Customer Success at Worth: Building Partnerships that Last

At Worth, Customer Success is the bridge between our customers and our mission to simplify underwriting and onboarding for financial institutions. 

We sat down with Jenn, the Head of Customer Success, about how her team creates a white-glove experience for our customers:

1. Jay: Why don’t we start by sharing a bit about your philosophy towards customer success. 
   
   Jenn: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve developed a philosophy around customer success that it isn’t just when the handoff happens after a sale, it’s an ongoing relationship that we build on trust and alignment and shared outcomes. 
   
   And I think at Worth, CS really, truly plays a strategic role. We’re not just a support team like some other companies might have, we’re a growth partner. And because of the time I’ve spent in all those different industries where customer experiences make or break, I’ve learned to be deeply empathetic and proactive in engagement and really operationalize the excellence to make all the difference with customer success. 

2. Jay: Great. So the Customer Success team has worked with a wide variety of lenders and fintechs and underwriting teams. What kind of experience does the customer success team bring to the table? 
   
   Jenn: Our CS team is one of a kind, and they really bring a diverse mix of experience, from lending and underwriting to risk management, customer success, technical support.
   
   Many of us have literally been in our clients shoes, and so we really understand the challenges that they face every day, and so that truly shapes everything we do, from onboarding through long term engagement, we can really focus on proactive problem solving and continuous optimization, not just reacting to issues, because again, we’ve been where they have. And it’s about helping our customers make better decisions and ultimately drive stronger results, while my team is ultimately building really strong ongoing relationships at the same time.

3. Jay: Awesome. So Worth’s President, Devon, often says that we don’t just want customers, we want long term partners, kind of like you mentioned. What does growing with our customers look like in practice? 
   
   Yeah, I would say growing our customers means staying engaged. We want to go well beyond just going live with them and going to production with us. We host regular status or success reviews. We check on feature adoptions, we make sure that we’re fully aligned with them and their evolving goals. 
   
   Part of that is we use the conversations we have with customers, and we’re bringing that feedback directly back to our product roadmap. So we have a regular cadence with our product and engineering team, some of our most impactful enhancements have come from customer input, not from us, not internally. 
   
   And so that transparency has taken a long way where we’ve built real trust with our clients and our partnerships with clients that we have, and we’ve evolved the partnership, which really captures how we grow and adapt together with them and their and their evolving needs.

4. Jay: Cool. So can you walk us through the handoff process between sales and customer success? How do you make sure customers feel supported from day one? 
   
   Jenn: Sales and CS work hand in hand, so it’s not just a simple hand off where they hand us a document. A lot of times, the sales team will reach out, and myself or somebody else from the team will join during a late stage deal to have some of those conversations.
   
   What is their success criteria? What are their milestones? What is their first phase of using us, and how do we get them implemented within that timeline? And so we really work with sales to discuss, what are their clients needs, what are their milestones? Do they have a phased out approach? Who is a team we’re going to be working with? 
   
   We’re not just another vendor. We’re a partner for these clients, and we’re truly committed to understanding and delivering what matters and what matters most to them. It’s not just about going live for us, it’s staying engaged well beyond that and continuing to evolve as they evolve.

5. Jay: What does going the extra mile mean for your team? Can you share an example of when the CS team went above and beyond for a customer? 
   
   Jenn: Yeah, the team does it every single day. I see it every single day in many different situations and cases. 
   
   For us, though, it means being accountable, responsive, and resourceful no matter what, and so we aim, you know, for certain timelines with turnaround requests, whether it’s super urgent or low on the priority list. We have to prioritize what is an immediate need and what isn’t. 
   
   A lot of our clients we communicate with outside of those normal weekly calls. We have Slack channels with them. They’ll ping us, and even if somebody else on the team is unavailable, like the lead CSM on that account. 
   
   So that goes an extra mile. It’s not just one person. We’re bringing our clients the full team exposure and experience. They know all of our names, even when that person’s out of office or whatnot. 
   
   I’ll use Priority as an example, they had a particularly complex workflow that required a lot of customization, a lot of custom fields, a lot of custom decisioning with our Worth score. 
   
   We partnered with our product team to tailor a solution for them with their configurations and their settings, in record time. We were able to use our cross functional collaboration, which is part of our DNA here at Worth. 
   
   We owned it. We brought it to them. We were able to give them another use case with Worth that really helped heightened their relationship with us and again, evolving what their needs are.

6. Jay: How does customer feedback shape Product Development at Worth? 
   
   Customer feedback is at the heart of how we build, right? We meet weekly with our product team to share insights and trends from our clients, and then we use those conversations directly to inform them or review the roadmap and really help prioritize features that matter most. 
   
   Is it a feature that multiple clients are requesting? Is it a feature that one client is requesting, but it makes sense across the board for all of our clients? Is it one that is very siloed, and maybe we need to come up with an alternative. 
   
   And so thanks to those conversations and how transparent we are with each other, we’re able to take some of our most used capabilities directly from our clients’ ideas and put them into action. 

7. Jay: What does a strong ongoing relationship with a customer look like after implementation? 
   
   Jenn: Yeah, I always tell people, implementation is just the start. It’s like the dating phase of Worth and so we’re just trying to get to know each other. We’re trying to figure out, like, what makes the client tick? What are their milestones, what are their priorities?
   
   And so what we do is we hold regular status calls and reviews, and we share insights, like performance insights, quarterly business reviews, where we can provide metrics of their use cases, really identify additional opportunities to get them to use the platform in other ways.
   
   Like, what does that look like for them? How do we give them a better and bigger ROI? 
   
   And as we continue, the product continues to expand. We guide our customers through those new features, and we use pieces that really drive additional value. 
   
   So I would say the goal is really simple: our clients should get more out of Worth as time goes on, not less. And part of that is the trust and relationships that we build. 

8. Jay: Worth is growing fast. We’re adding new customers pretty often. How does the Customer Success team scale while keeping those relationships personal? 
   
   I would say we’re really intentional about scaling, not just our people, but also our systems. And so each client has a dedicated customer success manager who meets with them regularly to discuss performance, feedback, and priorities.
   
   They have a dedicated implementation engineer. They have a dedicated customer success manager, analyst, and I’m part of all of the clients. Just, you know, I want to know what’s going on. I want to hear some of it firsthand. 
   
   And so as we grow, obviously, we’ll continue to expand the team alongside our client base to maintain that same white glove service and high touch experience that we’re known for, it’s really about scaling the relationship at the same time.
   
   And we want to continue to provide the same care and attention that works foundation is built on, no matter if you’re our first client or our thousandth client here at Worth. With us, you’re going to continue to get that same white glove experience throughout the entire experience.

9. Jay: How does your team collaborate cross functionally with the product team, the engineering team and marketing to deliver that experience? 
   
   I like to say Customer Success is the heartbeat of the company, everything flows in and out of us. We have the most communication with the clients, but we also touch every single department, product, engineering, marketing, sales, finance, legal. All of it eventually flows through us somehow. And so at Worth, collaboration is really a big core of our culture. 
   
   We don’t work in silos. We can’t, honestly, and so what we do is we have regular syncs to ensure feedback flows quickly from customer success to product. 
   
   By having those individual meetings, but also company wide stand-ups and town halls, we’re able to keep everybody aligned on our customers priorities and how we’re impacting those priorities and the constant communication. It really ensures that every touch point feels consistent, it’s transparent, and more than anything, that it’s focused on the success of our clients and building alongside them.

Want to see our Customer Success team in action? Get started by scheduling a demo call here.