Rethink your customer success strategy with Philipp Wolf from Custify

A few years back, Philipp Wolf noticed a worrying trend within SaaS businesses: they were focused on getting more and more customers, but weren’t taking care of those very customers they worked so hard to get.

The result? Customer acquisition rates were high but customer retention rates were plummeting.

So Philipp founded Custify: a customer success software for SaaS businesses to reduce churn, retain customers, and grow revenue.

Tune in (or read below) to learn how a positive customer success experience leads to natural, organic growth, why good CS decisions are always based on data, and the importance of understanding what success means to your customers.

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Listen to episode 28

In the episode “Rethink Your Customer Success Strategy,” we discuss

• The questions you need to answer to build a solid customer success strategy
• How the subscription model’s popularity radically shifted the customer journey 
• Why CSMs need to build a strong relationship with the customer to remove roadblocks

• The 6 habits that make a great customer success manager

• Why the entire organization (and not just the CS team) should put the customer first
• The unstated value of reliable data in customer success
• Why it’s important to get CES (customer effort scores) without context
• What led Philipp to start Custify: seeing SaaS businesses focus on customer acquisition and largely ignore customer retention
• How Custify helps customer success teams save time gathering data

• Philipp’s advice for CS teams who want to be more efficient and avoid burnout 

• What’s next for Custify: becoming the ultimate one-stop-shop for every customer success professional

Favorite quotes

“So how do they get value from you? Why would they actually buy your product? What's the pain they have? Why would someone pay you money? Understanding what that means and then understanding what success looks like for the customers.” - Philipp Wolf

“Now these [customer effort] scores, also CSAT and NPS in general, need to be treated with caution in my opinion. So despite you not wanting that, they are always asked in context. So for an NPS score, for example, it's always in context despite you trying to ask it as free of context as possible.” - Philipp Wolf

“Before we did that, we also talked to a lot of CSMs. I think it was more than 300 interviews that we did with the target audience about their day-to-day problems and their day-to-day interactions. What keeps them awake at night? How do they do things in their department? And those were very valuable insights. And in the end, they were also the foundation for the key functionalities that we built early on in the product.” - Philipp Wolf

“You cannot really motivate people. I think you can only demotivate people. I think people are self-motivated. So what you need to do is create an environment where this self-motivation can unfold rather than be destroyed.” - Philipp Wolf

Meet today’s guest, Philipp Wolf

Philipp got his first PC in the early 90s. Although the acquisition was motivated by playing computer games, he quickly fell in love with software development and information technologies.

During high school, Philipp started working at Avira, one of the first antivirus companies. Initially, he reverse-engineered computer viruses and was promoted to lab manager soon after. During his 17-year time with the company, he successfully built and led various teams with his hands-on approach.

After seeing companies spend big money getting new clients with no systematic approach to customer success, Philipp knew something had to change. It's been his mission ever since to provide a solution to this problem.

As the CEO of Custify, Philipp Wolf helps SaaS businesses deliver great results for customers. Custify takes the pain out of customer success management and allows agents to spend time with clients rather than organizing CRM data.

Productivity resources to explore

• Explore Philipp’s customer success platform Custify
• Stay up to date with Custify on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter 
• Follow Philipp Wolf on LinkedIn
• Listen to more episodes of the Get More Done podcast
• Check out YouCanBook.me’s online scheduling tool

“Rethink Your Customer Success Strategy” full transcript

This transcript has been slightly edited for clarity and readability.

Ben (00:00):

From YouCanBook.me, this is Get More Done. The blueprint for managers to lead happy and productive teams. I'm Ben Dlugiewicz, and my mission is to help you stomp out inefficiencies so you can focus on work that will grow your business. If you are just joining us, welcome. Be sure to check out all of our other episodes, where we talk with leaders, managers, and entrepreneurs about how they're doing more with less.

Ben (00:20):

On this episode, we'll explore why customer success is so important for a company and, how are those customer success teams scaling their programs? I'm joined by Philipp Wolf, the co-founder and CEO of Custify. Philipp and his team are building a customer success platform that helps CS teams automate health metrics, outreach, and other tasks. This allows them to focus on building relationships and not worrying about the data. Phillip shares what habits a good customer success manager will practice and how much time his platform is saving his customers. All of this and then some on Get More Done starting now.

Ben (01:07):

Excellent. Welcome back to the Get More Done podcast where we talk about all things productivity and helping you and your team level up. On today's episode, I'm sitting down with Philipp Wolf, the founder and CEO of Custify. So Philipp, welcome to the podcast.

Philipp (01:20):

Thank you, Ben, for having me.

Ben (01:22):

Yeah, I'm super pumped. As we talked about a little bit earlier, just on learning everything about customer success and all the good stuff that you're doing with Custify. But before we get into that, we typically start these conversations with an icebreaker question to break the nerves up a little bit and get to know you. So since you have developed and built this app, if you could invent something new, what would it be?

Philipp (01:43):

That's a good question. And as we talk about knowing me, I would say one of my biggest passions in private life is sailing. So I've been a sailor since I was three years old. And one of the things that in recent years has become really, really problematic is plastic, right? So plastic in our oceans. And if I were after inventing something, it would really be replacing plastic everywhere. So no more plastic bottles, no more plastic foils around any vegetables or any of those things because this is really a problem. And it's just very obvious when you sail, it's everywhere. It's just horrible on the beaches, on the ocean ground. So it's just like when you do snorkeling or diving, it's everywhere. So that would definitely be something that I would like to invest in or invent if I can, yeah. I don't have the skills, however, I'm more with the software, but yeah, this is something that really, really should be invented.

Ben (02:48):

Yeah. I'm all for that death of single-use plastic, right? Just stop all that. Yeah. So I want to dive right into Custify because it's, for those folks that are listening, that aren't familiar, it's a customer success platform for SaaS tools to help them turn their customers into advocates. So how important is it for our customer success team to use a piece of technology to work with their customers?

Philipp (03:13):

Well, I would say you can imagine it as critical as a CRM for a sales team. So of course you can run your sales team on a spreadsheet, but is that efficient? Does it give you all the data that you need as a salesperson? Most likely not. So this is pretty much exactly that. So it's an essential tool for a customer success team to get their work done efficiently, to understand their customers, just as for a sales team a CRM and for the marketing, Google Analytics. So it's a customer success tool for customer success teams.

Ben (03:48):

Yeah. So you can do it without tech, but the tech just helps you do things a lot faster on that scale, essentially.

Philipp (03:54):

Exactly. So of course, most of the subscribers that we get for our new customers are exactly there. So they handle things in spreadsheets and they log into various different tools. I mean, the role of a customer success manager very often, after time, is to really understand the 360 view of a customer. So what's going on in support? What was communicated in sales before? When is the renewal? What's the revenue? Were there any problems with the payments? What's the product adoption? What's the usage? What were the last meetings? Et cetera. So you really need to understand the customer as a whole in order to be able to do your job, right?

Ben (04:36):

Yeah, absolutely. And speaking of that kind of strategy side of things, you recently launched a quick guide, customer success strategy. So what are the key things to building a successful strategy, as you mentioned, having to monitor all of those touchpoints and all of that stuff, but what encompasses a good CS strategy?

Philipp (04:54):

Yeah. So I think this is where everything starts, where the leadership team typically sits together with the CS team, or in the beginning, it's one or two CSMs. It's not necessarily a team where most people at least start. Yeah, and the strategy is really all about understanding what success looks like for your customers. So how do they get value from you? It starts earlier, why would they actually buy your product? What's the pain they have? Why would someone pay you money? Understanding what that means and then understanding what success looks like for the customers. And do I have a segmentation of customers? So do I have tech touch customers, high touch customers, or segmentation by product? Do I have various products and so on? And then, what's this journey a customer starts with you?

Philipp (05:42):

What's the experience of the customer? What's the journey? They go through an onboarding process. Is there a lot of help needed? Is it a self-service product? What are the customer touchpoints that you have in the customer journey? And then it goes down to later on yeah, creating a list of the essential metrics that you want to measure in customer success terms, that's typically called health scores. So KPIs, metrics that you measure in order to be able to say, well, this customer gets value for me, or it doesn't get value for me. So product adoption, onboarding, measuring, and so forth. Yeah, and then where is all my data stored? And my CRMs, what's essential for the team to get to that conclusion? And then, of course, it's also about building a competencies team. So what are the skills that I'm looking for? And while there are probably common skills and general skills for CSMs and CS leaders, there might also be a couple of special skills needed.

Philipp (06:44):

For example, in our case, our CS team, the CSMs, are also quite technical. So our product typically imposes technical questions. How do I connect via CRM? What's an API call? How can I send this event? Et cetera. And that's our special case. So that comes on top. So I would say that those are all key points when it comes to your strategy and it helps to, I would say, define that and define it over time, but as early as you can.

Ben (07:20):

So essentially understanding that customer journey and where those touchpoints are. Kind of where you're getting your metrics from. And then what's that, I think you hit it on the head, of just who's that ideal person that we need in that role to basically fulfill those requirements in that skillset.

Philipp (07:36):

Yep, exactly.

Ben (07:37):

So I guess piggyback onto that, how important is the customer success role or the CSM role within a SaaS organization?

Philipp (07:49):

Yes, you had a good point here, SaaS, but if you think about software businesses in general, or even beyond if you think about what the car industry is offering these days, everybody's kind of moving to subscription models, right? That's why even beyond SaaS, it's a very vital position, just as important as sales and marketing or product. I'm a believer that the buying journey these days is more of a flywheel, so it never ends, right? So the customer joins you and then is in this flywheel and this just never ends. It's not like you do a one-off sale and then that's it. And we speak in five years, this journey never ends. Basically, customers evolve. Your customers evolved. They might get different products. They might have different needs, et cetera.

Philipp (08:38):

So this flywheel the customers are in is something I believe all the businesses are moving into. And hence someone steering that flywheel and someone monitoring customers in that flywheel, that's exactly what the CSM does. So I think it's really vital for almost any kind of business, not just SaaS businesses, but even beyond. Imagine you are getting a car and the offers these days are pretty much exactly subscription-based. So you can exchange it. You use it for one month, you switch the model, et cetera. So what's the experience? A big experience. It's not just like I'm signing a contract. I have it for one month, but what's happening in that time? Do you communicate with me? Do I get different offers? What's the service like? Et cetera.

Ben (09:28):

So in that regard, the CSMs essentially are owning that retention model, right? Of that touch base and kind of building those relationships up.

Philipp (09:37):

Well, I wouldn't say it's...Yeah. Okay. The owner is fair. It's not the only sole person responsible for it. I think this is a mistake many companies make, but yes, I think the CS department plays a major role in that, in that regard. But it also goes beyond that, imagine you put the wrong customer into that flywheel, for example, that goes then to attracting the wrong customer in the first place, which is marketing or selling to the wrong customer, which is sales. So it's not just CS. It's also the support of course, as well, the reactive part of this customer journey. So that factors in as well, but yes, CS in the end holds everything together.

Ben (10:21):

Yeah, it makes total sense. So how have you seen customer success managers helping their customers get more done and essentially do more with less? How have you seen that kind of shape up?

Philipp (10:33):

Well, I think the first thing is that you have to kind of build a strong foundation/relationship that you need to foster with the customer. So you need to understand who that customer that I'm talking to is and, going back to what we discussed previously, what other pains, why did they buy your product? What do they want to achieve? And based on that, the CSM can give the right guidance to use the product, removing roadblocks, avoiding long research, or testing cycles for the customer. That means if the customer would be alone, he would eventually take hours to explore a certain thing. And the CSM, knowing what the customer wants to achieve, can jump in and help. Get stuff done quite quickly versus leaving the customer on his own.

Ben (11:22):

Right. Essentially getting aligned on what that success looks like for that customer and then being proactive with how to get them there. That makes total sense. Now, we talked a bit earlier just again, on all the touchpoints and building the relationships and everything that a CSM would need to monitor and kind of be abreast of. What are some habits that you are seeing successful customer success managers have? What are they doing on a given day? Or how are they managing their book of business?

Philipp (11:51):

Well, I think they have a high understanding of their own product and different customer needs. Exceptions of course are there, but typically customers have different needs. Not all of them buy your product for exactly the same reasons. It depends a bit on the product. But most of the time there are different needs why the customer buys and understanding your product very well and understanding the needs. So you can suggest the right usage of the product is one of those habits. They are empathic. They can hit home. So when they talk to customers, this is something very important. A CSM conversation with a customer is not pleasant all of the time. I mean, that's just the nature of business, right? Not everybody is always happy with their product and you need to hit home and be empathic about that. Putting the customer first, of course, is something that not just the CS should typically have as a habit, probably the entire organization should have that. Yeah, and I think this is just trying to add value to every single conversation, trying to make the customer successful in the end. That's kind of the ultimate habit that you implement.

Ben (13:07):

Build a universe with your customer in the middle of it, essentially in doing everything for them, right?

Philipp (13:12):

Yes. And of course, also to add to that, this field of customer success is still, I would say young compared to sales or marketing, right? So this is not a 40-year or more established department or discipline. So one other habit would be also to keep yourself updated, what's going on? What do other CS teams do? Best practices, learnings. There's a lot of movement all the time in this industry about new ideas, new best practices, and these things. So that's definitely also a habit to keep yourself updated on best practices and things, and maybe join a community and exchange ideas with other CSMs in other similar businesses. That is definitely something that I would recommend each CSM do.

Ben (14:05):

Yeah. And I think that can apply to all roles as well, of just staying up to date. But mostly with customer success, because as you mentioned, it is a fairly newer discipline and a lot of people are still figuring out how to do it at scale and do it really well. So I guess on that note, what advice do you have for companies looking to explore customer success for the first time that maybe haven't had a branch of their business doing this proactive customer work?

Philipp (14:32):

I mean, it depends a bit on the stage of the company. I think what we see these days is that this concept of customer success gets implemented earlier and earlier on in the journey of a company. So these days, even investors in a series would ask you, “Okay, what do you do about churn? What's your strategy? How is that all handled?” So it depends a little bit on the journey. And the earlier on, of course, the easier it is to build the strategy, to establish priorities, to decide what data do I need to make the right decisions?

Philipp (15:04):

Yeah, one of the things, when you have a SaaS business, is data, right? So you have a lot of data and what is the right data that the CS team will need to make decisions based on that versus gut feeling and start collecting this data early on. Even maybe before you hire your first CSM, you can already think about, okay, what are my key KPIs? Why do my customers buy my product and how can I measure them and how can I start tracking them now and maybe put them in a data warehouse. So I have them later on, so I can learn from them. I think this is what I would recommend to organizations that are looking to get started. And then of course, start out small, test, and adopt similar concepts that you would probably apply to a product in general.

Ben (15:54):

Right. And yeah, that data, I think is key. Because then you have those metrics coming in. So you can test things out to see how it's impacting everything. And there's one point of data that comes up time and time again, of just the customer effort score. And so can you talk a little bit about what that is and why that should be something that more companies are tracking?

Philipp (16:16):

Yeah, this CES, this customer effort score is a metric that is used to measure the ease of the interaction, let's say, of a customer with your business. That can be playing a role in how easy it was to solve this problem for you in support, right? So support issues that get solved. That is one example, but it can also be used in other examples. And yeah, it plays a big role in understanding how easy it is for your customers to interact with your business in general, depending on when you ask this question.

Philipp (16:48):

Now these [customer effort] scores, also CSAT and NPS in general, need to be treated with caution in my opinion. So despite you not wanting that, they are always asked in context. So for an NPS score, for example, it's always in context despite you trying to ask it as free of context as possible. The worst situation is, for example, you ask an NPS just right after they had a problem and support solved it. Because this question is going to rate the experience with support and this ticket, and not what you actually want to ask about in the NPS score. And the same goes of course, with the effort score. So you must pay a lot of attention to how you ask this question and when you ask this question in order to really get the data that you are looking for and not some biased data. That's something that many people don't necessarily think of when they start rolling out an NPS survey to customers. That's just my experience there. And then yeah, putting too much.

Philipp (17:53):

That's why also when you get these results, it might very well be, and this is something that you find out when, let's say, a customer rated your experience poorly. And let's say in Custify, for example, what you can do is when you get this rating, you can directly create a task for the CSM. So hey, reach out to this customer, understand what went wrong, and how can we improve? And many of the times then in this conversation, you will find out that this customer actually rated something else than what you actually thought he would rate. And that's probably how you can implement this learning curve in order to ask this question better or in a different context to get to the result that you actually look for.

Ben (18:30):

Yeah. That's some amazing insight of just understanding the bias of leading into those questions of what that last interaction was. Because ultimately, that's what's going to be in your customer's head, so it's going to impact how they answer the question absolutely.

Philipp (18:45):

Yeah. Naturally in context, nothing you can do about it. That's how the human brain works. That's why you need to be careful how you ask it. Yeah.

Ben (18:56):

And potentially have more data points to go off of, not just say, "Hey, we're changing everything in the business because of this one survey this one time that we send it out," right?

Philipp (19:05):

Yes. For sure.

Ben (19:07):

So let's talk a little bit about your background Philipp because you've been around technology your whole life. Started out working with a software company that did antivirus software and then now you founded and are running your own software company. So tell me a little bit about that transition and really ultimately the frustration that led to you starting Custify.

Philipp (19:27):

Yeah. That's actually an interesting journey there, as you said, I was actually in software, yes. But in a very different field, IT security, antiviral software. It was something quite different. However, in the last years of my journey there, I was in the management of the company and we spoke to many other SaaS companies. And when you talk with the management team of SaaS companies, at least five or six years ago probably, what I realized is that everybody was focused very much on customer acquisition and they had teams and they had budgets and it was by the send. They could tell which channel works the best and so forth. And then when this question comes, okay, the customer signs up, what do you do next? We're like, how do you do things from there? Yeah. We send a newsletter, so you could clearly see this discrepancy between what people invest in customer acquisition versus in retention.

Philipp (20:28):

And I didn't even know that this was customer success back then. It just came to my attention. And then I was starting to research that topic and found that there is actually something on the market. However, what the co-founders and I saw on the market was not necessarily working for emerging SaaS companies. So this was more of a Salesforce kind of tool that takes a very long time to implement and is not really for emerging SaaS businesses. And that was then the reason in the end to start Custify. Before we did that, we also talked to a lot of CSMs. So I think it was more than 300 interviews that we did with the target audience, let's say about their day-to-day problems and their day-to-day interactions. What keeps them awake at night? How do they do things in their department? And those were very valuable insights. And in the end, were also the foundation for the key functionalities that we built early on in the product.

Ben (21:33):

Yeah. It's amazing that customer feedback kind of informed you and you made more intelligent decisions on what to build and how to build that. So are you currently still working on that customer-led growth?

Philipp (21:44):

Of course. I mean, this never ends. This is a flywheel. So absolutely. So, I mean, a good portion of our customers are coming from recommendations. So our customers, existing customers, recommend us or CSMs switch jobs and they just don't want to work without it anymore. And a lot of the growth comes organically from those kinds of relationships that we have built.

Ben (22:11):

Yeah. And a testament to your own CS team, right? Of them working on helping people get comfortable and growing the tool. So speaking of Custify, you mentioned earlier a little bit about kind of touching on the automation side of things in the app. So in what other ways does your platform help CSMs save time?

Philipp (22:29):

Well, one of the major things that we hear when people sign up for our product is, "I have my data in all those tools and it takes me X amount of time to gather all the data before I can actually work on what I'm actually hired for, which is talking to customers or spending time with customers," right? So we help them to focus on what's really important and they can make decisions based on data, supported by data, and not just on gut feeling. So they don't waste time on calls that lead nowhere because this customer is actually quite happy and he or she doesn't need anything from you right now while another one is close to churning. And you don't know because you don't have this data that tells you that.

Philipp (23:11):

And yeah, of course, automating workflows, like onboarding workflows or renewal workflows or all the things where CSMs are typically involved and besides fighting churn, upsells cost sales. How do you know a customer is a good candidate to speak to for an upsell or cross-sell, right? So how do you know that and which are those customers? And if you don't have a tool like Custify, the time that you spend gathering this data is typically huge. It's typically bigger than the time that you actually spend on your job. And yeah, we just increase this efficiency and allow them to spend the time with the customers rather than crunching data from different tools.

Ben (23:53):

Yeah. Kind of getting it all into one spot and just having this brain working for you 24/7 on keeping track of everything. So you don't have to manually do it. That probably saves hours, if not days, a week helping people.

Philipp (24:06):

Yeah. I mean, this is one of the things that we have in our business case, right? So when you think about, "Okay, should I purchase this tool?" This's a question that your top-level management would come back to you as a CSM leader. Like, okay, why would I invest in this tool? One of the things that we did is we asked many of our existing customers, "how did that change? What is different now?" And there are many things different, from what I just said, but in general, they can handle two, three, or X the amounts that they could handle before as a CSM. And if you just think about that business case, it's almost a no-brainer to not get started directly, right? So absolutely.

Ben (24:46):

Yeah. That capacity is just doubling or tripling your workload without taking up any more time than you're already using. That's huge, yeah.

Philipp (24:55):

Exactly.

Ben (24:56):

That's really, really efficient. So let's talk a little bit about your team internally. So how are you and your team able to kind of get work done? Do you have any processes in place that are helping you save time?

Philipp (25:11):

I mean, I don't have a magic recipe there. Of course, we use Custify ourselves, first of all. That's, I guess, obvious.

Ben (25:17):

Good dog food, right?

Philipp (25:19):

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But we keep in contact with each other. We are a remote-first company. So even before COVID, we were not necessarily all in one place. So we had the tools in place to keep in touch with each other across borders, across time zones, all the time. So I think it is really important to not work on one thing, to have the right priorities, et cetera. Giving people time to focus despite this is always difficult in any business because priorities are always difficult to set and can switch over time. But giving people time to focus, I think is also very important to have set aside a certain time for a certain project to get this done without too many context switches.

Ben (26:05):

Yeah. Giving people the ability to do that deep work and really get some big things moved for sure. So how large is your team now?

Philipp (26:14):

It's just about 25 or so.

Ben (26:16):

And roughly how many customers are you helping?

Philipp (26:20):

We are still in the three digits. So in the hundreds, but yeah. Eventually breaking the four digits.

Ben (26:29):

Yeah. And when you get to that point, how are you looking to kind of prevent burnout with your team?

Philipp (26:36):

Well, obviously in a startup, it's always a challenging environment. No question. So we fostered the concept of regular one-on-ones between employees and managers to make sure that the workload is never too much to handle. Despite that, it's hard to say no to some opportunities always. I mean, you would always like to say yes to them, but this is something that we also try to implement in the management to say, "Okay, this is a great opportunity, but sorry, no, we cannot do this. We don't have the capacity to do it right now." Might that be a special customer, might it be a special feature. So that's something that we try to implement as well. Not always successful, but we at least try. And yeah, the other thing, as I mentioned, we are remote teams, so we encourage the work from home concept. And that also saves time. I mean, imagine you spend one and a half hours, two hours in traffic every day commuting. That is also time that you can definitely use better in regards to work-life balance.

Ben (27:46):

Yeah, exactly. Puts everything into context when you just have a little bit more time each day to kind of anchor yourself and be home and do anything that you want to do. And yeah, in that point you made about kind of setting those priorities. It can be kind of tricky because everybody wants to do everything, but you have to be a little bit cutthroat and be like, no, we can't do that now or this is why we can't do it or that type of thing. And those aren't necessarily the easiest conversations to have, but with a small team looking to prioritize and keep things focused there. Imperative. So on the flip side of burnout, how are you kind of keeping your team motivated?

Philipp (28:23):

That's a good question. I think I have a different belief there. I think you cannot really motivate people. I think you can only demotivate people. I think people are self-motivated. So what you need to do is kind of create an environment where this self-motivation can unfold rather than be destroyed by the previous things that we discussed. So I don't think you can, in the end, motivate someone. I think everybody has self-motivation and it's your job as a founder or as a company or as a leader or a manager to make sure that this self-motivation can unfold and is not destroyed. I think that's the key.

Ben (29:03):

Exactly, yeah. Do anything you can to not make people demotivated, for sure. And so, you mentioned that you're hoping to obviously increase your customer base, but what are the overall plans for Custify? What do you see next for you and your team?

Philipp (29:19):

Well, our product vision or vision as a company is really to be the ultimate one-stop-shop for every customer success professional. So helping them to integrate multiple data points and getting this view and managing the customer journey and in the end really enabling them in their job so they can do what they are best at, which is spending time with a customer. And yeah, that means in the end that we will improve the product constantly. We improve our service constantly. So we are in that flywheel, right? That I mentioned before, where we always improve. And that's what we are focusing on, at least for the time being

Ben (29:56):

Yeah. That makes total sense. And something I wanted to ask you a little bit earlier, how long does it usually take to get Custify up and running for a SaaS tool?

Philipp (30:04):

Well, we are back to this data point that we discussed before, which is the biggest variable in this equation. So setting up the tool is really, really quick. So that takes hours. So for our CS team to train a new customer on it and to set up the first health scores and automation and all these things. And it's also built in a way that, for example, these automations can be easily dragged and dropped. So it's all Al and easy to configure. I think the most valuable part, in the beginning, is the data points. And that means, typically, product data points. And yeah, some customers are very well prepared when it comes to that and they have everything there. The only thing is they need to send it to Custify. Then this is a matter of hours or maximum days where, and then we have the product data and with some others, we first need to work on the strategy a bit further. And even some others say, "Okay, the product data is maybe not that important. We are more of an extreme high touch environment." And then this is of course also possible. And then yeah, it's a matter of hours or days typically to set up the product.

Ben (31:11):

Yeah. I could see the data being a blocker, because as you mentioned, there might be just some dirty data coming through or not having the good signals of when to send data through and all of that stuff that can be quite cumbersome to navigate. So where can folks go to learn more about Custify and everything you're working on?

Philipp (31:28):

Well, I think our website is a good starting point. We have a blog with a lot of great content for CSMs, best practices, tools, and so forth. Yeah, our social media channels. Of course, the best way is to become a customer. So what's going on, this is the best way, but yeah. I mean, our social media channels. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm also frequently sharing what our team researched and that's the best way, I would say.

Ben (31:59):

And that's Custify.com?

Philipp (32:02):

Yes.

Ben (32:03):

Awesome. Yeah, but we'll be sure to put that in the show notes and get all of the links to everything on our blog post as well. And is there a free trial or something that folks can check out?

Philipp (32:12):

Yeah. A free trial typically doesn't work in our environment very well because of that data. What we have on the other hand is called concierge onboarding. So basically we have a very high-touch onboarding where our team works with the CS team of the customer and helps them to establish the strategy correctly, establish the right data points, send the right data points, and then set up the platform. So that's kind of our guided process that we do, but there's a demo that people can look at. So when they subscribe to a demo that is absolutely possible.

Ben (32:44):

Yes, absolutely. You sign up for a demo, Custify.com, to see how you can help your CS team do way more with less and use data as your secret weapon. So Philipp, thank you so much for taking the time to be on Get More Done. It was great to talk with you to learn about everything customer success related. I wish you the best and for the team at Custify, for your continued growth. Have a good rest of your day.

Philipp (33:09):

Thanks, Ben. Thanks for having me.

Ben (33:11):

All right. Cheers.

Philipp (33:12):

Cheers.

Ben (33:16):

Thank you for listening to Get More Done. We hope you learned a bit more about customer success in this episode. Do you want to be alerted to all new episodes? Be sure to subscribe on your favorite platform and if you are subscribed, leave me a review and let me know how I'm doing. Are you and your team tired of back and forth emails, trying to find a time to meet with your customers? Consider setting up scheduling automation to avoid the headache. Find out how at YouCanBook.me/teams.