Anika Zubair, Griffin's Head of Customer Success, has spent over 13 years shaping her career in post-sales revenue roles, including titles like Director, VP, and now Head of Customer Success. Currently, leading customer success for a banking-as-a-service company based in London, her journey into leadership showcases her deep expertise and passion for helping businesses succeed through customer-centric strategies.
Anika’s career path has been rooted in helping companies generate revenue after the sales process by building lasting, successful relationships with customers. As a CS leader, she ensures that customers are satisfied with their products and services and achieve tangible value that drives mutual business growth.
What advice do you have for someone's first 100 days as head of CS?
For anyone stepping into a leadership role in customer success, Anika emphasizes three key areas to focus on during the first 100 days.
First, prioritize spending time with customers. According to Anika, customers provide essential insights into the product, the team, and the industry—far more than any internal analysis can. Engaging directly with customers will help new leaders identify the “good, bad, and ugly” of the business from the user’s perspective.
Second, understand your internal stakeholders. Leadership means guiding a team and navigating relationships within the organization. From the board to marketing, product, and sales teams, customer success intersects with many different functions, and it’s essential to understand their expectations and priorities.
Finally, Anika stresses the importance of knowing your team. Whether you inherit a team or build it from scratch, a leader’s job is to enable team members to be successful. Knowing their strengths, challenges, and goals sets the foundation for a collaborative and effective working environment.
What does your CS strategy focus on currently and in the future?
At Griffin, Anika focuses on building the foundation for a scalable customer success function. As the company has launched its first customers, they are moving from early-stage chaos to developing repeatable processes. Anika and her team gather data on everything from product usage to communication preferences, building a feedback loop that will enable continuous improvement.
Looking ahead, her strategy will revolve around refining these processes, improving onboarding, and driving customer expansion. Griffin aims to establish a seamless customer journey supporting product adoption and growth by creating a solid internal structure and leveraging customer insights.
How Do You Measure Success With CS?
Anika strongly advocates tracking metrics that directly align with customer value. One key measure she focuses on is the time first to value or time to first revenue—how quickly a customer moves from signing a contract to deriving value from the product. Griffin has been improving this metric by streamlining onboarding processes and refining support documentation, resulting in quicker implementation times and faster customer success.
What pain points do you have leading a CS team?
According to Anika, one of the biggest challenges for customer success teams is the tendency to get pulled in many directions. CS leaders often find themselves trying to help everyone, from customers to internal teams like product and marketing. This can lead to resource constraints and spread too thin.
Anika advises leaders to focus on the most critical priorities, understanding that not every issue can be solved simultaneously. Her mantra: avoid trying to “boil the ocean.”
How do you establish partnerships and gain buy-in with the C-suite?
In her leadership role, Anika regularly collaborates with Griffin’s C-suite, directly bringing the customer’s voice into executive meetings. Whether discussing revenue blockers or celebrating new customer launches, she ensures that customer success remains a central focus at the highest levels of the organization.
Her approach to the C-suite is similar to working with multi-threaded stakeholders within a customer organization. Anika believes in the importance of building relationships with executives like the CFO or CPO and ensuring regular communication and collaboration. This strengthens cross-functional alignment and drives company-wide initiatives that enhance customer success.
Do you have an example of utilizing customer feedback to improve your company?
Anika’s team frequently incorporates customer feedback into executive meetings. For example, they regularly share updates on customer blockers—issues preventing customers from realizing more value or revenue. By addressing these blockers at an executive level, Griffin can prioritize solutions that benefit the customer and drive business growth.
Customer feedback is also shared across the company during all-hands meetings, where the success of newly launched customers is celebrated. This ensures that the entire organization is aligned around the importance of customer success and its direct impact on business outcomes.
What is the future of CS?
Looking to the future, Anika sees customer success evolving into a more revenue-focused discipline. Traditionally seen as a support or service function, CS teams are now taking on a more proactive role in driving revenue growth. As businesses move further into SaaS and subscription models, the CS function will increasingly be recognized as a critical revenue generator.
Anika believes the future of CS lies in this shift toward revenue responsibility. CS leaders and teams must embrace their role in driving business outcomes, focusing on customer satisfaction and expansion, retention, and upsell opportunities.
About Anika Zubair
To keep up with Anika’s career and insights into customer success, you can connect with her on LinkedIn or listen to her podcast, The Customer Success Pro, where she interviews experts in the field. Anika is also available for coaching and consulting, helping CS professionals and teams unlock their potential.
About CX Chats
CX chats is an interview series with Ben Holland, where we talk to industry leaders in the field of customer experience and customer success. Each interview dives deep into the insights from each leader and highlights how they became successful, tips for aspiring CX professionals, and their thoughts on the future of CX.