The Advocacy Channel Ep. 6: Fiverr’s Unique Approach to Building Genuine Customer Connections with Trisha Diamond
Welcome to our first episode of 2022!
We’re excited to kick off the new year with special guest Trisha Diamond, Director of Customer Success at Fiverr - a freelance services marketplace. With over 15 years of experience developing resources and support programs for customers to drive client satisfaction and retention, Trisha shares her unique approach to building genuine customer connections in a double-sided marketplace. Plus, we get an inside look at how she helped build the customer success department at Fiverr from the ground up.
If you’re trying to drive a customer success department in your organization or just improve your customer connections, tune in as Trisha and host Will Fraser discuss how customer success can best work with other departments and build long-term relationships with your brand’s top users.
Check out the full episode below, or keep reading for our favorite pieces of advice from the episode.
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The importance of welcoming customer feedback and input
Improving your product or service starts with accepting that you’re not perfect, and understanding where you have room to grow. While you can spend time guessing at how customers are feeling, nothing will help guide you better than direct feedback from your users.
Will 12:50
So I think what you said that is really important though is to just ask the customer. And it's interesting to me because I continue to see this conflict in people where they simultaneously want customer input, but are afraid to go get it. What's been your experience when you try to reach out and ask the customer?
Trisha 13:05
Every conversation is different and some of them are much easier than others. But in the end, all feedback is good feedback. Even if a customer comes to say that they’re really frustrated about these three things, first of all, you should know it. You should absolutely know what frustrations your customers have, but secondly, understand the value to them that they're able to express this to somebody. Because how often have we all filled out a survey on a website that asks “How is your experience today?” and you say actually, it was really bad, but you never hear anything again. How does that leave you feeling? Can your mind be changed just because they send you a survey? Probably not. We've even done follow-up on surveys before where we say like “Hey, we saw you aren't happy. Do you want to talk about it? We can get on Zoom, Google Meets, whatever you use, and we could talk face to face.” The folks that take us up on it are really genuine and they're really pleased that we wanted to hear about it. And just that openness makes the conversation easier. But don't be scared! We're not perfect. No company, no person is perfect. And the way that we get better is that we know where we're not so good.
How does customer success work with other departments at Fiverr?
Cross-functional teams can yield great results, but this can be difficult to know how to execute. Trisha shares her experience at Fiverr and how the customer success team does much more than simply helping retain customers. Customer success at Fiverr works closely with marketing to not only be a value add to the loyalty program, but also uncover more insight as to what else Fiverr can be doing to empower its users.
Will 15:55
What you touched on there is the idea that customer success doesn't work in a vacuum. It’s not just customer success, but there are strategic initiatives and interactions with other departments. It’s generally a great idea that people accept but it's tricky in practice to figure out where customer success sits in the world. How does customer success work with marketing or with other strategic groups? Do you have any experiences there that you can share?
Trisha 16:27
Absolutely. At Fiverr in our customer success, we are literally intertwined with probably every department here. I’ll use the marketing example though. We have a loyalty program at Fiverr, called Fiverr Select. One of the value propositions we have for that is that you have access to a team of customers success managers. So if you have a new project that you want to start, or a series of things that you want to carry out over the next year, you can connect with somebody via video conference or email, and have someone that can guide you through the right types of services that you need.
For example, maybe somebody says they want to start a podcast and need someone to help edit it. We’d help them consider how they will market and design it as there’s a lot more to it, and we basically come in and help them fulfill that story. And at the same time though, because we're talking to these customers, we're always hearing their feedback about the Fiverr Select program or about Fiverr in general, and what sort of things they think that Fiverr should be there for them. As a marketplace that helps you curate freelancers and agencies, what else do you think we should do? Should we be sharing more education or more communication about these types of topics? We work so so closely with our marketing departments in that way.
What advice would you give to someone trying to improve their customer connections?
With experience building a customer success department from the ground up for an incredibly successful brand, we couldn’t end the episode without asking Trisha what piece of advice she would share with anyone trying to drive customer success in their own organization.
Will 19:05
If we have a listener that's trying to drive a customer success department to improve their customer relationships, what's that big piece of advice you'd have for someone out there who is just wanting so desperately to drive this customer success type relationship?
Trisha 19:25
So you said one, but I'm going to say two, and briefly touch on the first one because I mentioned it earlier, and that's to be prepared to pivot and change as your customers need.
The second one is to find the other people in your organization that can be your partners or your advocates or the folks that could really use the customer point of view in their work. Whether it's a large department or a single stakeholder in a smaller department, think to yourself who could do what they're doing right now a little more effectively if maybe they got to talk to two or three customers and they had some insights. Don't go too big too fast and show up to the CEO asking for thirty-five employees right off the bat, but start small because there's always somebody in an organization whose goal is to get their product out to more customers, or to retain more customers and you can propose to them the idea of getting together and talking to a few customers together. That's how we started and really gained traction to working with pretty much everybody in Fiverr.
Listen to the full episode for even more about Fiverr's approach to building customer connections.
Special thanks to Trisha for being on the show! Connect with Trisha on LinkedIn.
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