The Secret to Unlocking Performance: Your Technology Partner's Customer Success Team - Megan Yagoda Kaplan, Actabl [Sponsor Bonus]

Josiah: Megan, I'm really excited to speak with you because so many people in the hotel industry, leaders of hotel companies, ownership groups, everyone sees and believes in the power of technology. But they say the real key in driving those results is how teams are using the technology. You have built and are building an incredible organization that is helping our customers at Actabl do this. So I'm excited to get into this and hear your perspective. So maybe as a jumping off point for people who are kind of brand new to working with technology companies, the notion of customer success might be a little bit unclear to them. You're leading our customer success program at Actabl. How would you describe customer success?

Megan: Thanks Josiah. I'm so excited to chat about customer success today. So customer success exists as a function to ensure that customers are getting value out of the technology they purchased. And right now, I think our function is more important than ever, because as you said, hotel companies are reevaluating their tech stacks. They want to make sure they're using products that actually drive usage at the hotel level and they're actually getting an ROI. And so our customer success managers or CSMs are on the ground deeply understanding the pain points of customers and helping them drive adoption and achieve their business goals. And when customer success as a function is doing their job well, we are both retaining our customers, but also a growth engine for the company. Because when companies get value out of the technology, they want more of that technology.

Josiah: It's win-win, right? I think this is fundamental to software as a service, different from a decade or two ago where you just buy some software, you install it and hope for the best. The success of Actabl or any software as a service business depends on usage and results. So of course we're going to win, but we do that in partnership with our customers. And we talk a lot about that is that this is a partnership, right? I think hoteliers, and I said this before I joined Actabl, you have to look at your technology relationships as partners. These are very dynamic and you'll get some benefit just by purchasing software and providing logins, it's going to be a fraction of the benefit and the results that you see if you're actually partnering with a great customer success team like you're leading. I want our listeners to get to know you a little bit. You have a very interesting journey consulting at Deloitte, a Harvard MBA. How'd you find your way into doing what you're doing today?

Megan: Yeah, I like to think that I've spent my entire career in client service. So the first decade of my career, like you said, was at Deloitte as a management consultant. And that's where I really fell in love with hospitality as an industry. So as you can imagine, I spent a decade living out of hotel rooms. And at the same time, I was consulting for hotel brands on their toughest challenges and working with the hotel brands. I saw increasingly how important technology was really becoming in their strategy. So they needed both to deliver the best possible guest experience and they also needed it to hit their EBITDA targets. And so I was making a lot of slides at the time and I really wanted to get closer to the action. I wanted to be a part of really making the hotel operations better. And so when I was looking for new opportunities, I discovered Actabl and was excited because of the platform play. I also love that Actabl as a company is people first and we have brought together in my opinion some of the brightest people in the industry and so as a lifelong learner and like you said an MBA I love being around people that are always trying to learn and strive to be the best.

Josiah: I think we share that. I think the mission that we have to empower the people who power hospitality resonates on a deep level, I think for both of us and for our teams. And it's a really interesting vantage point. I think we share that as well. That's one of the reasons I joined Actabl. We work with 90% of the top 50 management companies in the US. 150,000 plus hoteliers every day are using the product. So it's a really interesting perspective. If you think about the question of what drives success in hospitality with technology, really interesting vantage point. Now, I want to, now that we've kind of defined what customer success is, how did you think about building this at Actabl?

Megan: Yeah, so I think what is special about what we're building at Actabl is that we have built our customer success team all around making sure we have people that deeply understand hotel operations. And so most of my CSMs have spent their careers working at hotels. So they have been the front desk agent. They have been the housekeeping director. So they have lived and breathed what it feels like to work at a hotel. And so our CSMs really understand how to drive adoption because they've been in those roles. And then they also understand the goals of our customers who typically are management groups, brands, or ownership groups and what their goals are. So for ProfitSword, that could be trying to improve forecast accuracy. For Alice, that could be making sure that they're resolving guest tickets efficiently so they can improve guest satisfaction scores. So to me, what the secret sauce is our CSMs understand both the hotel level, but they also understand what goals our customers are trying to drive and they bring those two together in the most magical way. And so to bring this back to my background, I think the greatest CSMs are consultants. They ultimately help customers get insights from how customers with similar portfolios or challenges are winning. They also bring a fresh perspective to the operation. So for example, we have some labor gurus on our teams that will go in and help a customer really optimize their labor standards and help them think differently about how they manage their labor standards to drive the best possible guest experience. It could also be as simple as one of our CSMs worked at the hotel level and she noticed that one of the hotels had a ton of guest service tickets around water bottle requests. And she pointed it out to the management company and now they made water bottles a standard amenity in the room and were able to save their team a ton of time from running water bottles up the stairs. So I think what Actabl really tries to do and what's special about what we're building is we have people that really understand hotel operations, but they also understand the strategy of what we're trying to ultimately deliver, which is technology that improves hotel operations and ultimately drives performance.

Josiah: What you just mentioned is so powerful and I think a lot of people are unaware of the potential this can unlock in their organizations. If you take all those things together, the hotel experience, if you take the consulting approach that your team has with the perspective again of this huge data set, we see what's working, what's not. This isn't anecdotal, it's not an article, it's not just you heard a podcast or something on a stage. We have data on what is actually driving performance. So you want to find a tech partner that has this perspective, right? Again, if we're working with 90% of the top 50 management companies, we see a lot of both what's working and not. But there's also the mentality and the perspective that your team has is battle tested by working at hotels. So I have appreciated the conversations you and I have had around how do we incorporate more of that perspective into the different touch points that we have. But I do want to rewind, you mentioned a few times goals and understanding what does success look like for our customer is integral to the work that you're doing. You've alluded to that, but I wonder if you could speak to how does that goal discovery or formation process work early on in the relationship that we have with a customer?

Megan: Yeah, it's at the core of everything we do. So at the very beginning of when a customer success manager brings on a customer, we start during the sales process. So there's a reason that a customer decided to buy our product. And so we want to understand what ultimately they were trying to achieve. Why do they buy the product in the first place? And what's the business case that they need to prove to their boss or their boss's boss? And so ultimately our job is to make our champion look like a hero to their boss. And so it starts from the very beginning of the sales process. What goals are they trying to achieve? And then we make sure during onboarding that they are focused on really telling the story to the end users of why we purchased this product. So for example, if it's to resolve guest tickets as efficiently as possible to improve guest satisfaction scores, that's a mission everyone at the hotel level can get behind. And then when they come out of onboarding, we create a success plan with them. So we say your goal was to improve guest satisfaction scores. Here are the three things we recommend you focus on to improve guest satisfaction scores. And then we're checking in with them during our cadence and meetings with them to make sure that they're actually achieving it. Once they achieve their first set of goals, we don't stop there. We continue to redefine their success plan because the goal is that there is more, of course, that they can do to improve guest satisfaction. It may start with making sure that they're resolving tickets within, say, 20 minutes. But from there, we can start to look at the trends of what types of guest tickets are they receiving and what can we do to make sure that we're anticipating the guest needs before they even ask for something or we're saving the team time by changing the way we operate. So it may start with a simple goal like reducing the resolution time and then it should evolve into something more strategic which is looking at the trends of what we're seeing to improve how they're actually operating and so that's where the real magic happens.

Josiah: Interesting. So the question behind the question or the driver of the outcome that you're looking for, it's often like an onion. There's a lot of layers to unpack there. I wonder just, I mean, on the notion of process in these interactions, another thing that you think a lot about leading this function at Actabl is the touch points and how those are scheduled. Some of them more formal than others. I wonder if you could speak a little bit to those more structured ones and how you thought about investing in making those as productive and effective as possible for our customers.

Megan: Yeah. As you know, from this podcast, hospitality is all about relationships. And so the way I think about customer success is our job is to build deep relationships with our customer and not every relationship should look exactly the same. So we always encourage our customer success managers to really get to know the product champion and the customer that they're working with. And we try to design the experience based on what we know will make that specific customer successful. So of course, there's very important milestones in a customer journey that we need to nail. And so we focus obviously on after onboarding those first 90 days, making sure that we're driving adoption. And so whether that's weekly meetings with the GMs, or whether that's monitoring their usage and sending them a report on how they're performing, we're really checking in to make sure in those first 90 days that we're driving adoption, that the hotel is excited about using our product and starting to see the value after that 90-day mark. Like we talked about, it's all about value optimization. And so there are some key touch points we like to have. We love to do strategic business reviews because it allows us the opportunity to really check in with the customer and reconfirm that we understand their goals. There may be new challenges that the customer is facing. So that's our opportunity to really check in and reconfirm that we're focused on the right goals, understanding any new pain points or strategic challenges they're facing. Obviously right now with RevPAR challenges, a lot of customers are coming to us and they want to really focus on EBITDA or opportunities to keep their labor under control or make sure forecast accuracy is obviously more important than ever right now. And so it's really important for us to check in on a regular basis that we really understand what pain points they're trying to resolve. And then we also use the strategic business reviews to provide recommendations on how we would optimize their usage of the product. Like you said, we see 90% of the industry, we have ideas for more that they can be doing to win with our products. And so we bring those recommendations to those strategic business reviews. So that's an important touch point, but ultimately it's about building that deep relationship with the customer, which a lot of times includes visiting their properties, going to their customer events, and ultimately spending time with them in person because we know in hospitality, the in-person connection is so incredibly important. So we love finding opportunities to connect with our customers in person.

Josiah: Well, I love that it's a bit of an aside, but you not only do this with executives, but you led our engagement around housekeeping week recently, which is so cool to see we had so many teams, so many cities across the US. You personally were there in Chicago, leading our teams, visiting not only leadership, but people on the front lines, housekeepers in this example. So, so cool to see that it feels like just how you think and operate. So I appreciate that. I want to kind of stay with this notion of the engagement though, because we talked earlier around successful technology implementations being this partnership, right? And so you've talked about different elements of this, but I wonder for the hospitality leaders listening, how might they show up and engage in the partnership in a way that's effective? I imagine you've seen some organizations interact with your team in a way that's been highly productive for them. And I'm curious, if that's true, what are some of the characteristics or what can our listeners keep in mind so that they can show up, whether it's a strategic business review or something else and get the most out of the opportunity that exists there?

Megan: Yeah, so I love that question. A lot of times with our customers, what we see as most successful is first and foremost, we need a product champion who is from the top talking about the why. Why are we using this technology? How does it ultimately deliver on our goal? Whether that's improving guest satisfaction score, hitting our EBITDA targets, getting everyone bought in on the dream of why we're using this technology. And then it's really important to celebrate the wins. And so we always try to focus on what properties are using our product really well and hitting their goals and how do we tell that story to the rest of the portfolio to get them first of all learning from the properties that are using it well and also getting them excited about using the product. So when our customers do those two things really well, championing the product and finding wins to celebrate, we see them adopting the product faster.

Josiah: This is so powerful. We actually just published a story with Hotel Equities. I had the privilege of sitting down with their leadership team a few months ago. In terms of communicating the why, it was so interesting to hear them talk about this. Obviously, there's efficiency. They want to grow at scale. They are able to achieve those things. But they were talking about career development opportunities. They were talking about all these things that directly benefit the users. And I felt that so compelling. As somebody who's done 1,000 episodes here, hearing that from them, I was like, this gets me really excited about the potential that exists here. And then a big part of that was working with our teams to get that story out. So they're sharing that internally with their team. But I think even sharing it externally, imagine, attracts talent. So these are really important things for leaders to be thinking about. I would love to...

Megan: One of my favorite things we do is when we find someone who's using the product really well, we can call out what a rockstar they are to the management group that they may not normally get exposure to. So we love creating opportunities to celebrate the hotel level heroes that are doing amazing work. And we've also throughout that gotten some amazing stories of people who have grown their career in hotels and have made such an impact. So we love making them look like the hero and really celebrating their successes.

Josiah: I love it. I mean, to that notion of stories, again, you see a lot. I'm curious if something comes to mind in terms of maybe it's an interaction or a customer relationship that you've enjoyed watching develop in terms of what this looks like when it's done well.

Megan: Yeah, so we recently had a property that was really struggling to adopt one of our tools and we sent out our full team customer success product to go and make sure that the property got all of the attention they needed to really understand again the why. But they were struggling, the change journey can be difficult if you're switching from a different technology to a new technology. So we actually spent time with them on the ground walking through their day to day with them and showing them how to use the tool, making some tweaks to their configuration so that it worked for their specific operation. And so showing up for customers in the moments that matter is really a big part of what we do in customer success. And then to the point I made earlier, now this is a success story of a property that was able to overcome some challenges, adopt the product. And we had a lot of important lessons learned that we can apply to the rest of the portfolio of properties. And so we love those opportunities to show up with customers at the moments that matter the most on property so that we can learn how they're using it, how we can drive adoption across their portfolio and ultimately get their end users excited about using our product.

Josiah: It's so great. Earlier, you mentioned this kind of hospitality mindset. I think this is a great example. I think the leaders that are listening to this will know this. I think this is how you provide hospitality in many cases to guests, right? You're understanding what's going on. How do we make this better? You're applying that thinking in this case. I think what also stands out to me, Megan, in the months that we've worked together, you are always investing, building, improving the way that Actabl thinks about customer success. I wonder if you could share some of the recent investments or work that is being done to uplevel our ability to support customers.

Megan: Yeah, I love this. So at Actabl, customer success is truly at the heart of everything we do. One example is we start every single full company meeting with bringing on an actual customer and interviewing them so that we make sure that every single team at Actabl, even our backend engineers, actually understand what our customers need to be successful using our product. And so we have continued to invest in our team. So even though it's a difficult time in the hospitality industry, we have invested in building out our customer success team, both with CSMs that have hotel operations experience. And then we've also built out this new team that we call technical customer success managers that have really deep product expertise. So they know our products better than anyone and can actually be in a live meeting with a customer and fix something on the spot, provide recommendations on how other customers are using a specific feature really well. And so that combination of having the CSM who's worked at the hotel with this technical CSM that has incredibly deep product expertise is really incredible to see what type of magic we can create for customers. So ultimately, we want hotel leaders to know that we're continuing to invest in building our customer success team and that our team wakes up every day motivated to make them successful.

Josiah: Amazing. Thank you for sharing that Megan. I'll include links in the show notes where people who are interested in working with you and your team and upleveling their use and the results they get from technology. We can have a conversation about that. Also link to some stories. I think story was a key theme through what you shared. I'll link to some stories where people can read what this has looked like. But thank you for taking the time to join us and share this.

Megan: Thanks for having me.