00:00 Hey everyone, I'm E-Readeezives here for CSM Practice, the podcast and Mastermind Programme for anybody who's interested and passionate about keeping their clients, making them happy and getting them to the results they seek when they engage with you in the first place.
00:20 And today we're going to have a special episode just on these kind of issues. So if you have them stay tuned because we're going to you a solution.
00:30 If your CSMs spend about 10% of their time or more in just searching for customer data, usage is buried in different systems, sales data is why customer purchase yet in another system, some systems they have access to, systems report on the same data, but somehow when you look two years back, the data
00:51 looks completely different. So there's in productivity, be like a trust and data, and you want to clean up and elevate the customer experience by centralizing the data and make it more trustworthy.
01:05 So if anything resonates with you, like this might be your world. You have too many systems, too much data points.
01:12 See you soon, spend way too much time looking for data. This episode is right for you. I have a very special guest today.
01:22 His name is Matt Kaplan. He is the director of customer success for Enterprise. At Indeed, he's gonna share what is he doing about it?
01:33 Hey Matt, thank you so much for joining this show. Yeah, I'm excited to be on the podcast and share some of my experience.
01:40 Indeed, it is a huge company. You're the director of customer success for the Enterprise team. What can you tell us a little bit about the team?
01:48 what kind of clients do you work with and what kind of problems do you help themselves? I've been at Indeed for a little over eight years.
01:55 All in the client success realm. I started working with small customers when I started that Indeed and made my way into the enterprise space and into leadership and currently I help lead teams of client success individual contributors who work with some of the largest brands in the United States that
02:14 are trying to hire and fill their positions. So we've built our strategic accounts, our top accounts, our program, and so my teams work with some of our highest level customers, just helping them get the application volume and the the people in through their funnels so that they can make the right hires
02:32 and drive business outcomes for their own businesses and get people hired and work is a powering thing for people and that's one of the things that we try to hold true at indeed is helping people get jobs and that's exactly what our teams are doing every single day and helping our employers find those
02:49 workers and help them be on power to do the things that they want to do. How big is the team if you don't mind and what's the CSM to custom our ratios just so we get a feel for it's a high touch, how high is it?
03:00 Yes, it's extremely high. Right now, it's about four individual teams of managers who have about six to eight individual contributors each half of the organization is the strategic and their ratios are a little larger, so we actually have multiple CS folks on individual accounts.
03:20 So for one account, for example, we have three individual contributors working on one overall business, and we segment sort of by different department and different business unit as some of these large customers almost operate as multiple businesses within one.
03:36 And so we've sort of taken that approach to the strategic accounts world. but at indeed we range from high touch like that to for scaled touch and making sure that one rep could have up to 150 customers in certain segments of our business.
03:52 For the large large companies, I assume these are companies that you work with, your customers that actually have tentacles, if you will, in various regions around the world, which calls for a much more complicated structure of a team that services that account or services that customer.
04:12 What everybody's listening right now, you, to really understand what was the issue and the challenges and why the initiative is coming together as it is.
04:22 And the more you understand the context, the better you get it. And we'll see you can learn a few things on how large companies are already managing this successfully.
04:29 So, as you being some of their accounts are very large international companies with global offices around the world or headquarters.
04:35 And so, usually for these types of accounts, it's not just so you're going to have one CSM in the US and one in Europe and one in Asia, you might actually assign sort of like a pod to these accounts, for example, in some companies that I worked with, some of my clients, they had a technical account manager
04:56 , and they might have had a solution architect or what they call application engineer, different types of specialized roles that have different types of address everything that the account needs or wants.
05:09 Is that the case for indeed as well? Like, you would actually have like an account manager from sales, as well as a CSM, and maybe like professional services.
05:20 Is that what I'm hearing you're saying between the lines? Yeah, we don't get as specific as all those different types of roles, we try to keep it as simple as possible and go to market with customers that they have a good understanding of who they can work with.
05:31 But we do take that pot approach with sales. Similarly, if we have multiple C.S. individuals working on a large conglomerate, usually there's that same amount of sales folks on that pod with them, and we think about it exactly what you said, the tentacles reference.
05:49 Do you think about some of the largest companies in the world? They have their hands in a lot of different things.
05:55 And so what we try to do is like some of these large customers may have a software component They're offering that they're selling, but they also may have Driven fleet of people that they need to hire and what we've learned is the type of CS person in type of sales person That works with those two different
06:17 types of businesses has different skills to we want to put the right type of CS person on the business That is gonna provide that customer with the best sort of outcome on indeed they may all be under the same umbrella, but we try to get in there and understand what are those customers needs, what are
06:35 the types of roles that they're hiring for, and that can change the way that they should be using indeed or the offerings that they have.
06:43 So we may call them all the same, but they definitely are a little more specialized in the types of needs that those specific segments of those customers need.
06:51 That's a very custom our centric approach. So good as for you because it almost sounds like the way you decide who to assign to that account has a lot to do with their specific business needs.
07:05 If they need to hire day-to-day workers where we call blue color then you have the blue color specialist maybe or if it's more somebody that specializes in failed hiring or hiring in Asia then they have their own specialty so they can bring a lot of value to the client versus somebody technical.
07:23 Yep, that's definitely the approach we try to take for this strategic account's vertical. That's definitely not what we do all customers that indeed, but we take that similar customer centric approach in a lot of different segments of our business.
07:35 For example, we might have one part of the business that actually has a lot of different users. So we're going to put someone on that business that's good at operating at scale with a lot of different types of users, whereas another part of the business for that same customer might need a relationship
07:51 driven C.S. person and someone that's going to help drive the relationship forward at the corporate level, and so we'll put someone that's strong in that regard.
07:59 So that's sort of how we think about that strategic accounts. Two things comes to mind. One, you're doing an excellent job as signing CSMs to maximize value for the customer versus any other consideration, especially for the enterprise account.
08:14 I want to frame this conversation that this is about working with those conglomerans with global presence, this is like very high touch, your world, at least, okay?
08:23 So put that in that framework, although the principle still apply, even if you do digital touch, your content should be very customer-centric focused.
08:32 Anyways, the second thing that shows up for me is that there might be a lot of people working on the same account for global purposes, because there's also the financial transactions versus the financial aspect versus the value aspect, sounds like that you have a lot of hands in the cookie jar for a 
08:51 lack of a bit of word. What are some of the challenges that we're starting to emerge as indeed was developing and it's a very high growth company.
09:00 You thought to yourself, well you know what? This is something that we need to address. You started to become a director of customer success for enterprise and a team leader and an executive approximately win.
09:13 So I've been in leadership. It would in CS that indeed for probably the last five this years in the director space within the last two or three.
09:22 I think some of the challenges that we've started to see the fact that and it's all in good faith. A lot of people want to provide good value and good experience for these types of customers, whether you're in CS, whether you're parts of our business want to provide a good experience for these customers
09:45 . What we sort of started to see is that like there's a lot of different places and things coming out our team of places to say hey we should go talk to this customer about this thing or this thing or this thing what we've started to discover not just in my world but across the organization.
10:01 There's a lot of different tools and reports and places that CS needs to go to to do their job and find the information that they need to do their job.
10:12 And that's one project that I'm passionate about and working on currently within the global CS team that indeed is trying to like improve the amount of things that we're putting in from our teams and ensure that they're prioritized in a way that's valuable to them.
10:29 Ultimately, you're going to drive positive outcomes for the customer and then for indeed. Yes, I totally get. It's very common also as a company grows that the customer success team might need to get different data elements, if you will, about the customer from different systems.
10:48 And I think that's very common. You're coming in five years ago, you're seeing like all these different systems that your team needs to log in and out of just to understand what's going on.
10:58 And what was the impact on the CSMs and why was this a challenge that you wanted to tackle? For me, the impact was mostly just the team spending time on things that weren't customer centric.
11:14 And so, if you're preparing for a call with a customer, and you have to spend 45 minutes to figure out where to go and where to collect all the different data to prepare for that 30 minute call, something's not working.
11:28 And so it's about driving efficiency for our teams and ensuring that they feel empowered to have the information that they need at the right time and in the right moments so that they're not having to spend too much time having to sort of navigate internal systems and they can spend more time talking
11:50 to customers, helping facilitate their outcomes on We had some interesting data that we found we surveyed a group of users that eventually rolled out a pilot to to consolidate some information.
12:03 And one of the questions we asked was, in the last month, how difficult was it for you to find the information you needed to find on a scale from one to five, five being the most difficult.
12:15 and our median score was like a four. Just the sense from the team was that it was hard to find the information that they need.
12:21 And then we also asked them like on average how much time are you spending and they were telling us things like over four hours a week that they were spending on just looking for the information that they needed to find.
12:33 Through that pilot, we definitely improved on some of those metrics and it's encouraging to see that like we can come up with a solution, implement it, test it, see some positive outcomes and then start to think about, okay, how do we get this in more hands in CS?
12:49 I'm hearing you look loud and clear. People were spending too much time just looking for the data that they needed about 10% of the time every week, probably sometimes more, and that time can definitely be used to have value-driven discussions with customers, which we know results in higher retention
13:07 , advocacy, and upso. Manual processes don't add up to any value to the company in general. Was there any other negative impact on the team you were noticing?
13:19 One of the anecdotal things that we've heard when talking to these folks who are in the day-to-day was just trust, trust in the information.
13:28 I'm the type of person that I assume good intent in everyone. I think when teams are creating new resources and reporting and that sort of stuff, the intent is always there, but they're not always thinking about, I'm putting a data point in this, does this match with the data point that is in this report
13:45 that was created a year ago? Are we using the same methodology with how we're populating that information? And what we learned through our research with this pilot group was they were inherently curious about how accurate the things that they were finding were, because they were seeing so many different
14:05 versions. You see one metric would look like this and then another metric from a different report that should be the same was a little different because of latency or because of some of their factor.
14:17 And so the underlying challenge too was like we wanted to try to consolidate and create something so that we can also drive better trust between our folks and the tool that there is.
14:28 We kind of get into the solution, consolidating data, your integrating systems, creating consistency in the way data is calculated from different systems.
14:37 So we can establish trust. But at that time when we were just starting to manage the team about five years ago, you noticed that there were a lot of inefficiencies in manual processes and looking for data about 10% was spent on that.
14:50 People weren't trusting the data. What do you think, Mad? Like in your mind, I assume you wouldn't have picked up this project or this initiative.
14:59 I must see like this foresight that if the company continues in this path, what do you think would have happened to five six years down the road if nothing would have changed?
15:11 I do firmly believe that like this is the right time for us to be working on this because indeed has the vision to continue to be the number one job site in the world, help the highest number of people in the world get hired through our platform.
15:25 In order for that to happen, CS is going to be in a real part of ensuring that employers on the platform are leveraging the products that they're purchasing in the right way, getting value out of them.
15:36 Again, if we continue to have the team spend time on internal things rather than external things, we may not contribute in the best way to those goals that we're trying to sell.
15:48 When did you start working on this initiative? Towards the end of the year last year, it's probably been about six to eight months.
15:54 What made you feel like? All right, this is the right time to do it. My answer to this is probably just empowerment from leadership.
16:03 We have a strong leadership culture, that indeed, especially within CS. It was recognition from our senior leadership team that this was also a problem, and then allowing sort of like lead blocking, creating the space for something like this to happen.
16:19 I've had to guess from everything that you just told me. I think your leadership's team has started seeing this issue of inefficiencies, data discrepancies, if you will, as something that if it were to be fixed, could be a great differentiator in elevating the experience for clients, but also a great
16:42 way to potentially either reduce costs to serve or just create bitter efficiencies and productivity for the team, which by the way always increases morale.
16:52 Almost like a year in, I can already starting to see some results, some impact, some change. In some of our pilot groups, we've already seen that number of how much effort that sort of on a scale from one to five.
17:07 We've seen that come down to a two or three in the pilot group ready, so we're making progress there. We also have had folks tell us that they're spending less time searching for things because we're putting it all in one place for them.
17:19 I would also say we are getting clear on like, what are the right thing? We're taking feedback from this group to ask them like, what are the things that you would like to see in a single place?
17:33 Because they're the ones that are in front of customers and they know what resonates well or they know what data is going to be important to them.
17:40 So starting to think about What is actually the right stuff and how do we continue to evolve it I think you touched on something iteration is important right now this thing I'm talking about it's not available to everyone in CS that indeed and that's actually on purpose because we want this sort of test
17:57 and learn make sure that we're solving the right problems before we are sort of expanding this to everyone else. And yeah, I think hopefully we talk again in six to 12 months, this is something that everyone in CES is using at Indeed, but also they feel like they're spending more time with customers.
18:18 They're spending less time pivoting between a lot of different things. We know that leads to higher retention, higher growth. And I think that's one thing about CS industry that is very good and we don't have to prove that more time with customers on the right things equals better outcomes because I 
18:37 think in a lot of industries you have to prove everything down the line keep going down the funnel and prove it but I think we know for sure everyone would agree that the more time you're spending on valuable conversations about your product that the customer is using the better outcomes that you're 
18:52 going to get. I'd like to doing pilots. We're a global company, so I think ensuring that the offering that we're putting to the team is solving the needs of all of our team members not just folks in the U.S.
19:09 or not just one certain segment. We're just ensuring and getting creative that within these pilots, we're taking people from different segments.
19:18 With small customers, some that work with large customers, we're learning like some of these data points are helpful for one and not the other And like, those are learnings that we can learn now before we sort of roll it out to the entire workforce of CS.
19:32 So that's one of the reasons. And just, there's a lot of different projects. And this isn't the only thing that anyone on the team is working on.
19:40 I think if we were to say, we're going to roll it out to everyone and then we need to fix something or iterate on something, just the scale at that would, I think it would be too difficult to pivot, rest here the ship in a different direction if we had to change.
19:53 And so we just want to sort of iterate get things right and slowly roll out to larger groups before we hit that like prime time number where it's available to everyone.
20:03 Any specific best practices if somebody's listening to this conversation and they're like, yeah, we have this, they me, should we need to do the same thing you back to the last eight to nine months?
20:15 What are some things that you would recommend another CS ops person or a customer success executive or even a small start of founder, they already have a few systems.
20:25 They know the team spends a lot of time looking at different systems and they kind of want to consolidate everything.
20:31 What are some best practices? What have you learned? What would you recommend? Think about globalization. Was something that we definitely knew we had to think about early, but I don't think we thought about it early enough and because of the global nature of our team, just things like data and different
20:47 currencies and translations and all that sort of stuff. So that's one piece spending, I think project organization is working. It took us a while to enlist the help of our operations team internally to sort of help project manage some of this.
21:04 And there's a lot of different teams in stakeholders. Stay true to all of the important things within a project of doing your rapid models and having task owners and all that sort of stuff.
21:14 I think we initially thought about, this would be a little easier than we thought, but it expanded and we had to invest the help of some people that are better keeping things organized than I am, for sure.
21:25 If anybody here is listening still, you're gonna take this on. This is a fun business intelligence project. You can hire an expert to lead it or you can do it yourself, but if you do, make sure you get a project manager on the initiative and leverage the ops team as much as you can because these guys
21:47 know the data. And if you're even larger company in more traditional one, potentially IT as well. CS teams, if they wanted to take on something like that and there was a very strong IT organization.
22:01 Is there any way that they could do it without IT? I don't think so. We have great partnerships with our internal system teams.
22:09 I don't think we would be able to accomplish some of the things that we have accomplished without their support, being in line with us on the vision of trying to consolidate and have the team spend less time in a lot of different places.
22:23 All right, final words. Thank you for all the tips, by the way. Super awesome. You've been in customer success for many years.
22:29 Perhaps you can share a book that you really liked or something that inspired you to become the CS professional you are today that you'd like to share with our audience and recommend it.
22:40 I would say trying, keeping up on industry norms or industry best practices is extremely important. Like every company does CS a little differently or has a meeting of customer success or client success that is different.
22:53 Staying connected to the larger population of CS people is important because we get to share what's worked and what hasn't worked and then apply it within our own internal organizations.
23:04 And I would say what's been helpful for me trying my best to stay connected to the customers, trying to keep the connection to customers It's extremely important as you grow in your career and try to continue to solve challenges for them.
23:18 Yeah, I love that. So seek customer feedback. No matter where you are in your career, always keep that connection with the customers.
23:26 Find out best practices and always learn the most innovative things. Matt, thank you so much. What I love about today's conversation.
23:33 Hey, everybody has some data issues. Everybody has some manual processes. What you've done is a very thoughtful approach. very agile, and you didn't overly emphasize this, but you actually had a score to show progress and to show the value of the initiative.
23:51 So you have a way to quantitatively celebrate when you studied yourself, it went from four to two. Yeah, it's important as you take on things, keep set on like how you're going to measure your success.
24:04 I think we asked customers as, yes, professionals in our first conversations with them in 10 months after you've used my product, what would good look like?
24:13 I think we hear a lot of CS folks ask that or what the success look like for you as a customer.
24:18 We have to ask that same question of ourselves when we're taking on internal projects and driving initiatives forward. It was great to be here.
24:25 I appreciate the time and the platform that you have. And thank you. Everyone, thank you so much for listening to this interview.
24:33 If you liked it, please go on our YouTube channel and give this video a like, subscribe, hit that notification so that you don't miss out on any new interviews and this fascinating discussions like we had with Matt Kaplan today.
24:49 And with that, it's a wrap. Big hug from me. I'll see you at the next episode.