The Secret to Building Great Customer Relationships: Conviction

I’ve been working in customer success for over a decade, and one thing I’ve learned is that, for my customers, I am the product. Not the software. Not the logo. Me. I am the face of the product and the company I work for. So the only way to do this job well is to believe in the product, to believe in the vision, and believe in the team behind it. And that’s why working at Ivo is so exciting to me. 

I had a job once where the product was pretty lackluster and could be easily copied by its competitors. That’s where I learned why it’s so important to believe in the product and the company you’re working for. The only way you can do this job well is if you actually believe in what you’re representing. And at Ivo, that works really well, because I know that people love the product and what it can do for them.  So if I can help create a great experience for my customers, they'll learn to love working with me, and love working with Ivo. But if the product is bad and the overall experience with Ivo is lackluster, that's my reputation on the line, too. So it’s really important to provide that level of service consistently.

Fortunately, the rest of the company makes my job easy. It’s an incredibly collaborative place. If I need to go to the engineering team because there's a bug, I need to go to sales because I'm looking for an expansion opportunity, or the legal engineers for a technical question, everyone plays a role and pitches in to help out. I have to make sure I have what I need from everyone else before I communicate it to the customer, and because we work together so well, it’s simple. 

There are ways I can tell that a company is going to be the kind of organization  I want to represent. When I spoke with Min-Kyu, our co-founder, I saw the vision in introducing AI into the contract review workflow. It seemed like such a no-brainer. It's a manual, tedious process. But with AI, you can utilize that technology to do the same thing and then do the fine-tuning yourself, actually creating the strategic component of the work. And then, hearing Min-Kyu’s passion and his vision, I realized that he really cares about what he's doing. During the interview process, I was invited to a lunch celebrating the Series A with the team, which at the time, was close to 15 people. I immediately felt at home and noticed nothing but good vibes. You could tell that everyone there really enjoyed working together and they were taking the time to actually celebrate a huge milestone. So when I got the call from Min-Kyu with an offer to join, it was sort of a no-brainer. There was no question about it.

Since then, the job’s just been more and more rewarding. I get to sit in the passenger seat while the customers are driving and observe and tell them maybe you could have done this a little differently and gotten a better result. And then watching the looks on their faces when they're like, oh my God, I can do that? That, to me, is rewarding in and of itself. And getting to do it alongside my team: all of us have that drive. 

Recently I had a customer at an education company, and they are federally mandated to provide responses to specific situations. It’s a very laborious, manual process. So I suggested to my customer, “why don't we try to use Ivo’s Assistant to do that?” It worked. And I realized that Ivo can do a lot more than I thought. It’s really just limited by your creativity. Every day I'm running into stuff like that. Seeing that happen more regularly only gives me an added conviction that we're on the right track and I joined the right company at the right time. 

The best part of my job is the creativity and the sense of ownership. At larger companies, they give you a playbook, a handbook — this is how you're a customer success manager here, follow all these rules, you'll do a good job. But at Ivo, we're creating the rules, and that's what's exciting for me. No one's done this before. We haven't scaled like this. So it's all new and exciting, and we get to dictate how that goes. I get to solve challenges together with my partners, and I think that's pretty rewarding.

So if working in a fast-paced, challenging environment excites you, and you enjoy being amongst other people who are equally driven to provide a world-class customer experience, I think Ivo is a great place to be.

Does being on the customer success team at Ivo sound like an interesting opportunity? Check out our open roles if so!