In this episode of Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas sits down with Patrick Ford, Customer Success Manager at Softr, a no-code platform for building apps and client portals. Patrick came into CS from a background in education and instructional design, and that foundation shapes the way he approaches helping people solve problems and build the software they need.
He shares what onboarding looks like when customers have to be convinced not just to use a product but to build something with it, how Softr’s partner network helps customers who don’t want to build themselves, why a healthy customer looks different depending on company size, and how the CS team uses AI internally without losing the human touch that PLG customers actually prefer.
What You’ll Learn
- What customer success looks like at a no-code platform where customers build their own software
- How CS, support, and sales engineering blend into one role at a smaller company
- How Softr’s shift from pure PLG to a hybrid go-to-market motion is reshaping the CS function
- Why onboarding in no-code requires convincing customers of two things, not just one
- What a healthy customer looks like for small businesses versus mid-market and enterprise accounts
- How the CS team uses AI internally, including dashboards built inside their own product
- Why most PLG customers actually prefer human support over AI chatbots
- How to think about the build versus buy decision when you’re the platform people build on
Key Insights & Takeaways
No-code onboarding has a double convincing problem. Customers need to be convinced both that the software is good and that they should build their own solution with it. That’s a harder gate than convincing someone to adopt an existing tool.
A custom-built solution drives long-term retention. Once a customer has something built specifically for their use case, whether by themselves or through a partner, they tend to stick around.
A healthy customer looks different by segment. For small businesses, success means a functioning app in daily use. For mid-market and enterprise, success means expanding department by department and replacing other tools in the stack.
Partners fill the gap between budget and time. Customers with budget but no time get matched with partners. Customers with no budget but time and technical comfort build it themselves. Customers with neither are pointed toward a vertical solution instead.
AI is heavily used internally, but human support still wins for PLG. Most customers are relieved when they get a human instead of a chatbot. Automated routing and enrichment happen behind the scenes, but the front-facing support stays human.
CS functions as an arm of product. A large part of the role is funneling customer insights directly to product and sales teams, not just managing renewals.
Diverse backgrounds compound into strong CS instincts. Instructional design, media production, and customer support each contributed distinct skills, feedback loops, empathy, and communication, that all show up in how Patrick approaches CS today.
Podcast Transcript
Intro
Irina (0:07 – 0:27)
Welcome to Mastering CS Candid Leader Insights, the podcast where we dive into the world of customer success with industry leaders. I’m your host, Irina Cismas, and today I’m joined by Patrick Ford, Customer Success Manager at Softr, a no-code platform for building apps and client portals. Patrick, I’m really happy to have you here.
Thanks for joining!
Patrick (0:27 – 0:30)
Yeah, it’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me!
From Instructional Design to CS: What Patrick’s Day-to-Day Looks Like
Irina (0:31 – 1:01)
Before we dive in, I want to do a background review. You came into CS from a background in education and instructional design, and you are now a CSM at Softr. Paint us a picture of how your day-to-day there is.
Who are your customers? What does the work actually look like? Tell us more about the company you work for.
Patrick (1:02 – 1:48)
Softr is a full-stack, no-code and AI-driven platform to build software for non-technical teams. A lot of the people I work with every day are non-technical. We do have developers who come in and use Softr, but I’d say probably 80 to 90% are very non-technical. They’re operations people, HR managers, product people.
My day-to-day, being a CSM, involves a lot of calls. I looked at my Fathom a while back, and within the last year I’ve done almost 1,200 calls with different people, usually around 5 to 10 a day. So I talk to a lot of different customers.
Irina (1:49 – 1:50)
Yeah, okay.
Patrick (1:50 – 3:41)
It’s a lot of different customers, from all different industries, backgrounds, and skill levels, so my day-to-day usually involves a lot of these types of calls. The subject matter is extremely diverse. We’re still a relatively small company, I think 50 to 60 people at Softr, so my day also includes email, some support, and some sales-related work.
We’re bringing on more sales-oriented people to handle that side more. When I first came on, it was very PLG-focused. We didn’t really do any high-pitch sales-type stuff. Now we’re transitioning as the company matures, stepping into more mid-market and enterprise companies. So I’m doing more solutions engineering, support, and implementation work, helping customers get more value out of Softr across their entire organization. A lot of the calls I do consist of exactly that.
The majority of my day encompasses speaking with customers, getting insights from them, and funneling those insights to our product team and sales team. The CSM function at Softr is really an arm of product in a way, gleaning insights, helping us build what people are asking for, making sure they’re successful with those things, and making sure that not only do we retain customers, but that I’m an empathetic advocate for what they need internally. That’s the majority of what I’m doing and what my day-to-day consists of. Obviously there are nuances and small things everybody does at a smaller company, but on the whole, that’s what I do.
A Blend of CS, Support, and Sales Engineering Under One Hat
Irina (3:42 – 4:24)
So help me understand, is the CS function more of a combination of CS, support, and some sales engineering, basically a buffer between sales and CS to make sure what was sold is actually delivered? Did I get that right?
So basically there’s no formal structure where this is the support team, this is the CS team, this is the sales engineering team. It’s actually a blend of multiple roles sitting under one hat. Did I get that right?
Patrick (4:25 – 5:19)
Yeah, that’s pretty close. It depends on the customer. For our free customers, basic plans, and some lower-tier plans, we have a full-fledged support team. In fact, our support team is probably one of the highest rated out there, because it’s real human support, available 24/7 on pretty much every plan, and they’ve seen everything there is to see about Softr. They answer questions all day, every day.
Mine is a bit removed from the support tickets side and more focused on small businesses, mid-market, and enterprise customers who need help with implementation, more of the sales engineering side, like you mentioned. But there are a lot of things that fall under a single hat. We’re still small enough that we don’t need that segmentation just yet, but we’re getting to the point where we’ll need more segmentation across those roles.
How the Shift from PLG to Hybrid Is Reshaping CS
Irina (5:19 – 5:52)
I’m curious if the structure of the CS team changed when the company’s go-to-market shifted from PLG to a hybrid approach. I’m guessing right now it’s a hybrid, PLG combined with sales-led, and that this actually drove the decision to formalize the CS function more. Am I correct in that assumption?
Patrick (5:52 – 7:46)
Yeah, exactly. I would say we’re still in that transition, not really transitioning from PLG to purely sales, but adding sales as an adjacent thing to PLG. We’re still primarily a PLG company, but the hybrid approach is something we’re focused on implementing currently. We’re bringing on more sales-oriented people to go after higher-value targets and companies.
I always think of PLG as traditionally a bottom-up thing, especially with no-code, where your builders are people with a very defined pain point but usually lower in the org chart than, say, if you’re selling Salesforce or Workday. But we’re starting to talk to more C-suite people and founders. A sales team makes a ton of sense there because we’re able to provide more targeted approaches to these companies rather than helping the builders push it up from the bottom. We’re now able to tap into the C-suite and mid-level people in the org chart and allow Softr to filter down through the organization instead.
That’s a critical dual-sided thing. We’re still trying to find champions, identify them in certain organizations, and help them promote Softr across their organization. There are a lot of variables that go into that, but by also focusing on people higher up in the org chart, we’re able to filter software down through the organization, providing both directions to get it implemented. It’s a messy process, but it’s challenging and fun, and our team has had a good time implementing and working through it.
What Good Onboarding Looks Like in a No-Code Platform
Irina (7:46 – 7:55)
Tell me what does good onboarding look like for you guys? What are you aiming for in the first few months and how do you know when you’ve got there?
Patrick (7:56 – 8:33)
Yeah, that is a great question. And I would, I’d be surprised if anyone says that they have this 100% figured out. In my opinion, onboarding and activation is probably one of the most difficult things to get right, especially with no code.
I think there are unique challenges to no code that are not present in other pieces of software, because not only do I have to convince them to use the software, we also have to train them to build the software that they need, right? For other vertical solutions, when you’re selling it and the software doesn’t need to be built, right? It’s already there.
Irina (8:33 – 8:34)
With software.
Patrick (8:35 – 11:02)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All of that stuff is already there.
You’re just convincing them, hey, this product is good, you should use it, right? No code presents very unique challenges, because not only do I have to convince them that software is good for building their software, I also have to convince them that they should build their software, right? And so it’s so they have to walk through two gates there.
And not every user is up for that challenge. And really good onboarding is in my what we’ve tried to do at Softr is, for one, provide them plenty of support and help resources, both self serve and more active instead of as opposed to passive guidance. And the way that we do that is that’s one of the reasons why I do so many calls is because we want to make our support team and our CS team as open as possible to help people get through that first door, right?
To say, hey, Softr can do what you’re to do. And here are some resources that we are providing to help you do that. One of which is actually our partner network.
So very similar to HubSpot and some of these other tools that have these agencies and freelancers that can help you implement that particular piece of software. We have a similar network. And so that’s one thing that we really push people towards who are not willing to build themselves is work with someone to help you get this up and running.
And in most cases, once people have a piece of software that’s custom built for them, they retain over the long term, right? And so the onboarding piece is a combination. There’s several different approaches that we take to it.
One is make it easy to get something functional as quickly as possible. Our AI generator helps do that very quickly and easily. The second one is after they’ve reached that point, help them with both self serve resources and offering calls and kind of support to help get them past any humps or hurdles that they may encounter.
And once they’re past that point, helping them with follow ups as well. So keeping in constant contact with them. If you, anybody is using Softr, you’ll know that we send out tons of emails.
There’s emails going out all the time. We have community calls that I lead every month where people can jump in and ask questions. So really just making ourselves available to people is one of the core tenets of onboarding and activation, I would say, is just being available to people to answer questions and help them get unstuck, basically.
Irina (11:02 – 11:16)
And do you also handle, do you also have a dedicated CS function for all those partners that you are managing? Or basically they are self-serve? Who handles the partner part?
Is it the CSM?
Patrick (11:16 – 12:08)
So he’s not a, that position is not a CSM, but our, we call him the partnership manager. Leo Selle is doing that right now. And, but super great position because he’s solely focused on partnerships or partners, our partner network, I should say.
And making sure that our partners are receiving leads, that the leads are high quality and that the leads are actually having their needs met by our partners, right? So there’s a two-way monitoring there that we, that takes place. We try to stay out of the business of any sort of deals that are worked out, right?
That’s between the clients and the partner that they work with. But our goal is to make sure that people can find high quality partners quickly and that the partners find high quality leads quickly, right? That’s the, otherwise you’ve got this like double-sided market.
Irina (12:08 – 12:14)
I know, it doesn’t, the matchmaking is not perfect and doesn’t work and it ruins what comes up the afternoon.
Patrick (12:14 – 12:14)
Yeah.
What a Healthy Customer Looks Like
Irina (12:15 – 12:24)
And speaking of this, once the client is onboarding and activated, how does a healthy one look like for you? What’s the definition of a healthy customer?
Patrick (12:26 – 13:44)
Yeah, a healthy customer for us, I would say that there’s two aspects, depending on the market that we’re looking at. If it’s a small business, there’s obviously limited room for expansion in a small business, right? They may have other use cases, but a healthy client for us is one who comes into the product, builds what they need, and they have a functioning app that they’re using on a day-to-day basis inside their business, right?
Whether or not they expand may or may not happen, but that’s what the baseline for a successful customer for us looks like. For something like a mid-market or enterprise customer, a successful customer would be someone who comes in, who does this kind of the same thing, maybe on a smaller team, but they’re also talking to other teams and putting us in contact with other teams to help introduce new use cases that software can be used for, right? So a lot of people use Ashby as their applicant tracking system.
You can rebuild Ashby with software, right? So if you need a specialized way to track or you have a specialized process or something like that, a lot of people find that they’re able to save money by reducing tech stack, reduce complexity inside their organization, and a successful customer for us on that side of things looks like we’re continually leapfrogging from department to department, helping each department solve their own pain points by building their own software.
How the CS Team Uses AI Internally
Irina (13:45 – 14:38)
I’m curious because the build versus buy is something that I’m constantly seeing and it becomes a theme now with the, I would say, explosion and the hype of all this AI that is available and is basically democratized, if you want. I’m curious, how do you guys leverage it? And in the CS day by day things, what’s the specific use case that you are doing it?
How do you leverage it from a CS lens point of view, not from a technical end product? Because I assume, and you mentioned that you have AI incorporated and basically this AI function helps the end user. Now I’m asking how you guys from a CS perspective leverage the AI infrastructure to basically make the team more productive and more efficient.
Patrick (14:39 – 14:43)
Yeah. So you’re talking about the team, the client’s team or our internal?
Irina (14:43 – 14:54)
No, I’m talking about the CS team from software as we speak. How is the CS team from software leveraging AI in their day-to-day operations, day-to-day CS work?
Patrick (14:55 – 15:03)
Yeah, a lot of it comes down to, first of all, we dog food our own product pretty heavily, right? We use it internally for a lot of different things.
Irina (15:05 – 15:09)
Tell me how you use it for CS. I’m super curious.
Patrick (15:09 – 17:41)
So for one, we have a bunch of different data sources that we use to collect data about customer usage and to identify expansion and things like that. We’re using BigQuery and some other different tools. But one of the things that’s a common pain point pretty much at every company is they have data in all these different places, but no way to combine it into a cohesive dashboard, right?
And so at NCS, we actually did this. We created a whole enterprise sales dashboard where we have all of our standard terms and MSAs and our standard vendor risk assessment. And we have resources there that are very easily accessible.
Our bank letter, our cyber insurance, all of that stuff is there for us to very quickly access. But then we also have dashboards where we can actually go to see at a cohesive place, who are our customers? What are the organizations?
Across an organization, how many users are there? Sometimes we find organizations that have multiple departments, and there are people in each department that are using Softr, and they don’t even know that each other are using Softr, right? And so those types of dashboards that we built in Softr are really helpful for helping us see an account from a holistic perspective with actual usage data behind it.
And so that’s just one example. Our marketing departments have also used it for numerous other things, for influencer content creation management and all kinds of stuff. But I guess to get back to your original question about the AI piece, we do use AI heavily inside of Softr for creating custom dashboards.
We have AI blocks that you can use to build things that we don’t have built in natively. We have AI chatbots as well that you can train on your data. So if you wanted users to be able to log in and ask questions about specific pieces of data that you’re storing, we have AI agent fields inside of our database.
So if you need to enrich company data and all of this kind of stuff, you can do that right inside of Softr. And so yeah, the AI piece is huge. There’s obviously a ton of different use cases for it.
And then, of course, we have the co-build that we can build entire apps using AI that are really great for business apps. So there’s a lot of different pieces to it. But depending on the user, the customer that we’re speaking with, some companies aren’t allowed to use AI, right?
They don’t like using it. But the flexibility of Softr is that you can either build with AI or you can not build with AI. You can build manually as well, which is not the case for a lot of other kind of things or pieces of software that you may be using.
Serving PLG Customers Without a White-Glove Approach
Irina (17:42 – 18:10)
And for the PLG segment, the one that basically can be served through CS in one-to-many approach, the value, the customer value doesn’t justify, I don’t know, a lot of interactions. I would say a white glove approach. Do you leverage AI through automations or what type of playbooks and automations do you guys run to serve the PLG segment in terms of CS?
Patrick (18:11 – 20:10)
Yeah. So a lot of that, our customer support bears a lot of the brunt on that. So even on like our basic plans, we provide 24-7 chat support, which is, it is a lift, right?
But there’s also this element of social proof as well in that, right? Because you may have a small customer that comes in that’s building some sort of a gardening app that they’re using on the weekend, right? If they’re successful with that, they’re going to talk about it, right?
And so this has actually been a very core part of Softr’s strategy from the early days even of providing social proof by building very simple apps, even from PLG customers. But again, a piece of that does come back to, we provide community calls for every single person to be able to jump in, to be engaged, to ask questions. We have a really active community forum as well, where our partners are actually in there answering questions, our support teams in there answering questions.
And so really, even for the PLG people, it’s very kind of manual support heavy. We’ve actually found that the majority of people that I talk to, they’re actually thrilled that they don’t have to talk to an AI, believe it or not. Anyone who has tried to talk with an AI through support, it’ll give you four options, and none of them are the option that you’re looking for, right?
So inevitably, you have to talk to somebody anyway. So rather than provide them a bad experience with that right up front, we just allow people to speak with a human right off the bat. And I think that’s going to be something that people are going to be asking for more and more, quite honestly, is yes, it’s heavy.
Yes, it’s tedious to deal with. We do use some AI automations for newsletters and routing and making sure that people get paired with the right person if they have a call. And enrichment is a big piece as well.
But in general, like supporting just basic PLG customers, a lot of it is still actually human touch, right? Empathic understanding, making sure that people have their needs met. And so far, we’ve had nothing but positive feedback just about that.
Buy Versus Build: How Softr Helps Customers Decide
Irina (20:10 – 20:28)
Awesome. And now I have to ask, being an on-call platform, what’s your company position when it comes to buy versus build? Do you buy any piece of software or you are basically building whatever you need, which is basically custom to your needs?
Patrick (20:29 – 21:35)
Yeah, this is honestly, the buy versus build question is probably the one that I get the most. People don’t always know to phrase it that way, but that’s essentially what they’re asking a lot of times. And so it usually comes down to a couple of different things.
One is, what is their budget, right? If their budget is extremely low and they are okay with building, they have the technical ability, they have the time, software is a really good choice for them. If they have tons of budget, but they don’t have time, one of our partners is usually a great solution, right?
Because they can just hand it off to the partner, explain what they need, and the partner can build it for them. In the case with just buying something that’s not good for software, usually it’s neither of those things, right? They have no budget and no time, right?
That’s the one where it usually makes sense for more people to buy some sort of vertical solution. And we’re totally okay with that, right? Software is not going to be for everybody, just like other pieces of software are not for everybody as well.
But we do try to do as much as we can to make sure that people have the resources that they need.
The Tech Stack Behind the CS Team
Irina (21:36 – 21:53)
And in your particular case, when it comes to your CS team, what is the operational infrastructure behind it? Does it sit only on software or do you basically use other tools to basically plug the information from software?
Patrick (21:54 – 22:38)
Yeah, we do have a tech stack. With CS specifically, we use a combination of HubSpot, Fathom, Softr, right? There are specialized pieces that are not going to work for all use cases.
And actually, we used to have a full dashboard, a full CRM, essentially, that we built in software for CS. But due to integrations and things like that, we’re still adding on more every day. But we have basically a huge kind of tech stack of Fathom, HubSpot, Softr, obviously email is comprised in there as well.
Those are probably the big four, right? I would say. And then Google Meet, of course, we use Google Meet for just about all the actual meeting stuff.
Irina (22:39 – 23:37)
Now, I want to wrap this conversation by asking you about one habit or one way of thinking or something that you learned the hard way early on in your career, because you went through, you have a very, your background has multiple pieces, it’s a puzzle for multiple industries, vertical. You basically went into customer service, into media production, into instructional design, education, and now also the CS part. All combined gives you a unique view, a unique perspective.
And I’m basically curious of what do those little pieces individually impact on what you deliver now? What did you learn from each and every one?
Patrick (23:38 – 26:04)
Yeah, that’s a great question as well. So I would not characterize myself as a salesperson, right? Which is probably why we’re hiring salespeople, right?
It’s like, I’m super passionate, but haggling over prices and deals and stuff, not exactly something I like to do, or that I’m necessarily good at, I would even say. But one thing that I am good at and that I like doing is helping people solve problems, helping educate people, and helping just the satisfaction that I get from seeing people be successful is very rewarding, right? And I think that carries over even from education.
When I worked at the university and did instructional design, it’s thrilling working with faculty, like helping them design curriculum and design activities to their students and hearing their feedback about the students love this part, but they hated this part. And so taking that reaction and those responses and applying it to the SaaS world is very similar. And a lot of kind of what I do in CS is very similar to the university in that it involves a lot of different disciplines for one, media production, kind of curriculum design, feedback loops, right?
But also just personal, interpersonal skills, right? Being able to communicate, being able to be empathetic towards people when they have issues. And a lot of those same things have transferred from place to place.
Obviously, I’ve learned different things at different places. I would say at Softer, more of the sales, paperwork, sales processes, that is really the stuff that I’ve learned very heavily about working at Softer. But the support piece, I learned very heavily at Adalo where I was previously.
And then obviously the education piece at the university. And yeah, all three of those things are really great for CSMs in my opinion, because I’m able to hopefully identify problems, help people find solutions to them, and then guide them and help them be successful. And then the great part is that I get to see people come back after they built their app and they’re like, Hey, we built this app.
I can’t wait to show it to you. I have a lady that I met with yesterday. She’s building an app for her business.
And she’s working with a partner to do it. And she’s so stoked. And she’s already trying to schedule a meeting with me months in advance to show me what she’s built or what they built together.
So it’s really exciting to be able to see that kind of stuff. And it’s really rewarding. But it is really interesting to see how all those different places wrap up together.
Irina (26:05 – 26:34)
Patrick, this was a really interesting conversation. Not many CSMs come into the seats through instructional design and at a platform where customers are actually building things. So thank you for getting me the chance to basically showcase your story.
To everyone listening, thanks for tuning in. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning, and mastering customer success.
