Founding Customer Success Manager

About Carla AI

Carla AI is an AI-powered voice agent designed for the rental industry, specifically for car rental operators across North America. It handles inbound calls, takes reservations, processes payments, and provides 24/7 customer support without human intervention. Carla integrates directly with rental management systems, enabling operators to manage their businesses more efficiently.

The Opportunity

We are seeking a Customer Success Manager to lead onboarding, adoption, and retention for Carla AI's growing customer base. This role involves working closely with the CEO and cross-functional teams to ensure customers are successfully integrated and seeing value from the product.

What You’ll Do

• Own customer onboarding and activation
• Lead new customers through implementation: configuring Carla for their business, integrating with their rental management system, setting up the knowledge base, transfer rules, opening hours, and greeting flows.
• Train customer teams on the Carla AI dashboard, analytics, call review, and configuration tools so they can self-serviced day-to-day.
• Define and track activation milestones to ensure every customer reaches first value quickly: calls answered, bookings created, time saved.
• Build and refine repeatable onboarding playbooks, documentation, and training materials as the customer base grows.
• Drive retention and customer health
• Own the ongoing customer relationship post-onboarding: regular check-ins, business reviews, and proactive outreach based on usage and performance data.
• Monitor customer health metrics such as call volume, booking conversion, feature adoption, and dashboard engagement to spot risks early and act on them.
• Manage renewals and ensure customers continue to see value as their business and Carla’s capabilities evolve.
• Handle escalations with empathy and urgency, coordinating with Product and Engineering to resolve issues and close the loop with the customer.
• Identify growth and expansion opportunities
• Spot opportunities to expand usage within existing accounts: additional locations, higher tier plans, new features, or broader use cases.
• Share structured customer feedback with Product and leadership to inform roadmap priorities, packaging decisions, and new vertical exploration.
• Collaborate with Sales and Partnerships to support case studies, references, and customer stories that fuel new business growth.
• Build the success function
• Establish the foundations of the customer success operation: health scoring, onboarding workflows, renewal tracking, and escalation processes.
• Maintain accurate customer records, notes, and lifecycle data in CRM (HubSpot).
• Contribute to building a knowledge base of best practices, FAQs, and self-service resources for customers.

What Success Looks Like

• In the first 90 days:
• You’ve onboarded your first cohort of customers and they are live, with Carla answering calls and creating bookings.
• A repeatable onboarding playbook is documented and being refined based on real customer feedback.
• Customer health tracking is in place and you have clear visibility into adoption and engagement across your accounts.
• You’ve built trusted relationships with early customers and are their go-to contact for anything Carla-related.
• In 6 to 12 months:
• Customer retention is strong: the majority of customers onboarded are renewing and actively using the product.
• Onboarding time to value has improved measurably through playbook iteration and process refinement.
• You’ve identified and supported expansion within existing accounts, contributing to revenue growth beyond initial contracts.
• Customer feedback loops are producing actionable insights that are influencing product and go-to-market decisions.
• The customer success function has clear processes, health metrics, and documentation that could support scaling the team.

What We’re Looking For

• 2 to 4 years of experience in customer success, account management, or implementation within B2B SaaS.
• Demonstrated ability to onboard and retain customers, with a track record of driving adoption and reducing churn.
• Strong project management instincts: comfortable managing multiple customer implementations and timelines simultaneously.
• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal, with the ability to train, present, and build trust with operators who are not necessarily technical.
• Proactive and empathetic: you anticipate customer needs rather than waiting for escalations.
• Comfortable working with data to monitor customer health, spot trends, and inform decisions.
• CRM experience (HubSpot, Salesforce, or equivalent).
• Self-motivated, detail-oriented, and comfortable working autonomously in a fast-paced, evolving environment.

PREFERRED EXPERIENCE

• Experience in the rental industry (car rental, equipment rental, fleet management) or adjacent verticals such as automotive, travel tech, or mobility.
• Experience onboarding customers onto AI, automation, or voice/conversational technology products.
• Experience building or materially improving customer success processes, playbooks, or health scoring from scratch.
• Familiarity with SaaS products and API-based integrations, enough to guide customers through configuration without needing engineering support for every question.
• Startup or early-stage SaaS experience where you had to build the function, not just run it.