How to Maintain +140% Customer Retention with Dooly's CEO and Head of Customer Success

thrilled to have Chris Hartviksen, CEO of Dooley, and Ellie Hutton, Head of CS at Dooley. They are going to be discussing how to maintain over 140% customer retention, an amazing topic that I know we're all really curious about. We have 20 minutes with Chris and Ellie, and there will be plenty of time for Q&A, so make sure to use that Q&A section at the bottom to drop your questions for them, and they will get to them at the end of their session. Chris and Ellie are going to be starting off with some really awesome stats telling more about their journey. And how they got to this number. So without further ado, Chris and Ellie, I will pass it over to you guys to take it away.

Perfect, thank you. I tried a really bad dad joke yesterday in our all hands, which is without further ado-ly. So we'll jump into this right now. And thank you everybody for joining us. I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day. I know that everybody's running up against year-end, and of course we have 10 shopping days left before a lot of us are going to be disappearing to spend time with family. So again, thanks a lot for your time. So let's just jump into this. We're going to give you a little bit of a sense of some of the industry benchmarks in SaaS around what we're talking about, which is retention, customer retention, that will help be, I hope, like good indicators for you for thinking about your business as it pertains to what you want to track with regard to your customers. So just to give you a sense of some of the things that we track quite vigilantly at Dually, it's always good to get a sense of how you stack up relative to other SaaS companies, but it's more important to be honest with yourself about why you're performing well or why you're performing poorly. And customer churn is a really easy example of that. What a low churn score should indicate is that your product is aligned with the problems you're solving. But when we talk about our product, it's not just the product itself. It's the complete package from the application through to the way that a customer feels feel supported by the business. Pretty much any interaction that you have with the customer is going to have some degree of impact on whether or not they're gonna stay or whether or not they're gonna leave. In the early years of your business, customer return is also not going to be always a bad thing. So I want you to think about it as a way of honing in on your ideal customer profile. Don't take it as a holy grail number in those early days. But as you scale, it obviously becomes more important. So think about it as you continue to grow as a way of understanding how much new revenue you need to generate just to stay level with the prior year. So if you look at the industry averages in SaaS, somewhere between 4% and 5% is sort of the norm. I'll give you a sense of why I think we've done some things to keep our churn incredibly low in our journey. The next thing that we track within Dooley is net promoter score. And The Net Promoter Score is really just a means for further understanding customer sentiment toward your product and toward your business. Our NPS is being monitored constantly, and yours should be as well, to understand whether a customer and/or the— whether your customer expectations are being met across the board. So what we've done at Dooley, which I think is slightly different than the norm, is we've taken a slightly adapted look at NPS of late to get a sense of how a user would be impacted if our product went away entirely. Not only does this help us get a sense of overall satisfaction, but it's also helping us to steer toward our ICP, our ideal customer profile, that much more effectively. The stronger your NPS score gets, the more you can expect material impacts on your business, whether it be accelerated virality for a PLG company, or reduction in your customer acquisition costs for a more traditional sales-led motion. Those that apply a really positive NPS toward your business are likely going to be the ones that help you scale all sorts of different initiatives across the company, whether it be, you know, G2 reviews, capped error reviews, asking them in for, you know, product sessions to work with your product management team, etc. Most importantly, it should be a really strong leading indicator of churn or growth opportunities. And that leads to the heart of our topic today, which is how do you perform with respect to net revenue retention? For those of you that aren't tracking net rev retention right now, it's a pretty simple equation. Take the revenue at any point in time for your customer base and benchmark it against the same revenue for the same set of customers one year into the future. If your churn numbers are low and your in-account growth numbers are high, you're going to end up with incredible NRR numbers, with anything over 100% putting you in the upper echelons of SaaS. So you can see at Duley, we're pretty proud of the fact that we're maintaining an NRR number of above 140%. Which is a world-class number. And that's, again, it's just a combination of so many different factors, from in-product and human-led experiences, and aligning both of those with an ROI story that really resonates with your core buyer. By doing so, you can really improve your LTV to CAC ratios, and reduce the strain on your sales organization to carry the whole load of growth moving forward. At Dooley, We follow churn, NPS, and NRR like a hawk, knowing that these are really the true force multipliers for our business for years to come. And I'm gonna hand it over to Ellie to take the next slide.

Great, thanks, Chris. So Chris and I have learned a lot of lessons over the years working together. We've known each other for quite a while across two companies. We've got 5 tips in 5 minutes so you can get to these kinds of results too. So first big tip, be customer first. This is really table stakes in earning the right to grow. You gotta go beyond paying lip service this idea and put your customer truly at the center of your business and know them intimately. You can't get to product-market fit right or reap the benefits of product-led growth without this. And you really need to go beyond just listening and be truly empathetic to their problems and pains, really intimately know them. For us, this means championing the voice of customer across the full journey to the whole company. And we do have a resource who's responsible for keeping everything in motion and making sure that all of the signals that are out, you know, in the market and G2 reviews and all those things, support tickets, all those things are getting translated into the business and what it means for them. But really everybody is responsible for being a listening post and feeding that knowledge back into the business. It's also really important to focus on one persona's— to become one persona's favorite first. Before expanding your market. Um, get that right and earn the right to grow with them, and then start going into other spots. So be really clear on who that target is, what value you deliver to them, what pain you're solving, and why you're better or different. Getting this right will help everybody in your business make better decisions faster. And really having that true empathy for your core persona will mean you'll have a great go-to-market strategy Product will build the right thing to solve that pain. Marketing will go out and find the right customers. Sales will sell what's on book, really critical. And then customer success will inherit something that is a lot easier to serve, and that success will become a lot more innate versus customer success having to gap fill and duct tape those things that might have been broken in your journey. So getting that customer right in the center of your business is absolutely critical. And doing it more than in a lip service way. Over to you, Chris.

Awesome. Thanks, Ellie. I think it's a huge mistake to say that customer success is responsible for retention. It's truly a team effort from engineering to design to product to support and all the other functions within your business. Even a negative billing experience can have a lasting impression that affects your growth and your retention rates over time. Everyone needs to understand their part and understand— in aligning to the vision and direction of the business, and everyone should understand how progress and performance are measured. We take metrics very seriously, as I mentioned before, but we also make sure that our customer-facing initiatives are both on brand and value aligned. And I think that that's a really important point. Don't just think about your customer initiatives as things that you're doing in the moment. It's not just transactional. You always have to kind of map it back to the things that make you special, the things that make you who you are. And it's It makes it far simpler to articulate how one plays a role in the performance of the business and also helps to reduce all of the different siloed initiatives and helps to weed out the people that are going to be net detractors from the positive, good human experiences that you aim to build. We, across Dooley, we have a lot of different things that we try to do inside of the customer engagement experience, whether it's me sometimes jumping on support or other people jumping on support, the way that we speak, the even things like capital personalization of the, the first word in the line, making it feel more human, making it feel more like something that you would have a text messaging interaction with somebody. Those are all things that make you who you are. Figure out the things that make you who you are and really double down on all of those things with respect to your customer experiences as well. We really, really over-indexed early on in Dooley's history in customer success and people and culture, knowing that both would have a really material impact on our ability to perform, perform at scale as well. So think about those things. Early. I know we say in this slide here, invest early in product and customer success. I would also amp up the, the people and culture piece early because the people that you bring in are also a reflection of the product and the brand that you're building and how that will yield itself in the eyes of your customers.

So Chris was alluding this to a little bit as well, but really focusing on a delightful experience and building human connections. It might seem obvious, but it's again not always prioritized. So some basic rules of thumb to think about are you got to build something magical. There needs to be some magic in what you do that solves real pain, something that builds that emotional connection for your users and your customers. Make your product easy, elegant, and fun to use. You know, people are using tech out there today, and your tech has got to stand up against any consumer-grade product that's out there. Build delight across your journey. Be human. Remove friction. And really experiment to see what delights the most before you build that into something in a more permanent way. So for us, we involve our humans when they deliver bonus value to the customer, and we ensure that our digital and one-to-many interactions are so personalized that it still feels like a concierge experience for the people that are interacting with Dooley anywhere across our organization or product. Plus, we really try to engage in ways that align with our brand personality. So we're playful, bold. We don't take ourselves too seriously. So some examples of delight for us could mean running a cocktail event for a team of our champions, We try to add GIFs to every support ticket to add some humor and to lighten the load a little bit. I have these little cute avatars. You can see one of them dancing right across the screen there. And I try to answer— all of us try to answer support tickets laser fast. We also have some very, very hot sauce that we ship out to folks, so hot that it requires a waiver. So really our brand personality kind of shines through in all of the big and little things that we do. And these things really build an emotional connection between our users and our brand.

Yeah, I just want to add one thing to what Ellie's saying here. Don't treat this as an obligation to interact with your customers. It's a privilege. It truly is a privilege to be able to have experiences with your customers. And if you treat it like that, then it will come across in the way that people engage with you moving forward. Awesome.

All right, data. Don't get me started on data. I could talk for hours about data. You gotta make it be easy. You need to have data to know who your customers are, how to segment them, to identify your risk and growth signals, and to personalize your communications. Plus, you know, your board's really gonna need some solid data to show evidence that you're crushing it. So best case scenario is predictive data. That's usually like the north star place that you wanna get to with data, but at minimum, you need to have proactive data and signals of what actions to take next. So these actions might be automated as part of your digital journey, or they might involve humans depending on the level of escalation that you need to have. So really get your, your data sorted out, instrumented correctly, and wherever possible, set up in a single source of truth so that your team can self-serve. For us, we're really in a happy place with data, thankfully. We invested in our brilliant data team early. We have easy data for usage and CS sentiment, what stage of journey a customer's at. We know who our user personas are at a very micro level, so we can personalize the experience for them, and we have segmentation set up. And plus, we try to use Dooley, our own software, to document our full customer narrative and verifiable outcomes there so that everybody can deliver a more unified customer experience from anywhere in the business. Okay, we've got 8 minutes, Chris. We gotta punch it. Next slide. We're there. Let's do it. Oh, thanks. Playbooks. So really, a repeatable playbook is going to lay the foundation for you to scale. For you to retain customers and can set you up to avoid regrettable churn. So we have playbooks in place from everything from new to renew, and the plays aren't always perfect, so we experiment, iterate as we go. A few things I'd say that there's 3 things to make sure you, you nail really, really well from my perspective. The first thing is internal handovers, especially those from sales to CS. CS needs to know what they're going to be servicing, and they need to have that narrative that often the account executive has stored up here You got to get that out of their brains and documented so that CS can go further. Next would be— next thing to focus on would be making sure that your onboarding is exceptional. If you get it right from the beginning, from day one in that onboarding process, then you're going to create champions and advocates for life. If you mess up with onboarding, it's going to be painful everywhere. And then third is just making sure that you know how you're going to handle your renewals and who's going to do that, whether it's CS or an AM. Or combination, make sure you have that, that play figured out. All right, let's jump to the next one, Chris.

Okay, so the work that you do to drive optimal retention and growth metrics isn't always going to work perfectly, and I think that that's something that Ellie's alluding to earlier. Really, you got to keep iterating, you got to keep thinking about like how you can tweak this to make the engine work perfectly moving forward. It's important to continually revisit, optimize, tweak, and to remember that if it didn't work it's likely that you've created misalignment from your assumptions of what the customer wanted to what their own realities are. And their own realities are very different on a customer-by-customer basis. So again, being able— having the ability to adapt is actually really, really important. Sometimes that's okay though. Like, don't be afraid to tell your customers that they aren't a fit for your business as well, because having the wrong customers can be hugely detrimental to team morale inside your own organization. You know, you get a lot of disappointed things that come across the wire. You get people building the wrong things. And it can lead to a product that is being built more on an ad hoc basis than with a clear path and vision to solving a bigger, more holistic problem. So when I think about companies that have done an exceptional job, I almost always come back to a really famous Maya Angelou quote. Thanks to my mother-in-law for introducing me to Maya Angelou. People may not remember what you said or what you did, but they'll always remember how you made them feel. By being customer first, you can easily live those words each and every day. By showing up consistently, your vision and goals will always come to life. By delivering on a promise, delight and happiness are almost always an outcome. And that's something that I've really tried to stress within our organization is making our customers and our users feel delighted, or as we say internally, doolighted, is a really important part of who we are to our core. But don't forget to measure what matters, and equally, don't do unscalable things when you find patterns that are worthy of repetition. And of course, don't be afraid to reboot and adapt if it isn't working. Delivering, delivering the results that you hope for is almost always going to be a challenge, and that's when you need to consider readjusting and going back to the beginning and resetting and rebooting. So I think That's all we wanted to make sure we covered across on today. And now we have an opportunity for Q&A. So I'm going to stop my share. We can jump into it.

Yeah, there's a bunch of questions in the chat and then a bunch in the Q&A. So, Chris, maybe you want to— if you want to pick one to answer live, I'm going to start typing some of the answers for the other folks.

Yeah. Okay. I'm just going to look at the one that we just received. Not sure if it's quantifiable with data, but You all have the strongest social engagement out of the top SaaS startups in 2021. How do you think your social LinkedIn efforts further the community engagement and retention efforts currently? It's an interesting question. I think that what we've tried to do is we've tried to create a real emotional connection to the brand and the business, but not in a way that makes you think, okay, I just wanna hang out with Dooley 'cause they're fun. Because we're solving something that we believe is really core to some of the pains and problems that our users wake up to every single day or have woken up to every single day. In the past. We're just trying to be really relatable. And so when we amp it up on social, it's certainly, you know, part of our growth efforts without question. But it really is from like coming from a good place in our heart. We really want to try to make sure that people understand that there's something that can solve the pain that they've been dealing with for so long. So I'm sure that it makes us more relatable. I'm sure that it makes us feel like we're in the room with them. And to a large degree, we are. We've all lived this. That's my whole background. Who should own NRR? Ellie, I don't know if you and I have the same opinion on this, but I'm gonna let you go for it. Fire away.

Yeah, I mean, for— it really depends. For us, it's a shared metric, you know, sales and CS. Our CS team doesn't own the revenue, though. We have AMs and AEs who manage the dollars. And CS is solely responsible for making our customers be as successful as possible and turning them into champs and advocates. But it's a shared metric. We do have it on our, on our line.

Yeah, I would say I'm going to expand a little bit on that. NRR is one of the things we track as a KPI for the whole business. So everybody in the whole company plays a hand in net rep retention. I think that you, you would be mistaken to think that an engineer doesn't care about net rep retention within our organization, or a product designer or anybody else, because they're indicators of how well we've assembled the product as much as they're indicators of how well we've supported the product, stood it up, presented it, etc., to our customer base. Let's see what else we got here. What tools do you use for data and analytics, marketing, sales, product, CS, dashboards, etc.? Go for it, Ellie. This is, this is you.

Yeah, Salesforce, Looker, Duly is our own product, obviously. And then we have a broader tech stack than that, but those are our three kind of key ones for data.

Yeah, yeah. We took a lot of time and investment into the data side of our business, and Looker has been one of the cornerstone pieces of that. We are incredibly data-driven to try to get ahead of problems instead of waiting for a problem to occur. We're trying to find those things way up in advance. And you can usually see that in the way that people are interacting with your product or the things that you would expect them to do versus the things that they aren't doing.

And I think we're at time, Chris.

Yeah, okay, it looks— I heard one more question, so let's—

okay, I can take this one of how do you build an emotional connection with and offer a personalized experience for customers at scale? Yeah, data. You can't do digital without data. You've got to have data. And you got to have data at a level in a, and in a way that you can personalize the communications to your users in a relevant and relatable way. So for us, it's knowing what role they are. So if they're an account executive or CSM or in sales ops, we personalize that journey and experience for them so that it's really clear the value that they'll get out of our product and really clear on how they should use the product themselves in terms of best practices. Without that, you can't get super personalized.

All right, thanks everyone. I really appreciate your time. Uh, happy 2022 and wishing you all the best of success.

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