Turning Customer Experience into Operational Excellence with Paige McDonald

Paige McDonald is EcoMap’s Chief of Staff. Over the past three years, she’s moved from Implementation Manager to Lead Customer Success Manager to her current role, where she connects strategy to execution across the company. Her path through customer-facing roles gives her a ground-level view of what makes ecosystems successful and what they need from their technology partners. In this conversation, she shares what she’s learned about adoption, trust, and building systems that scale without losing sight of the people they serve.

You’ve moved from Implementation Manager to Lead Customer Success Manager to Chief of Staff in three years. How does your customer-facing experience shape the way you approach operations now?

My work with our customers has formed my instincts about what will work or won’t work, what needs to be urgent or high priority. When you spend enough time listening to customers struggle with a process or light up when something clicks, you develop a sense for what matters. All of our work has to be guided by our customers’ experience and needs. If we’re not doing right by them, we can’t be successful.

Implementation is where customers first experience a product. What did you learn in that role about what makes adoption successful versus what causes it to stall?

Clarity is everything. Clear expectations. Clear next steps. Speaking someone else’s language instead of expecting them to speak yours.

That lesson applies internally, too. If you’re arguing for a certain decision to be made, you need to be able to communicate to each stakeholder in the language they’ll understand. Adoption stalls when people feel lost or when the process assumes they have context they don’t have. Success happens when everyone’s aligned on the path forward and knows you’re there to lend a helping hand where needed.

As Lead Customer Success Manager, you worked directly with ecosystems trying to coordinate complex work. What’s a customer challenge that stuck with you and influenced how you think about EcoMap’s operations today?

I don’t think the way I think about operations is the result of any one customer, but rather the consensus I hear across the board. Both with customers and with operations, I’m always looking to connect the dots on things I hear multiple times from different sources.

Of course, an individual teammate or customer can have insight into a specific problem that would be valuable to solve, but I really try to notice where there are patterns. When there are, that’s what prompts me to spring into action.

Customer success in GovTech and ecosystem tech often means navigating long timelines and multiple stakeholders. How do you build trust when results take time to materialize?

Building trust has two facets: the personal and the professional.

Professionally, the most important thing to me is my word. If I make you a promise, I will do everything in my power to deliver. When I set an expectation or give you a yes on a request, the customers I’ve worked with know that it’s going to come to fruition. And if, for whatever reason, it doesn’t or can’t, they know that I’ll have a reason and a workaround prepared for them.

That melds with the personal side. I like to remember that we’re all people and get to know the folks I work with. If we all agree that we’re all people and our success or failure is tied to each other, then we can have a symbiotic relationship.

The Chief of Staff role is about connecting strategy to execution. How do you make sure customer insights influence company decisions and don’t get lost in translation?

I think all my team members know me for speaking on behalf of our customers. Sometimes I feel like a vessel for other people’s words.

That being said, I really try to push myself to think in terms of what people are trying to accomplish, not necessarily what they’re asking for specifically. For example, before we launched ERM, we had so many customers trying to hack their EcoMap to be able to track outcomes and other off-platform activity. They’d ask for specific features on their ecomap, but over time, it became clear they were asking for something far beyond that. That’s how ERM came to be.

Same with the Nonprofit Intelligence Dashboard. People had tried to do additional analysis on their ecomap data besides what was publicly available on that organization’s website. For some time, we tried to help them out with custom keywords and things like that, but we realized what they were really asking for was a richer layer of data analysis, the type that could only be uncovered in 990s, NAICS codes, and similar sources.

If you can make that extra push to understand what they’re trying to accomplish, not just what they’re asking you for, you can go a lot further a lot faster.

What systems or practices have you helped put in place to make sure EcoMap’s growth doesn’t come at the expense of customer experience?

As we grow, we’re becoming more obsessed with customer experience, and that starts with our product. We’ve recently launched the newest version of our flagship platform, EcoMap Discover, which was designed to address the most common feedback we’ve gotten over the last five years.

I’m managing migrating all of our customers over to that new and improved infrastructure, and the feedback we’ve been getting has been so rewarding. So many of our customers feel heard in terms of the changes we’ve made, and that genuinely brings a smile to my face.

That being said, it is still a big change, so I’m working one-on-one with every customer to develop a custom migration plan to help it feel as low lift and successful as possible.

You’ve seen EcoMap from multiple angles — implementation, customer relationships, and now company-wide operations. What’s something you think we do really well that customers might not see?

As corny as it might sound, the EcoMap team works together. At so many SaaS companies, sellers, product teams, and customer support are at odds with each other. Here, our Product team takes our customer-facing people and our sellers seriously, and vice versa. We have a lot of trust in each other.

From a customer-facing perspective, that means it’s so much easier to advocate for our customers. If I tell the Product team that more customers care about one thing over another that was already planned on the roadmap, they’re willing to adjust course. And on the flip side, if the Product team suggests an alternate way to accomplish a goal, I know they have a good reason behind it.

You’ve worked across product, sales, and customer success. What’s one thing you wish more people understood about how these functions need to work together?

I think we each hold a piece of the responsibility for understanding the people we’re building these things for.

Our sellers are on the front lines of the market. They’re hearing what the people who aren’t bought into our vision are asking for and the problems they’re trying to solve. Customer success hears where what we have succeeds or falls flat, and advocates for the most valuable improvements. And product is in charge of doing more pointed discovery and bringing together the feedback from sales and customer success into a cohesive, user-friendly, and scalable vision.

We can’t do it without each other.

As Chief of Staff, you’re helping shape EcoMap’s trajectory. What excites you most about where the company is headed?

We’re starting to see entrepreneurial ecosystem building (our bread and butter) as part of a larger economic development strategy. We’ve known for a long time that we need entrepreneurs and small business owners because they open up wealth-building paths for those individuals. But those entrepreneurs and small businesses are also responsible for almost all net-new jobs in our local communities.

So we’re starting to think about a broader picture of economic development that includes things like creative economies, workforce development (especially given the rise in AI), and maybe even tourism. Each of these components is tied to the other. If our ultimate goal is to help local economies thrive and localized economic developers do their jobs more easily and effectively, then we need to be helping those folks connect the dots.

When you think about the impact EcoMap has on communities, what part of that story feels most meaningful to you?

I want to live in a world where every community can thrive. I don’t want people to feel like they have to move away from where they’re from because the only good opportunities are in the biggest cities. I want them to be able to make the communities they live in and love into what they want them to be.

The reality is that in every community, there are people who are trying to make it easier to do that. But they have so much on their plates and are constrained by tight budgets and outdated systems. So I’m excited by the idea that we could be helping the people who are working so hard to realize that vision for their community.