Matthew Kettell:
Hello and welcome to the CX Coffee Chat. I’m your host today, Matthew Kettell I’m the Managing Director of the Nest for the UK market at Concentrix. And today we’ve been joined by Martin, Martin, the Director of Implementation at Payhawk, very exciting company to hear about today. So, hey Martin, it’s nice to see you. Thanks for joining us.
Martin Jürgen Reindl:
Thanks for the invitation Matt. Very excited too.
Matthew Kettell:
Awesome. So look, I’d like to kick off by doing a bit of an introduction. So if you wouldn’t mind, you please introduce yourself to our audience?
Martin Jürgen Reindl:
Absolutely happy to do so. Thanks. Yeah, I’m Martin, 29 years old and currently Director of Implementation Management at Payhawk. I’m originally from Germany, as you might hear in my accent or by the fact that I will later translate some German sayings into English, hoping the audience will understand. But I moved to Bulgaria four and a half years ago.
And now working at the headquarters of Payhawk. Originally coming from a consulting background, so I was Senior Market Advisor for a small boutique consultancy firm prior to joining Payhawk in September 2021. And yeah, ever since here part of the Payhawk sports team. Apart from the office, you could meet me either having hikes in the nature with my family in Dock or flying high in the Bulgarian mountains with my paraglider.
Matthew Kettell:
Amazing. Okay, that sounds like a conversation for another podcast. But that sounds awesome. And for those not familiar with Payhawk, could you tell us a little bit more about the company?
Martin Jürgen Reindl:
Happy to do so. So Payhawk is essentially a finance orchestration platform, providing a way for enterprises to make and manage all of their spending with a maximum control and automation. So from corporate cards, employee expenses, the account payable and purchase all the processes, as well as the payments connected to them, all of this can be managed through Payhawk.
So you can imagine Payhawk basically sitting above the ERP and combining all payment methods with workflows, policies, intelligent automation, and most recently also AI agents. So by doing this, our mission is to take away the friction in financial operations without losing control so that finance teams can start to focus on driving the business forward instead of, I don’t know, chasing receipts or reconciling spreadsheets manually.
And yeah, specifically, I think unique about Payhawk is we’re Bulgaria’s first unicorn spread over nine offices and with customers across the whole European Economic Area, UK / I, and North America.
Matthew Kettell:
Amazing. Yeah, it’s been quite an astronomical journey. It looks like over the last couple of years. And I’d like to talk a little bit more about that. Yourself, your official job title is Director of Implementation, right?
I guess you’re responsible for keeping the making the machine run at Payhawk. Can you tell us a little bit more about what goes into that job title and your kind of primary responsibilities at the company?
Martin Jürgen Reindl:
Of course, I lead a function of round about 20 people split into three different teams and our main responsibilities are implementation, adoption and retention. So that means everything from understanding the customer’s initial pain point and advising the optimal Payhawk configuration as part of the initial onboarding to being their trusted advisor to get the most out of the Payhawk platform and then of course up to making sure that they drive long-term success with our solution and as our CEO likes to say until they become die-hard Payhawk fans. So the main responsibility of myself is to on the one hand make the machine run in the day-to-day operations while on the other hand being the strategic decision maker to ensure that our implementation and customer success function stays top of the market in a very competitive landscape.
Matthew Kettell:
Makes a lot of sense. And so I think it’s interesting that crossover and that journey into CX customer experience and how implementation plays such a big role in that. I know you’ve done a lot at Payhawk around helping customers. Can you share a little bit about how you’ve grown in the company. How long you’ve been there from your kind of original job title to where you are today. How has that personal journey rolled out for you?
Martin Jürgen Reindl:
Of course, I was actually just last week celebrating my fourth year at Payhawk. And when I started, I started as customer success specialist. I think the third one within the whole customer success team.
And back then, as you can imagine, startup spirit, all of us were still wearing multiple hats, given the company size. So next to onboarding back then, what we also were responsible for was retaining customers, but we also did expansions and even during the onboarding sessions, engaged with customers in support chats at the same time. As Payhawk matured, we of course specialized those teams. And I would say for me personally, it was crucial to have worked this frontline in customer success with customers in a very, let’s say dynamic growth environment that Payhawk was, but continues to be in. Because what it taught me is that what really matters when engaging with customers is trust. Specifically in a FinTech of course, which means in combination with corporate cards, their funds, payments, and also because one of my first customers that I was onboarding back then was our first real enterprise customer in the DACH market. So I would say while most likely, every CS leader will tell you about the importance of speed in customer interactions. I learned firsthand the importance of being the trusted face of, in our case, Payhawk for the customer. Because while speed in answering to their queries is, of course, one part of it, for me, it’s all about taking the customer on the journey with you. Meaning they want to be included in the process every step of the way, whether it’s a support ticket, the next steps in their implementation process, or how a product feedback that they raise is developed.
Matthew Kettell:
Okay, so it’s interesting, it sounds like there was a few moments that shaped your philosophy on customer experience. You mentioned signing that first enterprise client and I like the term trusted face and making sure that you get all the small things correct. And looking back, is there any particular kind of customer interactions that have shaped your… the way that you think about customer experience and have given you that kind of confidence to be the trusted face?
Martin Jürgen Reindl:
Yeah, absolutely. So actually specifically on this customer, so the first enterprise, real enterprise customer we signed in the DACH market, they were urgently awaiting one of a new feature that we were about to release. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, as there is more often the case in SaaS companies, we were not able to deliver it at the date that we initially expected. So had to reach out to the customer with the salesperson and my manager in the meeting as well. And we had to tell them, look, guys, super sorry for that. However, we are not able to deliver the feature at the expected timeline. Now, as you can imagine, the customer was quite disappointed because for them, this missing feature meant a lot of additional accounting efforts every month.
And what I realized there, initially, honestly, I would have expected for the customer to say, well, look, under those circumstances, we have to, I don’t know, search for another solution. But we didn’t let them go there because what we said is, and what we make clear to the customers, we understand the situation you’re in. We understand the market you’re in. We understand your processes, hopefully as well as you do. So we literally got every available function in Payhawk, including our Director of Solution Engineering, with them in the call and we, because of all this understanding that we had, we could wear this trusted advisor or we could fill this trusted advisor role. And in the end, we were able to ship few smaller improvements on our side that were just very quick wins, but also we helped the customer adjust their own processes so that we could bridge the gap in the meantime until we were able to actually release the feature. Now, this was three and a half years ago, and I actually just two weeks ago met a customer at the accounting summit event in Germany.
And I’m happy to say that they are still diehard, diehard Payhawk fans, very excited with the customer service, the setup they have, but also our continuous developments and they’re growing with us.
Matthew Kettell:
Amazing. So that’s a good segue. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the evolution of customer experience. And this is always an interesting topic. From people that have worked in startups from the early days and you’ve gone from, you know, being at Payhawk when you’re a fast moving startup and you might still feel like that today, but you know, you’re, really quite an established global platform now. And you often see that in the early days when, you know, team sizes are smaller and you’re fighting hard to win those new customers and the actual, the volumes are lower. It’s easier to give that personal experience. So how have you seen the customer experience evolve at Payhawk over the time as you’ve grown and what some of the things that you’ve done to make sure that you’re not letting the size of the company stop you from keeping your die-hard fans?
Martin Jürgen Reindl:
Absolutely good question. I actually would say that the customer experience got a lot more individual because we are now in new markets. We have bigger and smaller customers. They are more or less technically educated. So some of our customers have already worked with products like Payhawk specifically in the US market and they know exactly what they want while others are coming from paper and Excel processes, and they can really benefit immensely from this trusted advisor approach that we are following. So to give an example, as the team was growing, we were also able to specify more in a specialized more in market specific knowledge with local experts. So for example, instead of having an English speaking implementation manager who just understands the pain of chasing receipts, we now have a team of German speaking implementation managers who understand the burden of German tax legislation, the bureaucracy around it, and why hospitality receipts are such a pain, but also equally how Payhawk setup could be adjusted to save them hours of manual accounting efforts every month.
So for this, what we are continuously doing is we invest heavily in accounting and product enablement, as well as we have built an exhaustive internal knowledge base that is available to everyone so we can ensure every customer at any given point receives a tailored answer in a fast manner.
Matthew Kettell:
Interesting. Okay, that sounds really good. And I guess that ties into your progression into this role. When you look at yourself in, you know, implementation management, I think the fact that, you know, you come from a consultancy background, how has that philosophy sort of, you know, developed at Payhawk? And how, you know, why is implementation central to the customer experience?
Martin Jürgen Reindl:
Very good question. I think part of this was shaped by a previous manager of mine who would always aim to deliver the cherry on the top. So for every single consultancy project, it was not enough to just deliver what the customer asked for, but there needed to be one more nice graph or one more insight. And I’d like to see this approach as crucial to any customer interaction really where possible. I think in terms of implementation, why is this so crucial? Because implementation is really at the very beginning of the customer journey in terms of once they’re actually your customer and not a prospect anymore. So sales is handing over the deals to us with, of course, all the pain points and challenges that they have spoken with the customer about. But it’s now really on us to ensure that the setup is put in a way that the customer receives the first value fast.
And a lot of companies actually, experience buyer’s remorse. So you sign a contract for 24, 36 months, and the first question you ask yourself is, was this the right decision? And now it’s really important that you have someone taking you by the hand and reinforcing this investment and say, this was the right decision. Now let’s make sure that you move your first subscriptions over to Payhawk and you get all those amazing features. You get your policies set in.
And the best case scenario is literally the month after signing with Payhawk, your accountants are reaching out to you and saying, hey, we just saved, I don’t know, a day or two because we don’t have to manually reconcile anymore. Matter of fact is a lot of companies, as I said, they do have quite individual process in place. So it’s exactly about this. can’t set every customer up the same way. We do have, of course, best practices, but to share them with the customer and help them even improve their processes. This is what it’s all about. And this is what allows them to get value out of Payhawk, except just the digitalization of their processes.
Matthew Kettell:
Amazing. And you can work so hard to find a customer in those early days, right? And, know, that excitement that they have when they join you from onboarding, can either ruin the experience or make it extremely memorable. From your kind of perspective and your experience, what makes a good onboarding not just smooth but memorable and turns a customer into a die-hard fan?
Martin Jürgen Reindl:
So I believe the answer here is two-sided. On the one hand, it is the personal touch throughout the process and the way that your CS contact makes you feel, in our case, the implementation manager. So a lot of individuals, specifically in the beginning, they’re uncertain, but it’s all about how do you make them feel when they have their initial contact points with Payhawk? Is it a pain to set it up? Is it a lot of back and forth emails? Or is it just someone who is very dedicated to show you and guide you through where the value sits? On the other side, I think it’s the early successes that you have. So, since we’re usually onboarding finance directors or accountants for the initial platform setup, it is our responsibility to ensure that they have early… the earlier experience that they have with Payhawk is a success. So the ease of having an automatic reconciliation or the redundancy of chasing receipts. But that is just their own wins. As a finance team, what we’re always super happy and excited to see is that these finance professionals then being approached by the end users of Payhawk, sharing their experience with the tool that they’ve implemented. And in my opinion, this is the very core of making your customer successful and customer success meaningful.
And I think that’s a careful line that every company is walking across right now, ensuring that you keep the human side of customer experience, but blending automation to actually enhance that. But, Payhawk how do you decide where you lean on technology and where you need to lean on empathy and the human side in the process? Yeah, so I think it’s very much a question of what does the customer actually want. So for a lot of situations, and I think this ties into the whole conversation around AI right now, what I’m most excited about when speaking about AI in customer success and more detailed in implementations is to make sure that we are using AI and any technical means to be able to deliver a fast way for our customers to get their how-to questions or like early, let’s say easy technical challenges solved automatically. However, wherever there is trust or more specific guidance needed, I think this is exactly where you would still need to have that human touch in customer success when it’s about emotions and even though we’re speaking a lot about financial data, it’s, it’s inevitable that customers will have certain emotions towards your platform. And I think this is wherever you need someone who, who has empathy. And while I’m very excited to see where I will be going in the next 12 to 24 months, I still think that this is a part that will stay human-centric and it needs to stay human-centric is to have, yeah, this person being there to guide you through certain key moments in your Payhawk journey. And this is where I think it’s, it’s relevant that we keep a very human approach to customer success.
Matthew Kettell:
Got it. Really nice. And so kind of coming back to what we were talking about on the implementation process, I wanted to talk a little bit about your approach to management and leadership. You know, it sounds like a classic example here where you’ve gone from being on the front line and, you know, contributing to success yourself with you know, a very clear philosophy and principles for that, how it should be done. And now you’re in a position of leadership and you’ve built and led teams throughout Payhawk’s growth. How’s your leadership style when it comes to managing teams and, you know, such a CX driven role and so much influence over that process and, you know, ensuring that you kind of communicate those philosophies and principles that you talked about earlier?
Martin Jürgen Reindl:
Yeah, I think one of the reasons I was so keen to join or to become a people manager at Payhawk was because of the existing leadership culture we had already that I believe very much matched my personal style, partly maybe driven because I’m of German origin, because it’s very deeply rooted in the behavior we’re empowering, which is data driven, radically candid, but also leading with context over control, as we call it.
So for me, what is incredibly relevant, just as the trust our customers have in us, is for leaders to be able to have trust in their team members. And I truly believe that everyone in our amazing customer success and specifically implementation team is highly motivated, smart, and really striving for this customer success. Additionally, the feedback of the team is that they’re proud to work with a company as innovative as Payhawk and a company that’s really interested in their success, trusting them to make their own decisions. So the important part for me is that we have a framework in Payhawk that allows every individual and every team member to be able to take their own decisions, of course, within this framework, but equally making sure that everyone is aligned around company goals and values in order to guide those decisions. And this is why I would say my leadership style is very much built on trust.
Now, how do I make sure that the team is aligned around this and how does this look in the day to day? Yeah, as I said, it’s very much about making sure that every team member along the way is aware of our current goals, is aware of the metrics, is aware of where does the company want to be end of this year, end of this quarter, end of this month, and then just have open conversations with them about it. So a lot of feedback in our team is actually driven bottom up.
And a lot of initiatives and process we changed comes from bottom up up feedbacks because in the end it’s the team having the conversations with the customers and really have the closest pulse check with our customer base. And I would say it’s very much a combination of these.
Matthew Kettell:
Amazing. That’s a really good answer. Short on time, a question I really want to ask you is what excites you the most about the future of customer experience right now in FinTech?
Martin Jürgen Reindl:
Yeah, good question. And one I’m very often thinking about it. I think what really excites me is to see which role can AI play. Currently, if we’re looking at a lot of competitors in the market, AI is often for now still reduced to customer chatbots as part of the customer success area. And I’m really excited to see where can this elevate customer success processes. I mean, at some point, what I, for example, could imagine is that every implementation manager has a co-pilot live in the calls that guides them for this specific customer, this will be the perfect setup.
And of course, next to all the admin stuff that hopefully will fall off of customer success, professional diaries. And the other part is to use exactly this AI functionalities to not only become have the change from a reactive to a proactive customer success approach, but I think even one step further to a predictive customer success approach where a customer doesn’t need to tell you anymore, hey, I’m unhappy. I want to cancel the subscription and then you need to fight to save them. But a system telling you, hey, by the way, based on this and that data, we expect the CFO to disengage in the next two to three months. Here is what you could do. And I think this is really what I’m excited about is of course AI as a lot of people would say right now, but where can this bring customer success and how can this elevate the state that the market and the teams are currently functioning.
Matthew Kettell:
Awesome. I mean, yeah, that sounds like a very exciting specific use case as well. So I very much look forward to that. And fortunately, that’s all we’ve got time for Martin, but I really appreciate the chat was really interesting.
Thank you so much for joining us today. And thank you to everyone for listening. This has been the CX Coffee Chat.
