We sat down to speak to Yarden Naveh, Director of Customer Success at Applitools. Yarden’s career path has combined his passion for innovative technology with his desire to make these technologies accessible to wider audiences. In this interview, Yarden talks about how a Customer Success role at Applitools links products and people with successful outcomes. He describes how, in his role, he enjoys working with a multitude of people every day. Through his work in Customer Success, Yarden continues to develop and apply his engineering and people skills across a varied and challenging array of technical projects.
Yarden is currently hiring for several positions within his team in the US and Israel. If you want to learn more about these, check out our jobs page.
Hi Yarden, it’s great to have you here! So, tell us what convinced you that a career in Customer Success would be a good fit?
Ever since I was very young I’ve always been interested in technology.
I started off my career as a software engineer. I enjoyed the technical challenges that the role brought with it. In that role, one is constantly presented with a new set of problems. One must challenge him or herself to come up with appropriate solutions with each project. Although technology is something that I’ve always enjoyed, I truly enjoyed and got energy from the people interactions. When it came to my project choices, I naturally gravitated towards the people facing projects. That’s my main motivation for going for a career in Customer Success. It allowed me to combine both skill sets.
Also, on a more personal note, my real understanding of how organizations work and the importance of efficient optimized processes came from back home: having two amazing parents, who have been very successful business people as a role model my entire life. The combination of business-oriented thinking, technical aptitude and the passion to work with and help people, also lead me to pursue this path for my career.
Could you tell us about what a day in your life in Customer Success at Applitools?
As Customer Success Engineers at Applitols, our customers are our priority. We interact with a range of people coming from very different types of organizations every day: from small businesses to large enterprises. This range presents us with a bunch of different problems to assess and resolve. Our best people demonstrate a great dexterity with context switching, constantly diving into a completely different set of problems.
Our customers’ success often hinges on integrating Applitools Eyes with incumbent third-party technologies. Each customer’s deployment is unique; it can involve different programming languages and technology stacks, operating systems, devices, integrations with open source and vendor frameworks, various CI and source control systems, etc. This can get quite complex! But luckily, this also means that no two days are ever really the same.
The role also involves cross-collaboration with other teams in the business. As our product develops and grows, it’s important for me and my team to be on top of the changes so that we can help our clients to get the best out of our services. This is why we work very closely and collaborate with the Engineering and Product teams, liaising between the two, while advocating for the needs of the customers that we manage.
Could you tell us about Customer Success at Applitools and how you define your mission?
My team goes on a journey with each customer and supports them through the process from demos to onboarding, through to training and development of best practices. As Customer Success, it is our mission to enable our customers to utilize Applitools technology to its full potential.
We currently have 12 people looking after Customer Success at Applitools: five are based in Israel and seven in the US. And, we are growing! We have several Software Support Engineer roles open in both Israel and across the US.
Our customer base is increasing much faster each quarter, so basically, we need more hands on deck. With a bigger team, we have aspirations to add more touchpoints to the customer journey and improve and scale the onboarding experience and in doing so, increase our customer number.
For people who are contemplating a career in Customer Success at Applitools, what qualities do you look for in a hire?
In this global team, you need to show that you align with our two main values. Firstly, you have got to be a people person with a customer focus! These are challenging roles that require people with savvy interpersonal skills – so you have to have a passion for understanding and supporting customer requests! We’re service-oriented and to excel you need to personally care enough about the customer and the value that you can help them achieve with the product. Secondly, you’ve got to be a team player. We work as a family and we look for people to fit into this process seamlessly and to synergize with everyone, collaborating with many other groups within the company to ensure that we advocate for our customers’ needs.
Beyond our team and people values, you need to demonstrate that you are technically adept. These roles offer the opportunity to those with the technical aptitude to broaden their abilities and apply these new skills at an exceptionally fast rate. Each day you’ll encounter new technical problems and will be challenged to create workable and manageable solutions for your customers.
These roles challenge our team to learn more about new technologies. We currently work a lot exciting and evolving automation frameworks like Selenium IDE, WebdriverIO & Cypress. In fact, many of our customers depend on our experience to help them increase their test automation effectiveness. We start by helping them deploy visual UI testing with Appitools Eyes; we end helping them become more efficient as a team. A lot of our team have deep experience in multiple programming languages and technologies, which they combine with their love of analytics and problem solving to offer our customers the best solutions.
In 12 months time, what do you hope to have achieved with your Customer Success team at Applitools?
I want to find some more great people to build out the team. I seek people with both technical and soft skills, as well as the cultural fit. We don’t compromise on these requirements because we want to learn and progress with each other while prioritizing our customers.
Our goal is to broaden our customer reach and demonstrate the value of our product in more meaningful ways. Our work directly translates to increased use of Applitools Eyes and the value our customers are getting out of it. We know that customer results drive our renewal business. We are metric-oriented and over the next 12 months, we intend to push our renewal numbers even higher.
With future releases in the pipeline, I know that Applitools has a lot to offer to all our customers. Our team is on a mission to help our customers get the most from their Applitools product. We want our customers’ integration and use experience to be as seamless and smooth as possible.
Has this article got you contemplating joining our team at Applitools?
Check out our open roles for information on how to apply!
Find out more about Applitools. Setup a live demo with us, or if you’re the do-it-yourself type, sign up for a free Applitools account and follow one of our tutorials.
Applitools develops powerful technology for visual testing. Here are some other posts that might interest you:
How I ran 100 UI tests in just 20 seconds
What Is Front End Testing in 2019?
Applitools Expands Left: AI Powered Ultrafast Visual Testing for Developers
