Why I Started Reef

In my role as head of Customer Success at MuleSoft, we grew a team of three into an organization of hundreds responsible for almost a billion dollars in ARR.

It was an amazing seven years and we learned a lot along the way. We experimented, we succeeded wildly, we failed spectacularly, and everything in between. But we learned and we adapted and we made ourselves a better team every day.

Our challenge

The company was growing fast, and it created a lot of pressure for our customer teams. They were expected to be good at everything: retaining customers, growing customers, building relationships, delighting customers, driving adoption, running interference with Support, and representing the voice of the customer to Product. The list goes on and on.

Not only were we expected to do it all, we were held accountable for improving NRR and increasingly doing more with less.

When you’re expected to do so much, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and spend too much time spinning plates vs. recognizing and prioritizing the highest impact activities.

As we got busier and busier, it became clear that our model wasn’t sustainable and we had to work differently. We couldn’t invest in every customer at the same level or use our gut instincts to determine where to spend our time. We needed to know (based on data) which customers we should invest in (and which customers we shouldn’t) if we wanted to optimize for three factors:

• Improving customer outcomes
• Preventing churn
• Accelerating customer growth on our platform

Enter Reef

I started Reef because I couldn’t find a product that enabled me to effectively scale our CS model so I decided to build one. I saw an opportunity to help customer teams cut through the noise and focus less on busy work and more on prioritizing the customers and actions that matter most.

Teams don’t need another system to capture customer data or answer questions about the health of their customers. They need a platform that asks for very little and delivers a lot of value – a platform where they can quickly identify customer risk and opportunity – a platform where they can see how engaged a customer is beyond their own interactions with that customer – a platform where they can easily prioritize, take action, and see the result of that action.

Meet Reef

Reef is an always-on AI platform that takes the guesswork out of customer engagement. Reef gives customer teams unique visibility into customers, helps users determine the best actions to take with each customer, tracks those actions to completion in the Reef app or in Slack, and quantifies the impact of each action.

How do we do it?

Reef does the heavy lifting and makes it easy for any business to get started by connecting and aggregating customer data from multiple systems, creating optimized ML-based customer scoring models across multiple engagement types, and engaging users with a modern, intuitive app to explore and drive action with their customers. You and your team can be up and running in days, saving your ops and tech teams months of work.

More importantly, you can stop being overwhelmed by an impossible to-do list. With Reef, you can narrow your focus to engage the right customers with the right actions at the right time. As a result, your customers will thrive and your NRR will grow.

If this resonates, I’d love to connect and get your feedback on Reef.