The Top 3 Things Every COO Should Track for Operational Excellence with Adyen

Well, excellent. And I'm going to pass over to Jacqueline to kick us off. Yeah, thanks, Caitlin. Hi, Jacqueline Berger. I am Adyen's VP of Operations focused on point of sale. I'm based out of Adyen's New York office, and I've been with Adyen for about 4.5 years. I'm joined today by Cameron. Cameron, I'll let you introduce yourself.

Thanks, Jacqueline. Hi, everyone. Pleasure to be here. I'm Cameron Zaki. I'm the Chief Operating Officer for Adyen. In a global capacity, but based here in our San Francisco office typically.

So for those of you who aren't familiar with Adyen, a quick, quick intro there. Adyen provides a single payments platform globally to accept payments and grow revenue online, on mobile, and at point of sale. Payments is a complicated business, operating a complex business on a global scale. Has enlightened us to some of the things that we're excited to chat with you about today. By way of agenda, what will we cover? Operational excellence, we want to talk about how we think about it and how you can think about it for your businesses, and then dive into the 3 key considerations that every COO should think about in terms of operational excellence in your organization. So the 3 points: your customers, your COO dashboard, which are your KPIs— we all know and love them— and then finally, what do you do with those KPIs? And spoiler alert, we share them. So with that, Cameron, I will pass it over to you.

Thanks, Jacqueline. Yeah, to Jacqueline's point, we thought we'd share how we think about operational excellence and try to use simple frameworks, right? So we think about 3 main things within operational excellence. One, we think it's really important to think about this from a customer experience standpoint. So some of the challenges we think organizations run into is you think about operational excellence from an inside-out perspective of, hey, what does it mean for, in our case, Adyen, and hey, how should we really say what does it mean for support or implementation teams or product teams? But we came up with KPIs based on, hey, how is the customer experience impacted? And then let's work backward from there. And we'll share a few examples. Two, the context that we frame it in is scale versus growth, right? So I think lots of companies are growing fast, but there's linear growth and there's sort of scaling. In our example, we have a few key business metrics, one of which is how much volume is processed over our platform. And in the last 5 years, that's grown 10x, right? So it really led us to think about, hey, operational excellence in the context of growing at that kind of scale. And then third is having a continuous improvement mindset, right? So there is no definition of done. As we give examples, you'll see we didn't say, hey, here's an SLA that we want to put to it. It's, hey, let's first measure these things, define them, then measure them, and then let's continuously see how we can improve for the betterment of our customer experience. And then we'll start talking through these and hopefully have some time for Q&A at the end as well.

Great. So I think with that framework that Cameron just spoke about, let's dive into the first of the three key considerations on operational excellence. The first one, let's start with the customer. So operational excellence should allow your customer to feel the full value that your business has to offer. And I think feel or experience is the word that I would highlight here. So customers can experience operational excellence in bottom line cost savings, right? Revenue uplift. But they also experience operational excellence in their day-to-day interaction with your company or your platform or your teams. So in order to ensure a positive customer experience, you need to understand a few things. Uh, one of them is what are the key things that impact your customers? Um, and I think a good way to think about that is what are all of the different contact points that your customer has, where they're touched by different teams or systems? And then how can you unify those touch points into a complete and consistent reflection or profile, right, of where the customer is on their journey with your company? I think a simple example of this, right, is a customer, customer who went live last week and is potentially dealing with some, you know, launch, launch pains. Or is it a customer who's been with your company for 5 years and is on their third integration in their 10th geography, right? Those are, those are customers that you might speak to slightly differently because they have just a different level of understanding of working with your organization. So at Adyen, this reflection or profile is what we call a single view of the customer. It's certainly a continuous work in progress, and we continually look for ways that we can improve upon this and thus add value to our customers. We believe if you're able to provide your teams with this information, the single view, at the right time, in the right format, you'll enable your teams to consistently and seamlessly engage with your customers across different functions and teams. And consequently, it allows us to have the full context on our customers across the business, right? Not just within a specific team. To be more efficient, so we can troubleshoot faster. There are fewer mistakes made. We can work towards proactive outreach, not waiting for our customers to come to us. We can reach out to them when we see they may be impacted by something. And finally, it allows us to best prioritize what critical items need to be addressed and what customers will be impacted there again. So as we've laid out on the slide here, a couple key guiding questions to ask yourself about your customers and how you can view your customers throughout your organization. Customers feel operational excellence, so it is best to ensure that all teams have that access to the single view of your customers. Great.

Thanks, Jacqueline. You know, maybe take a step back and share some of our experiences of how this came into being. So early on, when we were much smaller and figuring this out, we started with monitoring dashboards, which measured the health of, hey, our APIs and the tickets we got in. And the realization we came into was, as Jacqueline said, that's a bit of a reactive approach. You're reacting to issues that may come about and impact your customers. And we wanted a much more proactive mindset. So we said, hey, again, what are the key KPIs that impact our customers? How do we start defining them? How do we measure them, and how how do we start then actioning them? And within that, we came up with a few, again, key criteria. One was how often do we want to look at them? I think individual teams, of course, look at these at an individual customer interaction level, at a daily level, weekly, et cetera. But we thought, hey, from a broader business standpoint, we wanted to look at these monthly and start seeing trend lines and see how we can make sure they're going in the right direction and sort of tie back to this continuous improvement concept we talked about. Two, we said, hey, let's focus these on sort of the operational and product aspects more so than the business metrics, right? So of course we look at things like revenue and number of customers, but that's separate from this context. Here, we'll give a few examples in a minute, but it's really about the customer interaction and what the product implications are or operational implications are for those. Third, I think as Jacqueline hopefully gave a few great examples, we wanted to make sure it's all about the merchant in our example or customer perspective, right? And how they feel these potential pain points and/or hopefully delightful experiences. And then last is once we defined what these KPIs were, hey, how do we make sure they're measurable and most importantly actionable, right? So if you see a trend line going in the wrong direction, God forbid, then what— actions do you need to take? Otherwise, it's great that you're now defining and measuring these, but if you can't take action on them, then it doesn't really benefit your end customers. So to try and bring this to life, because I think frameworks are great, hopefully, for how others can adapt this to themselves, it's a little vague. So here's 3 examples. The data is mocked up, but the, the actual examples are real. So one thing we look at, for example, is connectivity or degraded performance events. So again, as Jacklyn said, what we do is payment processing. And when somebody's making a payment, there's a real-time component. And if the API is having issues, whether connectivity issues or some kind of degradation, then obviously it's impacting somebody else's business. So we measure how many events happen in a month and sort of look at trend lines. And then if there's an event, obviously there's a resolution, but then there's a postmortem and, hey, have we really resolve the root cause, or did we sort of just band-aid it or patch it? Second example is ticket resolution time, right? So when customers do contact us, how long does it take us to resolve it, right? And we don't have the mindset that, did I just answer Jacqueline's question and I closed the ticket? It's no, if I do that and Jacqueline has to open another ticket because I didn't really understand or resolve her root cause, then that doesn't really help us. To us. So we have a few different ways to look at it, but what we're really talking about is resolving the actual underlying issue. So if it gets reopened a few times, we want to take that into account or consideration also, because the amount of time and the negative experience obviously isn't a great customer experience. And then the time to live is for new customers. So when somebody signs up, given what we do as payment processing, there's a fair amount of know your customer and do money laundering. Et cetera, processes. But how long does it take from when we start the process to when a customer can start doing live transactions with us? So those are 3 examples that we measured. Then there's, hey, the KPI is an event, or it's in hours or in days. There are these graphs to show sort of trend lines and then the actual numbers. We sort of then share this. With the teams monthly, and there's a big drill down behind it, of course, right? Saying if somebody wants to see what those were, why the trend line's going the right way, what's causing it, and how do we make it more actionable. I think Jacqueline will touch a little bit about how we share this across the organization next.

Exactly. So, well, the KPIs are clearly very important to the operational teams. We also feel that there extremely important company-wide. As Carmen mentioned in the framework, as described in the framework, we are rolling up our KPIs on a regular basis, which is monthly, and sharing them not only with leadership teams for key decisions, but with our entire organization with full transparency. So they're posted on our intranet for anyone to see. In doing this, you are creating transparency and accountability. You are gaining visibility and buy-in buy-in, which I think allows for alignment throughout the organization and then fosters a real mindset of continuous improvement. We all see what we can do better, and then we're all sort of challenged to do so. So Adyen has taken the approach to share and publish all of our KPIs, our operational KPIs, with the entire organization. When we see we're not on track, we use each other to sharpen ideas and implement improvements. You can see that this is vastly different from the approach of just keeping operational KPIs or operational issues to a selected few. We feel this is particularly impactful for, for our company. One of Adyen's formula points is that we launch fast and iterate. As such, we've organized the Adyen business objectives to be aligned with industries that we work towards, and we call them solutions. And our solutions go through annual planning cycles and have team OKRs, but we value and then make sure that we can stay nimble and change direction as, as needed. And this is where operational excellence KPIs are so valuable as a shared, shared resource. They're used as the basis to discuss real-time dilemmas or to as Cameron mentioned, indicate if course correction is needed. Um, an example, I think, here of just how this plays out in, in actuality is, um, since our commercial teams have insights into operational KPIs, we can align on what we want to invest in. Um, you know, commercial folks, I think we sometimes— they— we give them a reputation of, uh, wanting, you know, the sexy new product features But when they can see that our operational teams are manually doing work that could be automated, that really helps with the internal alignment of focus, right, on what we should prioritize next as an organization. So more eyes help more people consider what could be a problem down the road and what we should, should focus on. So third consideration here is share KPIs across your entire organization in order to gain visibility and buy-in, and action, continuous improvement. Cool. So I think we just recapped our key takeaways here. We'll leave them up during Q&A. We're happy to answer any questions that you might have and maybe also just a plug while you're all thinking of your questions. I'll be in the virtual lounge following this and would be super happy to chat. So you can join me by heading to the virtual sponsor hall and going to the Adyen booth. Okay, well, Károly, I see one question here. In your experience, are there any drawbacks to sharing KPIs broadly?

From our perspective, no. I think as Jacqueline mentioned, it's a big part of our culture and how we like to and want to work together, right? And ensure that there's full transparency. So yes, that may mean if the KPI is something Jacqueline's responsible for, she may feel the heat or the pressure, right, of making sure we improve it. But that's the way it should be. We shouldn't be defensive about something that could be better in our area. It should be more of, hey, Jacqueline either has a plan, or hey, she needs help, and let's brainstorm on how we can improve it, or she needs more resources. And if this is a critical area, How do we want to reallocate resources and change priorities? And let's be flexible with that. So it's a core part of how we work together in general, and we think it's been super positive in this context as well.

Yes. Another great question just popped in the chat. How many KPIs should a company be tracking or working towards? I've seen some challenges with too many.

Great question. I think when we first set these up, we said, let's start with a list of all the relevant ones that impact the customer experience, right? From when a new customer would onboard to how they do payments to, hey, the different sort of features and products that they may avail. And we did exactly as you're suggesting. We said, let's dedupe them. Let's really synthesize them down. We didn't say, here's sort sort of a max number, but we did really try and say, hey, if it's 100, then it's gonna be really hard because people stop reading and stop actioning them. I think we sort of iterate and continuously add or tweak them. And I think so far we're sort of sticking at the global level between about 20 to 25 KPIs. Each of them then sort of can be drilled down, right, by individual teams so that they can action them better or they can sort of track them better. But at the global level, it's about 20 to 25 operational KPIs currently.

Great. Couple great questions coming in. Let's, let's talk about this one. Please talk more about building your culture of continuous improvement. What is the mix of nature and nurture when recruiting team members?

Great point. Maybe we should talk, and feel free to chime in here, Jacqueline, about the, the Adyen culture. So we have something we call the Adyen formula. It's on our website, so you can feel free to take a look at it. And it's really how we work as a company and how we want to work. And when we're recruiting, it's literally part of every single interaction or interview, right? We literally ask people proactively of, hey, have you seen it? If you have, haven't, could you please take a look? We talk about it with candidates. We make sure that they understand it and ask questions. It's part of the onboarding process. And it sort of ties in, therefore, to this concept of transparency and operational excellence and how we want to work, right? So I think it's both nature and nurture in that we look for candidates who sort of want to work in this culture, right? Feel it is a good fit for them and vice versa. But of course, when they join, there is an onboarding session. There is sort of ongoing dialogue around it. And we sort of say it's a living, breathing thing. We want people to give feedback of how we can constantly make it better. Even with the global KPIs, as Jacqueline said, they're published, and the team that sort of manages it is always available to answer questions and is also always looking for input and feedback of, are we missing a critical one, or should we change a definition or redefine it? To make it clear for everyone.

Yeah, and I think I love the question of nature versus nurture when recruiting. I think the culture of continuous improvement being sort of embedded in our organization is super powerful, right? So people will come in, and as Carmen said, we certainly look for people who are excited to be in, in the environment that Adyen formula fosters. But, you know, I think we do see people learn and grow and really adapt the Adyen formula. So, you know, if someone is not sort of naturally someone who can be super direct and have a straight conversation, I think it's something that they learn over time at their tenure at Adyen. So it's a very good question. I guess being cognizant of time, do we have time for one more question or should we look to wrap things up? Go for one more question. Love it. Fantastic. All right, Cameron, I see a good one. What have you seen work well as it pertains to ensuring the team feels their day-to-day work impacts the KPI? In other words, they feel like they're having impact.

Uh, a great question, and I think, um, it ties into the transparency but also to making sure that, um, the teams can contribute to these global KPIs but also that we cascade them down, right? Um, so if we take the examples we talked about, uh, if we talk about the, the time it takes to onboard a customer, um, we really say, hey, that's an overarching number, but what are the steps that go into that onboarding process, and how do we in that case work with the credit credit risk team or merchant onboarding team, underwriting teams to really map those out. And then they have more granular KPIs, right? But they can really see, ideally this number goes down, right? Because that's ideal that we've streamlined things. So if Jacqueline's a new customer, she can be up and running as fast as possible. So they can see firsthand how their kind of more granular process improvements or automation initiatives will tie back to this and lead to a better experience. Experience. And in that example, we also use NPS, right? So they can see these KPIs, but also some of the other relevant metrics that we focus on to make sure we're really delighting our customers.

Wonderful. I'm glad you guys have— we're able to get a few more. I— these questions I can share with you guys after if you guys want to follow up, which is great. And I'm sure people will reach out to you or find you on social if they can. Jacqueline, Cameron, thank you so much for being with us. We truly appreciate having you guys and having you at SAS Enterprise. It's always a pleasure. So for everyone who is here, thank you again for also joining us. I believe we have 1 or 2 more sessions left in the day. But as Jacqueline said, go head over to their sponsor hall, their booth, which is at sasenterprise.com. She'll be— or members of the Adyen team will be in the lounge for a little bit, and you can check out what they have to offer. Again, thank you guys, and we hope to see you around. Thank you.

Thanks, everyone.

Have a good one.