Matthew Kettell:
Cool. Hi, and welcome to the CX Coffee Chat. I’m your host today, Matthew Kettell. I’m here with Craig Jackson, the Director of Customer Success at Pleo. Hello, Craig, welcome and thank you for joining us!
Craig Jackson:
Thank you for having me and thank you for having the patience to put this together.
Matthew Kettell:
Before we dive in, tell us a little bit about yourself. Let our audience kind of know about who you are and what you do.
Craig Jackson:
Okay, yeah. So on the personal side, I’m Craig. I hail from sunny Wales, otherwise known as God’s country. I have two wonderful children and a family. I’ve been in customer success now since 2016. My first role actually was working alongside somebody who’s actually part of Concentrix now, which is quite wonderful. I originated in recruitment, got the opportunity to step into a role which married recruitment, technology and finance. And that suddenly gave birth to my dream of FinTech organizations and I’ve been in that industry ever since.
Matthew Kettell:
Amazing. And can you share a little bit more about that background? What led you to your role today at Pleo? And so what’s that journey been now? You’ve been there for a few years.
Craig Jackson:
Yeah, so I’ve been a player now for four years. Arguably the best career move that I’ve ever made. But in order to get there, I had to make some previous ones, right? So my first experience in the fintech world was working for a company called Sonovate, a company I hold very dear to my heart. Fantastic opportunity to join the company at very early stage and be a part of its tremendous growth. Tremendous amount of love for the two directors who gave me the opportunity there and equally the chief of operations who was really like pivotal in my career decision making from there onwards. In between there, I managed to work for two really impressive organizations before I landed at Pleo, just under four years ago and I’ve had the time of my life ever since.
Matthew Kettell:
Amazing. And for those who might not know, Pleo, too well, how would you describe the company and what really drew you to join?
Craig Jackson:
Yeah, great question. And I find myself in a challenging position with this all the time, because my mum often asks me, like, what is it that you do? And despite doing it for years, she still doesn’t know. So I’ll give it another shot. So Pleo is a spend management organization. Ultimately, our principal product is around smart cards with an app that feeds through all of the company’s spend through to an ERP system.
Now we have some very clever features which wrap around that to manage subscriptions and invoices as well. So ultimately the goal of the business is to capture a business spend and provide an effortless experience when understanding where the funds go. But from what drew me in, how I first heard about the opportunity with Pleo was actually somebody I’d worked with in a previous role. They led me to the information that there was a new regional leader position.
And I put my hat in the ring and from the very first conversation, I kind of knew that this was the organisation that I wanted to be in. I met with the then people partner who was arguably one of the best that I’ve ever worked with since. Extremely human, very diligent, very caring. Just met everything that I looked for from a cultural and a personality perspective.
I was a by-product. I worked throughout the course of the interview process. I went through five in one week and I was very, very fortunate that the end of it happened to me and number of different people that the role was offered to me. Despite being a process for some other opportunities as well, it was an absolute no-brainer for what I was looking for in my career and still four years later, I feel the same.
Matthew Kettell:
Amazing. That’s a really good story. And so now that we kind of know what drew you in, let’s talk a little bit about what does your role looks like day to day as director of customer success.
Craig Jackson:
Yeah. I’m gonna steal a little bit from Ben Horowitz when I talk about this, because ultimately my role rallies around three key areas, which is first, the vision, secondly, creating followship, and then lastly, execution. So getting things done. know, Pleo is an ever-changing organization. We’ve 10x’d our SaaS revenue over the course of the last four years, and it has been a tremendous effort from under a thousand people. But during that time, like no two days have ever remained the same. But there are three key principles I would say which align consistently, which is to ensure that the team, and when I say the team, everybody that falls within the customer facing role are constantly rallied across a common goal, whether that be within my direct leadership or stakeholders. Secondly, we have people committed to that common goal. And then lastly, we rally around really tight, executionally focused KPIs and objectives and key results over a period of time. Sometimes that’s biannually, sometimes it’s quarterly. But my goal really is just to steer the chip whilst working with some incredible human beings.
Matthew Kettell:
Nice. I really like that.
Okay, so you’ve spoken about how intentional you are with driving that culture. I think that’s a real cornerstone, it sounds, of your day to day. Could you give us a sort of a peek behind the scenes? What’s something that actually like really works when you’re talking about driving that vision being kind of the one of the key attributes of your role?
Craig Jackson:
Yeah. This question couldn’t come at a better time because it was only last week that the entire team were together for quite a few days. And I think one of the most lasting impressions that have happened to be in my time in Plio was actually at one of these events. So last year, we rallied the team around a team building event and taken into consideration now that our CS team has spread all across Europe. So we’re in very small pockets, some are remote, some are attached to offices. So from a time in person company, we get very limited throughout the course of the year. So these events are really quite special to us, not just for what we can achieve there, but also the connections that we built. And one of the exercise where we split the team up into various different groups, nobody from the same segment or from the same country.
And we asked them to five key values out of a pool of 50. And once we completed that exercise, we all came back into the room and we shared, and there was a remarkable likeness or synergy between each and every group on the key values that they opted for. And quite literally, just before my conclusion, one of the team members stepped up and this will stick with me for a large part of my career and said, the favorite thing for me to take away from today is that no matter where we work, no matter our upbringing, no matter our career history, we’ve all rallied around the similar values. We’re all connected no matter where we are. And that’s like a dream come true for me as a leader. That’s everything you could ever hope to achieve because when I’m not in the room, it means the team are self-governing that vision because it’s what they believe. So I think as a group, we’ve hired really well.
We’ve got a lot of very committed people and we’ve grown. We’ve grown collectively as a group as well, you know, I have to say, I’m extremely proud of the group. I couldn’t be happier.
Matthew Kettell:
So I imagine that last year, that team building event, bringing together all of those cultures and different personalities must have been a real kind of milestone moment for you at Pleo.
Craig Jackson:
Yeah, definitely. It’s something that we try to do every year. We rally around business objective. So something that’s critical to the company at the time, but also ensure that we have enough time dedicated towards connection, building relationships and just spending time with one another. Because ultimately, you know, the results over the years, people will forget them. But the memories now people feel in those moments and in those in those events, they’ll stick that. That’s what will matter over time.
Matthew Kettell:
I guess you have quite an interesting perspective, right? So you will have been to quite a few of those team building events every year as your company has grown quite considerably over the last few years, right? How have you seen it evolve year on year as the company’s gone through such a growth period?
Craig Jackson:
Something which I continuously find remarkable about Pleo, and I’ll use some stats from the team as well, is that every quarter we carry out an ENPS score within the team. And I’m very proud to boast that globally across Europe that our team is currently sitting at 80. But despite the fact that when I joined, I was employee just under 200, we’re now close to 1,000.
That hasn’t diluted. There are still people who are passionate about making a difference to customers and even the world. And I think because we have that, it makes all the challenges even more bearable. And you know you’re in an organization where people are collectively trying to achieve the same thing. And that’s, I’m a very small cog in a very big machine here. So that is like a collective high five to everybody within the organization, because it’s not easy. Like even within, within teams, have microcultures. So to keep those aligned to the organization is, is, a challenge. So, you know, high five to everybody, the organization for doing such a great job to just, to just keep it.
Matthew Kettell:
Definitely. And I want to talk to you about that a little bit. I think you’ve given us a really good inside view of personally what makes you tick that big picture view that really carries everything that you’re doing at Plio from perhaps like a more granular level with from hiring to onboarding to actually keeping those teams driving against those mission statements.
How do you personally help make sure that the people that you’re bringing into the business are right and they match that and they’re going to contribute to the team in the right way, particularly when you said you’ve grown from 200,000 employees in quite a short amount of time. It’s a challenge to maintain the quality and those values. What are some of the ways that you’ve delivered on that?
Craig Jackson:
Mm-hmm. Definitely.
We’ve intentionally set a high bar and that high bar is quite personal to us as a team. I think the latest stat would suggest that less than one in 100 applicants are actually successful in getting a job within the customer success team, which is very low.
We’ve also engineered the process to be very focused on the individual applying as well. mean, it is an experience both ways. We have five steps, which traditionally would be seen as very long, but they are also very intentional. you know, our people team are very heavily embedded in our organization. They know, they understand the personalities. They know the team members that exist there today. They attend our events. come to our all hands. They play a big part in the team in general.
So they can make a very early call on the type of individual that would really succeed within the organization. And from there onwards, they’ll meet the hiring manager, but they’ll also get a chance to meet the team that they’ll eventually work with. And that’s a great opportunity for them to ask questions that traditionally wouldn’t be suitable maybe for a hiring manager role. And then finally, they’ll end with me where we’ll just talk about values and…
And ultimately for me, what I’m trying to do in that call is to understand the inner motivations of somebody. Can I provide the opportunity that they want? Is the expectations on both sides really aligned to a genuine outcome? And one of the things that come up really quite regularly is everybody loves to talk about hop. Very excited about the opportunity of the Pleo. I love the idea of change and continuous change.
And everybody loves that idea until it actually happens. So, you know, it’s not just somebody that’s willing to adapt, but you also have to have quite thick skin working in this team as well. Not because it’s not a wonderful place to work, but because the way you operate today may not be the way you operate in six months. And that continuous evolution within the team is critical to make sure we succeed as a group. So you have to be up for that because if you’re not… It can be quite a challenging place to work.
Matthew Kettell:
Absolutely. And it resonates with me personally and also on a level to what we’re doing at Concentrix with The Nest and being able to find a place for people that are keen to work in dynamic environments. Let’s call it that with startups and scale ups where absolutely the right person is going to thrive and it can be a complete game changer for someone’s career if you put the right person inside a startup equally there are people that aren’t going to flourish in this type of role. So I think it’s really important that you’re going to those steps.
Craig Jackson:
And I think something that tells us that we’re at least heading in the right direction with this, you can never get anything perfect is that when we again relating back to our E-NPS score is that you’ll notice that the score is actually higher than the those that have been here longer. So anybody over two years tends to keep a higher score. They’ve been through the evolution of Pleo. They’ve seen so many different iterations of how the company looks and has operated and still, you know, with those… wonderful high scores. It’s a joy to see. It just makes you think that you’re doing something right.
Matthew Kettell:
And forgive me for asking this, but is there any experiences where you’ve tried something that it didn’t work in your team?
Craig Jackson:
I’ve got them all. I think, you know, I often say this at the beginning of every quarter, he used the same line, knowing what not to do is equally as important as knowing what to do. We rally around very tight KPIs and objectives and key results every quarter. And ultimately they’re tests, right? They’re tests is can we, can we create a more efficient, a happier, more diligent team with a higher output by running this test?
Some work, some don’t, but you the key is, is that we just find out fast. and incidentally, uh, I listened to another podcast recently and we’ve experienced this firsthand as well is that the original success metrics, the original goals that we set out to do, we, we, we’ve missed them all. But during the period, we’ve actually found other ways that this individual projects have become successful. So, I mean, what may look like a failure on a surface may also be like an overwhelming success if you look at it through a different lens.
So, there are so many different ways to approach these, but ultimately everything comes back to the customer. How are we giving the customer a fantastic experience? Will this increase the lifetime value? Does this make people want to speak about play? And that’s really the question that we’re trying to answer with each and every one of these projects.
Matthew Kettell:
Lessons learned, the intelligence that you’ve gathered is ultimately equally valuable to the business. So, great. You’ve talked before about, I’ve heard you talk about customer success in organizations becoming more strategic, particularly in the fintech space. Can you walk us through sort of your view on that and what shift you’ve noticed?
Craig Jackson:
Too many.
Certainly. I mean, customer success as a, as a principle or an idea, is fairly, it’s fledgling. It’s fairly young, right? I mean, very few people even heard about it before, say 2016, but the principles that guided the idea behind customer success existed for years. and I still speak to them, to a few people in the industry today that would consider themselves purists. So. i.e. no revenue metrics set against the organization. They’re purely there to support the customer and make them successful. And I would argue that there’s still a major, still a key part of the role, but ultimately is your input must generate an outcome. And that outcome needs to drive the business forward in some sort of way. Something that we’ve done within the team over the past few years is we’ve run a series of degradation analysis across customer behavior and what would eventually lead them to wanting to turn. And we’ve managed to take those steps way back to the beginning so we can identify the earliest experiences that you may have with the organization that may send you down a slippery slope. We’ve essentially focused the team around five key principles, which we know provide value to our customers today. And we can…
We can directly attribute an activity that we make to a form of either revenue growth or revenue or protecting revenue that otherwise would have been lost. So I think from a, from a CS perspective, particularly going back a few years ago, it’d be very easy to become distracted by every single problem that’s in the organization. And something we believe very heavily within the, within the team is you feed the focus and you start the distraction.
Matthew Kettell:
Yeah.
Craig Jackson:
And we’ve done that by creating a global standard of performance, which ultimately channels the team to measure their input versus a direct outcome for the customer and the organization.
Matthew Kettell:
Nice. And so rather than asking about those sort of specific KPIs, let’s talk the signs and how do you personally know when your team is doing well outside of, you know, those, those kind of cornerstone metrics traditionally.
Craig Jackson:
Yeah. So like there’s nothing revolutionary here, right? I have a fantastic leadership team. I love them to absolute the moon. They’re incredible. something that one of their sort of combined traits is how people focus there and throw every single one to one before we even get into any of those challenges around work as we focus on three key areas, which is happiness, value and support.
I’m a big believer that nobody comes to work to do a bad job. Everybody wants to do a good job. In life, what are we all trying to do? Trying to pay our bills, get ahead, go on some wonderful holidays and live a life that we’re proud of. So I don’t believe that anybody comes to work to essentially do a bad job. There are external impactors that can influence whether or not you show up your whole self. So those three key areas are really important to us. Are you happy? Do you feel valued? Can you offer value and do you feel like you have the necessary support? And if we can tick those three boxes, we are confident that based on the people that we’ve hired and the focus that we provided them, they will deliver great work. So if anything is lacking within those three principles, sometimes we’ll just spend a few sessions, few weeks just working on them with the belief that the outcome will be that we’ll get the individual back on track if it’s necessary and they’ll be achieving much like they were before.
Matthew Kettell:
Ultimately, if you’re keeping those people happy in way that you described, then that’s translating to the customers. But I asked you a similar question earlier. But in terms of how your customer base has grown, Pleo, equally how you’re introducing kind of new product lines, new markets, companies growing in a lot of different ways. What are you doing to keep that human experience that you’ve described? Any tools or particular approaches that you found really helped you to maintain that personal touch in such a, you know, scaling environment and increasingly digital world.
Craig Jackson:
This, this is like all credit to my boss. Like, it’s probably good that this has been recorded like massive brain, lovely guy. The way we’ve segmented our customer base means that we’ve the right people in the right spot. But then we’ve also, we’ve also supplemented this with an incredible customer marketing team that essentially maintained a tone of voice globally across, all of our customers. So, despite the fact that, you know, we have thousands and thousands of customers that we simply wouldn’t physically be able to touch at a human level globally. We still manage to keep a tone and an approach that I think leads directly to our culture internally and how we want customers to be treated. Ultimately, we’re trying to drive an effortless experience and any communication from us globally or personalized or should also follow that track. We’ve also got extremely, what I would say, an extremely good product team and they focus very heavily.
On ensuring that the right interactions are being made with customers at the right time while they’re in the product. So we’ve kind of like this 360 approach to customers, but from my personal day-to-day focus, it’s on the Northern end. So, the mid-market and enterprise section, we’ve managed to create some really profitable portfolios of ensuring that we’re not giving too many customers to the CSM so they can maintain those really strong relationships.
And we also have an internal sort of competition or channel where the team will share just great experiences that they’ve had with customers. Like it doesn’t have to drive anything. It could just be a wonderful conversation. could be a congratulations on a wedding. Could be a tiny little thoughtful gift, but just something that, that, that shines a spotlight on a wonderful interaction and not necessarily a business metric.
So, it kind of keeps that human aspect to everything that we do.
Matthew Kettell:
Celebrating the right, the behaviors and things that you want to channel into the business as well. I think that’s really good. On that point of kind of human experience and keeping that, we have to talk a bit about AI. It’s everywhere now, it’s in every business. And how have you started to use it in customer success? Particularly, has there been anything that’s particularly useful? Any caution or?
Craig Jackson:
Yeah.
I think, I mean, you can’t, you can’t get through the day now without somebody messaging you that they’ve got the best AI platform out there. You can’t go through a day without somebody boasting around how they’ve utilized it in an absolute incredible way. And I always find that like, you know, rushing too heavily into these environments without too much intentional thought can ultimately end up creating a negative impact on your customers, which are the most important thing in everything that you do.
So we have invested, we’ve invested heavily. We’ve got a team internally that’s dedicated to this. A lot of our tools also have enhanced AI operations as well, particularly some really cool stuff within our CRM system where you can just click a summarize button and it’ll give me all the interaction. So there are very many ways in which we can use it today, but ultimately like the heart or our goal is to enhance what our team can do rather than to take tasks away.
Throughout your working life, you have tasks which ultimately deliver very little impact to customers to maximum impact on customers. What we’re trying to do is to take away those kind of one or two star tasks that don’t actually help. Generating notes, transcripts, ultimately the basics. Where this goes, AI, think,
I think we’re just kind of knocking on the door and who knows where it’s going to be in the next few years. But we are very diligent in our approach to using it, but also very focused on not taking away anything from the human interaction that we’ve had so far.
Matthew Kettell:
Interesting. I think that’s a really good perspective. Broadly speaking, if it detracts from that human experience, which is obviously so important to you. Are there any other situations where you think, no, I’d definitely not use AI? And are there any specific examples where you’ve seen a tool or a use case that’s genuinely impressed you and you’ve seen genuine value?
Craig Jackson:
Yeah. Um, that’s a great question. I think there’s correctly this, this, so many, think from a, from a, I think I’ll double down on my previous statement from whatnot teams, right? I mean, like what makes the world go round at human interaction? We crave it in so many ways. And I’m particularly in the space in which I operate it’s crucial. So, we wouldn’t, I can’t see a world where we’d be in a position to ever replace the team with some form of an AI concept. don’t think we’d ever even want to do that, but.
We do want to help the team become the best they can be. And there are some incredible tools out there that help them do that. That take away the need for them to go and read through multiple meeting notes or craft documents, however that may look. But from a usage perspective, mean, one of the tools that we have right now internally is called Leo, which is ultimately our own version of ChatGPT, and it’s tied to a lot of our backend systems. So it really cuts out all of the effort required to go and find a certain metric. It has access to our help centers. If we need to query it for any reason, it can spit back and answer to us in no time at all. And then fundamentally what that’s been able to do is cut a lot of admin time for the CSMs. In fact, we’ve got some stats across it, across each and every one of the key queries that has been able to support.
You’ll have to forgive me, I can’t remember the times off the of my head right now, but I could share them or late today, but it’s really been quite impressive.
Matthew Kettell:
Amazing. Look, great. think before we wrap, let’s end on a note of sort of reflection. I think you shared some really good insights here for other leaders that potentially trying to build out. I mean, not just customer success teams, right? I think that a lot of what you’ve talked about is generally really strong advice for building teams with strong internal cultures. If you were to kind of reflect back on the last four years at Pleo, is there what was sort of one piece of advice that maybe you’d give to yourself or someone else in your shoes?
Craig Jackson:
Crikey, what a question. Where would I even start? I think, you know, believe in yourself. It all works out. It all works out in the end. That would be like that’s ultimately what it would come down to. But, you know, if it’s if it’s if it’s for somebody who wants to build a strong culture, I would say, you know, have a clear view in your mind of what you want to achieve and how that may look. Have an equally clear view of how you don’t want it to look. Find your fellowship.
And then ensure that your team and everybody around you has a stake in building it because, you know, before you, before you buy in, you’ve got to weigh in. And I think that’s one thing that I’m really proud of is that we talk about the culture in Pleo. It’s not down to me. Like I’m just, I’m just one part. Even if we look at CX, it’s not down to me. I have just, I’m very fortunate to work with incredible people who are very smart and very driven.
and just really nice people as well. So they have collectively created the culture that we have today and it’s something that I’m just super proud of.
Matthew Kettell:
I think that’s a perfect note to end on. Thank you Craig for joining us today and thank you all for listening. This was the CX Coffee Chat.
Craig Jackson:
Thanks for having me.
