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Josh Schachter:
Hey everybody, and welcome to this week’s episode of UnChurned. I’m Josh Schechter, your host, and I’m here today with the chief customer officer of Airtable, Kate Kohane. Kate, thank you so much for being on the program.

Cait Keohane:
Thank you for having

Josh Schachter:
me. Okay. So for those that for for the very, very, very, very, very few that don’t know Airtable, what is Airtable? And then I wanna talk about your role, and we’ll go on from there.

Cait Keohane:
Perfect. Yeah. So, we have hundreds of thousands of users. So, hopefully, Airtable is, is not new to many of your listeners. But for those that it is, Airtable is a no code, low code platform that allows teams to build the tools that run their company. So think about it as you have the simplicity of spreadsheets with the structure and power of a relational database. So you can build these powerful flexible solutions really tailored to the way that you work.

Josh Schachter:
Love it. Love it. Okay. So, you’ve been the CCO there now for eight, nine months. And before that, you did a pretty long stint at at Zendesk. I mean, you were there for over thirteen years. Were you there from, like, close to the beginning?

Cait Keohane:
That’s right. So, scrappy pre IPO days. I think I was employee 66. When I left, we were upwards of 6,000, multibillion dollar organization.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. So forget forget Airtable for one second because I wanna focus on that. I’m I’m on a journey of 60 to 6,000. Like Yeah. I I don’t even know where to start, but, you had a myriad of different roles there.

Cait Keohane:
That’s right.

Josh Schachter:
I assume you started more as, like, an individual contributor and then kinda worked your way, graduate your way up the ranks. Is that fair to say?

Cait Keohane:
It is fair to say. Yeah. I I was my first role at Zendesk was really the task was build out a post sales account management function from, you know, zero to something. And so that was those were the early years.

Josh Schachter:
And you were focused on SMB at the time, or it was enterprise, mid market? Where were you in that regard?

Cait Keohane:
So, Zendesk was actively so I started when we were really, building off of their PLG motion. So so much of their business, like, their first hundred million plus, no sales team was even on the ground yet. And so, you know, coming in and helping to build out the human touch post sales element, as we were starting to move upmarket and and win those enterprise customers.

Josh Schachter:
No no sales team was on the ground when you started building out this motion?

Cait Keohane:
It was like a team of five. I think very, very lean. Yeah. Zendesk had such strong product market fit, still does, and then just an incredible pull and demand.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. So what was the signal? And we’ll we’ll get to Airtable. Trust me. But what was the what were the triggers and the signals that that told them that they needed to to bring together, you know, larger account management?

Cait Keohane:
Yeah. So, churn was not a problem, at the time, which I think is a great time to actually bring in someone focused on churn before you have a problem.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Cait Keohane:
We were also starting to introduce new, plans. So we are moving from just having a singular offering to a tiered model. And so having someone come in not just to manage the relationships and drive retention, but also to think about how do we upsell and how do we cross sell, into the install base, which was such a powerful lever for us as we as we continue to move from a hub market.

Josh Schachter:
I don’t even know what question to ask next. I’m gonna ask you to ask me the question to ask you. But I wanna know about going from CS or account management in a company of 60 to a company of 6,000. I you know?

Cait Keohane:
Was Jared.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. I mean, I’m sure your the size of your team mapped accordingly. Yeah. What question should I ask you about that? What are your biggest lessons? What was the difference when you started when you ended?

Cait Keohane:
What got really interesting along the way at Zendesk was, really thinking about the different touch points within the journey. And so, you know, sales with sales, and they continue to build up in line with with customer growth. On the post sales side, though, really thinking about, you know, what role did we want an account manager to play? Was that different from customer success? How should we think about professional services or support? Right? Like, early days, everyone wears every hat. And so, you know, trying to figure out that specialization was was tricky. I I still think in some organizations, it’s tricky. You know, you you want focus, you want specialization, but you don’t want a customer to have 19 touch points, you know, on the on the company side. So, that was an interesting journey for us, especially once you started to layer on all the acquisitions we did and the new products we were trying to bring into our install base. But those are the fun those are the fun problems to solve.

Cait Keohane:
Well, I

Josh Schachter:
mean, how how did you solve those the the acquisitions is one piece. But even just the trade offs you’re talking about of, you know, having all the different specializations, like, what were some of the the guiding principles that you guys put in place for making those decisions?

Cait Keohane:
Yeah. It’s it’s a throwback to to think about that time. But, one, I think we needed to reanchor on sales is not just going to be a one and done. They have to stay in the the account for longer than just the up until the point of sale. Mhmm. The reason for that, again, is because so much of the business was starting to come from expansion, and so to have them completely pivot away into a sheer hunter model, it just wasn’t gonna work. And so what we saw happen at at Zendesk was the salesperson in the AM role sort of merged into one. They were the commercial, call it the CEO of the of the account.

Cait Keohane:
Then you had customer success, which became more like the COO. So a a real delineation between commercial sales and AM plus customer success. And then you had your technical folks, whether that be, at the time, someone running a services engagement, whether that be, a support person, sort of the CTO. And that became the the pod model that we used for many years there successfully.

Josh Schachter:
You you were there at a time where you saw the company go from small growing but still private to public back to private. Right?

Cait Keohane:
That’s right.

Josh Schachter:
Owned. Did did how did you, how did that impact the service delivery model and the way you guys thought about customer management?

Cait Keohane:
Yeah. I mean, you know, we are our founder CEO, Mikkel Steyn, who’s amazing, he was very customer first. He always brought everything back to what the customer needed, what the customer wanted, and and so that guided a lot of our our journey through IPO and beyond. Ironically, I think some folks might, you know, in their heads think, oh, private equity playbook, you start to shift the model a bit. Our CEO

Josh Schachter:
cost at all at all at all expense. Save cost. Yeah.

Cait Keohane:
That’s right. Ironically, that didn’t happen. Our our c our new CEO, Tom, who came from private equity, if anything, was even more driven towards a customer first, customer obsessed mindset. And so when he came in, it was a real, you know, reckoning. If if we are not doing things, building things, spending our money on the things that are gonna help our customers, we’ve lost, focus. And so, you know, different, but really in the same way, we kept it customer first.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. So I imagine around a year ago or so, you know, you started to get, feelers or somebody somebody knocked on your door somehow. Like, hey. There’s this amazing role of chief customer officer at an amazing logo in the SaaS industry

Cait Keohane:
That’s right.

Josh Schachter:
At Airtable. You know, outside the the logo itself, which does mean a lot, what was the most compelling thing that attracted you to join Airtable? Like, what were you most excited about coming in?

Cait Keohane:
Yeah. So look. It it’s it’s a different motion, growing a company from, you know, the first hundred million to the billion versus taking it from the billion beyond. Zendesk, a lot of what I was doing was operating as a sort of systems thinker, thinking about the enterprise, and I I missed the days of of really getting my my hands in and building and creating, which, the opportunity at Airtable allowed me to do. And so Zendesk is a tremendous company, and it would have been amazing to also spend another thirteen years there, but just getting back to that that build phase, was really enticing for me.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. So first three months, let’s say, you know, your your thirty, sixty, ninety day plan at Airtable. You’re you’re now fairly well beyond that. I’m sure stuff some stuff bleeds over. Right? But, those very initial, instincts and priorities, what were those, and how did they go when you joined Airtable?

Cait Keohane:
Yeah. The benefit too from having come from Zendesk where you sort of saw that full life cycle, you know, the learnings from that and being able to bring that back in ahead of those, milestones at Airtable, what a you know, what an advantage, and, having that pattern recognition has really served me well. And so, the first thing I got in front of my team, the company, and said is we need to make sure we have a a comprehensive customer listening engine. What I mean by that is, you know, one, are are we clear and aligned on the customer journey? And two, all of those critical milestones in the journey, are we are we asking our our customers, Are we serving your needs? Would you recommend us to a friend? So, what I saw at Zendesk, and again, trying to bring that and translate that to Airtable, was it’s so easy to start making decisions that benefit the business and not the customer. It’s just so easy. You grow fast. You’re thinking how do we create less, you know, operational overhead, but not being able to anchor that in truly in what the customer needs is where you start going off off course. And so for me, it was critical that we established both the journey map as well as those key listening points and that we bring that insight back into the business to guide our strategy.

Josh Schachter:
And was there anything that that the team, after having done these exercises well, first of all, actually, I would be interested in how you went about those exercises of journey mapping, like, tactically speaking. And then if there were any learnings or surprises that the team was like, oh, actually, wow. Glad we did this because this we didn’t we weren’t aware of that or this forced us to think about this in a new way.

Cait Keohane:
Yeah. So for me personally, well, one, I I had a tremendous team that had a bunch of really great customer insights, at the ready, but I found it really important, to to go directly to my customers and our customers and spend time with them. Yeah. What’s so interesting about Airtable, which differs a bit from Zendesk is it’s such a powerful platform that it really isn’t a one size fits all. It’s not a point solution. You’re not serving the same buyer or the same use case, and so it was critically important for me to get in the field and and understand truly where customers were enjoying the platform or where they’re feeling that friction. And so we’re not we’re certainly not done on the listening, component. I’m I’m learning new things every day.

Cait Keohane:
I was just on-site last week in LA with a, big customer of ours, took took away some new insights that that hadn’t even dawned on me. So, you know, thinking back to your question around, anything that sort of surprised us or how how it influenced us, One thing that I have, I guess I’ve with the encouragement of Howie, our CEO, at his staff meetings each week, we do a customer insight. That can be an escalation from the week. That can be, a story that a customer’s doing really well, whatever it might be. He wants a raw insight with a bias to action so that we as an e team can can move very quickly. And we’ve had two things come up. It was it was something that no one thought of was a problem. It was something around how we set up our our automations, our our billing, our dunning, cycle.

Cait Keohane:
And we were able to really quickly make two changes that fundamentally impacted in a positive way the customer experience. And so, you know, we

Josh Schachter:
This is this is anybody so this is his his ELT, team? That’s right. That’s right. That and he asks, what is it? Anybody just to come with a with a story, or do you do you go kinda round robin? Or how does that work?

Cait Keohane:
Yeah. So I source it from within my organization, which is our support team, our professional services, our partner network, success, etcetera. And and that group is the one sourcing the intel from the ground. So it’s coming directly from a customer that we’ve recently engaged with or through a support ticket, etcetera. And and I’m sharing that with the team. We dialogue it. We unpack it, and then we assign actions around it. And, like, again, building out the journey, building out a listening program takes time, but that sort of bias for action in the meantime with his leadership team is is pretty tremendous.

Josh Schachter:
That’s great. I love I mean, it’s you you I’m sure there’s stuff that you get that’s anecdotal, and, of course, it’s kinda one by one, but I’m sure you’re you’re being selective and intentional about what you’re presenting as well to him. Yes. It gives you a great opportunity. I mean, talking about, you know, literally having a seat at the table to to to run such a hallmark moment of, excuse me, of that staff meeting. What you mentioned kinda as you go about and and, bring together the the listening, motion. Like, what what are you guys doing for that right now?

Cait Keohane:
Yeah. So, we use CSAT, which is, you know, it’s a it’s sort of the best we have. We do intend on rolling out NPS as well. We had a really robust NPS, mechanism at Zendesk. We used Qualtrics for that, and it was it was really good. I I intend to do something very similar here. And then we’re looking for a lot of signaling in our product usage data, which we have a ton of. But, really, in terms of getting the customer voice back to us, we use CSAT.

Josh Schachter:
I mean, I have to ask you. In my role for UpdateAI here, how are you using the voice of the customer, the literal voice of the customer or text of the customer?

Cait Keohane:
I think there’s always room to improve, on that front, and so I look forward to actually having learning a little bit more about, having my team learn more about UpdateAI. So, look, in our community, which we just recently relaunched, on Gainsight, this was just months ago, we have a really great forum with which we collect customer insight, customer feedback. That used to be a bit of a black hole, and we’ve now created the mechanism where folks can come in and it will route directly to the product manager responsible for that part of the product, which is a huge benefit, obviously, for our customers in trying to get real time answers.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. I love that. I love that. Okay. So so journey orchestration, understanding the customer journey, top priority to come in. There was something else there that that was adjacent. Yeah. Oh, go ahead, please.

Cait Keohane:
Maybe one more thing on that one in my first ninety days, which, has served us really well. And in full transparency, it was already underway before I joined. I wish I could take full credit, but I have a really strong operational partner here. So we we launched a tightened renewal forecasting and risk rally program, equally important. So it’s a bit of, like, dealing with the day in, day out of now. So, like, what account is on fire or what’s and how does our forecast look and then building all these foundational elements, the customer listening, the journey for the future. And those two things working together is is is been first ninety days, first hundred days, and it’s it’s awesome.

Josh Schachter:
Heard of risk rally program. I love that. Who came up with that?

Cait Keohane:
Again, I I can’t take credit. We have a a great strategy in ops team over here. Yeah. A lot of people say red account or Yeah. You know, customer war room, whatever it might be. We call risk rally, and it’s truly that. It’s a rally everywhere. Yeah.

Cait Keohane:
Yeah. It’s it’s great.

Josh Schachter:
You’re all rallying around resolving the risks of your customers.

Cait Keohane:
Nailed it. Nailed it.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. So so you’re outside of oh, actually, let’s go back for a second. So the renewal forecasting, what’s the process for for managing and forecasting that?

Cait Keohane:
Yeah. So I spoke to this a moment ago when we were talking about early days Zendesk around sort of the role of the pod. So similarly at Airtable, the CEO or the salesperson is on the hook not just for the new business, but for the retention of the dollars. And so they make a call. The sales leaders make a call, that rolls up through their one l l, two l l, etcetera. Similarly, I have a success, team and a renewals team that are also doing forecasting. I expect my renewals manager to do in quarter forecasting, meaning they’re they own the number for the quarter. I expect my renewal, my success folks to be doing out quarter.

Cait Keohane:
So my CS team is looking at q three, q ‘4 right now, and we’re off cycle. Sorry. I should make that clear. You’re probably like, what year is she in? We’re off cycle. So my renewals manager and the AE are triangulating on in quarter forecast and that my CS folks are doing q three, q ‘4, out quarter, And that’s where we’re starting to do any of that risk rally motions to make sure that we are two steps ahead on the success side.

Josh Schachter:
Your renewals manager and your AE are working on forecasting. They’re they’re paired up together to work on the forecasting of upcoming renewals. In quarter. Within within the quarter is what in quarter is or within the next?

Cait Keohane:
Within the quarter.

Josh Schachter:
One quarter. Okay. So for all the accounts that have renewals coming up in that quarter?

Cait Keohane:
Correct.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. And then your your your CS team is focused on, is it renewals beyond the quarter? Or

Cait Keohane:
I I’m having them go through their accounts that have a renewal in an a quarter that isn’t current quarter. So two call it rolling two quarters. Okay. They’re looking at their checklist saying, you know, do we have the exact buyer? Do we have a champion? Are we powering critical use cases? Yeah. Again, because the ideal state for me is sales and renewals walk into the next quarter

Josh Schachter:
Right.

Cait Keohane:
With a green healthy account. But then it’s more around dollar retention, less around full account.

Josh Schachter:
And it’s staggered. They’re always kinda staying one step ahead of the rumors and the a team and the AEs and Correct. Right? Like you said, like, they’re they’re trailblazing a little bit, smoothing the pavement before they get there.

Cait Keohane:
Exactly right.

Josh Schachter:
Do they have a a, ceremony or procedure for handing off that information?

Cait Keohane:
Yeah. We use Airtable to do all of our account planning, account mapping, use case mapping. And so, any information they’re getting is real time, in Airtable and can also prompt workflows or actions or, you know, automations based on the intel that they’re getting. We do a lot of we’re we’re heavy Slack users here. That’s maybe, that’s a culture change that I’m not quite used to. But everything goes into Slack as well, in terms of account updates and real time comms. You need to take this, check on them, do this, etcetera.

Josh Schachter:
Do you guys have a Slack channel for each account?

Cait Keohane:
Oh, we do.

Josh Schachter:
Wow. Yeah.

Cait Keohane:
The in the in the manage book, I should say, not the hundreds of thousands of users, but in the in the managed books. Yes.

Josh Schachter:
I love that. I mean, we do as well, but, obviously, we have a a different, size and scale. That’s great. I I highly recommend that to anybody that’s listening, and, you know, using Airtable as the the gold standard in that case because I think it does help just gel the team’s information sharing across Truly. Accounts. Yeah.

Cait Keohane:
Truly.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Okay. So I had a question there, but I I it’s blanking on me right now. This is great. So as you look into your current priorities, now that you’re beyond six months, what’s the biggest rock that you’re pushing up the hill these days?

Cait Keohane:
Yeah. I would I’d imagine this is the case for, you know, all leaders right now in the current climate, but, how do we continue or, you know, at Airtable and beyond, how do we continue to deliver that personalized high touch experience, without incurring the cost of additional full time employees? Right? Like, we want to balance a good customer experience while also, being financially responsible to the company.

Josh Schachter:
Are you trying to to keep in the words more with less?

Cait Keohane:
Yes. I am. But don’t you know, if my if someone on my team is listening, that’s that’s not really what I’m not suggesting you’re doing more with less with the with the same.

Josh Schachter:
The same.

Cait Keohane:
Yes. Yeah. And look. So it’s gonna be a big focus around, you know, data, automation, AI. I’m I’m so excited about AI, but, it was clear to me how we used AI on the front end of the customer support experience, sort of less clear how we think about AI.

Josh Schachter:
That was at at Zendesk.

Cait Keohane:
Even here that table. But both both. Okay. And, you know, AI disrupted support early. Right? All of the Right. Customer support bots were sort of at the forefront of the experience. Thinking about AI in the context of customer success, so how do we get our CSMs, to, you know, do less of the task management and more of the focus strategic conversation, that’s top of mind for me.

Josh Schachter:
Can you think of, like, the top task management piece that you would love to have eliminated by AI for your teams?

Cait Keohane:
Yeah. Gosh. Well, I think most of my CSMs right now, like, note like, the summarized notes that they’re getting from calls, that’s all already being run through AI.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Cait Keohane:
I think we, you know, we do a lot of the executive business reviews where we we have conversations around value and and realize value over the the course of the relationship. So many administrative things go into that, pulling the deck together. So, you know, how do I pull all the insights from how they’re using the product into a tailored deck? I wish all of that were were just, you know, AI driven. I can take the product data. I can take the customer business, objectives, which we’ve captured through the life cycle, and I can blend it together in a really solid EBR deck. That would be that would be awesome.

Josh Schachter:
I do wanna go back to, one thing about Airtable specifically. You’d you’d mentioned it a minute ago. The the platform can do so many different things. Like you said, it’s a it’s a spreadsheet on with superpowers. Right? And so it can appeal to so many different industries, so many different stakeholders. And, it’s a huge opportunity, but I can imagine for your team, that’s also probably quite a challenge to be able to educate on those specific use cases that, you know, knowing that will make them more effective in helping their customer, but you can’t expect them to know the ins and outs of every verticalized niche.

Cait Keohane:
It’s it is the blessing in the curse, and maybe the one thing I didn’t fully account for when I joined, was just how how challenging that is. Things that we didn’t have to think about at Zendesk were the role of a change manager. And what I mean by that is, you know, as Airtable’s usage expands within an organization, just gov like, helping customers think about governance and Yeah. Change management, that is a a motion that we didn’t have to to think about in in my old world order. And so our CSMs really to your point, like, they’ve got one account could be the equivalent of 10 accounts or 20 accounts depending on where Airtable is deployed within the organization. And so, yeah, it’s it’s tricky, really tricky.

Josh Schachter:
I mean, I I happen to know some, some former CSMs at Slack. And Slack had the this is a couple years ago. Slack had the tendency of, hiring former consultants because they were in places like Accenture because they were really focused on change management. They were trying to change the organization from going to being email based to being Slack based and think about 100. Yeah. Yeah. All the change management that that entails. It’s not just, you know, whatever other widget SaaS solution.

Josh Schachter:
I would imagine that’s similar to what you guys have. Right? You’re you’re trying to throw out some of the other operating systems, the the Windows PC type stuff maybe that they’ve known for years and have them all, you know, the whole organization, all different types of personas really. And and and I guess it’s twofold, right, because the end users ultimately are the folks that really have to adopt it and appreciate it. That’s probably why the NPS and the CSAT is so important to you. But there also has to be that, that appreciation and usage from the leadership and the decision makers too.

Cait Keohane:
Yeah. It’s it is, interesting, you know, having the business owner and understanding their the business outcomes they’re driving, having the relationship with IT or CIO that are looking at sort of the end to end portfolio of technology and making sure they’re very clear that this isn’t a commodity solution and that real business workflows are being built on top of Airtable. And then, yeah, the folks that need to help with the, opera operationalization of Airtable. It’s you got you got a bit of a a trifecta there of of team members that we have to coordinate with and across, for all of our large deploys. It it is a challenge. One thing that I’ve seen, that has been amazing to walk into here truly is, while, you know, we have our challenges because the the platform is so extensible, there is a huge Airtable community, of these power users and these MVP builders, and it is prolific. I mean, they are on YouTube. They’re on our in our community, and that is so powerful.

Cait Keohane:
I’ve seen, we’ve just recently launched an MVP program, and these these folks and organizations come together and they become really the, like, our partner already embedded within the the account. So we’re trying to get scale through this MVP community, and, really, that’s the, you know, that’s the motion right now.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. I remember that. I I was at, Boston Consulting Group, and this is about eight or nine years ago. And shout out to my boy, Tony Pelosi, who they called Tony the tool man. And he was like the we were all in the product management group, and and he was the tools guy. He loved peeking out on tools. And I remember he came to us, you know, eight years ago, and he’s like, oh, you guys gotta start using Airtable because it was very distributed. We had different pods working on different projects and stuff.

Josh Schachter:
And he took it upon himself to educate all the different team leaders on how they can be using Airtable. And and there was resistance, of course, at first. Like, no. We’re fine with Google Sheets. We’re fine with this. You know? But, but but and but he you know, his persistence and and his fandom of of the product is what paid off. And I imagine that’s what you’re referring to. You probably got some fanatics out there that really truly understand the power of of the product and then advocate that for for others.

Cait Keohane:
I think I need to get Tony the tool man’s contact info so I can send him a a a basket to thank him.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Well, he’s over in Singapore running, running startups for, for the sovereignty over there. So maybe I hopefully, he’s, he’s got more of a multiplier effect now getting all of those other startups to to use it.

Cait Keohane:
I love it.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. But I but I totally get it from that example. What else? What else, what else can we talk about, Kate? What did I miss?

Cait Keohane:
Let’s see. You asked me what I I would hope if I could look back in a year from now and say, like, what would good look like? What would Yeah. If I accomplish everything I wanted, what would that look like? I I will say this. I see the role of both the CCO and the CX organization as so much bigger than just the, the group responsible for retention or adoption or, you know, realizing value. I think the the real power in this team, this function, this role is if we can truly bring customer insights back into the business and have that be what dictates, you know, company strategy, product strategy, you know, really all of the different things that we need to be doing for our customers should be coming and sourced directly from our customers. You know, at Zendesk, when I ran the support organization, which was a amazing opportunity, if you ever have the if you ever have the chance to run a customer support team, you should do it. It is the closest I’ve ever felt to customers. It is so insightful.

Cait Keohane:
It’s a highly strategic and operational role. Everything that is preventing you from getting to your next step as a business can be found somewhere in a support ticket. I believe that fundamentally. And and so finding a way to really funnel that back into the business, you’re just gonna it’s it’s a force multiplier. So, you know, I I hope to be that person here at Airtable and my team to be those people collecting that insight and bringing it back to the business.

Josh Schachter:
There we go. I love it. Kate, thank you so much for being on the program. Good luck the rest of the year. Thank you. You’ve got a great opportunity there in your hand. You know that, and, wish you guys all the very best.

Cait Keohane:
Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Thanks.