This article was transcribed from a panel talk from a Customer Marketing Summit in 2021. You can discover out upcoming summits using the events tab at Customer Marketing Alliance.
Introducing our panelists
Saikrishna Chavali
Welcome folks! Today we're going to explore the unique way Fiverr has structured its group for success. I'm Sai Chavali, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Proofpoint, one of the largest cybersecurity vendors out there, and I’m joined by Trisha, Director of Customer Success at Fiverr. She has built and nurtured a unique model of customer marketing from 2015 to now. Let's learn more from her directly. Trisha, can you introduce yourself?
Trisha Diamond
Yes, thank you. I think you introduced me perfectly, but my name is Trisha Diamond. I'm from Fiverr, an online marketplace connecting businesses with freelancers that offer digital services. We run this in about 400 categories, so a huge variety of business happens on our platform.
Fiverr’s unique customer success model
Saikrishna Chavali
Let's dive right in. You call this group customer success, but it's different from the traditional model, so tell us more.
Trisha Diamond
We have to be different because we're a unique environment. You hear customer success being talked about a lot with SaaS companies, but we're a marketplace. Our customer success managers are here to help ensure the success of both the freelancers that use Fiverr to earn and the businesses that are leveraging the platform to purchase services. Basically, we want to help them get the most out of it.
When I need to explain it very quickly, I usually say that we're acting as consultants for people that use Fiverr. We're far from customer service because we don't answer tickets. We’re not like account management either, which usually involves managing a large portfolio of revenue and things like that. We're more focused on the experience; we’re kind of like experience managers, although I should not be inventing a new industry while we chat today!
Our purpose is to ensure that both sides of the marketplace operate effectively. It's an automatic platform, so buyers and sellers can find each other without us, but we step in to make sure that everyone is happy and gets the most out of it.
Saikrishna Chavali
What parts of customer marketing are involved in your customer success function?
Trisha Diamond
When you think about customer marketing, a lot of things might come to mind, whether it's retention emails, in-app pop-ups, social media, or any of the dozens of other formats. We use this content with the goal of educating our customers and rewarding them for doing the things that we want them to do.
We use a human touch to take the whole funnel and put it in one place. Our success managers take the time to speak to each customer and help them through any aspect of their journey. If they're selling, for example, instead of sending marketing emails that explain how to sell better or faster, we're sitting down with freelancers, optimizing their profile, looking at how they work with customers, and educating them in a personal way on how to do this better.
Saikrishna Chavali
The way I understood it, and I was naive in my understanding, was that your function was like customer marketing plus upsells. In reality, you're helping freelancers to build better businesses, and by doing that. you’re also helping Fiverr to be successful.
Trisha Diamond
Exactly. There's not much of a traditional upsell model. Basically, the more our freelancers or our business buyers are using the platform, the more successful we are as a business. We help them engage and use it better, so we're not even having to upsell. We're just helping people and that helps the business as well.
Saikrishna Chavali
That's so unique it’s blowing my very B2B-structured mind. How's the team structured to deliver on Fiverr’s promise to help customers succeed?
Trisha Diamond
We're structured with a few considerations in mind. The first is that the type of customer success manager that works with a freelancer is different from one that works with a small business. Large businesses too might see a different type of success manager.
From there, we consider locations and verticals, for instance, someone who specializes in graphic design versus programming or tech. Most importantly, we involve the customer in that decision. We make sure that they're there with us and that we have a personality match because this is about relationships.
The origin story
Saikrishna Chavali
We've talked a bit about the structure and the goals of your organization. Now I want some stories. How did this all begin? What was the inspiration behind this, and why was it so important to Fiverr?
Trisha Diamond
First, Fiverr is all about its community. We are truly a customer-centric organization, and we wanted to know more about our customers, so in 2015, we formed this department. Starting out, we had a lot of areas of opportunity, so we picked one, and that was our top-rated freelancers in the marketplace.
At first, we were taking inspiration from SaaS companies. Of course, Salesforce is a common name there because they're so big in this industry, but I was also looking at companies like eBay, as well as Etsy and other marketplaces, to figure out how they support the growth of the people that sell in their marketplace. Even though Fiverr is unique in that it's about digital services, we were able to learn a lot from these physical goods companies.
In the end, because we're a unique organization, we had to innovate, flex the rules a little bit, and find out what worked for us.
Saikrishna Chavali
I love it. We're getting a bit more into the stories, but I'm gonna push you further. Let's start with identifying your ideal customers. How do you do that? How does this whole process begin?
Trisha Diamond
We work very closely with our data teams, and we've developed some algorithms that look at customers' patterns to detect who has high potential, who might be very engaged, and who we should connect with. But it's not just data – we actually ask them. If we see high-potential customers, we can reach out, but if they're not interested and connecting with us, it doesn't go any further. This relationship-based model only works if the customer is engaged in the process.
Saikrishna Chavali
What internal teams are you collaborating with through this process? You mentioned the data science teams; is there anyone else? It seems like it would take a village to make this run well.
Trisha Diamond
Definitely. I would say that customer success at Fiverr is connected with everybody. It’s no big surprise that we’re connected with marketing, but also product and… Goodness! I can't think of a department that we're not connected with because not only are they helping us build this unit, but we're bringing back information about our customers’ needs and pain points and what marketing resonates with them – everything. It is a village and it has two-way traffic.
Saikrishna Chavali
Let's move to awareness or what we might think of as a kind of marketing. How do you make customers aware of what Fiverr has to offer, and how Fiverr can help them grow their businesses and solve their problems better?
Trisha Diamond
We're so closely connected with our customers. We're speaking with them regularly, so we really know them. We know their strengths, their weaknesses, and what they're less comfortable with. When new features, tools, or promotions become available, we want everyone we work with to be able to take advantage of that. We can also take our knowledge of the customers and concentrate our efforts on helping them make the most of those opportunities.
For those customers that we don’t know so well, we’ll do traditional emails, but for the customers we have close relationships with, we can do a little more. If it's a new tool, I can go right to those people and demo it for them, then I’ll bring feedback to our internal teams about what was working for them and what was not so intuitive.
How Fiverr nurtures advocates
Saikrishna Chavali
A big portion of customer marketing is around advocacy. How do you gain Fiverr advocates and keep in touch with them after you've helped them grow their business, and they can move on?
Trisha Diamond
Advocacy is my favorite part. It's where I feel like we're stronger than anywhere else. That’s because the human touch is such a natural way to bring customers close to your brand.
If you know Fiverr or, say, a certain chain of stores, that's great. You know the name, and that’s an important first step. But if you know the brand and you can connect that brand with a face, a voice, a personality, and a relationship that you have, it becomes so much stronger. It's not just Fiverr; it’s also Brandon, and Brandon takes care of me and understands what I'm going through in my business.
To keep these relationships going, our CSMs are in constant communication with our customers. Of course, a lot of it's by email, but we're on video calls all day too. We're a global company, so we can't meet a lot of people face-to-face, but I'm located in Orlando, where there’s lots of tourism, so believe me, as soon as somebody's coming to Disney World, we're inviting them into the office with us!
Saikrishna Chavali
The global portion is so interesting. I’d love to understand a bit more about that. Did you find any differences or surprising similarities between the customer success initiatives in various parts of the world, and were there any unique things that you've had to observe depending on the geography and the culture?
Trisha Diamond
That's a great question. For sure, there are cultural differences, but I think what was most striking to me is that in the end, we're all humans. We're all looking to create a connection and to work with somebody who understands us and our journey. The cultural barrier almost doesn't feel like it's there most of the time.
I know that might sound like hyperbole, but really we're all in this world together, and it really shows when I can connect with someone anywhere in the world, and very quickly we can understand each other because we share a Fiverr as a common thread.
Saikrishna Chavali
Would you be able to share any stories of customers that have gone through this journey with y’all?
Trisha Diamond
Buckle in – I've got about eight hours of content here! It's so hard to choose one story, so I'm gonna go with just the first one that popped into my mind.
It’s somebody I started working with early on, and I still work with them six years later. They work in writing and translation on Fiverr, and this was sort of a part-time side hustle for them. Of course, all of our freelancers are great quality, but I recognized something special in this person.
Over time, we looked at what they were doing on the platform and what tools we could help them leverage while they were balancing their full-time work and this night job, if you will, on Fiverr. We optimized both their offerings on the marketplace, how they communicate them, and how they manage their own upsells and retention with their customers.
It grew over time from being just a few hundred dollars a month to 15 or so thousand dollars every single month. Of course, that is amazing for the freelancer, but it's also great for Fiverr. We have a seller that we can recommend to our buyers and know that they'll have a perfect experience working with them. It's great for everybody involved, and that's why we stuck with the name “customer success,” even though we changed the principles around a little bit.
Best practices for bringing a human touch to your organization
Saikrishna Chavali
Do you have any tips or best practices for organizations looking to start on this journey?
Trisha Diamond
The one thing I would say is that you should talk to your customers when you're forming this. This is so often overlooked, but I really want to encourage anyone thinking about doing this to get to know their customers. Maybe bring them in for roundtables, do one-on-one interviews, and ask them what they need. Ask them what your company could do to make their experience more meaningful and successful and help them feel that your brand is there for them.
Saikrishna Chavali
I also wanted to ask you if there are any lessons you’ve learned the hard way, because nothing is just a path of roses.
Trisha Diamond
Absolutely. We've been doing this for over six years, and we've definitely learned some hard lessons along the way. A lot of that is in how we engage with our customers. We tend to assume that everybody wants to talk to us, so we’ll email them and we'll invite them to Zoom meetings, like, “Hey, I'm Trisha, and I'm here for you. When do you want to talk?” This assumption still sometimes bites us on the behind today.
It's really important to find the methods that work best with different customers. For example, we were emailing a lot of people to try to get a hold of them, and we had very low adoption and success rates there. However, we have an inbox on the platform, so we decided, instead of trying to meet the customer in their email inbox, we would meet them where they are with a pop-up in their in-app inbox. From there, we saw a lot more success.
Now, instead of asking when they want to have a Zoom call, we’re asking what's good for them, how we can help them, and what's the best way for them to talk to us. We’ve also adopted all sorts of interesting communication methods; we even have shared Slack groups for some of our customers who said, “This is what works for me because I'm on Slack all day.”
Tips for collaborating with product teams
Saikrishna Chavali
You’ve mentioned that your work is very collaborative. Do you have any tips for customer marketers working with product teams, for example?
Trisha Diamond
Yes. In customer success, all the data we have is qualitative because it comes from speaking with customers, so we also partner with the data team, once again, who can bring in the quantitative data on who's using what feature, how often they’re using it, and how quickly they stop using it, for example. Then we go to the customers and ask them more about why they’re not using certain features, what's working, and what's not.
That way, when we come to the product team, we come with a full story, and we're able to make a very strong case on behalf of our customers.
By the way, I want to mention that even though this is a very personalized relationship we're talking about, when we need to do things at scale like ask specific questions about a specific feature, we're not afraid to use automation. It's okay to take these outreaches, make them automatic, and just have a human being ready on the other side for when somebody replies.
Saikrishna Chavali
I love the nuance there, and I'm sure the product team just loves having both the qualitative and the quantitative data at their fingertips to make decisions.
Well, that's all we have time for. Thank you Trisha for taking the time to talk us through your unique model of customer marketing.
Trisha Diamond
Sai, thank you. This was great. Are you sure we can't talk longer?
