Adrian Diaz leads Customer Success Operations at Findem, the AI-driven talent-acquisition platform, where he also owns learning & development (both internal employee training and customer education) and support. He backed into ops without ever intending to: he began as a CSM around 2012-2013 — the first CSM podcast host Anthony Enrico ever worked with — and got curious about why his team was inconsistent and inefficient, teaching himself to read Salesforce flow logs and reverse-engineer broken automations. Over more than a decade close to the customer he was a Gainsight admin and CSM at Mindflash and Director of Implementation & Support at WorkRamp before moving into a dedicated CS Ops mandate. His operating beliefs: align the process before you buy the tech, adoption is not health (a green-dashboard account can still churn), build an aggregate customer health index, fix renewal forecasting first, and use AI to strip repetitive work off CSMs so they can drive customer outcomes.
“CS Ops is taking the low-value, highly repetitive tasks away from the teams supporting customers, and focusing them on where the real impact is — driving customer outcomes.”
“Their dashboards were showing green — green across the board. But come renewal time, they churned. And of course they churned at the moment I got my promotion. That crushed me.”
“Not just tracking things for the sake of tracking them — these vanity metrics. Yes, they've logged in, but are they tapping into your product in the way that's actually going to be a differentiator for them?”
“Maybe there's a bonus sixth thing at the beginning, and that's: breathe. There's going to be a lot of overwhelming things, and it's going to be very tempting to immediately try to action and start solving challenges right away.”
“A CSP will really only be valuable for you if your wheels are already turning a little bit — if you already have your processes buttoned down.”
“If you're not tracking this data now, then you're almost buying a glorified email tool — it'll let you create emails and sequence them, but blindly.”
“On average, I was seeing up to 20% of their time every week being spent in Zendesk tickets. That blew my mind.”
“Every individual I support — CSMs, account managers — I'm their CSM in a way too. I want to understand the challenges they're facing and create ways to unblock them.”