Maranda Dziekonski is a battle-tested customer success executive and currently Chief Customer Officer at Fexa, a facilities-management software company bringing AI to the space. Over a 20-plus-year career spanning her 11th company, she has built and led customer success organizations at high-growth tech companies including LendingClub, HelloSign, and Swiftly (where she spent four years serving public-transit agencies). She fell into customer success by chance — landing a Spanish-speaking account-services role at a $40-billion-a-year company in Lansing, Michigan, and only naming the discipline 'customer success' after moving to Silicon Valley a decade later. Her leadership is shaped by a hard personal journey: growing up in poverty, becoming a young single mother on public assistance, and putting herself through college while raising her son and working full time — a story she is turning into a book (working title 'From There to Here'). She is known for reading 'the temperature of a room,' for treating customer success as a revenue-driving competitive advantage, and for a comp philosophy built on team net revenue retention.
“I wasn't just waiting for customers to reach out to me with problems. I was proactively managing these accounts, trying to make sure they had everything they need to be successful.”
“A lot of customer success teams have done major reductions in force, and it's making it a little bit harder for those junior folks to get an entryway into customer success.”
“If you can't own revenue directly, figure out a way to tie the activities and actions your team does to revenue.”
“If your CSMs sit in COGS, that's one of the first places a company looks when it's making cuts.”
“I would put money on it that CSQLs have a higher close rate and a shorter close time than leads that come in through other channels.”
“You create joint goals around NRR and let the world work itself out. The more you divide the upsell motion without aligning the goals, the more friction you insert into your org.”
“I gave everyone in the company a small bonus tied to NPS and NRR, and it completely changed behaviors across the org.”
“I don't care who gets the upsell across the finish line, as long as it gets across the finish line. I don't want any finger pointing. I want partnership.”