Introducing Lorna Henri, our new VP of Customer Success
By: Eric Gundersen
By far one of the coolest parts about this job is seeing what Mapbox customers do with the tools we create.
Our most successful customers are wielding location data in ways we’ve never dreamed. So I’m thrilled to announce that Mapbox brought on Lorna Henri, our new VP of Customer Success, to turbocharge some of our biggest collaborations and help create pathways for new teams to start building.
Lorna comes to us from App Annie, and started in Customer Success when it first began as a function nearly a decade ago; she understands this vision of equipping customers deeply. According to her,
“Customer Success is about deeply understanding the reason that customer came to Mapbox in the first place. But much larger than that, it’s about understanding their overall business initiatives, where they want to succeed, and then mapping your product into that to help them achieve their business goals.”
Lorna’s career has been a journey, and her perspective on various components of the customer lifecycle will be invaluable for us at Mapbox.
Lorna has seen almost every side of a business. She’s had operational and marketing roles in wireless Telecom, Marketing for Vodafone and Verizon supporting explosive growth in the wireless industry, learning the ins and outs of digital marketing and then moved to BrightEdge where she got her first introduction to customer success. In each role, Lorna learned how to see the opportunities in front of her and transform them into even bigger successes for the company.
At BrightEdge, she built their customer success team from the ground up. BrightEdge, an organic search company, reached out to her because her previous role was the exact persona they were selling to. With intimate knowledge the pain points of a Director of Marketing, she was able to train their first customer success team to help customers through every part of the journey, Her teams did everything post-sale — from on-boarding to integration, to adoption, upsell, and renewal. In just four years, she grew from being a Customer Success Manager to managing a team in charge of their largest global customers.
Lorna then moved to App Annie, where she was able to gain an intimate knowledge of the whole mobile app ecosystem and how transformative it is. App Annie is all about helping people create better mobile apps through their app data. This understanding aligns well with Mapbox, where we’re helping customers use mapping data and visualization to understand their business better.
In finding her next role, Lorna says,
“ I was drawn to Mapbox because I wanted to be somewhere where the product was interesting, exciting and transformative. I also wanted to go somewhere I could bring my CS skills and experience to the table but also learn something new. Moreover, I could really feel that diversity wasn’t just a value on the wall, but something the company really lives. People are able to bring their whole selves to work, and I wanted to be a part of that.”
Lorna’s experience and understanding of Mapbox come at just the right time. As we rapidly scale our customer base, we want to make sure we don’t lose the personal touch that Customer Success provides. With only a few days in, Lorna is thinking about the customer experience — from smaller companies who just want a quick answer, to larger users looking for someone to partner in achieving their vision. She wants to help us rapidly scale the team — with more structure, new systems, and, of course, more customer success managers to enable our customers to be massively successful.
So what will it look like if she succeeds? Well, according to Lorna,
“We’ll have thousands of delighted customers, who are telling the Mapbox story for us, providing referrals and allowing us to partner with them in each of their ventures.“
Welcome to the team, Lorna! We’re excited to see where you take us.
The steward of our customers’ success was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.