Michelle Lim: Building The Best Direct Debit Experience Through Customer Success Management

While this particular job goes by many names across the board, Customer Success is becoming one of the most important transformative aspects of growth for all types of businesses today. We can no longer talk about Customer Success as a separate function within the business, but ultimately, a driving force to the way we do business.

Fully strategised to maximise customer and business sustainability by optimising its efforts, Curlec’s Customer Success team is constantly evolving to find effective ways to manage our clients, as well as making them as successful as possible when using our services.

We sat down with Curlec’s Head of Customer Success, Michelle Lim to discuss her role, as well as how she is helping businesses, big and small to derive value from their partnership with Curlec.

What is Customer Success, and why does it matter?

As its name implies, Customer Success is focused on working proactively in partnership with clients and customers to drive the client experience forward and ensure a successful flourishing partnership in the future.

As the Head of the Customer Success team here at Curlec, I make sure we help our clients get the most out of their experience with us by delivering value throughout every step of the customer journey. And we work closely with our product and development team to do so, that includes designing programs for client onboarding, product training, as well as customer service and support.

My main role here is to help merchants to quickly master our system, and of course, to advise them on how they could leverage our system to reach their goals and untapped potential. We do this by custom designing the client program, encourage high-value feature adoption as well as provide on-going value driven engagement with the clients accordingly.

You have dealt with numerous clients at Curlec, ranging from SMEs, Enterprises and Big Corporations alike. What are some of the distinctive differences you see when handling these cases in terms of Customer Success Management?

The portfolio of clients I have served includes businesses from different industries, may it be Fitness, Professional Services, Financial Services, Property, Education and etc.

And based on my experience, the definition of a payment solution provider for these businesses can be very broad. Different companies will need different requirements and solutions when it comes to billing and collection cycles.

Identifying their payment pain points as well as providing the best solution are parts of what I do on a daily basis. Some will require payments in the forms of weekly or monthly recurring payments, a few would opt for one-off payments, and in some cases, clients will need to include instalment plans as well, which we can assist with to fit their needs accordingly.

However, the engagement goal has always remained the same – to overcome the traditional payment barriers such as expensive cost, error-prone and time consuming processes that are associated ‘push’ payments, and replacing this with what we coined as ‘pull’ payments that will automate these processes so that the merchants can be in control of when they get paid.

What were some of the key challenges along the way?

Well, the way I see it, Direct Debit is still new in the Malaysian market. So the key challenge here is to educate the public on how the system works, and how it can be beneficial to not only big corporates and Enterprises, but also to SMEs.

Historically, the banks only served large corporations for this particular method. And now, with our resources, we are able to help the SME market, who never had the payment option available to them before, to access this particular method.

Our role in Customer Success is all about being proactive, as opposed to reactive. So, looking at it from that perspective, the main challenge that we face is to constantly work to figure out the ongoing efforts so that we can continue to deliver value to our clients and customers, as well as improve their payment processes using Curlec.

How do you measure success in your current role, and how do you keep yourself up to date on the changes in the industry?

As of date, we are now serving a diverse range of businesses in terms of size and industries. This includes more traditional brick and mortar businesses, such as gyms and tuition centres, to technology related businesses such as P2P financing platforms.

I measure success by looking at:

• The ability to turn these new clients into long time partners
• The ability to increase our client’s lifetime value
• The ability to prioritise client issues and improve on their experience so that they fully leverage on our system to process their month-to-month collection

The key idea here is to be constantly learning. Utilising all the channels that are available to us such as industry news, having good connections with experts in the field who will be able to help you grow and advise you on how to improve in your craft.

Want to work with us? Our team come from a variety of backgrounds and we always welcome diversity – submit your applications today by visiting www.wps.curlec.com/careers