Dexterity Talks with Paul Bichsel
In early August we met up with Paul Bichsel, CEO & Founder of SuccessCX (https://www.successcx.com/) to discuss the opportunities and challenges facing start-ups in 2024.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do?
I founded SuccessCX about seven years ago. We help businesses improve their customer experiences to drive loyalty and business growth. We have now grown to a team of ten.
How did you get here?
I actually started out studying landscape design at Victoria College. I really liked the design part of it but it was otherwise pretty gruelling. I transferred into studying a Bachelor of Computer Science at Monash University.
My first job out of uni was at a Telstra subsidiary, which was pretty old school IT. Despite this, we worked on some pretty exciting things for the time. I remember a project we worked on, building a solution to stream video over a network. Ubiquitous these days, but in 1990 it was cutting edge stuff.
After that I had a number of different roles in the tech industry leading up to my time at Zendesk. Before I started SuccessCX, I was running the professional and success teams for Asia Pacific based at Zendesk Melbourne office.
What does a success team actually do?
We were responsible for the customer’s successful adoption of the Zendesk platform. When customers signed up to cloud software, the success team ensures successful adoption and the customer gets speed to value from the service.
What made you want to start a business?
I felt that I could offer clients a more personal touch by starting my own business. It is difficult to do that when you are part of a large corporation, with different priorities. Having local experience and cultural sensitivity can be very helpful for a client when they are otherwise having to deal with a behemoth organisation. A tech vendor tends to focus purely on the technology, whereas we think people and process considerations are just as important for best outcomes.
What has been your biggest challenge in business?
For small businesses there is a lot to juggle and it’s easy to get distracted with spending time on immediate, low priority tasks. This makes it hard to focus on the more strategic items that may have no immediate payoff, but will help grow and sustain a business for the long term.
To improve the quality of our offerings, we’ve recently implemented a continuous improvement program. All team members pick-up one item every two weeks on our kanban board to work on, which goes to improving the business in some small way. This helps every team member to think about, and rise above, their day job. Over time, we are seeing marked improvements being implemented, which makes our lives easier and delivers better outcomes to our customers.
What’s your advice for advisors (be it accountants, lawyers etc) when dealing with start-ups?
For us, we want to receive what we try and give to our customers: a personalised service. We really appreciate it that our accountant comes in and meets with us face to face. It makes a real difference to the relationship. On top of that, it’s important to feel that they are being proactive with our individual needs and situation. We don’t want to feel like we are just a number and they are only going through the motions.
What do you most enjoy about your role?
The best part of being a founder is that you start with an idea in your head and develop it into something tangible with lots of twists and turns along the way. You build a team of individuals who come together, grow along the journey, and make their own mark on the business. The downside is you do need to get comfortable with nothing being perfect.
Paul Bichsel, thanks for speaking with us!
Dexterity Talks is a web series of interviews with founders, investors and advisors in the Australian start-up scene. This interview was conducted by Pippin Barry (BA, JD), an Australian lawyer and the principal of Dexterity Law.
