Pretty much every company out there will tell you that they ‘put their customers at the heart of everything they do’, right? Well… At Spirii, we actually mean it.
That’s because our customers make up both sides of the eMobility coin – charging operators and EV drivers alike – and if either side can’t achieve what they’re trying to do, then the whole sustainable transport movement falls apart.
To ensure that doesn’t happen, we’ve built a world-class customer success department operating out of our Copenhagen HQ, and we recently sat down with a few members of the team to ask what ‘putting the customer first’ really means to them.
So, without further ado, allow us to introduce Thomas, Kristine, and Kasper…
Two kinds of customers, one unique team
“It changes a lot,” Thomas says when we ask what the team’s day-to-day roles look like.
“One minute we’re helping our partners get the most out of all our platforms or answering requests from new EV owners, and next we’ll be teaching new charge point operators how to manage their own customer support.”
As Kasper explains, that means that the team “touches all branches of the company, from development to management,” with topics ranging across “partner meetings, technical questions, and financial support.”
And Kristine tells us that the team has to manage those wide-ranging responsibilities with careful capacity planning: “We have a plan for each day which allows us to consider if we need to allocate more resources to specific areas. So that could be billing questions if we know we’re just entering a new month, for instance, where a bunch of customers will have recently been billed.”
“But because we’re talking to both end-users and partners, things can really vary,” Kristine explains.
“End customers want to talk passionately about their EVs, while partners want to talk about developing the best charging network solutions and features.”
For EV drivers, for example, our team spends a lot of time helping people get used to this brand-new way of motoring:
“The main challenges for EV drivers have always been range anxiety and where to charge,” says Thomas.
“We talk a lot with EV drivers about the general charging pattern of owning an EV,” Kasper adds. “For many of our customers, this will be their first electric car – and they usually have lots of questions around usage and charging at home, as well as public charging and how it all works from one app.”
Learn more about charging with the Spirii Go app:
[.text-center][.button]Learn about Spirii Go[.button][.text-center]
Thankfully,” Kristine says, “a lot of those questions are easily solved. But even when that’s not the case we can of course call upon the expertise of the team in our Network Operations Center, and – if needed – we’ll arrange a technician to make a visit.”
But those questions – and the kind of support queries the team receives – vary massively depending on who’s asking them. EV drivers’ needs are totally different from the people operating Spirii-powered charging networks.
So what does customer success look like when that’s the case?
“In my mind, customer success is about making both our customers and business partners successful in their specific use of our product,” says Kristine.
“By providing the best possible service and being proactive in solving any issues we see coming, we can help our partners continue to choose us instead of the competition.
“And the same thing goes for the end users: if we provide drivers with great service and problem-solving skills, they’ll be successful and happy in their use of our product.”
Kasper agrees. “I measure our success based on the customer’s goal,” he says. “If a company that hasn’t dealt with electric cars before wants to offer home charging or company car solutions to improve its carbon footprint and we help them do that, I count that as a success. If a partner wants to enter new markets because they’ve had great success in their current one with our services, I count that as a success.
“We have tons of different offerings, and many different partners, but ultimately we succeed when they succeed.”
A problem shared…
We wanted to know what the team thought it was that made Spirii’s customer success efforts stand out from the crowd, and we got two very clear answers:
- Rapid growth
- Collaborative curiosity
Growth first, then. Spirii’s only been around since 2019, and there’s a unanimous feeling amongst the team that they’re incredibly proud of what they’ve achieved in such a short space of time, as Kasper explains:
“I think it’s remarkable how far we’ve come with our whole setup – even in just the seven months I’ve worked here,” he says. “A lot of challenges have been resolved since I started.
This is a young company, and because of that you get to affect key processes with your own experience – it feels great being taken into account for big decisions and to personally improve things.”
“Seeing how fast new team members get up and running has been incredible,”
Thomas adds. “It confirms that we’ve pretty much perfected the onboarding flow, and are choosing the right people!”
Learn more about how we handle team onboarding at Spirii.
As for collaboration and curiosity, Thomas, Kristine, and Kasper are all keen to tell us how digging into problems and solving issues together are the best parts of their job:
“A lot of the customer or partner inquiries we deal with are complex, and not often things you can find an answer to in an FAQ,” Kristine says. “So the role requires a lot of communication across the whole team, asking a ton of questions, and relying on each other to contribute with our area of expertise.”
“Everyone wants to understand all aspects of the product,” says Kasper.
“So we work really closely with other departments and don’t shy away from asking questions if we don’t understand a process or feature.
The talks we have with product owners, technical analysts, and developers – where we share insight and experiences – have definitely helped improve the overall experience greatly.”
And, as Thomas puts it, that sense of collaborative curiosity also extends to how we want our customers to feel:
“In my mind, true success happens when you empower the customer to make changes or solve the problem themselves. When they’re included in the solution, it makes them feel self-helped rather than taken by the hand.”
Everything moving in sync
Ultimately, Spirii’s lucky to have a customer success team packed with talented, passionate people who want to help our customers make the most of the transition to electric vehicles. Or, as Kasper puts it: “I think good customer service is often described as exceeding expectations, and we’re able to deliver that because all of Spirii’s moving parts are in sync.”
“I think great customer experiences are built by acknowledging problems, listening to customers, and taking proactive control,” says Thomas in closing.
“My favourite part of the job is getting those ‘it worked, thank you!’ emails in the morning, chatting to colleagues over lunch, helping our partners in the afternoon, and going home knowing that I’ve helped a lot of people every single day.”