This Week in Startups - Customer Success | Scaling Your Startup S2E9 with Statusphere’s Kristen Wiley & Techmate’s Nicole Beals | E1229

Episode Date: June 9, 2021

Customer success is key to startup success. First, Statusphere CEO Kristen Wiley shares strategies from managing two customer success teams in B2B and B2C. (1:00) Then, find out why customers churn from Techmate COO Nicole Beals, who also shares how Techmate increased their customer retention rate from 70% to 98%. (27:07) To wrap, Jason leads a Q&A covering compensation, productizing customer moments, and more. (40:41)

Hey everybody, welcome to This Week in Startups. It is our Scaling Your Startup series. Yes, this is the series where we have founders teach you how to grow and scale your startup. This is the second season, episode nine. You can find all of these amazing tactical discussions, two per episode at this week in startups.com slash scale. And we're writing notes about each one so that you can quickly figure out what happens. and did each episode, you're going to want to watch these episodes with your entire team or maybe a subset depending on the size of your team so everybody can level up. Season two of scaling your startup is brought to you by Our Crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join Our Crowd for free at OUR-C-O-D-com slash twist. LinkedIn jobs. A business is only as strong as its people, and every hire matters. Go to LinkedIn.com slash your startup to post your first job for free. That's LinkedIn.com

slash Y-O-U-R-S-T-A-R-T-U-P. Terms and conditions apply. And NetSuite. Don't let old software and spreadsheetsuits slow you down anymore. Upgrade to NetSuite, the world's number one cloud business system. Schedule your free product tour right now at netsuite.com slash twist. Now, this is the ninth episode. The other episodes, we went through growth, copyrighting, social media, sales, fundraising, product, SEO, conversions, culture, having a low burn rate mentality. And today we're going to cover customer success with two extraordinary entrepreneurs. I'm lucky enough to have invested in Kristen, Wiley, is the founder and CEO of Statusphere,

and you can visit their website at joinstatus.com. And Nicole Beals is from TechMate. You can go to their website at TechMate.com. Now, customer success is critically important because your best customer is your existing customer. And losing a customer because you didn't pay attention for them, you didn't study their usage, and you didn't care for them is a horrible mistake.

You spent all that time landing that customer. Don't lose them. And in fact, try to get them to double or triple or quadruple their spend with you because that's a faster way to grow. The two ways I see companies knock it out of the park is to increase their prices and to land and expand. In order to do that, you have to have to be driven by customer success and you have to take it as not just an art, but as a science.

Okay. And so we'll start off with Kristen Wiley. Take it away, Kristen. Thanks, Jason. And today I'll be talking about customer success. And again, my name is Kristen Wiley, and I'm founder of Statsphere. So today I'm going to be covering the following. I'm going to be covering the customer success mindset

and how you can transition your team into focusing on this new mindset and approaching problems in that way. Second, I'm going to cover questions that your customer success management team should be asking so that they can approach these problems and achieve the ultimate goal of customer success. Number three, I'm going to cover how to, measure customer success so that you can see how you're improving over time on a qualitative and quantitative from both perspectives. And then lastly, I'm going to cover aligning your sales and

customer success teams because I actually find that customer success is not just one portion of your business. It actually should be across the board, and it really should start with sales. So those are the agenda items I'm going to be covering during this presentation. But I also want to give you a little background about my company so that as I give you examples, you'll know how I'm referencing it. So I am founder, CEO of Statsphere, and we help brands scale word of mouth marketing, which means we actually have two customer segments and two customer success teams. So on the brand side, we help brands get thousands of people posting about their products with a push of a button.

And then on our member side, we have consumers that sign up and get free product in exchange for posting. So because of that, we do have two full robust teams that approach customer success for both our brands and our members. So in this presentation, I will be covering both. B2B and B2C tactics that you can use. So first starting out with defining customer success. So the term customer success obviously sounds like what it is.

It's making sure your customer is successful. But I think at least when I was starting out as a founder, I didn't think too much about it. And I didn't really focus on it enough. And that's one of the things that I want to talk about throughout this presentation. So when you look at the customer lifecycle of when a customer finds you to when they actually onboard and expand, it kind of breaks up into four main categories. So first, a customer finds you, and it's the interest phase.

They just learn about you. They typically learn about you through some form of marketing that you're putting out. And that's how they learn that they actually are interested in possibly learning more about your service. Then they move into the purchase or decision phase, which is when your sales team comes in and helps them convert. So if you're on the B2B side, you probably have a robust sales team, especially if you hire a ticket item that will help them close. the sale. If you're more of a low-ticket SaaS, this purchase decision phase may be a lower-touch sales process, but it still is that sales and decision process as well. Same with the B-to-C. And then once they actually transition to becoming a customer, they get moved into onboarding

onto your product, and then eventually either renewing their contract with you, expanding their contract, or purchasing again and being a repeat buyer. And that's whole last section from onboarding to renewal and expansion is where customer success comes. in and where your customer success team lives. So when you look at this full life cycle of your customer, customer success is the entire time that the customer is with you. And the most important time they're with you is during this customer success phase. But I find that a lot of brands, including ourselves starting out, focused a ton on sales

and not enough on customer success, when really customer success is where you have the most opportunity to really scale your brand and make sure you have product market fit. So that kind of feeds into this statistic here. the probability of selling an existing customer is 60 to 70 percent, and the probability of selling a new prospect is only 5 to 20 percent. And I point this out because once again, if you're focusing all of your efforts, or let's say even 90 percent of your efforts just on the new sales, and you're not focusing it on customer success, which is the major portion of your customer's life cycle, then you're missing out on this low-hanging fruit that has a probability of expanding,

renewing, closing, growing, that's 60 to 70 percent. So significantly higher. So three times is likely. Kind of getting into that, I'm going to talk about this customer success mindset and kind of what we implemented on our team. Starting out at Statsphere, we had two customer success teams for both our members and our consumers and for our brand side. But we called the brand side account managers at first. And then I quickly realized that they weren't account managers. They were so much more to that. They were customer success managers. They were making sure that the customer was being successful. We had to make sure that they were approaching problems that way.

And I found that by calling them account managers, they weren't approaching problems the way that I wanted them to approach them. So, for example, some major points of the customer success mindset are here. So first, they prioritize customers' needs and goals over everything else, which means they'll actually prioritize and we tell our customer success team to prioritize customers' needs and goals over even, like, don't make sure they're using all the parts of the product if they don't need all the parts of the product. Make sure that you're really listening to what their goal is and giving them the solution, whether that's through

something status you can provide or not, and really looking at it in a holistic way, just to make sure that you're not missing out, especially as a startup when your product may not be fully built out. You don't want to just get in the habit of your customer success team, just trying to hammer the solution you have at your customer. When they might be asking for something else and your customer success team is just not listening. So that's also a great way where you you can find insights as well as you're growing out your product. So prioritizing those customers' needs and goals over everything else, being solution-focused. So when a customer comes to you with a problem, not moping and having a positive attitude and saying,

how do we solve this? Which seems obvious, but really making sure that your customer success team approaches everything in a solution-focused manner really does change overall how customers interact with you and realize that, which is my next point, that they're the customer's advocate. We call our CSM team the BFF of our customers. We tell them no matter what, tell the customer that your goal is to make this successful for them. It helps diffuse situations when there is an issue when there was mismatched expectations or something. Make sure to let them know, I'm on your side and I want to figure out how to fix this and instantly diffuses the situation.

But then it also gives you opportunities to build those relationships and expand with that customer over time. Next is being customer focused versus product or feature focus, which I talked about a little bit. But I find with a lot of startups and just companies in general, you'll do a sales call, you'll get onboarded, and you'll find that the customer success with the account manager is really trying to get you to use a part of the product you don't even want to use, and they're not even like listening to your problem and giving you a solution for it. So really finding out what is the overall customer situation and how can you best approach a solution for them? that's not just solely focused on the product that you're selling. And then lastly, be proactive versus reactive,

which I think is one of the best ways to win over clients in the future. And as a startup, when you are launching brand new products and there are little bugs and little things going wrong, it's great to be the one who messages them first about it. And it really just also shows that you're on top of things as well. So going into how to shift this customer success mindset, this is an example of how our account managers at the time used to approach things, they would say, my job is to make sure that our customer fills out their portal on time.

Versus with a customer success mindset, my job is to make sure this campaign is as successful as possible, which includes making sure they fill out their campaign portal on time. So it goes from being this like checking a box, making sure they do things, to saying, no, let's explain why we're asking them to check this box. Just shifting that in your verbiage and your messaging that your team uses with your customers, whether it's B2C or B2B, really will change the way that you learn what your customer's issues are and just how you solve the different problems that you have. Okay, it's time for another R Crowd Deal of the Week.

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If you're not already asking your customers this, I highly suggest you add it in. And it doesn't have to be a one-to-one conversation. You can actually just add it right inside your product. We added this question in, and it was so insightful to see how different success looked like for different customers that work with us. And what's also interesting, And that is it also can help you figure out what parts of your product you should build next or what customers you actually serve best based on what success looks like to them. And how can your CSM team be successful if they don't know what success even looks like to start with? So it's a very basic question, but it is so insightful.

Second question I tell them to ask is, how do we fit into the other initiatives in this category? So for us, we are a marketing channel. So how does our marketing channel fit with the rest of their marketing strategy? So we help them scale up their word of mouth marketing. But are they doing product launch marketing? Are they doing product sampling? Are they doing Facebook ads? What other marketing mix are they doing so that we can better fit and make sure they're

leveraging our product to the best of its abilities to provide the most value possible? And that can be the same for whatever industry you're in. If you're in an HR platform, what other HR tools are they using? What does their strategy look like? The third question is, how can I help get my contact promoted? which is a little bit of a different question. But I like to kind of challenge our CSMs to think, my contact at this company,

what could I do to actually help them get promoted at this company? What above and beyond thing? Can I ask them, like, what would make them look good to their boss? Because if you're making them look good, they're going to stick around and they're going to want to use you. So I think that that's a different way of approaching it. That makes you kind of think outside the box a little bit and think about other things that you can provide in your products

to make your customers successful. And then lastly, how can I reduce as much friction as possible? So I'll explain friction is kind of an interesting point, especially when onboarding a client, because the definition of friction is pretty much just resistance to complete a process, right? I like to give an example that friction isn't necessarily

taking out as many clicks as possible. Like back in the day, everyone said the least amount of clicks to check out, the better. But I challenge that it's not really the least amount of clicks or the least amount of actions, you might actually need some more actions to make less friction so that the process goes smoother. So an example for us was we found that our clients were being onboarded, but then once they got in the portal, they were confused. So by adding an extra thing of text and more verbiage inside their email, we were able to mitigate a bunch of those issues. So it's not always removing touch points or removing steps. It can sometimes be adding steps that

reduce the friction. Kind of goes back to being proactive. And then what kind of questions to ask on the side. So I tell our consumer customer success team, why did this customer buyer use our service or product? Like, what were they trying to gain? Make sure that you understand that and you're putting yourself in their shoes. If they're upset, was there a mismatched expectation? And where did that happen? And can we correct it? We like to look at that in whenever we do have an upset customers and it is a miscommunication. Like, where could we have corrected that earlier? Could we have put it in some of the automated emails? Was it in our marketing messaging? You have to sometimes go all the way back as far as marketing as well to make sure that you're using the same

verbiage all the way through and not having any mismatched expectations. Next, how would I feel if I was in their situation? Which is just the basic empathy question. Like putting yourself in their shoes, maybe they're having a bad day. You know, finding good customer success team members who, you know, definitely don't take things personally and really have a lot of empathy, I find are the ones that just really excel in this position. And then fourth, how can I reduce as much friction as possible?

So we're back to that again, but on the consumer side. And as I said, it does not always have to be removing steps. It can be adding them. Now sometimes it's removing them. But, you know, just making sure you're looking. Like, did you do your checkout process on mobile? Are there any friction points there? Are people confused once they get into your app once they download it?

How can you clear those things up? And then if they're confused about something, how can we make this clear in the future? So that kind of goes back to the other piece of reducing friction. but like just how can we make this clear so they don't even have this question later on to begin with. And now moving into the next section where is measuring customer success. So now you know how to get into that customer success mindset. But now you want to learn how to measure it to see if you're actually getting better

once you train your team on this, which was just very fresh with us. Because over the last year, this is what we've been putting into place. So there's a few ways to track customer success. I think personally the best way is tracking contract increases in expansion, specifically for B2B clients. if they are increasing, expanding, renewing, those are all very good signs that they're very happy with your product and your customer success team. And if you can start tracking those metrics, you can see how they're changing over time and with different cohorts of customers.

Next is your net promoter score. This is great for both B2B and B2C customer success teams. It's obviously the question that says, how likely are you to refer this to a friend? And that's a really great one just to get a easy quantitative answer and do it on a systematic way like monthly or quarterly and get those data points in. Next, if you're a SaaS business, churn is a great one to track. And the last one is product market fit survey is a great way to track your customer success. It's a little bit of a different of approach. Raul from Superhuman has a great framework for following this. And it's a little different than net promoter score where instead of asking the questions,

around would you refer us? It's asking how would you feel if our product no longer exists. So I encourage you to Google that and check it out because it's a very interesting way of measuring your customer success over time. Next is feedback and communication so you can get some qualitative feedback on top of the quantitative feedback that I went over in the last slide. When you're gathering feedback, you have to actually be conscious about creating touchpoints throughout the course of the customer's contractor lifetime with you. If you aren't actually putting effort into creating these touchpoints, you're not going to get the information. And all of a sudden, months will go by and you're just not going to get any information.

And take it from me, you're moving as quickly and growing as quickly as you are. If you don't put these systems in place, you're never going to get this awesome feedback that is so important for growing your company, but ultimately building your product. So I'll go through a couple examples of where we put touch points on the next side. But on the consumer side, focus groups and incentivized feedback are also really great, you know, emailing out a gift card. if they're willing to talk to you, doing some stories where you can actually have your team put together, listen to somebody's feedback about how they've used your product and their product story with you, is a great way to get some more color with your customer success teams and where you can reduce friction and excel overall. Some of those touch points that I was talking about last is, so with us, we actually in our CRM have parts of the contract highlighted.

So 45 days left in contract, you're going to get a bump that. asks for feedback that asks how we can make it more successful. We have a bump after their contract ends, before their contract ends, when it starts, you know, adding those touch points right into your sales and onboarding process. So you don't even have to think about them and they're being captured in some sort of either form or you have a systematic way of having your team fill it out in a form. So we'll have, we have a spreadsheet that everyone adds to so that we can get all that

feedback in a systematic way. And then a second touch point that's really great to leverage throughout your customer success journey. and just your customer's journey in general is resources. So I find a lot of businesses put a ton of money into creating beautiful marketing resources and guides and content, but they use it only at the beginning of the sales process and don't actually share it with their customer success team and make sure that they're leveraging all of this great content as well.

So if you're already producing it, make sure that you incorporate those resources that position you as that expert into the full life cycle and the full journey of your customer. And then the last section that I want to cover is combining and aligning sales and customer success. Because as I mentioned before, customer success mindset is really something that your whole team should have. And although you may have a department specifically dedicated to it, it is a way of just approaching it from the sale all the way through to the onboarding. And I find misalignments between the two can cause areas of problems. So kind of going back to that customer lifecycle where we go from interest to purchase to onboarding, and then renewal and expansion.

As I said before, customer success covers both onboarding and renewal and expansion, but the sales team comes back in right when the new renewal and expansion happens for a lot of businesses. Now, there's different ways that you can approach how your customer success and sales works together. For us personally, we found that having a salesperson come back in at the point when there is an opportunity for upsell renewal was very beneficial because they have a different skill set than your customer success team. but the key is making sure that you define what each of the roles are between customer success and sales. So the way that I look at it is it's like three main parts of a triangle.

So you have the customer on one end, you have sales on the other end, and then you have customer success on the other end. And they all bring different goals to the table. And you need all three to kind of actually grow and especially if you want to expand the contract. So you have the customer first, who is the problem solver. their goal is to get their problem, whatever it is solved. You then have the customer success person now who's been working with them for maybe a year, three months, however long the contract was. And they have all the technical knowledge of that campaign.

And they're that customer advocate that, you know, knows all the details and actually wants to make sure to make the next contract with them super successful. And then you pull back in the sales team, which is the growth planner. They're the ones that see those opportunities for growth. So the reason I think it's so important to have all three, because, for example, if the sales team is, missing from this, you don't have anybody who is actually looking for opportunities for growth

in the contract and selling them in general, which is a very important part of the process. And then if customer success is missing, the sales team doesn't know the whole history, and there's no one advocating for the customer as well based on all the history that you have with the customer. So that's why I think it's so important to have all three when you are working on expanding or resigning, especially for larger contract deals on the B2B side. in the last piece for the sales, aligning both sales and your customer success team, is managing expectations. So I think the biggest point of problems that I've seen personally on our team

is when you don't make sure that your sales and your customer success are on the same page. Sales' job is, you know, their main KPI is to keep getting you more and more sales to grow that revenue. So what they can sometimes do is they like to promise things that you can't always provide. So now a good salesperson understands that and they try to mitigate expectations because they want them to resign. But if you don't keep a finger on that and you don't have your customer success team on all of the sales decks and the edits that you're making, you're missing out an opportunity. So one way that you can help manage expectations when customers are going through the full sales to customer success life cycle and actually expanding with you is making sure you run through the sales deck with customer success team regularly. So if you're anything like us, our sales deck, I mean, our product changes like every few months, we have new, new features. So our deck is constantly changing. And it can be very easy to forget to show the customer success team what your sales team is showing customers.

So make sure that every time there's a change, you run through it with both teams to make sure they're all in the same page. Because you don't want any friction between the two. You want them all to feel like they're on the same team. They all have the same goal. And you don't want any like weirdness between one feeling like the other is selling something. they don't have. And then I also ask our customer success team to keep track of all the times where there's a discrepancy and expectation. We have a spreadsheet where any time they feel like something was promised that we can't deliver, we make sure to document it so that we can figure out how that happened, make sure it doesn't happen again, and kind of see, though also if there's opportunities on our product side, like, is this something we should be offering because people are wanting it?

So it really ends up also pulling in your product team as well. And then I'll close on this. it's never too late to win over an unhappy client. So customer success is all about making them successful from the beginning. But if a customer does get unhappy, there's still easier to close and turn around than a news prospect. I always challenge our team members that if there is somebody who's very unhappy, I say like, if we turn them around, they'll actually be our most loyal customer that we've ever had. We've seen that happen before. If you go above and beyond and show them that you are here for their success and for their

solution. You can actually turn around some of the most dire looking situations and they can be your actual biggest advocates on both the consumer and on the B2B side. So that's the end of my presentation. If you're looking for more great resources, you can go to join status.com slash resources. We have tons of marketing content along with other great business resources and guides that you can check out. Today, many small business owners are busier than ever because because they're focused on managing and growing their business. They can't always spend the time they wish they could on recruiting. That's why LinkedIn Jobs has made it easy to find and hire the best candidates for free.

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So here's how you get that free, free, free first job posting. LinkedIn.com slash your startup. LinkedIn.com slash your startup, Y-O-U-R-S-T-A-R-T-A-R-T-U-P. Your starting. LinkedIn.com slash your startup to get a free job posted today. Terms and conditions, of course, apply because they're giving you something for free. Thank you, LinkedIn, for making my life so easy. I found so many great people on the service, and I love all the great features you have. The news feed, God Live, groups, all these great features.

You keep adding them, and I keep using LinkedIn more and more. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. Okay. Thank you, Kristen. Wonderful job. Next up is Nicole from TechMate. Take it away. Nicole.

Thank you, Jason. Yes, I'm Nicole. I'm the co-founder of TechMate, and we are on-site, on-demand tech support for remote and satellite offices. So we've been in business for about three and a half years,

and over that time, we've learned some valuable, sometimes painful lessons when it comes to customer success, but in the end, we've been able to, increase our customer retention rate from a dismal 70% to 98% and that's been consistent over the last year and a half. So I'm excited to share some of our experiences with you and hopefully you will be

able to learn a little bit from what we have experienced. Some of the things that I want to talk about are just reasons for churn, how we think about delighting our customers, how we think about scaling without sacrificing customer success, how we get our whole team on the customer success, train and jumping right in. So churn doesn't always mean that you're doing the wrong thing. Sometimes you're doing all the right things, but you're just doing it for the wrong customer. So for us in TechMay, when we started, we were actually, our target market were small businesses that didn't have an IT department. So we were essentially being the IT department for our customers, which we were very ill-equipped to do. And because of that, we were consistently getting very low customer

satisfaction ratings. At the same time, we kept hearing from a lot of larger companies that they were looking for help to support their remote and satellite offices. And we kept saying, no, no, no, that's not what we do. But we heard it enough times that we decided to start running some tests in this market. And when we did, we realized that our true superpower was actually in augmenting IT departments for larger companies. And when we started doing this, our customer success went through the roof. The problem was that at the same time, 70% of our revenue was still coming from small businesses. So we had to make the very difficult decision to burn those ships and to put all of our momentum towards the side of our business that was actually giving us the best ROI.

And once we did that, everything in our business clicked into shape. And even now, it's an important decision for us because our sales team will bring in really big potential customers that, you know, there's a lot of potential for revenue. But our number one question is always, are we going to be able to make this customer happy without sacrificing the happiness of our other customers? And if the answer is no, then we absolutely cut ties with it and we burn our ships. So another reason for churn could be bad experience. Maybe the product just doesn't live up. to the customer's standards. And I think an important point here is that while it is very important to focus on user experience,

the more important thing that we've found is to focus first and foremost on making sure that we're solving a real pain point because that's 95% of the customer success battle. And I use an example of a app that I just signed up for. It's called 1520. I think it's just in New York right now. but they actually deliver groceries in 15 minutes. And their app is pretty rudimentary, and it's a little bit glitchy, and there's not all the bells and whistles, but for me, it's solving my pain point, which is they're delivering my groceries

in 15 minutes. And what I've found is that the customer will give you a lot of leeway when you're actually solving a real pain point for them. And this is important as we start to scale because you're not always going to be able to please all of your customers all the time, which is what brings me into my next segment, which is delighting customers. And the first way we do this is we stop trying to please our customers. And what I mean by this is when you please customers, you're basically meeting all of their requests. But when you're delighting a customer, you're actually solving a real problem for them.

And for us, for TechMate, early on, we interviewed about 100 or so potential customers. And we asked them, you know, how they were dealing with our competitors and what their biggest issues were. And what we found consistently was that their, their issue was always with the quality of technicians and the consistency. They never knew what they were going to get. So they didn't know if they were going to get a professional technician or somebody was going to show up in a tank top. Were they going to get somebody that was just out of college or were they going to get a true expert in the field? And so when we brought on our CTO, he was very strong. He was very stringent on this point that he personally interviewed every single technician that we brought on.

And he personally matched each technician with each job. And as we've grown, we've obviously began to automate some of these areas. But we've always kept that in mind that we never want to lose sight, that that is our true superpower. And that we make sure that everything we have done has been to scale around that. And the same has held true for our technicians, that, you know, we realized we could create all of the community programs in the world and all the incentives, but in the end, our technicians really just want two things. They want to be able to have consistent work, and they want to get paid quickly.

And if we can solve for those two issues, then we've won most of the battle. Another thing that we think about when we think about delighting customers is finding those key touch points. And Kristen talked about this a little bit, but this is when and how we communicate with our customers. And I like to think about this in terms of a waiter. My mom always says, you know you have a good waiter when you don't realize that they're there. And so a touch point for a waiter could be making sure that your drink is always filled, making sure that the ticket comes on time. But they're not at your table every five minutes asking you annoying questions. And so for us, what we've realized is, you know, we have several key touch points. A couple of them are, you know,

immediately after that first job gets completed. We make sure that somebody is reaching out, getting the feedback, all the good, the bad, the ugly. And another key touch point is when usage, if and when usage falls below 50% average over three months, then we're making sure that somebody is reaching out to the customer, making sure that they're on the same page and community. communicating opportunities that we can help them. One thing that we've thought a lot about is how do you scale a high touch company without sacrificing customer success? How do you automate those touch points?

And we really subscribe to the notion that we heard from Airbnb's founders, which we do everything manually until it becomes too painful to do it manually. And only then do we automate. And the reason for this is it really allows time for learning. So you can learn so much about the process before you have to automate it. And for us, this has been, I'll give an example of our customer feedback process. In the beginning, we were doing this very manually where we had somebody from customer success reaching out after every single appointment and getting that feedback.

And, you know, that was a lot of work. but those early conversations really helped us understand the feedback that our customers wanted to give us. And a lot of times it had nothing to do with the questions that we were asking. So we were able to take all of those learnings and put it into a much more effective customer feedback process, automated process that we use today. And the great thing about being at this stage of a company is that we have a lot of data that we're now able to take and start finding some of, similarities and finding patterns with. So I talked a little bit about our ideal customer profiles before. And that's important because similar customers are going to have similar problems and that we can provide similar solutions for. And so, you know, for us, 99% of our legal customers are going to be

raising the same types of tickets. So we've been able to start creating processes around those specific types of jobs that make it much more easy to scale and to automate. Another point that I want to make is when you're identifying frequent issues that come up, especially when issues that come up when you're dealing with customers, it's important to be able to read between the lines. So for us, it's not just about asking, you know, what is it that the customer is asking for. It's understanding what the customer actually needs. and I'll use an example from our invoicing.

At one point, we had 30 different customers asking for 30 different lines on their invoice. And this was taking a tremendous amount of time, as you can imagine. And so what we did is we went and we took all of those requests and we put it on a piece of paper and we started just categorizing and trying to understand what they were actually asking for. And in the end, what we realized is basically what they needed was a way, to be able to bill their membership hours to different departments or different locations or sometimes their own clients. And when we figured that out, we were able to create a solution specifically for that issue. And that eliminated about 80% of the other requests that were coming in.

And my final point here is just getting everybody on the customer success train. And Kristen talked about this in her presentation. I'll just touch on it a little bit here. But again, we've had the same experience. And I think there's always going to be friction between sales and operations or customer success. Sales is always going to want to go bigger. Operations is always going to want to run a tighter ship. And what we've done is we've really just embraced this friction and realized that iron sharpens iron and all the departments can really help one another learn more about customer success.

And one thing that we've started doing is we've actually had started having somebody from operations sit in on the sales process. So second or third sales call, a technical person will actually sit in. And this allows the customer to ask more technical questions. But at the same time, it allows us to start setting those expectations that maybe the sales team might not understand or be able to set themselves. And vice versa, we have our sales team actually sit in on operations meetings to understand what some of the pain points are that they're facing. And the idea is really for everybody just to understand the role that they play. And as Kristen said, that we're all on the same team and understand kind of what those bigger

picture goals are that every department has. And so it's our job as leaders to really help our employees understand how they're touching the customers and how they're giving input and really getting them excited about the customer success role. And then finally, in summary, the number one key to success is really focusing on the pain point that you're solving, finding that superpower and scaling around it and automating very late in the process and only when necessary and making sure everybody understands their role in customer success. So again, I'm Nicole, the co-founder of Techmate, and you can find us at Techmate.com or you can email me directly at Nicole at Techmate.com. Thank you so much. If you're a business owner, you might be making running your business harder than it needs to be.

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garbage. Now is the time to upgrade to NetSuite by Oracle, the world's number one. Cloud Business System. NetSuite gives you visibility and control over your financials, your HR, your inventory, e-commerce, and more. It's everything you need all in one place instantaneously. Whether you're doing one million or 100 million in revenue, save time and money with NetSuite. Join over 20, 24,000 companies using NetSuite right now. Let NetSuite show you how they'll benefit your business with a free product tour at NetSuite.com slash Twist. Go ahead and take the tour and then see how all the scaling,

big, important companies are using NetSuite. Never too early to get in there and understand how Netsweet can change your business. Schedule your free product tour right now. NetSuite, N-E-T-S-U-I-T-E, you know how to spell it. NetSuite.com slash twist to get that free VIP tour. Netsweet.com slash twist. Okay, great job. Kristen, tell me what is the compensation, the proper compensation for customer support reps,

CSRs, and then how do you keep them in the role for a long period of time? Or is it like SDR, sales development reps in that it's a transient position. Are there people who are lifers who want to be in this? Are there people who are transient? How do you deal with that? Yeah, for us specifically, I believe it's more of like a lifer role, but they can actually move up within it. You can have senior.

We've been working on building better career paths so that they can kind of grow within the team. The reason I think that it's more of a lifetime role is because I find the people that attract these people that are really good at customer service, they love it. I just have a meeting with one of our CSMs today, and it's just very interesting to like, you know, the happiness of the customer you can really feel is like what brings them joy.

And that's how you know you found the right person. Now, if you find the wrong person, I do think you need to get them out of that role quickly because if they take things personally or if that's like one of the biggest red flags I've seen, it's just it's going to really crush a lot of their energy and it's just not going to be a good fit long term. Now, in terms of compensation and rewarding them, we do a hybrid approach for resigns and expansion where they get some of the commissions for when a customer does resign afterward. So then it really does put your sales and your customer success on the same team because they are splitting the commission at the end of it, which has been really helpful for us. Ah, so using a customer support rep to get the expansion going from one or two seats in a SaaS company to three or four or to renew a contract, that is a great moment because they've been helping the customer. They know what they've been experiencing. And maybe it's a better person to ask for that signature or that re-up.

Exactly. We actually, for that, I was talking a little bit about where's the line between and who's responsible for. for what. Our line is actually when a customer's contract is ending with us, it's the customer success person's job to follow up with them and to get that call to renew if they haven't automatically renewed. And then the salesperson actually joins the meeting, but the customer success runs the meeting because they know the client the best. And then the salesperson is just there to help upsell and get them to sign on the dotted line at the end. So that's how we work. Have you considered just having the customer support manager, you know, rep, whatever, get

them to sign? Or are they uncomfortable asking for that signature? Yeah, so sometimes they will resign without needing a little extra meeting or whatever. They'll just ask for a, you know, oh yeah, we're just renewing. For the ones that need a little bit more handholding or the bigger contracts, we definitely push for a meeting because we know we can expand it more. I just find that the salesperson has like a different repertoire of skills that they bring to the table in terms of the upsell. And that's why it's been good. We've tested different options. But at the end of the day, the salespeople are very good at selling if they are good at their job. So they're good at identifying opportunities and for expanding the contract where that customer

success person is like that comforting friend and warm blanket that makes them feel, you know, comfortable to keep working with you. Nicole, any thoughts you want to build on there in terms of the line between sales, customer support, and who develops the better ongoing relationship? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, and it's something that we've, really wrestled with a lot as well. And I think it's an ongoing conversation for us. You know, for us, a big thing is customer usage. So we sell membership packages. And so if we don't

have, you know, a certain amount of hours used in a month, then that's a trigger for us that, you know, there's some, there's an issue with customer success. And so one thing that we've been doing is, we have, we give our sales team commission off of not just that subscription fee or that monthly membership fee, but actually any overages that the customer uses. So they're really incentivized as well to make sure that not just through the sales process, but also through the onboarding process. And then even further, that they're constantly invested in the customer's success. And so they're also getting on the phone, uh, when, When customer usage falls below a certain percent, we have monthly meetings where our entire

team is on and we understand how our customers are using and what that customer usage is like. And every single person on our team is picking up the phone and making those calls and reaching out to customers. It's got to be a morale killer if you get the sale and then they don't use the product. Conversely, it's got to be just an incredible morale boost when they blow through their, you know, credits and have to buy more. Have you learned things, Nicole, from these customer support moments that have been productized and somebody's got to come up with a creative idea of how to get more usage? How does that ideation work or how has it worked?

And are there any techniques for coming up with new ideas to drum up and increase utilization? Absolutely. So a big thing for us right now is Richard turn to office. So this is happening across all industries. And, you know, one thing that we've done is we've created a campaign for existing customers. So they understand how other similar customers in their industry are using us to more effectively return their employees to the office. So that's one thing that we do a lot of where we look, and I mentioned this a little bit in the presentation, but we look at similar customer profiles. And then we create campaigns around that for existing customers to help them understand

not just how we can help them in how they originally signed up, but to give them ideas outside the box for how they can use us in different ways and what different opportunities are that. So one, it even jumps from client to client. You have a client who's returning to the office. Now you have an opportunity to take the best practices and learn there. and share them with folks, either in an email or a phone call, et cetera. I wonder if you have questions for each other, having watched each other's presentations,

or was there an idea, Kristen, you got from Nicole or Nicole from Kristen, that inspired you to think about your business differently? Yeah, I had a few. I thought that the, first of all, I loved your presentation. I had a lot of different, yeah, I had a lot of different, I think, similarities, even though I know our businesses are different. And there's always a lot of applicable things. One thing that I know you were talking a lot about is the wrong customer segment and going after it.

And that's something we've been working a lot on is trying to identify our different customer segments. And although someone spends less money, but stays longer, like, who's more valuable? And then you said you were like burning your ships, I guess. What was like the turning point for you to finally like realize it? Was it like straight revenue numbers or was it usage? Or like what was like the actual KPI that I guess allowed you to make that decision to cut off those customers, completely. Yeah, it's a great question because, as I said, like at that point, 70% of our revenue was still coming from small businesses. But the usage was very low and the churn was very high. And the, our customer feedback was very terrible. And so when we started seeing these customers that we, we were, we were getting fantastic feedback from them. Um, we weren't getting the turn. over and we their usage was through the roof so you know they might sign up for a package of 10 hours

but in some cases one customer would use 100 hours in a month and so we that was kind of like the aha moment that this the revenues maybe not there yet but all the other signs are pointing towards success in this area and it was a very difficult decision but once we did that and moved our momentum in that area, that's when everything kind of changed in our business. And as we wrap up here, what are the remaining challenges that you're frustrated with when it comes to managing your customers? Perhaps speaking with one voice, does that come up often of how do you maintain the singular

voice and make sure that people get consistent answers? Is that just a knowledge-based issue? How do you look towards the future of where you're at and what is frustrating now? Yeah, I can chime in on that. We've been really trying to standardize all of our answers. I think the one-voice thing is definitely something that we've tried to refine. We actually include it in our branding guidelines for the company, not only just talking from a marketing perspective,

like what to say and not to say, but also from a customer success and sales point of view as well. like dues and don'ts of how we want to frame it to make sure it's consistent across the board. So one of the big things we've done recently, and we're still in the process of doing because it's a very big undertaking, is creating that library of FAQs and content to make it less and less variations in what people are saying. And the more, the longer you're running a business, the more similar everyone's questions tend to be. And then trying to figure out how to get people not to ask the questions to begin with is probably the biggest thing that we work toward.

Nicole, I think for you that you're struggling with now and thinking about for the future? Yeah, I think just again, you know, what we were talking about, making sure that everybody is on the same page, making sure that the whole team has buy-in. I think it's really easy, especially as you scale for departments to start working in silos. It was a lot easier when we were kind of all in the struggle together and, you know, it was just like two or three of us kind of knocking head. but, you know, now teams are growing and there's actual whole departments and it's easy for everybody to kind of be in their own little section of the company. And so we're just constantly thinking of new ways that we can make sure that we are getting everybody on the same page, that everybody's understanding what everybody else is doing and how all of that is working together.

And again, it all comes back to we're all in customer success roles. Every single person in the company is a customer success person. And so understanding, you know, how you're touching the customer and how you're and how everybody's working together, that's always a challenge and hopefully one that we just never stop thinking about. I think that's a great way to phrase that we're all in customer success at the end of the day. All right.

Listen, great job, Nicole. Great job, Kristen. Great to be in business with both of you. Very proud of the success and the hard work you're putting into your companies. And we will see you all next. time on this week in startups. Bye-bye.