Payments Dialog: Customer Success at Spreedly

On this episode of Payments Dialog, we speak with our head of customer success, Mike Lee about how the Spreedly team works to develop a deep understanding of each customer's payments journey and how Spreedly can help play a part in the path to success.

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Want to learn more about how Spreedly can help along your payments journey? Reach out to us here.

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Rough transcript of this Payments Dialog:

Peter Mollins:

Hi everybody. It's Peter Mollins at Spreedly and welcome to another edition of Payments Dialogue. Today, I'm joined by Mike Lee who is the VP customer success at Spreedly. So Mike, welcome.

Mike Lee:

Hey Peter, how's it going?

Peter Mollins:

Excellent. Great to see you. Great to see you and great to chat with you.

Mike Lee:

It's good to be here.

Peter Mollins:

Excellent. Well, if you don't mind, could you just give a quick rundown on your background in your role at Spreedly?

Mike Lee:

Absolutely. I am the director of customer success here at Spreedly and I've been here about five months now. I started in October of 2020. But before then I have a background of being a customer success advisor, customer success manager, senior customer success manager. And I've set up a few organizations in the commercial space, the month to month space, and also the enterprise space as well.

Mike Lee:

My focus really was the higher end red accounts, the ones that were in trouble, because of the relationships I'm able to build and try to help reconcile based on what's happening for the customer. But I came out of school as a Java developer. So I have a technical background as well as but customer success kind of feels like home for me.

Peter Mollins:

Great. Well, terrific. Well, customer success is super important for Spreedly as you know. I mean, hence you're hiring and so there's a number of topics that I'd love to explore a bit more in detail so that folks can understand the customer success in general, but also how it fits into Spreedly in particular.

Peter Mollins:

One of the things that often comes up when you're thinking about customer success is, kind of thinking about it from a journey perspective, when you've got that very first stage where they're onboarding, can you maybe tell us a bit about how that team is structured for onboarding and getting a customer ramped up?

Mike Lee:

Absolutely. We have a great customer success group here at Spreedly and we're growing. As the company grows, we're going to grow as well. Our team is really divided into two parts. One is the month to month team and the other is the enterprise team. The enterprise team is we're really based on customers that are ACV based, or annual contract value, so those are the ones that have contracts.

Mike Lee:

And we call that team account managers. Well, on the month to month side, we call the team customer success managers, and we have a variety of different people there. We have those who really kind of focus on the technical touch, the customers who don't need much attention or just kind of reach out periodically. And then we have others who focus on that proactive outreach, both on the enterprise and on the month to month side.

Mike Lee:

We do the executive business reviews. We're the ones who are reviewing what the value that Spreedly provides. When someone is interested in network tokenization, we're the ones who kind of walk through what does that mean for your business? What type of revenue value will you have for network tokenization and the new programs that we have? That's really what we're about here, and we try to reach every single customer, but as we grow we work on more automation type things, but for the most part, our relationships are built human to human and our engagements are as well.

Peter Mollins:

Great. So just thinking about that, from that human perspective, what should a customer expect when they sign up? So if I'm a month to month customer, I've just put my credit card down. Or if I'm an enterprise customer, I sign that agreement. What should they expect as they start to onboard?

Mike Lee:

Well, when you come into the Spreedly family, and we consider you family and not just customers, we try as hard as we can to really reach out and develop an understanding of where you are in your payments journey. Payments orchestration is a really integral part in the success of the payment strategy of an organization. So we want to get in there, we want to get you on the phone, get you on a Zoom call and figure out what is it that your strategic priorities are and how can Spreedly connect you with those?

Mike Lee:

So what you can expect is you may get an email from the system saying, "Here's where our information is. Here are these resources." But what are you going to have is a link to set up a call, an onboarding call, and we're going to work with you, and we're going to figure out where you are and how we can best leverage our resources, or the different products or ideas that we have available to you to help you on your journey.

Mike Lee:

If you need a little more help, we're going to point you in the direction of how you get that help. That's the same thing with the enterprise customers as well. You're going to speak to your account manager and they're going to understand where you are and how to get you where you need to be. And that's a specialty of that what we have in the customer success organization. We're able to have these conversations, make sure you're on the right path, the journey, and help you along that journey.

Peter Mollins:

That's great. So when you're thinking about that journey, you must've seen lots of customers that are onboarded successfully. So when you think of successful customers, what does that look like? What do you see when you know they're going to be successful?

Mike Lee:

Well, we get customers that come in at a lot of different phases in their payments journey. And success for different customers, it can vary based on where you are. But I think in general, what makes a successful customer is the motivation you have behind where are you trying to get? What are the challenges that you're trying to solve with the Spreedly product? And you don't necessarily have to be super technical to use Spreedly, we have guides, we have programs, we have offerings, but if you are a technical person, if you're a developer co-founder, or a lot of our customers are developers who found companies or apps to do a different payment type things, you're going to have what you need.

Mike Lee:

We have great documentation. We have great resources, we have great knowledge bases, and you could come in and find that information. But if you're a business user and you don't quite have that ability, we're here for you as well. We have professional services, we have other resources, support engineering, and your customer success manager is going to be here to guide you along the way. So success means different things to different customers based on where you are, but wherever you come in at Spreedly you're going to have the resources there to help you be successful.

Peter Mollins:

That's great. So you talked about resources, so obviously there's resources in terms of people and it sounds like there's now management, customer success team that are definitely there for you. And I know from working with those folks myself, terrific, terrific group. But what other resources are there for a customer that's coming on board?

Mike Lee:

Right. So when you come on board, what you can expect is at very first, at the very basic level is you're going to have access to pre-leased documentation. This documentation system is something I've never seen before. The amount of screenshots, the amount of code snippets, the way things are written out that everything you need to be successful is right there in the documentation. We've made it very searchable. We've made links to other types of articles, right there in the documentation. Our knowledge base is growing. If you have a challenge, chances are someone else has had that as well. So you start your knowledge base, get your answers. If not, you can submit a ticket and a resource, a technical resource is going to reach out and help you walk through those things.

Mike Lee:

You're going to have full access to your customer success teams. And if you can't find the chat, if you can't find what you need, I guarantee you customer success will be able to put you in the right place with the right people. And you also, a lot of times what we have, our product managers, our product people reach out to our customers to see how things are going. We involve our product people on calls. We involve our highly technical people on calls when we need that type of support. So all of these resources are kind of together right here at your fingertips, and you have all the answers, you get all of the answers that you need, and in any way we can. That's what we're here for.

Peter Mollins:

That's great. Yeah, no, I love that, especially because when you think about Spreedly and being in the payments orchestration space and having a payments orchestration platform, there's a lot of flexibility to it. I mean, that's one of the core values that we deliver, isn't it? The idea of flexibility. And so when you have that flexibility, that can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, and it helps to have someone that you can bounce an idea off of.

Peter Mollins:

Someone that's a payments expert where you can say, "Hey, I'm thinking, I'm concerned about outages in my payment stack. What should I do to make sure that that's the case?" Or, "I'm expanding into a new market and I'd like to think about how to be flexible and going into that new market with my... In building connections to more gateways." So it sounds like-

Mike Lee:

That's right.

Peter Mollins:

... a good sounding board for that as well.

Mike Lee:

Absolutely. And that's what we try to be. At the very core of what customer success is here at Spreedly is that trusted advisor. We want to be able to advise you on your tokenization, your network tokenization strategies, or priorities. We want to help you understand the complexities of payments orchestration and how Spreedly is a leader in that, and helping you to get into new geographies and making sure that your revenue is optimized.

Mike Lee:

Your transactions are optimized with that payments orchestration side as well. So we are your advisors. We will be there to make sure you're headed in the right direction.

Peter Mollins:

Great. Okay. Terrific. Since you've come on board, there's been a lot of great changes and just continued enhancements, which has been fantastic. I mean, there was already a great customer success team in place and platform, but you keep adding more developments to it. Tell me a bit more about what's what's new and what's new that you've brought or the team has brought that can help our customers.

Mike Lee:

Absolutely. I'm really excited about being here because this is a great place to grow and great place to grow a world-class customer success organization. And so with the new developments that we have going on here, as we're starting to develop these webinars, where if you have questions about specific topics about payment and payments in general, but also payments orchestration, network, tokenization, revenue optimization, those types of things that Spreedly does so well, you can just sign up for our webinar.

Mike Lee:

It could be prerecorded or it could be live. We're going to have a lot of these product people coming in and explaining how this can actually help your organization grow as payment strategy. And that's absolutely wonderful. We have a new offering in our professional services where say you're having a challenge with getting off of the ground, getting your payment strategy off the ground.

Mike Lee:

We have implementation as a service now, so you can sign up for this. It's an extra cost, but you can sign up for it and have a good runway into getting yourself off of the ground and getting your payments going yourself. We're revamping. We have a great documentation system, but we're revamping it to make it even better with our searches and even better with the code snippets. The copy and paste functions, the ability to ask questions, real language type questions, or even Boolean searches in there, so that you can get exactly what you need out of there. So the team in general is really getting better at understanding and becoming experts in the payments industry.

Mike Lee:

So the advising service that we have is just going to increase. You're going to be able to come to your customer success manager and really find the answers that you need in any part of your strategy and help and allow us to move you forward. But all of these things together just continue to grow your experience, we want you to ask once and get the exact answer that you need in that one question. You will not bounce around. We will not send you to someone else, forward to someone else. If you ask us, we're going to get the correct people in place or the correct answer to you so that your experience is beyond anything or any other place that you can do business with.

Peter Mollins:

That's great. Because I know one of the things that's so exciting about Spreedly is the fact that we were the original vendor for payments orchestration, the leader in this space by far. And so being able to bring that leadership, that knowledge, that experience in payments orchestration to our customers and just provide that resource for them around payments orchestration is phenomenal. So it's just great to see that you are leading that charge.

Mike Lee:

Absolutely.

Peter Mollins:

So tell me, just to kind of wrap up, I'd love to hear a little bit about what should people know, or what should prospective customers know about our success teams in general?

Mike Lee:

Well, what you should know about our customer success teams is when you work with us, when you become a customer, you have a set of professionals who deeply care about your industry and your challenges. We want to reach out. We want to build these relationships to where you call on our professionals here to answer whatever question or whatever challenges you may have in your payments journey. We work to research your industries. We work to research your organization. We track whatever challenges you may need.

Mike Lee:

Our professional development, we continue, we're continuing to grow. We're continuing to learn the discipline of customer success, as well as the mindset of customer success, so that we can service whatever challenges you may have directly here with you. We want to work with you. We want to help set up plans for you to move forward, we want to help set up programs so that whenever you run into an issue, you know exactly what your next step is.

Mike Lee:

If you want to mature your payment strategy, we have a maturity model that we want to provide to you on how to move forward. So what you're going to expect, or what you should know about our teams is you're going to get the best of the best in your payments industry, in the payments industry for customer success here at Spreedly, because we care deeply about your success, and we want to continue to make you wildly successful. That is our goal, to have wildly successful customers.

Peter Mollins:

That's terrific. Well, Mike, really enjoyed the chance to hear more about yourself, about the team and the success that you're bringing to our customers. So really enjoyed the chance to have this dialogue.

Mike Lee:

Thank you, Peter, it's been a pleasure to be here, and this is exciting. So for our customers, reach out, we have all the answers for you. Thank you.

Peter Mollins:

Awesome. Thanks, Mike.

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