Keeping disparate teams aligned
Seth Terbeek — Hi, my name is Seth Terbeek. I'm Vice President of Customer Transformation at DrFirst. DrFirst is a healthcare IT company. We serve doctors, physicians, EMRs, hospitals. We've got about 400 employees, around 2,000 customers in total.
And when we think about what's difficult for our business, it's really as we've continued to scale and grow, making sure that all these disparate functions that it takes to onboard a customer and really give them a great experience are working well together.
We've got professional services in one platform, customer success in another platform, support in another platform, and there was just no interaction and collaboration that everyone could see singularly what was going on with the customer in one place.
Many teams, one tool
The main driver for us exploring a post-sale solution that would help our teams really function as a team and a unit together for our customers was that we had three separate markets we were serving at the time and individual teams doing that.
So with that, there was a lot of, one team does it one way, another team does it differently, and we did not have a unified tool to really help us facilitate that across all of our customers and our teams. And so with that, we saw there's a lot of opportunity to drive efficiency for our business as we scale an improved customer experience and really help our employees be excited to work together and really have a platform to help them communicate.
We actually went to market and did an analysis of all the different customer success platforms in the market that we felt met our needs. So there were four vendors that we looked at, and we did a pretty deep analysis with each of them. We had basically an RFP sort of approach that we went through, okay, here are the requirements we have, and then here's a scale of how we would rate everyone in that process.
And so we went to each of the vendors, saw their demos, looked through everything, and what we realized is that if we're going to make customer success and a single platform work, we need to have everybody in that platform. And that was a big selling point for Planhat, that we could bring in all the teams around the customer. Whether they're deeply involved or whether they're just tangentially involved and only need to look at it a little bit, but it gives us the way to start to make it a unified function for the business and really help us be more customer centric as a business.
The cost of tool-hopping
It's funny, when I brought Planhat into the company, people were like, why are we bringing in Planhat? It's like, well, let me show you. So I said, 'Hey, I need to go look up this customer in our ERP' and we go look 'em up. Like, I wonder what their usage is. Okay, well, I need to exit the system. Go into our data warehouse, check that out. Oh, and hey, I got to log in. Okta's going to prompt me to approve all that, and it was just such a difficult process. People are like, wow, this would be a really big improvement when we get this up and running.
Now when I'm on a customer, I don't have to pause, go log into another system, go pull up that report, pull up that customer, and then look at the data. So because I'm now in the system, we have our CSM teams coming to us saying, this is one of the most powerful things in Planhat that I can see the data about the customer when I'm thinking and on the customer, which has been huge.
So they really appreciate that, and it gives them an efficiency gain that's really impressive. And then allows them to really think about how they can leverage that for the customer and really strategize on it without losing that train of thought
Findings at your fingertips
The ability to say, okay, I'm planning out my business review, or I'm planning out the next meeting with this customer. I'm looking at what their objectives are. Then I can go and immediately see how are they doing? What does their data look like? How are they performing? What's their utilisation?
That is so powerful that our teams can then start immediately thinking, all right, how do I have to change my strategy? What questions do I need to ask? Who do I need to talk to internally or externally with the customer is a game changer for us.
One of the things we've done a lot of is: we'll run NPS and then we will be able to have a dashboard that gives us all the information that we need. That used to take me a huge amount of time. So we'd run NPS through a survey system, we'd gather that, get all the feedback. Then you'd have to do Excel, spreadsheets, like all this stuff that I can just design some filters and it's right there ready to go, which has been really amazing.
And so people are really excited to get into Planhat. They're asking us, 'Hey, when is our team going to be onboarded to Planhat?' They want to really understand how they will get involved and be able to support making things better for the customer.
Vice President of Customer Transformation
DrFirst
Seth is a senior customer and operations leader with over 18 years of experience driving impact across healthcare technology. As Vice President of Customer Transformation at DrFirst, he leads cross-functional initiatives that improve retention, expansion, and customer experience at scale. Over nearly two decades at the company, he has held multiple executive roles, including VP of Customer Success and VP of Operations, where he launched new markets, scaled teams, and rebuilt core delivery processes. Known for his strategic clarity and operational depth, Seth blends executional rigor with people-first leadership.
