Guy Nirpaz talks about defining, viewing and improving the customer journey as a product, where companies looking to do so should begin in order to find success, and the importance of optimizing for the speed of learning when looking to scale your business. Guy also addresses the biggest changes in customer success to date and how Totango comes in to save the day.
This episode of CS No BS features an interview with Guy Nirpaz, Founder and CEO at Totango, the fastest-growing, most trusted Customer Success company in the world. Totango started in 2010 when Guy saw an opportunity to use the cloud to process billions of customer signals and make meaning for customer-facing teams. Since then, he’s been on the forefront, preaching the importance of treating the customer journey as a product, a modern business thought process that many companies have yet to adopt. Needless to say, Guy has a passion for improving the way that people do business. Since founding Totango, Guy has become an evangelist in the field of Customer Success and an award-winning author of his book, Farm Don't Hunt - The Definitive Guide to Customer Success.
In this episode of CS No BS, Guy talks about defining, viewing and improving the customer journey as a product, where companies looking to do so should begin in order to find success, and the importance of optimizing for the speed of learning when looking to scale your business. Guy also addresses the biggest changes in customer success to date and how Totango comes in to save the day.
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“Everyone is in customer success these days. Every company’s customer-centered. And if they're not, they're going to be. Because with digital transformation…you know so much more about your customers and you have to deliver a much higher level of experience and value. So now the challenge is more around where to start, what to do first, and how to measure success.” - Guy Nirpaz
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00:23 Founding Totango
02:40 Defining the customer journey
05:03 Viewing the journey as a product
07:55 Improving the customer journey product
10:46 Defining success in the industry
12:52 Where to begin
17:38 Timelines for different journeys
18:58 Optimizing for the speed of learning
23:20 Delivering value to customers
29:34 Cultivating customer success
31:45 Challenges of scaling successfully
34:06 Biggest changes in customer success to date
34:42 Use cases for Totango
35:26 Quick hits
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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
Guy Nirpaz: Everyone is in customer success. These days, every company is customer centered than if they're not, they're gonna be because with digital transformation, 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 now the challenge is more around where to start.
What are the first, how to measure success? Hello,
Narrator: and welcome to CS. No BS, your practical playbook for delivering net revenue retention. The. Rail of customer growth, hosted by Jamie Bertasi, COO and president of totango today's episode features an interview with guy Nirpaz, founder and CEO of totango, totango is the fastest growing most trusted customer success company in the world.
Propelling customer driven growth for over 5,000 organizations of all sizes guy is a widely respected thought leader. And award-winning author of the. Farm don't hunt. The definitive guide to customer success. In this episode, guy explains his core philosophy of treating the customer journey like a product and shares, why you should always optimize for the speed of learning.
But before we get into it, here's a brief word from our sponsor.
Guy Nirpaz: Wanna make your work more impactful? Join TaskRabbit, extreme networks, Aruba, and other CS. Pay setters at the customer success summit for teams in Miami, from September. To the 16th hosted by to tango. This conference is an incredible opportunity for CS leaders and teams to up level skills and influence, get thought provoking guidance and strategies for growth from CS innovators as well as best in class training exercises, coaching and certifications.
Learn more at totango.com.
Narrator: And now please enjoy this interview with guy Nirpaz, founder, and CEO of totango.
Jamie Bertasi: Hi, my name is Jamie Bertasi. I'm the president and COO of totango and I am here today with guy Nirpaz, the CEO and founder. Let me, uh, let you introduce yourselves to our audience and tell them a little bit more about your customer success background.
Guy Nirpaz: Hi everyone. I'm guy Nirpaz. I'm the founder CEO of totango. We do a lot of customer success in to tango as you know, Jamie. So, uh, you know, I'm sure we touched more on that
Jamie Bertasi: later. So guy, tell us a little bit more about how to tango got going. You know, where'd it come from this idea of a company that is focused on customer success and what's the Genesis story.
The
Guy Nirpaz: root of it is like the transition to SaaS and cloud, right? So the idea was that companies now need to deliver services for their customers. The business model became subscription or pays you go. Amazon kind of told everyone that that's the way to go Salesforce and others. And all of a sudden companies not only need to deliver products and services.
They also need to make sure. There's value coming out of that. So that's the challenge in this entire dynamics that shifts power to the customer has become super clear. I think where we saw the silver lining here is that by moving to the cloud, there's a lot of data around customers that companies can.
Have access to, and they can turn that into kinda meaningful insights so they can identify if they're, um, are delivering value customers or where are the gaps, so they can take action and resolve that. So that was the beginning of the, you know, the thinking and I, I think it's still, you, you, you can admit it is still kind of core and true to the way to tango operates today.
Jamie Bertasi: Yes, I would definitely agree with that. I think the concept of delivering value to customers is something. Integral to everything we do here, as well as I think, many other companies who are trying to transition either into a SAS model or kind of SAS natives, you know, to start with who may have born that way, you know, has it always been easy going
Guy Nirpaz: to tango?
Yeah, it was, uh, hits from the start. I mean, in my mind, of course, I mean, we started when, um, you know, 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. And the conversation is everyone is in customer success.
These days, every company is customer center than if they're not, they're gonna be because with digital transformation, the first realization companies recognizes, you know, so much more about your customers than you have to deliver the. 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 know, we had a good idea. It was a little bit ahead of its time, but in the recent years, we are very fortunate that the market has come our way and where the, the right place, the right time to deliver great value to customer.
Jamie Bertasi: One of the things that of course gets mentioned all the time is the customer journey.
So for many people who aren't necessarily even familiar with what is a customer journey, let's just start with defining it. So what is a customer journey?
Guy Nirpaz: When we start thinking about, you know, customer value and customer centered user centered, we are adopting a lot of consumer language and not necessarily B2B language.
And I think Steve jobs said that you start with the customer experience and you go all the way and you start from there and you go all the way back into what you're actually building. It's the same concept where you think about your customers that have a business problem. You know, they're trying to solve a workflow in their organization, depending on what you're selling.
So where do they find you? How do they know that you're the right solution for them? And once they let's say subscribe, which is a very, you know, soft purchasing, they need to get quickly up and running it's gold onboarding, and then you want to make sure that they're kind of maximizing the value of their license.
So that's usage and adoption and consumption. And you wanna identify ahead of. Whether or not they have issues. So you can actually react to them because contracts are not super long, right. It could be monthly contracts or even annual contracts and sometimes multiyear contract, but still, this is not a 15 year 10 million paying to IBM or SAP, Oracle, something like that.
So you gotta think about this from your customers advances and mean as simplest definition. That was the question to finish and think about the customer life cycle. That's the journey. The customer life cycle is the journey, but more nuance. The reason why we call it the journey, because. There's highlights and there are low lights and there are like big aha moments and so forth and so forth.
So, you know, it's a nice term to describe, think about what your customer is going through, whether they're trying to accomplish every point in time to give you a better context of serving them. So would you
Jamie Bertasi: agree then, then if we think about it as a journey, it's probably not the same company to company, right?
It's probably seems like it would be very individual.
Guy Nirpaz: Yeah. So the, the high level is similar. Right? They gotta find you, they gotta, you know, subscribe could use first and then subscribe if it's a premium to premium model and so forth, and then they gotta get onboarded. Yeah. But it's different because different businesses, different markets, different products.
Jamie Bertasi: So, what would you say to folks who have, you know, started to really think about how to evolve the customer journey? What's the first step, and then most recently between you, before we even go there, I've heard at a compass conference recently, you talking about the fact that you see the customer journey kind of as a product.
So maybe talk about those two concepts first, you know, how to get started. And then the concept of like, is this a product? Is this an offering? What is this
Guy Nirpaz: thing? So let's start with the second one, because I think it kind of has this idea that the journey is not fixed. It's always evolving because the market is always evolving and the competition is always evolving and the products and the offerings that you have always evolving.
So you can't have like a fixed mindset to the journey. You gotta continuously evolved the journey to hit higher bar of user experience, higher bar of value being, deliver. Adaptation to market situations, right? We've just went through massive ride and then COVID, and then another ride. And now this markets are crashing.
You know, let's stay optimistic about that. But, uh, the good news is there's always a room to improve the customer journey. So you gotta think about this in iterations and as a product, right? The current version of the customer journey is what is currently being delivered. 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, 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 th really think about it holistically from the customer's perspective and given that it's not static is that the journey should be treated as a product with a roadmap and a planning and design and implementation and a release and measurement of the performance and, and iterating across that.
So that's why customer journey should be treated as a product. And I'm a product guy. So I really like to think that everything is a. But I really think it has something more tangible to it versus the customer journey is super amorphic and it's not very clear. It's not specific. It's not specified. I really do think companies have to be super intentional.
And I think the best companies in the world today do right. Apple is this defining user experiences, their product. Although they're selling the best products in the world, they. They have this Uber product, which is the user experience. So Tesla is doing similar things. Disney is doing similar things. So I think we can learn from the best and actually start adopting this mindset of the customer journey as a.
Jamie Bertasi: So the customer journey and positive product, I feel that that's like a really illuminating concept. I think when you think about that, it helps you kind of understand and think about how to get started. You know, because a lot of times when I talk to people, I, I agree with you that the journey seems amorphous to them and they're not sure they know they want what outcome they want, which was, is a happy customer, you know, who buys more from them and stays, but they're not really sure how to go about it.
So I guess I would say if continuing. Concept of the customer journey as a product. What advice do you have for folks for how to just get started and improve?
Guy Nirpaz: The journey in a very high level is not very difficult. Right. You just need to break it apart into modules. Right. So if we just think about like a post signup, right?
So you gotta onboard the customer first or the users, and then there's another period in which you have. The opportunity to drive further momentum, right? So that's like, let's say, you know, sometimes people call it the first 90 days, the first 60 days very much depends on the products and services, those life cycles.
But, and then what's super clear if it's subscription or you have the renewal period. Right. So the question is, what do you do ahead of renewal to maximize the chances of renewal or even how do you identify opportunity that the conversation is not about the renewal? It's about the. Right. So if you just think about from these lenses, right?
The, those very basic things, we call them into tango. The basic success box. We use our onboarding or manage onboarding projects or manage digital onboarding drive adoption, detect risk, automate renewals, and sometimes, um, get customer feedback through a voice of, uh, customer program. This could be like the basic building books, but what we're seeing is people very quickly.
More sophisticated than advanced about this, because maybe. Your enterprise customers, their journey's a little bit different than your, uh, high volume customers who have a, more of a low touch in many cases, self-service model to them. So you gotta start by laying it out, right? You gotta start somewhere in executing this and, and the most important thing is optimize for learning, right?
So how quickly can you learn what you need to do in order to optimize that? And if we tie this to what we talked about before, where the customer journey. The product then basically, what bugs do you have that you want to fix for the next iteration? Or should you build new features, which are like a bigger moves than your customer journey to move it along?
I mean, for those of, you know, people in your new audience, Jamie and I, hopefully you're gonna get a lot of people signing up for this amazing podcast. Right. You know, wait for the second, uh, episode where you're gonna act actually gonna have good guests, not like me. I think this is kind of. If it's hard to believe.
I live in Palo Alto and, um, downtown Palo Alto, there's the apple store. And once every few months you, you see the sign on the, on the glass saying that they're creating a new version of the store, right? So it is real people do treat journeys as. The next iteration and the reason why they do that is because they think they can optimize the experience that will optimize, you know, output for customers value, but also output for business, which is better metrics across retention, expansion and reputation.
Jamie Bertasi: So, I guess I have several questions more on this concept of the journey as a product and getting started and so forth. But the first one would be, how do you know if you're successful? So I
Guy Nirpaz: think you start with the end going mind, right? So there's a very basic one. Is it complete? Right? So this is like, do you have all the ingredients to, to actually help customers go through what they need to do?
Right. If there's a missing button, then they can't. Yeah, the, your journey ISN incomplete, right? So there there's this, this basic thing of, you know, what is the minimal, secondly, as I said, it's very kind of business oriented. So the metrics that we're all trying to optimize for are metrics around customer based growth in, you know, more technical terms, it's called net revenue retention, which is the combination of growth from existing customer.
And. A loss, which is called churn from existing customers. So that's net revenue retention. So if it's over a hundred percent, it means that the customer base, you had the beginning of a period it's value grow. And if it's less than a hundred percent, it's value shrink, right? So, you know, good metrics are 120%, 140%, you know, things along along those lines.
So the high level assumption here, the underlying kind of idea is in today's world. You know, and Amazon is a great example for it. If you focus on what's good for the customer, it will pay off in, in a business outcome. Right? So this idea of managing a customer journey or creating great experience for customers is.
You will get rewarded by these customers and the customers that they're gonna talk to in, in the form of business growth. So, you know, if you remember, when I said, when we started to tango, it was clear that the dynamics of the relationship between companies and customers have shifted and companies that have identified this companies like Amazon that have this customer centered mindset and they're doing what's right for the customer at all costs.
Zoom is another great example like that they're very successful because the market rewards. With higher loyalty of customer, more growth referral, and you know, all the impact of other people talking. Good, good things about you and your.
Jamie Bertasi: So, what would you say then for, you know, our listeners who might already be running companies or running a division and already have a customer journey, how do they start?
They clearly can't just take their whole journey down and you know, what should they do?
Guy Nirpaz: I don't think it's about taking anything down. I think it's, you know, you first need to document what you're doing, right. So that's gonna it's. Mapping the journey, but I, I, I'm not just talking about the nice visuals that are being used once and then being thrown away, it's having a system that constantly reflects the current state of a customer journey.
Who's doing what, when you know, SLAs experiences and, and so forth, then you wanna measure the performance of your journey, right? How well is it working right in any experience now? I mean, let's use simple example. Let's take part of the journey, which is called customer. Right. So the goal of a customer, let's say enterprise customer be a company that buys technology from another company, it bought it to get value, right?
So the onboarding is doing the basic setup. Sometimes integrating systems, setting up the, the basic workflows. They want to do this as fast as possible and know later from the timelines in which they've actually anticipated. To happen. So if you sold them, you know, it's gonna take a week. It should not take more than a week.
If you sold 'em it's, it's gonna take 60 days. It should not take more than 60 days and preferably faster. So there's a metric around onboarding, which is time to onboard, which is reasonable. And, you know, you can compete on that. This is what TGO does, right? Where you wanna provide exceptional timing, time to value that gives you a business advantage.
So in any case you wanna measure the time it takes to onboard customer. you also wanna measure that level in which they get at the end of onboarding, the level of adoption set up and you know, that they're actually ready to go and get value. You also want to get their feedback, right? That's the customer feedback, you know, how was it was, you know, did we provided with a great experience or was this disappointing?
And the sales experience was better than the onboarding experience. I'm happy to say that in our case, it's, it's the other way around. We really care about the onboarding experience, because I think we think it's the first impression and how do they say there's no second chance for first impression. So long story short, you have those metrics, which is customer facing metrics, and you have metrics around business metrics.
Like how many escalations you had, what was the cost of it? How many resources you have to put in place? Because you know, companies have to be these days more than ever before have to be financially valuable, right? So you can. Throw money at the problem. So you measure that and let's say for 80% of the onboarding cases, it, you actually meet your metrics and 20% you're not.
And you wanna learn of, you know, what is it that we did that didn't meet the metrics and you run another. Cycle of improvement. It could be the, the initial setup onboarding you didn't set up all the right stakeholders to be involved in the onboarding process. In the case of escalation, you had no one to go to.
I mean, it could be various of other things. It could be like yours flow is inappropriately set up and, and so forth and so forth. But every time you fail, you have the opportunity to learn what worked, what didn't work. What can we do about this and implement an improvement and keep measur. So you ask, how do you get started?
You start small, you take one part of the journey that is, I guess, the most painful for right now. And you document that you measure it and you start improving. And then, you know, this is clearly the, the speed of the cycle time. How long does it take you to roll out? A new version is dependent. The tools that you're using it in this case, you know, in the case of, to tango, we used to, we, we sell technology that allows to for very quick iterations and, you know, immediate time to value and so forth and so forth.
But I think the outcome here is, uh, the speed of iteration. Then you move to the next part of the journey. To optimize this as well while the first part is still working, right? You can't kind of drop it and move to the next thing. You have to make sure that whatever you put in place is actually have a process of improvement behind it and so forth and so forth.
It's actually not very complicated. It's just, you know, you can't rule it all. You can do it everything at the same time, you gotta start where it matters and you gotta. Make sure that whatever you build is persistent, right? So it's document consistently documented. So you would benefit from a system that every change that you make actually documents those changes.
So you don't need to keep, you know, the run time and the design time is the same system, right? So there's a lot of ideas like that, that don't wanna bore the audience with too many details. But you just take one step at the time of, of the journey and you. Have this discipline of documentation and measurement and consistent execution that allows you to
Jamie Bertasi: improve.
Okay. So what I'm taking away is iteration is definitely key, but it sounds also, um, like it takes a long time. I mean, how long would you think that someone should expect when they're thinking about, you know, taking their first step, maybe starting to iterate against their first journey stage and so forth.
Is it a long process, a short process.
Guy Nirpaz: So it doesn't have to take a long time, but it has two aspects to it. One is how ready. Is the organization. Right. Do you really know what you're doing for onboarding right now for companies that don't know what they're doing? I would recommend start from. Best practice, you know, like to tango success blocks are best practices that you can just use and learn from there for companies that do know what they do, how they do it, put the effort, get some people in place and document what you're doing and go through that.
But in any case, a super large company could take, let's say a month or two much younger companies, you know, it could be a matter of hours. Days, it's not super complicated. Right? I mean, to the most part, the part that is missing is that companies don't have the single place in which they go to document what they're doing to measure how they're doing it, to have the same execution engine so that this is where it becomes, uh, a bit tricky.
So without proper technology, yes, that could take a long. Although worth it, right. It's better to know what you're doing versus doing things just because the previous guy was here that did that the same, you know, there's technology today that allows you to do it super.
Jamie Bertasi: What do you think then for folks who are, would say, struggling with improvement and okay.
They're gonna start with one area they're gonna start. Do they need to design the whole system before they start? Or do you think it's just like one piece at a time? Don't worry about the rest of it. I mean, how do you think about that? Because I think a lot of times, from what I've seen folks feel like, okay, I can't really get off the dime cuz I gotta really make sure I understand everything I wanna get.
Guy Nirpaz: I think if we optimize for the speed of learning, which is what I believe is the best thing to do. You wanna, you know, break it down to steps and you wanna get one product, typical use case and complete a cycle. And by just simply completing a full cycle, you have so much that you're, that you can learn from.
And then you are much smarter and much. You can make better decisions, right? The concept of agility. It's not just iterations and incremental iterations. It also gives you a lot of checkpoints to make different decisions, right? So if you make all the decisions up front and you're challenged to the point that you're making with, you know, I don't know enough, then you're probably making a lot of bad choices, right?
Because you don't have the information to make those choices on, or you're relying on consultants that are basically gonna tell. What to do so they may know something, but they don't know your business the way, the way, you know, your business. So, and that has been, you know, proven true in, you know, software development and then DevOps.
And so, and I think everyone understands this re these days, you know, get a small chunk iterate quickly, learn from that, make the next iteration better. Don't optimize for perfect first optimize for perfect over. And assume that there's never perfect, but the idea is continuous improvement. Versus I like to call it like incremental releases, right?
This is, this is my thinking, because I'm thinking that if I'm not doing anything today, then the current user experience is whatever I have right now. Right. Which is not that. We know that it's not good enough, but if I'm waiting for the perfect, my customers are still gonna get an experience that I think I can immediately improve.
So let's improve a little bit and then improve more. So the speed of iteration, the speed of learning it, it goes hand in hand. It also leads to a much faster user experience. I also think that a lot of the. Kinda, you kind of mentioned this, there there's a sentiment in what you're asking, which is around, you know, it's too big daunting.
And I gotta commit to my leadership that this is gonna work perfectly and so forth. You know, we can tell everyone a hint, the leaders know that it's not gonna work on the first iteration. So the, a strategy to minimize risk is actually take bite sizes, learn from it, and then come back smarter again, which is.
You know, into Tago, as you know, we believe with this concept of first day value, right? Very, very quickly getting to something that is working. We relentlessly focus on language, not just technology, but also language that make it super easy for people to understand and explain. We're trying not to introduce new language that is Chari and where people kind of think it's this inside baseball.
I will never be able to. Get it. We're not always perfect, but you know, it's, at least it's intentional to bridge, you know, what you're trying to accomplish and with simplicity and, and accessibility and ease of use. So I think, you know, minimizing risk is about learning faster. It's about taking smaller bites.
Minimizing risk is not aiming for perfect and relying on a third party to build this. No,
Jamie Bertasi: I totally agree. I mean, I think these days business leaders have to be able to make changes and be able to adapt to what's going on around them. And so I think no one has an unlimited budget and if we're constantly beholden to getting some consultants back in to help us, it's gonna be tough in the speed of which, you know, we're all working these days.
So I completely agree with the sentiment around iteration and around kind of business decision making and leader. And being able to get the business people to be able to make the changes themselves and so forth so that they don't do not have to beholden to others. Let's switch gears a little bit and talk a little bit more about delivering customer value.
So one of the things that you mentioned is that, you know, thinking about the customer journey as a product that delivering that value early is a really. Important kind of concept. So maybe talk a little bit more about what you're doing at to tango. How do we deliver value early? You know, what is it at?
What point is it just, do we wait till after the deal is done? Do we, how do we think about delivering
Guy Nirpaz: value? I mean, it, it's a little bit broader kind of reason why we're doing this in te tango. And I think you're alluding to the free model where we kind of basically allow people to, you know, sign up directly from the website and for free and use it as much as they, they need until they hit the, you know, the premium feature limits, and then they can convert to paying customers.
But the true motivation behind that was, uh, in my opinion, one of the challenges in customer success was always. You know, it's a desirable outcome, but it's not specific enough. So people want customer success, but they don't know exactly. So what do I do, right? How do I get that customer success? And it's a little bit of an elusive definition.
So what is customer success? I mean, I remember early days in customer success where people were putting like symbols of hearts, like customer success, about love, loving your customer, read all of. Terms, which are, I think these are, you know, admirable, but they're not sustainable. Right? I don't think businesses love other businesses.
I mean, they could, but that's not the majority. So for us, the, the challenge was how do we make customer success? You know, tangible. So it was clear that what we need to do is simplify this, and this is where we broke it into modules that we created the, you know, the, the only composer customer success platform.
And the second thing is also learn by experience versus by, you know, words and. Presentations and things like that. So the idea was allow people to really put their hands on the product and the capabilities and learn by doing. And then we could see a lot of, you know, light bulbs go on and, and so forth.
Right. So, I mean, my, my best example is when I tried to convince my wife for the first time to switch her Nokia to an iPhone, she asked me questions around. Okay. But. Have text or calls or browser and so forth. And, you know, the answer is of course, yes. So, okay. So why do I need that? And the answer was okay.
Try it out for yourself. And then let me know if you wanna send it back to the store and, you know, obviously she never did, but this, this idea of, you know, putting the value first and, and. We've got also anecdotal examples where we start giving free support for free customers, because I still believe that, you know, when, when a customer in need, you give them like a, you help.
It's the best selling action that you can have versus, okay. You gotta buy first and then we're gonna answer your question, right? So that's, that's another thing. And then we added free onboarding as part of the free offering, but you've all seen, this is the apple store. You go there and they teach you how to.
Create a movie or how to, uh, you use other products, even if you didn't buy their, their products, because it enables you to think like bigger strategically and so forth. And then the assumption is you put value first good is gonna come out out of that over time. And as long as you have the conviction in that, and you have the runway to actually invest in that I would highly recommend to do.
Yes.
Jamie Bertasi: I totally agree with that. And I think, you know, thinking about the apple store example, I mean, basically it's almost like they're driving adoption, right? A key term that one throws around all the time with customer success. And I feel a lot of the business leaders are, you know, who those who aren't as close to it sometimes are a little confused by that concept of driving adoption.
What does adoption mean? Adoption of what? Right. And so at apple, what are they doing? They're teaching you how to consume their products, right.
Guy Nirpaz: Exactly. And also note in a very specific intent based way. Right? I mean, I've, I've been to their store several times recently and their sessions are very, very specific, right?
It's not how to use iMovie. It's kind of more how to use iMovie to create a birthday movie or something like that. It's very intentional. I think it's, you know, super smart and it's worth learning from, because, you know, we use to sell products based on their features, but consumers and enterprise buyers are buying products based on their output, based on the value that they provide.
I think even the definition of value could, you know, we should use more specific words because every product has a. Value. Right. As an example, this mic right now is being used to record this podcast. It could use to be used to do something else, but you know, let's say 30 minutes ago, what we wanted to do is set up the mics for the podcast.
So long story short, again, this is the same concept. You start thinking from the customer experience and the customer value and the customer intent, and you take it from there. And if you can economically deliver that without the need for the customer first to. Do it it's good for two reasons. One is you can convince the customer with the, the, the quality of the value and the experience, and they will become your customers.
You can also, uh, show customers that you don't have the value that they need, and it's even better because you don't spend all the effort in the time to try to get them in contract with them only to realize that this is a, it's a misfit, what you're offering and what they're looking for is two different things.
Uh, and you end up in this not super fun relationship with them. So, you know, thinking from the customer value angle and value first. Yeah, absolutely. Just hard to do, but very, very important to do. So. One of the other
Jamie Bertasi: things that I am struck by many times is it doesn't really matter who I talk to about their business, about their customers.
I always think they should be using some sort of customer success technology, because the fact is that most people still don't even understand this kind of stuff is out there. So I'll give you an example from last night at. right. I'm talking to my 19 year old who has just started a summer job. And his primary role from his first day was to go into a spreadsheet that has, you know, hundreds of sales or hundreds of rows in there and figure out if these people are current customers or not.
So that the sales people can know where they're actually going to go and further drive, you know, additional maybe expansion business, or maybe. Going to go after them for new logo and so and so forth. And this is a pretty successful technology company, but running things off of a spreadsheet. So how do people find out about customer success and what do you recommend for folks like that?
And just, it seems like the free way to go here.
Guy Nirpaz: The question I would, I would define it is how do I know which logo is my customer, right. And that's it. Right. And I think this is what we've been trying to do with, to tango, which is kind of market to the intent versus market to the category. Right. You know, I don't care if people know if it's customer success or not.
I think we're talking about, you know, customer value, customer intimacy, right? Understanding your customers, you know, managing the customer journey. I, I. The key here is kinda more around making sure that whatever you want to do for your customers or with your customers, like whether it's a internal business process or a customer facing, this is a journey thing.
You want to be able to do that. So, I think customer success is all these things combined. However, it's very hard to explain something like that. So you gotta break it down into, let's say applications of customer success, another concept of modularity and composite composable customer success. Yeah. And that's it.
So that's what we do, right. We, we are trying to kind of focus on the specific intent problem. And explain how you know, how to get started, how, how it's being solved and what to do next, because I'm sure to your point, you said, the first thing you needs to do is who is my customer. Who's not, then my existing customer, who's in good standing and who's not.
It's called customer health. And then the ones that are in good standing, what else can we sell them? And the ones that are not in good standing, bad health, how can re repair. The relationship. And so it's, it's never like just one thing, but sometimes people think about it from that angle. So fine use technology for that.
Then it's talk about what you wanna do with that as
Jamie Bertasi: well. Right. And I guess the thing that I'd like to get out there is that for companies like that, who maybe that aren't willing to spend any money on it, there is a free option available. Yes. Yes. So one does not have to manage the world outta the spreadsheet, which I think is a key takeoff death to spreadsheet.
Guy Nirpaz: Yes. Okay. Or, or, or death
Jamie Bertasi: by spreadsheet. Yeah. for him. For his summer job for short death brush spreadsheet. This is I'm sure his eyes are gonna be clouding at the end
Guy Nirpaz: of day's. At least it's a cloud spreadsheet.
Jamie Bertasi: Uh, I am sure it is. I would, I would expect nothing less from this company. Okay. So how should companies think about scale?
We talked about the starting, but how about the scaling? Yeah, so
Guy Nirpaz: scale is always like a challenging because it's not necessarily that what worked for you at the small scale is gonna keep going in a, a much larger scale. When I'm talking about scale, we've been sync companies. Thousands of people engaging in customer success and concert, right?
So I think this goes back again into this product thinking where you have to build this in a systematic fashion. This idea of, I, I think the go and scale is predictable outcome, right? So again, if you think about this as a product, then the product has a certain throughput, which, you know, quality.
Throughput or, you know, predictable throughput. And when you create a new version, it's about throughput and predictability. So I think what companies are trying to do at scale is predictable outcome in cycles that are also, uh, you know, fast enough, because sometimes in scales, just rolling out to thousands of people or hundreds of people, or even tens of people takes a very long time.
This is again where you've gotta rely on technology that is basically embeds, all those decisions and enforces. You know, the best practices or older learnings, that's kind of how you, you gotta think about scale. There's another concept in scale, which is, you know, big companies have this idea of, of change management.
The best change management is the changes that have not been managed. I mean, for example, the adoption of iPhone. Yeah. Or smartphone across, you know, enterprise people. Right? So, so there's something to say about leaning on technology, not services, specific technology with easy to consume an intuitive experience to apply change.
And if, if what you're offering to your employees is something which is makes them a hero and makes them a hero in, in your eyes and so forth and so forth. They would adopt that if you go about it in a very kind of, let's say. Heavy handed fashion. I think these days, especially what do we have now, gen Z gen Y with the, the, with the new generation?
No, you can't say that they're part of your audience. So, uh, with this new generation, you wanna, you wanna use technology that, that empowers people. And I think this is, you know, this is where you need to value the quality of the technology, the UX, the design, the modern experience and
Jamie Bertasi: so forth. Okay. So I'm gonna, you two questions then I'm gonna do quick hits.
First is what are some of the biggest changes you've seen in CS over the last couple?
Guy Nirpaz: I think the first big, big is the recognition of it, right? That's the, that's the big one, right? I mean, didn't exist. And now everyone talks about this and, you know, and I think I told you in the past that I'm seeing a lot of educators moving into CS and even in our company, we've got so many teachers or ex academics becoming CS.
So that that's a big thing. And I think the second one. Is a recognition that customer success is company wide. It's not a function or it's not just the function. It's the function. As let's say that the advocate for the mindset of a customer centered thinking,
Jamie Bertasi: what are some of the most unexpected creative solutions you've seen in you set to tango?
Guy Nirpaz: I wouldn't say a hundred percent creative, but I've seen Togo being used for sales use cases for, for like managing the se use cases. We've seen Togo being used for managing the CS program for Cisco partners. The one that I'm personally super proud of is that we used to tango a hundred percent to manage our entire freemium life cycle.
All of the data, capturing analytics, usage, tracking interactions, sales interaction, I think, you know, it's pretty cool. One and it, I like it a lot because it was one of the original use cases that we've built to tango for.
Jamie Bertasi: All right here. Come the quick hits. I'm gonna ask you a question you give to gimme a one line answer.
Are you ready? What is one of the biggest mistakes you see people make when it comes to providing a successful customer journey?
Guy Nirpaz: They're putting people in the middle of it.
Jamie Bertasi: If you could change one thing now in your industry, what would it be?
Guy Nirpaz: What I mostly regret is that the initial thinking that customer success is a form of account management, where you throw people the problem.
And it's all about relationship or only about relationship. I think relationship is important, but it's only about relationship. I would love for our industry industry, take many, many pages from the consumer playbook, where you start with a user experience. And you translate that into systematic approach towards that.
That's if I could do it all over again, I would emphasize this
Jamie Bertasi: further favorite response from a customer who loved their journey with, to tango.
Guy Nirpaz: We love the UI. I love this always when they say that, but mainly we didn't know the to tango could do all that. That's the favorite response we bought to tango for X and we're using it for so much more.
Jamie Bertasi: What advice would you give someone looking to design for success in the.
Guy Nirpaz: Start with the customer in mind, customer is the users, right? It's not the building of the company, or now it's the homes of the employees of the company. It's start with the users and what they're trying to accomplish and start small and start simple.
Right. You know, don't boil the ocean. It has been proven that it's not working.
Jamie Bertasi: What's something you've read, watched or listened to recently that you can't let.
Guy Nirpaz: I think it's, it's not exactly recently, but I think the Beatles movie was unbelievable. And I think the main, the, the reason for me is the creative process.
Right? Because you you're seeing at the end, I mean, by the way, it's a good example for how to get started. Right. So you could see when they, when they, when they're creating the get. Song. It is completely initial improvisation by few people it's broken. It's not. And then, you know, it starts to build up based on feedback and so forth, you know, so you can see the, so what I like about it, it's it shows that you can accomplish, you know, really best in class outcome.
Without really knowing where you start and being open and vulnerable to feedback. And that's the, to me, this is like unbelievable creative, uh, creative experience.
Jamie Bertasi: Awesome. I love working with guy for those of you who are listening and, uh, I hope you will, uh, join us again.
Guy Nirpaz: Thank you, Jamie. Thanks for having me and good luck in your podcast.
Narrator: That's it for this week's episode of CS, no BS with your host, Jamie Berta. If you enjoy today's episode, please leave a rating or review and tell a friend. This podcast was created by the team at to tango design and run best in class customer journeys with no code visual software that delivers immediate value, easy iteration and optimization and predictable.
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