Secrets to Driving Customer Success with Freshworks

So let's get started. Again, thank you so much for joining us. And it is my pleasure to introduce Mukesh Merchantani. So take it away, and thank you again for joining us today.

Thank you, Kaitlyn. You did such a good job saying my last name. That's not an easy one. A very, very good morning to everybody who's dialing in. I hope you're having a good Monday. I hope your SASter's journey is off to a good start. Like Caitlin said, my name is Mukesh Merchantani, and I like to think of myself as a sneakerhead, a fashionista, and as a CX enthusiast. But what pays the bills is that I am VP of Global Field Solution Engineering at Freshworks. Now, till before last week, I would say, hey, Freshworks is a fast-growing SaaS company. You may or may not have heard of us, but we are really passionate about CX. I guess this week I will have to change that narrative as part of my talk track. So without any further delays, let's, let's look at what we're going to talk about today. I'm— we're going to talk about a lot of very interesting things. We are here to talk about customer success and the success mandate. But what I'm going to do today is I'm going to try and find an intersection between human centricity and customer success. I think when we talk about customer success, we are often very focused on revenue and value, and I think those are very good things to focus on. But I would like us to start thinking about design thinking as it applies to customer success. I'll introduce this concept of human-to-human connections rather than business models such as B2B and B2C. So let's get into the content, and this is probably a slide that you see very frequently if you are in a B2B SaaS organization, if you are running a B2C company, you think about customer success a little bit differently, right? You think about— in B2B, you think about customer success being a growth driver and net revenue retention. You often think about building customer champions. You think about creating customer value for your customers. And all of those are great things to think about. In B2C, this looks a little bit different. You think about wallet share. You think about loyalty, you think about returning customers. But I, I want to sort of say today that why do we think about B2B and B2C? Why don't we think about a human-to-human connection as we think about success, as we think about service, as we think about our customers in general? And so this is going to be what we'll focus on today. And to me, what is really critical when you start to think about those human-to-human connections is you have to understand what your customers expect. Customer expectation, I think, is the foundation of building good relationships. So let's think about a B2B organization. Some of you are probably in some sort of SaaS startups. You are probably looking to build really cool and powerful GTM business models. And I'm sure as part of your journey, you are thinking about self-service and trials. I hope a lot of you are thinking about that. And to me, there isn't a better form of empowerment for your customers than that type of helping themselves, whether it comes to sales, whether it comes to service, because I think customers expect that empowerment today. The second thing that you, you think about customer expectation, you should think about choice. Gone are the days where you had one channel or two channels to communicate, whether it was just phone, just email. Today it's about channels of choice, it's about meeting your customers where they are and thinking about what do they expect in terms of those communication mechanisms. Are they more comfortable with messaging? Are they more comfortable with chatting? Things like that drive— lead to choice and that leads to convenience. Customers today equate choice with convenience. And this has been a big aha moment for me over the last 12 months or so as I've been speaking to so many of our customers. Third, I think personalization is something that you all probably know the value of. You probably think about this all the time. But I have a funny story to tell here. I actually received an email from a bank recently. And it said, dear customer. It started with the words, dear customer. And to me, that is a sin. If you're not using the right personalization, if you're not knowing your customers well enough, then how can you expect to earn the business? And then finally, delight. Delight is something that Freshworks as an organization is really focused on, and we are trying to make delight easy as we think about our customers. But delight basically equates to efficiency and effectiveness. Think about how quickly you can resolve a question and how effectively, meaning can you resolve the question on the first attempt or will the customer keep coming back. So these are some key customer expectations that I truly encourage you to think about. This is where, if you think about your customer expectations, this is where human-centric design comes into play. So if you think about customer success, that you will be successful with your customers if you understand their expectations. In order to understand their expectations, you have to think about human centricity. And so I'm gonna break it down into 4 buckets. I'm gonna talk about design thinking, which is, by the way, a very powerful concept that has existed in product development for a long, long time. If you are users of the mouse, you're probably using design thinking. But design thinking is something that has found so many applications in sales and in strategy, and now it's finding a lot of applications in customer experience. So think about design thinking, think about some of those elements like curiosity, the customer journey, and those type of things when you're thinking about your customer success, your customer journey. Second, empathy. This is no longer a buzzword, and this is no longer scripted. This is— organizations that are doing empathy well are the ones that are really, really winning in the market. And empathy comes from insights. Empathy comes from knowing your customers well and asking all the right questions. The third bucket is human desirability. And again, when you think about your customers, they have a certain expectation from you, but they also have certain desires on how certain things should work. And if you can delight them with human desirability, I think that can be a game-changing aspect of your business. Now, of course, I want all the cool things and I want all the things that, you know, a company can offer. But technical feasibility is something as well that we need to worry about. And so when you think about your systems, when you think about your platforms, you have to basically invest in platforms that can drive delight, that can drive human desirability. And the final thing, the final element of human-centric design that you should be thinking about is nonlinearity. So let's say that you have a customer experience journey that you've mapped out for your organization, for your company. You have to keep learning and you have to keep iterating. If you feel like you've got it right and if you've mastered your customer journey, you are probably going to be in for a rude shock a few months down the road because there's a constant evolution and iterative approaches to customer experience and customer success are key. Now listen, these are— a lot of these are topics that are somewhat abstract, right? And I recognize that as we're talking about these things, but these are fundamental things that can drive a company's success. So it's very important to understand these abstract concepts and then apply them to your business. So let's talk about the customer journey, because I think the customer journey is the most important thing in customer success. Organizations that are understand how their customers do business with them are the ones that are going to be successful in the long run. So my advice to any organization that's thinking about customer success is start with journey mapping of your customer experience. And what I have on the screen is a very simple, a very basic B2C use case, right? This is how we shop, don't we, right? But what are the things that go into this? And to me, the number one thing is your customer journey should be scenario-based. So when you are thinking about a sales scenario, your customer journey might look very different. Your customers might start with a trial, and then they might just use a credit card to process that trial, right? And they may not even be in touch with you. In, in the case of customer service, you might have a situation where a customer engages with a bot or a chat and then uses a knowledge base to help themselves. Both of these scenarios are very unique. They're very different. And so making your customer journey scenario-based is a really good idea if you're getting started with journey mapping. Second, I think customer preferences are really important. We've talked about this, right? When I am in my car, remember those days when we used to drive to work? When I'm in my car driving to work, I am, and if I need to use, if I need to contact customer service, I'm probably gonna use a phone and I'm probably gonna use a hands-free device. But if I am at the end of my day, I'm chilling on my couch watching some TV, I am probably gonna chat with customer service. And so understanding your customer preferences in those journeys are extremely important. I would say that customer feelings are even more important because when a customer is, for example, going through a sales process, there is a certain expectation, there's a certain excitement, around that purchase that your customer is about to make from you, right? So understand those feelings of excitement and match those feelings and reciprocate those feelings. When you think about customer service, when a customer is trying to work with you and your product is not working like you said it would, right? We've all been there. There's frustration, there's angst. And so how do you manage those and how do you deliver empathy against those customer feelings? And then finally, engage with trust in your customer journey. This is a very, very critical thing. To me, trust is about consistency. If your customers are reaching out to you and talking to a sales organization, let's say they have a certain type of experience. They reach out and talk to your customer service organization, let's say they have a different type of experience. That is inconsistent and that can break the trust. So What I tell organizations that are willing to listen to me is have some sort of a system that's unified across sales, service, and customer success. Have a unified platform that drives the single customer record that you can sort of learn and understand your customer in a very consistent way, regardless of where you are within the organization. So engaging with trust is a very critical part of, of customer journey mapping. A couple of more concepts I want to introduce to you as we go through this. I think empathy is definitely a very underutilized concept in the SaaS world. I think we are very metrics-driven, and I think what drives us is, like I said, net revenue retention and value and things like that. But I think the softer touch around empathy is very important. And so I'm starting to think of empathy as a CX tool rather than as feeling. And to me, we've all been in those situations where we've called the customer service organization and we've got a scripted response to our frustration, right? And sometimes when we're in a rush, the scripted response actually bothers us even more. So empathy is not a script. Empathy has to be organic. It has to be genuine. It has to be driven from customer insights. So having systems of record is great, but I encourage you to think about systems of insight, systems that give you specific information about your customers that you would otherwise not get. And this can be around data, it can be around sentiment, and then give this— these empathy tools to everybody in your organization, whether it's sales, service, customer success. Everybody should be engaging with your customers with this level of empathy. This is a 20-minute session, and so sometimes it is, it is really hard to distill a lot of concepts into a 20-minute session, and I want to make sure that I save a bunch of time at the end for Q&A because I can see there's so many questions that are popping in. But I want to sort of wrap it all up with a few key concepts. One is design thinking. When you think about customer success, Don't think about customer success in the traditional way of customer success. Those metrics are extremely critical, and you should focus on those. But think about some new ways of driving customer success from a very early stage of your development as a company. This could be around journey mapping at a very early stage, using design thinking, using curiosity, using empathy to engage with your customers. And training your entire organization to think like this. The second key takeaway is empathy. Empathy comes from data. Empathy comes from having systems that speak to each other. Even better, having unified platforms that store data consistently, and then using that data to unleash customer insights. So I think that is a very critical part of it. And then finally, human-to-human connections. Train your teams, define your company's culture in a way that allows your teams to engage with your customers in a very human way. Build relationships, build those bonds, and I think that's what leads to long-term success. With that, we're at the end of my presentation, and Caitlin, I think we can start taking a few questions.

Wonderful. We definitely have some questions rolling in, so I will get right to it. How do we convince a sales-centric that design should receive more resources?

I think you cut out just a little bit, but I think the question was, how do we convince a sales-centric organization that design should get more resources?

Yes, exactly.

Got it. Look, I think design as a product concept is— that was in the 2000s. And that was in 2008 and 2009. Today, design is in everything. It's not just in product development, it's actually in sales, it's actually in customer service, it's actually in customer success. And so to a sales-centric organization that cares about revenue, I would say that the business case of design is actually around maximizing your revenue. Now, I don't know who asked the question and what your products are, but typically when you start to think about your products, you'll find that there is a certain way you sell. There is a certain sales cycle. If you're a B2B SaaS company, sounds like you are, there is going to be a sales process that your sales team is following. Oftentimes those sales organizations will stumble in certain types of deals, whether it's a product gap, whether it's a competitive pressure, right? And so using design thinking in those sales cycles will actually speed up your sales cycle. Because guess what design thinking is grounded in? It's grounded in curiosity. What is sales grounded in? Sales is grounded in curiosity. So I think there's a very distinct connection between sales and design. And I think to me, the best business case for design is in sales. So hopefully that addresses your question, but please reach out to me on LinkedIn if you'd like to explore this further. This is a— it's not a question that I can answer in a minute or two.

Yeah, I think that was a very thoughtful answer for the few moments you had though. Our next question is, how do you think about empathy when it comes to AI and chatbots? Or based on like your human-centric approach, do you feel like that's even possible?

It is a brilliant question, isn't it? Because on one hand, the industry that we live in talks about AI and chat, and they talk about automation. On the other hand, here I am talking about human centricity. Those two things on the surface, those two things couldn't be further apart. But if you actually think about it, efficiency is a very important customer expectation. So I will take it back to what your customers expect. Your customers expect efficiency. And I want to give you an example of a company that— a customer of Freshworks. And when, when we went into COVID, a lot of customers of this organization were reaching out to them for refunds because this customer of ours was in the business of selling tickets to events, music concerts, sports events, etc. And so a lot of people were reaching out to them and saying, hey, give me a refund. And so what this customer did was they set up a chatbot and they took the most common questions that the customers were asking And they put it inside of the chatbot flow. And so what ended up happening is that instead of waiting on hold, because there were hundreds and thousands of customers that were trying to get the refund, right? So instead of waiting on hold on the phone, these customers were able to engage very effectively with the chatbot, get the answers that they wanted, and be on their way, right? And so to me, this is the perfect example of having hundreds of thousands of people wait on a phone line or give them the efficiency that they want in the first place, right? Give them quick answers. And so So to me, the intersection, Caitlin, between efficiency and human connections and human expectation is actually very strong. Because one key expectation that we cannot forget is human beings, all human beings value their time. Time is the most important commodity. So if you can design chat, AI, and ML in a way that saves time, you're gonna have successful outcomes.

Yeah, I love that answer. We are just about at time. I see one more question though. So quickly, do you have example of one tool or product that can help drive empathy?

I will, I will say that instead of calling out a tool or a product, I will call out a concept. I think a lot of organizations have a system of record for sales. They have a system of record for service. They have a system of record for success. They have three different systems of record. Oftentimes when you are young startup, you don't think about connecting all of this data together. And so to me, the most important thing that drives empathy is having unified data. So instead of calling out a tool or a product, Caitlin, I will say invest in a platform that unifies sales, service, and success data into a unified customer record. And I think that's the holy grail of empathy.

Great answer. All right, I think that's a great way to end. Thank you so much, Mukesh. It has been an absolute pleasure speaking with you. Thank you all for tuning in to SAS TR Annual.