Ep 74 | Kate Panasenko

Speaker A: Foreign. Welcome to Mastering CS Candy Leader Insights, the podcast where we dive into the world of customer success with industry leaders. I'm your host, Irina Chismash, and today I'm joined by Kim Panacenko, customer success manager at Raccoon Gang, a company that builds and customizes elearning platforms. Kate, I'm really happy to have you here. Thanks for joining.

Speaker B: Thank you Rina. Thank you for this opportunity for joining and I'm um, happy to share my experience.

Speaker A: Let's start with a, uh, bit of context. Help me understand your world today. What does your role actually look like and what kind of customers are you working with?

Speaker B: Great, thank you for the question. I actually want to start with the introduction, uh, of the background of the company because I think that's necessary to mention that Raccoon Gang is a software development company. So we don't deliver one product to many clients. We deliver unique customized products to different clients. That means that every client is unique, every product is unique and we work with uh, every single client under his own requirements. And the great thing about this, that we are working with the open source products. So that means uh, that when a customer has uh, his own flow, his specific business, uh, and the uh, existing platforms doesn't match his requirements, however, he doesn't have time and budget to invest a lot into building the complex solution from scratch. Here we are. So we work with the open source products like uh, lms, uh, CRMs reporting tools. There are a lot of them on the market with the code that has already been open sourced. So you don't need to build the basic functionality. However, on top of that basic functionality we customize and make the integrations with the other solutions and we build some additional modules on top of that to meet the customer flow. That is why we don't have any client or any LMS that is similar to each uh, other. But on contrary they are very different. And because I work with um, different clients from different countries. So my work starts with the clients from Asia, from China, Australia, Indonesia, then it comes to the Middle east, then Europe gets up, uh, and in the evening I work with the Americas. Uh, because of that I'm so happy that I can share the experience that worked well in the Asian region. Yeah. And uh, or share the experience of America with that part of the world. Uh, and for example, what went very good in China, that could be implemented with the American elearning platforms because there are a lot of agents in the United States. Right. And that's so great to share that experience among the Regions and among the clients here I'm doing that. And because we have around 200 people on board. Those are developers, business analysts, engineers, tech leads, architects, all of them. So we can do any kind of solution, especially in elearning because we have that expertise. And I am one of those guys who simply is responsible for the relations and the revenue generation.

Speaker A: Oh man, that's a lot. And I was under the impression that I do have a lot on my plate. But listening to everything that you said, do you ever get a break or what happens when Kate is on vacation? Because it seems like you are connected 24 7, 24 hours you are starting with APAC and ending up with us. Hopefully you have a team that helps you out there, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, of course we have the project managers on uh, each of the project. And uh, fortunately I don't have the uh, time limitations for my work. So I can uh, arrange my schedule as it is appropriate for the client and for the team. So I manage my time. So the final focus is the result. Till I give the result, till I generate revenue. That doesn't matter when and how I work. I can work at night or I can work during the day. That absolutely.

Speaker A: As long as the results are coming in, it doesn't matter what you do and how you. How we do it.

Speaker B: Absolutely.

Speaker A: Are you uh, I hope you are not alone and I hope the CS team is basically representative and I hope there's a team of CS in place. Not necessarily you alone or the other, I would say peers in terms of. Okay, marketing, sales, product, project management. Okay, so you are part of a uh, you are part of a cs. You are not a lonely wolf.

Speaker B: Yes, yes, absolutely. It is not possible to do it alone and we have a lot of clients but we came to this approach so that all css, so that there is no division into one CSM focused on one segment or on one region. So we can substitute each other and we are uh, capable of jumping into any project and speak with the client on his own language. And we cover actually five main segments of the clients that we work with. The first one is K12 education. These are the schools. The second one are universities and institutes. And uh, these two segments they are more focused on the uh, instructor led training. So there are two ways instructor led and self paced training. K12 and institutions are the organizations where learning takes place under the uh, instructor recommendations year end in classes. So the learning management is more for delivering of the content to the supplementary content or delivering content to enhance the learning or courses for teachers or Parents while there are three other segments that we work with. These are the training and the certification centers where most of them are earning money with uh, specific courses delivering in specific industry. So for example if you want to be the real estate agent you need to pass the course, get the certificate. So that's for the compliance purposes. There are the non profit governmental organizations that deliver specific courses. They're free of charge but they populate some topics e.g. water consumption or human rights in Europe or things like that. And the fifth segment I think most interesting and most demandful these are the corporate because all the big uh corporations have uh e learning platforms and their internal learning for their employees to develop skills for onboarding for enhancement of their skills. And we are covering those uh, different products and because they want something different and because they are in different regions and cultures it is also necessary to take into consideration the way they deliver the content, the type of the content they deliver and of course the way how they work uh because building relations. What is the key in customer success with different cultures. That requires patience a lot.

Speaker A: What does good onboarding look like for you guys? What are you aiming for and how do you know when you've got there?

Speaker B: That's a great question. So in our software development world onboarding doesn't look like the uh, standard onboarding in the SaaS industry where you know the product, you have the processes and you are talking about how to use, how to implement and how to make the next steps to usage of this platform. We consider onboarding to um, make the client on board with the first scope of work that we are going to implement and to connect the dots of what was sold, what is expected and what is going to be developed, tested, launched and implemented. For him the next thing what is important is to uh onboard in our processes because for there are different kinds of stakeholders and when the stakeholder is aware of the development world and software uh development life cycle that's really good, very easy and he understands the this process. But however when the stakeholder is not tech savvy and have not developed previously any product uh, that is very crucial to get uh him or her to know at least the wording what does deployment mean, what testing we will be doing or what is CICD or things like that because we are using the words uh, like this very often and we came to the fact that people simply don't understand that. So we need to make the glossary and make that universal software development things and the other that he or she needs to know how the process how the internal process happen on our side because delivering the feature it looks like uh, a developer uh is sitting and producing the code. But it's not. It's the full cycle of planning, requirement, elicitation, estimation of the time verification. After that development, the development. So all the developers they sync together, the front end, the back end, the DevOps part has been prepared. Uh, then we need to make the testing, uh then we need to communicate with the client and these internal processes, internal things and the dependencies on the client has to be clear and transparent. So once it is in uh clients and stakeholders mind and once it is on the paper with the shared structure then it is considered to be uh, onboarded. And one more thing that onboarding includes is onboarding into our help chain and our stakeholders and people on our side. The client needs to know where and how and to whom to contact. Uh, once he has this or that issue or that question or anything that he requires, he needs to be comfortable to work with me.

Speaker A: Okay, and once everything is on place and the client is onwarded, what happens next, what when? Okay, all the apps and everything is set it up. How the, how do you know that customer is there to stay with you? What does, how does the, I don't know the renewal process look like for you? Where, how do you identify a healthy customer?

Speaker B: Yeah, the health score which I'm responsible for and the nps. So these are metrics that attract uh, along the way of the development. Because I'm interested in the healthy and happy customer. Because by the end of the contract once we deliver the product, the happy customer his business will run and he will get the revenue from delivering the courses and he will require the further enhancements or the further more learning seats for example. And for this reason we need to change the infrastructure for example. And this is the additional work for our DevOps and development team. Uh, at the same time I understand if he is happy he will recommend us to his community, to his partners, his vendors and that happened so many times. So that's the great thing. Uh, our customers have their specific customer journeys and I understand in their journey. So once we deliver the scope, whether we continue with the renewal considers as the additional scope after the main product is delivered and that depends on whether there is the necessity or the we deliver the MVP and it's enough to go to the market and it's enough for the client to do his business. So once he get the feedback and he needs these enhancements, improvements or integrations with the other software. So here we are, we make this sell. As for the revenue generation here, I work in two areas. These are upselling and these are cross selling by reference. Uh, and upselling means that we have the new scope of work or we put this platform on the support and maintenance because any product has to be supported and has to be maintained or else it will not survive. If the customer doesn't have his own development team or developers on his side, he needs that support. Or the other business that we have is the instructional design and course development. So once the client has the platform he has to build courses and if he has the uh, his internal content creators, that's great, they can do on their own. But if there is the requirement to build the course, here we are, we additionally help to build the courses.

Speaker A: What's the operational infrastructure behind all of this? Before or in other words what are the platforms, the tools that are critical for the CS operations to run in day to day?

Speaker B: Actually you mean uh, the software tools for the customer success.

Speaker A: Yes. And what's the layer? And let me go one question further. What's the role of AI? How is AI going on top of um, basically the um, operational infrastructure that you guys need in order to be productive and deliver the uh, KPIs that you are responsible for.

Speaker B: That has been changed a lot during the last year because uh, actually we didn't need a lot. We had the, we had the customer success tool that we built in house because we have developers here. We, at first we had everything in the Google spreadsheets, but after that we implemented that in our own software. So it's, it was not very uh, complicated because we just needed the uh, customer journeys success path, the uh, things to track the health score. So we need the pipeline as in the CRM and track the deals and several more uh, action items. However the issue here is to have the CRM or customer success tool of good higeon of ring data, ah, of everything that was spoken during the meeting or noted somewhere in the other documents, it has to be in one place because only then the AI tools can analyze and can simplify what you're doing. If you don't have that structured data in one place or if you have it torn or for example, uh, I remember that we had, of course we had clients where we had issues and no one wants to mention those issues. Issues in details, no one wants to talk about that and to write the detailed ways how that was solved. It was just solved and everyone was happy and that's all. But after we make the array estimation or estimation for the next scope we need to take into decision and into account all those details before because they are very critical for the further estimations uh and once they are not noted, AI doesn't know about that. That is why we came up that every single person had uh, to had that in mind that the data hedgen, it's not for only for customer success, it's for everyone in the company to have it, to have the data clean, to help themselves in future to use AI and to have the good results of it for us. Uh, yeah we have been implemented AI functionality during the past past year. Right. Uh and in every department. So I in on every stage in marketing, uh, in pre sale team, in development team, in our sales and customer success team while making the estimations, proposal, fixing recordings, meetings, years. Right. A lot of things. I can't even imagine how we can cope without AI. Now

Speaker A: Kate, you've taken a path most people wouldn't predict. You worked in industry and trade, you work in sales. Now you are in customer success. Is there something you learned the hard way that still shapes how you show up for customers today?

Speaker B: That is a very interesting question. Uh, actually my sales academy started I think at the age of 8 or 9 when I sold apples from my garden with my grand grand nanny in the market. And believe me that was the best experience experience I've ever had because you had to know uh, at the early age how to communicate with the customers, how to package and lay out those apples and how to make the discounts in the end of the day because you don't want to get those apples on your shoulders back home. So that's something in my consciousness. Uh and you are right, a lot of people switch to customer success or they go naturally to customer success management from onboarding or from support departments. So I switched from the sales department and from industrial from the glass factory. However, I have never distinguished customer success from sales and sales from customer success. So while making sales I was uh, thinking ahead of the customer and his success in business uh, and building those relations for a long time. Because working in the industrial enterprise that's not about building relations in two, three months or within a couple of meetings. That takes a long time, it may take two, three years, even more. Because they are working with corporations, they have their budgeting time, they have their suppliers, uh, to break through that wall you need the persistence and time. So I learned that any relationship requires time and patience. Probably what is also important is that uh, I worked in the glass factory production and that means that while the Furnace, uh, melting the glass. It is doing it constantly and you cannot stop it. So for me as a salesperson, uh, I didn't have the chance not to have clients or not to have orders, no way. Because we couldn't stop the furnace. To stop the furnace, it took a couple of months to stop it and then up to six months to restart it. So it is very expensive, very time consuming. And we just lived and worked in the environment where you need to forecast, you need to budget everything, you need to predict unpredictable things. And that where I learned to be proactive and think of the customer. And I learned how to make the forecast, uh, based on the historical uh, data, understanding the market. So I had uh, instead of the clients be with the market of their business, so we supplied two glass bottles for the alcoholic beverages. So I had to know everything in that market. Moreover, I had uh, to follow the governmental regulations. So that's a lot of information and you always need to stay with that uh, information and to be ready to adjust to the changes. And as for the probably, uh, uh, third thing to mention that is the operational accuracy and operational accountability. Because you cannot say that you will do better in the next quarter because when you supply jars for the production of cucumbers who need to put those cucumbers in the jar, those cucumbers will not wait, they will spoil it, and you will not have the chance to supply those products in the other quarter. So that level of responsibility and accountability made me think that in any industry you're working, in any role you're working, uh, that is very essential to keep your word and to follow the contract and uh, be transparent with the client if anything happens.

Speaker A: Kate, this was a great conversation. I really enjoyed hearing how your background shaped the way you think about customer relationship. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me today.

Speaker B: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to everyone listening.

Speaker A: Thanks for tuning in. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning and mastering customer success.