Making Okta Customers Unstoppable: A Day in the Life with Scott Campbell
Customer success is one of our core values at Okta -- it's at the heart of everything we do. No one knows that better than our dedicated customer success managers. Being able to work, communicate, and problem solve with our customers all day, everyday, is what drives enterprise customer success manager, Scott Campbell. Early mornings and long drives for facetime are enjoyable if it means going above and beyond to make his customers successful.
Read on to learn how the customers Scott works with continually inspire him to be proactive and grow the capabilities of Okta’s technologies with the growing needs of our customers.
How long have you been at Okta? I've been at Okta for about 18 months, and it’s so wild how much the company has grown so much in that time. When I started, we didn't even have a central customer success manager (CSM) team and we've had one now for coming up on three quarters. Our team has grown, the global CSM team has grown, and the company has grown -- I definitely feel like a veteran at this point.
How did you find out about Okta? I discovered Okta through a good friend of mine, Derek DuBois, on the West CSM team. He had just started as a CSM a few months before I started my interview process and he told me that the company was looking for motivated customer success folks in the Chicago market. That's where I live and at the time I just happened to be looking looking for a new position. So it was really a matter of right place right time.
Why did you choose to join Okta? Joining Okta was, to me, less of a no-brainer and more of a dream come true. From the get-go I could really tell that everyone here believes in the product and they're really invested in customer success. Not just customer success managers, but everyone. The quality of Okta’s technology speaks for itself, but the quality of the people is what really drew me in to join Okta.
I feel really fortunate to work at Okta everyday. It's rewarding and it's exciting, and we've got great customers that make this experience a lot of fun and really rewarding so for me. I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.
So tell me about your role. I would say customer success requires me to drive in a number of different lanes, often times all at once. I manage and grow Okta customer relationships from the executive sponsors to the admins. I manage the escalation paths for customers and I help customers drive product enhancements, optimize their resources and adoption, and so much more than that. I'd say that the CSM role at Okta really boils down to this: a responsibility to ensure customer health and grow the real measurable value for both, delivering ROI through our products and services and growing the account.
What does an average day look like for you? It's tough to say anything is an average day. Since I started at Okta, I'm not sure that any two days have been alike. I find a lot of value spending time with customers in-person, so I spend a lot of time on the road traveling across the North Central US. Like all CSMs, outside of customer meetings you can usually find me prepping meeting decks and following up with customers on key action items. I'd really say that the one consistent - regardless of whether I’m at my desk or on the road - is that I’m constantly in contact with customers on the phone, via text and email all hours of the day. Always on!
What's the best part of your role? There are many great aspects of my role but I'd have to say the best is when customers actually realize their vision for Okta, as in they see the success of the technology that they've implemented firsthand. That's really the moment when I know that what we're doing here is important.
What's the most challenging part of your role? I'm tempted to say early mornings to beat the traffic to O’Hare, but I won't. In a customer-facing role like customer success, customers expect a lot out of us. They push us and that's a good thing. I'm fortunate enough to work with some customers who have really big visions for how they want to use Okta's technology and they push the envelope. They challenge us to think about identity in new and exciting ways. So keeping up with their strategies and ensuring that they have the right visibility into ours is really the best challenge.
Describe Okta's culture. Okta's got great diversity in professional and cultural backgrounds which I really enjoy, but a couple of things are really clear. Okta people expect a lot of each other but they also expect a lot of themselves. Every team that I work with fosters a strong "can do" attitude from the top down -- people believe in what they're doing and that's both unique and inspiring.
Outside of work what do you enjoy doing? I've got a great little family here, my fiancé and our two dogs. I love spending time with them, whether it's traveling, binge watching shows and movies, or finding really great pizza (his favorite pizza spot is Pequod’s Pizza!). Being with them is definitely my favorite hobby.
Okta in one word? Unstoppable. Okta's already redefined the enterprise identity and security landscapes. The company has always been eager to bet on its own success and that attitude is paying off in a big way. So as we continue to lead from ahead, I expect that we'll find many more exciting ways to shape how businesses enable and secure their most valuable assets -- their people.
Want to help make Okta customer successful too? We’re hiring!
