Customer Success Lead

Stanley is an iconic American brand, well known for their high-quality, sustainable drink containers and original green thermos flasks. For the past two years, they’ve doubled their annual sales, mainly driven by a focus on D2C channels. With this significant ecommerce success, the Customer Success Lead will create and implement a strategy to achieve optimal customer success across EMEA.

About Stanley

Founded in 1913, Stanley was mainly known for its iconic green, stainless-steel thermos flasks until 2020. Since then, the company has put major efforts into expanding its product range. And thanks to social media, Stanley’s slick designs and sustainable containers have gained additional traction. This led to Stanley doubling its annual revenue every year since 2021 and they’re on track to maintain this momentum for the foreseeable future.

To achieve its fast growth, Stanley focuses on its core strengths: innovation and sustainability. They add new product lines and designs are added, such as vibrant colors that appeal to the young demographic. Stanley’s sustainability proposition focuses on creating products that last a lifetime, made from recycled materials and wrapped in paper packaging.

Stanley has headquarters in Seattle, and is owned by HAVI: a global, privately owned company that connects people with ideas, data with insights, and ultimately, people with the products they love. Founded in 1974, HAVI employs more than 10,000 people and serves customers in over one hundred countries. Their businesses offer best-in-class sourcing and supply chain capabilities, brand-defining marketing, promotion services, and innovative consumer products.

The EMEA region is served by a commercial team of around fifteen people in Amsterdam. With Stanley’s growing sales, a strong customer success strategy is becoming increasingly important. This is where the Customer Success Lead comes in.

Vacancy: Customer Success Lead

Historically, Stanley EMEA’s customer success has been handled either by distributors on a country level, or in partnership with an agency with a dedicated, multi-lingual, and scalable team. With increasing growth expected, a senior Customer Success Lead will develop Stanley EMEA’s customer success strategy, appropriate for the scale and success of Stanley’s D2C business and mindful of the needs of the other channels, such as retail and its distributors.

Regional optimization, global fit
The Lead reports to Stanley EMEA’s eCommerce Director, analyzes the current setup and potential future scenarios for customer success and then advises on the most appropriate strategy. This could be finding the right balance between outsourcing customer success and running it in-house. Or if outsourcing be centralized or localized. And how important are culture and language? Although this is a regional position, there is a dotted line to the Global Director of Customer Success, to ensure alignment between regional and global strategies. For operational excellence, the EMEA customer success strategy and operations need to fit within the language and tooling used by Stanley in other regions as well.

Best practices
To develop this strategy, the Customer Success Lead analyzes market dynamics, consumer behavior, and competitive landscape, identifying actionable insights and opportunities for innovation. They spearhead initiatives to enhance operational efficiency and eliminate bottlenecks, fostering a seamless consumer journey. They also implement industry best practices for delivering exceptional customer success. And they monitor and analyze consumer feedback across multiple channels to identify pain points and opportunities, which drive continuous improvement in the consumer experience.

The Customer Success Lead will establish clear performance metrics appropriate for the chosen setup, assess team performance, capability building, and ensure accountability.

“The Customer Success Lead is an optimizer, a strategist, and an innovator. They recognize the strategic importance of excellent customer success and customer experience as an integral part of building and expanding a trusted, top-shelf brand. And they are eager to devise a strategy that fits this need in the most frictionless but also cost-effective way possible.” – Thijs Vermeulen, eCommerce Director of Stanley EMEA

Change Management
The Customer Success Lead plays an important role in change management, guiding employees in the transition between retired and modern tools and providing input on service management project plans. They oversee learning delivery, and partner with training teams to ensure training quality and brand representation in all customer success training material and programs.

In addition , the Customer Success Lead consults with internal clients on appropriate technologies and technology use, based on a solid understanding of their business and collaboration needs. They also develop internal partnerships, working with service managers to understand and influence technology roadmaps. Finally, they oversee customer support and troubleshooting and are responsible for all legal and liability claims.

This is an excellent opportunity for a consumer-obsessed leader with a passion for building world-class customer support around compelling brands. They will play a pivotal role to ensure a premium customer experience within the EMEA region. The challenge is enhanced by Stanley’s comprehensive sales mix: the Customer Success Leads will optimize best-in-class customer success across all direct e-commerce channels, social media platforms, distributors, and other strategic partners.

Interested?

Stanley is working with Top of Minds to fill this vacancy.
To express your interest, please contact Claire den Beer Poortugael at claire.denbeerpoortugael@topofminds.com