Blurred lines | Joy Holmes | Ep. 102

[Rob] (0:00 - 0:08)

What's proactive and what's reactive? And to be honest with you, I think you guys are right that like the distinction is a lot blurrier than we give it credit for.

[JP] (0:14 - 0:15)

Yeah, let's go.

[Dillon] (0:17 - 0:30)

What's up, Lifers? And welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man, Rob here.

Rob, you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:30 - 0:31)

What's up, Lifers?

[Dillon] (0:32 - 0:44)

And we've got JP here.

JP, do you want to say hi? And we've got Joy with us. Joy, can you say hi?

[Joy] (0:44 - 0:45)

Hey, how are you doing, Lifers?

[Dillon] (0:46 - 0:53)

Happy you're here. Joy, thank you so much for being here. I am Dillon Young, your host.

Joy, can you please introduce yourself?

[Joy] (0:53 - 1:01)

Yes, my name is Joy Holmes and I am a customer experience expert. Can I say that?

[Dillon] (1:02 - 1:05)

No, you can say whatever you want. You can say you invented it.

[Joy] (1:05 - 1:08)

I'm a customer success expert.

[Dillon] (1:09 - 1:22)

Right on. Thank you so much for being here and for dedicating your time to this. Joy, you know what we're doing here?

We ask every single guest one simple question, and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success? So can you tell us what that is for you?

[Joy] (1:23 - 2:16)

Yes, I'm currently in the job market, which I'm not afraid to admit to. So I've been seeing a lot of customer service jobs or manager jobs that are mixed with sales. And having done this for over 20 years, almost 17 plus years, that's very skewed.

So I want to discuss how I feel like if you're going to be customer service management, you need to be in a full support role for what happens either before or after, depending on what the customer is, depending on what you're doing. You don't need to put in a lot of metrics, a lot of data. I know that's so important, but we're all customers at the end of the day.

So you have to decide how you want to be treated. Do you want to be treated like someone who's calling for support? Or do you want to be treated like somebody that's trying to buy something and you're trying to sell?

Comes out kind of car sales.

[Dillon] (2:18 - 2:24)

So let me just clarify. You mean customer service, customer success? Do you make a distinction there?

[Joy] (2:26 - 2:28)

I don't. I think they just made up a title.

[JP] (2:29 - 2:30)

Well, it's all made up.

[Joy] (2:32 - 2:50)

A customer is a customer. We're all customers. Am I going to be your success story?

Are you still going to give me service? I mean, you can say what you want, but a customer is a customer at the end of the day. So as a customer, I don't care about your data.

I don't care about your metrics. I don't care about any of that. I want help.

I want a refund, right?

[Dillon] (2:53 - 2:55)

Hey, I'm the same way.

[Joy] (2:56 - 3:25)

And if I'm having an issue, I don't want you to... If I'm a customer and I'm coming to your company, I've already purchased something. I don't want you to try to sell me something before we get...

I got X, Y, and Z, and you're trying to sell me A, B, and C. Let's figure this out. And if you're a salesperson, I feel like those sales should go back to your sales team.

They should get their commission. They should get the money. Because if not, it just goes to the house.

And we know that the higher ups always get hit.

[Dillon] (3:25 - 3:39)

You are packing in a lot of strings to pull on, and they all go back to a piece of dynamite. So I'm going to defer to my friend, JP, and he gets to pick one.

[JP] (3:39 - 6:55)

Let's light that dynamite. Let's light that dynamite. You know what I mean?

Let's light it up, baby. Come on. So look, I actually...

So I was hearing this and I was like, Oh, you keep saying customer service. And then something that's interesting is when I talk to people and when people are like, Oh, what do you do for work? And I'm like, Oh, it's customer success.

My chest puffs up a little bit. I don't know of a lot, but not like a lion, but like a penguin. You know what I mean?

Like customer success, it puffs up a little bit. I mean, I think that's because it's, Oh no, I don't do customer service. Like I do customer success.

Now, the other place where sometimes people may find it tough to make the distinction is if we're talking about customer support, right? So people hear that and say, Oh, so like customer support. You know, like to be like, yeah, not really.

You know what I mean? Not really. Now this is a point of pride, I think, amongst the customer success crowd.

But I think what you're actually doing in a way is actually calling out the role distinguishing. Because when you say we're all customers, I think that there is actually something to this because you are doing customer service. Everyone is really in a customer support role at a company, right?

Everything that you do, if you want to boil it down, is in support of the customer. That's the ultimate thing, right? And, but I think like when it comes to the role, let's say of like customer success and maybe what our role typically may entail versus something like sales.

I think that there's some overlap in terms of the skills or the things that we're going to use. However, there's a little bit of a difference in terms of, I think, philosophy that sort of leads to some of these differences. So like I work very closely with sales in my current capacity, which you'll find some CS, especially CS leaders will be like, wow, you're really fortunate that you get to work so closely with sales, right?

They'll say that. Now that means though, that I do have to, we do have to communicate a lot more. We do have to figure out what falls under whose purview, right?

I have to do more communication. And I think in that way, it's actually helped me in terms of figuring out more of the separation actually. So where the separation is versus where there's overlap.

Yeah, I think I'm just going to say for passage to Raj, you got so much to, but I think that there is a good call out because in a way you can say that customer success in a lot of ways, you can think of it as customer service. But I think that the small sort of distinction is customer service can, not that it has to be, but can be seen very reactive. And I think ultimately customer success tries to, wants to be proactive, though we do end up doing a lot of reactive stuff, which is why I'm like, customer success, not that bad.

Go ahead. Go ahead, Rob.

[Rob] (6:55 - 8:27)

No, no, no. I agree with you. I think that the important point that we're bringing up here, anytime I open up LinkedIn, I see this like big debate about what's proactive and what's reactive.

And to be honest with you, I think you guys are right that like the distinction is a lot blurrier than we give it credit for. I'm thinking of other examples that like I had a guy come to my house to fix my water heater. And while he's just talking about like the water heater installation, he's like, you can get this tax credit if you do this and that.

And I'm like, is this guy doing service or success? Or if I try to label this, technically it's like a service job. It's a reactive job that I had called him for, but he ends up just casually dropping all this advice that you would think of as very proactive, very quote unquote strategic and whatever.

And I think of other examples that I've come across where at one time I built a support team that generated more sales demos for upsell products than our sales BDR team was able to generate. And that was because we taught our support team how to think about the success of the customer. It's like, okay, you have a support service job, but you can take a moment every time you open up a customer page when they call in to look up the account, take a big, deep breath and understand what is happening with their business and ask them some more provocative questions that then help you find those opportunities for really proactive guidance.

So, I think the distinction is a lot blurrier than it needs to be. I think there's probably a lot of opportunity here that we don't tap into because we get so fixated on that distinction.

[Dillon] (8:29 - 8:36)

Joy, have we been helpful at all as you noodle this over or have we just made the waters muddier?

[Joy] (8:37 - 9:51)

Yeah, I think that you've broken it down. I'm not saying that. I think having worked in sales and I've considered it very hardcore.

When I first moved to New York, I was a sales rep for Verizon Wireless on their sales floor. And that's very cutthroat at the time. Everybody was getting the blackberries and things like that.

And then I moved over to customer service and we needed to know all of these things about customer service as you're like a little dictionary for your company because you know about the company, you know about the sales, you know about all the metrics, you know how everything works together. I think where I feel like the line is blurred and for the salespeople that I know work very hard is if I'm upselling something, which is amazing for the company because that benefits the company, but how is that benefiting my colleague? Your customer service team had better outcome than the sales team, which I don't know if our salespeople now just all salary, do they get commission?

I don't know how that works anymore because I'm not on that end of sales. But it's like, does that make them better salespeople? Does that make them better salespeople?

Could that create a very toxic type of environment? I've seen it play out. So that's, I'm just speaking from experience.

[Dillon] (9:52 - 10:18)

Yeah, I think they're all good questions to keep in mind. And it goes back to, I think, Joy, what we're saying or what I've heard a couple of times here is like just managing this perspective and understanding that every one of these scenarios is different. And how do you fit in?

And are you comfortable with the way the scenario has been designed wherever you are or wherever you're planning to go? So I love it. It's a great call out.

Joy, we are out of time, though. We'd love to have you back in the future. But for now, we've got to say goodbye.

[Joy] (10:19 - 10:23)

Oh, my goodness. It's been fun. Thank you for having me on.

This is really nice.

[Voiceover] (10:28 - 10:58)

You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at LifetimeValueMedia.com.

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