Employee Spotlight: Customer Success Manager Kristin McLaughlin

Part of our Team Spotlight series, featuring Crisp employees and what lights them up at work.

Meet Kristin

Role: Customer Success Manager
Lives in: Denver, CO
Favorite grocery store product: A sparkling water brand made in Colorado called Dram. They have a lavender lemon flavor that is so refreshing and delicious!

Kristin McLaughlin helps growing CPG teams become data power users. Responsible for the well-being of Crisp’s customers, she manages onboarding and training, leads the support and account management teams, and represents the voice of the customer within the company. We spoke with Kristin to hear more about her role, her unexpected career path, and why she loves working at Crisp.

(Data) knowledge is power

Every customer is different, whether it’s an emerging brand digging into data for the first time or a data-savvy analyst looking for deeper insights. Once a customer signs on with Crisp, Kristin’s approach to Customer Success starts by learning what their business goals are and who on the team will be looking at data. From there, she’ll onboard the customer and make sure they’re confident using data to find growth opportunities, track inventory, predict demand, and more. Kristin and her team check in frequently, communicating any new features or functionality that Crisp has added to the platform and passing along any feedback to our team internally.

Kristin has worked in tech for years now, with her last customer success role in the financial tech sector. But her career path hasn’t always been linear. She had another life working as a mental health professional serving children with developmental disorders, and has a Master’s degree in Psychology. “All of my people skills come from that experience,” Kristin shares. “It’s what I enjoy most.” Ultimately, Kristin shifted careers to pursue her lifelong love for technology. She recalls growing up as her family’s “residential IT support,” asked to troubleshoot any technology in the house. When she interviewed with Crisp, she found a close-knit family of its own as a startup with only 10-15 employees at the time. While the software was cutting edge and the mission admirable, it was the interview experience that ultimately sold Kristin. She loved the idea of working alongside great people in an environment where everyone seemed excited to be there.

“As someone with dietary restrictions, I love seeing niche brands enter the market, because you couldn’t always find those gluten free, plant-based, or specialty products.” — Kristin McLaughlin

Helping each brand become “the next big thing”

No day is ever quite the same in Kristin’s world, but she still has time to pursue longer term projects. One that her team is particularly proud of is a system to keep track of Crisp’s customers, so they can operate at scale while maintaining a truly customized approach to each brand. The tracker records all of her customers’ unique needs, goals, and important milestones, and can even nudge her team when it’s a good time to reach out. “Ira, our Customer Support Specialist, has done a tremendous amount to automate some of our workflows and make the account management process seamless,” she explains. With this, the team runs smoothly even as new customers join the platform every week.

Ultimately, it’s working with brands to achieve their unique goals that gives Kristin the greatest reward. “As someone with dietary restrictions, I love seeing niche brands enter the market, because you couldn’t always find those gluten free, plant-based, or specialty products,” Kristin says. Many of the up-and-coming brands she works with started out as a passion project that has since grown into a promising business concept. They’re often operating with small teams and no data analysts on staff, so their main challenge is how to apply data and work it into their business process and strategy. That comes down to using data to solve problems — which is a well-honed skill set of Kristin’s, thanks to all of those statistics classes she took in graduate school.

When she isn’t championing Crisp’s customers, Kristin loves rock climbing and being outdoors. She moved to Denver during the pandemic to make the most of remote work life and find a destination to enjoy her greatest hobbies. 

To learn more about life at Crisp and view open positions, visit gocrisp.com/careers.