Ep#27: Secrets to Customer Success at Cartloop ft. Alexandra Carmen Buză (Head of Customer Success)

Alexandra Carmen Buza: I think the main factor that helped me excel in my journey was saying yes to a lot of things that made me feel uncomfortable. And going the extra mile and that Taylor Kenerson: Welcome to the hyper engage podcast. We are so happy to have you along our journey. Here we uncover bits of knowledge from some of the greatest minds in tech. We in the house rise, and what’s that drive the tech of today? Welcome to the movement. Adil Saleh: Hey, greetings, everybody. This is Adil from the Hyperengage podcast we have our co host just like always smiling. Taylor kenerson from New Jersey, and we have our guest today Alexandra, she’s leading customer success team at Cartloop. Thank you very much Alexandra for taking the time. Alexandra Carmen Buza: Thank you so much for inviting me. I really love what you guys the way the podcast. It’s a pleasure to be here. Adil Saleh: Likewise, likewise. Okay, so Taylor, could you just jump in since ladies go first? And you go ahead and talk about why did she choose this customer success role? And what was her biggest why into you know, starting off with this journey? Unknown Speaker: Hmm. Okay. Alexandra Carmen Buza: This sounds is gonna sound very cliche. But I really believe the role chose me and not the other way around. And I will tell you why. So before finishing high school, my communication skills were awful. I was a very social awkward person, I was playing video games all day, without interacting with people barely with my parents. So you could tell that customer facing role was not really on my list. But then for college, I had to move to a different city so I can afford for the college. So I can afford like paying for the rent paying for the college itself. And as I didn’t have any experience, I had to get a job in a call center, which kind of forced me to get out of my comfort zone and learn how to communicate and manage a lot of angry customers. Because if you know how call center is, I like to call this my black year, the black year of my life, because it was both mentally and physically challenging and energy draining. But at the same time, this was a year where I think I kind of reinvented myself. So then after one and a half years, I decided to take for a look for a new challenge because I was getting very comfortable in the environment I was in. So I got an opportunity to work at Uber for an in person support. So in person versus call center. These are two different big things. So this was a new challenge. And when I joined the position 99% of people of the customers were male, and I was the only female there so because I never had a in person communication. And I was very scared to talk to people, it was very challenging. But after like two or three months, I started to love it. And remember, it was Christmas, I couldn’t wait to get back to work. Yeah, there was one point about Uber that scared me a lot. And that was talking to businesses because we had customers and we have businesses. So at some point, Uber open two positions for key account management. And I decided to go for it. And I had to actually work only with top businesses for Uber. So that was another thing I had to do to get out of my comfort zone and just smash the fear away. And then the lockdown happened working remote became a thing. When all companies including Uber, were laying off people, I decided to just take the biggest risk out there and quit my job. And another thing with like high risk, high reward, I had to look for a remote job. So I can also switch the series and this is how I find my current company car loop. And because I did not have that much experience in the role, I had to join the company as an executive assistant. I was rejected. Firstly, I had to apply twice. In one month, I was promoted to a CSM. So I started to work on a lot of projects that were I had no knowledge about. And I felt like so uncomfortable. And this helped helped me to grow a lot. I was like waking up thinking that I’m going to be fired because I’m not moving fast enough. But that actually pushed me in learning a lot. So I think the main factor that helped me excel in my journey was saying yes to a lot of things that made me feel uncomfortable, and going the extra mile in that, so all my career choices were based on how comfortable and uncomfortable I am with the role, the more fear I would feel, the better the challenge. So, honestly, switching from the corporate world to a startup can be a very nice challenge. Taylor Kenerson: I love that. You have such an incredible journey. Alexandra, there’s so much to unpack. You say you went through kind of like a black period in your life where you know, everything was kind of at a low point. And then in that low point, you began to see that there are some opportunities that you can take advantage of I see the benefit and the potential, and then you grow and you flourish. Can you kinda like and then you, you go and you’re, I want you to really dive into you getting rejected. And then you having the courage, or the persistence to know that you were valuable. And to show that value. Can you like, walk us through what your mindset was what your thought process was? Because usually when somebody gets rejected, it ends there. Alexandra Carmen Buza: And I understand why because you’re so sad. You’re like, oh, you rejected me. I’m not going to come back to you. Why would I? But then I realized why they did it. I was applying for. I remember, it was a community manager role. I had no experience, I tried to make like my assessment, amazing. But I do understand why they did it. So I really believed thats my company, because I went over the core values, I went over the people page and that inspired me, I was like, Okay, you guys are my people. So I like waited for them to add another job in when I found the executive assistant one, it wasn’t my job. That wasn’t me. But it was like, Okay, I’m gonna start with this one. So I can learn and just get into the company. So I show myself up. And I remember I got the key study, and I worked like two days for it. I even did some things that were not required, just to like, add that extra touch. I was so excited. But yeah, it was challenging. Taylor Kenerson: And, and having that, both and having that vision to you knew that you had the vision that you weren’t just an executive assistant, that wasn’t your ultimate goal. But you understood that you had to take one step to get to your goal. And oftentimes, that one step is sometimes the most challenging and humbling. And you learned the most out of that. So that’s just incredible Adil Saleh: So we have, you know, multiple businesses around here. And one of the values that we that is that sits in our core is adversity signals opportunity. So you always need to seek discomfort, and you need to make sure you have the foresight at the same time, but you are, you know, just focused on the separate stepping stones, you’re not just taking so far out, and you just focus on the, on the next steps and making every day count. So I love the journey that you have, and the kinds of courage that we can only just think we can hear it, but it takes a lot of courage for somebody, like you sitting there and getting rejected and you know, pulling yourself back up, I appreciate that you shared. Okay, so Alexandra looking at cartloop, just talk a little bit about, you know, as a product helping retail business, and you’re trying to scale it, you recently got funded too how big is your team at this moment, the customer success team, and, you know, what kind of challenges you had, while, you know, being a part of the team and, you know, then leading the team, you know, operational challenges, like it can be systems, it can be, you know, integrating the right technologies and data pipelines, data diseases becomes so powerful and saves a ton of more time to for Customer Success teams. So could you put some light on that? Alexandra Carmen Buza: I love this one. So we are right now, three CSMs. Because we are still holding, we’re actually 11 members in the team. And you will face like multiple pains and blockers when having a team but I would say, of course systems was one of them. But I would go for documentation and processes. Because as a startup, we need to move very fast, adapt faster, and a lot of things are changing like weekly, monthly. And because of that we at the beginning, we didn’t offer too much attention to documentation and processes. So when we started to grow our team a bit, I realized that there was a big mistake. And no matter how small or big the businesses you need this too. So you need to have processes in place, even if you’re going to change them often. And you need to have documentation so that when you grow, when you hire more people, you won’t spend like two weeks into onboarding someone, you’re just gonna have a few days, they’re going to have the documentation, the transparency, and they will be able to find their own answers. And this is also helping, for example, let’s say I’m a developer, and I want to understand how sales works. If I have everything into a documentation, and I can see how people pitch Cartloop I will understand the product better, even as a developer, so we pretty much encourage people to to get curious, and to understand everything about each area or department. And because we’re like a small business, that can be tricky, because you also asked about the systems. So our main strategy is not to rely heavily on data. This works amazing for businesses with lots of customers where you can find patterns and take decisions based on that. But for us, the best approach is to just build fast and get insights from our customers. So when trying To involve our top customers in the product decisions and see if what we build really adds value and if it really has the market fit. Adil Saleh: Okay, okay, so right now you have a few customers that you’re working really hands on with, should we call it a high touch model? Or you have a hybrid posture? Sorry? Should we call it a high touch model? Or do you have a hybrid? Alexandra Carmen Buza: yeah, we can call it Adil Saleh: hybrid. So you have, you know, how do you segregate these customers amongst your team. Alexandra Carmen Buza: So we do have engaged customers. And these are exactly the customers that are on the high paying plants, then we have high paying customers and the customers who are using the app in the background, and that’s all. So we’re trying to communicate as much as possible with the engaged and high paying customers, while of course, adding the value because you don’t want to spam anyone. Everyone needs time, time is money. So we’re just trying to add value with each message. So yeah, yeah. Adil Saleh: Okay. So to be able to, you know, accomplish a touch of hybrid approach towards some of the customers that are going to be big customers in the few years, what kind of technologies are you using, you can start with, like product uses, technologies, segment mix, and all these tools and for documentation for customers testing how that fills in and translates it to its customer facing teams? How does that process work? And how technology is involved? Alexandra Carmen Buza: Okay, so we are using intercom for in app chat communication, we have hubspot for both sales and customer success, because we’re trying to have a very smooth process. We do have pitch for presentations, and very metrics for analytics. And of course, notion for another part of the documentation where we keep all day, let’s say, all the heavy stuff Adil Saleh: loved it, we use notion day in day out, 5 different workspaces. Taylor loves it, Taylor will go on Taylor Kenerson: Yeah, they’re awesome. They’re great, all these little tools, you know, sometimes they, they’re really helpful. You know, some, sometimes too much can get complicated, but being able to have, you know, a centralized system, like notion is, is, you know, really impactful. And it also gives you insight into kind of what you want to look for, to implement in your, in your company. Beyond that, like having all of the access, and the features in notion show, okay, if you can get all this done in one platform, like, Where else can I kind of implement this same kind of concept where I can put multiple things in one, you know, dashboard in a way? So when when we talk about customer success you have, you know, of course you have your team? How do you guys go about measuring what customer success looks like within the company? And can you just walk us through, you know, what that journey looks like from the onboarding and the adoption and beyond. Adil Saleh: And also touch on some of the metrics that you have standardized, let’s say, on the post, like post sales, onboarding, these are the things that need to be met, or via an expansion opportunities. These are things like maybe data points, or some sort of conditions or rules based, you can say, strategies that you apply to force you need to go for scale. So is, is there anything like that, please go on Alexandra Carmen Buza: So when we say success, we of course, think about happy customers. That’s the main thing. And we have three metrics we’re usually measuring in our department. And the first one is feature activation. So we know we did a good job when our clients are engaged with the product. And as we’re offering a various number of features, the more features you activate, the more invested you are with our product and the better results you get. So this leads to happy customers, amazing case study opportunities. And of course, reviews that can help your company grow because you know how important social proof is. And here, the average feature activation, we’d like to see is 80%. The second metric would be retention. So feature activation has a huge role in this, but we like to keep these two metrics separated because our customers have different needs were different features may apply. Judging it just by one metric can be a bit misleading. So we like to have like a free speech here. But one important rule is do not have the churning rate higher than 5%. The moment the rate goes above that percentage, it is a big red flag and we need to investigate what’s wrong. Maybe it’s something wrong with the product with the pricing or even with the positioning, so we’re getting a lot of wrong customers. And the third one is, of course, the most popular one net revenue retention. And this one is so powerful because you can really show the potential growth with the current merchants that you have, while also looking into consideration like churning and renewal. So the third one is the most powerful one But the first and the second are really about the customers. Taylor Kenerson: One, one of the metrics you touched on was engagement being a factor for, you know, showing that someone is really adopting the product. Well, can you go into what what that what that looks like? How do you go about measuring the engagement? Is it like, the amount of time someone spends on the platform? Or the amount of features they adopt within the platform? Or how does that engagement metric look like in order to drive then what you prioritize to as a team, you know, you’re getting so much information, sometimes it can be almost overwhelming back to you know, having too much. So can you kind of dive into that? I love this. Alexandra Carmen Buza: Yeah. So of course, we’re looking over like, how much someone is using the platform and how many messages they’re sending. But we’re also having like a private Slack community, where we have channels with everyone. So that is our main selling point to high paying plans. And there, we actually like tracking them weekly, we try to see exactly what value we can add. So by how often they respond and how engaged they are in our messages, in our calls that’s the way we really can tell how happy a customer is. And we actually have a strategy for this. So to keep customers engaged from day one, something that really worked for us was asking for people while in a call to book, the next call with us. So let’s say we just had the onboarding call, you’re happy you are engaged and excited about the app, right? That’s amazing. Now lets book another call in one or two weeks to get more in depth with our strategy. So when we have the strategy call, that’s fantastic. Let’s book another call in two weeks, so we can go over the results. So this is our strategy on making customers being engaged with us. And showing that okay, we’re not just an app, we can actually be like partners, we can be something like an agency, we are part of your business, we can be part of your business. Taylor Kenerson: That’s so funny. You said that that reminds me that’s like, Well, my hair salon does that like you want to come back in six months, you want to buck now like, oh, okay, yeah, I’ll make my appointment. Alexandra Carmen Buza: See, that’s, that’s good. Adil Saleh: Yeah. So that’s, you know, you definitely keep people in the queue. Always give them attention for the queue. Love it. So listeners serving in the SMS marketing space. I’ve seen your plans, some our initial plans that have like self served, onboarding. And the the middle plan, which is probably for small businesses, 500 per month, is has, you know, customized, like personalized onboarding. So what is the difference, like, towards the onboarding? Could you expand slightly a process of onboarding, so our audience would know how easy cartloopis to integrate into their systems, whether it’s when it’s self serve, and when it needs personalized onboarding Alexandra Carmen Buza: of course, because we work so closely with the sales team, the moment after someone is finishing their demo, we’re trying to get everything ready, especially because we are using real people. So when you install Cartloop you’re gonna have an SMS marketing app that is using real people. So that requires training. And normally, if you would be the business that has to train the agents, that would be very time consuming, you don’t want that you want just like to install the app and then get to the business, get revenue and get benefits. So what we’re doing is we’re trying to go into the store, prepare everything, even if sometimes it’s a, you’re gonna lose a bit of time and they might not join. And we have so the first month they have to pay in advance before the onboarding. So the moment someone is paying, we know, okay, they’re gonna come. And we’re gonna start preparing the documentation, we have the selling points ready, we even have some materials that are appealing in the onboarding call, the moment we join the onboarding call, so we know their needs, we know exactly what they expect, and we’re gonna have a personalized experience for them, we’re gonna have three main core features recommended, we then have them already drafted in their account. So it’s gonna be very easy for them, they just have to, let’s say, offer us the green light and we’re gonna do everything. So I would say our main selling point is the fact that we are going to do we are doing the work for them. Because we know how valuable time is for everyone and we don’t, the moment to ask someone to think about the solution is going to be very overwhelming and the anxiety is going to hit in so we’re just trying to avoid all this and it’s working it’s working very well. Adil Saleh: Personalization keeps the customer in the jerk keeps keeps them in the dirt. Okay, wonderful. So when it when it comes to future you previously mentioned that you keep your customers in the loop while, you know, making product decisions like future decisions and all that. So you as a customer success leader, what kind of features that you guys recommend working alongside your customers, understanding their goals, evolving with their goals, and you know, making some really cool feature requests, can you share some of them. Alexandra Carmen Buza: So what happens is, whenever you think of a feature, you’re going to be super excited as a founder as a customer success manager, because you think it’s going to be valuable. And what we realized at some point, we were building a very time consuming features that weren’t used at all. So they were like, just just there in the dashboard, an extra tab for you to tap. And that was wrong. So we tried another approach, which was Okay, before we launch any new feature, let’s talk with our top 10. Customers show the features, show the design and see what they think about it. Now, normally, you know, bigger team, you will have the product manager to join the call, show the prototype to really get into the feature so that you get way more direct feedback. But having the customer success manager do that is also working very well in small in small teams. So what we’re really looking for is like, Would you be using this feature if you have it right now? And if no, we’re going to try to see exactly why, having 10 Yes it’s also not a very good, good idea. Because you really need some feedback. Like, if everyone is saying, Yes, are you really building something that is powerful, or are just people people being nice, because some are doing some are doing that. So yeah, this worked for us. And it’s also very good for better access. So okay, we had the customer interview, you said, you’re gonna like this feature, its now live, let’s test it. So we are doing this with our most engaged customers and with high paying customers. And it’s also very good for retention. So I’m going to ask you, for your opinion, everyone loves to offer their opinion. So in their point of view its gonna be like, Okay, this app is asking me for my feedback. So I am valuable to this company. I’m going to remain here, if I go to a competitor, are they going to ask for my ideas? I don’t think so. I’m just going to be there. Adil Saleh: Yeah, it’s always good to be curious, like during cadences to a lot of customer success teams, they are not leveraging cadences as much as they should, like, they’re not being touristic and bring some ideas, not even not building the features, they can come and come up with some ideas, some things that you are doing as a product down the road, not You’re not just working, do just thinking and, you know, keeping customer, you know, part of your journey, your product journey as well, you can bring product managers as well get, get them accustomed with the technology and the back end, and you know, giving the awareness and everything like that. So, like, Senator, just quick question Taylor, we’re going about during your stay, what kind of features that you think that you can go in and say, Okay, these are the features that we thought out. And we’ve worked with our customers to figure out, okay, these are the right features at this point. And we actually went to the tech team, and we got we got any features that you can share here? Alexandra Carmen Buza: Are these features related to the product itself or with? Yes, yeah. Okay. So most of them are really about like triggers. So what extra thing we can add in our app, so we can increase the messages we are sending to their customers. So having more triggers, having more countries having more flexibility, these are the main things for each customer. So they’re not really going to care about, okay, we cannot do this. Because of that. They really want whenever they have, let’s say a new country coverage they want that country in. So when they have a trigger, like okay, order canceled, we want to send a message, right, so most apps don’t have the order cancel trigger. With that, that is going to be a good idea for re winning the customer back. And this is actually very, it’s a very good idea. So these are the features like more flexibility, more triggers more volume, that also leads to more revenue for the customers. And they also want the transparency. So what we try that car loop is we try to build an inbox. So the place where all messages go, where it’s like one customer in one trade, because normally when you go into, let’s say, a help desk, you have to open all the tickets until you find the right one. So in our inbox, we said okay, we’re gonna have all the touch points into one scroll. So you’re gonna find all the interactions super quickly. And we’re trying to think for the future like what’s gonna make the process easier for everyone, including our agents that are trying to communicate with our customers, right? Adil Saleh: Smart inbox. Yeah, call it a smart inbox. Okay. Taylor Kenerson: I love it. That’s, that’s awesome. Kind of, you know, just shifting in a slightly different direction. One of the things that you mentioned earlier on is you know, as you kind of came out of the pandemic and knew you wanted to like kind of shift directions and know go in like remote first and you were kind of exploring different roles and like where you saw yourself, you said that you know, Cartloop had a really unique culture and like the people about it, when you read about it, they really drew you into, you know, discovering more about the company and you know, eventually pursuing something there. Can you kind of dive in on like, what it is about the culture? What is the culture at Cartloop? What is it that is intriguing to you and like dive really into the culture and the people kind of aspect of things. Alexandra Carmen Buza: I’d love to, so something, at least at that point I, I wouldn’t find in all the other companies was people like founders looking for future founders to hire. So looking for these traits of entrepreneurs that are hungry to learn who want to wear multiple hats, so that one day they’re going to build their own thing with activity gathered, that really got my attention. So they were very much about over communication, transparency, ownership moving fast. And because I was in a corporation world, I really thought there’s something wrong with me, because I was moving very fast, I was trying to get things done. And everyone was like moving carefully and slowly. And they were telling me that, okay, you have to stop, you have to like, slow down. And I thought it’s something wrong with me. So when I joined, when I looked over the the websites, the Cartloop website, it was like, Okay, this is actually myself, like, I find myself in the description, into the values. And actually, when I joined the team, the things that were judged in the corporation world, were actually my superpowers in a startup. Yeah. So I think I pretty much find myself in the description, and the part with the ownership with transparency are really important for me, and you have to over communicate, because we are working remote, and we have the possibility of hiring talent all over the world. But that also means that okay, we have to work at sync, and yeah, you can wake up early, you can like sync with your team for one or two hours. But then all the other projects are gonna be asking, so you have to know how to communicate. And there is not such thing as like sharing too much information, right? I need the information, share it with me, it’s better than not talking at all. The transparency, then, as a company, as a department as a person, it’s extremely valuable. And everyone has transparency over the sites and they talk about transparency, like it’s so easy to have, but they find it so hard to build. You have to work a bit for it. Because sometimes you just get into your work, you forget about everything and you forget to share. And that’s normal to happen. But you have to stop from time to time and waiting, okay, let’s become again, transparent. And then ownership. I love that. So I’m gonna take a project, I might not know exactly what I have to do with the project, but I am the DRI i gonna do, I’m gonna do the research. If something went wrong, I’m going to just take the ownership of the mistake, but I’m learning. So knowing that, okay, I can do mistakes, but I am responsible for them. It’s like a mind shifting perspective is not wrong to not know how to do something. And I think that if everyone in the team has these values, the rest is just a matter of time until everything grows. Taylor Kenerson: I really, I really love how you kept emphasizing the over communication aspect. I come I played sports my whole life. And that I have to say is one of the one of the biggest elements to success is, is communication. Everyone has to be always communicating, understanding, asking questions, that that there’s no such thing as a stupid question, when you arrive a team, and that’s really important, too, is allowing others on your team to feel the comfort level that we’re all equals. We have different knowledge bases, but there’s no stupid question there is, you know, the quicker you understand, oh, I don’t know something Oh, my God, I should begin to ask and learn about this is the fastest way to grow. Instead of veering off and going in the opposite direction. When you encounter that unknowns and that uncomfort it’s, it’s important to you know, go through that. And then obviously, using your communication is really powerful, and can drive a lot of things. So I’m really glad you said that. That’s a great Alexandra Carmen Buza: I want to say that, like building a product is exactly like a sport, you need the same things for both art products. Exactly the same. Adil Saleh: Is absolutely and startups started to relate so much with sports, because it’s there’s a winning and losing element into it. And you carry sort of the fear of failure all the time and you beat it. And then you know, you build yourself and you know body language, temperament mindset. And, and it’s about it and that’s why I love talking to startups. There are so many SAS businesses came up sharing the stage with us. They were very, very big ones too. But we always love to you know, integrate so much with the startups because they have some shanique stories unique challenges. They’re trying different things, you know, they’re doing the real hustle. So I really appreciate, you know, Alessandra that you joined today and took the time out of your schedule. And definitely touchback soon, anything that you want to, you know, share with public like anything that cardhu needs at this moment, you have loads of people and eyeballs listening to this, be it, like growing the team with more talent from I’m sitting in Asia, Pakistan, she’s in the States, United States, right across New York. And we will help you our team will get together and help you fill in those gaps. And, you know, anything that you guys need, so you can go Alexandra Carmen Buza: of course, as a company, we’re always looking for talent. That’s, that’s a vast, and then of course, clients feedback, anything like any insight, even like, if you go on the website and see something you might think can be improved. That’s also helpful, like any kind of feedback or insight is, is welcome. Adil Saleh: Yeah, it was really nice having you today. Alexandra Carmen Buza: I really love what you guys do with a podcast. So it was a pleasure to be here. Taylor Kenerson: All right. Enjoy your enjoy your day. We’ll talk soon. Thank you. Adil Saleh: Thank you so very much for staying with us on the episode, please share your feedback at adil@hyperengage.io. We definitely need it. We will see you next time in another guest on the stage with some concrete tips on how to operate better as a Customer Success leader and how you can empower engagements with some building some meaningful relationships. We qualify people for the episode just to make sure we bring the value to the listeners do reaches out if you want to refer any CS leader. Until next time, goodbye and have a good rest of your day.