Making Customer Success a Profit Center vs. a Cost Center with Cast
Welcome Cast team to the Array Ventures Portfolio!
Product-led growth has gained tremendous traction in how enterprise software companies go-to-market. Many companies such as Twilio, Slack, Dropbox, and others have been able to grow faster and efficiently by leveraging product to build an active pipeline of customers. This move to product-led growth will continue for the foreseeable future. As a result, the relationship with the customer might not always be strong. As a board member of B2B companies one of the most important questions I get asked is how to scale your customer success teams especially for customers you can’t connect with on a regular cadence.
Most customer success team tap out at 150–300 customers. This problem helped me build a conviction to lead an investment in Cast.
Covid, Cloud, and SaaS is changing who businesses sell their products to. Large 6-figure contracts that took months to sell are becoming more rare. Businesses are looking at shorter sales cycles with smaller contract values and then upselling those customers with good customer success over time.
This sounds good but there is a problem with this approach. It is very expensive to build up a good customer success operation. It’s also very hard to find good customer success talent. So what sounds like a good initial plan ends up being a bad strategy with high customer account churn because companies couldn’t keep all their customers happy.
Customer success teams only have bandwidth for a small portion of their top 10% high paying customers. The others that might have had potential to be upsold to churn because they didn’t get enough attention.
Team & Product
When Dickey Singh and Daljeet Virdi pitched their vision for Cast I saw the value of their product. Cast.app is humanizing customer success by automatically generating personalized videos, slide-decks, and podcasts effortlessly to keep their long tail of customers happy so they buy more of your product instead of churn. For 63% of the Customer Success teams that have revenue responsibility, Cast enables renewals, up-sells, and cross-sells directly within the Cast platform. Cast makes customer success a profit center vs a cost center. And customers such as Google, Pure Storage, Comcast, Aruba believe in their approach.
Cast creates personalized content for their customer depending on their role in the company. So each user within a company gets different content depending on what Cast thinks the user needs to make them successful in their role.
Forward looking companies, like Plaid, Slack, Notion, and LinkedIn with deep investment budgets, have built homegrown tools for digital customer success, but today look to Cast.app to replace these efforts.
Humanize your customer success operations
If you are an organization growing rapidly and struggling to keep all your customers happy and growing you should connect with the Cast team.
And if you are a designer, engineer, or marketer please join the growing Cast team.
Investors in Cast include angels Jason Warner CTO of Github, Mickey Alon CTO of Gainsight, Rav Dhaliwal former Head of CS at Slack, few a16z angels, and other CS experts and funds such as Soma Capital and New York Venture Partners
