In this new episode from our podcast, Mastering CS, Irina Cismas, Head of Marketing at Custify, sat down with Violeta Yuste, the Head of Customer Success at Userguest.
In this podcast, Violeta shares her journey in CS, the challenges she overcame, and the strategies she implemented.
What You’ll Learn:
- How to make sure your team is aligned
- How to keep the team united even if you work remotely
- How to prove the value of CS internally
- The importance of data and KPIs
- How to prioritize in customer success
- How to incorporate AI in CS
Key insights and takeaways for CSMs based on the interview:
Importance of Documentation and Communication in Remote Work: Working remotely requires thorough documentation and clear communication to compensate for the lack of in-person interactions. Ensuring that all processes are well-documented and easily accessible is crucial for effective collaboration.
Emphasis on Soft Skills and Flexibility in Customer Success: In the field of customer success, soft skills and flexibility are essential. The ability to learn quickly, adapt to changes, and communicate effectively with clients are key traits for success.
Alignment with Company Values and OKRs: Ensuring that team members share the same values and understand the company’s objectives (OKRs) is vital. This alignment helps in maintaining a cohesive team that works towards common goals, even in a remote environment.
Cross-Team Collaboration and Integrated Projects: Successful projects often involve collaboration across multiple teams, such as tech, product, marketing, and sales. An example highlighted is the integration of various tools into a single system to enhance productivity and proactive customer support.
Podcast transcript
Intro
Irina 00:01
Welcome to Mastering CS Candid Leader Insights, the podcast where we deep dive into the world of customer success with industry experts. I’m Irina Cismas, your host. Today’s guest is Violeta, Head of Customer Success at Userguest.
Irina 00:48
Violeta, welcome, and thank you for accepting my invitation today! You’ve led Customer Success teams across various industries from hospitality to digital marketing, and now I’m super curious if you could describe your career journey at the hotel experience. What kind of hotel would it be and why?
Violeta 01:20
Wow. Okay, so first of all, Irina, thank you so much for inviting me to this session. It’s really nice, and I’m sure we’re gonna have a nice conversation.
I love the question, by the way, it’s a question I’ve never been asked ever in my life. So in this case, I define my career as this kind of like exotic resort in a hidden destination, something like that.
Yeah, yeah. Pretty curious. Why is that? Yeah, it’s kind of a place without any guarantees. Is not a hyper-touristic destination, but it’s a very exciting journey to start learning. It’s like opening something big that didn’t exist before, plenty of opportunities, many dreams around that, many illusion, many different possibilities, and, most importantly, plenty of fun. Definitely like an exotic resort.
Customer expectations depending on the industry
Irina 02:22
Let’s say it’s a fascinating way to look at your career like this. I want to go into the specifics, and I mentioned both industry hospitality and digital marketing. How do the customer expectations differ between the two? What do they have in common? What do they have the opposite?
Violeta 02:42
Okay, so here, I think that would be great to first remind the audience what customer success is. We’re talking about making the experience of our clients the best. How can we do that? Normally, we build strong relationships with the customers, not punctual, not short-term. We have to take a look at the future and try to understand their needs and goals, to provide tailored solutions and to have a tailored relationship as well. Even if we don’t want to state it in such a strict rule, it is a tailored relationship that we are building.
And if you think about it, isn’t that exactly the same goal that hospitality has? Hospitality tries to have tailored solutions for the guests, tailored experiences, tailored rooms, and all of that. So, it’s kind of the same. Customer success is very related to hospitality, and this is why it’s not a surprise that many people from hospitality end their journeys in customer success as well.
In the hospitality world, if we merge your question between hospitality and marketing, we have to talk about the different nuances between the two industries. The first one, hospitality—not necessarily in this order—but I would mention that relationships are very important, then you have soft skills, then you have data. Of course, data is very important: revenue, monthly recurring revenue, business performance, and all of that. But we are always going to be looking at relationships and soft skills.
In digital marketing, we don’t necessarily follow the same order. Here, we talk about data numbers first. Both of our clients are down to earth. In marketing, we look at the data, the analysis, the numbers, the conversion, and the revenue. If everything makes sense, then we can start our relationship together. So, it’s kind of the same but a bit different. In hospitality, there’s always a more holistic or abstract approach.
This is why it’s very important to have customer success managers with soft skills and empathy. In SaaS, things could be complicated. You have to explain how to utilize a determinate tech tool to different stakeholders. This is why we always emphasize trying to speak the client’s language. And I’m not talking about speaking Romanian, Spanish, English, or whatever; we’re trying to adapt and adjust to each kind of client or stakeholder that we’re talking to.
So, whether we are talking to a hospitality client or a marketing client, if we speak the client’s language, we will understand what the priorities are. This helps us organize our train of thought and communicate effectively with them.
Irina 05:36
I want to thank you for the analogy that you made. Even though I’m working on the marketing side at Custify, I started my career as a performance digital marketer, and to be honest, I resonated very well with what you mentioned about the journey. You start with the data, with the conversion, having the analytical foundation, and then the relationship comes on top. I didn’t think about it, but you basically described my experience.
Thank you for this. I’ve always said that I’ve been working in customer success for many years prior to me working at Custify, but I just didn’t know it.
Now, what does a typical day look like for you as Head of CS at Userguest? How do you start your day? What does it involve?
Violeta 06:32
One of the things I like to showcase is the fact that my company, Userguest, is 100% remote, 100% delocalized, and flexible. This means I never spend my days commuting. I don’t travel to go to work unless I’m already traveling, or unless I’m going to a co-working space or a cafe because I want to work there that day.
I start each day with a fresh mind, being in the place that I want to be, with the flexibility to adapt and adjust my daily routine based on the needs of the day.
Besides that cool part, the rest of my day is like that of any Head of Customer Success, which involves plenty of one-to-ones with the team, data analysis, and working with the funnels and customer journeys. This is one of my favorite parts—trying to get the perspective of the clients, understanding their customer journey experience, and adapting our approach to meet our company’s OKRs and KPIs, which are usually based on generating revenue for our clients.
We aim to help our clients have the visibility they need, using a simple tool that generates money. We put ourselves in our clients’ shoes to help them see exactly that. For this, we have an amazing team of customer success operations managers and strategic roles working in that direction.
So, defining the one-to-ones is a big part of my day, along with analyzing lots of data and numbers. As we talked about before, numbers are important, but my CS mindset prioritizes one-to-ones with the people. It’s always like that, similar to hospitality. And, of course, my life is surrounded by music, so I always have good music playing in the background to maintain my full capacity.
Data, KPIs, and team alignment
Irina 08:53
Speaking of data, which KPIs do you focus on to keep your team aligned and effective? Because I’m not actively working in the CS shoes, but I know that CSMs can get distracted and very busy in a very short amount of time. By the end of the day, they can be burned out and overloaded with a lot of small tasks that seem mandatory and urgent but might not be. They might not manage to influence the right KPIs. So, how do you make sure your team is aligned, effective, and productive without being burned out and overwhelmed by all those tasks?
Violeta 09:48
So I think here we need to have, and this is very typical—it’s not rocket science—but we need to be very aligned on communication. OKRs need to be mandatory so that everyone knows them by heart. Whether it’s X percent of churn, X percent of MRR, or whatever the metrics are, everyone must be aware.
You’re totally right. The problem we tend to have in customer success is that you can go so granular into the life of the clients. You have to navigate from the bigger care of the company down to the small requests of a small client on a small island, because this could be affecting one of their rooms. You have to understand how to get from here to there without getting too distracted and prioritize everything you need to work on.
In this case, to be honest, communication is key. The one-to-ones I have with my teams are usually based in that direction. We work on those metrics during these one-to-ones. However, a significant portion of my time is dedicated to understanding how they are feeling. It’s not only about how they’re doing, which is great, but also about how they are feeling with the workload they have. We try to fragment and defragment this workload.
Once we get granular into this workload, we try to redirect it to the OKRs. How is this affecting the OKRs that we have? Again, it’s not rocket science. If you have four problems that you are contemplating, you ask how these are affecting the ten OKRs that you have. If something is affecting seven OKRs, then that’s priority one. If it’s affecting three, maybe it’s not priority one. If it’s not affecting any OKR, then why are we talking about it?
The rest of the OKRs are the same that all Heads of Customer Success could have. We’re talking about churn, retention rate, client satisfaction, onboarding timings, upsell, and MRR. We also have a little secret sauce, a little recipe of KPIs that make for a successful journey in customer success, but I won’t share them unless you join the team.
Irina 12:13
That’s a very good, that’s a very good answer. Earlier, you mentioned some roles. And because you mentioned some roles that you have in the team. And now we mentioned KPIs.
Do you organize your team based on the customer journey? Or how do you structure the team?
Violeta 12:36
I think we can discuss it a bit because that can work sometimes, but it’s not necessarily going to work all the time. You really need to fragment your team. This could involve looking at the partition of your team with critical eyes. You can specialize your customer success managers in different roles. That’s really cool because sometimes their soft skills will be redirected in one direction or another.
They can have roles such as the renewer, the upseller, the onboarder, the performer, and many others. But depending on the structure of your team, this will either make sense or, on the contrary, fragment the team and the clients even more. So, you have to adjust it. You have to find the perfect balance to try to find, again, this perfect recipe that would make sense for the client.
Proving the value of CS internally
Irina 13:37
You also said, and you started, we started this discussion with your definition of customer success, and I know that, and it’s interesting that you started it with that, because I also share the same with you. In every every company has its own definition.
We call it CS, but in some cases, is either proactive, it’s either reactive work. It’s more important, what does it what does it mean? So I want to ask you, how do you prove internally the value of your team? How do you advocate for your team internally?
Violeta 14:25
So this is one of the funniest parts of my job, like trying to help, for example, a tech colleague, a marketing colleague, or a finance guy understand their numbers make sense and that they should be celebrating those numbers with us. It’s funny, but I have to admit that it’s been 15 years of trying to explain to my family and friends what I do on a daily basis, and it’s complicated sometimes.
I’ve learned a lot from my personal life in order to introduce and implement CS, or customer success, internally. For me, it’s all about giving numbers that they consider impactful. If I tell them our MRR is 2000, they’re going to be like, “Yeah, cool, nice. I don’t even know what that means.” Because if, for example, a tech colleague tells me the deploy timing is an average of X, I’m going to be like, “Yeah, okay, but how is this going to impact my client?”
So, at the end of the day, we need to try to speak the client’s language. We need to let the tech colleague know how many clients he is saving from churning thanks to that tech implementation he achieved. This is another side of the story. They will understand that thanks to this implementation, they saved four clients, and the portfolio increased by 4%. Thanks to that, we’re more aligned with the OKRs.
We don’t need to pretend that everybody will understand all the OKRs of a company because I think that will never happen. That would be nice to have, but it’s very complicated. So, again, it’s about speaking everyone’s language.
Irina 16:11
I realize you mentioned OKRs. We’ve also implemented that in Custify, as well as in several other organizations I’ve worked with. But what I felt is often hard is making the connection between the company OKRs and what you do on a day-to-day basis.
How do you divide those micro KPIs that help you work towards those OKRs? What’s your secret recipe? How do you manage the smaller parts?
Violeta 16:49
So honestly, what we do in the team is that we work with our own OKRs. We understand the company OKRs and then escalate this down. Now, we have all the information: the company mission, the company vision. I ask the team to propose the OKRs they think will have an impact on delivering those company OKRs.
So, it’s actually the team that is proposing their own OKRs, and they align with them. Thanks to this approach, they understand the impact they will have on the general and common OKRs at the end of the day.
Irina 17:25
It is so evident. It really works. It’s a top-down and bottom-up approach. It’s a calibration between the two.
What can I say? It might be cool to work at Userguest for everyone who is watching
Violeta 17:43
We have fun. We have coffee times as well. Even if we work remotely, we try to bond a lot the ones with the others, and we see each other on a quarterly basis.
Keeping the team united while working remotely
Irina 17:43
I’m gonna ask you now, how hard is it for you to keep the team spirit united? Since you are working in a remote environment, how do you make sure that the team doesn’t feel, I don’t know, distributed and missed out from the whole thing?
Violeta 18:19
Okay, so I think one of the most important things you need to understand when working remotely is that you don’t have your neighbor to ask a question, or another neighbor saying out loud about a process they know about and you didn’t, and you’re learning from that. This is why it’s mandatory to give so much importance to documenting everything. Everything has to be documented, but not only documented—it also has to make sense and be easy to find.
It’s really complicated to understand everything when you’re not surrounded by your seniors or people who know more than you. So the first thing would be to make sure that documentation is a big chunk of the initial process. Once you have this, you need to promote interaction between the teams. For example, we use Slack, which has huddles. You can just call somebody, and you’re on that call with that person. We try to be very polite, but sometimes when you just have a question, you huddle that person and they’re there. We’re trying to increase the level of associating Slack with a table. We’re all here together, so just Slack me whenever you want, and we can discuss any questions you have.
Another important thing is that you don’t need to sell the dream of something that doesn’t exist. At the end of the day, we’re a remote company. This is how it is. But we all have the same values. If the values are the same, and you work along with the same values as the rest of your colleagues, you’re building something great. You don’t have to lose focus just because you’re not in the same room as that person.
It’s not going to be frustrating for them because we are very clear from the beginning that we work remotely. We only work with people who are glad and keen on working that way. When they join us, they feel this connection, communication, and transparency that is unique to a remote company.
As I mentioned, we have those coffee times. It’s a coffee break where you can take your cat when it’s here, pet the cat, and tell your colleague what you’re going to be doing on the weekend. It’s like when you take a coffee with your colleague. We have those interactions between us that are pure and naive, like the kind of communication you have with your co-worker.
One of the counter sides we have to admit is that the onboarding process for a newcomer takes a bit longer. It takes longer because they’re not here to ask all the questions to everyone. It’s very important to assign that person to a buddy to show them all the documentation. During the first week, as a manager, you need to be really invested in that person to provide as much guidance as possible. If you lose that person from the beginning, it’s going to be complicated to reconnect. But if you have them from the beginning, it’s going to be good. It’s going to be brilliant.
Recruiting the right people for the CS team
Irina 21:29
I have to ask, whenever you are building your team or you are recruiting, what’s that? Because you mentioned the values, and we share the same values. We work for the same company mission. We are aligned. How do you make sure that the person who joins your team actually shares the same values? What’s your recruiting strategy?
Violeta 22:03
Now, honestly, it’s all about having honest conversations. I’m very interested in the soft skills and the deliveries that the person has had in the past. Our job in customer success is not like being a spinal doctor. You don’t need to study for six years to perform surgery. You can learn on the job.
This is why one of the most important skills I check when interviewing someone is their learning curve and learning speed. I focus on how this person digests the information I’m giving them and how they reproduce it in a solid and consistent way. This tells me if they can take the pieces of the puzzle without knowing all the context and deliver something that makes sense. That’s something I check from day one for sure.
Then, flexibility is number two. You need to be flexible if you’re working in a remote company, in customer success, and in a startup, because things change all the time.
I’m also looking for people with a hospitality background. As I mentioned, hospitality is fundamental in serving the client and speaking the client’s language. Our tool at Userguest is based on increasing revenue for hotels. When you can put yourself in the shoes of a hotel owner or the head of marketing for a hotel chain, you will know how to speak their language and touch the correct buttons.
So, it’s a mix of various factors, but it makes a good combination. I cannot complain.
Incorporating AI in Customer Success
Irina 23:59
You mentioned soft skills. I want to ask you about the technology piece because I know that Userguest uses AI to boost the customer engagement part. So how have you incorporated the AI into your CS, and what benefits have you seen so far?
Violeta 24:20
So everybody talks about AI first. I think we need to understand what AI is because there have been many concepts, and everybody’s associating AI with ChatGPT, which is great. We love ChatGPT, but we need to understand the different aspects that artificial intelligence can bring to the journey.
I can explain two ways we’re using AI. The first one is algorithmic. That’s a complicated word. Algorithmically speaking, what we do at the end of the day is use intelligence to help our clients match dates, such as occupancy needs, with the predicted booking behavior of our customers and web visitors. It’s a bit like a puzzle, but if you understand the concept, we match dates with the predicted behavior that guests are going to be booking based on the website visitors. All of that helps us give lots of information to predict what is most likely to happen.
What is going to be most likely booked? What is most likely to happen in the future for your hotel? But as well, what is going to happen on the downside? When are you going to have only a 40% occupancy rate? When are you going to start having some troubles with the guests at your hotel? We have this magic sauce for hotels that helps them generate bookings. Thanks to this logic, many algorithms, and we learn from those algorithms to continue feeding the logic of those numbers and to make them smarter. That’s the first one. That’s the algorithm.
Then, Customer Success-wise, we are starting to work on different tools that match all the criteria we want regarding AI. For example, we want to have the ability to generate recommendations to the customers using the right data points. Right now, we are doing that on a human basis, which is great. We are never going to stop doing that because this is one of the big values we have. But we want to try to identify revenue opportunities and the right initiatives that the client needs to impact revenue. Again, the human approach is very important, but we want to complement that with all the pieces we might not be able to reach thanks to AI.
Irina 26:52
That’s super, super interesting. We all know the apps that help us book accommodation from a user perspective. I’ve always been fascinated by the recommendations they make and how they basically predict everything. For me, that was the real brain behind it.
CS priorities
With all the things you mentioned, what’s that one thing you want to focus on until the end of the year? What’s your main priority?
I know that CS usually has multiple priorities, and they can change from day to day. We all know about the need for flexibility. But what’s the most important thing you want to make sure you tick off your list?
Violeta 28:07
On that note, do you know how they call us in companies? They call us the octopus. We are the octopus because we have many legs and arms, and we are touching everything. We are in marketing, finance, sales, tech, and products. We’re everywhere. So, when you’re asking me for one main priority, it’s like, oh my God, just one.
Okay, in this case, I think I will go with something very simple, just because we’re doing very well. At the moment, we’re really working on the new customer journey funnels. We’re going to be launching the new client journey, which is going to be great, and I’m really looking forward to it. That would be one of my priorities.
We are also getting really good at reducing churn. I think my next milestone is to continue reducing the churn rate. By the way, we reduced it by eight points in the last six months. We’re doing a really good job here.
What do you need in order to make it happen? Honestly, that’s the marvelous part of my job. I think we’re already going in that direction. All the steps and stones we already put on the path are leading us toward that churn number we need to reach. I’m really confident that we don’t need anything else besides what we already have. Maybe a more accurate forecasting system and strengthening some partnerships a bit more, but everything is very feasible.
Irina 30:00
I would dare say that you don’t need distractions. You need understanding and making sure that nobody bothers your team and lets you do the thing.
Violeta 30:13
Yes, everybody needs a bit of us, which is normal, and we’re more than happy to help everyone. We are a small company, and we work in a very united way. This has always been evident in our company culture. Everybody loves everybody in this company. Of course, something can happen sometimes, but we are so aligned, and the strengths we have together are so valuable that we don’t want to break it.
Speaking about this cross-team collaboration, can you name a project that we are proud of that involved multiple teams? You mentioned that you work closely with product, sales, marketing, and support. What was one initiative where everyone was on the same page?
Actually, I can mention one that we’re leading and finishing at the moment, which is the integration between our tool and another CRM, along with a couple more tools. We are doing a meta-integration of many tools into just one to align more with a proactive approach rather than a reactive one. We always aim for productivity. To deliver that, we need tech, product, marketing, and sales.
Everybody has been involved, and we’re all engaged in this very project. It’s the biggest project we’re working on at the moment, and it’s great.
Irina 31:43
Last question before we wrap up. I have to ask who has been your most influential mentor, and what’s the best piece of advice that gave you that you still follow?
Violeta 31:58
I learned from many, many people, and I keep on learning from them and other new people that have come across my path. But when I have to tell somebody about someone I’ve always looked up to on my professional journey, I always talk about Olivier Baraka. He was the CEO of another company I worked for before, Hosko, and he has been the most empowering and inspiring leader for me.
Olivier is a true example of resilience. He is the kind of person that, if you stay very close to him, you can almost listen to his brain working at full speed. You just want to seize everything that’s going on there and try to gather all his trains of thought to understand and replicate them yourself. But it’s impossible. His brain works at such a speed and in such a comprehensive and efficient way; it’s great.
It’s not only because he’s been a really good CEO, but also because he taught me something invaluable: you can be a good person and a great professional. I cannot tell you a specific sentence from him, but I learned this overarching lesson. Being a CEO with a gigantic heart is something that sometimes doesn’t happen. They sell us a dream that everybody has a big heart, but here I’m talking about something evident that I’ve experienced.
This lesson has helped me in my future companies and professional adventures. It has made me continue to focus on working with companies led by CEOs and professionals who have both great skills and big hearts. I don’t believe that an amazing professional should be cold-blooded all the time. You have to be sometimes, but you can still be a great person at the end of the day. This is why I only want to be surrounded by great professionals and good people.
Irina 34:13
Thank you so much, Violeta, for sharing your insights with us today, and a big thank you to all of you who listened this episode. I hope you found this conversation as valuable as I did, and until next time, stay safe and keep mastering customer success. Bye.
