Digital for the people! | TDSU Ep. 21

Dillon: [00:00:13] What's up Lifers, and welcome to The Daily Standup. Your destination for just a dash of customer success content every single day. I've got JP here. JP, do you want to say hi? Rob's here. Rob do you want to say hi?

Rob: What's up dashers?

Dillon: We've got Julie. Julie, do you want to say [00:00:43] hi?

Julie: Hi.

Dillon: And I'm your host, Dillon Young.

Julie, thank you so much for being here. Do you want to introduce yourself?

Julie: Sure can. I am Julie Fox. I am a CS leader that has experienced both building CS teams from the ground up, as well as helping grow and scale more mature companies and CS teams as well. I am the Global Director of CS for Cin7 and excited to be here.

Dillon: And that's relatively new [00:01:13] news, so congratulations.

Julie: ...time I think I've ever said it out loud. So this is brand spanking, new hot off the presses.

Dillon: And we got it on wax, that's perfect. So Julie, you know what we're doing here. We want to hear from you. What is the number one topic about customer success that's on your mind?

Julie: Okay. So what I want to talk about is that digital CS is for everyone. It's for all. No. It's for all customers. Not just for low ARR and especially not for [00:01:43] junior level CSMs. Do you want me just to dive right in?

Dillon: I want to say I've been on this train for a little while and the way I think about it, tell me if this is in line with where you're going with it is... I believe that there's a lot of "digital" motions that can build a foundation of communication and enablement, regardless of the size of a customer or type of user.

Am I saying the same thing you were saying?

Julie: Yeah. Yeah. I think there's layers here. [00:02:13] So I guess the way I look at this, two different angles. One is if I have someone amazing on my team, so this is thinking of this from the internal lens, and I'm talking like best-of-the-best person on my team. I don't want to have them only be spending time with a select few customers.

I want to amplify them. And in fact, I want to use digital CS and kind of these different resources that you're mentioning as a way to better support all customers so that my absolute best people can not only spend their [00:02:43] time in a more productive, proactive, more human way where they're really needed.

But also I want to have them spend more time with customers in a more amplified way. So I want to build up a scaled CS team that I can find best-of-the-best people that I can have a true team of experts because I'm going to be taking all of their amazingness and amplify it to more customers.

So I want my best people that are able to now be the face, the voice of the team.

Dillon: So that's [00:03:13] an interesting angle that I've never thought about of the way your high performers think and treat their customers. If you can find a way to... increase their coverage, not lose that feel or that experience while delivering that experience to more customers.

That's a really interesting way to think about it.

Julie: And honestly, what a dream for a CSM. It's like you're taking away some of the more mundane administrative-type tasks, the things that they [00:03:43] may not love doing. And you're saying, "Okay, I want you to take the stuff that you're really good at. I want you to do more of that. But I also want you to do it for...

more customers. I want you to be the one hosting the webinars or writing up the email programs and different things," and basically helping amplify the way they think the way they interact with customers and broadening that reach that they have.

Dillon: So, JP, from your perspective, as somebody who's sitting in seat, you are a manager of customers, [00:04:13] does that resonate with you and what are your second level thoughts about what Julie just said, if your boss came to you with that pitch? What sort of questions might you ask?

JP: What kind of ingredients in the secret sauce? What's-- of course I, I, I want to be able to like, do that and I know that in the day to day, part of the manager of customer success is managing competing tasks. And I think Julie, you were mentioning, you want to make sure that awesomeness that the CSMs have, maybe they're using that [00:04:43] in these very specific targeted ways.

I think I'm more curious about the how, but maybe that's part of the secret sauce, and you don't want to share that, but I would love to know, like, how that is, or if that's proprietary.

Julie: Oh, it's not. There's no secrets in CS. I feel like we're all here just to try to help each other. I think the way to look at it is...

First of all, you can, in talking to teams as well as using data to better understand when customers win, [00:05:13] what are the commonalities? Why do they win?

What's-- what is the good? As well as looking at the opposite side of that of, "Hey, when things do go wrong, when do they go wrong? Are there any trends that you can do?" And what you can start to do is think about. I think digital CS, at its core, it started as this more reactive thing of, "Hey, let's take our low ARR customers.

Let's take our low risk, low growth customers. And let's just basically take away a human and in place, we're going to give them all this 'digital' stuff. So we're going to give [00:05:43] them more resources, more emails. We're just going to drown them in stuff and take away the human." And what I'm talking about is completely different.

I feel like that was digital CS 1.0. This is maybe 2.0, where you're actually saying, "Let's take all this information. We know when a customer falls off, let's anticipate that. And before they even have to come to us and ask a question, let's give them what they need. Let's actually take them through, let's use in-app guides and walk through and all these different [00:06:13] things to be able to better bring customers together, but also to anticipate what they need and bring customers together in a way that helps them grow."

So I've tried a lot of things. I love office hours, love 1-to-many's, any opportunity to bring customers together, I think, is really magical and I've seen how that can really help for both product adoption as well as expansion and growth. Being able to have customers come together to learn and build and do stuff together.

But then using the automations and programs for more of that reactive stuff where it's more [00:06:43] of... instead of getting an NPS response, for example, and having a CSM be like, "Oh, here's my list of stuff that I need to do. I need to go send this template out to these customers." Automate that. Anything that can be automated, just automate so that then the CSMs time is spent...

actually building and doing things that matter more to the customer. And so it's, " If we know what we need to do, just automate it." And so I think that's where it's you got to start peeling things away instead of just piling on more and more on the CSM's plate.

Dillon: [00:07:13] Yeah. If you know what you need to do, and it's gonna be the same every single time. Take a human out of that experience.

Julie: And it doesn't have-- I mean, you can factor in persona. You can factor in role types and all this type of stuff. So it's, if I'm creating an automated type sequence, I usually have multiple versions of it where it's like, alright, this is going out to the CEO or this is going out to the champion.

This is what's going out to the system admin. This is what's going out to, like, the typical users. And that's how I think people-- that's how it doesn't feel as automated. It, arguably, it should feel [00:07:43] pretty personalized. Okay.

Dillon: Rob, take us out of here.

Rob: Julie, I just got to say, that brand, digital CS 2.0? Next level. That's really good. I like that. And I agree with where you're, where your head's at, that I, in my line of work, I get the privilege of hosting some workshops on this. A lot of times people come to the workshop thinking, "How do I get customers off my plate?"

Not, "How do I enhance my service level using digital tools?" So thank you for bringing that up. I [00:08:13] appreciate it.

Julie: Yeah, absolutely. I think truly, last thing I'll say, again, digital CS is for all customers and for all companies. I think it's something that helps improve the overall customer experience. Helps keep customers from-- customer success managers and teams from burning out and really drives results around adoption, retention and growth.

So, I think it's involved into something much bigger. So maybe that's... Digital CS 2.0 or whatever we want to call it, but it's here to stay. And it's only going to [00:08:43] continue to evolve and grow from here.

Dillon: One of us is gonna race out of here and buy that domain name, I'm sure. That's our time, Julie. Thank you so much. Hey, congratulations. So happy for you. Couldn't happen to a better person.

Julie: Thank you. I'm so

Dillon: Best of luck. Best of luck. Can't wait to hear more about it. And thank you so much for being a part of this. We'd love to have you back in the future.

But until now, until then, bye bye.

Julie: Bye guys. See ya.