Meet the Team: Kiko Cvetanovski
Tell us a little bit about yourself, background, and role. How did you land here?
I started my journey with a degree in Literature from The Ohio State University, and worked as a library associate at a local public library where I found my passion for customer support. Afterwards, I joined a library software company, OCLC, where I made a transition into a customer support role. After some life changes that moved me to Seattle, I took on a customer success manager role at Ekata back in 2022. When I first joined, Ekata was undergoing a huge project transitioning customers whose use cases didn’t apply to the risk/fraud space. Part of that migration was to move customers over to Trestle, since we offer APIs for lead verification and enrichment purposes, so I met Jordan pretty early on.
I was drawn to the energy of building something from the ground up, a company still finding its footing, where I could roll up my sleeve and actually shape the experience for my accounts. I wanted the ability to work closely with my accounts and work with them to help find how our solutions meet their needs. That’s something that Trestle does really well, and what excited me most about joining the team. I’m now a Customer Success Manager here, and I really love meeting customers, understanding their business problems, and helping them right-fit our API solutions to drive more value.
What does your daily routine look like?
First of all, I work with customers–it’s in my title! A huge chunk of my day is dedicated to communication. I’m checking in on usage and volume, watching for API errors, hopping on calls, gathering feedback, and actually helping implement it.
And because I’m essentially the first Customer Success Manager here, I’m building out a lot of the systems that future CSMs will inherit. Building out a regular cadence with customers to inform them of new product releases, account onboarding, regular check-ins. I’m creating the framework from scratch.
What excites you most about Trestle?
The trajectory. We’re still pretty small, but I’ve watched the team grow so much since I started. The product is always evolving, too. Rollouts like Name Match Details and Phone-to-Name Confidence Score have introduced genuinely interesting problems to solve.
What I really love is how close we stay to our customers through all of it. There’s always an effort to continuously improve the product based on customer feedback and use cases that arise. That’s the biggest thing because again, we’re able to be fast and flexible for customers. Getting that shoutout from SFR Analytics was one of those moments that solidified, “Okay, we’re doing this right.”
What Trestle value do you relate to most?
I have to say Customer Obsessed. I’m constantly sending reminders about product updates, checking in on customer onboarding, listening to people’s feedback. It’s an essential part of my role.
My entire career is intertwined with the customer experience. I started out by working at a public library, where you’re constantly communicating with people and trying to figure out what they’re actually looking for. The key to any customer-focused role is understanding what a person wants, what they actually need, and how you can deliver the best outcome possible.
What’s one surprising thing that helps you do your best work?
There’s one sentiment I heard in a presentation at Ekata that stood out to me: At the end of the day, your job is building relationships with customers. You can’t treat it like a transaction. Being in customer success means deeply understanding their role, the pain points they’re experiencing, and ultimately how you can make their lives easier. I really took that to heart.
What’s a topic you could give a 5-minute impromptu talk about?
In terms of work, I definitely think I could talk about CRM data hygiene. I know the pain of looking through outdated customer information, inaccurate records where people are no longer working at the companies listed, or super generic use cases where you can’t glean anything from the description given.
Outside of work, I’m a huge reader. I could talk about literature for the rest of my life. I still have the Dewey Decimal System mapped in my head. Fun fact: the Dewey Decimal System was actually invented at The Ohio State University, and OCLC inherited the rights to the system. They’re a nonprofit group that spun off from the academic research society that created the system. That’s one of the things that makes OCLC such a valuable company, because they have the right to the most widely used system of organizing library information.
