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.
