[00:00:38] Maxime Manseau: I'm super excited to dive into the world of customer support with a very special guest, Mara, who is a VP of support at PipeDrive. Mara, it's a pleasure to have you here. How are you today?

[00:00:52] Mara Vicente: Pleasure is mine. Feeling super excited also to be able to be here and share a bit about our world and customer support at Pipedrive.

[00:01:01] Mara Vicente: So yes, so all good for both of us, it seems.

[00:01:05] Maxime Manseau: Nice. So Mara brings a wealth of experience and insights into the support strategies that drive success at Pipedrive. I don't think we even need to introduce Pipe Drive because I believe everyone knows. And the main idea today, Marat, I'm going to ask you many questions.

[00:01:27] Maxime Manseau: I don't have a specific track, but the main idea is for people to have an overview of what's, what is happening in Seaport at Pipe Drive. But also what has happened, from before to today. Okay. And what might happen in the future. Here we are. So maybe to kick things off you can tell us a bit more about your role as VP of support at PyDrive.

[00:01:54] Mara Vicente: So I am VP customer solutions at Pipe Drive, the best sales CRM out there. For those distracted that don't know I own the customer support team, also support engineering, solutions engineering and we're also responsible for tackling self service and automations within the customer support organization.

[00:02:17] Mara Vicente: Basically is to cover all fronts of customer support, that's pipeline technical billing, commercial, whatever the challenges on a customer slate, wherever these customers sit in the customer journey before signing, signing up after starting a trial after payment at payment, if they want to give up on us, we're always there.

[00:02:42] Maxime Manseau: Okay, I just want to stop you, like you mentioned, I think three different teams solution engineer, so this kind of, can you just tell us quickly what's the difference so we can understand, because like, all support teams sometimes have similar name, but scopes are very different, so this way we make sure to understand.

[00:03:00] Mara Vicente: Yes. And one of those teams is actually new to the game. Because the only thing that is always a constant is change. And if we don't evolve in customer solutions, we become obsolete. So we're always introducing new stuff. So first team customer support, the core is our tier one support.

[00:03:20] Mara Vicente: So front and center speaking with customers, regardless of time zones regardless of language or their front lines. We tackle the simplest technical challenges, but when these challenges become more complex we resort to support engineering. There are middlemen between us and the engineering tribes and can facilitate even discussions with these engineering tribes to help solve for technical challenges for customers.

[00:03:53] Maxime Manseau: Could we call that like a level two support? It's a level

[00:03:57] Mara Vicente: two support, but they're not customer facing.

[00:04:00] Maxime Manseau: So

[00:04:01] Mara Vicente: they help us backstage with all the technical challenge. They do their magic to make things happen for customers, but it is tier one support, customer facing that manages the conversations and the relationship.

[00:04:15] Mara Vicente: Solutions engineers are new to the game. So basically they're a mix, they're a combination between customer we're facing. And technically enhanced equipped skill sets. So these solutions engineers usually jump at conversations with biggest companies, bigger, big, bigger organizations that have really complex integrations, automations, challenges on their plate to be successful.

[00:04:44] Mara Vicente: And it's easier to have someone directly in touch with these companies and not having a middleman translate these technical challenges over. So we have this team that can quickly jump on a conversation with whatever customer, if the challenge technically is big enough and we want the immediacy and the resolution.

[00:05:05] Maxime Manseau: Just to understand, does it mean this is dedicated to a, some type of your customer, for example, like enterprise customer, or do you apply this to all your customers?

[00:05:15] Mara Vicente: Not just, but mostly yes, because enterprise type customers are the ones that do have these highly complex challenges to tackle and usually resort to us for help and advice.

[00:05:27] Mara Vicente: Sometimes customers don't even know how to be, to begin using our CRM. So we resort to obviously it's a big partnership. Support doesn't do this alone. We have a outstanding sales team. Selling pipe drive, explaining the ins and outs of the tool that sometimes resort to solutions engineers for that technical enhanced skillset.

[00:05:50] Mara Vicente: Also customer success organization that do handle mostly our big. Organizations that use pipe drive that the larger organizations using it. They also resort to solutions engineers here and there, but any customer with a big enough challenge, regardless of how big the organization is, can make use of solutions engineers.

[00:06:13] Maxime Manseau: Okay. Gotcha. So we also

[00:06:14] Mara Vicente: use it for, as a retention mechanism.

[00:06:18] Maxime Manseau: Okay. Yeah. Gotcha. And what was the internal analysis of fuck, we need to create this team,

[00:06:23] Mara Vicente: Yeah so we understood as a group, as a team that we, these teams were always resorting to salute, to support engineering and always struggling to get that final outcome and translate that technical outcome over to customers because the skill set was not there.

[00:06:43] Mara Vicente: So conversations took longer to be resolved. Usually translating the technical needs and the troubleshooting, the steps was a hassle for customers because they wanted it to be simple and immediate. So we found it more effective to bring support engineering to the conversations and equip these experts with the skill set so that they're at ease when speaking to someone on the phone or through a video conversation.

[00:07:12] Maxime Manseau: Okay. Okay, cool. And no, it

[00:07:16] Mara Vicente: was actually a combination of customer feedback for someone saying that, Oh God, it's taking a while. And also generally really realizing that, yes, we needed a better way to cope with the, with these apps.

[00:07:29] Maxime Manseau: Okay. Now it makes sense. It makes total sense. And so I'm a pipe drive user, so I never met one of these.

[00:07:35] Maxime Manseau: Yes, Maxime. Yes, we need to talk. So what. While we're talking about the structure of the support team do you have for each team different position based on, the seniority, the experience, like how does that work, for example, if we take the frontline team like,

[00:07:55] Mara Vicente: yeah,

[00:07:57] Mara Vicente: We do we do have career paths sets within the customer support organization.

[00:08:02] Mara Vicente: Usually depending on the, so we have the organization spread across the globe. We have a big team in Lisbon. We tackle mostly our biggest markets, which are the American and the Brazilian markets. Luckily for us in Portugal, we do speak Portuguese. Portuguese. And then we have teams in Talon.

[00:08:22] Mara Vicente: This is where our company was founded. We always like to have a good, solid team of experts and customer support expertise in this location. And then we also have a team in St. Pete in Florida, because it's always good also to have someone that is local and understand the ins and outs of, Even the cultural fit that needs to be there for our American customers.

[00:08:46] Mara Vicente: So we are spread to guarantee 24 seven rotation. And depending on the locations, we can have different ways to secure good experts so we can start with internships. In Lisbon, we have been doing some form of internship to begin with, and then if the intern internship goes well, we do a contract full time.

[00:09:07] Mara Vicente: We start at junior. So that's like level one support. When the juniorship is over and if it's successful we move to experts and we can also transition to aspiring manager, and then you choose if you want the managerial path. You go for a manager, senior manager head, or if you go for a specialization, you can go into the operations team, so basically be a project manager, a process manager, a trainer, a quality assurance specialist.

[00:09:41] Mara Vicente: So basically the teams that are helping the front lines be successful, right? Or go to support engineering and pursue that highly technical skillset. So that's also a possibility internally. Yeah,

[00:09:56] Maxime Manseau: it's great because people tend sometimes to put all the support people in the same basket, but like everyone is so different, and for example, I've met like many like amazing support reps that just didn't want to manage at all.

[00:10:12] Maxime Manseau: They want to keep like being by themselves and doing what they love. So I really appreciate that basically looks like you have, a path for everyone. How big is the organization? PadDrive and how big is it like your support team just to have an idea. So people realize, because obviously your organization, you can't set up something like this if you don't have a critical size and a critical growth too.

[00:10:37] Maxime Manseau: Can you just tell us,

[00:10:39] Mara Vicente: Pipe Drive as an organization is close to 1, 000 people and within the customer solutions organizations, it's a bit over 100 headcounts, so a big enough organization to get this rotation happening and I, usually I joke with it. I say, I run a customer solutions organization, but actually I run a university because I, it.

[00:11:03] Mara Vicente: It's the entry point for the organization. And I have so many talented people that actually have backgrounds related to marketing, related to sales, and they immerse in the process and the product while they're doing support, but they also look at career opportunities, not within support, but outside of the organization and move to different areas of the company too.

[00:11:27] Mara Vicente: So that's another career path for them. That we make available. And I'm very proud to say we have people across the entire organization that have started it within the support.

[00:11:39] Maxime Manseau: And I have a, this is bringing me to basically another question. It's I see a lot of team who, and it's not a bad thing.

[00:11:47] Maxime Manseau: It just, I feel just because this is the way support is, higher by the bottom. So what I'm trying to say here is basically, like you're People who are at Pipedrive and hire basically like junior ones and make them grow within Pipedrive, maybe for a high level manager position, you're going to look for someone from outside the organization.

[00:12:10] Maxime Manseau: But is that something? You feel to a pad drive or not really?

[00:12:16] Mara Vicente: So at Pipe Drive, I think the biggest difference and advantage I'd say is that for some organizations customer support is the bottom, the bottom line. So if you don't make it anywhere maybe you'll make it in support. Go try that.

[00:12:36] Mara Vicente: We don't have that philosophy at Pipe Drive. You need to make it. Where you will add the most value and we need to develop you into that. But we don't feel like, Oh, anyone could do support. That's really a myth.

[00:12:51] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, I couldn't confirm especially I feel if you're looking at the, at the if you are looking at someone soft skill, maybe support is where like your soft skill is going to be like The most specific and important, like clearly I've seen some people and super smart and even like super good communicating, just banging your head against the wall at the end of the first week, just because it's not for them.

[00:13:17] Mara Vicente: Yeah,

[00:13:19] Maxime Manseau: I see you have a very, like clear and strict your process. How long ago did you arrive to Pipedrive?

[00:13:26] Mara Vicente: Six years ago.

[00:13:26] Maxime Manseau: Six years.

[00:13:27] Mara Vicente: Yes, I joined six years ago.

[00:13:29] Maxime Manseau: Six years. Nice. So how was, first, like, how big was the support team when you arrived like six years ago?

[00:13:35] Maxime Manseau: So now you are like a bit more than 100?

[00:13:38] Mara Vicente: Yes. Sweet. Wee. We doubled the organization since I joined. We doubled the organization. Then again we move a lot within our customer base also. So it made sense to do that. And we scaled support because when I joined, it was not 24 seven support.

[00:13:56] Mara Vicente: It was not. Multi language we didn't have any responsiveness KPIs tied to our performance. It was very different very different. Even the the ways of working as technology evolved and as some forms of communication also come to play to make the customer support activities more proficient.

[00:14:17] Mara Vicente: We too needed to evolve, so we didn't have phone support as visible as we have now, chat conversations were session based, and it was just one conversation at a time. So it was a very, it was a very way, a different way to operate. Whilst now we have, we actually have reduced the team recently.

[00:14:39] Mara Vicente: So as the team is growing into different new positions, we have been able to downsize the number of experts and still release the same level of service because we're scaling also the technology. Yeah.

[00:14:54] Maxime Manseau: And you mentioned different topics, like you set up like this past year. So I'm curious, do you have like a clear process about like you looking into what you want to improve or is it just a bit out of the blue saying, Hey I feel like, we're not great at all with that.

[00:15:14] Maxime Manseau: And what I'm trying to ask you is like, how would you advise someone would be like you six years ago? They just grab like a new team. Like there, there are a few new events and they want to bring into the next level. What should they do? How, where should they start?

[00:15:32] Mara Vicente: Yeah. Our challenges did change from six years ago to now.

[00:15:37] Maxime Manseau: Can imagine. Today the

[00:15:38] Mara Vicente: challenge is making sure that we're living up to customer's expectations. Why we scale this technology front, like we're, we've been experimenting heavily with AI. And understanding how we can better support and serve our customers using this technology.

[00:15:56] Mara Vicente: So we remove a bit of the human touch from the equation. Although we have really caring caring set of humans taking care of this AI technology and the chatbots for us, humans are always there. But the challenge for us is. Coping with the demands of being lean and being scalable, maintaining scalability, but still not neglecting customers expectations and wants and needs.

[00:16:24] Mara Vicente: So basically balancing innovation and efficiency with a human touch that we definitely want to keep having.

[00:16:33] Maxime Manseau: And that

[00:16:33] Mara Vicente: sets us apart from the competition,

[00:16:35] Maxime Manseau: I'm sure. And so six, six years ago, what was the challenge when you arrived?

[00:16:40] Mara Vicente: Six years ago, we were definitely scaling the team in a way that we could.

[00:16:45] Mara Vicente: Be faster at getting to every customer wanting help. So because of the methods that we used and well, the size of the team that was small at that stage, we wanted to be sure that we could scale to the point that we were staffed well enough. And we would be delivering that excellence type of service that our customers were used to having and slowly we're not getting.

[00:17:11] Mara Vicente: Because they were growing way faster than us. Yeah. So the challenge was, all right, how can we make this team omnipresent, fast enough, proficient enough in all languages so that all customers feel they are being supported?

[00:17:27] Maxime Manseau: Gotcha.

[00:17:28] Mara Vicente: It's still the same challenge, but at a different rhythm,

[00:17:32] Maxime Manseau: yeah, I can imagine.

[00:17:35] Maxime Manseau: You mentioned a few minutes ago support metrics if I'm right you were saying that it wasn't included into performance or something like this. Can you tell us a bit more if we're entering about like the metrics, like what, I'm not going to ask you what do you measure because I'm sure you have a bunch, but which one is or the two or three most important you're talking about?

[00:17:56] Maxime Manseau: Taking a look I don't know if you're taking a look at it like every week or every month,

[00:17:59] Mara Vicente: yeah, we have a very specific mission and support to deliver fast, useful answers with a human touch, right? So all our main metrics need to translate the mission and how well are we doing against the mission we set ourselves to do.

[00:18:15] Mara Vicente: So responsiveness resolution times, handling times. Those are the fast part of the equation. And then quality will measure the useful and human touch, right? That will measure how effective and efficient were we and how much customers feel that we cared. So those are the main metrics.

[00:18:39] Mara Vicente: And then we measure the world basically on, on all cuts and all fronts because we are dealing with humans. Across the globe, which makes it quite challenging. We're not, we cannot say it's like, Oh yes, I know my customers so well. I know I need to know all my different types of customers so well enough that I know the expectations the ones and the issues and the challenges that each core segment has for us.

[00:19:08] Mara Vicente: So yeah, and we basically measure these main KPIs department level, team level, individually also. Because in, in six years ago, we were just. measuring team level or department if you'd like. But we didn't know and even an expert wouldn't know how much do I contribute for that mission?

[00:19:32] Mara Vicente: Am I doing good or am I lower than I should be? So giving them this comparison and giving them the ability to really understand the trends of their own performance and all KPIs help a lot with development conversations, training needs and specific avenues to develop talent.

[00:19:55] Maxime Manseau: So if I understand correctly let's say Max and Mara is in the same team.

[00:19:59] Maxime Manseau: My, my KPIs would be like totally transparent to you, right? You could see my, I like that.

[00:20:06] Mara Vicente: Yes. All KPIs, very transparent. And we have visibility on how everyone is doing and we can compare. Why wouldn't we? It's okay.

[00:20:14] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. No, I, anyway, like usually in a team, like just people are not stupid in the sense that.

[00:20:24] Maxime Manseau: They basically know what the other teammates are worth, like they know like when someone is really good, they know if they are better, not better, worse, faster or slower, like people tend to know and position themselves like,

[00:20:40] Mara Vicente: yeah. This is a reality. This just makes it tangible.

[00:20:42] Mara Vicente: Yeah. And I think, it's fair to say we, we cannot change the things we don't know are not working. So this gives the visibility and opportunity for us to realize things that are not working as they should, or where we are actually excelling at. And gives us also the opportunity to compare against others because it's always healthy not to just look for our own capabilities, but search for the rock stars that are doing it and nailing it and asking how, teach me because I want to know more about how you do that magic.

[00:21:16] Mara Vicente: So yes it, it was positive to share these KPIs.

[00:21:20] Maxime Manseau: And I want to get back a bit just to you. I have so many questions, but just. What is your typical day? What did you do today? For example, this morning, what were you do? What did I would love to, to know, what's a day in Mara's life looks like?

[00:21:33] Maxime Manseau: Is it like pure management? Do you sometimes jump in a few tickets? What do you do?

[00:21:38] Mara Vicente: It can change dramatically from one day to the other. Because we, in this organization, it's good because it's not a highly hierarchical organization. So I can be talking to someone on a very tactical point. And understanding how the bot is doing, what actions are we going to do going forward, and brainstorming around good opportunities for that specific team.

[00:22:09] Mara Vicente: I can be having a one on one with one of the team members and understanding how we can improve engagement going forward. Or can we actually planning the next offsite where we all celebrate being a great team and be, and enjoying time, spending time together for this morning. I actually spent a very good portion of time exploring that.

[00:22:31] Maxime Manseau: Love it. Nice. What do you mind like sharing a bit like your stack? What tools do you guys are using? Also, did you build any like Internal tool, maybe, to improve support operation. Yeah, we love to

[00:22:47] Mara Vicente: make some internal tools. And vendors that we use for a subset of activities.

[00:22:54] Mara Vicente: We have a CRN that we use to manage relationship with customers and establish those conversations. We use a translate translation tool. We have an internal tool to secure escalations to other teams that use other systems. Or other CRMs. So we have built an internal tool to secure those escalations.

[00:23:15] Maxime Manseau: What do you mean to secure escalation? I'm not sure I understand.

[00:23:20] Mara Vicente: Imagine, Maxime, imagine that next month you'll be a Pipedrive user. I see it happening. And, I am a

[00:23:26] Maxime Manseau: PipeDrive user.

[00:23:28] Mara Vicente: Okay.

[00:23:29] Maxime Manseau: I am.

[00:23:31] Mara Vicente: So you have a challenge or you want to go bigger. You want to, you have a good opportunity to explore increasing the number of seats, exploring a different plan.

[00:23:43] Mara Vicente: And we actually have a team inside customer success that is just focused on doing that, helping these customers look to explore opportunities to enhance the way they use PipeDrive. So if you would reach out to support and ask for help, we would redirect this, talk to the customer success team and someone would get in touch with you to have this conversation.

[00:24:05] Mara Vicente: So in order for us to escalate this topic to another team, we use this internal tool. Just to keep the conversations going before we use Slack, but we love to understand how many conversations we pass over to other teams. Is it working? Where could we be improving the communication? Time to respond. So Slack was not the best tool for us to really quantify.

[00:24:34] Mara Vicente: We use it an internal tool as well.

[00:24:35] Maxime Manseau: Okay. Okay. Nice. And

[00:24:39] Mara Vicente: we have. We have a huge tech stack because we do so many things to assist customers using these tools. But I think for secure conversations, it's the CRM and the translation tool. Because we have luckily for us, we have customers around the globe.

[00:24:57] Mara Vicente: Sometimes we don't have that language proficiency right then and there, but we use Localize, it's our, the vendor we use to secure those conversations.

[00:25:09] Maxime Manseau: Definitely. And you, you mentioned AI. I don't want to talk too much about that because I feel you just I'm bored of AI right now, but bored in the sense it just, like you just Every time I, I have a conversation, it's the flavor of

[00:25:22] Mara Vicente: the year,

[00:25:22] Maxime Manseau: which anyway, like it's I love it.

[00:25:24] Maxime Manseau: And I've seen you can do like amazing thing. And it's super promising and it's the future. But I would be curious, like, how are you using it right now? And, or how do you think you're going to use it? Use it in in, in the what do you think is going to change? In the p support team in the next two, three years.

[00:25:45] Mara Vicente: .

[00:25:45] Mara Vicente: We have been exploring ai for, to secure some subset of conversations with customers. We have taken steps to using Finn Ai our CRM as intercom. And this is one of the features that Intercom has released. So we've, and we've been having very solid results because the Gen ai capabilities.

[00:26:07] Mara Vicente: Do you make it feel white human, the conversation, very fluid troubleshootings there. So we have been experimenting on that front to be able to actually scale as our number of customers is growing without having so many Trains on recruiting, recruiting all the time and getting humans, like it, it becomes.

[00:26:30] Mara Vicente: It's very hard to cope with the level of growth we have. So this is a very good introduction of technology to it because we can level and put humans to the more complex situations and let AI solve the simplest of questions.

[00:26:47] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, I agree. I like to see as a, like a like a pipeline, I was going to say like a pipe driver.

[00:26:53] Maxime Manseau: Like a pipeline, where really at the beginning of the pipe, you have Zeus I would say like low effort tickets, where basically everything could and should be sold by AI. You said it feels quite human. To be honest, no, what I've seen, I could say it feel humans, like really, like I feel in terms of it's great at it, but as long as you move into this pipe, like obviously low efforts tickets need to be deal with with with customer. And I feel for those high efforts tickets, probably the value of AI would be more internal in the sense that the customer can't see it, right? But you can clearly like have the agent. So this is how I like to see things now.

[00:27:41] Maxime Manseau: But yeah, future.

[00:27:42] Mara Vicente: Yeah. There's no replacement for human curiosity and care. This is safe to say, what, when I say that it's becoming more human is the exploratory question, the wanting to understand, like with with traditional Bob, this is either I understood your question and here's the answer, or there's no way past this.

[00:28:06] Mara Vicente: And with AI, the machine is actually trying to learn and converse, like the conversation is fluid in the sense that, was it this, or can it be that? And yeah it's way likely that the bot will get an answer out that satisfies customers.

[00:28:23] Maxime Manseau: Before me, I was always talk to an agent, talk to an agent, talk to an agent, but because I knew that the bot like could never going to be able to provide me with the right answer.

[00:28:33] Maxime Manseau: What I'm trying now is really I'm starting to chat with the bot because eventually I really get What I need, so

[00:28:40] Mara Vicente: I know Maxine, we're all going through this change, I think, and it is emotional, right? We know we're talking to a machine. It feels unnatural sometimes. But truth be said, if we're patient enough with the technology we now have, yes, these answers will come out.

[00:28:57] Mara Vicente: But for some people it's highly emotional. Like even when the conversation was successful and the answer was okay, and people write, it helped in the end. They don't give us a good C slap because they feel I spoke with a machine. I don't know. I know yeah. So it's still emotional, but I think it's a stage.

[00:29:15] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, it's a stage. Definitely. I've seen, it's been like already 35 minutes. So I'm gonna, I want to jump into, I would say more I don't know if it's technical question, but basically I have a few for you. Maybe the first one would be like, is there like a specific flow?

[00:29:34] Maxime Manseau: Even a small thing that you have set up At pipedrive that really change the things. So basically either, basically, like I'm going to reframe this. What is the smallest change you've done that yields the most return? On an operational point of view.

[00:29:58] Mara Vicente: That had the most return.

[00:29:59] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. In a sense, what is this little thing that doesn't take much time? It's not like a three month project that if you haven't done it yet other support teams should do.

[00:30:12] Mara Vicente: Oh, if it's that quick of a thing, we've done it. We've done it. I'm pretty sure. Usually like the return on investment is not that fast.

[00:30:21] Mara Vicente: There's no like big thing that we can do that changes things dramatically around. It's safe to say that when I joined and when we changed the KPI and the change, the KPIs and said, all right, responsiveness needs to be one of the KPIs. We need to be fast because we're speaking with our customers through chat and the expectation is that it's gotta be immediate and within a week, because we hire people that care, I decreased responsiveness from 20 minutes to under one minute.

[00:30:58] Mara Vicente: Just within a week.

[00:31:01] Maxime Manseau: Yeah.

[00:31:03] Mara Vicente: I think that was the most drastic transformation.

[00:31:05] Maxime Manseau: Okay. Yeah, I like that. And just saying that, Hey, we're gonna look at this metric and, okay, cool. Yeah. You, yeah.

[00:31:11] Mara Vicente: I think oth other changes need, require more time. AI will definitely bring return on investment is it's already bringing it, but it's an ongoing journey.

[00:31:21] Mara Vicente: Yeah. We always need to be iterating on it.

[00:31:23] Maxime Manseau: You mentioned return on investment I always like to jump on this topic because like back in days, support teams were seen like, like a cost center and still like a lot of support teams are seen by their C level as a cost center.

[00:31:39] Maxime Manseau: I feel in Pipedrive it's probably not the case at all. I don't even have to ask you this question. But. Is there a way you calculate, like how support helps bring revenue or is it like how do you demonstrate to your CEO basically is that Mara and her team. As an impact on the revenue side.

[00:32:03] Mara Vicente: Yeah. We're a cost center. Yes. Usually call centers are seen are as cost centers and we're no different because we are a support organization. That number is always there, but fortunately for us, it was never, we never needed to prove inequivocally that we are helping. Because anyone understanding the way we operate internally know that a customer support organization will add value because customers getting in touch with us always come with a challenge, right?

[00:32:38] Mara Vicente: Either they're lost or they need help or someone to do it for them or with them. So there's always an opportunity. If, and if we're not there, then how will that customer turn things around, right? So there's always the risk. We not being able to convert or not being able to retain more customers when they hit these roadblocks.

[00:33:02] Mara Vicente: So we will always be valuable in that sense. But yes, we also understand volume of conversations coming into against customer, total customer base and from that volume, understanding customers that were intending to trial, did they, after engaging with us, and did they churn after engaging with us.

[00:33:24] Mara Vicente: These are two metrics always important to keep track of and keep monitoring, obviously, and also compare against those who don't get in touch with support. Another thing that I can say is, it's a, is a very good action that I advise everyone to do across any organization is we have this fun activity called one day new shoes where we invite people from the organization to come live in the customer support shoes for one day.

[00:33:55] Mara Vicente: And these, like every executive has done it. We have people from engineering actually asking us for the opportunity to be there and do it. Which is amazing, right? They do want to understand what customers are saying and our challenges when getting those solutions out. So we always do this and I think it's very healthy.

[00:34:19] Mara Vicente: That people, not only they understand customer challenges, what people are asking for when they come in and talk to support and the emotions behind it, right? It's different to look at the number and hear a customer explain a challenge, but also the challenge for us to manage consecutive conversations at the same time.

[00:34:41] Mara Vicente: different languages at the same time, different types of situations at the same time, and still keep smiling and still keep, caring.

[00:34:49] Maxime Manseau: Especially because I feel other departments usually takes support. I don't know if it's as granted, but just, they're doing the support, and just by, like usually when you invite them like this after a day, they come back to their seats with a totally different vision.

[00:35:08] Maxime Manseau: So

[00:35:10] Mara Vicente: indeed

[00:35:11] Maxime Manseau: this is a f Yeah. The first comment, and the second comment I have is usually companies who are doing what you're mentioning, have their support much more centered, I will say, in the organization. This really help basically like putting support in the, in in the front, of the scene.

[00:35:31] Maxime Manseau: Which it's not always the case. So definitely like a

[00:35:35] Mara Vicente: no,

[00:35:35] Maxime Manseau: a good practice to, to flow.

[00:35:39] Mara Vicente: I have to be honest. We're not at the front, nor do we, should we be at the front of the organization? We are holding hands with all critical departments to make the organization successful. Yeah, that's how it should be.

[00:35:54] Mara Vicente: We have a seat at the table. Obviously we don't mandate what the destiny of the organization should be, but we definitely contribute. And within Pipedrive, everyone's a salesman because, we want the product to be used and we want to have more customers and we want everyone to experiment with Pipedrive, but we are also all support agents in a sense.

[00:36:18] Mara Vicente: So I think this is what makes our magic work.

[00:36:21] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, I like that. You mentioned you have many users sorry, many agents, many users too, but many agents we've customer speaking different languages, different times. And how do you manage like shift handovers?

[00:36:37] Maxime Manseau: If I'm talking, with Mara and at the end of your shift what, what's happening. happening in the back, backseat.

[00:36:45] Mara Vicente: Yeah. So we do have a reassignment automation in place so that no conversation is left unattended, even if that agent is out of the shift already, because we don't work, we work 24 seven, but we don't work 24 seven.

[00:37:01] Mara Vicente: People obviously have life. And they work the legal standard shifts, obviously because we want them to be happy and have a life. Usually what we do is we use automation to secure that a conversation as soon as I leave is reassigned to someone else that can take over, is working still, and will take over.

[00:37:22] Mara Vicente: We have also used AI to sum up the conversation so that whoever is taking that conversation can quickly Read an extract and understand what's going on. But we also ask, we let customers know that this is happening. So I'm ending my shift. This can move over to a colleague of mine, or if you'd we'll go back to it tomorrow.

[00:37:46] Mara Vicente: So we pretty much leave it open because sometimes customers don't really appreciate the handover. And they say no, I'm okay to wait. You and me, we talk tomorrow. So we leave the conversation there on hold and then go back to it on the next day.

[00:38:01] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. I guess it depends also on the, urgency of the issue and that customer and many things.

[00:38:05] Maxime Manseau: Yeah,

[00:38:06] Mara Vicente: exactly.

[00:38:08] Maxime Manseau: Okay, cool. Maybe to answer the last questions if I'm new, like at Pipedrive support team, like how does it look like is it like a one month's training, like a three month's training what's the process for onboarding people?

[00:38:24] Mara Vicente: Yeah. Full onboarding we give it three months.

[00:38:28] Mara Vicente: We have a two week immersion just on our product so that people understand the ins and outs of the product. We also have a very good briefing around how we're organized internally. What every department does, how we connect to each department, responsibilities, roles, basically the ins and outs of our internal processes.

[00:38:51] Mara Vicente: And then we start moving into the internal tools. What tools do we use to check customer data, to translate, to talk to customers. And we go through the tooling. Then slowly we start introducing conversations. Very slowly. It's a gradual introduction to customers. Because we don't like only proficient experts will have access to multiple conversations at the same time graveyard shift.

[00:39:22] Mara Vicente: So those shifts where not many backup exists to help with questions or doubts. So we gradually onboard to make the team members proficient enough to be left alone or more alone to do their jobs. So it takes usually three months for an expert to have a full ramp up

[00:39:44] Maxime Manseau: to be up and ready.

[00:39:46] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, and

[00:39:46] Mara Vicente: then after that we have we have certifications in place so that they can technically enhance their skill sets because there's so much that we can explore technically and curiosity is definitely there to understand, like, how many integrations can we do for a customer? Infinite, because there's so many softwares out there that can integrate with PipeDrive.

[00:40:12] Mara Vicente: So just on that, it's a special, a specialization in itself. So usually we take time and make sure that people that are performing well, no need to develop on their current roles, can take these certifications and progress technically.

[00:40:28] Maxime Manseau: Okay. Okay. And when you say you start like moving slowly into conversation, does that mean like the first day, maybe you give me just two or three conversation?

[00:40:38] Mara Vicente: Yes, it's one conversation at a time usually with a trainer or a quality assurance specialist or your manager coaching you through it and introducing you to the conversations to then starting adding more sometimes you start with emails because the expectation is actually a slower response.

[00:40:57] Mara Vicente: It's okay. So you start with emails just to make sure that you have time to really think those questions through and get the very solid response out. Then we move to chats and gradually introduce more chat onto your pipeline.

[00:41:12] Maxime Manseau: And I think at the beginning of our conversation, you mentioned phone support.

[00:41:16] Maxime Manseau: Do you mean like phone calls or do you mean some like Zoom calls? It

[00:41:20] Mara Vicente: can be it can be phone, it can be Zoom. It's usually, it's whatever the customer wants. It has voice. So it's easier, it's more immediate. But yes, it can be a zoom call or it can be phone.

[00:41:31] Maxime Manseau: Does that mean if on pipe drive, I go and I ask, Hey, I want to have a call with someone, they're going to tell me.

[00:41:38] Maxime Manseau: Yes. Okay. But because okay. Depends because internally it's not

[00:41:44] Mara Vicente: available. Yeah.

[00:41:45] Maxime Manseau: Okay. Because internally do you have a team specialized into this or how does it work? Because I guess like what, phone calls is just something so different from, all the rest. So you need to have specific training.

[00:41:58] Mara Vicente: We secure specific ships but we equip everyone with the possibility of doing phone support. But usually, as you mentioned in the beginning, there are people that are way more prompt to engage on the phone and people that are rather happy, like being there backstage. Nobody sees my face. Nobody hears my voice.

[00:42:19] Mara Vicente: So usually we go with, we don't have that many phone conversations to tackle, so we go with the experts that are more likely to engage in these phone calls without that level of stress and anxiety added to it.

[00:42:32] Maxime Manseau: In reality, it's always I've seen many team moving to the, we're going to provide the phone support.

[00:42:38] Maxime Manseau: And I know it's, internally, from the outside, just you had a number and basically that's it, or like a zoom link, but like internally just, a lot of work. It's way more

[00:42:48] Mara Vicente: challenging. Yeah. Definitely. Within Pipedrive, we do offer phone support for specific segments of customers, depending on your plan.

[00:42:57] Mara Vicente: So it's only for a subset of customers that we offer this possibility. And truth be said, although it's out there for most of our customers, the majority is very happy with the engagement through chat. With the chat as a, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's the way the world is going now, like WhatsApp conversations are big.

[00:43:17] Mara Vicente: And so chat is becoming a thing, key thing for engagement. So yeah, majority of customers still prefer chat over phone.

[00:43:25] Maxime Manseau: Okay, cool. I think we are coming almost to the end. I always have one or two questions to close this conversation. I'll move ahead with that if you don't mind.

[00:43:36] Maxime Manseau: First question what is one thing you wish more people understood about the role of support at Pipedrive?

[00:43:45] Mara Vicente: Can you go back to the question?

[00:43:47] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, sure. So the question is Is there something, do you feel that there is something that people don't really get about support at Pipeline, but something, people outside of the support organization, is there something you feel that you wish that people outside from your support organization would understand better?

[00:44:07] Mara Vicente: Outside of my organization, I think there's a lot of clarity on what we do and why we do what we do. I don't think there's that big of a challenge. Inside Pipedrive, at least, I think our executive team really knows the value and understands the value of having a support organization. I don't think everyone knows how hard it is to be a customer support rep.

[00:44:31] Mara Vicente: And because it is an entry level job, usually seen as an entry level job. It's immediate to think it's the easiest. Because it's the first, it's not, it's actually one of the hardest jobs out there. But I think we are very lucky in the sense that the organization knows, everyone at PyDrive knows because we've been evangelizing what support means.

[00:44:58] Mara Vicente: And what, how we do what we do every day. One good, small, but good example. Every time there's a bank holiday somewhere we have our internal comms team go on to Slack and say, Hey guys in Lisbon, there's going to be a bank holiday on the 10th. Thank you so much for our support to people that will still be working today.

[00:45:18] Mara Vicente: It's visible, they know we will still be working and they thank you, they thank us for it. So I think it's that we feel proud of being in support and doing support. So yeah, I think I'm very lucky in that sense. Very lucky with this organization.

[00:45:38] Maxime Manseau: Is there something like looking back?

[00:45:42] Maxime Manseau: Of your six yeah, looking back at your six years at Tadbribe, is there something you would have changed or would have liked it differently? Or is there something, or something you would have done differently, if you could go back or no it's fine too, huh?

[00:45:57] Mara Vicente: I think yes, in, in the beginning when I joined and this is a personal challenge in the beginning when I joined It was very clear what needed to change.

[00:46:06] Mara Vicente: It was very clear for me because I had the background. I've done these types of projects before. And seeing those types of challenges. So I went fast and furious changing things. And I felt, don't trust that this will work, right? And then it was a bit of a chaotic moment where people said are you sure this will work?

[00:46:29] Mara Vicente: I don't know. Anxiety is building. So probably today, looking back, I would definitely have bet more on communication and then starting jumping at the opportunities of doing it, because it would have been done anyway, but it would have been way easier. Learn as you go. So

[00:46:49] Maxime Manseau: yeah,

[00:46:49] Mara Vicente: I did learn.

[00:46:50] Maxime Manseau: No, but that's a really good advice though, because when you arrive from, outside and take care of a team not everyone going to trust you.

[00:46:58] Maxime Manseau: So I feel it's a really great Advice.

[00:47:00] Mara Vicente: Indeed. Indeed. And it's, we you can just, get there and say, trust me, I know this. I am solid professional. This is going to work. No, it's there's gotta be different ways and approaches to sell the ideas and communicate to teams. And we have been doing that for the six yeah, no more friction in that sense, but in the beginning, definitely, it was.

[00:47:23] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. No, but I I feel you. Cool. Is there to finish anything else you'd like to add that we haven't covered?

[00:47:33] Mara Vicente: No, not really. I just want to thank you again for the opportunity. It's always great to be able to speak about the work we love to do. And give a bit more visibility on the solid job my teams are doing inside pipe drive.

[00:47:47] Mara Vicente: And to be honest, the great partnership that I have with other departments too and kudos to them also, because we could be doing a very solid job internally, but then we would die alone with no information from marketing, no help from product or engineering, and this is not the case. We have solid partnerships going.

[00:48:06] Mara Vicente: So yeah, this is always a good opportunity to voice this.

[00:48:10] Maxime Manseau: Okay. The nice was very it was a pleasure to having you on the show. Thank you so much for my for your time, Mada. And if anyone listening want to get in touch with you, maybe the best is LinkedIn.

[00:48:25] Mara Vicente: I'm sorry, I missed you right at the end.

[00:48:28] Mara Vicente: No,

[00:48:29] Maxime Manseau: no worries. I was going to say if anyone want to get in touch with you, like people listening, I guess maybe the best way is to. Write you on LinkedIn.

[00:48:38] Mara Vicente: You can search for me on LinkedIn or just email me at mara dot resend at pipedrive. com.

[00:48:47] Maxime Manseau: Awesome. Thank you so much for your time.

[00:48:50] Maxime Manseau: Take care. And have a wonderful end of the day. Bye bye. Thank

[00:48:54] Mara Vicente: you. You too, Maxine. Bye bye. Bye guys.