How we engineer customer success

Next week I’ll be speaking with thousands of women attending the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing — the world’s largest gathering of women technologists — about areas of business where they can make an impact with their technology background. This year I am excited to share a new business trend that combines a highly technical skill set with a customer facing role.

When I discovered Textio, I had just completed my PhD in Electrical Engineering (digital signal processing, to be specific) and I was on the hunt for something unique. I wanted a role that allowed me to impact social good while also having an innovative impact in my industry; something that allowed me to be deeply rooted in my technical contributions but still talk to people, as well as drive the strategic direction of a company. As it turns out, revolutionizing the way we approach writing is a hard problem worth doing.

Building a new business model

I Like many emerging SaaS companies that have machine learning at the heart of their platform, Textio’s business model relies on a robust exchange of data with our customers. The more each customer fully adopts Textio into their writing process, the better the product works for everyone. That means that our customer success operation and data engineering have to be tightly integrated. That’s why we call it Customer Success Engineering.

For every Textio enterprise customer, one Customer Success Engineer (CSE) owns the relationship from top to bottom, and everyone on the account has direct access to their CSE. Our CSE team must not only be technically skilled, but also have the ability to explain technical concepts to all kinds of people.

Want to know why manage a team draws more men to apply, but lead a team attracts men and women both? Curious about the best way to use the Textio doc library? Anyone in your company can ask questions about the data behind the Textio platform and figure out the best way to use it. Our vision is to change the way the world writes, but we are also changing the way the world does business.

In addition, Textio’s continuously evolving learning loop requires continuous customer improvement. Our engineers provide a care and nurturing function rather than a command and control structure. There is no set curriculum to master. No longer can we tell people exactly what they need to do to succeed; we need to set them up for successful growth by shining a light on the places that need development and giving feedback and guidance around mutually defined success metrics. This learning loop is continuously evolving, not only for Textio’s predictive engine, but for the kinds of challenges we can tackle with our customers.

As a result, Textio’s philosophy for customer success engineering rests on three key principles.

Principle #1: Great support is predictive, not just responsive.

Customer Success at Textio all starts with Data Exchange, where you share former job listings along with their performance metrics — items like applicant count, time-to-hire, and the demographic mix of applicants. This is essential for measuring progress. At the very start of your Textio subscription, your CSE uses Textio and your historical data to find the language patterns that are already statistically significant at your company. This lets Textio make even better predictions for your future jobs.

Principle #2: Success metrics are transparent and adaptive.

Textio adapts its guidance to the range of writing styles in your organization, so how we define success considers not only recruiting outcomes but also adoption across your organization. Our case studies show us that the more Textio users there are within an enterprise, the higher the overall average Textio Score and the faster roles fill. Our CSEs continuously interpret technical usage data to uncover insights that foster this ongoing evolution.

Principle #3: The best outcomes are best for everyone.

One of the benefits of access to Textio’s learning loop is that you can use the aggregate intelligence of the entire hiring community to improve, beyond what your or your company can achieve on your own. So as Textio optimizes one customer’s usage of the platform to improve their hiring performance, it strengthens results for everyone. By addressing challenges like unconscious bias in a way that is scientifically measurable and rigorously evidence-based, we can impact not only the hiring practices of an individual organization but of a whole industry. Customer Success Engineering is at the forefront of feeding these changes back into the platform.

We’re hiring!

As Textio grows, so does our CSE team. We’ve listed roles for this team under both engineering and business because it requires a broad combination of skills that allows us to analyze a customer’s entire recruiting data pipeline as well as support their very human goal of developing their workforce.

Does a job that is equal parts people and engineering sound fun to you? Hop on over to our careers page or better yet, come find me at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. I’ve been involved with GHC for several years and always meet inspiring people at the event.

If you’re hiring yourself and would like to learn more about what we do, we can meet in person at GHC or we can set up a call. I’d love to meet you. I can be reached at charna@textio.com.