 Thank you for coming to hear me talk about how to build customer love and I'm really excited to talk about this topic because it's Definitely one of my passions as the introduction said I'm Rebbe. I'm running customer and employee experience at pigment and Pigment is the next generation planning solution for forward-thinking companies So we actually power companies like figma karta brex deliveroo gong and many others and since it started in 2019 We've raised over 150 million dollars and we're expanding our operations across the globe specifically in the US market as well So I wanted to give you some practical steps of how we went about building customer love at pigment So the most important thing is to talk about why this is a very worthwhile investment from day one So it shouldn't be an afterthought and I think we know that a lot of us are focused on closing the new customers Making sure that there's new revenue and while this is really important Actually building and very exceptional customer experience is probably the most important thing that you can do and the reason is is because especially at the beginning You're trying to differentiate yourself from the competition and maybe your product isn't yet fully there with their potential So you need to find ways to build that value quickly and the easiest way to build that value quickly is by building trust Value to our customers and really differentiating with that experience And it also makes business sense So we know that actually the most efficient ways to grow your business are through renewals expansions cross sales up sales and just to illustrate this point this is a Gartner study with companies under 50 million of revenue and what they found is that actually over 60 percent or sorry Just under 60 percent of their revenue came from existing business another study That's interesting is from Forrester that said that companies that are customer obsessed Are actually 2.5 times Better at growing their revenue quicker so it makes sense and The realities that many of us can claim that we're a customer obsessed that we're customer first is very easy to put that on a Slide on a website But the truth is that it is going to down spiral very quickly if you're not Substantiating that with true advocacy with true results and stories from your customers So here are my practical steps on how I went about when I joined pigment on building that customer love The first step is that you have to know what you want to achieve and invest in the round foundation So if you don't know what there are the biggest things I will bring that impact and what how you're going to measure it You're not going to know where to invest your first Moment so what we do at pigment is every six months We define okay ours Objective and key results and we say this is what we believe is going to make the most impact and we do that by an Accompany wide level on a team wide level and we really put every resource to focus on that aspect Then we're also very clear about what the state looks like today and where we want to go and actually the example on This slide is the real slides when I joined pigment where I put on a page What I wanted the customer experience seemed to have and look like and as you can see most of everything was read and I was thinking You know where are we going to prioritize and spend the most time and with the pain of my heart? I had to put a lot of things read as well because we were just not going to be able to get to everything But how I prioritize was based on what would have the most impact What was the most urgent and also what had dependencies for us to build into the future? So yeah, it was a very interesting exercise and actually I'm pretty happy to say that pretty much everything on that slide is now green at pigment and Very important is to invest in the right tooling So outside of your people having the right infrastructure is going to really help you accelerate and get a lot faster at everything that you build So I'm very very fortunate to have incredible Leadership team that really allows me to put an investment into my team's resources and tooling And so I will start with pigment because of course we use pigment for everything So I actually use pigment to track our ok ours our upsells our renewals our performance And then I also have a tool called plan hat which allows us to have a 360 view of our customers This is really powerful because we really are able to not just bring the revenue numbers from our customers But we can see their usage we can see they're participating in community If they're participating in the academy if they're giving us any tickets So we're able to automate a lot of tasks because of this information And I have a lot more things. I have the community platform Which I'll talk about in a second our Academy as well that helps a lot and self-serve and making customers empowered from the beginning My second tip is to pick what you want to be known for and I think many of you have probably seen this quote before that people may Not remember exactly what you did But they'll remember how you made them feel and I thought a lot about that too when I joined pigment and what did I want our customers to think about when they thought about pigment and There's a lot of implementations. I've been actually in sass a lot of a lot of years. I've implemented a lot of customers I've also implemented tools within my own organizations, and they're just you know, very unmemorable sometimes And I wanted to have something that would mark a moment in time for our customers That would make a difference because it was delightful and it was valuable. It's not just about being great Have another great relationship and being happy It's about also making sure that they are getting value and that's something I think a lot about and this is just an example of Not a grand gesture But with I think a lot about these little moments and how they all make a difference and how people experience pigment And so this is an example of an executive email. We send this before launch for our customers To their executive we name the project team and we say, you know Your your fantastic project team has done a great job and we're very proud to be partnering with you And this is just a moment to really celebrate the project team give that visibility to their executive and we do a lot of Different activities such as this or for example when our customer signs a renewal We send them a little plant just to signify our growth together and how we're going to continue to evolve The second one is to build and maintain a Community so I have three kinds of community right now at pigment that we have our user groups where we host On-site events we've done one recently in San Francisco and people come and learn from one another share We also have our customer advisory board So that's a picture actually from our latest customer advisory board in Paris in July We actually have our next one coming up next week again But this is where we unite our customers with three key goals One is to understand what is top of mind that helps us go to market with better messaging Understand how we're going to build a product We show our roadmap and we let them give feedback influence that and then finally if you ever go to our website Go pigment.com if you see videos there, they're actually or recording through our cab as well so we take that moment to really maximize the fact that we have our customers there and Sorry, and one thing I did mention the communities. We also have our online community online communities are very powerful downright It takes a long long time to build so this is definitely an early investment But it's something that is very worthwhile because then it takes a life of its own And you have to do a lot less in terms of support and the final one is to stand up from the crowd So I just want to show an example of what we do when our customers Launch pigment again to really mark that moment in time and maybe I will cue video If it's ready So it's a very small thing but I ask customers, you know How will you know if you've been successful at pigment and many of it told me a rebel when I don't have any more excels running around and you know I'm not chasing all this Difficult numbers and so I tried to give them a pinata with an excel logo and they can walk with their team and kind of say You know no more excels for us now The third is to be one percent better every day And I am a huge fan of this notion that if you improve yourself one percent each day by the end of the year You're gonna be 37 times better as a result. So it's something I pay a lot of attention to and It really is a combination of all these little Details and changes compounding how we did a pigment this is we actually mapped out the entire customer journey we Made sure that we understood where were the parts each milestone each resource that support that which team is in charge of it Which team supports? What are the bottlenecks? We asked them themselves What are your bottlenecks was causing you to waste time? But we also measure that from a data perspective and pretty much my whole goal with the team has been to automate this as much as possible So as we learn as we grow we as we understand you things we keep automating and we keep making sure that they when they're spending time They're spending in time in the way that adds the most value Don't shy away from big bets. So this is something also I mentioned quite proud of but to give you an example of our Academy Before we had the Academy we used to train our customer would take eight hours per customer to train them on using pigment At least and we've actually now moved that completely self-served on the Academy So you can imagine these are eight hours that my team is able to spend on doing something a lot more valuable Same with the community is still early on. We're only about six months in with our online community But we're already seeing customers answer each other We're getting really excited about you know becoming top users and things like that So it's really creating that variety effect for us and My probably most important tip is to invest in operations So operations team is really the glue the engine that powers everything they bring you the data the insights They allow you to cost-correct and they are going to multiply every single effort that your team is doing And on this slide is just a very small sample of actually all of the things that this team has done to make us way more efficient So to give an example of the playbooks that we have this playbook enable on our customer success We'll call plan had but we have basically made a playbook for when there's a handover from sales to CSM to make sure that it's always Consistent that it's always the right way and that we're not missing anything We also have a playbook for example for onboarding. So every onboarding will have Pre-made tasks for the CSM with the emails with the presentation so that they don't have to spend that time doing that and they're just spending time with a customer and Another playbook example that we have is if a customer starts to reach a certain number of license penetration So they're really like living up to the seats that they bought it creates a task for the CSM to start having an expansion Conversation and and getting there an example The automated task are maybe aligned to that but on the smart notifications This is something I really love So for example when a user comes back after a certain number of in a days of inactivity We get a notification so it allows us to grab them right at the beginning very recently actually one of our customers launched and I noticed that the CEO went in for the first time and right away I was able to send him a message and I said hey, you know, how did you find your first experience? So we're able to have very much more meaningful conversations with that other type of notifications Maybe just interesting when our customer is about to renew Long before actually we start getting notifications to understand it or if a customer actually is achieving or User rather is getting into the top of the top Performers and most active then we also give them a badge to say hey You're in the top 25% of all of our users and we really leverage all of this notifications for that and Finally, they're rich data as an example So when we have what we've built up pigment is we just don't see like oh, this is John Joe using Pigment at Figma what we see is that hey, this is John Joe and he's the head of finance He's currently opening three roles to hire. He's actually just posted in the community He has three tickets pending and so we're again when we have these conversations We just have all the context behind it to make that way more valuable for them. I Think if no chat could be completed without talking about the team I will also say I didn't put it here, but very important is the product. I'm very lucky Also that our product is fantastic. We have an amazing relationship with the product team a lot of empathy and cross-functional Efforts, but I want to talk about how we hire for the right people and The first thing is that we are very clear into what we're looking for and we have a scalable recruitment process Everyone knows what we're asking who is asking it Why what what good looks like and we of course have our pigment values These are for pigment values that we use to also assess whether someone will be living into the kind of spirit that we want to create Being very clear on what are your known negotiables I think this one is really hard for us at a startup Where there's so much to do and I think all of us want to find that unicorn person that is Scrappy yet very polished that you know can think commercially, but also be very technical and While we do find them sometimes you have to be very clear of what are the things that you're not willing to go without and That will really make a difference if you make a misstep With that this is something I tell my team a lot when we're hiring is that I don't want someone who can just do the job That's great And it's good to be able to do the job But I want people that are gonna bring a superpower to us and are gonna make us better because maybe they're Very strong commercially or maybe actually they've been on the customer side And they can give us that sense of empathy of what it's like to be there Or maybe they're just been in the industry a long time and they can bring some insight So or maybe they've never been in the industry and they can we can think about how someone who's never experienced this product Would we live it and adopt adopt it So it's something I think a lot about and every every hire I've made so far. I'm very proud I always find that superpower that is coming to improve us all Hiring people you won't regret that you will regret not working with every single interview. I have and I have a lot At the end of it. I always ask myself one question Would I be upset if I never saw this person again in my life and it's a very simple question But you have no idea how many times it's made me and it's probably saved me from making the wrong hire Because a lot of times and maybe to the next point, you know, we're desperate. We see our team that is Very stretch that is fighting for capacity and we want to make sure that we we can have someone in seat And you want to avoid those red flags sometimes you're like, oh, but maybe you know if if this is the right way and I just I'm here to just advise you not to Avoid taking up attention to this red flags ask yourself this question And if there's someone that you would not forget and that you want to see in your working team hire them and And then the final tip I have for you is around not selling yourself short and I think especially when we're in a startup. We're trying to get customers. We're trying to Build our brand. We don't you know, we have a lot of power sometimes and I'm very proud to think about how do we? You know if we've done everything right if we've done everything I said from the beginning if we've hired the right people if we've invested in the right foundations If we know what we want to be known for And we're every day improving then hopefully you would have created an experience that is worth a lot and so do not sell that short so This is again just an example, but like if you've done all the right steps, you know You are going to be lucky and successful in getting more. So First of how I think about this being in a customer facing team, especially It's not about being a yes, man to build a fantastic customer relationship Is not about you saying yes to everything is not about you going above and beyond all the time Because that actually doesn't build that respect and that partnership that you're supposed to have so An example of how we do this and how we actually build that trust is that we set the right expectations from the beginning We say how often we're going to meet with them What is the value of everything that that we're bringing where are we going to show them something? So we actually for example also have a customer portal where we show them pretty much everything that we see So we really open ourselves to say we're completely transparent and you're gonna see exactly how we assess you and how we think about it This together we also let them know who is part of their team including all the way to our executive team We also say we're gonna have a monthly check-in. We're gonna do this This is your level of support. So we just transparently communicate everything that how they're gonna live up in the pigment ecosystem And then we put a price on things and we make sure that they are valued So I'm very also proud when we started our implementation team We actually very early on started charging for this and I've been in other startups and even at Meta before where we actually would just give This for free, you know in kind of spirit of the ARR that you would be getting or nervous that they wouldn't sign if you kind of Priced your services and we have a fantastic professional services team at pigment. They're probably the best in class in the world Experts and so customers have to also understand the values that they get and they're They're really able to see that when they pay for this it's definitely worth it and also like how we're gonna deliver to it We also have what we call the premium packages of premium services and this is Actually recurring ARR that we do where we give customers the ability to buy an upgraded service So that would be faster response SLA's from support. It would be more certifications from the Academy It would be some support hours a dedicated CSM and then based on this They're they're able to again put a price Maybe something that many customers do and many companies do for free just to make sure that their customers are happy Our customers are happy, but they also value every time we invest an hour with them and we do something and Then finally there's a lot about this give and take so maybe you kind of see a theme across But I really believe that we have to be in a partnership together that we have to be open and transparent to one another And I really appreciate this as well when we're thinking about discounts for our customers every discount that we give a pigment Has a purpose so that could be that they're signing a multi-year deal that could be that There's a high volume and so we're giving a volume discount Or we also have what we call the advocacy discount and what we do here is we tell our customers Hey, if we are successful, you know, I'm making you're successful and you are truly happy We would expect you to do a video testimonial a case study a G2 review and then for that you get a certain percent of discount And we hold them accountable to it. So again, we have really fantastic stories a lot of great G2 reviews So G2 is the platform that so there's over ratings and thanks to all of this. We actually won 12 badges Many around like our great support and how customers experience So yeah, I think it's about really knowing that you do have good things to offer and to price that and Then just to kind of conclude I just want to say that no one has some monopoly of good ideas So I would say try things out gate creative You know, sometimes you have to as someone says kiss a lot of frogs to find the right way and Don't be afraid to you know, have a couple of failures here and there because they're getting you closer to where you want to get to each day The second one is to include other teams. I mentioned we have a very close proximity with our product team But also with our sales team And I mean really all teams across Facebook But I think sometimes good ideas come from them as well where they say, you know Sometimes you're too close to the problem and they say I have noticed you you could do this better And so definitely listen to your cross-functional partners as well And if you're ever in doubt, I think the best idea is to listen to your customers So that's why the customer advisory board for example is quite important to us But if you don't know maybe, you know, how you want to price a certain thing or how you want to grow certain feature just ask them and Just to conclude this are some of the resources that I think are useful in this topic So I just wanted to give you an idea of some books that I quite like or podcast that I think are interesting to look at so In-depth the happiness lab are good podcasts that I like and then atomic habits It's actually that whole principle of being 1% better every day and how those atomic habits Multiply the effect in the future. So that's all I wanted to share I realized I'm a little bit quick on my talk, but hopefully you enjoyed it And yeah, if you have any questions feel free to see me in the mentoring launch or also at me on LinkedIn I'm very happy to share very passionate about this topic. And yeah, thank you so much Thank you very much Thank you