The Toronto Customer Success Executive Breakfast is a forum whereby local industry leaders get together over breakfast to discuss the still young and rapidly evolving field of Customer Success.
Organized by DesiredPath, senior executives in the field of Customer Success are invited to share their knowledge and expertise amongst their peer group in an intimate and highly interactive setting.
The breakfast is an opportunity for these leaders in Customer Success to convene, exchange ideas and further define industry best practices.
How Uber Eats manages enterprise partnerships was the focus topic at this month’s Customer Success Executive Breakfast.
Held at the beautiful new, Toronto office of Uber and Uber Eats, Karin Ronde, Senior Operations Manager Uber Eats, led an engaging session that covered an overview of how Uber Eats partners with restaurants to drive mutual success.
What was unique about this session is that Uber Eats, although a technical platform, is not a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company, rather they are in the Delivery-as-a-Service (DaaS) business.
When end-users use the platform to order and then consume the product(s) produced by the partners, i.e. restaurants, how do customer acquisition, retention and expansion strategies apply to the function of Customer Success?
And what does value realized mean to the end-users and partners alike?
Much of what the Customer Success Managers (CSMs) do looks similar to the responsibilities of CSMs in the SaaS space: quarterly business reviews and bi-weekly meetings are held, responsive communication via email, store visits and weekly reporting occurs, and technical support is provided to handle customer issues.
Customer segmentation includes SMB, Enterprise and Strategic partnerships and accounts are resourced accordingly with varying account ratios. The focus of the CSM’s efforts vary depending on the account tier.
Similar key metrics are also used to measure CSM performance with revenue, user acquisition and Net Promoter Score (NPS) being key areas of measurement.
What is unique in the DaaS model as it relates to Customer Success is how CSMs onboard and then partner with restaurants to realize success and demonstrate the benefit.
Will a restaurant cannibalize its own customer base by choosing to use DaaS? Will they pay more to have their normal, in-house users order delivery, therefore impacting revenue? Should they work exclusively with one partner or many?
CSMs spend their time addressing these concerns but they also spend a lot of time outlining, and then demonstrating, the value realized out of the partnership.
They work with the customer to show them how delivery increases their basket size and offer value add by proposing different levers that restaurants have at their disposal to increase basket size.
The fascinating part of the session was to see how common Customer Success challenges are being addressed in another type of As-a-Service model.
Although there are real, nuanced differences between SaaS and DaaS, ultimately metrics, data and demonstrating value realized are still common themes that apply to Customer Success universally.