In two years, Beetween, a French recruitment software company, has grown from 800 to 1,400 customers whilst its Customer Success team has stayed at 8 CSMs. Each CSM looks after between 30 and 200 accounts, and around half of all customers (those with an ARR below €6,000) have no dedicated CSM. To make this model work, Beetween combines high-touch management of its highest-value accounts with an increasingly automated low-touch approach.
Caroline, Head of Customer Success, talks us through how Skalin was rolled out, the rituals that keep the tool alive within the team and the results so far, including meeting preparation cut from 20 minutes to 5.
Could you introduce yourself and tell us a little about Beetween?
I'm Caroline, Head of Customer Success at Beetween. I joined the company in 2019 as its first CSM and took over the team in 2021.
Beetween is a French recruitment software company. Today we support more than 1,400 customers, with quite different needs and set-ups. The company has grown a great deal in recent years, partly through integrating other players in the market, including Keycoopt.
That growth forced us to change the way we work. The challenge is to keep supporting customers well, even as the portfolio grows.
How is the Customer Success team at Beetween organised today?
The Customer Satisfaction team is built around three units: Support, Onboarding and the CSMs, who take over once deployment is complete. The team has 8 CSMs, each with a portfolio of between 30 and 200 customers, depending on the segment.
It's worth noting that customers with an ARR below €6,000 don't have a dedicated CSM. So we adapt the level of support to their needs, with the aim of keeping the follow-up relevant without always relying on one-to-one conversations.
For all other customers, CSM portfolios are organised by sector: private sector, public sector and recruitment professionals. This means they understand their customers' challenges better and can support them in a more tailored way. Customers are then segmented by MRR, so the segmentation is based on both vertical and account value.
You've been using Skalin for two years. How did you manage your 800+ customers back then?
Before Skalin, HubSpot was our main tool, but we also had information in other tools, especially on the support and product side.
The problem wasn't a lack of information: it was that it was scattered. To prepare for a meeting, you sometimes had to dig out the history of conversations, the tickets, the usage data and the actions the team had already taken.
With a portfolio that size, all that searching took time. We also needed to get better at spotting the customers who needed particular attention, rather than mostly reacting to requests as they came in.
What was the trigger that made you look for a dedicated Customer Success solution?
The trigger was the growth of the portfolio. We couldn't keep absorbing every increase in customer numbers by adding resources in the same proportion. We had to find a more efficient way of working.
We wanted to save time on repetitive tasks, prioritise accounts better and structure the support we give to customers who don't have a dedicated CSM. We also needed to bring product usage data together with the information already held in our tracking tools.
The aim was to get a better view of account health, spot risk signals earlier and find it easier to decide which actions to take. On the management side, we also wanted a clearer view of the team's activity and of the portfolio.
How did the Skalin roll-out go, and how did you get the team on board?
We involved several teams from the start, including leadership, product and onboarding, to make sure the tool really met our needs.
The roll-out took around two and a half months, which gave us time to get to grips with the tool and set up our first playbooks. At the time, we connected HubSpot, our mailboxes and calendars, Intercom and product usage data. Since then, we've moved support over to HubSpot and added Modjo to record our customer meetings. All our customer data is directly available in Skalin.
The first change was having all customer information in one place. After that, we had to learn the tool, fine-tune our health scores and gradually build our playbooks and alerts.
We're still developing it, too: we adjust the automations and add playbooks as needs arise. It's not a tool you configure once and forget; it evolves with our organisation.
What concrete results have you seen since you started using Skalin?
- Time saved on meeting preparation: we've gone from around 20 minutes to 5 minutes to prepare for a customer meeting, thanks to centralised information and the AI Assistant.
- The capacity to manage larger portfolios: in 2 years, the portfolio has grown from 800 to 1,400 customers. The team has stayed stable at 8 CSMs. Skalin helps us handle a much larger volume of accounts by making account follow-up and prioritisation easier, even if it isn't the only reason for this change.
- Better visibility of customer risk: we're better at spotting churn risk. Before, we had less visibility of warning signs; today, we can more easily identify the customers who need particular attention and act sooner.
In practice, how do your CSMs use Skalin day to day, and what has it changed for them?
CSMs use Skalin to find information about their customers, prepare for their meetings and decide which accounts to prioritise. Health scores, alerts and playbooks also help them keep track of important situations and automate some recurring actions.
The AI Assistant is especially useful for quickly getting the context of an account: past conversations, problems the customer has faced or actions already taken. It saves us from manually going through several tools before a meeting.
We saw this in particular when several people in the team went on maternity leave: portfolio handovers went smoothly because the information was easier to find. It also helps day to day when a CSM has to step in on an account they don't normally look after.
The idea is to spend less time looking for information and more time analysing it and preparing the right actions.
And what does Skalin bring you day to day as Head of Customer Success?
As Head of Customer Success, Skalin first and foremost gives me an overall view of the health of our customer portfolio and lets me quickly identify the accounts that need particular attention, whether that's high-ARR customers, risk signals or potential churn.
This view helps me prioritise the actions to take and steer the team's activity according to business priorities. I rely on Skalin in particular during my one-to-ones with CSMs, to dig deeper into certain situations, challenge their analysis and agree on the right action plans with them.
I also use the platform to track the team's activity, playbook usage and progress towards our goals. Finally, having information in one place makes handovers between CSMs easier and ensures better continuity in account follow-up.
The aim is to have a consolidated view of the portfolio so I can make the right decisions, support the team better and focus our efforts where they'll have the most impact.
Which Skalin features bring you the most value today?
The 360° view (emails, tickets, transcripts of our meetings, platform usage and so on) means we can quickly see where each account stands. But the AI Assistant makes all of this extremely easy to digest, and it's now our most-used feature. When you've been looking after a customer for several years, the history can be long and spread across emails, tickets, HubSpot, product usage data and conversations recorded in Modjo.
The assistant lets us find and summarise this information more quickly, for example to prepare a QBR or take stock of a sensitive situation. Depending on the case, it can suggest action plans and offer to create tasks automatically.
Playbooks, for their part, help us structure and automate certain customer journeys. We have many active playbooks, which let us respond to drops in usage and set the pace of customer follow-up for each segment.
Finally, alerts help us spot situations that need our attention more quickly, such as customers approaching their contract end date or whose health score is falling.
These features complement each other well: we find the context faster, identify the priority issues and can trigger the right actions.
How do you lead the team around Skalin?
With a team that works remotely a lot, I wanted to manage activity with shared indicators, tracked directly in Skalin: the number of meetings per month, overdue tasks, updates to the CSM score and the overall health of the portfolio. The idea is that every CSM can see where they stand, and that new joiners have tiered goals from the day they arrive. We're currently setting these up with Skalin's Goals module.
We've also agreed a few shared rules so that information stays reliable, whichever CSM takes over the account. For example, the account summary is written as a note tagged 'summary': that way it's dated, we know who wrote it, and it syncs to HubSpot. The CSM score and the usage score also sync to HubSpot, so Account Managers can see them when they log in. And an automatic reminder regularly prompts CSMs to update their CSM score.
Playbooks are built collectively. After a training session with the whole team, everyone created their first playbooks, drawing on what already existed. We then review them with the Skalin team to validate and improve them.
Keeping the tool up to date is also part of the CSMs' goals. I ran a quarter-long challenge to make sure the data in Skalin was properly filled in. During the challenge, every CSM had to check, for each of their accounts, that the admin contact, the recruiter contact and the champion were identified, that the summary and next action were filled in for Run Premium accounts, and that every at-risk customer had a documented action plan. Our portfolios are now much cleaner, which is essential for the playbooks to work!
We're also planning a Skalin workshop during our brainstorming days, to share best practice and look at how to make better use of the tool day to day.
Looking back, what advice would you give another Head of CS who's hesitating about adopting a platform like Skalin?
I'd advise them not to see this type of platform as just a reporting tool, but as a real lever for structuring and developing their Customer Success organisation.
You need to start from the team's concrete problems: how to save time, prioritise accounts better, anticipate risks and support more customers without increasing resources in the same proportion.
The other key point is to make the tool part of CSMs' everyday work. Centralising data isn't enough: everyone needs to get real value from it, and the platform has to genuinely help them make better decisions and trigger the right actions.
Finally, I think you have to accept that your use of the tool will evolve gradually. At Beetween, Skalin keeps adapting to our organisation and our challenges, especially around low-touch. It's this ability to evolve the tool with your needs that makes it a real performance lever.
What are your next steps with Skalin? How do you see your use of it evolving?
We want to keep digitising low-touch so we can better support customers who don't have a dedicated CSM, without increasing the team's workload in the same proportion. That will mean setting up new playbooks and possibly moving to a pooled model for managing customers.
We also want to go further with the AI Assistant and the analytics features, to better understand portfolio health and anticipate risks. On the management side, we want to go further in tracking the team's goals, and to better manage customers who use several of our products in Skalin, especially since integrating Keycoopt.
Further reading:
