Graduating from Customer Success

Few things are better than being part of the Pendo Success Team and helping our customers become successful with our software. Even better than that is seeing them become successful again and again in their everyday activities, and sharing what they’ve learned with others in their organization to help them be successful too.

For the Success Team at Pendo, we get to double up on the fun and share in the joy of spreading the Success philosophy both to our customers and throughout our entire organization.

Many Success Managers know that Success Teams are in the unique place of advocating for everyone’s success. We are, by nature, in the business of perpetuating mutual wins and are often faced with a small challenge in the software start-up world. We are dedicated to constantly delighting customers in the moment, as well as planning for their future success–all this while our own organization is growing and changing every day along the way. We love the challenge!

When we brought on an intern to join our team this summer, I was immediately excited to see how the Success philosophy would be absorbed by a local student, Tristan Haas, who was really just setting his sights on what his ongoing success would look like after graduation next year.

At the end of our busy summer, in the midst of our end of quarter wrap-up, which included tons of OKR activities, onboarding new customers, employee celebrations and vacations, and a release of our newly branded website, I decided to conduct a Success exit interview and see how Pendo stuck on him. I was more than excited to see that Tristan “gets success” — apparently we rubbed off on him!

What school are you hailing from and what is your class?
Duke University, and yes, Class of 2017

What is your major?
Majoring in Public Policy, Minoring in Economics, and getting a certificate in Markets and Management

What are your extracurricular activities like?
Former Class Vice President, Director of Social Programming and Philanthropy Chair for my fraternity, Co-Founder and President of the “You’re Not Alone” Social Initiative, to name a few

Your favorite day or event at Pendo?I very much enjoyed the end of quarter activities. It gave a great opportunity to see where the company stands on every metric and how far it has come in a short period. The transparent nature of the company’s operations really made it an educational experience.

One word to describe the culture at Pendo?
Open

One job you knew nothing about and know a little bit more about at Pendo?
Product Management

If you could take one thing from your experience at Pendo, what would it be?
A fundamental understanding of company processes and motivations

What is your ideal first job after graduation, what would it be?
Being a consultant at a major firm

What do you think Pendo does and what does it do best?
I think Pendo gives the necessary tools to its customers to best capture the most relevant and important actions, and provide guidance that can help them achieve their goals. Pendo is best at keeping the success of the customer paramount.

What’s the best thing about working at a startup?
The young nature of the company makes everyone heavily invested in the success of the whole entity.

Would you ever think about starting your own startup?
<Absolutely. Some friends and I are throwing around startup ideas to potentially compete in the Duke startup challenge this year, and I would definitely be interested in doing so at some point in the future.

Two words to describe customer success?
Delivering value

I always think of “Pendo-isms.” Was there any one word or phrase tossed around so much that you had never heard before or that were commonplace at Pendo from what you noticed? For example, many Pendozers will use the phrase “let’s take a step back.”
Hmm, one thing I can think of is hearing “this was helpful” a lot, in a lot of the calls with clients as well as in-house. I guess it illustrates how we’re always absorbing things day-to-day, and improving ourselves as we improve our clients.

We’d like to thank our Summer Intern, Tristan Haas, of Duke University for taking on tasks to help fuel our Success Managers and Engineers with more insights that will take us into other projects. We love it when people “Get Success” and wish Tristan the best in success in his final year and hope to see him back at Pendo pretty often along the way. (And if he needs a place to study for mid-terms, we will have a desk open for him with Success at our new office.) If you’re curious about exactly how we keep other success teams running smoothly, read our latest article about “Building An Onboarding Engine for Product and Customer Success.”