Lykken on Lending

In our Hot Topic this week, we have Vishal Rana, Vice President of Customer Success & Operations @ Snapdocs.

The discussion will focus on what providing exceptional customer success looks like…

Want to know more about Vishal Rana?

If you want to learn more about today’s podcast click here!!

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Why Digital Transformation Needs Great Customer Success Teams With Vishal Rana

I’m grateful to have you. I got away. Once a quarter, I like to go out. I like to do a three-day fast. That’s it. Just water. “Do you have to do that?” Everyone asks. It’s easy once you start doing fasting. I get away, I journal, and I get quiet. I went away into the Hill Country of Texas here in Central Texas and we got some beautiful spots. I rented this cabin. The only thing was an occasional jet way up above in the birds. It was so peaceful to be out there in the woods. I journaled and thought about things, and then I’m thinking about 9/11.

You thought automatically to go to events many years ago. We look also at events on what’s gone on in Afghanistan. There was some extra pain that went with this particular holiday. What’s in the game? Where are we at? It was interesting. Remember 9/11, certainly celebrating their lives and what all the first responders did to protect us.

That whole event created a shining spotlight on first responders and the amazing job they do. All first responders and military personnel, we appreciate you here on the show. We appreciate your sacrifices, many of them. Thank you for your commitment to keep the rest of us safe. This show is honoring you and this holiday or remembrance of a tragic event many years ago.

I am looking forward to the Hot Topic segment. We’re going to be talking about customer service and what you do to create great customer service. Be sure to stay tuned into the Hot Topic segment, where we have the Vishal Rana join us. Also, Snapdocs is the newest sponsor. We’re excited to have them there. We’re thrilled to be a part of Industry Syndicate, IndustrySyndicate.com. They do a great job of creating and promoting podcasts, getting them out into the industry. We’re on their website. Be sure to check out all the podcasts there and we support them and encourage everyone who’s getting out to help make a difference in this industry.

Also, we had a great conference call with Josh Pitts. He and I are going to be doing some things together and launching another new podcast and look at how many is that we’re doing. That’s going to be 3 or 4 podcasts I’m involved in. I’m excited about that one. Josh is a fun guy. He’s got a different style than we do. We’re going to bring our two styles together and launch another podcast talking about things going on in the industry from another perspective.

In this show, we try to bring relevant operational topics to you and talk about what’s going on from an operational standpoint. Overall, about what’s going on. Many people say, “This is probably one of the most impactful, broad-covering, fast-covering shows out there that covers all the aspects of what’s going on in the industry.” We put links in these episodes.

That’s all made possible by our sponsors, who I want to thank, like the Mortgage Bankers Association of America. If you’re not registered for the annual conference in San Diego, be sure to do so. I did and I’ll be there. I’m looking forward to seeing many of you there. Also, Finastra Fusion Mortgagebot Solution. It’s the leading point of sale for origination platforms. I’m grateful to have them as a sponsor. 

Also, now Snapdocs. I am so thrilled to have Snapdocs as a sponsor on the show. Also, Lenders One and Mortgage Collaborative. These two do a great job of helping the lenders get together in a more intimate setting to talk about the issues that are going on. We have a lot of our clients who are members of both of them, and they see the value of membership with both of them. Both are very complimentary. They do a great job for independent mortgage bankers. There are some banks involved with them. It’s not exclusive to independent mortgage bankers, but check out both of these.

Also, Community Mortgage Lenders of America for their support as well as Insellerate. Josh Friend, what an amazing amount of brilliance going on. He’s got a webinar that he’s going to be doing. Check it out. They’ll all be pushing it out through LinkedIn. Be sure to get out there and take a look at what they’re talking about. There’s a lot of wisdom in what Josh is doing and what he’s built into Insellerate.

Also, Knowledge Coop as well as Modex. Both of these companies do a great job of helping you recruit top LOs. They give you the tools for you to recruit top LOs. If you’re looking for methodology and how to do it, get a hold of me. I got a lot of ideas for how we are using both of these tools and advise our clients on how to recruit top people. Also, thank you to Rob, Alice, Les, Allen, and Matt for their contributions to the show.

Welcome to the Hot Topic segment. We have Vishal Rana, Vice President of Customer Success and Operations at Snapdocs, our newest sponsor. It’s good to have you here, Vishal. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. I want to give a shout-out to Amy Moses for connecting us and connecting me to your whole company. It’s an amazing company. I’m a big fan of Amy. You guys are so fortunate to have her and all that she does to promote your company.

One of the first things she said was, “Dave, I got to get Snapdocs on your show because of your audience. We want to get the word out.” A lot of people talk about the format. While we’re going to be talking some about Snapdocs, it’s about what you’re doing to provide exceptional customer service. Before we go there, give us a little insight into you, your background, and what brought you to Snapdocs.

We are super lucky to have Amy. She’s been incredible, especially as a partner in crime for us on the success team. Before we jump into my background, I’d love to take a second. I know that you’ve dedicated this episode to the first responders in the military at 9/11. I grew up and my whole family has lived and worked around New York City. We were all there around 9/11. I was super privileged to serve in the Air Force at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, where a lot of these first responders also served. I’m very honored to be part of the episode dedicated to all of them. Thanks for doing that, David.

Thank you for your service, too, Vishal. There’s a lot of sacrifice that goes into what the first responders did that special day certainly and then go on every day. That’s unsung. We deemed to do a better job of honoring our military. I have so much respect for our military. We’re talking about Snapdocs in this episode and a little bit about yourself. Thanks for starting off with that. Very good.

Let me jump into the topic. I’m Vishal. I lead the customer success and operations teams at Snapdocs. These are essentially the customer success managers. These are ongoing account managers, implementation folks who are technical specialists, as well as our services, quality control, and support organization. It is a big chunk of the organization, effectively everyone you talk to once you sign up with Snapdocs.

My background is primarily in financial services and technology. Snapdocs stood out as a good marriage of the two. As I mentioned, I started out on the East Coast. My early career was working in big banks, insurance companies, and things like that in New York. Since I moved to California, most of my work has been in technology companies. It’s been helping my clients, who are usually financial institutions, use technology to improve their customer experiences. I’ve worked at a couple of different technology companies and, in all of those cases, it’s been about how we make the experience that the customers of our customers have better and more technologically empowered and enabled.

I look at the challenge. It may be worthwhile to explain what Snapdocs does. Amy told me she worked for Snapdocs, but the name didn’t suggest all that you do. Give us our readers a little insight into what Snapdocs does.

At a high level, Snapdocs is a digital closing platform. We’ve got this whole process of closing loans that starts at the lender and goes all the way through to the settlement company, ordering title, appraisals, and all that stuff all the way down through actually funding the loans and then selling them out into investors. A lot of that process, as everybody knows, is pretty manual. It’s off of paper. It’s FedExing documents all over the place and lots of little sticky notes, a sign here, that sort of stuff.

What Snapdocs does is take that whole chunk of the process and digitize it so that you’re able to do this all in one unified platform where everybody can see what everyone else is up to and use all the available technology to help make it better for borrowers and for the lenders themselves to execute these closings.

The goal is to make this whole process more seamless, transparent, safer for borrowers, and easier for them to understand. It’s this service of this perfect closing because, at the end of the day, when you think about what a borrower is trying to close a loan, they remember that closing appointment, and a lot of times, lenders aren’t there. They’re sitting in a title office somewhere and it’s this very interesting part of the experience that is super emotionally charged for the borrower.

They get their keys so they feel like they’re actually done, but a lot of times, that process isn’t great. Millennials are looking for better technology, things that are easier for them to use, and things they can do for their phone. Being more technology-enabled through that process versus sitting in a big conference room in a building with someone they’ve never met with all the information about themselves and their co-borrowers written out on their pieces of paper. It’s signing a stack of documents. I always laugh. You can move thousands of dollars, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars, on your phone with a couple of clicks, but you’ve got to go into an office and get fingerprinted to sign a mortgage document. It’s silly.

 

One of my friends bought a nice high-end Tesla and was talking about how quick and easy that experience was. You’re so spot on that the Millennials and the Gen Zs, the younger generation, are looking for a much easier experience than what we have created. You guys are well on your way to creating that. You have a marvelous number of integrations.

You integrate almost everybody that’s out there. I want to focus on something that we all can learn from. You guys are doing this exceptionally well and I encourage people to get to know Snapdocs, specifically you, Vishal, because you guys are exemplary in providing exceptional customer success. I’d like to ask you to tell us what that looks like from Snapdocs’ perspective.

Let me step back and this is maybe more generic than for Snapdocs itself. I’ve been in the customer success business for a few years. It’s providing a great experience for your end client. When you buy software, you’re not looking for the software to work. You’re not expecting it to do what it says. What you’re buying software for is to solve a problem you have. What you want at the end of it is that your problem is solved. Allen was talking about how you’ve got to be the one in charge of the business case. That was great. That’s exactly right. You buy software to solve a problem, you have a business case and people think about enterprise software like Snapdocs and the great experience for them is that the software works. We’re upfront about what we can solve for you and then we do it.

The case is that like we’ve got this great software and a bunch of great people working together to solve the end-to-end problem with digital closing. The reason you need both the humans and the software is that this problem is complicated and it’s tough to move through all of those different components of getting all the integrations and connections to your ecosystem right. That’s what’s important.

When you think about what great customer success looks like, there are a couple of pieces that you need to have. One is you’ve got to have a team that is both proactive and reactive. First, you’ve got the proactive team. You’ve got CSMs, account manager types, and implementation folks. Those are the folks that understand your business and the business problems you have. The second is they’ve got to understand the capabilities of the software and other tools in the ecosystem so that they can use those things to help solve your problem.

The third, and this is quite possibly the most important, is they’ve got to be motivated and empowered to solve your problem. They’ve got to be okay and encouraged to go above and beyond to make sure the customer’s problem is ultimately solved. You’ve got to couple that with a great reactive team. This is technical support. These teams are trained to identify if the software’s working as quickly as possible and escalate things that are broken or unintuitive.

The unsung part of that is partnership with product teams. At Snapdocs, we’ve got a specialist engineering team that works with our support organization to make sure things are going right for customers. There are two parts. You’ve got to have the proactive and reactive stuff working to have great customer success and the way customers describe it is, did my problem get solved?

You've got to have the proactive and reactive stuff working to have great customer success. Click To Tweet

At the end of the day, that’s it. Did you solve my problem? You’ve done a lot of things well up to that point, but if you didn’t solve the problem, it’s still a problem. Allen, let’s get you in on this discussion as he mentioned you and what you were saying earlier. Do you want to jump in, please?

I would agree 100% with what you said. I’ve met some of your team and I’ve come to learn more about what you guys do and it’s quite interesting. There are things that people don’t realize. The technology integration is not that difficult. If folks are sitting here thinking that in order to get Snapdocs integrated, there’s this big tech integration that’s needed. Maybe you can talk about the technology side of it. What I’ve learned is that it’s not that big of a deal.

Second is partnering. From what you said, it sounds like you guys make sure that you partner with your clients and help them overcome what they think technology will do and what they need versus what they get in the end so that you have those successful implementations. You onboard clients and they’re happy.

I can talk about both of those pieces. One is the technical integration. You’re right. It’s not as complicated as many folks imagine because we’ve spent so much time thinking through all of the different configurations and ways you get information into Snapdocs. We’ve got out-of-the-box integrations with common platforms, with Encompass and some of the others.

We also have open APIs. If you’ve got a custom loan operating system or if you’ve got a custom point-of-sale system, we can integrate directly through our open APIs. Our team’s responsible for helping you with that. We’re experts on the technology and figure out as we talk to you through the sales process and then later through implementation what the easiest and fastest way to get the right information into Snapdocs so you can get up and run it.

Fast is the key to getting these integrations and getting people up and running and experienced. Let’s get over to Alice. She has some questions about strategic value. Talk about that, Alice.

This is fascinating to me. I had never thought about software implementation as a proactive and a reactive side. I love the way that you explained that. It sounds very strategic. Can you talk a little bit about why Snapdocs places such a strategic value on customer success? Why doesn’t everyone do this? It sounds so amazing. I’m assuming two good things are two customers, borrower customers and then client customers.

Maybe I’ll start with why we place strategic value and why, and then I’ll jump to why everybody doesn’t do it. We do it because we have to. It’s the only way this all works. Our goal is to get your problem solved and we’re there for you until it is. That’s how we think about whether or not we’ve done our job. First and foremost, like I said, we have no illusions about the complicated problem we’re solving. As we started to talk about closing mortgages, let alone doing it digitally, is a horribly fragmented process. There are lots of industries that are working together to close.

They all have their own processes, and to the integration comment, they all have their own systems of record. If you’re trying to do this digitally, you actually add a little bit of complexity and that you’ve got to integrate with all these things, whereas everybody can pick up a piece of paper. When you add in things, the stakes of the number of players get bigger and more complex. You need somebody who’s a guide who understands all these different technologies and how your technology links up with all the others.

To be honest, lenders don’t have the time or expertise to figure this all out and do it right. There aren’t that many people out there that have implemented a digital closing process. It’s not like hiring a loan officer or a closer from another lender who might have this expertise because you’ve got to know the specific ecosystem of your lender in order to do it right. These folks don’t exist out in the wild with the right expertise to scoop it up. We have them.

The folks here at Snapdocs have the collective experience, the scar tissue, the best practices of over 100 successful implementations, and all the combinations that come with doing that so many times. We do that because this is what it’s going to take to move the industry forward. Everybody’s agreed that this is great for borrowers, so we’ve got to step up. The knock-on effect and part of why we do it is these teams, when they’re deep inside the customer’s businesses, understanding what’s going on, hearing their pains and their relations when things work, are gold for our product teams.

They’re so close they can provide invaluable validation and say, “This customer would totally want to use that. This is going to change the borrow experience.” There’s this pain when I watch this close or walk through this process, it’s a miserable experience. Let me take that away. Let me fix it. We sit down with our product org and we give them that feedback and that’s how we build products that people want to use because we see the users trying to use them.

That’s why we spend a bunch of time doing it. In my experience, when I think about the folks who don’t invest in customer success, I feel bad for them. I was thinking about this before. There are two camps and this is how I’ve talked about it to the rest of our executive team in the past, and I’ve described it or I’ve seen it.

First, these are technology companies that, to some extent, get a bad rap of Silicon Valley. They’re like, “My software is so clever that everyone’s going to get it. It’ll be easy. You’ll pop it open. You’ll log in and everything will do what you want.” If I look at companies that have been successful at stuff like this, these are people following you home to watch you use their software to make it work. It takes an enormous investment to make software that gets it.

For the most part, most companies don’t do it well. Those companies wish they were consumer software or model themselves off consumer software companies. They don’t invest in the type of consultative value-focused work. In the proactive work that I mentioned, those teams get underfunded or spread too thin. They’ve got too many customers and too many products to talk about.

They can never become experts or advisors to your team as a lender. It’s second-rate. It’s an afterthought because it’s the bottom rung of the totem pole inside the organization. It doesn’t attract the right people, not real problem solvers, or the people who are great inside those CS teams leave and they go work in sales or they go work in the product. That’s what these types of companies care about. That’s one camp.

The second camp, when I think about it, is this old-school enterprise pattern. Customer success, in many ways, grew out of support and professional services and the archetypes. If you think about the big database companies out there where you need an army of consultants to come and you write the statement of work, they do all this work for you. They charge an hourly rate or something like that. They charge you for the privilege of supporting you when their software breaks or is confusing.

That sounds crazy when I think about it. With the proactive work, they know it’s super valuable and it’s worth a lot, so they charge for it. You, as the lender paying them to hook up your software, anytime you need to change something, it costs an arm and leg and a statement of work every time. Sadly, it’s the model most lenders and financial institutions are used to from big software companies. It’s a lot of reasons why they’re stuck with the processes they have. It costs too much to change them once they’ve implemented or they have this one super overworked person in the company, the admin for that software, and everything sits in a queue for them to approve or make every change.

They can’t try stuff. They can’t innovate, they can’t move faster because there’s only one person who has the whole system in their head. That makes the whole relationship about cost and administration and you’ve totally lost sight of your core problem. The reason you bought the software, the reason you’re incurring all these costs is because you want to do close things better or you want to do whatever you bought the software for better. You built this whole change management team or your tech team inside your org to manage the software instead of focusing on revenue.

Allen, you started to talk about this, too. There are two real camps, one that’s super tech for, “We don’t need support. Our software’s so good,” which the reality is it’s not the software that needs to be good. It’s got to be the interface with the customer. The customer doesn’t quite know exactly how to solve this problem.

You’re 100% right about that. I got to tell you that the consultants probably won’t like hearing me say this because they make a great living and some do a fantastic job. In those cases, it’s good that they’re there and there are cases when you want to hire those implementation consultants because things are complex and you don’t have someone on staff.

At the end of the day, when you buy a piece of technology or a solution and you’re looking for a partner, the partner that you’ve acquired, they’re the experts. They’re the ones that understand your business and they should be the ones that help implement it. That is where there’s a big gap sometimes. It’s great to hear that’s your focus.

It’s a philosophy that you quoted Scott Cook about Intuit. Those who do not know the story of the founding of Intuit are very nervous about this product. They seem to have the same attitude you do, Vishal and Snapdocs, because they used to have egghead software stores. Scott used to go hang in there like he was a customer.

He would watch someone buy the product and as they’re buying it, he would step to the counter and say, “I’ll pay for this product. All we want to do is watch how you install this. We want to make detailed notes about this. We’ll give you free customer support for letting us.” He threw some sweetener in there to let them follow. It was brilliant, Vishal, because what it did was they studied in detail everywhere the person struggled.

That’s exceptional customer success. I got to tell you, we don’t let any company come on and have me an advertiser on the show. We very carefully select. When Amy and I were talking, I said, “What’s unique about Snapdocs?” The name didn’t grab me at the time, getting to understand it better. When she started talking about exceptional customer success, I said, “We have got to have you as a sponsor and I want to have Vishal on to talk about this.”

I’m watching another vendor right now, a well-known vendor. It’s a very popular sizzly product that everyone’s installing right now, but they’re struggling in this very area in the implementation. It’s way too complicated and it’s how to do that, which is getting into what customers can expect during implementation and post-implementation when using Snapdocs.

Real quick about what you mentioned about Intuit, two things stick out to me there. One, when we implement software now, you don’t pick up a package in the store. If you buy the software online, how do we get somebody into your house? We’ve got staff a person. We’ve got to get somebody to watch you and check in with you all the time. We’ll talk about that in a second. The second is it was the CEO or the founder of the company. It wasn’t somebody way down on the totem pole calling someone home. This person had to be a key problem solver. Somebody who cared about the outcome. Those things are important, but what can customers expect?

During the implementation, there are three things that need to happen. We need to be crystal clear on why you want to adopt Snapdocs, what success looks like, and how we’ll measure that together. Customers find that a little bit strange because most companies don’t do this. I don’t understand why because if you’re going to ask the customer to write you a check, you’ve got to know what you’re getting paid to do.

 

The second is we need to build technical connectivity. We talked about that a little bit between your organization, Snapdocs, and your partners. The third thing is we’ve got to complete a change management and adoption process. Everybody understands what’s going to happen now that you have Snapdocs and we’ve got specialists for all these roles because they can help you go faster and with confidence. The CSMs focus on the business case. They play a supporting role during implementation but own the relationship going forward.

It’s important for them to understand, “Why are we going through the implementation? What do you want to see at the other end? How are we going to solve this problem?” Your implementation manager is your director of the implementation phase and they’re your primary contact. They’re part technical project manager and part change management. They’ve got some technical chops to make sure that the system integration stuff goes well. They’ve also got a document specialist who will make sure that we’ve analyzed your document packages to make sure that they’ll work with our patented AI system.

We’re hooking all that stuff up and then the next step is that we’ll build a custom rollout plan for your organization. Most customers decide to implement Snapdocs everywhere on all of their documents. What we usually do is we start in one region or one loan type to make sure we’ve worked out the process with you and then we’ll roll out and we’ll do training as we go with loan officers and closers.

Ultimately, we’ll also train your settlement partners because they’re a big part of this process if they aren’t already familiar with our product. A lot of them are already familiar with Snapdocs from other lenders or because they’re customers of ours either on our notary scheduling platform or for something else. We do a lot of work on the ground that isn’t typical software work. It’s not writing code. It’s walking around your offices in the Zoom world. Talking to everybody and making sure they understand here’s what’s going to happen, here’s what’s going to change, here’s what’s not going to change for all the important constituents.

It’s creating proper expectations all the way around and getting a sense of you’re present. You’re there, you’re paying attention, and you care. It’s a VOS, Vendor Over Shoulder. I’m thinking of POS, Parent Over Shoulder. It’s having that high touch where you care and it’s not doing any of the creepy sense, but in the sense that you are wanting to make sure you have success. That’s so important. I love that.

You think about it. If you’re a closing platform, you probably think we spend time talking to closers and settlement agents, but we spend a lot of time talking to loan officers, explaining to them, “You now have this digital closing system.” When you talk to your Millennial or Gen Z borrower, you can tell them, “By the way, we’re going to do this partially electronically so you don’t have to spend a bunch of time in a title office,” or, “If you’re eligible for a remote online notarization, our company’s invested in this technology to make this easier for you.” All these things are important.

I love this because I’m going to give a shout-out to one of my clients, Michael DiClemente, at Watson Mortgage who is boarding a bunch of new employees and he was going through it. It is very exciting how he goes into great depth to explain every single piece of technology. Alice, you’d love to see what this guy does. He has 300 slides in his introduction. It’s week-long.

I know there are many fine programs out there, but I was so impressed by the effort they went into and I said, “Where did you get this material?” It was the vendors that supplied a lot of that material that is so important for boarding a new employee and it helps them explain the value proposition why they’re doing so. Alice, I know you got to run. Do you have any quick questions or comments?

It was great. I was taking lots of notes. I love the concept of that investment in the customer success plan that you have. Is there anything else that we should know that’s unique about how that onboarding process works?

The onboarding process, I’d say, those are the components. It’s understanding the measurement. What’s exciting is when we get to the post-implementation and what we do where we start measuring those success criteria that we started with. We’re checking in pretty regularly, at least a couple times a year on higher-level goals, which could be implementing eNotes or remote online organization or other products that we’re starting to launch.

We’ll do the same, understand the business case and roll out the process for those additional products as you go on. The real North Star with the customer is going back to that original problem. What’s the thing you were trying to do? Were you trying to improve the borrower experience by reducing the time it takes to fund a loan, reducing errors, shortening the signing appointment, or raising NPS, or was your original goal to improve operational efficiency by reducing the time closer spent on the loan so you can finish or complete more loans with the same number of staff?

 

That’s the engagement model that we build out and we want to make sure we’re delivering for our clients. It’s not about, “Was the software available when you wanted it? Did the documents get from point A to point B?” It’s like, “Did we actually change your business?” That’s the way we know if we solved your problem. It’s the whole point of buying the software in the first place.

If I could add one thing. Having done so many software implementations and been on the good sides and bad sides, I work for lenders. I will say the most important thing, and I don’t know if you’ll agree, is having a single point of contact.

Is that on the partner side or within your organization?

On the partner side. Instead of going to a round-robin email or a ticket, having a single point of contact or someone who is your shepherd to success is critical.

That’s the customer success manager. That’s the person who’s ultimately accountable for making sure that business outcome occurs and they’ll loop in the rest of the team. They’ll pull in support if your question is technical and requires something to go do with deep dive or they’ll pull in an executive if there’s some escalation and something super important or a real business conversation, maybe an advisory conversation. We’ll pull in some industry relations experts. We’re so lucky to have Camelia Martin on our team, who can join conversations about the industry. That single point of contact is your customer success manager and they can bring it there, the whole organization’s capabilities.

We fail in this area. As an industry, so many vendors fail when it comes to this implementation process. I’m looking at one particular piece of technology right now which has got so much promise to be such a major game changer out there and how they’re failing on implementations. It’s going that extra mile. What is the philosophy? I’m thinking back. I do a lot of leadership consulting and coaching. Vishal, where did this start? Where is Snapdocs not falling prey to what has been, I hate to say it, the norm when it comes to implementation and that’s failed implementation? Where did this begin within Snapdocs? Is it leadership at the top?

It is and it was an important part of the criteria for how I decided what company to join. Before I joined Snapdocs, I made sure that this was in the DNA of the company, that it wasn’t just, “Vishal, you have this team. Here’s some money. Go hire the right people.” Did the product care about the problems or requests that came from customers? Were their teams staffed to solve them? Did sales care that, after they sold the deal, the customer was successful or not?

When I talked to the finance team, if I had a problem and needed to spend some money to solve it, whether that’s the staff of a particular team, were they going to say, “Sorry, you’ve got a margin requirement and you’ve got to hit that number?” Are they going to invest in the business and say, “We’re going to make a customer happy and they’ll be a customer for life.” Let’s do it. That math is easy.

If you make a customer happy, they'll be a customer for life. Click To Tweet

A huge part of the vetting process was understanding from all of the executives and teams that were already there when I joined that this was part of the DNA. It wasn’t lip service that they did that is part of the recruiting process many of us have seen. It comes from Aaron King, our CEO, from the beginning. He founded the company and he’s always scared about what problem does this actually solve for the customer. Is this worth doing? That permeates the organization.

As we wrap this up, tell us what experience customers are having in partnering with Snapdocs and your success team. Do you have a couple of stories? I’d love to hear the stories.

Let me tell a couple of stories. This is when I get to brag a little bit, I suppose. We’ve got world-class retention rates and let me go back to a story. When I first joined, I did a tour of customer conversations to get a sense of what customers valued, soon after I joined the company, a few months later. I showed a handful of customers’ different packages of our software.

It was totally market research like, “If I put this in and took it out.” In one of the packages I was testing, I reduced or removed the CS team or different pieces of the CS team and added some of the new features we were working on. I asked the customer, “Would you pay the same? Would you pay more for this new package with this cool new technology?”

Before I could even finish asking the question, there was no pause, no hesitation. The contact was like, “No, I’d never buy that. I need my CSM. They’re my right arm. I couldn’t do it without them. I’d never pick a package without full scale.” I’d made it like limited CS because this customer had already implemented it. They were already up and running. They don’t need all of that handholding anymore. They literally said like, “I’d be blind without them on what to do next. I wouldn’t know how to keep moving forward.” That was great. I was like, “This is awesome.”

The other was, and this will be crazy, we interviewed a customer in one of our internal meetings. Sometimes we do this for all hands for the company and the contact said that their CSM and their implementation team was the critical factor in deploying eNotes. They had implemented eNotes in the business and then eVault.

They implemented this three months ahead of schedule. When was the last time that a lender deployed a technology ahead of schedule by a quarter? Imagine your IT team or vendor management team reporting up to an exec and saying, “By the way, we’re done with this a quarter early and the CSM at Snapdocs was the reason we did it.” That’s music to my ears. That’s why we do this work. It was personally satisfying. Having a string of successes builds happy teams and it means that those CSM implementation folks and everybody else do better work because they know they’re the best in the business.

Having a string of successes builds really happy teams. Click To Tweet

What’s a CSM?

A CSM is a Customer Success Manager. That’s the new version of an account manager. This is the single point of contact that you would have during your relationship with us.

We use a lot of acronyms in this mortgage industry and certainly, we have a whole bunch when it comes to technology, but this is interesting. There are so many people I wanted to forward this show to, and it’s the intentionality that Snapdocs has to quality. At the end of the day, if I’m going to be in a relationship, especially a critical area like you fit in so many where you integrate into all the different vendors you integrate to, it is so important that this be done well. You create that truly exceptional customer success.

Vishal, I celebrate what you’re doing and celebrate the leadership at Snapdocs. We’re honored to have you guys as a sponsor of the show. We’re very picky in who we bring in as sponsors, but we’re very grateful to have you. You took some time out of your very busy day to be here with us. Thank you so much.

Thanks so much, David and the rest of the team.

What is the best way for people to learn more and get more knowledge about Snapdocs wherever they go? A lot of people know Amy, I’m sure. Go to one of the conferences, you’ll see Amy there. If you could give us the website and is there anyone in particular we should direct our readers to talk to?

I’d say the website is pretty easy. It’s Snapdocs.com and if you’re interested in learning more, you can reach out to me at [email protected]. I’d be happy to chat with you or direct you to the right person on our team that can answer your question or get you started.

Vishal, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it and wish you continued success. We’re very excited. You guys are going to do well. We’re very honored to have you as a guest and even more so as a sponsor. Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.

Great. Thank you.

Readers, be sure to come here next time. We’ve got Taylor Stork joining us with Developers Mortgage. He was introduced to me. He gave some comments about Lenders One and his involvement there when we were going to the Lenders One conference. The conversation Taylor and I had before and then after at the Lenders One conference. I said, “Taylor, you got to come on and share your passion for this.” It’s going to be a high-energy, very dynamic interview with Taylor Stork at Developers Mortgage.

Be sure to come back next time, as many of you do come back faithfully and read all of our episodes. I’m grateful for that. Be sure to tell others about the show. Also, it goes without saying that we’re so grateful for our sponsors, Finastra, CMLA, Snapdocs, Lenders One, Insellerate, Mobility MMI, Modex, MBA, Knowledge Coop, and the Mortgage Collaborative. We are so grateful for all of our sponsors and we’re grateful to you, our readers. We look forward to having you back here next time.

 

Important Links

• Snapdocs
• IndustrySyndicate.com
• Mortgage Bankers Association of America
• Finastra
• Lenders One
• Mortgage Collaborative
• Community Mortgage Lenders of America
• Insellerate
• Knowledge Coop
• Modex
• [email protected]
• Mobility MMI