Latviv provides customer success software, thought leadership, and services to help companies build long term and mutually beneficial relationships with their customers. Below is Mateen’s recent interview with Piyush Agrawal, CEO of Latviv:
Q. Piyush, thank you for joining us today. You have come a long way since I last interviewed you about ten years back. You recently started Latviv. What motivated you to start this business?
A. Mateen, it is a pleasure to talk with you again. For context, over the last 25 years, I have worked with sizeable successful management consulting organizations that have done a great job in handling customer relationships and worked with startups that struggled to retain customers. I see an opportunity to transfer the best practices pursued at large consulting organizations where relationships mean everything to other companies that can benefit from these best practices.
After my last position as customer success VP, I realized that many companies today are disproportionately focused on customer acquisition and not in keeping customers. Most of them are unaware of what it takes to manage relationships, resulting in a high degree of customer churn. For every step forward, they move two steps backward, resulting in enormous destruction of investor wealth.
The underlying issue is that these companies are not generating real value for their customers. When customer sponsors make a preliminary investment in a vendor’s solution, they look for returns before committing to a continued relationship with their vendor. Broadly, these expected returns are in the form of revenue gains, reduced cost, or reduced risk. It is difficult for the sponsors to justify the continued investment in vendors’ products in the absence of these returns.
Q. What business principles would you recommend companies pursue to help their customers achieve this value, and why do you think you are the best person to teach others?
A. Company management and sales personnel need to put themselves in the shoes of an investor to understand the importance of the value point made earlier. I am an investor and can relate to this point very well. In parallel with my professional career, I have been investing in real estate for close to a decade. When I made my first token real estate investment in 2012 to test the waters, my real estate agent guided me through the process and taught me how to manage it. He walked me through potential returns before the investment and stayed with me until I realized those returns. Since then, I have invested millions of dollars through him and reaped 8x gains over the years. He is the only one I work with because of this consistency. This business practice demonstrated by my agent should be the guiding principle for all business transactions.
At the time of starting Latviv, I looked back at my experience making former customers successful through my efforts and the firsthand success of growing my wealth. Based on the above principles of customer success, the idea to form a company took shape last year.
I took some time off from work and family, went to Central America for two weeks, prepared a business plan, shared it with former colleagues on my return, and started executing it after they said, “Piyush, you may be on to something big. Go for it!”
Q. I agree with your friends. You are onto something big here. Why did you name your company Latviv?
A. As I started deliberating on the company name, I looked for Latin words that represent customer success. I wanted customer success to be in the company’s DNA, and so we settled on the name Latviv which is the combination of two root words “lat” and “viv.” They stand for relationship and vitality – collectively standing for – vitalizing relationships. Our mission is to maintain the spark in corporate relations during business transactions, related product/service implementations, deployments, and beyond.
Q. You recently published your book to explain this concept further. If you were to summarize your book into two key takeaways, what will they be?
A. In essence, the two key messages in the book revolve around customer experience and customer success:
1) customers will allow you to work with them only if they like you
2) one is successful when their customers are successful
Accordingly, “Helping Customers Win” is a very apt book title. The word “customers” applies to both my customers (i.e., my readers) and their customers.
The book has three parts. Part-1 covers #2 above. The other two parts support #1 above. Part-2 outlines suggestions for everything customer-facing professionals should do when interacting with customers during sales, implementations, rollout, adopt, and review phases. Part 3 dives into the desired personalities and internal operational support expected of and for the customer-facing teams.
Q. Writing is difficult, especially for one who doesn’t write for a living and does not have a liberal arts background. How did you start and work through the book completion?
A. I have a product and content marketing background, so that helps a bit. During my Central America trip last year, I liked to rest on a hammock in the jungles of Costa Rica. As I thought through Latviv’s business plan, I also jotted down everything I did right and wrong during my professional career to ensure that I put my best foot forward for my next venture. After substantial thinking and writing, I realized I had significant material for a book that could benefit the younger generation getting into the workforce. Most of us have sons, daughters, nieces, and nephews that are just leaving college. What if I can reduce the learning curve to help them grow in their professional careers and not let them make the same mistakes that others have made? This motivation to help the younger generation got me started thinking seriously about writing a book.
The next step was to evolve the contents of the book. In the professional world, irrespective of whether we handle customer-facing or internal roles, we all have customers. I combined elements of soft skills and corporate etiquette with all relevant customer success considerations to help emerging customer success professionals.
To your point, book writing is hard. After the book idea was born, I completed the first manuscript draft and ran it by other customer success professionals. Then I engaged a book publisher who was willing to work with a first-time author. The publishing team walked me through the process, helped me with copy-editing, and launched the book after a few rounds of iterations. For a first-time author, writing original thoughts, elaborating, continuous editing, and refining, while building something truly differentiating, can be a trying experience! This process took nine months. It is my nine-month baby!
Q: Wow, congratulations! Shifting gears to Latviv, tell us about your company’s business plan, and your progress in executing it.
A. With any new venture undertaking, the marketing of the idea becomes crucial, and the credibility of the person promoting the idea becomes equally important. Right from the beginning, I knew the book and Latviv’s business plan need to go hand in hand to support each other’s success.
As the book evolved, I shared the manuscript to attract and build a fully functional team around Latviv. We researched all available customer success platforms in the market to create a product roadmap with the best of breed capabilities on top of our distinctive thought leadership and product functionality. For context, we have incorporated all of the book’s content in the form of deployable checklists, risk assessments, and best practices in the Latviv software platform. Our clients can drive consistent customer experience with their customers by ensuring that all customer-facing roles are conversant with these best practices, execute desired tasks, and watch for common pitfalls regularly.
After multiple six-figure dollar investments, our platform is ready for deployment, and we have started engaging with a few initial customers.
We wanted to offer our thought leadership and platform access to a broader customer base in line with our mission. Accordingly, our rock star engineering team has designed the Latviv platform as a multi-tenant SAAS offering to allow low-cost access to all organizations. Today, our pricing is user and usage-based with little to no commitments to test and use it.
Q. Thank you, Piyush. What can you tell us in closing?
A. Losing customers is not an option. Customer-facing personnel needs to do the right thing, every time.
Investors, senior management, and customer sponsors expect visibility and smooth operations:
- Investors want to know how their portfolio companies are doing. Are they retaining customers?
- Senior management wants visibility and wants to course-correct customer-facing operations before it is too late?
- Customer sponsors wish to measure progress against promises.
We have designed Latviv from the ground up to help you with these needs. Check our website https://latviv.com for details and call us to learn more. You can get started with our platform at no cost or commitment until it starts working for you.
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Mateen Syed is an experienced and well-connected business strategist, advisor, mentor, and public speaker based in Silicon Valley. He is the founder of Bizhance; a firm focused on helping startups with strategy, structure, connectivity, and partnerships. He speaks on innovation, entrepreneurship, and leadership and has interviewed world leaders, fortune 500 CEOs, innovators and entrepreneurs, diplomats and prominent academics.
