How Egidijus Pilypas Enhances SaaS Growth through Strategic Customer Retention

[00:00:03] Hector: Hello and welcome to another episode of the how to scale a business podcast. My name is Hector Santhia Esteban and I'm your host for today. And we're here with Eggers, Pelley bus, and he's the founder of Exocaster and host of the CVM stories podcast. And,I'm appreciative of you and your grace being here. IThanks for taking some time today.

[00:00:22] Egidijus: thank you for having me here.

[00:00:23] Hector: Your thing is customer value management. I think what's really cool is that is probably something that impacts so many businesses that don't even know what that is. Educate us on what that is and then catch us up a little bit on how you got, to helping businesses with that.

[00:00:41] Egidijus: okay. I'll start from a, brief longish story of how we ended, up here because we didn't start from customer value management. It all started pretty randomly almost 20 years ago, when I was studying statistics in university and I met one crazy professor who at that time was obsessed about machine learning and artificial intelligence, that 20 years ago. And, at that time, I was the guy, who actually learned, the latest, greatest, AI tools, to work with. And, we together, that professor tried to conquer the world by trying to predict the financial markets. But after three years, of trying and losing all my money, I called to my friend. from telco industry and, said, Hey, Sharona, I have the best algorithms in the world, but I don't have a business problems to solve, and, then Sharona said, Gideus, I hear you.

[00:01:39] Egidijus: I have a problem for you. can you predict which customers will leave the operator, or switch from one mobile carrier to another? And I was like, Yes, of course, this is what machine learning does prediction. But what we did there, it's,we did some pitches, we got some early access to the data, did some prototypes, showed that we can do the, we can predict the churn.

[00:02:04] Egidijus: And, this is, how we got our first contract. And this is where the Exacaster as a company started as doing the term prediction for the customer. So basically, predicting when your customers will stop using our service. But at the same time, after we delivered our first product, what we understood is that even though we are extremely good at predicting customer behavior, companies are not very good with the customer data, meaning they provide us bad data.

[00:02:36] Egidijus: We provide bad predictions and the business outcome is Bad, so at the same time, we created our second business line, which was all about data management. And we got this part right. Now we get great data about the customer. We have great predictions about customer behavior. So who will leave, which offers would they like to accept, et cetera.

[00:03:00] Egidijus: And now we've got the third part when businesses said, Hey, so how should we use those predictions to drive our revenue and drive better customer experience? So this is where we ended up in customer value management. which is all about analyzing individual customer behavior, predicting that behavior and understanding customer experience and basically managing that customer experience and customer value so that both businesses would achieve their business targets.

[00:03:37] Egidijus: But customers would Get the most of the value out of, the business as well. So basically getting this win win situation. So this is how we ended up in that customer value management area. So

[00:03:51] Hector: So you went back,you had a process, you had a product, you had something, and then you went and looked for a market. Yeah. And That's not always the advice given necessarily, a lot of times our biggest challenges become, the biggest blessing.

[00:04:06] Hector: So was there. Good things that came from that or was there things that you either learned or had built into to the system take us back to that and how you were able to actually overcome that and maybe even leverage that a potential strength

[00:04:21] Egidijus: I said, We started working with machine learning and AI 15 years ago. And at that point of time, we were super bright. We were talking about the things that we are talking today, But, what we,so we had a great product, but our market was not ready to accept that product.

[00:04:41] Egidijus: So the challenge was that we were educating the market. And even though we had a great product, we had to build other products. That would put, let's say, the machine learning product in a context and would allow it to work. in this case,the learning was that if you need to educate your market, with a super new product or super fancy product, it will be a really tough job. so we as a company needed to build basically three business lines to stay in business. And because we needed to serve through these different products. And this turned out to be, both, really good and bad experience. Bad experiences comes from you as a company, so who are we?

[00:05:27] Egidijus: Are we a product company or are we a service company? Are we a data company or are we a customer management consulting company? there are many,existential questions. But at the same time, the blessing was that during the good and bad times, one product line, during the bad times, one product line might go down and the other goes up and you have a really good balance in the long term, to grow and evolve and, the opportunities that are actually evolving in those three different product lines.

[00:06:04] Egidijus: Helped us out in a really challenging situation, the ones like, I don't know, your biggest customer is canceling our contract, or there is a pandemic and some services, they are closing, but we know others are starting to grow, et cetera. yeah, that, that would be some learnings that we took from this adventure.

[00:06:24] Hector: I think it's, there's a lot to say about being ahead of the market, having a product that the market isn't ready for and what you can do. In that instance, and I think another thing that you, I'm curious if that was the only phone call that you made or if you were out there making lots of those phone calls saying, Hey, I've got this great product.

[00:06:46] Hector: I don't know what to do with it. did it just happen that you like called the right person the first time or were you out there shopping that around?

[00:06:54] Egidijus: that first person whom I called, it was my previous boss. So I knew him , and it was, a second lucky accident. if I would have made a call to other we wouldn't probably have a good match, so this was a lucky, a lucky shot.

[00:07:08] Egidijus: we as a company, afterwards, we did, invest a lot of, in, other, research and development initiatives with other products that were, let's say, ahead of the market. And, many of them, died, without receiving that,friendly answer on the other end. Bye. So yeah, it's the first product, it was, super lucky other products didn't get, so

[00:07:34] Hector: the last thing I want to get before we go to break is you mentioned that you guys had, some conversations about, are we a products company? Are we a service company? Are we a data company? I think that's a very important decision because that sort of identity shapes subsequent decisions, or it makes certain paths clear, or if that identity is not clear enough.

[00:07:58] Hector: Then all of a sudden those other decisions become much more challenging. Can you take us through how you guys landed on where you landed and what some of the, what were some of the variables that you were considering and maybe some of the implications that led to later on?

[00:08:13] Egidijus: yes,I would say we are still, reinventing ourselves, every three to five years because the technology stack changes, et cetera. but I think the crucial point for us was when we defined our purpose as a organization because all our products and services, they're interdependent from one another.

[00:08:35] Hector: And, when we started thinking about that, we understood that our purpose as organization is to empower others to use data for good. And to create impactful change to their business. When we think through this lens, both creating data services and creating machine learning services and also doing customer value management services, it's all about empowering our customers to use data for good, Yeah. When we get back from break, I guess I'm curious, a lot of our might not be ready to be able to leverage some of your tools to the most, but I'm sure that they can. Utilize some of the insights or utilize some of the things that you're learning. And so I'm just curious what it is that you're learning and we're going to get into that when we get back from this quick break.

[00:09:33] Hector: Hey, y'all, today's episode is brought to you by Amplify Media. And we are a podcast and content creation company. we like to think of ourselves as platform builders because chances are you have a passion, a product, a mission, a message. Something that you want to get out to the world, but you may not have the time, the team, or the tech skills to be able to do that.

[00:09:49] Hector: if that's the case, we can help go to amplify media. com. That's a N P L a F Y media. com. You can also check the show notes for info. And with that, let's get back to the episode with these.

[00:10:02] Hector: we were talking a little bit before that you get a lot of data and there's a lot of learnings in there. And you've been on this AI thing For much longer than most of us who, recently picked up chat GPT. And so I'm curious, a lot of our businesses are service providers.

[00:10:19] Hector: their digital service providers. and maybe they're not at the scale at some of these telecom companies. However, are there insights? Are there things that you're learning from some of these come working with some of these companies that might or could apply to industry, across industries or across kind of categories, if you will.

[00:10:38] Egidijus: yeah, so I could give, let's say,the simplest advice, for any businesses who have their customers. It doesn't matter how well they are educated with the data and machine learning. I would say, think about your customer and about your customer's moments of truth. And moments of truth are the moments in time when they Make a decision to have a business with you or to have, let's say, to extend the business with you or to cancel the business with you.

[00:11:14] Egidijus: just to give, let's say, an example from, telco, industry, yeah? It's like when you come walk into the store, And you start,chatting with,let's say people in the store. This is the moment when you probably will build a lot of business, for that telco or for whatever service provider that you are talking because at that moment of time, you will make the purchase, you will make your decision to stay or to purchase, let's say, your new device, et cetera.

[00:11:44] Egidijus: And these moments of truth. They are, we only have a couple of them, in the touch points between us as businesses and our clients. And if you really think well about them, you will find that you have five or six or maybe ten moments of truth. Which you really need to handle well to actually build,your business or to influence your customer's decisions at that specific moment of time.

[00:12:15] Egidijus: And if you do it right, your customer lifetime value, or the total amount of value that customer can bring to your business. would be huge. You will win a lot. So yeah, that would be my kind of smallest advice from this area.

[00:12:33] Hector: Are there anything that you are looking forward to or that you're excited about or maybe it's things that are. that perhaps are coming to, the technology is not quite there yet, but that you are, you're able to see because you can connect the dots or are there things that you're excited about?

[00:12:50] Egidijus: yeah. I am a total data geek and a totally AI geek. So I am definitely, really excited about how the data and AI is connecting together and how we will all leverage the capability that tools like Chad GPT brings to us. And, in this part, it's I want to be the guy who integrates,Chad GPT capabilities with my brain the first, To, to get that advantage, to get this know how and capabilities,for both business and my personal life,

[00:13:30] Egidijus: this part, I would say, learning how to explore, how to leverage All the know how which is condensed into ChatGPT type of tools. it's the biggest leverage that you can get right now for your business.

[00:13:48] Hector: Yeah, it seems like there's a window here where the people that. Both because it's the wild West, and I don't know that it's going to stay the wild West for forever. So I think that it's either going to get a lot more expensive or there's going to be a lot more restrictions on some of these things.

[00:14:06] Hector: and then also, like you said, the ones who, ultimately everybody's going to end up adopting it in some sort of capacity. And so the ones that are the early adopters of the early integrators. perhaps have an outsized advantage. And so I think that's just a really good point.

[00:14:22] Egidijus: Yeah, advantage will be huge. I don't know how it will end up, as nobody knows. But the only thing I know it's that advantage will be huge. And, The other thing which I see that the adoption is not so huge as,there is a buzz, I see a huge window of opportunity, for,part of businesses to leverage that.

[00:14:45] Hector: Yeah, and to that point, I think there's A lot of people who are trying it out and they're dabbling, very few I find are really thinking about how do I integrate this? Like you said, not only it's my business, but it's my personal life. And how do I really maximize the tools that are here? Because I just don't think, I know that most of the people that I'm interacting with aren't thinking about how do I use AI on a day to day sort of basis and I think that's eventually where we'll be.

[00:15:20] Egidijus: Yes, definitely. I use it,I don't know, I use for 10 different use cases per day. From teaching my daughter to do some, crazy stuff, to, teaching myself to speak some other language, to discussing,and getting opinions of what, let's say, Elon or Steve Jobs or, whatever other business guy would do in my situation with that context, you can leverage, from very different perspective.

[00:15:48] Hector: Very fun stuff. I have to always pace myself when it comes to AI, because I nerd out and geek out similar to you. And I know that not everybody's quite there, but if people want to get more, more from you and can go deeper into your world, where's the best place to do that?

[00:16:04] Egidijus: we have launched our, podcast, which is called the CVM stories podcast, and here we share the industry know how about how to do the customer management. So if people are interested in this topic, I really encourage you to join and listen.

[00:16:21] Hector: And we'll link that up in the show notes as well. And we want to thank you for being here. I got one more question for you is in your opinion, what is the secret to scaling a business?

[00:16:33] Egidijus: think it's, all about, Trust and confidence that the value that you create is a really true value so that you could,bet all your time and all your money and all your effort on scaling that,that value.

[00:16:50] Hector: Yeah, you heard it. Go get connected with egus. we appreciate all of you for sticking with us. If you made it this far, we would appreciate our rating or review wherever you get your podcasts. And if you know someone who's in the midst of scaling the business and needs to hear this episode and hit that share button and send them a text, let them know you were thinking about them.

[00:17:08] Hector: And, as always, we appreciate you being a part of the tribe here. We'll see you on the next one. Later y'all.