In this episode of CS No BS, Maranda Dziekonski, Chief Customer Officer at Swiftly discusses the importance of finding your inner voice and advocating for yourself, the benefits of geeking out on standard operating procedures, and the best way to build a CS team from scratch.
This episode of CS No BS features an interview with Maranda Dziekonski, Chief Customer Officer at Swiftly. Swiftly, the first Connected Transit Platform, helps transit agencies improve their service reliability, passenger information, and operational efficiency.
Maranda is a ground-up builder and leader with a passion for setting up the right teams, systems, processes, and overall infrastructure to take both the team and the company to the next level.
In this episode, Maranda discusses the importance of finding your inner voice and advocating for yourself, the benefits of geeking out on standard operating procedures, and the best way to build a CS team from scratch.
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“If I'm a leader going in and I'm building out CS from scratch, I'm going to want to understand, what type of CS do I need to build out in order to be able to enable and empower my customers and my teams to be successful and then drive a successful business outcome. So I urge folks to stop going out googling and trying to plug and play stuff. I see it happening a lot and you're hurting yourself. Yes. Some of the things may work, but the reality is, is businesses are unique and require different types of activities to solve the problems you're trying to solve. Once you get that understanding of what type of customer success, I like to center myself with some problem statements . So what are the problems that I have right now that I need to solve?” - Maranda Dziekonski
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*(04:53) Marand’s first role in Customer Success
*(09:57) The first steps of launching any CS initiative
*(17:07) Finding your inner voice
*(21:56) Advice for building a CS team from scratch
*(29:40) Maranda’s biggest challenges
*(33:18) What would Maranda do differently
*(40:00) 3 Key Must-Do’s
*(41:08) Quick Hits
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This podcast was created by the team at Totango. Design and run best-in-class customer journeys with no-code, visual software that delivers immediate value, easy iteration and optimization, and predictable scale-up growth. Join over 5,000 customers from startups to fast-growing enterprises using the industry’s only Composable Customer Success Platform. Start for free at Totango.com.
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Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn
Connect with Maranda on LinkedIn
Narrator: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to CS. No BS, your practical playbook for delivering net revenue retention, the holy grail of customer growth, hosted by Jamie Bertasi, COO and President of Totango.
Today's episode features an [00:01:00] interview with Miranda Dziekonski, Chief Customer Officer at Swiftly, the first connected transit platform helps transit agencies improve their service, reliability, passenger information, and operational efficiency. Miranda is a ground up builder and leader with a passion for setting up the right teams, systems, processes, and overall infrastructure to take both the team and the company to the next level. In this
episode Miranda discusses the importance of finding your inner voice and advocating for yourself. The benefits of geeking out on standard operating procedures, and the best way to build a CS team from scratch. But before we get into it, here's a brief word from our sponsor.
Don't get stuck waiting on a rigid time intensive build for your customer success software.
Start right away and see immediate value with, Totango. The industry's only composable customer success platform. Enjoy a modular platform that enables easy iteration and optimization [00:02:00] to drive predictable scale up growth. Start for free at Totango.com. And now please enjoy this interview with Miranda Dziekonski, Chief Customer Officer at Swiftly.
Jaime: So Miranda, thank you so much for being here with us today. I wanted. Start out our CS, no BS podcast. By having you tell us a little bit more about your company and what you do, kind of the scope of your
Maranda: Yeah. So first of all, thank you for having me. I love the name of this podcast. I thought it was genius when I saw it.
Yeah. So I'm the chief customer officer at Swiftly and under my scope, I have implement. Uh, which is everything from change management training, uh, ingesting data feeds all of that fun stuff. The customer success management, which everyone here probably knows what it is. If they're listening to this podcast, I also have CS operations and tech support all under my purview.
Swiftly is a connected transit platform. [00:03:00] So, what we do is ingest multiple data feeds to provide real time passenger analytics for folks that are taking public transit or the behind the scenes analytics for the folks that work in the agencies. And they're trying to make decisions about, you know, where to add service or where to, to cut run times and all of those fun.
Jaime: which are your customers, are your customers, the transit agencies and the people putting on the actual, um, transportation services or your customers, the users who are actually trying to figure out, you know, what the situation is status.
Maranda: Yeah, no, that's a really good question. Our customers are the folks at the agency, not the writers.
However, as we all are, we, we know that we're ultimately serving the folks that ride the bus, but the, the individuals we talk to every day, they're at the transit agency. Can you give
Jaime: us a sense for the kind of the scope scope, maybe the scope of the organization, the scope of the number of CU of agencies you're working with some way of sizing it.
Maranda: Yeah. So, um, [00:04:00] we are working with, well over 125 transit agencies now, uh, we are in, I think we're in. Six countries, five, six countries. Uh, and we work with agencies as large as like Los Angeles, Metro, which is, I think number two in the us to as small as Avalon transit, which runs the shuttle around, uh, Catalina island so we have everything in between.
Um, but the majority of our accounts are at the higher end. So it's a lot of B to B enterprise white glove type of customer. Which is interesting because I've also had the, you know, one to many before and all of that at other other companies that I've worked.
Jaime: Right. Exactly. So how did your first job in customer success prepare you for this career in the field?
And in fact, what was your first job?
Maranda: Yeah, so my first job in what I would consider a real customer success role was at a company named [00:05:00] lion Del Bael, where I actually managed a portfolio. Uh, so I managed a portfolio of accounts and making sure that they were set up for success and. Pre SAS. So pre you know, the pre SAS world, we didn't quite know then that what we were doing was customer success.
But now looking back is a hundred percent customer success. I worked in a pretty, you know, high pressure, high dollar. Uh, kind of environment. We were serving, you know, folks in the automotive industry and it's, it's a pretty, it's a pretty cutthroat industry. So how that really prepared me. One, I started out at a very large organization.
We had probably 30 plus thousand employees globally. So we had resources available to us to do training or participate in things. ISO auditing. So I did internal ISO auditing at one point. And having access to all of that helped me [00:06:00] think in a way that has served me throughout my career. So very operations focused process driven, but also understanding that relationships matter, especially in the B2B enterprise sector relationships matter and making sure that customers are achieving value in their investment.
All of that matters, uh, . Yeah. So I think having that, you know, big company. Motion right at the beginning of my career, really set me up throughout the life of my career, because then I switched and joined small startups and I was able to bring those experiences with me and figure out what do we need to be successful now at this smaller startup?
And what do we need to be successful a year from now? And kind of fill in the gaps, leveraging that experience. Right.
Jaime: So it sounds like you're what you're saying is that at the big company you had access to training, whether that was maybe like on the job training, you just like watching [00:07:00] other people kind of seeing what they're doing, picking up tips and tricks, or even probably more formal training.
It sounds like
Maranda: all of it. It was all of it. It was on the job training, formal training. It was, you know, shadowing. It was being able to go out in the field and meet with customers, watching how folks that were 20, 30 years my senior manage these relationships and how they, how they adapted to sticky situ.
Okay.
Jaime: So, yeah. So you started at this larger company, 30,000 people, you got access to all this training, even though it wasn't called customer success, you were saying at the time it definitely was customer success. So what makes you feel like that? What made it, what made it customer success? Say from what, at that time, of course we all called things like that.
Maybe account
Maranda: management. . Yeah, so there, there wasn't a sales component. So to be clear, I didn't have a sales component. And when I hear account management, I do think a little bit more on the sales side of folks that have, you know, goals [00:08:00] around expansion or upsells. And of course that's true in a subscription model, but this was, I had a.
Portfolio of accounts that were my responsibility. It was my responsibility to make sure that they had the product that they needed when they needed it, that we were, you know, achieving their goals in our partnership and our relationship. And it was very high stakes. So I'll give you an example. Um, if you know, my customers all serve the automotive industry and if we were to shut down, GM.
If we were to shut their line down from any kind of mistake that was made, either on my part or the molder part or whatever, it is $4,000 a minute. So when I say high stakes, that's what I mean, you know, that could bankrupt a company. Um, so I had to really manage this portfolio and know the ins and the outs and the goals and all the little nuances about the individuals I was working [00:09:00] with.
And. I learned that when I was talking to Bob and Bob mentioned to me that their grandchild had a tee-ball game, they were going to this weekend. I would jot that note down. And then when I talked to Bob again, next week, ask them, how did the tee-ball game go? Right. So not only did I need to be on my game with all of the day to day ins and outs and managing that portfolio, I also took it up a level and made sure that.
I was their professional partner. Um, they knew that they could rely upon me to keep their operations functioning and that gave my company a good name.
Jaime: Awesome. Okay. So now switching gears to where we are today, obviously here you are the CCO of a technical, uh, technology company and, um, You have a completely different perspective on things I think at this time.
So yeah. Thinking about it now, when you launch a customer success initiative for Swiftly, what's the first step you take?
Maranda: Yeah. So the first step I take when I launch any [00:10:00] CS initiative and here at Swiftly as well was understanding where do we need to be as a team and as a company in a. And what's the ideal customer journey to get us there.
So backing into it that way. Um, so for example, when I came into Swiftly the customer success team, they did everything. They're doing support and there, it was a very small team. I think we had three or four individuals at that time. They were doing everything from support. Uh, to managing the relationships to the implementation motion and renewals motion.
All of it was within a core group of a few people which worked okay because that's, you know, that's where the company was and that's how big they were. And that was. That was right for the time. But I knew that a year from then we were going to be doubling and we were gonna double our customer count and that the customers were going to need different things because we were moving up market.
The customers were going to need different [00:11:00] things, order to make them successful. There was going, we were going to need more change management. I needed the team to be able to be more proactive and manage the relationships, be able to collect. Customer goals and drive outcomes to those goals and have the motion of doing an executive business review, put in place, all of these things.
So understanding the company needs to be here. We are here, let's pepper in the customer journey and create our goals quarter by quarter to get us to where we need to be in a year. And then do that again for the following year and then the following year. And you create that motion and that's how. Built out customer success and peeled off all the various areas of specialization.
Um, so the first area we peeled off was the implementation team. The implementations at Swiftly are very technical. We're ingesting multiple data feeds. We have to do data validation and so on and so forth. Lot of change management implementations can take anywhere from three to six months and sometimes more so specialize in that [00:12:00] immediately freed the CSMs up to be able to.
Be very focused on their overall portfolio. The next thing we weren't getting a ton of tickets for support. Um, so it didn't make sense at that moment to put in a tech support layer, just wasn't a need. Um, but now that need started rising, uh, we, our product became more and more technical over the last.
Couple of years. So we put in the tech support motion, uh, and then, you know, we've now peeled off the CS operations function. I've always been the, uh, the CS tool engineer. I would do it in my spare time at night while I watch 90 day fiance or whatever other garbage TV I have on. And. Now we're at the point where that doesn't scale anymore.
So we put in our first, uh, CS operations person earlier this year and have them manage the tools, the reporting, and all of those things that I need to be able to help me make the data driven decisions, but it all starts with where do we need to [00:13:00] be? You have your, your guiding beacon and then where are we now?
And now what's the roadmap we need to put in. Thinking about what does the customer need? What does the business need and what does the team need? And you balance it out throughout the journey.
Jaime: And how does the team do with that? So, for example, you know, when you, Mar you mentioned when you first started at Swiftly, you had a small team, three or four people.
Now you have specialization, you've got tech support moving over here, CS ops, moving over here, uh, implementation over here. Folks who are probably, you know, somewhere earlier in their career, some are later in their career as this is all evolving, what's happening with the. Yeah.
Maranda: So one of the things I like to do, and I, I mean, at every organization I've been at, I'm not saying I'm perfect.
You know, I've learned a lot over the years, but you know, at lending club, I took the team from about five individuals to 70 in my organization at hello sign, very similar. I had. Just a couple of individuals. And then I had 20, [00:14:00] like, it felt like overnight. Um, and we we're on the same journey here and I just, I called those three out.
There were quite a few other companies in there, but those are the ones where I really hit mass scale. I wanna make sure that. everybody feels like they're part of the change and that change just isn't happening to them. I also recognize sometimes you have to move quick and you have to make decisions and you have to stand behind those decisions.
So I try to balance out the two of figuring out who needs to be in the room. And when you're only a, a team of like three or four that's. Everyone. But when you're a team of, you know, 20, you can't manage by consensus. Sometimes you have to, you know, bring in the key stakeholders over each of the departments and you all brainstorm out what the ideal state is.
And then we bring everybody along and look, the reality is, and this is the hardest thing about a startup is sometimes you do have folks that leave along the way, because the next part of that journey isn't for them. that's okay. I think also recognizing [00:15:00] that if you're building out a CS team or a CS org, that you will have folks that fall out along the way, as long as they're falling out and leaving for the right reasons and not the wrong reasons, then I think that's fine.
But if they're not, then you have to really look at how you're bringing folks along on that change management journey. So other things that are happening with the team though, more tactical and practically speaking is a lot of white boarding, a lot of, you know, in zoom now, now because we don't, you know, whiteboard as much together anymore, but a lot of zoom sessions where we think through.
You know, blue sky, what do we need to be successful? If resources weren't a problem. And then, okay, now resources are a problem. What do we absolutely need to do to be able to scale? But lots of those types of conversations, lots of leveling up identifying what skill sets are we missing and do we need to hire for these skill sets?
Or is this something we can, you know, we can train there's a lot of those [00:16:00] types of things going on and last. Career planning, career growth, career planning, career mapping. I'm a big advocate for, you know, promoting internally as often as you can. Um, I think a lot of folks, uh, you know, appreciate having a vision for themselves over the next six months to a year to understand what is next for them.
Uh, so there's also layering that component in showing the team like we may add. These two teams in the next year. Um, and if this is something you're interested in, raise your hand. I can't guarantee. It'll be for you, but at least between now and then you can start building out those skill sets to make yourself a candidate for that kind of opportunity if it comes up.
Jaime: And I think that's one of the open questions, right? People ask us this kind of stuff all the time. How do I grow my career? I really believe in customer success. I wanna be in customer success and you know, I just don't know. Continue to move my career forward. Do [00:17:00] I have to just continually go out there and move company to company to get the next job?
Or what is it I should be doing to grow my.
Maranda: well, first and foremost, I think people do themselves a tremendous disservice for, for not, uh, from not finding their internal voice and advocating for themselves. There's never a guarantee. And I always say this to everyone. Like there's never a guarantee that opening up and advocating that you want to move to.
That next level will result in that. But if you don't open up and advocate for yourself with your manager, they won't. They won't know that you're interested in being a senior CSM or a director over a customer success or so on and so forth. I think a lot of folks, and I know this to be true based on conversations I have.
They're fearful of doing that. Um, they're afraid that's gonna put their, their job at jeopardy for whatever reason. And then they end up leaving and going somewhere else to achieve that [00:18:00] next level title. So that's one is advocate for yourself. Two is also like, look at yourself through a realistic lens.
That can be very hard for folks to do, but. Ask for a career kind of development or matrix that shows you, this is what a CSM looks like. This is what a senior CSM looks like. This is what a strategic CSM looks like and so on and so forth. Read it through, do a strong self-assessment understand where you are in that matrix and understand and recognize your gaps.
Then partner with your manager to figure out how to fill those gaps in. I. You know, Jamie, you and I talked a little bit earlier, but I think there is a lot of people kind of skipping a few steps and then not really doing the reflections that they should to see where they really are in their career. Um, and they do themselves a tremendous disservice by trying to skip those steps.
Jaime: Yeah, I [00:19:00] think that the question is really about trying to figure out what skills you have and what skills you need. You know, what skills you need tomorrow to be successful in this next job. And then what skills do you wanna develop kind of for the long term, so you can continue to move your career forward on this nice, uh, on this kind of nice trajectory.
And it's interesting. I think also because many of us. Yeah, I think yet, you know, I look back to myself when I was 22 years and years ago. And if you ask me, okay, you know, what do you wanna do in your li with your life? I don't know that I would've known all the answers, but I could just say that, you know, okay, this looks like an interesting path to be on for the next five years, the next 10 years or whatever.
And many of those skills I think are super transferable, right? Communication skill, or a sales skill, or, you know, whatever negotiating skills, whatever the skills are that you're trying to develop. And it's interesting too Miranda, because you were mentioning your large company background at the beginning, but it sounds like, you know, you really found yourself in a great place to develop some of those
Maranda: skills.[00:20:00]
Absolutely. And you know, I don't want to say you can't develop them in a small environment either. You, you can, it's just, you know, let's be. Smaller startups do not have as much money or as resources available to do those types of investments that larger organizations have. Um, which is just the truth.
However, smaller startups, you know, where people can really thrive is they can go in and put their name on more than one thing. Really make an impact there as well. So it's just a different kind of trade. Um, and I learned that really early on when I joined my first startup and I'm like, okay, where is the Wiki?
And they're like the, what I'm like, where do we put our standard operating procedures? And everybody looked at me and they're like, what's a standard operating procedure and I'm not, I'm not kidding. And I'm like, wow, this is amazing. I could sit and write standard operating [00:21:00] procedures and. All of us get on the same page and create efficiencies and make sure that everybody knows what they need to do when they need to do it.
And I just geeked out on that, right. Of creating like this process with everyone and getting us all on the same page and it made a huge impact. That's the kind of stuff that you can do in smaller companies that in larger organizations, if you want to make a change to a standard operating procedure, it could be a four month process.
Because your various certifications that you have with ISO and whatever requires you to jump through hoops, to be able to get something updated. Right? So there are pros and cons to both worlds in that regard.
Jaime: Exactly. Exactly. So let's go back to kind of your experience building CS teams. Cause I know a lot of people listening are facing that, right.
It's pretty tough to hire these days. And there's lots of folks who, uh, lots of, you know, CS, job descriptions and CS job postings out there and all of this. So what advice do you have for our listeners before they [00:22:00] start building their team? You know, how what's, what should they think about? How should they approach
Maranda: this?
Well, one. Depends. That's the age old answer to everything in customer success. It depends. Um, so first, if I'm a leader going in and I'm building out CS from scratch, I'm gonna wanna understand what type of CS do I need to build out in order to be able to enable and empower my customers and my teams to be successful, and then drive a successful business.
right. So I urge folks to stop going out, Googling and trying to plug and play stuff. I see it happening a lot and you're hurting yourself. Yes. Some of the things may work, but the reality is, is businesses are unique and require different types. Of, you know, require different types of activities to solve the problems you're trying to solve.
So one, once you get that understanding of what type of customer success, [00:23:00] I like to center myself with some problem statements. So what are the problems that. I have right now that I need to solve. And I would probably grab a few team members, maybe, you know, if I report to the CEO, I would get their problem statements.
I would get all of the other executives that I need to link arm with arms with, get their problem statements, aggregate my team's problem statements, and then take a holistic look at the problem statements. And what are the prevailing themes? If there are any, then I would, you know, again, Create like a point in time and say, buy a year from today or six months from today, these are the problem statements we're gonna solve.
And we're gonna solve this group of problem statements in the following and so on and so forth. I use an OKR methodology to objectives, key results, map it all out. and we create the, um, key results that we wanna see and then the activities we're going to do in each quarter in order to help solve those problem statements.
I look at 'em [00:24:00] again, quarter after quarter to see, did the problem statements change? Are they, you know, still relevant? Do we have new problem statements that we wanna add? What's changed with our customer base. Are we moving up market? Are we maybe doubling down on a freemium model? You know, things change a lot, especially.
Companies that are moving to scale. So again, looking at the problem statements and seeing are we solving for the right things still on top of that, I usually put in the KPI level and have a weekly look at where are my KPIs, because data tells me. It tells a story. He doesn't tell the full story, but I like to be very data driven in my decision making.
So making sure I have the KPIs that mirror with the problem statements that tell me the story of are the activities we doing, doing the right activities to help positively impact those KPIs. I will call out one other. Is, if you have, you know, [00:25:00] KPIs or problem statements that are heavily leaning towards the business side or heavily leaning towards the customer side, make sure you have counter measurements in place to look to make sure you're not impacting the other side negatively.
Uh, an example of that would be, let's say we want to really expand our net retention. Um, so we're gonna double down on expansion and growth and figure out how we can, you know, just expand the overall revenue, good counter measure if you're doing that. And that means you're, you know, probably uptick your marketing drip campaigns, and you have your customer success manager strategically thinking about how to get into other parts of the organization.
A really good way to have a counter measurement. There is looking at sentiment, measure, sentiment, measure. And making sure that you're not losing your customers along the way by overburdening them with a lot of marketing drip campaigns or turning your customer success team into [00:26:00] a sales machine. Right.
So you kind of balance it all out, just so you get the full picture.
Jaime: Yeah, totally. The thing I guess I hear from you is, um, one of a change in iteration, right? And I mean, it's kind of thematic in many of the things that you're mentioning here, because you know, you're saying, oh, well, things may change. You may move to a freemium model or you may move over to a more high touch model or you may have, you decide, you wanna go for more expansion, right.
Things are kind of constantly changing. Yeah. And so I guess that's that the other thing I would say is too, is that, you know, you just wanna make sure you're in a position to constantly iterate, really looking at that data, learning from the data and then making the changes that are necessary to your overall CS program.
Because I think one thing that is, um, you know, just so constant is that the fact that you've gotta continually iterate to hit those results, that net revenue retention and so forth, which is, you know, it's quite challenging as we all
Maranda: know. absolutely. And you're right. It is change. If anything, the prevailing theme and everything I [00:27:00] do.
And the constant, if anything is constant . So, yeah, I think where new CS leaders fall short or even seasoned CS leaders fall short is when they rest on their laurels and forget to be constantly looking at, you know, what needs to be updated and what needs to be changed, just because something. Was, you know, got something work to get you to where you are today.
Doesn't mean it's going to get you to where you need to be tomorrow. And that's something that I always have to remind myself. And I'm sure other CS folks that are listening to this have to remind themselves that, you know, if you are in a rapidly growing organization, building CS, you cannot do that. You have to be always looking at the full motion and iterating and iterating and figuring out a way to level.
Jaime: Yeah, totally. And I guess it can be overwhelming, can't it? Because you know, the question is where do you wanna really focus within the journey, right? Because you could be focusing on, okay, I'm gonna iterate against every single [00:28:00] aspect or I'm gonna pick out one particular area of focus, you know, how do you decide what to iterate
Maranda: against?
Yeah. So here's another thing. If you're iterating on too much all at once, uh, you won't. What change you made, caused the success you're having, or the downfall that you're having. Um, so being very deliberate about what you are iterating on and figuring out what is the most important and urgent thing right now that I can do to help the business, the team and the customer, and being very clear about it.
You don't wanna create. Chaos. You don't wanna create a frustration in your team, but you also don't want to have things become static, outdated and so on and so forth, but just be deliberate. Um, don't go out and spray and pray or try to boil the ocean. And that's why I like the. OKR methodology. It helps you, you know, set up, this is my roadmap for the next three months, and [00:29:00] we're going to do these, you know, three things.
And these are the activities that feed these things. And every week my team updates where they are, you know, with these things. And we're talking about them on a regular cadence and figuring out are these still the right things? And then the next quarter doing the same thing again and again, and it helps keep everybody focused, but also helps everybody move quickly and make changes.
If things become, you know, if, if the things that you're working towards are no longer relevant, which happens all the time.
Jaime: Yes, exactly. Okay. So let's talk about challenges, right? Because this is like CS, no BS. So everyone wants to know. Okay. What are some of the biggest challenges you face? So I would say if you just reflecting on your long and very illustrious career in customer success, what do you think was one of the biggest CS challenges you had to solve?
And, you know, maybe tell us a little bit more what it was, and then, you know, some of the learning.
Maranda: So one of the [00:30:00] biggest CS challenges I've had to solve. Okay. So I was working at a company named paired it's my, my friend's company, uh, high will, if you're listening and he did on demand workforce placement for restaurants, I.
You know, found myself to where I, I, you know, him and I wanted to work together and, you know, I had been kind of loosely advising him behind the scenes. And when I became available on the market, after the company, that I was a COO of, you know, failed, he's like, why don't you come in and build out customer success here?
This is an interesting thing because it was on demand workforce placements for restaurants. Okay. And. In order for customer success to be successful, you have to have customers who partake in the journey in most instances, right? There's a lot you can do with technology and [00:31:00] driving. You know, this digital touch tech.
Touch, whatever motion through the tool, but the ki kind of customer success that he envisioned to be built was that of having CSMs manage these relationships with these restaurant owners and these catering companies and driving more revenue. And what we soon found was restaurant owners don't care about customer success, restaurant owners.
Don't want somebody managing their portfolio or their account. They just wanted, when they went in and used their tool. And they put in there that they wanted someone to show up, to wash their dishes because their dishwasher just called in sick. They wanted that person to come and we did so many different things trying to figure out.
Like, how can we like really manage these portfolios? And we were trying to put this them into like a, B to [00:32:00] B kind of enterprise motion and it didn't work. And I will say this on this podcast. It is no secret. I went in, uh, after a year and looked at will and said, you pay me way too much money for what you're having me do.
you can use technology to drive this engagement and you just need a manager of customer support so, and he said it was the first time anybody had ever said that to him. So the, the, the learning there that folks should take away is if you're out there building out customer success, make sure you're building out the right motion.
Don't just stick to a vision that somebody maybe. Like really look at it and say, what do the customers need in order to be successful? And they may not need that high touch motion. You may be able to solve your customer success [00:33:00] needs by just, you know, having the right drip campaigns or the right organic outreach through your tools or your apps or whatever.
Um, so don't try to put a square peg in a
round.
Jaime: Have you at this point built out. I think that's awesome. And a great story. And, um, I wonder if you could do it all over again, what would you do differently? Yeah, if I
Maranda: could do it all over again, what I would do differently is one. I think I would've started, uh, one, I, I, would've probably interviewed more restaurant owners right away.
I went into the data. I was looking at the data and I was looking at the, you know, stickiness and usage rate. And I did all kinds of analysis on how much extra potential revenue we could get. If we could get, you know, this percentage of restaurant owners to log in X more times and use us X more times, this could be, you know, a revenue bump.
And I had it all modeled out. I should have started immediately with [00:34:00] segmentation and looking. What does, why, why are, why is catering so different from restaurants? Why are smaller restaurants very different from restaurant groups? Like there was this own, they had their own unique set of problems they were trying to solve, and they didn't wanna CSM to tell them how to do it.
I would've started with the human side of it first and then dug in on the. Yeah,
Jaime: super interesting. And, um, would you have spent so much time? I wonder probably, huh?
Maranda: I probably would've just done it as a consulting gig and not that I, you know, I, I know paired people are gonna listen to this. Um, I'm sure I love them all dearly and I always, I love the time that I spent with them, but they did not need.
They needed, they needed more marketing. They needed more, you know, customer support. I hate to say this, but they didn't need somebody who was, who was as focused on [00:35:00] customer success as a practice. , I don't mean it as a motion, but as a practice, as I was
Jaime: mm-hmm interesting, you know, it's so true because even, um, I, from the customers we work with, I would say even, uh, within the segments, there can be such differentiation, right?
Some who are perfectly happy with being managed. Completely digitally and others who do require some human element. Right? Exactly. And, and to the point we were saying before on the iteration, it is about understanding what they need iterating against that, making sure you're building out that those engagement models and putting your, uh, your, um, use cases and everything together in such a way that you really understand what you're trying to achieve with each one of them.
And each, I guess, each segment, which is super interesting. Okay. At Swiftly then kind of coming back to Swiftly as the first connected transit plat platform. What was the biggest challenge you were trying to solve at Swiftly when you first joined?
Maranda: Yeah. So getting my team used [00:36:00] to the customer success motion, we.
Had a group of individuals, none of 'em had really done, I think maybe one had done CS before, but everybody else came from transit. So they were very intelligent individuals that, you know, were planners and schedulers and, you know, really running cities and are so passionate about the mission of the company that they joined.
And I, it was getting those baseline things down to where everybody understood why ROI is so important. Especially when you're dealing with government contracts and line items that are decided six months be in advance before the, you know, account is even up for renewal. Right? Why is that important?
Because of the RFPs that we have to write responses to and making sure that we have enough. You know, use cases spelled out to show the value that, you know, customers and transit agencies have gotten from our [00:37:00] product. So really the full customer success motion of thinking about it from implementations and the change management that we needed to do, to be able to get stickiness, especially with.
Customers that have users who've been there for 20, 30 years. So it was a very big change management order. And then moving into the adoption and adoption phase of figuring out, you know, what are the key activities and things we need to do here around collecting goals and having the right calls and talking to the right individuals and expanding to the right areas to showing.
The successes that we've had together, making our key stakeholders look like rock stars in front of their executives. Uh, and then making sure we secure the budget and the renewals we've been very fortunate ended in 20, 20 to 116% in that retention during a big time of downturn. And yeah, in the last two years it was, I think we were at like 1 0 7 last year.
We're at one 10 this year. [00:38:00] Um, so. Customer success. Motion is really strong and we're continuing to iterate on it. But the biggest thing was really getting us all on the same page about what customer success is, why it's important and how it can be impactful to the industry. And
Jaime: were for you at Swiftly doing all this.
Were there any moments you were like, you had like an oh shit moment. Like, oh my God, this is not gonna work. What am I gonna.
Maranda: You know, no, actually, I, I, I wish I had some kind of like no BS CS moment here. Um, no, because the individuals that I was working with are awesome and very intelligent and want to make an impact in this industry.
And because they knew the ins and outs and transit is complex, it is so complex. They knew the ins and outs of. The agency, they know the ins and outs of the agency. So that part we didn't have to worry about. It was the [00:39:00] CS motion and anyone who can really grasp the ins and outs of the agency and do so at the level these folks have to do.
I knew they would get it and they did, and they do.
Jaime: So when you guys hire swift, do you hire people who are coming from industry? So from transit or you, are you hiring people who are coming from customer success? How do you think about that? Trade off?
Maranda: Yeah, both actually. So, you know, what I talk to my director about is take a look around at the team and the skill sets that we have and the skill sets that we're missing, that we're gonna need over the next six months to a year.
And then as we hire, we try to fill in those. So we hire both from transit and enterprise level CSMs. So it's, it's both things that we're doing. Um, I like to make sure that we're balanced out though, and we don't have folks that are all one way or the other, because then, you know, it's, it's harder to learn from each other when you hire people that are the exact same profile again and again.
So we like to balance.
Jaime: Yeah, I think that makes tons of sense. [00:40:00] Okay. So if you had to boil down CS to kind of three key must dos for others, what would they be?
Maranda: Okay, must do number one. If you are building out CS or getting started in CS, understand your business levers right away. So know what those numbers mean and what are the levers that you have available to you?
Either, either as a leader or a practitioner to move. That's thing, one thing, two, really understand your customers, know what they need when they need it, how they need it. And don't assume that they need it the way you think they do, because that's the way you've done it before. Thing, number three is be vocal and advocate for yourself, but do so in a way that is beneficial to you and those around.
So there is ways that folks can try to advocate for themselves and it not go as well. So make sure you learn how to [00:41:00] advocate for yourself in a way that is beneficial for your career, your journey, and all those around you as well.
Jaime: Okay. Great. And let's see a couple more quick things before we wrap up.
What's something you've read, watched or listened to recently that you can't let go.
Maranda: Yeah. Um, so I am really loving Wayne. I'm gonna mess his last name up Wayne, his seven pillars of customer success. And it was a great book and I, I couldn't put it down. I devoured it. Um, so I highly suggest that for everyone that's in customer.
Jaime: okay. I think Wayne is a Totango customer over at WalkMe. Yes. If I remember correctly. Yes, I think so. Okay. I'm gonna definitely read that book. Thank you. What advice would you give to someone starting out in your role today?
Maranda: Um, take a deep breath, just like I did, uh, go in with a curious mindset and really learn and understand the journey that the [00:42:00] company has been on up until now.
So respect history, understand the various things that have been done and why they've been done before you go in and start ripping in and replacing. I think it's key. Um, I've seen a lot of leaders just go in and start ripping things apart and replacing things before they understand. And it, it hurts them in the long
Jaime: run.
Right. And I guess the other thing is that, that, uh, that iteration as well there, because the thing is that if you rip everything else out, you might not be iterating. You know, you don't know, you know, what happened exactly before you got there. Exactly. So it's interesting. Yeah. Okay. And if you weren't working at your current company or in Ts at all, what would you be doing?
Maranda: Well, I'm just getting over, uh, having my second broken foot in a year and a half. But prior to that, you would find me in the Hills here in San Francisco bay area, hiking by myself with a great audio book on just, you know, trudging through doing, you know, my five mile hikes every weekend. So.
Jaime: Okay, well, take care of yourself.
Thank you. Don't get distracted hiking with the audio [00:43:00] book.
Maranda: thank you, Jamie. That's it for this week's episode of CS, no BS with your host, Jamie Berta. If you enjoy today's episode, please leave a rating or review and tell a friend. This podcast was created by the team at to Totango design and run best in class customer.
With no code visual software that delivers immediate value, easy iteration and optimization and predictable scale up growth. Join over 5,000 customers from startups to fast growing enterprises. Using the industry's only composable customer success platform. Start for free, at Totango.com.[00:44:00]