Matik takes the grunt work out of customer success reporting

One of the job responsibilities of a Customer Success Manager (CSM) is keeping customers updated on how their company's product or service is helping customers. Quarterly business reviews, monthly updates, and other reports are important to show business value. But they also take time to create and can keep a CSM from the real work they need to do. Matik wants to change that. 

Nik Mijic is the co-founder and CEO of Matik. He worked for several start-ups early in his career, including one in the customer success tech space. He later worked at LinkedIn on the Insights team, where he helped build out internal tools and narratives for success and sales teams.

One of the things Mijic did while at LinkedIn was rebuild an internal tool that automated the QBR (quarterly business review) process. Product marketing or sales enablement would create templates for reports such as business reviews, inserting placeholders where content and data would need to be added for a particular account.

The CSM would take the template, make a copy, and then proceed to pull together the data from various business systems. Creating these reports was time intensive, but they knew it was important to create and share them with customers because it drove better business outcomes. Mijic said that when you could clearly show customers product adoption, higher renewal rates, lower churn, or net new business, you are proving your product's or service's value. And it worked very well at LinkedIn, he said.

He also realized there was an opportunity to automate the data-gathering process that took up much of a CSM's time. So, with Zak Stein as CTO, he started Matik in January 2019. After doing research, they found that many companies faced this challenge. So they built a prototype out of his apartment and raised a seed round with Menlo Venture at the end of 2019.

What does Matik do?

If you want to save time building reports, the obvious answer is automating the data collection process. And that's what Matik does. Supporting customer success and sales teams, Matik automates data-driven narratives and content in the form of PowerPoint or Google slide presentations, including ROI decks and calculators, quarterly business reviews, adoption reviews, and account reviews.

An administrator connects data sources to the product, such as the CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot), Big Data databases (Google BigQuery, Snowflake), Google sheets, and other data via API. It then queries the data for the reports; it does not ingest the data. Admins can create presentation templates that include specific data or content placeholders. In some cases, it's a simple lookup field; in others, it's a SQL query. Content can be text-based, an image, or other content that the presentation software supports. You can also set up charts or tables and have the data feed them.

CSMs go into the product, select the template they want, input some filters like account and date range for the report, and then Matik goes out to all the required systems, pulls the data, and adds it to the report. Administrators can also set up rules-based logic that applies rules to the template. For example, admins can create a rule that states if a metric was under a certain amount, then delete the slide that shows that metric from the presentation.

Once the report is built, the CSM downloads it and can open it in their preferred presentation software (or in the case of Google Slides, it opens directly in the software), making any changes they want. Mijic said they realized everything couldn't be automated, so by providing the report in presentation format, CSMs could easily open it and make the necessary updates.

Mijic pointed out that Matik is not a new presentation software product. It creates PowerPoint or Google Slides that end users download and edit. Once the presentation is downloaded, that's the end of Matik's role in the process. The presentation is not linked to the data sources – it is a point-in-time view of the account data.

Who wants this type of software?

Mid-market companies that find their customer success teams are spending more time building reports than strategically engaging with customers will want a tool like Matik because it dramatically shortens the time required to build reports. It's also a good tool for pre-sales and salespeople to build ROI calculators or pricing proposals for prospective customers.

Another benefit of Matik is that it helps keep CSMs and sales on brand and using the most up-to-date templates. And it ensures the data is accurate by eliminating the need for error-prone manual calculations.

Matik's own account team uses its software to send customers one pagers showing how their CSMs or sales people are using the software, he says: 

And that's kind of the big thing that we're driving our customers to do as well with their clients, is how do you take this data, turn it into data-driven content that shows value and adoption, which think about with the current economic climate? I think that's at the forefront of every leader's mind right now is how do we show better value to our customers, right? Especially as budgets get tighter, that's going to be the key, and you show value through the data and being able to tie it to the business outcomes that they initially purchase your product or service.

Where does Matik go from here?

In 2021, Matik raised additional Series A funding with Andreessen Horowitz, and it has plans to evolve the product in several ways. One thing on the roadmap for the first part of this year is to integrate with Office 365, so a presentation can open in PowerPoint online.

But Mijic also sees other trends with digital CES. For example, companies are looking for a way to ensure that every customer gets an ROI one-pager every month or a regular QBR. To do that, Mijic wants to enable Matik to send a report programmatically and help with distribution via email. Matik is also expanding its suite of integrations, including Gainsight, Catalyst, and other data sources, to provide even richer reporting.

My take

The number of use cases was apparent when I saw how the product worked. This is a great tool for customer success and sales. But it's also a tool with many internal use cases, from marketing reports to executive briefings, department updates, etc. All it requires is someone to develop the template and make it available. 

Mijic agreed that there are wide-ranging use cases, but his team is focused on supporting the needs of customer success and sales right now, which makes perfect sense. It can be easy to say your product works for everyone, but nuances might get lost when trying to support every team and use case.

I'll also add that at a time when everyone is talking about Artificial Intelligence, it's nice to find that every product that provides value to companies doesn't need an AI story.