#FREECLIPPY | Emma Lo | Ep. 74

[Emma] (0:00 - 0:15)

If you think back, oh, PLG is so hot, everybody should go do PLG. And now, oh my gosh, partner led growth is so amazing. But like you said, it's ancient Greece, they did it before.

So it's nothing new. All these new ideas coming out in GTM world, they're not new.

[Dillon] (0:23 - 0:38)

It won't be in the final product. 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've got my man Rob with us. Rob, do you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:38 - 0:39)

What's up, lifers?

[Dillon] (0:40 - 0:43)

And I've got JP here. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:44 - 0:46)

What's up, all you Cabbage and Sour Patch Kids?

[Dillon] (0:48 - 0:51)

And we've got Emma here. Emma, do you want to say hi?

[Emma] (0:52 - 0:53)

Hi, everyone.

[Dillon] (0:54 - 1:04)

And I am your host. I personally love Sour Patch Kids. So thanks, JP.

My name is Dillon Young. Emma, thank you so much for being here. Can you please introduce yourself?

[Emma] (1:06 - 1:32)

Hi, lifers. I am Emma Lo. I am currently the manager of customer success at Noibu, e-commerce monitor system.

But I have a second job. I'm also the owner of CSM Focus, a customer success community in Canada, and also the podcast host for Spotlight, where we introduce customer success, where we work together with GTM partners. Okay.

[Dillon] (1:32 - 1:50)

Perfect. Perfect. I love it.

I love all of it. So you're active in the community, which is exactly what we want. You know what we're doing here, Emma?

We ask every single guest one single question. What is on your mind when it comes to customer success? And given everything you've got going on, I feel like you've got a good one.

So can you hit us with what that is?

[Emma] (1:52 - 2:27)

What's on my mind is about the digital CS space right now. Why is it interesting? Because I think this year is all about if CS is dead, it's a cost center.

All these have been involved. I know. All these have been involved till today.

And even at GameSight, we're talking about digital CS and AI evaluation. So where is it heading now? What is most special for me now is actually Noibu's enterprise software.

And we're adapting to this digital CS strategy and how to fit in. And that's all that's coming into my mind right now.

[Dillon] (2:28 - 2:49)

So let me ask you. Is the reason Noibu is adopting like a scaled motion or a digital motion on the enterprise side because you just have so many customers you can't and they're smaller, much smaller dollar value? Or is there another reason that Noibu is saying we've got to implement this strategy?

[Emma] (2:50 - 3:23)

Well, the biggest change is we did revamp our ICP. So we're more focused on enterprise segment. So we re-segment and then there is a low touch segment that need to be served.

And that's why digital CS or smart touch has come into place. It's an interesting time because everybody's still adjusting and figure out what does that mean in this space. When in the past, everybody is so used to like human touch, one-on-one account management or the CS way.

[Dillon] (3:24 - 3:52)

Particularly for enterprise, which is where I've spent most of my time. And so that's kind of what threw me for a loop is if you guys are shifting your ICP to enterprise, but also aiming your sites at maybe digital first or having a healthy portion of it be digital efforts. That's where I start to get curious.

But before you answer that, I want to give Rob an opportunity to either tell me I'm crazy or maybe what he got from what you described, Emma.

[Rob] (3:53 - 4:54)

I love this topic because it's putting a lot of our critical thinking skills to the test. So for anybody listening to this, who is making this leap and needs to think like, but you asked the question, what does it mean to implement digital customer success? Personally, my definition of it is that it's a set of strategies that leverage data and automations to produce customer outcomes, to produce retention, expansion, advocacy, all the positive outcomes that we associate and KPIs that we associate with customer success.

One of the interesting realizations that I had at one point was, I was like, is this really new? And I remembered the first time I used Microsoft Word, I was probably 10 years old and I had Clippy, Clippy came on the screen. Is Clippy digital CS?

Is Clippy the grandfather of digital CS? So I don't know. I mean, I think maybe in many ways, we're just going back to the origins.

[Emma] (4:55 - 4:58)

This one is really interesting. You have how old things become new again.

[Rob] (4:59 - 5:00)

And it's like, yeah, exactly.

[Emma] (5:01 - 5:02)

Same fashion.

[Rob] (5:02 - 5:07)

But it helped me wrap my head around what was otherwise a really feeling big amorphous problem.

[Dillon] (5:07 - 5:41)

I think this goes back to our conversation though about the difference between B2B and B2C, right? Of like B2C has had it figured out for a really long time just by way of the sheer volume of customers that they had. They couldn't possibly have high touch CSMs. And so they did other things, one of which was either make the product so damn easy to use that they didn't need anybody. That is a customer success effort. It's just not a CSM doing it. Or like in Microsoft's case, Clippy, where he tries to help you out.

JP, can you make up a good Clippy analogy, please?

[JP] (5:42 - 5:51)

Oh, this episode is going all over the place. Let me. Do you need a second?

[Dillon] (5:51 - 5:52)

Do you want me to throw it back to Emma?

[JP] (5:52 - 7:20)

I usually fall upon an analogy just by virtue of talking. So let's go that route. Because I'm thinking about like tuna sandwiches for some reason.

And I feel like that's just not gonna hit like the bologna sandwiches did before. So yeah, the one place you don't wanna find a paperclip is in your tuna sandwich, right? You don't wanna find one in there.

Now, what does that have to do necessarily with digital CS? Well, some people don't mind. They'll just take that paperclip out and toss it.

Those are the people that are good for digital CS. If they're gonna throw a fit over that and could be a threat to turning your whole tuna sandwich operation upside down. Well, then they sound like they're probably more like a white glove customer because not only are they upset, but maybe they have more power.

Now, to reel it in, just sticking with the tuna, really back in a bit. I will say, yeah, right? So like, I think whenever I think of digital, I think about all the customers that I've ever worked with that really didn't care about my emails.

Like they really didn't care and it didn't make a difference. They were fine. Like they're fine.

Everyone's like, you need to, how are they doing? Get in touch with them. See about a QBR, see about a check-in and they're doing their thing.

They're totally fine.

[Dillon] (7:21 - 7:24)

And on top of that, they're like, JP, leave me alone. I gotta do my job.

[JP] (7:24 - 8:35)

Exactly. They're fine. And so I think like digital CS is about how many customers do we have where they will be just fine using our product.

Maybe they probably have some element of being an ideal customer, right? And how can we just build an effort so that they can be serviced because they don't need that much. And if we do this right, they can basically service themselves at scale, whether that's through some chatbot or whether it's through, like we've seen the whole community thing, right?

Or even, I think that this is gonna be the new thing and it's very apropos and kind of meta, just content, people creating content, right? And you can use content at scale. A YouTube video like this one, hit subscribe below.

You can just, everybody can watch this. We spent however long we did on this, but it's scalable out. And so I think that there is a lot of gold here in the digital CS conversation.

It just has to be a little nuanced, but I think you figure out the threshold of which of the customers that like, really don't care if they have a paperclip in their tuna sandwich.

[Dillon] (8:36 - 8:57)

Emma, this is a choose your own adventure. You can go down the path of complete absurdity and talk about paperclips and tuna sandwiches, or you can keep us on the rails and talk about some of the strategies that you guys are now implementing at Noibu. Aside from YouTube videos, please subscribe.

Tell us kind of what you guys are doing.

[Emma] (8:58 - 9:12)

Well, this is, I would say it's ongoing. And I know digital CS means so many things in so many ways, like the paperclip or tuna, whatever. Yeah.

[Dillon] (9:12 - 9:13)

Be careful.

[Emma] (9:14 - 9:55)

I know, but I always believe what CS supposed to be doing is always meeting where the customer, where they need to be, no matter what strategy or how we go after. Doesn't matter digital touch or a gift at this very time or a call from a human. It's just, I think that's where it is.

And it's kind of interesting because now AI is everywhere. Suddenly you get 10 times emails in your inbox by different things, but are we actually meeting people at the right time, giving the right message, right time, right space, whatever. So it comes down to segmentation.

Are we doing that right?

[Dillon] (9:56 - 10:40)

Here's a question I have for you, Emma, that I'm eminently curious about with everybody we talked to that wants to talk about digital and scaled motions and automation, whatever you want to call it. What does your data situation look like today? And what did it look like prior to Noyboo making the decision to go down this route?

Were they smart enough to have thought about this at inception? And are they collecting a ton of data telemetry? And is it just kind of this cornucopia of information for you to base activities off of and decisions off of?

Or is that a challenge you guys are dealing with because you didn't start that kind of intake process from the beginning?

[Emma] (10:41 - 12:11)

It's quite interesting because we did realize how product, marketing, CS are calling the same customer different type of roles. Like product user, what's that mean? What do they do actually?

And like just to combine all these data together, like the cleanness, I think that was the first step we recognized as, and we did a big cleanup or how to say, okay, let's go back. Like what is actually customer? Let's forget about the roles, about the titles.

What are they actually doing in our platform? So we have the workflow mapped out. Now this stage, ABC does this.

Can we give them like a title? So we start mapping out like who is responsible for what throughout their workflow or things. And we start cleaning up in Salesforce.

Okay, this is called prioritizer or investigator because based on the role they're doing. And then right now we're going slowly as, okay, now we know what they do at that time. How can you match with product metrics?

And now we're designing onboarding, like training them. And then the next step is additional CS. Okay, now we can map them.

Oh, they're not doing this for a while. Maybe we should train them on this X, Y, Z. So it's going back, all back to, like you said, like data cleanness, understand what they're doing during the customer journey and start figuring out the signals and target that.

[Dillon] (12:12 - 12:21)

I love that. I love that, first of all, you adapted to my unplanned question, but also I love the- To your cornucopia filled with tuna and paper clips.

[Emma] (12:22 - 12:23)

We can go back to that.

[Dillon] (12:23 - 13:33)

That's not me, brother. That's not me. Don't put that on me.

And Cabbage Patch Kids. I am the straight man on this episode. I got nothing to do with any of this.

But what I thought was really interesting there, Emma, was how the distinction you made between the titles and how that's different for different perspectives within the vendor organization. But also then, why don't we cut through that and instead talk about user behaviors? Because we can control that titling a lot more, categorizing it by, okay, well, they use this particular module most of the time.

Whereas this other group of folks use this other module some of the time and a third module some of the time. Like you can start to segment based on that behavior versus trying to understand like, oh, well, a senior analyst does this within our system because you don't control that. And it's going to be different for everybody as well as folks within your organization.

So I love that distinction. We're running out of time here. So I want to ask anybody if they have any last thoughts before we get out of here.

Double check.

[Rob] (13:34 - 13:38)

Double check your tuna. It's a great topic, Emma. I love it.

[Emma] (13:39 - 14:07)

Well, I'm going to go on the ramp because I feel like this digital... I'm sorry. I'm just pulling back a little bit.

Go ahead. Yeah. Digital CES.

Everybody feels like machines can take over us. So we have this kind of barrier that actually is not going to do this or take away your job. And also the same motion if you think back, oh, PLG is so hot.

We should... Everybody should go do PLG. Product-led growth.

[JP] (14:08 - 14:09)

I feel a big deal with that.

[Emma] (14:09 - 14:45)

Yeah. And now, oh my gosh, partner-led growth is so amazing. But like you said, it's Asian Greece.

They did it before. So there's nothing new back. Like if you think of eco-like growth, ecosystem, near-bound, all these new ideas coming out in GTM world, they're not new.

They're just the old ways of bringing back. So what old is new? That's what I'm trying to say.

And I don't believe human... Like human would replace my machines. Even though I'm in the digital CES world and AI world, it's just how we use it and how much we understand it.

Okay.

[Dillon] (14:46 - 15:05)

Love it. Bring back Clippy, please. Let's campaign for it.

That's definitely... Emma, we may have to forego a picture of you on our thumbnails for the promotion of this and instead use Clippy. Or maybe I'll superimpose your head on Clippy's body.

[JP] (15:05 - 15:12)

Yeah, yeah. Are you opposed to that, Emma? Okay.

Yeah, okay. There we go. We got it.

[Dillon] (15:13 - 15:22)

Anyway, that is our time, Emma. Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention for that little rant at the end there, though. We'd love to have you back for round two, but for now we've got to say goodbye.

[Emma] (15:23 - 15:24)

Thank you for having me.