Head of Customer Success

Looking to lead customer success at a media-tech business working with Apple and publishers including The Athletic, The Atlantic, News UK and The Telegraph?

We’re FlatPlan, a SaaS and managed service company helping publishers deliver news content to millions of people on Apple devices. We’re a preferred provider to Apple, working with hundreds of prestigious news organisations, helping them grow audience and revenue.

We’re hiring a Head of Customer Success to lead the teams working with publishers once they become customers, improving how we onboard, support and develop those relationships as we grow.

Your Role

FlatPlan has scaled fast in the last 12 months. Renewals have remained strong and churn is low, and the focus for this role is ensuring we retain the highest standards of success as we scale. We believe the experience we offer our customers is a differentiator, and it’s vital we retain this.You’ll work closely with our Founder and CEO, our Chief of Staff and our Publisher Operations Manager to shape the best possible customer experience from sales handover through onboarding, ongoing support and account development.

You’ll lead project management and customer success, and our Support Team Lead will report to you, while continuing to manage their team. Your responsibility will be to keep customer satisfaction high, measure it consistently and strengthen the processes behind it.

How we work with customers

• Publisher goals: We work with editorial, audience and commercial teams to help publishers grow readership and revenue through Apple News and Apple News+.
• Clear ownership: You’ll help our onboarding, support and account teams coordinate their work, so publishers know who to speak to and what happens next.
• Specialist input: Our Head of Client Strategy uses publisher data to advise on performance and growth, working alongside our Head of Audience on audience development.
• Account visibility: We use Attio, our CRM, to track account health, renewals and expansion opportunities.

Key Responsibilities

• People leadership: Set clear expectations, coach regularly and give honest feedback. Develop and recognise strong performers. Address underperformance early with practical support.
• Onboarding: Review the journey from sales handover to post-launch and drive improvements to help publishers get live and see value sooner, with fewer issues to resolve afterwards.
• Support quality: Work with the Support Team Lead on service standards, customer communication and escalation routes, using continual feedback to improve the service.
• AI and automation: Lead the team’s continued adoption of tools like Claude, including automation, use of Cowork and connectors. Spot and share inventive uses and give hands-on help where uptake is slower.
• Strategy: Set the direction for how we take publishers from signed to successful. Work out what needs to change across onboarding, support and account development and turn that into a plan the team works to.
• Account coverage: Review workloads and customer needs, then decide how often we meet each publisher, who owns the relationship and where specialist support is needed.
• Customer relationships: Stay close to customers, step into important conversations and make sure concerns reach the right people before they become bigger problems.
• Retention and expansion: Give the team clear ownership of renewals, account plans and growth opportunities, keeping the publisher’s goals central to those conversations.
• Customer feedback: Work with Product and Engineering to address recurring issues, improve handovers and make sure customer insight informs priorities.
• Measurement: Establish baselines for onboarding time, post-launch fixes, support quality, adoption and customer feedback. Agree useful targets and report progress to leadership.

Within the first six months we’d expect smoother onboarding, fewer avoidable fixes after launch and clearer visibility of customer experience. The team should understand what they own, with less day-to-day coordination falling to our CEO and Chief of Staff.

Must-haves

• Customer leadership: Experience leading customer success, onboarding or service delivery in a growing SaaS or technology business.
• Strategic thinking: You can step back from the day-to-day, spot patterns across accounts and turn them into a clear plan with priorities and trade-offs. You've redesigned a customer journey, not just run one.
• People management: Evidence of improving team performance, developing people and handling difficult performance conversations directly and fairly.
• AI-led mindset: Proven experience with AI tooling, including automations, scheduling and utilising connectors to unblock teams to do their best work.
• Operational experience: You’ve improved customer processes across teams and can explain what changed as a result.
• Commercial judgement: You understand retention, expansion and the relationship between customer outcomes and revenue.
• Communication: Comfortable working with senior customers, technical teams and founders, including when expectations need resetting.
• Ownership: Happy to get into the details, make decisions with incomplete information and build processes that a small team can maintain.
• Data: You can choose measures that reflect the quality of customer experience, and use them to spot problems and guide improvements.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with publishers, media businesses or technology serving the news industry.
• Experience managing team leads or bringing several customer-facing functions together.

Benefits

• Competitive salary - full details to be shared ahead of first interview.
• Fully remote working.
• Flexible hours at a family-friendly company.
• Quarterly team meet-ups with travel covered, a team meal and activities.
• Training allowance.
• New Apple laptop and a work-from-home stipend for necessary accessories.
• Generous annual leave.
• Opportunities to attend industry events.

How we’re set up

We're a growing, fast-moving startup that works with some of the biggest names in news media. Our team brings experience from Stripe, Apple and a range of startups and media businesses.

We use AI and automation to free up time for that expertise rather than replace it. We share company performance openly each quarter, ask the whole team for input on how we work and run a monthly learning session led by team members. Hours are flexible, many of us are parents and everyone has a training allowance. We celebrate curiosity, diversity, kindness and direct, clear communication.

Why you should apply

You’ll have room to shape how the customer function works, with direct access to leadership and a team that knows its publishers well. There’s an established customer base and a service people value, with plenty of scope to improve how we deliver it.

FlatPlan was formed in 2019, is profitable and is backed by TinySeed. We’re Apple’s preferred provider for Apple News and a direct supplier to Apple. We share knowledge openly, support each other and make time for people’s development as the company grows.

Many of us are parents, and flexibility matters here. Everyone can suggest improvements, and our Wonder Wall gives colleagues a way to recognise each other’s contribution.

Our commitment to diversity

We want our team to reflect the publishers and audiences we serve. All qualified applicants will be considered regardless of race, colour, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, disability, background or age. We strongly encourage applications from underrepresented groups.