Crisp Team Spotlight: Nina Giviyan-Kermani

As Crisp’s VP of Customer Success, Nina is building a strong foundation to empower every CPG brand to solve problems with data.

Meet Nina

Role: VP of Customer Success
Lives in: Chicago, IL
Favorite grocery store product: Cheese, particularly feta!

Driven by a mission and armed with operational expertise, Nina is all about using her career to make the greatest possible impact. She’s built and scaled rapidly growing customer service teams with a focus on creating the right culture and processes to help every customer thrive. We spoke with Nina about her unique journey to Crisp, and how the Customer Success team helps brands use data to solve pressing business problems and reduce waste.

Making a difference at scale

As VP of Customer Success, Nina leads Crisp’s customer-facing teams, from onboarding to account management to enterprise solutions. She joined Crisp in November from Neon One, a software provider for nonprofits that grew rapidly during her seven-year tenure. In her role there, Nina built out all customer operations functions as the department grew from just a few people to 90.

Before entering the world of customer success, Nina was a minister and chaplain (she holds a Master’s in Divinity from the University of Chicago). It might sound like a surprising turn, but throughout her time in ministerial work, Nina was always steeped in operations, systems, and data to help herself and those around her make a greater impact. It was this skill set that led her into the customer success world, where she could help other organizations and brands achieve their own goals. As Nina reflects, “I’ve always been a person who gets a reward from helping people and solving problems. The puzzle nature of working in technology, combined with a role designed to make people happy and their day easier…that’s where it all comes together for me.” Nina also sees the customer success function as a partnership builder, and not just toward customers: the team serves as a switchboard for other departments in the company, from product and engineering, to make sure solutions are working and help inform product development.

“I’ve always been a person who gets a reward from helping people and solving problems. The puzzle nature of working in technology, combined with a role designed to make people happy and their day easier…that’s where it all comes together for me.”

Nina Giviyan-Kermani

Building a strong foundation at Crisp

When considering new opportunities, Nina says she was drawn to Crisp right away. In addition to the adventure of a rapidly growing startup, she appreciated Crisp’s theory of change: reducing food waste is a tangible, but globally important issue, and Crisp outlined a clear path to realizing its mission by using data to strengthen supply chain performance. It also helped that the people she met throughout the process at Crisp were genuinely nice, creative, and fun to work with. 

With the chance to build another customer success team from the ground up, Nina was most excited about laying the foundation for a strong internal culture. Nina values assembling the right team with the right principles from the start, defining values and processes from the center of the organization that ultimately spread outward. With this foundation in place, the team can work to offer as personalized a customer experience as possible, and chart a path toward helping each customer further over time. “The dynamic that we have on the team is amazing,” Nina says. “Everyone cares so much about our customers that it makes my job easy and delightful. I can come in and remove blockers and set up processes, but we always have each others’ back, and enjoy our work along the way.”

“In a lot of cases, the ‘aha moment’ is when [customers] see retail data for the first time that they would have had to spend hours pulling together manually. And when they see trends or issues they might have suspected reflected in clear numbers on the dashboard, everything clicks.”

Nina Giviyan-Kermani

Helping brands succeed with data

Nina’s team is already off to a strong start. They’ve launched an enterprise solutions team to customize the onboarding experience for clients with larger data sets, adding more project management support and detailed training plans to support their unique challenges. They’ve also launched channels to get regular feedback from customers, including collecting customer “effort” scores (how easy or hard it is for customers to learn a new product), which are at 100% so far (meaning the easiest to implement). Crisp also surveyed customers to determine the ROI of enhanced data visibility, and found encouraging results: they’re growing sales by an average 12%, 94% report deeper understanding of their retail accounts, and they save an average 16+ hours per week. Nina notes that it’s also been incredibly helpful to learn how Crisp can provide additional support for customers, and is always seeking new ways to open that dialog (if you’re a customer who would like extra help or has feedback to share, you can contact our team at https://support.gocrisp.com/) .  

Through the new online feedback and from direct conversations with customers, Nina sees immense value in solving data-related challenges for CPG brands. “In a lot of cases, the ‘aha moment’ is when they see retail data for the first time that they would have had to spend hours pulling together manually,” Nina explains. “And when they see trends or issues they might have suspected reflected in clear numbers on the dashboard, everything clicks.”

When Nina isn’t building out the customer success team, you might find her departing from her hometown of Chicago for a new adventure (she’s been to over 10 countries in recent years). Back at home, she’s an avid Peloton cyclist and tends to her impressive collection of houseplants, which provides helpful insights for Crisp’s active #houseplants Slack channel. 

To join Nina and the Crisp team, view our open positions. To see how Crisp can help your brand be data-ready, contact us for a demo.