Technology
How SecureWorks reduced onboarding time by 81% and built its first global Customer Success organization pre-IPO
81%
Reduction in onboarding time
18%
Acceleration in revenue recognition
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About
SecureWorks, a Dell Technologies company, is a global cybersecurity provider delivering managed detection, response, and threat intelligence solutions to enterprise and public sector clients. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, SecureWorks operates across more than 50 countries, helping organizations detect, prevent, and respond to cyberattacks in real time. The company’s Customer Success and operations teams ensure protection, resilience, and measurable value across its global client base.
Industry
Technology
Company size
10,000+
Founded
1999
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“At SecureWorks, Customer Success wasn’t a department — it was a transformation. We built a system that turned onboarding speed into measurable customer and business value.”
Mike Carter
VP Global Customer Success
The Company
Cybersecurity required measurable speed.
SecureWorks provided cybersecurity solutions for some of the world’s largest and most complex enterprises. As the company prepared for its public offering, leadership recognized that customer retention and time-to-value were critical to performance credibility.
The Customer Success function did not yet exist formally. Customer engagements were managed regionally through support and operations teams, creating inconsistent onboarding timelines and limited visibility into customer outcomes. To scale effectively and satisfy investor confidence, SecureWorks needed to operationalize Customer Success as a global system — one that could prove its impact in both customer results and financial performance.
The Motivation
Inconsistent onboarding delayed recognition.
Prior to transformation, SecureWorks’ average customer onboarding time spanned nearly 10 months, creating downstream issues in adoption, satisfaction, and revenue recognition. The lack of standardized processes made it difficult for customers to experience value quickly, delaying renewal conversations and weakening the company’s ability to forecast growth.
Internally, teams operated in silos. Regional practices varied widely, and data collection on onboarding progress was inconsistent. Without a structured framework or shared metrics, it was impossible to scale improvement or replicate success globally.
SecureWorks needed to shorten onboarding dramatically, improve time-to-value, and build a Customer Success structure capable of proving its role in the company’s financial story ahead of the IPO.
“We knew our growth story would only be credible if our customers could see value faster. Onboarding was our weakest link, but it was also our biggest opportunity. Once we built structure, visibility, and ownership, time-to-value improved faster than anyone thought possible.”
Mike Carter
VP Global Customer Success
The solution
Structure turned onboarding into a system.
The transformation began with the creation of SecureWorks’ first global Customer Success organization. This team was tasked with reducing onboarding time, improving customer outcomes, and establishing a repeatable success framework.
Key initiatives included:
Process standardization: Reengineering onboarding workflows across all global regions to eliminate redundancy and accelerate implementation.
Customer visibility: Creating dashboards to track onboarding milestones, customer readiness, and early value indicators.
Role specialization: Defining Customer Success functions focused on onboarding, adoption, and retention to improve accountability and scale.
The organization also partnered closely with Finance and Sales Operations to connect onboarding progress to revenue recognition metrics. This alignment positioned Customer Success not as a cost center, but as a measurable growth lever.
The results
Speed and structure accelerated performance.
The impact of the transformation was immediate and measurable:
81% faster time-to-value achieved by reducing onboarding from 10 months to 58 days.
18% improvement in revenue recognition velocity through earlier activation milestones.
200+ professionals embedded across regions in SecureWorks’ first global Customer Success organization.
The initiative established Customer Success as a cornerstone of SecureWorks’ operating model and investor narrative. It proved that measurable outcomes could drive both customer retention and business performance — setting a precedent for Customer Success excellence across Dell Technologies.
“At SecureWorks, speed became proof. By turning onboarding into a measurable system, we created credibility, customer confidence, and a blueprint for how structure drives value.”
Mike Carter
VP Global Customer Success
