Upfront & Personal: Betterview’s Customer Success Manager Rachel Salinas

Rachel Salinas is passionate about customers, bringing energy, enthusiasm and genuine interest to her new role at Betterview. “To me, ‘customer success’ means helping customers get the most value out of their experience using and integrating Betterview’s technology platform seamlessly into their business processes,” Rachel shared.

You joined Betterview this year, just months into the COVID-19 pandemic. What’s your role at Betterview?

At one point early on at Betterview, we were onboarding over 300 employees for one customer. We had less than three weeks to get them up and running because the customer couldn’t send inspectors out to physically look at the insurer’s property risks because of the pandemic. With Betterview, they could access high-resolution imagery and our data analytics, such as roof scoring, without relying on physical inspections during that difficult time. They could do the legwork at their desks.

My role is to work hand-in-hand with Betterview customers, Betterview’s sales and technical teams. Once an insurer becomes a Betterview customer, the first thing I do is talk with Betterview’s Sales Representative and the customer. I ask a lot of questions! For example, do your employees need training? What level of training? Do you want to accomplish the training in 1 or 2 days, or would you prefer a customized training program? Then, I work with the customer on setting up expectations. How many properties do you estimate you will need to look at and over what time frames do you want to see the properties  – weekly, monthly, quarterly?

I love my job! It’s a great job because I can have a major impact on the success of Betterview’s customers in implementing our products and services – on the customers’ long-term success and on that of Betterview itself!

“Customer success” is obviously something you’re really passionate about. How did you get into Customer Success Management?

Before joining Betterview, I worked at Glassdoor, a technology company that offered employers a website portal where job candidates can apply for posted positions. I started in sales development and then moved into customer success management focusing on small businesses. I loved helping the employers and job candidates during a tough time.

I heard about Betterview and during the interview process I made a presentation to each of Betterview’s Co-Founders, David Lyman and David Tobias. I called the interview a presentation because I knew Betterview didn’t have a Customer Success Manager so I wanted to explain how important I thought it was to help people and customers succeed, to see and experience the value of a product or service.

In the insurance business, there’s a lot of focus on recruiting new talent into the industry. What do you think Betterview is doing right about recruiting talent?

What really impressed me about Betterview was how everyone works so hard. No one says to me that “we can’t do it that way because that’s the way we’ve always done it”. They really want to hear what I have to say.

As Betterview grows what are you implementing to make sure the customers and the users feel supported?

Making sure that our current and future customers feel supported as Betterview grows is my major focus. Since starting with Betterview, we have added hundreds of new users to the platform. I noticed that most of our users who were writing into our chat system were coming from the Eastern and Central time zones, and our support specialist was sitting in California. Customers weren’t receiving responses to their issues until about 11 pm or 12 pm Eastern Time so they weren’t getting the support they needed when they needed it. We decided to hire another support specialist to cover the early morning hours. Now our users can reach us from 8 am to 8 pm Eastern Time. Since implementing this change we have seen our first response time drop from roughly one hour to less than 15 minutes.

We also wanted to make sure all of our decision makers have visibility into their usage and how often their users are visiting the platform. We now send out monthly usage reports showing customers their month over month usage. Lastly, I have worked with Business Intelligence over the past six weeks to show customers total views and orders by user, interactions over chat, and platform survey responses.

What would people be surprised to know about you?

During my Junior year in college, I worked Tuesdays and Thursdays every week at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. After I graduated from Purdue with a BA in Hospitality and Tourism, I was hired as a Credentials Specialist for the Speedway. It actually turned out to be my first “customer success” position! My job was to ensure that those attending the Grand Prix of Indianapolis, the Indianapolis 500, and the Crown Royal 400 at Brickyard found the process of coming to the Speedway a smooth one. One without any issues over credentials. The Indy 500 event alone draws over 300,000 people. As you can imagine, it could be a chaotic and challenging experience getting everyone into the Speedway and in their seats in time for the races and without glitches. It was a great experience – I even drove a golf cart around the track and learned a lot about the science behind the racing experience.

What’s the best way to contact you?

You can reach me via email at rsalinas@betterview.com, call me at 415-672-8022, or connect with me on LinkedIn.