Welcome to CS, No BS: Your practical playbook for delivering net revenue retention…the holy grail of customer growth. On this season of the podcast, we’ve talked to some of the brightest minds and key voices in Customer Success. Today we’re bringing you a bonus episode where our recent guests spotlight the biggest BS in CS and share how to overcome it.
Welcome to CS, No BS: Your practical playbook for delivering net revenue retention… the holy grail of customer growth. On our first season of the podcast, we’ve talked to some of the brightest minds and key voices in Customer Success. Today we’re bringing you a bonus episode where our recent guests spotlight the biggest BS in CS and share how to overcome it.
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**(01:06) - Brent Cogswell
**(03:10) - Maranda Dziekonski
**(06:22) - Shona Fenner
**(08:55) - Kerri Brown
**(12:09) - Guy Nirpaz
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This podcast was created by the team at Totango. Design and run best-in-class customer journeys with no-code, visual software that delivers immediate value, easy iteration and optimization, and predictable scale-up growth. Join over 5,000 customers from startups to fast-growing enterprises using the industry’s only Composable Customer Success Platform. Start for free at Totango.com.
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Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn
Listen to Ep. 1: Customer journey as a product with Guy Nirpaz, Founder and CEO of Totango
Listen to Ep. 3: Building CS from scratch with Maranda Dziekonski, Chief Customer Officer at Swiftly
Jamie:
Hello and welcome to CS, No BS: Your practical playbook for delivering net revenue retention…the holy grail of customer growth.
I’m your host, Jamie Bertasi, President and COO of Totango.
On this season of the podcast, we’ve talked to some of the brightest minds and key voices in Customer Success. Today we’re bringing you a bonus episode where our recent guests spotlight the biggest BS in CS and share how to overcome it.
But before we get into it, here’s a brief word from our sponsor:
Let’s start with Brent Cogswell, Head of Customer Success at Schneider Electric, who believes that the first step is making sure everyone actually understands what customer success is.
Brent: I guess I'd go back to people's lack of understanding. Customer success is. Again, there's there's people still in our company that would probably initially when I explain it to 'em they get it, but it's this whole difference between customer care and customer success. And, and I come with a unique background because I was that guy. I built and ran most of those teams. Right, and everyone in the global team knows us, you know, knows me personally about that.
So, so from a credibility point of view, it, it was very easy to help explain that. One thing I didn't bring up, which I think is critical and, and maybe this is true with other companies is that in our job codes, like when you're hiring somebody, we have this internal book of job codes that, you know, it's kind of predefined.
One of the things I did in my first year in, in the job is I helped define job codes specific to customer success because the CSMs that were, that were already called CSMs, they were using like tech support, job codes or inside sales job codes. There was no home for them. Like there were orphans when it came to our HR systems right.
Of what job codes, because the job code comes attached to its competencies, which were dialed into those other functions. Right. So we gotta dial those into what we want for customer success. Yep. And then we also built a training curriculum that's associated to, you know, building upon all those competencies.
And so that's something that we, we built out. So when we go to a country and talk about here's what you need, and then we also show them here's who you need. And oh, by the way, it's all set up in the HR systems. You know, everyone's gonna know what you're talking about when you're trying to hire this person and oh, by the way, when you hire them, you know, here's, you gotta enroll them in this training program that we put together and, and they can get started.
Jamie:
Next up is Maranda Dziekonski (Dee-kon-ski), Chief Customer Officer at Swiftly.
Maranda knows that the best way to cut the BS out of CS is to get specific about the individual needs of your organization, especially if you’re just beginning to build out CS for your company
Maranda: So first, if I'm a leader going in and I'm building out CS from scratch, I'm gonna wanna understand what type of CS do I need to build out in order to be able to enable and empower my customers and my teams to be successful, and then drive a successful business outcome, right?
So I urge folks to stop going out, Googling and trying to plug and play stuff. I see it happening a lot and you're hurting yourself. Yes. Some of the things may work, but the reality is, is businesses are unique and require different types of activities to solve the problems you're trying to solve.
So one, once you get that understanding of what type of customer success, I like to center myself with some problem statements. So what are the problems that I have right now that I need to solve. And I would probably grab a few team members, maybe, you know, if I report to the CEO, I would get their problem statements.
I would get all of the other executives that I need to link arms with, get their problem statements, aggregate my team's problem statements, and then take a holistic look at the problem statements. And what are the prevailing themes? If there are any then I would, you know, again, create like a point in time and say, buy a year from today or six months from today, these are the problem statements we're gonna solve.
And we're gonna solve this group of problem statements in the following and so on and so forth. I use an OKR methodology to objectives, key results, map it all out and we create the key results that we wanna see and then the activities we're going to do in each quarter in order to help solve those problem statements.
I look at 'em again, quarter after quarter to see, did the problem statements change? Are they, you know, still relevant? Do we have new problem statements that we wanna add? What's changed with our customer base. Are we moving up market? Are we maybe doubling down on a freemium model? You know, things change a lot, especially in companies that are moving to scale. So again, looking at the problem statements and seeing are we solving for the right things still on top of that, I usually put in the KPI level and have a weekly look at where are my KPIs, because data tells a story. It doesn't tell the full story, but I like to be very data driven in my decision making.
So making sure I have the KPIs that mirror with the problem statements that tell me the story of are the activities we doing, doing the right activities to help positively impact those KPIs. I will call out one other. Is, if you have, you know, KPIs or problem statements that are heavily leaning towards the business side or heavily leaning towards the customer side, make sure you have counter measurements in place to look to make sure you're not impacting the other side negatively.
Jamie:
Shona Fenner, Senior Customer Success Operations Manager at PetDesk, doesn’t beat around the bush when sharing her thoughts on where the BS in CS can be found…
Shona: As much as I love sentiment values, I think NPS Net Promoter score is a bunch of bs.
It's something we all hold far too near and dear in my opinion, as like the key sentiment value. The only thing to make judgment calls off of way to find referrals, find all these good nuggets and it's, it's good. I'm not saying it doesn't have some value, but I, I've seen so much written about nps and a lot of talk about it as if we're married to it, especially when we're using that traditional question of like how likely you to recommend us to a friend or colleague in the veterinary space, for example. It's small enough that our vets don't want to recommend us to the vet down the street. They don't want that vet down the street to have a cool, unique loyalty program where you can earn paw points and have like awesome rewards.
They don't necessarily want to let everyone in on the secret. I found it interesting to both use that NPS for what it's worth as a nice indicator of some folks that are unhappy, some folks that are very happy, but also can need to remind ourselves that this isn't the only way of knowing what happiness looks like, or how a customer can tell us that they're jazzed on Petdesk and if it goes up or down, doesn't usually mean that we should cry or cheer.
It means that we might have some customers who just wanted to get out of that survey a little bit faster and maybe click some bureaus, or some people that were happy enough gave us a 10, but they probably feel about a seven so, NPS is some BS.
We're not enormous. And part of that is because we've been trying to keep it relatively lean. And I've been talking about scaling quite a bit and that's kind of what it was. Being post sale, especially when your CS team isn't handling expansion and renewals, you're a cost center. For your business, you, you just are and trying to show metrics that say the opposite of that is an uphill battle.
So you can, and you should show about the value you give the customers, you retain the churn that you fought, but for us too, was also like, Hey, what's this extra secret sauce that maybe doesn't translate immediately into fighting churn, but it does translate into like this kind of support paradox, where even if something goes incredibly wrong, that person you talked to on the phone was so empathetic and was so clear and gave you next steps that no matter what happens, you're hopefully gonna be more loyal to us.
Jamie:
But what’s the most effective way to cut out the BS and make CS truly work for your company and customers? Kerri Brown, Head of Customer Success Strategy Execution, reveals how they’re doing it at SAP.
Kerri: We have, I think, a well orchestrated model that's an equal partnership between the business process owners, and then our IT organization. And really those three groups come together as a meeting of the minds and, and really talk through, hash through, first of all, does this make good sense?
Is this helping to improve the customer experience? Does this not unduly burden the front lines our, you know, our customer success managers and the like, and then what is the best path forward to help realize the, the change that's being asked for in a way that is in keeping with the SAP strategy and our overall customer success transformation, you know, vision.
So I do think that that kind of conglomeration or the meeting of the minds of those groups is the underpinning, the success of how we're able to continually innovate, iterate, and also remain true to what we're trying to accomplish.
We have made a tremendous amount of changes in our customer success function over the last few years. Starting about the time that we began partnering with Totango, we had nearly all of our customer success functions were disparate, meaning we had these various lines of business that were the cloud companies that we acquired.
They had their own customer success functions, and of course they were all doing, you know, great work, but specifically focused on you know, that specific area of the business. So we've since brought them all together. And then, you know, maybe the next major evolution was customer success expanded even further to include those customer success type functions or customer engagement type functions, what some people refer to as post sales together with sales.
And then we've most recently brought services in. So basically what we now have is, one holistic function that is really about all of the people who are responsible for delivering on the promise that we make to our customers during this, the sales cycle and beyond in one group. So that is rather massive. And, you know, going back to what I was talking about with TSIA, something that it seems like a lot of different organizations of, you know, generally speaking, smaller size are also kind of looking at or struggling with or debating. And it certainly has made sense for us. It helps to streamline and reduce silos and reduce handoffs and really make things more kind of warm transitions versus, you know, kind of cold handoff.
Jamie:
Kerri makes a great point, and while there may be some lingering BS to iron out, it's clear CS has come a long way. Guy Nirpaz, founder and CEO at Totango, reflects on his journey as a leader in the CS industry.
Guy: I mean, we started when people were kicking us out of conference rooms because, you know, what are you talking about when you, when you say customer success? I think the good news is 10 years later the conversation is everyone is in customer success.
These days, every company is customer-centered and if they're not, they're gonna be because with digital transformation, the first realization companies recognize is you know, so much more about your customers than you have to deliver, it's a much higher level of experience and value and so forth. So now the challenge is kind of more around where to start, what to do first, how to measure success.
You can't have like a fixed mindset to the journey. You gotta continuously evolve the journey to hit, uh, higher bar of user experience, higher bar of, uh, value being delivered, um, adaptation to, uh, market situations. Right. Just went through massive ride and then COVID then another ride. And now this. Markets are crashing. You know, let's stay optimistic about that. But, uh uh, the good news is, uh, there's always a room to improve the customer journey. So you gotta think about it in iterations and as a product, right?
The current version of the customer journey is what is currently being delivered by your company, which is the sum of all interactions across the customer life cycle, by your digital channels and your people. Right through all their channels. And the next version is the next iteration of the journey in which you improve. So um, you know, now I think that, you know, while we initially thought that customer success is more around interactions and activities, I really think that if we really think about it, from the customer's perspective and given that it's not static is that, um, the journey should be treated as a product with a roadmap and a planning and design and implementation and a release and, um, measurement of the performance and, and iterating across that.
Jamie:
We hope you enjoyed this bonus episode of some key moments with my recent guests! If you’d like to hear the full conversations, I encourage you to listen back through earlier episodes of the podcast.
Thanks again for listening. I’m Jamie Bertasi, President and COO of Totango, and we’ll see you next time on CS No BS.