Scaling Customer Success: Victor Raposo on Proactivity in CX at BusterFetcher

So today's episode is sponsored by BraceB, the AI service to prevent customer churn in vertical SaaS with the rise of AI and competition. Of course, customer churn is at an all-time high, and the ability to understand how your customers really think about your product lets you save churn before it happens. So BraceB listens and understands everything your customers say by analyzing customer calls, emails, chats, everything that comes in so nothing gets missed. BraceB shows you in real-time how much revenue is at risk for every issue that it identifies and more important how you can fix it. So stay ahead of churn and increase customer retention to keep your revenue. Add BraceB to your tools in seconds, let the AI do all the work, and know the most pressing issues and how much revenue is at risk. Check it out on BraceB.com. In today's episode of the Retention Branch podcast, I have a very interesting guest here with me today. I'm with Victor Raposo, who's heading over from the guys over at Buster Fetcher. He's not only an Ironman finisher, but also, I'll be talking about his role as a customer SpaceX manager in Buster Fetcher, and Buster Fetcher is essentially acting in the shipping vertical, but I will leave it to Victor to explain more about it. First Victor, welcome to the show. Very much. We're really happy to be here. Sure. So maybe give people a quick overview. What is Buster Fetcher all about in your own words? So at Buster Fetcher, we help companies actually recover money from their late shipment and their agreement with either Canapos, FedEx, UPS, PureLater, across Canada. And we also audit every single shipment when they get overcharged for packaging or anything surcharge regarding any orders that they ship. Very clear. Now, can you tell us a little bit about the types of organizations that you work with? What's the scale? How big are they? Maybe just so people understand a little bit about the types of organizations you work with. Well, our ICB varies a lot depending on the customers, but it's either e-commerce businesses that use Shopify. Also we have banks that ship mails, letters, and also logistics companies that transport packaging. So it goes from 100 orders per week to a few 20, 25,000 orders per week. Okay. That's an impressive volume. Now, what got you personally excited to work in that vertical? It's a very interesting, of course, somewhat omnipresent vertical, but many people haven't obviously worked in it. What got you excited to work in it? It's a very question. What got me excited? It's simple. I've been working in logistics. My background is in supply chain and I realize I've been helping one company at a time to improve their operation and at Buster Fisher, we actually help many customers at the same time with data. So it's great. There's no bias at the end of the day. We take this information and how they can reduce their cost of shipping and improve their logistics from the day to day. And with which type of people would you be working with then in these organizations is that even ahead of shipment, I don't know if that even exists, and who is the people that you're talking to? Definitely. Most of the time it's the VP of operation who's making the decision. Also CFOs, when they realize there's an actual ROI on logistics and also the team internally. So the person who's in charge of the picking pack or negotiation in contract. So it varies between three personas, three, four personas and yeah, there's more of the decision maker in operation. Very cool. Now, maybe for the last question so that people can get an overview of the company from a bird's eye perspective, how do people typically hear about Buster Fisher, like what's kind of the journey? I know you're not in marketing or sales, but maybe on a high level, is it a very word-to-mouth driven industry, is it sales? Word-to-mouth and sales, a lot, a lot of customers, they don't even know or exist. Most of the time when you think about the customer job, they just don't know. They're like, "Oh, I didn't know that you have guarantees for late deliveries. Can I post?" You can actually claim your late. So we do it for them and people are like, "How?" While my salesperson at Can I Post never told me about it, well, they don't want you to know about it. We're pure later just because they're losing money at the end of the day. We wouldn't exist if they would just refund our customers, if we're from the get-go. So this is where we come to help, and once they know that, they won't get involved. Most of the time, they never leave. So our turn rate is actually great. So you mentioned churn there a little bit, and I'm sure you guys have a high retention, but maybe let's talk a little bit about from a customer success angle because there's, of course, customer success teams listening in. What's maybe like an AuraStar metric or something that you find very important for the success team to measure? Yeah, definitely. Actually, the first thing is how much money we generated for our customers. We have customers that had over 100k per year net revenue from late shipments. So from there, we know that not only our service is working well, but our customers are happy. They didn't even know they paid for a type of service they didn't get, and now they got their money. Also it's how long they've been with us, and also with the data, well, we can actually help them improve inside their warehouse or their logistics to reduce costs. So that's about it for us. Very cool. It sounds like a great product that is just giving you money that you didn't even have on the radar, so that's pretty cool. That probably ties into the user experience and retention there. How are you thinking about retention? What's the processes, the tools that you take into consideration when looking at that? Well, for the retention, our main focus was the late deliveries and the retention is quite easy in terms of knowing that we can only charge a fee when our customers get a refund. So it doesn't cause the money, but the retention goes also with season. We have clients who doesn't ship much during winter or summer, and that's where they tend to forget about us. So it works so well that they forget about us, and then we charge them, and they're like, what is the service every six months? So this is where we try to educate our customer, and that's why we build other service that take closer to our client and all their shipment and bill. Very cool. So that you stay on top of mine, that makes a lot of sense. Now, if we're looking ahead, I mean, of course, AI is shaping a lot of vertical SaaS companies and SaaS products. Could you give me an insight of what you think, how AI is going to impact your vertical and specifically the customer success function? What do you have in mind there? Yeah, I do love AI for anything that we don't have to do. At Buster, we automated many tasks, and that's how we stayed solely with over 2,500 customers, but at the end of the day, there's still room to improve, and AI will be the tool to help us to get there. So there's the customer experience, there's even the platform to building retention. AI will help us, my goal is to help us to not have trend or know that our customer will turn ahead of time. That would be the main reason why I want to use AI, because right now, we're reactive versus proactive on every single case. In a sense. And what do you have in mind there, if you would have a magic wand, what would you do? It's a great question. The magic wand would be how many times a customer logged in, anything like that, and just to make sure that we get to never turn, to get to 0% turn. So the magic wand would be we don't have to do anything, and AI will do the whole thing to us. Awesome. Now, sounds very cool. I want to learn a little bit about yourself. I teased it in the introduction, you're an avid sportsman, actually, that's also our team. Got a notice of yourself, you just finished an Ironman, so congrats on that again. I was curious, right? What inspired you to do the Ironman? Was there a person, a book, a story, what was it that inspired you to go that journey? Yeah, well, many things. First off, I got sick, I got a long problem, and the doctors were like, "Oh, you need to heal, you cannot do anything." And I always kind of judged people who were doing trot lines. I was like, "This is crazy. Why would you bike, run, swim? Why would you want to do all that? That doesn't make any sense." And the fact that I closed myself by judging other people, I was impressed. But also, I was like, "Why would you do this?" And when I got to the point that I was sick and I couldn't train, I couldn't play hockey or anything like that, I said, "How crazy would it be if I do a trot line?" That's what I told myself. I'm like, "Stop judging, just try to see." I got inspired by, of course, David Goggins and other people, and one of the books that I read was, "Be Your Future Self Now," basically, and I loved that, or "Atomic Habit," and I said, "Let's do it, why not?" And I tried training, it was painful, hated every single second at first. And one of the things was running, I still hate running till this day, and I run between 500 to 1,000 kilometers per year, and I still hate putting my shoes on. But it became so easy to acquaint that I'm running a marathon in a few weeks, I'm just, I'm doing it for the fun of not liking something, everything else becomes easy. Working remote, working on your desk, you're like doing tasks that you don't want to do everything, it's simple. Because you get used to do something hard many, many times in a row. So that's why I got into triathlon, and now I'm basically part of myself to just do that, then help other people also do triathlons. Very cool. Now, in regards to your work at Buster Fetcher, what would be an important project or a focus area that you're excited about? Yeah, so we're building different features now, opportunities, we're going to try to, I mean, will have opportunities in terms of how they can actually reduce their costs. We have the data now, we collect over 1.4 million shipment per month, so we can tell to our clients how much they should be paying versus other companies that they are paying. So we're capable of telling them how to negotiate their rates with their carrier, the estimate also regarding anything else that it's happening in their logistics, how they can improve their packaging as well. So many different services that will allow to save money, cents, like carriers right now improve, increase their rate by just adding three cents to their shipment. And that three cents become millions of dollars for UPS. So if we can reduce, let's say, seven cents, eight cents for every single package or even a dollar for every single package that is shipped with multiple services, our companies will be saving 10, 15% of their cost. Very interesting. As a last question, I want to ask something about your journey, if that's okay. I know you've been working, Heinz Kraft, for example, or Bombardier. Now looking back at your journey, starting into your professional career and customer success, because also a lot of, as I said, customer success people are dining in, what's one advice that you would give yourself for that journey? What is maybe a skill or like a mindset or something important that you learned over the years that it has helped me? I love that. And I will tell myself to trust your instant, learn, ask questions, be curious. And yeah, it's don't stop your belief, like don't believe what you tell yourself. I know it's contradictory. I cannot do this, I shouldn't, I don't have all the capacity, I don't know it, just do it. Yeah. Very cool. And you've definitely put in, have put in the proof into it with the ironman. So Victor, I really appreciate you joining us today in the retention range podcast. I want to give you the very last word. If somebody would be forgetting all that we discussed on BusterFetcher, what's the one thing they should remember? If you ship any packaging, you're entitled for late delivers. You're losing money, not doing it. Thanks a lot for being a guest on the retention range podcast.