For an additional overview of our CSE team-specific responsibilities, please reference our Job Family: CSE Responsibilities & Requirements

CSE Content Handbook

Content/1:many is a critical part of our strategy to drive customer adoption at scale across our very large book of business. This requires dedicated resources/DRIs to execute this strategy.

To learn more visit our CSE Content Team Handbook page.

CSE Content

Learn about the Customer Success Engineering content team, catalog, creation and contribution workflows.

CSE Operating Rhythm

View the CSM Handbook homepage for additional CSM/CSE-related handbook pages.

CSE Team Customer Engagement Types

There are several different ways that the CSE team engages with customers, including:

Targeted Campaigns

Customer Success Operations and CS leaders determine, based on various GitLab health metrics, a set of outreach campaigns to drive customer interactions that will help improve GitLab adoption and usage. Examples of campaigns are:

CSE Playbooks page

View the CSM Handbook homepage for additional CSM/CSE-related handbook pages.

SAFE information

This information is considered SAFE and therefore is only available in the internal handbook

CSE Team Member Onboarding

View the CSM Handbook homepage for additional CSM-related handbook pages.

Overview

As a Customer Success Engineer (CSE), your onboarding experience will be a blended learning experience that includes virtual synchronous meetings, a self-paced role-based learning path on GitLab University, and a hands-on virtual workshop called Sales Quick Start (SQS).

Your role based learning path is highlighted in this role-specific onboarding guide. Please make a copy of this document and check off items as you complete them.

Customer Onboarding Best Practices

View the CSM Handbook homepage for additional CSM/CSE-related handbook pages.

Onboarding Best Practices Deck

During onboarding it’s critical to ensure customers have confidence in foundational areas to ensure their continued success. The areas we’ve identified are:

Best practices for setting up group/project hierarchy
User authentication and authorization
Early DevSecOps adoption

This should be covered in the initial technical onboarding call with the customer, for instance the 21 day check-in call for CSEs. The deck (internal link) provides open ended discovery questions to learn more about customers’ plans, progress and most importantly confidence in these areas. By learning about their goals and how confident they are in their progress we can provide them with the best enablement resources (webinars, documentation, videos) to create a solid foundation they can build upon.

Last modified December 12, 2024: CSE DCI Matrix: Updated the table structure (9447de1a)

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