The return of BS in CS | TDSU Ep. 52

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What's up lifers and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas, maybe a couple complaints every single day. I got my man Rob here. Rob, you want to say hi? What's going on? We've got JP here.

JP, do you want to say hi? Live from the complaining tortured CS department. I hate that you made that reference. I'm going to fight you.

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Don't tell anyone, don't tell anyone. Okay, so first complaint of the episode will be, I won't even say her name. I don't even know what you guys are referencing right now.

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Boys, it is my favorite kind of day. I'm bringing back my favorite segment. Today's episode is a reprisal BS in CS, gentlemen.

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Today, boys, I want to hear what you're tired of in customer success. It's summertime now. It's the perfect time for a little nap, a little siesta.

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There is no shortage of topics in customer success that make us tired. JP's wagging his finger. I think he'd like to go first.

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Well, first of all, there's a great idea I just heard, which is siesta. Nobody's taking that. It's got siesta in it.

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Siesta. Siesta, baby. Well done, our resident GoDaddy expert.

Get on that. We trademarked, we trademarked right now. Yeah, so what am I sick of in CS? Sick of saying the same damn thing over and over.

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That's right, because you know what? This show, it's called The Daily Standup. Dillon says in his intro every time we're representing you with fresh new ideas. Something that we do on this show that I really love is we really try to keep it fresh.

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I know that sometimes we are reaching for yesterday's Tropicana shipment, but we still get real good juice out of it. And I'm feeling like from what I'm seeing on LinkedIn, y'all not juicy. You're not giving it to me.

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You're drying me up out here. We got a dry environment. It's not good.

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We need an environment, a wash, an inspiration. A rinse. We need more than a rinse, baby.

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We need a bleep. Juicy rinse is going to be sticky. We need a bleep.

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Yeah, we need a bleep. Talking about sticky. Yeah, real sticky.

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It's gone x-rated so fast. No, no, no, no, no, no. We've never x-rated.

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We always fly under the radar. We're always under the radar. Keeping it juicy.

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We're keeping it juicy. So I was just saying that's my main thing. It's not that I'm saying we have to reinvent the wheel.

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You know what I call it? Let's keep it moving. Let's keep it moving. Don't stand in one place.

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Don't let it get stale. Let's keep it moving. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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You know, that's just my little thing. I'm not too big on complaining, but that's pretty much it. It's just the sort of repetition.

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I'm just like, oh, okay. Let's talk about QBRs. Okay.

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There is stuff to talk about with QBRs. It's not that there isn't, but it's just, oh, I have a hot tank. It's, oh, what is it? You know what? We should get rid of QBRs.

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Wow. Wow. You're the thousandth person I've heard say that.

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You know, I took it personally every single time we had a guest on who said CS isn't dead because I made that one post that one time that was like, I think CS is going to change drastically within 20 years. But what I think is interesting is nobody hates on the screwdriver. What's up, guys? It's Dillon here, and you know why I'm here.

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Hat in hand. I got a favor to ask of you. If you like what we're doing, give us a like on whatever platform that you find us on.

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And if you want to know when we're dropping new stuff, give us a follow. Give us a subscribe. And maybe best of all, if you want to give us some feedback, drop a comment and let us know what you like, what you don't like, or how we can get better.

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We want to make sure we're giving the best content we can to you and others within the community. Thanks so much, guys. I'll let you get back to the show.

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Right? We know that a screwdriver isn't the best thing to use to hammer a nail. I tried not to say hammer, but I don't know another way to say put a nail in wood. The idea being it's just a tool, and you don't hate on the tool for being used improperly.

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And I think we do that so often in this community of QBRs suck. Get rid of them entirely. They're useless.

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They're antiquated. Maybe not a QBR, just call it a business review. Very valuable if designed correctly and used in the right way.

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If it's targeted intentionally. I'll leave it there. Rob, what are you tired of? Two things.

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One extension of what you just said. I'm tired of the very absolutist advice that we're getting in our world where people are saying, if you don't do it this way, you're doing it wrong. There's not a lot of nuance to that.

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Like, I've literally heard someone say, if you don't have Google News alerts turned on for every one of your clients, you're doing it wrong. And then I talked to someone. Oh.

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If you don't do QBRs this way, you're doing it wrong. Point is, like, you know, then you talk to somebody who's in a B2C environment or in the product-led CS environment, and they're like, well, that's just not true. That's just fundamentally untrue for my role.

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That's the one side that I'm like, that's my runner up. But my main thing is actually even beyond that. What I'm really tired of is I'm tired of having to define customer success for people.

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Like you said this, JP, this is not ancient aliens. It's not some mysterious Illuminati stuff that we're working up here. We're just keeping people happy and renewing and buying more stuff.

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I had a breakthrough once when I was talking to my mom, and she was just like, oh, so like client relations. And years of me trying to explain my job to her, she just says, oh, like client relations, and she just got it. And I was like, that's it.

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It's not a novel concept, necessarily. Obviously, all the KPIs, all the fancy terminology, all that stuff is fancy. But really, I'm just tired of having to explain our jobs.

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And I'm tired of how that's manifesting in the workplace with like people, you know, unfortunately, people getting subject to layoffs because they couldn't explain their job or the value of their job or people not being able to get a job because they can't tie back to the financial impact of what we're doing. So I think that a lot of us are complaining because we're getting kicked down. You know, we're sort of getting kicked down the road as like maybe an optional department, maybe an unnecessary department, maybe a superfluous department.

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But really, at the end of the day, like. Yes, sir, Rob. At the end of the day, I'm just tired of having to have that conversation.

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So let's move beyond it. Keep it moving. I wonder, though, Rob, how realistic that request is because we haven't yet landed on what customer success does.

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I think we have or it's easy for us to say, well, we provide value to the customer. We make the customer as successful as possible, and then we extract additional revenue from them. Well, that's super like theoretical and high level in a way that there's a ton of ways to interpret that in the same way.

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Like, I want to challenge your mom about what does client relations mean? Is that a concierge? You want to challenge my mother? That's all I heard was I want to challenge your mom. Well, I mean, it's just I think it almost does it a disservice to try to try to interrogate down to two words versus I think it demands a level of additional detail of second order thinking or description because we haven't yet. It's not sales.

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Sales is I'm responsible for going and finding new customers and signing them up. OK, well, that's super easy to understand. Customer success is not that simple because you might be responsible for keeping customers and growing them.

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That's it. I think it's simple. OK, OK.

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But what if you were a support person that lives under the customer success umbrella? It's all part of the same. You're responsible for keeping customers. You're not necessarily responsible for growing them.

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OK, so part of the same way if you're a BDR, right? Your responsibility is to set up a meeting, not to close the deal. I agree. But you wouldn't say you're a salesperson.

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You would say I'd set meetings. Well, here's the thing, right? I don't think they say that. Customer success is also supposed to be what do we always say? Like a company wide philosophy and undertaking, not in a department.

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And so I think that to Dillon's point, Rob, somebody could say like sales, for example, some people have the clawback structure to their compensation, right? So that we don't want people to sell and have better leads that are more likely to stick around. So you're essentially trying to give incentive for sales to be part of keeping customers around because you're recognizing where they're coming in in the pipeline. So I think that to Dillon's point, it can be very different depending on where you are, even if at the core, it's still the same.

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And I don't think that's our fault either. I don't think it's like a bad thing. It's just an inconvenient thing.

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And my complaint or what I'm tired of was going to be of leadership, not having a clear vision for their CS group. But I think that ties back to what you were saying, Rob, of it can't happen unless they really understand what CS is meant to be at their organization, what it's capable of and what its limitations are. It's a tough nut to crack.

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We're certainly not going to do it in a single episode. So my mom already did it though for us. Thanks, mom.

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Client relations. But I thought of a hotel concierge. Like that's different than what we do.

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I have no idea how that relates to customers. I can see. No, no.

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When you say client relations, I think it's just as easy to interpret that as a hotel concierge type person. Damn. Interesting.

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That's good. That's a different take. That's a good point.

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That's why I'm here, guys. I don't do much else. All customer success professionals should work at hotels because it's hard.

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Yes. Because it's hard. You should go dig a hole because it's hard.

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I didn't like that clip, by the way. I love Tom Brady, but I did not like that clip. You like his facelift? He looks like perfect Squidward.

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Yeah, I do have handsome Squidward. No, but for Boston, Tom Brady is great. I've watched all the Super Bowl.

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You better watch out. Yeah, I love him. He's one of my favorite.

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I once bought a poster of Tom Brady. I thought it was going to be this giant poster on my wall. I'm waiting.

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It's like, it's delivering. I ran downstairs, and there was this tiny envelope. And I was like, it said it was six by 10.

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And then I opened it up. And it was smaller than the sheet. That's our time, folks.

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Gentlemen, that is our time. Thank you both for entertaining me in the resurgence, the reprisal of BS and CS. I can't wait to make this a thing.

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Love you both. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

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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. Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value.

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And find us on the socials at LifetimeValueMedia.com. Until next time.