Why I joined ZapScale?

My friends and colleagues have been asking me this question since the time I joined ZapScale. Today, I choose to answer this! But let me tell you a short story first!

I was the first employee of ThreadSol (my previous company) where I was taking care of projects, customer onboarding, and customer success overall. As we all know in a start-up, compartmentalizing is not a choice; hence, I used to work in every department. This means that I had visibility of everything happening in the company, we were only 8-10 people.

I remember onboarding our first customer! It was a joyful experience and we were so thrilled! For the initial 5-8 customers, I remembered every detail, the KPIs and their achievements were at the top of my fingertips and I loved doing what I did. As time passed and we entered the growth stage, our small start-up began to grow up and every month we were adding people and onboarding many new customers every quarter. Our team size increased and we got divided into specific departments. I started looking into my department (customer success) and focussed on structuring and streamlining the process.

All good challenging things!!

But, gradually I started to feel the real pain, the real struggle!

Initially, I used to know all of my customers, their metrics, achievements, and challenges. But with the business growth, the number of customers increased (good thing right?) but I started struggling from that very moment. I couldn’t remember all the metrics and I didn’t have visibility of all my accounts. The same challenge was faced by my team members as well.

I was dependent on other departments and team members for insights and to take the next course of action.

One day, one of my colleagues and I started listing what we needed - to gain more visibility and control. We needed a lot of information from the other departments to know how our customers are doing and what can I do more so that they remain satisfied. With that thought, we started an exercise to gather information once a month from all other departments. It did work for a certain period with all the support from the founders, but as we grew more, it became a challenging task to extract tons of data and derive actionable intelligence from it.

I remember while on periodic review, I found that one of our customers had not used our product for the past 10 days and I had no clue about it. I was 10 days late in finding this out.As a result, my whole team struggled and had to put in a lot of extra effort to get that customer back on track.

I was not happy!

It was still not enough!

It was still reactive rather than proactive!

I knew the reactive approach is not good enough! I was frustrated!I used to discuss all these thoughts with the founders. They all understood and agreed that we should find a solution.

So, we started looking for a solution to the problem.

We needed more automation, and visibility so that we as a team could become proactive.

I wanted something which can be used by all the departments (sales, development, support, finance, and us-customer success) so we all could be on the same page (after all we were all one team).

We found a lot of solutions but the main challenges were:

1)???Cost (not enough budget): The cost for unlimited users was so high, it was simply beyond the budget

2)???Time: We were not ready to invest so much of our time in integration. The development team was too busy building the product, we were a growing start-up and we needed to build features and fix issues.

3)???Effort: During that time my team used to travel 8-9 months a year for projects, implementations, and CS-related work. Setting a complete tool with KPI, playbook, outcomes, etc from scratch was painful. We simply did not have any bandwidth to do that.

4)???Worth: Was all this pain worth it? How would I solve all these problems?

I was back to square one! I had no solution but only problems!

We started making processes and tried to handle them manually for the time being. Customers used to love us but I knew we could have done a lot better if we could get more real-time visibility. Plus this way of working was not sustainable! We could have been more proactive.

Anyway, long story short, we never found any solution that could solve all these issues.

A few years down the line when ThreadSol founders (who had now exited and started to build a new venture) reached out to me and told me that they are building something which I used to ask for. At that exact moment, I knew what I wanted to do.

I was certain that this is what the industry needed and I wanted to contribute more as I faced these challenges. I had first-hand knowledge of what is needed and I realized it’s not just me who is struggling to solve these challenges of retention, churn, and expansion. That very moment, I decided that I will be a part of this amazing journey and build something that will be loved and ultimately solve the pains of customer success for many other CS People like me.

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”?–Steve Jobs,