Daniel Costa — Sendcloud: “Walk a mile in your customer shoe” for real— English Version
In this next interview, we will look at the customer experience from a slightly different perspective. First, because our interviewee, Daniel Costa, who is a Software Development Manager at Sendcloud, will give us an overview of how software development teams deal with this topic. And second, because we will also understand a bit of the cultural bias, since Daniel has been living in The Netherlands for four years, where he has worked for some companies, and he will show us a little of the day-to-day differences in relation to how he worked in Brazil.
Daniel has a 15-year career in the technology area, which began in Brazil, where he worked for companies such as PC Sistemas and TOTVS. In 2018 he moved to The Netherlands in search of a better quality of life for his family and less violence in Brazil. Initially, he thought about going to the United States or Canada, but he was convinced by a friend to embrace this opportunity in Europe. His main worry was about the Dutch language. But he soon realized that a large part of the population speaks English, especially in the work environment. His daughter, now 8 years old, already speaks fluent Dutch, in addition to already having advanced English, the result of a quality public education since elementary school. His first opportunity was at Coolblue, a large omnichannel retailer. Then he went through FRISS and today, as mentioned before, he is at Sendcloud as Software Development Manager.
Sendcloud is a logistics platform that connects carriers to e-commerces. It is the largest logistics platform in Europe, specializing in the SMB market. Their story is interesting. Its founders started with a small e-commerce and suffered from the issue of managing deliveries and logistics contracts. They decided to deal with this situation by building software in-house. A few other retailers heard about this solution and asked to use it too, until the moment came when it made sense to pivot the business to a SaaS logistics integration solution. Currently with more than twenty thousand customers, integrated to more than forty e-commerce platforms and eighty carriers across Europe.
The solution was proposed with a PLG (product led growth) strategy, so the entire journey from software acquisition to use is very simple. The customer does not need to have technical software experience, allowing onboarding without technical support. The key guideline here is: setup in 5 minutes. They achieve this through 100% automated integrations with e-commerce partners like Shopify, Amazon, Magento and other platforms in addition to carriers. The customer can connect to Sendcloud directly through the e-commerce platform.
The business journey with some contact goes to the medium and enterprise customers that are less usual so far. The sale is usually already organic with customers searching Google for “logistics platform for e-commerce”. The first tier of the offer is free, where the customer does not even need to inform a credit card, making the purchase process very simple.
The big difference is that Sendcloud not only optimizes the technological part, but also the contractual part with the carriers. The goal is to take the pain out of the customer’s logistics, allowing them to focus on their sales. Sendcloud’s Customer Support does not only look at technical issues of the platform, but at the journey as a whole, so they are also do the first level management of the delivery of the package sold, intermediating the contact between the retailer and the carrier.
This attention to the customer is part of the company’s culture, being present from the first day of the new employees. In their orboardings, regardless of the area of operation, an activity is given to create a store in an e-commerce that connects to Sendcloud, generating a purchase with the entire journey of how the solution works, allowing every new employee to put himself in the customer’s shoes for real and from the beginning in the company. This concern also appears in the performance review, where one of the pillars is “taking care of the customer” and this has its consequences for each role, including for developers who are encouraged to understand the impacts of their actions in relation to the customer at the end, which can be by deploying without defects or participating in design sprint sessions with users, for example. Within technology specifically, transparency is also a very strong value. The solution has a page that shows which services are active or down at any given time, and in case of any stability problem, there is a clear process in the company where customer support and customers are quickly notified and with the negotiations for resolution.
The product design is also thinking about the customer. Product Owners look a lot at the needs with the other areas of the business thinking about backlog prioritization. But very focused on the market as a whole. Today the solution is already mature and meets much of what the SMB segment needs. There is a focus on expanding to other European countries that occasionally need new developments, especially in new integrations with local players. They have a beta community with specific customers, with a characteristic of early adopters. This community is heard a lot from the point of view of experience and solution improvements. And the product has feature flags, where it is possible to make new features available for these beta community customers to test beforehand. It is a way of engaging the team to be close to the customer, as well as validating hypotheses before making them available to the entire public. As a bonus, customers feel heard.
An opportunity for the company is to improve the process of measuring value generated for the customer and for the organization, which is still superficial. They can be more focused on metrics and businesses cases about new business opportunities. It is looked at at macro levels for freight cost reduction, operational cost reduction. Business metrics tend to be gut feeling. This has already been worked on, and is expected to bear fruit in the near future.
The structure and practices of software development in Europe are generally no different from Brazil. Agile methods, hypothesis testing with customers, with quick feedback and iterations. Also use design sprint in some scenarios. The main differences are in the hierarchies, which are much flatter, and in the strong autonomy with responsibility at the end to make decisions. The team does everything, and is responsible for the entire journey based on the strategy directed by the executives. And this is part of the culture, where any employee has a safe environment to question anyone, regardless of position.
Another different point that helped Daniel’s rapid professional growth during this period is his management style. The Brazilian’s natural human warmth promoted greater collaboration and creativity within the team, which, together with the autonomy with responsibility mentioned above, generated good results in a sustainable and healthy way for the team.
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