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In this episode on customer experience, we’ll be focusing on Customer Success. I’m the host of this virtual space, Juliana Andrea Castillo, part of the commercial team for LATAM. Today, we have a very special guest: Felipe Ovalle, the Customer Success Manager at Bold. A big welcome!
Hello Felipe, thank you for joining us. How are you?
Hello Juliana. How are you? I’m doing well, thank you for the invitation.
Of course! We’re thrilled to have you here and we’re excited to get to know you and hear more about yourself! We’re truly honored to have you on stage.
Of course, Juliana. First of all, thank you for the invitation. Welcome to all who are listening to this podcast. My name is Felipe Ovalle, I earned my bachelor’s degree in International Business Administration at Rosario University. I have been working in startups for 9 years and more than 7 in the fintech world. It’s a world that I’m very passionate about and I know it well!
I’ve worked in companies like PayU, Addi, and currently I’m at Bold as a Customer Success Manager. This role includes everything from post-sales generation to customer care. I’m 31 years old, passionate about sports, and enjoy reading about entrepreneurship and personal development. I was born in Bogota and have lived here all these years.
For those who don’t know Bold, it’s a company that started by offering payment services through data phones for SMEs. Today, we offer a wider array of services, allowing us to provide everything from a credit or payment button to a payment link and now our new deposit account, so that we can provide all crucial services to businesses, allowing them to grow continuously.
Thank you for the introduction! Since you’ve had an awesome ride in the world of Customer Success, could you tell us what you’ve experienced over these years? How has that experience been? How did you land in this area of the business?
Well, my experience has always been in commercial roles, always client-facing. I’ve been involved in post-sales, retention, and general business generation. As I was saying, I’ve gone through different stages and now, with over nine years of experience and more than seven years in Fintech, it has allowed me to navigate this world. As I was saying to some colleagues, the world of customer success is quite new in Latin America and it’s a concept that has been introduced in more developed countries like the United States, several years ago already.
At Bold, we’ve been focusing on customer-related topics, more specifically on understanding customers, their behavior, their needs, and expectations, and ensuring that our services align with their needs and making sure that our business develops services that fit accordingly.
Great! I understand that you’ve had experiences with different brands that are well recognized for their excellent customer experience, but from my understanding, your current role has unique responsibilities compared to your previous roles. Tell us a bit more about that, and about those responsibilities in your new role, and how you go about doing them. Oh, and we’re also interested in understanding the difference with your previous roles!
Yes, indeed it has been a very rewarding role because the purpose of the customer service team is to be the voice of the clients within Bold. We ensure that the needs, expectations, and feedback from clients are aligned with the products and services we offer. So our role is to ensure that there is a connection between our customers and services. We look into customer satisfaction and try to understand what we could improve with our services.
Furthermore, this connection has allowed us to develop amazing services. Moreover, we also ensure that there is a connection between the product teams and the technology teams. As this happens, we also include the customer service team, which is the area that allows us to unify and achieve the development of more advanced and well-thought-out products, specifically tailored to market needs.
So, it’s like a gear working in harmony to achieve quality products and services, right?
Yes, and let’s say that we have always aimed to offer a service akin to Google Cloud, a World-Class service that is designed holistically, not just focusing on customer service, which is important and fundamental, and not just on Customer Success areas, but also ensuring that the service complements the entire process, from the experience of purchasing the dataphone to registering and using it, and the entire process that businesses go through to obtain a dataphone. And in addition to that, when they purchase the dataphone, it obviously works in the best way possible. If they were to have any issue or inconvenience, we would have a quick reaction to resolve it and provide that rapid response capability so they can continue processing and making their sales.
There is nothing more painful for our merchants than encountering a failure during a sale. And before our arrival to the market, there were a lot of failures that didn’t allow them to have a fast and reliable dataphone. They used to take weeks to replace a faulty dataphone, buried in paperwork. We now have the technology and the team to provide quick replacements. What I also want to add is that we’ve significantly improved our processes to ensure fast and reliable service.
Interesting, isn’t it? Because in the end, one might think that delivering a dataphone is handled in a very basic way including by competitors and that the only thing that seems to matter is the device itself, right? But you focus in a very unique way on the overall experience and the product because you want the customer to feel satisfied throughout their entire journey, without any gaps. How interesting Felipe. Well… tell us more.
When we talk about Customer Success, considering your passion for it, how does it influence your approach in your role at Bold? What does Customer Success mean to you, and how do you incorporate it into your daily work?
Customer success, as we perceive it, can be shaped and strategically planned. The goal is, of course, that the customer feels happy, satisfied, and proud of the product, of the service we provide, but also that they feel it propels their business growth and transformation.
One aspect I truly value and cherish is when, for instance, we attend trade shows and individuals approach Bold’s booth to share how transformative our solutions have been for them. It’s inspiring to witness how our offerings contribute to their success. They express how their businesses have flourished, sales have surged, and new clienteles have emerged, especially following our various product launches, beyond just the dataphone. Now, with features like the payment link and payment button, we’ve been able to extend our reach into untapped market segments.
Moreover, in today’s landscape, online sales represent a significant portion, about 11% to 12%, of our total monthly sales. This shift towards e-commerce has been pivotal in shaping our customers’ satisfaction. It’s led to a sense of fulfillment among our customers, thanks to the quality of the products we’re developing. Ultimately, our goal is to empower our customers to achieve success with our services, to provide them with tools and solutions that contribute to their success. We want them to see the value in using our services, to help them increase their sales and expand their customer base.
And what’s truly rewarding is when your product helps your customer achieve their business goals and KPIs. Seeing your customer succeed with your product is invaluable. Their success is the ultimate measure of your product’s worth. That’s what makes it all worthwhile.
Excellent, now, tell us more. While all of this is inspiring and transformative, I’m curious, based on your experience, what are the common challenges you’ve faced? And how have you personally overcome these obstacles? I’m interested in hearing about your strategies for tackling these challenges.
Well, here’s the thing. Let me break it down for you. We jumped into a tough market in Colombia, and, as you might expect, ran into some issues with the local businesses. Today, with every successful transaction, there’s a portion withheld as per legal tax regulations. This entails a standard deduction applied to each transaction, an aspect often overlooked by our clientele.
These clients typically don’t see the benefit of gaining more customers in exchange for an additional cost. So, for the Colombian market, let’s say that currently, our fee starts at $2.89 and $300, and it can change according to the sales volume of the businesses. However, businesses sometimes lack the perception that by gaining more customers, their sales will increase. Possibly if they didn’t have the dataphone, they wouldn’t have been able to make that sale or acquire that new customer.
So here it has been quite a significant challenge, especially for the Colombian market, to demonstrate to customers that there are intermediary costs that need to be covered and to understand that obviously we have to be a profitable company that needs to find that balance between providing good service and achieving profitability. Customers often complain that the costs are too high, but in reality, those costs are necessary for us to provide excellent service and support.
And technology teams. They join our calls, participate in group sessions, and accompany us on visits to gain firsthand insights and feedback from our sales team. This has facilitated rapid iteration and implementation of changes, allowing us to incorporate the necessary adjustments in subsequent technology sprints. We make these changes in line with what the customer or merchant is requesting.
Precisely, and that has been a key factor in the growth, adoption, and retention we’ve experienced to date.
Very interesting. Now, let’s delve a bit into tools. You’ve already touched on some internal or technological tools, but I’m quite curious, and I’m sure our audience is too, if there are any best practices or specific tools you emphasize for customer success. Something you would say is transforming the experience.
Well, I believe that with each client, we’ve relied on having our own in-house backend. This has empowered us with direct information, allowing us to collaborate with the team on any data or specific software aspect. Consolidating all information and compiling a customer’s profile within the same system has allowed us to become more responsive and react faster to issues, inquiries, and what occurs with our merchants. Within our customer service department, we have a dedicated area led by an exceptional leader who consistently seeks to employ the most advanced service platforms and cutting-edge technology. For example, we use bots to automate around 70% of our WhatsApp messages.
Consistently, the product teams are actively exploring new platforms or releases that could optimize our processes, ensuring we can identify cost-effective improvements to consistently deliver enhanced services and experiences to our customers. They prioritize the axiom, “what isn’t measured can’t be improved,” and utilize tools that allow them to understand the customer’s voice for continuous calibration and improvement.
It’s fascinating. Well, let’s delve a bit into measurement. Could you enlighten our audience on those pivotal metrics, those KPIs you employ to gauge success in Customer Success endeavors with your clients?
One of the primary ones, a sort of beacon, is the NPS, which spans the entire company. While it’s a metric gauged within the realm of numbers, it’s an area that impacts all departments. Presently, we can proudly assert that our NPS stands above 70%. Achieving an NPS considered World Class has been incredible for us. According to the measurements, it’s well above the industry average. This has also allowed us to gain valuable feedback from our NPS scores. It’s crucial that we gather feedback from all our detractors and neutrals to continuously improve. We need to address the pain points our customers are experiencing and identify what changes we should be making. We need to think about this as a continuous process. It provides a very transparent snapshot of what our customers are feeling at the moment. If, for example, they are frustrated about something, the NPS reflects it, and that’s when all the teams come together to work on improving that indicator.
Moreover, another important metric we track is retention. We measure retention in two ways: by TPV (Total Payment Volume) or by sales volume, and the retention of our sales team. For example, if a merchant sold to 100 customers last year, we expect them to be selling at least $100 or more compared to the same period last year. And if we have 100 merchants, how many of those 100 processed transactions in March last year and also processed in March this year? This is a crucial indicator for us to measure the company’s growth health. I think about NPS every day because all our clients demand high scores, so we work constantly to improve it.
Well, I believe this is a crucial metric for all teams working directly with merchants and customers. It’s essential for measuring the level of satisfaction and knowing if we are doing things right and heading in the right direction.
Yes, Felipe. Drawing from your experience throughout your career, what have been the challenges you’ve faced and how have you navigated them? What strategies have you used to overcome them?
Well, that’s a great question. Personally, I like to have a close relationship with customers and clients. And well, although Bold is a tech company that works under the Business-to-business model, we end up working more with the massive consumer. Today, as mentioned earlier, we serve over half a million businesses equipped with Bold dataphones. This presents a significant challenge in maintaining direct contact with all these businesses. One challenge stems from our extensive presence, reaching nearly 90% of the country’s cities. However, reaching 100% has proved difficult due to logistical constraints. This limitation has made it challenging to communicate with 100% of our customer base and engage as extensively as we’d like with the goal of having more meaningful interactions, gathering feedback, and ultimately improving our services.
Presently, we employ statistical models for guidance. Our in-house team sets the parameters, determining the minimum criteria. This includes the required percentage of accurate responses, interviews, or street interactions needed to gather precise and comprehensive data. Personally, I’d rather establish real contact with everyone because each individual will have something different to share and something valuable to contribute to our company for continued growth. So, that was one of the main challenges.
And secondly, as I mentioned earlier, there’s the issue of pricing, which has always been a challenge for us—making people understand how Bold’s tariffs work and how we provide it to merchants. We’ve held demo webinars and invited influencers and financial experts to explain the topic because we feel we need to provide more digestible information for merchants so they see added value behind the fees. We want them to understand the worth behind the money.
What’s been your experience? In terms of corporate experiences, how have they contributed to your personal growth and learning?
Yes, definitely. I always feel that when working in post-sales, you develop certain soft skills, particularly in communication. You also learn patience because when you deal with frustrated customers, for example, they might call and say they’ve lost a client or a sale because their payment terminal wasn’t working. You need to understand their frustration and know how to handle it. I think it helps us develop those soft skills, to be more patient and know how to guide the customer, explaining that even though we are a tech company and strive for zero errors, in technology, that’s not always possible. We also rely on our suppliers, and sometimes, issues arise from their end. It depends on network connections and sometimes also on the banks. We explain to people that many of these issues aren’t caused by us directly but by third parties. It’s frustrating because, in the end, we are the face of the problem, and customers say that when they buy a device from us, they expect it to work. So, it’s important to manage customers effectively, to explain things clearly, and to navigate the complexities of this industry.
From the customer’s perspective, both in service and sales, we learn valuable skills such as patience, resilience, and the ability to think outside the box. These qualities drive us to constantly improve and find the best solutions for our customers, ensuring we address their needs effectively and efficiently.
That’s super interesting, Felipe, thanks! And now, to wrap things up, tell us, if you had the opportunity to give our audience one last piece of advice based on this interesting conversation about Customer Success, your challenges, your experiences, and technology, what would it be?
Well, as for what I could recommend or offer them on this occasion, to continue refining their roles day by day and everything they do for their customers. Moreover, for those who have listened attentively until now, I’d advise them that if they aspire to grow, to scale their company, business, or startup, they should heed their customers’ feedback closely. There’s no point in boasting, launching a product if it doesn’t meet expectations or market demands. So, avoid delivering something to customers that they neither want nor expect.
