In this episode, Morgan Courtney, Director of Customer Success at Taskrabbit, discusses working from a place of empathy, the methodology behind her recruitment mindset, and the importance of “dogfooding.”
Today’s episode features an interview with Morgan Courtney, Director of Customer Success at Taskrabbit. Taskrabbit is a marketplace platform that makes the neighborhood a little more familiar by conveniently connecting people with Taskers to handle everyday home to-do’s.
With expertise that includes strategy and program planning, customer success, behavioral science, product operations, community engagement, and so much more, Morgan enjoys building strategies for long-term goals and developing paths to get there—using operational, product, brand, and community approaches.
In this episode, Morgan discusses working from a place of empathy, the methodology behind her recruitment mindset, and the importance of “dogfooding.”
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“Customer success is really an art and a science. You're working with people, and people are unpredictable. So it's really good to understand people and get close to people so that you can try to figure out, okay, how will messages be received? What is the best way to communicate? What is the most effective way to communicate? How do you frame a message? When and where do you reach people? So all of those things are really critical.” - Morgan Courtney
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**(04:21) - The Taskrabbit model
**(05:30) - Morgan’s journey
**(14:27) - Biggest Obstacles
**(23:32) - Morgan’s recruiting mindset
**(35:44) - Quick Hits
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Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn
Connect with Morgan on LinkedIn
Morgan: Customer success is really an art and a science. You're working with people and people are unpredictable, , so it's really good to understand people and get close to people so that you can try to figure out, okay, how, how will messages be received? What is the best way to communicate? What is the most effective way to communicate?
How do you frame a message? When and where do you reach people? All of those things are really critical.
Narrator: 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 interview with Morgan Courtney, director of Customer Success at Taskrabbit.
Taskrabbit is a marketplace platform that makes the neighborhood a little more familiar. By conveniently connecting people with taskers to handle everyday home to-dos with expertise. That includes strategy and program planning, customer success, behavioral science, product operations, community engagement, and so much more.
Morgan enjoys building strategies for long-term goals and developing paths to get there using operational product, brand and community approaches. In this episode, Morgan discusses working from a place of. The methodology behind our recruitment mindset and the importance of dog fooding. 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 customers success software. Start right away and see immediate value with Totango. The industry's only composable customer success platform. Enjoy a modular platform that. Easy iteration and optimization to drive predictable scale up growth.
Start for free at Totango.com. And now please enjoy this interview with Morgan Courtney, director of Customer Success at Taskrabbit.
Jamie: So Morgan, thanks so much for being. I really appreciate it. You're so awesome for doing this. Tell us a bit about your company.
Morgan: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me, Jamie. It's a real pleasure to be here. Um, Taskrabbit, as you may know, is a dual-sided marketplace in the gig economy. So if you think about. All the things that you might want to get done in and around your home.
You have a long to-do list, whether it's cleaning something or mounting your television or your artwork or assembling your furniture. Um, that's the kind of stuff where clients can go on Taskrabbit. They can take a look at different independent contractors. We call them taskers, uh, who are in their area and at different price points, and they can look at their profiles and, and hire an individual to come and, and do that work for them.
So it really is all about saving you a lot of time so you can basically spend your time on better pursuits, whether it's spending time with your family or doing things that you love. So that's really, that's really Taskrabbit in a nu.
Jamie: Awesome. I love Taskrabbit and I've used you guys many times for many things, particularly packing.
Packing and moving boxes. A couple of my favorite, uh, Taskrabbit items. Okay. So how big is Taskrabbit and how many customers are you working with?
Morgan: Um, Yeah, so it's interesting you asked that question because we have two different kinds of customers, right? We're a dual-sided marketplace, so we are in eight different countries worldwide, and we started here in the United States, and we have tens of thousands of taskers.
That's one kind of customer that we have, and we have hundreds of thousands of clients, and those are the people who come to the platform to try to get something done. And
Jamie: are there any particular types of customers who are coming to the platform or any particular types of taskers? Like do you guys have a segmentation and a, you know, like as we would think of a traditional customer success org?
Morgan: On the customer side, we see a wide variety of people who come to the platform. Um, so they come to the platform because they want to save their marriages, so they hire someone to assemble their furniture for them.
Jamie: got to that one a little late, I guess, ,
Morgan: um, But we have, we have customers who, you know, they can do it themselves, but they don't want to.
We have other people who don't want to do it or don't know how to do certain things. Um, so they hire it out. So we really have customers of all kinds. Um, and then on the tasker side, yeah, we absolutely, we have segmentation, of course, on, on both sides of our marketplace. On the tasker side of our marketplace.
We have some taskers who are, uh, They find some of their work on this platform and some on other platforms. Some, we have a lot of people who are artists and actors and they have all these other pursuits, uh, and they need flexibility in their schedule. And so they come to Taskrabbit to, um, make money to fill in those gaps.
And then we have other people who work basically most of their time, uh, on the Taskrabbit platform. So we have really a wide variety of people, um, and a wide variety of skills on the platform.
Jamie: Okay, so tell us a little bit about your journey, your personal journey, Morgan, and you know how you ended up as the Director of Customer Success at Task.
Morgan: Yeah, I have a weird journey, .
Jamie: Um, tell me
Morgan: more. . I have a very, very strange background. I actually started in, uh, international security and foreign policy. So, um, the beginning of my career was really working in conflict countries, um, trying to understand the roots of conflict and trying to prevent and rebuild after conflict.
So I've worked in a number of different places, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Myan. And others as well in East Africa. So I've been kind of all over the place, but for a while. So I was working in foreign policy and really enjoyed it. But one of the things that I wanted to understand better was what kinds of other tool sets are there.
I love a hard problem so that if there's one. Thread that goes through my entire career is that I love a hard problem. Throw me some really tough ones. Um, so conflict obviously a very tough problem. Yes. Um, , but I wanted to see what are some other hard problems and what are some other tool sets. And so I eventually made my way into tech.
And what I love is the hard problems that we have here at Task Rabbits. When I first came to Taskrabbit, Um, I was running what we called at the time, community operations and what that really means was tasker operations. So one side of the house really thinking about supply. And that has really been true the entire time I've been at Taskrabbit.
We eventually morphed the community operations into tasker operations and eventually into customer success. And so that has been a little bit of my journey, but essentially we were really focus. On a few things when it came to taskers and supply operations, and it was really thinking about how do we activate taskers.
By that I mean, how do we get taskers to go on to do their first task after they come on the platform? How do we ensure they're billing, uh, repeatedly and over time? How do we retain them for the long term? We know that tasker's quality improves the longer they stay on the platform. So what can we do to retain taskers?
How do we work with, um, you know, different levels of quality? How do we provide education to our taskers so they can provide a great service, but also help them to upscale if that's something that they want to do as well on our platform? Um, so these were all questions that we were thinking about. And, uh, a few years ago we actually had, um, a, a new VP of operations who came in and I was talking to him about what we were doing and he said, you know, You know, what you do is actually customer success
And I said, is that right? He's like, yeah, it's a relatively new discipline. Um, but that's exactly what we do. And it's not usually in this context, it's usually in a SaaS context rather than a gig economy context. But all of these things are true. Um, and, and we should think about pursuing. Customer success.
And so we actually transformed our team. We transformed our team from a tasker operations team into a customer success team. And so ultimately, um, now I'm a director of customer success there. Um, and, and really we're focused right now on taskers cuz there's just so much to do on the supply side of our marketplace.
Um, but you know, really it is still supply operations, but it's using customer success as the tool set, um, to do that. And it's been very, very. Great.
Jamie: So I assume two years ago when you guys got started with this, moving from Tasker operations to customer success, you know, it was probably very basic at that level and you know, a couple years, uh, down the road.
Here we are, I'm sure things are very different now. Can you give us an example of, you know, something that you've kind of matured over those that time or started with one thing and here you are doing something else totally different.
Morgan: Well, first of all, . We were pretty differently organized when we first, before we even established ourselves as a customer success team.
So as we established ourselves, we really looked at the tasker journey and thought about what are the highs, what are the lows? What can we do to amplify the highs? What can we do to mitigate the lows? Um, and this was something that we had known about for a long time. As we built out our team, our team became much more, much larger and more robust.
We were able to layer in more and more programs and experiment, um, with different things that we could do to reach taskers and, and try to help them along their journey. So, um, one of the things that we piloted and we've. It was very successful. It's continued to be extremely successful for us. Um, was new Tasker outreach.
So this is really about onboarding and activation, very much a customer success principle. Um, but it's, it's also a supply operation principle too. Um, we wanna make sure that those taskers who join our platform are able to get going. , and it's not necessarily easy for all of 'em. And so we tested out a new program where we did one-on-one coaching calls with individual taskers and talked them through how to use the app, how to optimize their profile so that a client would hire them.
Um, telling them where to find work in their area. Um, other advice that we could give personalized advice and what we saw was that the performance metrics and the activation rates for those people that we reached through that program were significantly. Higher than those people who didn't do the program.
But everything that we did, Jamie at that point was manual. So, you know, we didn't have anything in product to tell Taskers to sign up for this. We didn't have any way of systematizing, triggering emails to get people to sign up. So literally what my team was doing was sending emails multiple times a week out to all new taskers to tell them, Hey, sign up for this.
Call with me. Sign up for this call with me. It was very, very labor intensive. Um, so over time we've optimized that program a lot. Um, it has continued to be extremely successful. And, um, now with Totango software, we have triggered comms that go out, um, once a tasker is on board. So we have, uh, we've actually optimized again since then.
So we have these huge workshops, onboarding work. For new taskers or reaching more task, more new taskers than ever before, um, with some of the basic information about getting started. But then we still have the one-on-one coaching call that comes after that. Um, so essentially they'll do this workshop.
They know how the app works. And then they can still have that high touch call with a tasker Success manager is what we call them on our team, um, who can give them that personalized advice, and we've seen really fantastic results with this. Our activation rate for the people who go through our workshops and our one-on-one coaching calls is 25 percentage points.
Percentage points higher than those who don't, um, which is pretty remarkable. Um, and their performance. So we track all kinds of performance metrics, but their performance metrics are basically 15 to 20 percentage points higher than those who don't. And it's been really helpful for us to have the Totango tool because, um, now we can really tri, we can trigger those coms to people who have done the workshop but haven't.
Uh, the coaching call yet, or they haven't done the workshop and they probably should. Um, so we're reaching more people than ever before, so it's really helping us to improve our metrics across the board with our new taskers. And that's just one of the things that we're doing. So we have a number of other programs for other parts of the journey that we are also running.
Jamie: It's super impressive and I just love the creativity of everything that you guys are doing. What are some of the other metrics that you're really thinking about in terms of the success of the team and how you think about, you know, the work that's being done and whether it's, okay, let's keep going with this, or let's cut that, that type of
Morgan: thing.
Yeah, I mean, I think we, we look at a lot of different things, but Key is really thinking about a few things. We have a million metrics, but one of them is Tasker performance. So for the level of effort that we're putting in, are we seeing that Tasker performance is improving? Um, and when Tasker performance improves, that is real money to our company.
Um, because it means that they're doing more work, they're doing better. Um, and so when taskers are earning money, We as a company are earning money. It's, it is our business model. Um, and so as a result, we, uh, we really take a look and see are they producing more invoices? Are they producing more revenue?
Are they finding work? Are they getting invitations from clients? Um, if they're not, are we helping them to improve? And we are also, of course, measuring all of our programs to make sure. Those people who participate in our programs are in fact doing better than those who don't. So we actually are making a meaningful difference for those taskers.
So it's all really interlinked. I, I like to talk about our team as the revenue engine of the company because really the company is nothing with our taskers. Our taskers are everything. Um, and so we wanna make sure that they feel supported, that they know where the work is, they're getting the right information at the right time, and that's where we come.
So I would say those are probably the, the key things. We have a million metrics that we're tracking, but essentially it all comes down to that how are our taskers performing.
Jamie: Okay. So what do you think is the biggest challenge that you and your team face at Taskrabbit?
Morgan: Yeah, I mean, there's a, there's a lot of challenges.
I said that I love a hard problem. Yeah. . Well, , there's a, there's a lot of hard problems around customer success and the, the biggest things I would say are probably the same as anybody else, or activation and retention. So activation is a really tough problem for us because also the way our. Platform works.
So, um, we, unlike Uber where you go on Uber and you book a ride and someone comes to pick you up and you didn't choose that person, they were dispatched essentially by the app. Um, that's not how our app works. Our app works as you can look on a, you can look on the screen, you can look at different taskers, read their profiles, and then you choose.
And so our taskers actually have to be hired by specific. We're not auto assigning them to go to different, to different tasks. And that means activation is tough because activation is in part, dependent on a client hiring you. So the, some of the tasks that we have as a customer success team is trying to help taskers build their profiles so that they are really, um, interesting and compelling for clients to hire.
And well, that's what we've seen, right? So as I, as I mentioned, we're, we actually see very, very high activation rates, activation rates like 50%, 55%, um, for, for some of these taskers who are, who are talking to us and getting advice from us. Um, so we know I'm having a meaningful impact there. But how do we do that even more?
How do we reach even more taskers? How do we help even more people activate? Um, activation's always a big issue. So that's the first one. The second one is retention. Um, and retention is kind of woven into everything that we do. Basically, it comes down to. are taskers earning money. So the, the fundamental reason why any tasker is on our platform is to earn money, right?
If they're not earning money, they're gonna leave like full stop. Uh, so how can we help them earn money but also earn money reliably? And that's tough. So just as I mentioned, um, the way there are platform works, you have to be hired by a. We can't just auto assign you work. Um, and so it really is about trying to help these taskers understand where the work is, when the work is and what categories.
And by that I mean, you know, moving versus mounting versus packing as you were talking about earlier, versus. Cleaning, you know, what are those things that are popular in your local area? And really try to help taskers understand so they can make, they can hit their earnings goals reliably and over time.
And we believe that if they do that, they're much more likely to retain. Super interesting. So
Jamie: I guess, you know, we talked about retention, we talked about activations being challenges. What advice would you give to somebody else who's facing those same challenges? Right. And I think as we talked about some of the customer success principles that you guys are applying here, really they applied at any company that has like any kind of recurring revenue business.
So, you
Morgan: know, what would you. I mean, I would say to get closer to the customer. Um, I think that that is the absolute first thing to do, is to really understand your customer journey. Um, really understand what do they need, um, what do they need to operate effectively? How can you get that information to them when and where they need it?
So I think all of those things are absolutely critical. Um, the other thing I, I often talk about is something that in the tech industry we call dog fooding, which is one of my very favorite terms, . Um, but it really is about building empathy with your customer. So, you know, for for us, it's, it's using your, you know, it's eating your own dog food is where that comes from.
Using your own product. Um, use your products, you can understand and all. At Taskrabbit sign up to be taskers ourselves because then we really understand the highs and lows of signing up to be a tasker. We have a lot of people who go on to task as well, and it's really good for them to see what you know, what are the different anxieties and and questions that come up for a tasker as they go to their first task as an example.
It's really helpful for us. And then we of course use it on the, on the customer, on the client side as well, booking taskers. Um, and all of those things are really critical because when you work that into like what is the product, what are the problems? So for example, activation, retention, or what I was talking about earlier, you know, it's really critical to understand what are the different barriers, um, how are those barriers also perceived from that human perspective.
Um, one of the things I often talk about too, with our team, Is that, uh, customer success is really an art and a science. Um, you're working with people. and people are unpredictable . So it's really good to understand people and get close to people so that you can try to figure out, okay, how, how will messages be received?
What is the best way to, um, to communicate? What is the most effective way to communicate? How do you frame a message? Um, when and where do you reach people? So all of those things are really critical. I.
Jamie: Yeah, it's just so, um, interesting to see everything you guys are doing and you're so articulate and impressive.
I think even your background working in like, you know, foreign policy and like conflict locations and everything. So very
Morgan: weird. I'm very weird. . No, you're super
Jamie: interesting. So I would say then what mistakes have you made along the way? What could our other listeners
Morgan: learn? Yeah. You know, I was, I, I was thinking about, you know, what, what are some things that we, we have done?
I like to say, so we have, we made mistakes. Absolutely. One of the things I make sure we reinforce with the team is that we are very much a testing and learning team. I try to encourage failure. I mean, we don't want spectacular, huge scale failures. Obviously the, it's all about failing. Small and failing forward, right?
Um, but if you're not failing, you're not learning. And so it really is all about testing and learning and changing. And so we've learned a lot about how we message people. We use a lot of behavioral economics to inform how we frame our messages. And we've tested a lot of things, you know, from subject lines to content, et cetera.
Um, but you know, some of the other things we've learned are . You know, basically we had not, this is a, this is a big learning for us. We didn't realize how popular our offerings would be with taskers. Um, so I'll give you a funny example. Funny, it was painful for a little bit, but very funny, in the end. . Um, so I mentioned to you earlier we've been manually inviting Taskers to participate in our program.
So I was talking about our new Tasker coaching calls before. We have another program we call business checks, and business checks are for taskers who've made a certain amount of money in their lifetime on the platform. And so they, they're, they're tenured, they know how the app works, but they really want more information.
They still probably need some help optimizing their profiles, um, online. And, uh, and we had been sending out these emails couple times a week saying, Hey, sign up for a one-on-one business. Check with us. It's a phone call. It's free. Like, come talk to us. We'll help you, you can make more money. All of these things.
And we had really, frankly speaking, mediocre signups. Um, and then we, uh, we launched triggered communications once we had Totango and we expected the same thing. So we basically just set it up and let it run and just. Sent an email out to everybody who was in that cohort that's eligible for for business checks, and we really thought it would just be kind of still the drip, drip, drip.
Oh my gosh, Jamie, we had a tsunami of interest . All of my tasker success managers were like, whoa. Like, oh my gosh, my, I'm full from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM with phone calls with people who want business checks. I mean, we hadn't even realized, um, and it was, it was, you know, a little bit stressful for a couple of weeks, but it was a good kind of stress, right?
I mean, this is where we, we just hadn't been reaching people in the right way. And once we did and systematically, um, it was really just fantastic for us. Right. It was great to see. There was actually so much interest where we thought there wasn't, I mean, Tru. It was one of those things where we said, okay, we're gonna test it out and this is part of our iteration.
Like, do we continue this? And the answer was a resounding, absolutely. This was very, very popular. Um, so, you know, what was our learning from that we now learned? Okay, when we roll out something new that's a triggered calm, we're doing it in stages that we don't overwhelm our TSMs. Um, but it was, uh, it was a great learning.
Jamie: Yeah, a great problem to have, right? Too much success.
Morgan: High class problem.
Jamie: Yes. Awesome. Love that one. Okay, good. So let's talk about recruiting on your team. You know, bringing in those tasker success managers or task, I think you call 'em Tasker, success managers, TSMs. Many other people are looking for CSMs, but you know, everybody kind of is looking for the same types of things, um, and obvious.
Challenging these days to hire people, even with the layoffs, because you know, it's oftentimes that you know, difficult to find people with the right skills. So what are you really looking for? You know, when you think about recruiting onto your team, what skills or experiences are you
Morgan: prioritizing?
Ultimately, what I say to everyone is it's always, I'm recruiting for attitude and aptitude. So I'm one of those people who really feels like everything, almost everything is teachable. What's not as teachable is how to be like a, a good person to work with. . And, um, and that growth mindset and that hustle, right.
Um, and so, you know, I don't feel like you need to have prior account management experience, prior partnership management experience, all of those different things. I don't, or prior customer success management. Um, honestly, for, for my team, um, What I really like, I, I can teach all of those things and we have a very robust onboarding for our own, uh, for our own team members.
I hope so. Cause we're a customer success team . So we're own very robust onboarding for our team members. Um, but really what I'm looking for is understanding, you know, our. Are, are you as a recruit, a potential recruit? Are you a fast learner? Um, are you a critical thinker? Do you know how to use data to drive your decision making?
Are you good with people? Um, you know, are you collaborative, but are you also able to work independently? Are you motivated to help people succeed? Do you love solving really tough problems? Um, how do you deal with ambiguity? Um, those are the kinds of things that I'm trying to suss out in. I. and the people who have been most successful on my team are those people who really don't have the account management background, but who have all of those kind of fundamental qualities and they bring that to the work.
Um, and so that's one of the things that I've learned over time. Again, I can teach, I can teach you anything. I can teach you anything. But if you don't have that, that wonderful, uh, starting point to work with, like that moldable clay, then it's, you know, it's probably not gonna work.
Jamie: Yeah. So how do you tell, right, it does it, does the multiple clay jump off the resume to you?
Is it through a series of, do you give folks like a test or just through the qualitative interviews? How are you figuring it out? .
Morgan: Yeah, it's a great question. So obviously with the qualitative interviews we're we're asking questions to try to understand how do people work in groups independently? You know, when we ask them, you know, when have you done your best work?
What was the situation in which you did your best work? How do they talk about that? Is it independently? Is it talking about as a team? Um, but we also have case studies that we provide. You don't have to have prior experience, but we'll provide some data and we'll say, what, how do you interpret this? What actions would you take based on this data?
And it's stuff that anyone could really grapple with, but it helps us to understand how someone thinks through a problem. Um, and that's really what I'm looking for, is how do you grapple with problems and how you come up with solutions versus something you've done before. I, I don't care as much about that as I do about seeing that aptitude.
Jamie: Okay. Interesting. And you previously stated that you believe teachers are a great recruit for the customer success field. So why is that?
Morgan: Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting. I, um, as I think about, as I think about teachers, I think about, um, one of my friends who is a middle school principal and she's spectacular, and she once said to me, she said, Morgan, I.
The best teachers in the world are those teachers who, if they have 40 students, they have 40 lesson plans. And that to me was stunning. But as I think about it, I was like, well, you know, it makes a lot of sense why teachers are so good at customer success, so they know how to meet students where they.
Right. They see individual students. They see where they are. They know where they are. From a customer success perspective, my tasker success managers are looking at individual accounts of different taskers to see how they're performing. And they can, they can easily tell where some improvement areas are, right, and teachers are.
Really trained to grow people. And that's what I think CSMs are also trying to do, right? They're trying to help you improve your business. Um, and it's the same thing that we are doing and I would say teachers are, um, really patients, they are very, very good at explaining complex concepts in a very easy way.
They're extremely organized, um, and they're great with people. So it, you know, I, I hate poaching from the education realm. We need excellent teachers, but I will also say I've recruited some spectacular people on my team, um, who have come from the teaching field. It's, it's been a really, um, easy, I mean, I would say an easy transition for them because they have so many transferable skills.
Jamie: Right. And you know, it's so funny, um, I totally agree with you by the way. We at Totango also have a number of great folks on our customer operations and customer success teams who've come from the teaching field, uh, as well, even because the fact these days there's a lot of teaching that's. Even done in a kind of remote environment, right?
With, you know, virtual and so forth. So a lot of the stuff that we're doing now where you're doing a lot of customer success, obviously in that arena, so interesting. So let's talk about churn reduction, right? Or retention I think is, you know, kind of more, maybe a more positive way to say it. So what, what's your most successful tactic on that?
What do you think works the best for you guys?
Morgan: Man, that's a really, really good question. I , I don't know whether it's most successful, but, um, we have a number of things we're running, right, because we have done a lot of analysis on churn and on retention, and we know it works, but it's different for different stages of the tasker journey.
And so that's one of the reasons why we have the programs that we do. But, uh, you know, really. In some ways it's thinking about, basically we have the same program, but it's slightly different for different parts of the journey because each tasker needs something a little bit different. So I would say in terms of reducing churn, the number one thing is to improve activation.
So we have a lot of taskers who join our platform and never go on to do their first task, and then they churn right out. And that is the kind of thing that makes me lose sleep at night. Because these people have gone through the gauntlet of registering. They've come on board hoping to make some money, and then they haven't, and then they're gone.
And so it's a real opportunity for us to improve. And so really it's it, that's one of the pieces is driving activation, but it's also retaining our really quality taskers. We have taskers who do amazing work on this platform and I wanna keep them. So how do we keep those people as well? And so the way to do that is to help them hit their earnings.
If they're hitting their earnings goals, they're gonna stay. So it's really that. And then the third piece of this is fostering a sense of connection to their tasker success manager. I want every tasker to come on board and feel like they have their person at headquarters that they can reach out to that can provide them personalized guidance always.
It's very accessible. But then I also want taskers to feel really connected to the community. We did a survey a couple years ago and we asked taskers, are you interested in having a community or are you just here to make some money and you're out? Right? And we heard overwhelmingly that taskers want to know each other.
They wanna build community with each other. It's a community of do. They are very creative. They're problem solvers, and they love sharing tips with each other about how did you do this? How'd you tackle that? What tools are you bringing? It's a great community, and so the, the more that we can lean into that and foster that, Also the stickier, the platform and the experience is.
And so that's the other thing that our customer success team does, is community building. And we do that by a tasker socials that we host in different metro areas. We, we buy taskers of beer or other fizzy drink of their choice. Um, We get them together, we provide them tips on how to succeed. We also have some virtual for as well, whether that's on Facebook or Discord.
So there's ways that we're trying to, virtually and in real life get taskers together. And so these are all ways that we're trying to reduce churn, but. One of the things I will add, if I might brag a little bit, Please do. If I might . So I've, I've shared some of the, the great results that we've had from our new Tasker coaching calls and workshops.
Um, and I've kind of pointed at another program, the business check program, but we also have a third program called our Quarterly Business Reviews, and those are for. Top taskers who've made the most money on our platform, they unlock these video calls with our Tasker success managers. Um, so it really is another level.
We provide them insight on the product, et cetera. We really want them to feel special because they are, and we've had some really, really great results. And so this is another way that we're striving to make our platform stickier and retain people. So for our business checks, we found. Those taskers who do business checks with us receive 42% more invitations from clients.
So clients are booking them that much more than people who don't do the business check, and they're getting 58% more invoices. And so what that means is they're actually doing a lot more work. When they're doing a lot more work, they're making a lot more money. When they're making more money, they. Right.
So we're really trying to keep people on the platform, reach them all, let them know that we are here. This, again, is a service. I haven't actually mentioned this, but you know, as far as I'm aware, we are the only customer success team that's really supporting independent contractors in this way, like through their entire journey, giving them.
Lots of information, personalized information about how they can make more money. So that's also part of our value proposition that we try to leverage in order to retain our taskers.
Jamie: I gotta say that they must love talking to you guys cuz everything you do is about making them more money. Making them more money.
Making them more money. They must be like, okay, here comes my money.
Morgan: Coach . Yes. And they are very happy to have someone to provide feedback to. So , they, they, uh, you know, Taskers have lots of opinions. We love to hear them. And so, um, it's, it's great. I mean, we're the go between for the rest of the guy haven't even talked about that.
I mean, the, the, what we do as a customer success team is also representing our taskers back to the rest of the company. Um, and so we are collecting their feedback. We listen to them, we look into their accounts if they're having problems, but then we are also communicating their feedback back to the product team, to our policies, teams, et cetera.
So yeah, they love us cuz we listen and we help them make more. Awesome.
Jamie: So, uh, before you wrap up and ask a few more personal questions, I have to ask one thing, which is, I'm sure everyone else is thinking of this exact same question, which is how much do taskers make? Like, what's like, okay. A big number that you're like, wow, this is amazing.
This is a QBR type, top tier tasker. Give us just some sense
Morgan: for it. Um, well, we have at least two. I haven't pulled this number in the past couple of months. We have at least two taskers who've earned over a million. Each on the Taskrabbit platform. Wow. . So real money can be made here. Um, but yeah, no, honestly, you know, we have a lot of people who make more than $50,000, more than a hundred thousand dollars a year on the Taskrabbit platform.
It really comes back to taskers being able to set their own rates and, and do what they love and determine their own schedule. And that kind of freedom really enables them to make a lot of money if that's what they wanna. Awesome. All
Jamie: right, so now onto the quick hits. Okay, so what's something you read, watched, or listened to recently that you can't
Morgan: let.
So recently I read this fantastic book called Exhalation by Ted Chang. Um, I believe it's a, a New York Times Bestseller. Um, it's a book of futuristic short stories, so it looks at AI and robots and nanny robots and all kinds of things, and it's fascinating sometimes. Scary, very thought provoking it. I really wanted to savor every single story because it really felt prophetic and like I, I needed to spend time thinking about it and thinking about consequences of some of the technology, um, that's out there right now.
That's also being, Created right now and cultivated was really excellent. I, um, think
Jamie: I'm gonna add that to my Christmas, uh, gift list for people. I think that's a great one to give for somebody who's, you know, kind of a creative and fun, unique gift. Love that. All right. What advice would you give to somebody starting out in your role today?
Morgan: Yeah, I would say to be flexible and always be curious. Um, there are so many unknown. So many unknown unknowns. So it really is all about testing and learning and iterating and scaling. And we were talking about failing fast and failing forward, failing small . Um, but you know, again, when you're working with humans so much is unpredictable.
You really, you really have to try different things. And, and, and humans can change their behavior all the time. So, you know, tactics that work in one market may not work in another market, but it's worth trying and learning. Um, but you have to get close to the customer. You have to understand what their experience is because if you're not working from a place of empathy, you're not gonna go anywhere.
So I would say that really understand a customer's pain points and successes and act according.
Jamie: Okay. And if you weren't working at Taskrabbit or in CS at all, what would you be doing?
Morgan: I'd probably be back in foreign policy. I think I'd probably be in some, some conflict area and I'd probably be in Ukraine or something
Um, or maybe writing a novel, I don't know, one of, one of those two probably. Yeah. Solving
Jamie: world peace, I guess. .
Morgan: That's a tough one. That's a really tough one. All right. Thank you, Morgan. Thank you so much for having me.
Narrator: That's it for this week's episode of CS No Vs. With your host, Jamie Bertasi. If you enjoy today's episode, please leave a rating or review and tell a friend.
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