Carousel Industries Ramps Up Customer Success Focus With New SVP Role

‘Carousel has three decades of experience helping clients weather the uncertainties of the marketplace and be able to reinvent and plan their business for the challenging times ahead, and looking at those as opportunities to innovate. So, for us the need of our clients to really think about innovation really has enabled us to think very differently about how we partner with them in the years to come,’ Carousel Industries’ Juan Gonzalez tells CRNtv.

Carousel Industries, No. 59 on the 2020 CRN Solution Provider 500, recently named Juan Gonzalez as its senior vice president of customer success, a newly created role to expand its relationships with clients.

“The SVP of customer success role is a natural continuation of our continuous improvement culture, and just part of customer success obsessed mission to really unify our experience for our clients,” Gonzalez told CRNtv. “But the role is new in that it combines all aspects of our [client] relationship from when they first hear about the way we can impact their business to the way in which they plan the redefinition and reinvention of their own businesses throughout the client lifecycle.”

Here’s a look at some of CRNtv’s virtual interview with Gonzalez:

So by combining all aspects of your client relationships under this new role, talk about what’s the need for this position?

Customer success as a discipline has been around for a while and it’s generally been necessary because as clients realize that they’re looking for partnerships and not simply vendor relationships, they’re looking for organizations that truly understand their business needs and can help them plan for the future. Carousel has three decades of experience helping clients weather the uncertainties of the marketplace and be able to reinvent and plan their business for the challenging times ahead, and looking at those as opportunities to innovate. So, for us the need of our clients to really think about innovation really has enabled us to think very differently about how we partner with them in the years to come.

What are your top priorities as SVP of customer success for your first year in the new role?

Carousel has had a tradition of listening to our customers very generously, and I really want to double down on that exercise. We have some of the industry leading metrics for ensuring that our customers are being well represented, but I think that there’s a true opportunity for us to provoke a more genuine conversation around how we can innovate for the future. Many of our customers are asking questions around what the future holds; how they should innovate in their business on a return to work basis. So, we want to start having meaningful conversations with them and start introducing them to a new vision of the future and how partnership can help them bring their employees back into the office, and scale their business in a geographically distributed way because the future is definitely a return to growth future.

Could you gives us a little bit more detail as to what that will look like — this idea of what the new normal business environment will look like — while addressing the needs of both your partners and customers…

You know the pandemic really taught us that when clients engage in industry in sort of a piece meal fashion and try to build an infrastructure that isn’t really integrated around a business plan, they find a need to have new conversations around how they can scale and grow. So, the future of business really is a combination of infrastructure needs radically distributed communication and collaboration with a focus on security and cloud. To really approach this you need a trusted partner who can help you navigate these waters and build a plan for the future, and we’re just so thrilled to be able to build that relationship with our clients and build upon decades of experience in earning their trust.

Head over to CRNtv to learn more about how Carousel is investing in customer success.