What Customer Success Means to Sentry

At Sentry, collaboration is vital to everything we do. While this collaboration is often internal (product and engineering), we also recognizes the value of external, customer-focused collaboration. Enter: Sentry’s Customer Success team.

As a group of experienced Customer Success Managers (CSMs), we're here to help our paying customers achieve their objectives and get the most out of Sentry.

How we’re measured.

Sentry is, and always was, an open source project. In that vein, our team values transparency in ways that closely mirror open source collaboration. We want to share direct insight into what we (Sentry's CSM team) internally consider success. We are not measured on how much money you pay us. Instead, our team is measured on whether or not you continue paying us, in addition to your usage and feature adoption over time. To be fair, this might ultimately influence how much money you'll pay us, but that’s not the point.

How we fit into Sentry, the company.

As CSMs, we work across different departments at Sentry to provide you the best experience possible. Here are some examples of how we work with other teams:

• Support: Support Engineers are our technical resources for solving your product questions or troubleshooting a bug fix. CSMs and Support Engineers roll up to one team — Customer Operations — that works together across tools to share knowledge and surface trends.

• Engineering: Our SDK engineers work with us to answer tricky SDK questions as well help resolve any issues with the many platforms Sentry supports.

• Product: We use Jira to track your product feedback and requests, which are then reviewed with the Product and Engineering teams on a continual basis.

• Sales: If you're an Enterprise customer, your Account Executive and CSM are jointly responsible for your success. CSMs work with the Sales team to make sure your needs are met and any questions are quickly addressed.

• Marketing: The Marketing team is our partner for creating content, including case studies and tutorials. We also collaborate on community events and customer advocacy groups.

How we’ll work with you.

We keep an eye on our customers through a health score: our internal metric that takes your activity, product usage, and feature adoption into account. Our goal is to reach out to customers with low scores to help improve things but also to learn from customers with high scores. Over the last few months we've experimented with different ways to move the health score needle and we hope to continue optimizing this experience for all customers in the future.

We’re also here to answer your questions about Sentry features, collect your product feedback, and provide best practices and recommendations. If you want to reach us, email our team whenever at success@sentry.io.

If you’re on an Enterprise plan, a dedicated CSM provides additional value via quarterly progress reviews and customized on-boarding to help you get the most from Sentry. Enterprise customers are also invited to quarterly “Lunch & Learns” for advanced best practices and an annual product roadmap preview. Fancy.

Our Framework.

Errors can be noisy, especially when you first turn on Sentry. This initial uproar of events is often the result of opening the error-floodgate without first taking advantage of Sentry’s visibility and actionability features. To ensure your success, we built a maturity framework that helps you implement Sentry and maximize its value.

This framework isn’t necessarily linear, and you can absolutely achieve milestones in any order -- customers often prioritize the most meaningful features to their specific business, first. However, we recommend following the steps we've created in sequence, as they build off of each other and lay the groundwork for more advanced features. Here's a sneak peek of the framework.

Exception Driven Culture

In conversations with our most mature Sentry customers, we learned they're evolving towards an exception-driven culture where the ROI on fixing exceptions is clearly tied to their bottom line. We really liked this term, so we built it into our maturity framework to define a culture where issues are assigned or resolved at a specific, measureable rate.

In today’s technology-driven world, your competitive advantage in the marketplace is a stellar customer experience. Acting quickly on bugs in your product improves usability, responsiveness, and the overall experience customers have with your service.

Sentry’s maturity framework is designed to help you achieve an exception-driven culture. If an exception-driven culture isn’t what you’re looking for, our framework will still help you have a better experience with Sentry. Using the milestones will help your engineering teams know when they need to act on bugs that are affecting your customers.

Be on the lookout for future content about using Sentry’s maturity framework to achieve an exception-driven culture. In the meantime, please email success@sentry.io if you have any questions. The Customer Success team is here to help you.