Carly Agar

Key takeaways

1. How did you get into Customer Success?

I began my journey in Customer Success back when it didn’t have its own identity separate from Account Management. I started my career in Sales and quickly learned I did NOT love “hunting”, but I did love “farming”, and that’s what brought me to and kept me in Customer Success all these years! 



2. What do you enjoy the most in your role?

What I enjoy most about my current role is that the work I’m doing feels meaningful and impactful. Helping others in the Customer Success world land jobs, get promotions, and figure out their next big career moves is wildly fulfilling! I’m very grateful for it!


3. What skills do you believe someone excellent in CS should possess?

You might be surprised to hear my answer because they aren’t skills you’ll ever see listed in a job description. To excel in Customer Success I believe you need to be excellent at self-reflection AND self-advocacy. Without these two skills, you’ll likely find yourself in roles where you are unhappy, underperforming and even underpaid. Those are never conditions in which someone can truly ‘excel’!

4. How important do you think CS is for an organization?

Customer Success is critical for any company’s long term existence. Period. If you don’t get on board with prioritizing your paying customers’ desired outcomes, your company will get beat out by competitors who do. I believe customer advocates will become a company’s most important differentiator.. and you don’t get advocates by not investing in customer success.

5. What are your predictions for the direction of CS and CS platforms in 2024, given the increasing prevalence of AI?

I’m excited to see AI evolve customer health into a much more nuanced and holistic view of the customer. For instance, can my CS platform go beyond just looking at basic product usage data like the number of logins, and instead warn me if my customer’s depth of adoption is low (meaning they are only using a handful of features)? Can my CS platform warn me if an account is single-threaded or we only have relationships at the end user level? That’s the kind of insight I’d like to see from AI in a CS platform!

6. What tips do you have for anyone looking to enter CS?

Too much advice to squeeze into a few sentences! My biggest piece of advice is before you do anything in your job search (like updating your resume, applying for jobs, etc.), make sure you deeply understand how your previous roles are similar to Customer Success. If you don’t understand that, you won’t be able to communicate it. If you can’t communicate it, you won’t get far in your job search.

7. How can individuals seeking a job in CS go about it? Anyrecommended forums/events?

Listen to my podcast, Customer Success Career Coach, or check out my free job search resources at carlyagar.com/freebies 🙂

8. What are some of the key challenges in the field of CS youhave faced and what helped you overcome it?

One of the biggest challenges anyone in Customer Success will encounter is how different the role can be from one company to another. That makes navigating your career pretty difficult. The key to overcoming this is deeply understanding what aspects of the Customer Success roles you’ve held you enjoyed and were good at so you can carry those as your “must haves” in future roles you take on.

9. Who are your mentors or individuals you look up to in CS?

I’ve been lucky to have managers throughout my career that were also great mentors (too many to name)! Finding a mentor can be difficult and pretty awkward, so I like to encourage people to
1) look for coworkers who are doing ‘big’ things in their careers or coworkers who intimidate you with their ideas and accomplishments and then
2) find excuses to be in the same room as those coworkers as often as you can.. And ask them LOTS of questions!

10. Your favourite book?

My favorite fiction book is Fourth Wing!

11. Your favourite pastime?

I started golfing a few years ago and I LOVE IT. (But on days where I’m not playing well, I’ll tell you that I absolutely HATE IT).

12. Is there anything else you would like to add?

There are lots of women out there looking for women mentors! Consider that even if you are only 1-2 steps ahead of someone else, you could make a great mentor!

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