In this episode of CS No BS, Shona Fenner, Sr. Customer Success Operations Manager at PetDesk discusses shifting from an account management model to customer success, the importance of staying curious, and the secret sauce behind the customer success paradox.
This episode of CS No BS features an interview with Shona Fenner, Sr. Customer Success Operations Manager at PetDesk. Designed with busy veterinary practices in mind, PetDesk streamlines client communication to keep staff happy, patients healthy, and practices profitable.
With more than seven years at PetDesk in a number of roles, Shona has developed a breadth of knowledge across the company. Prior to PetDesk, she garnered wide-ranging expertise in fields such as video production and editing, sales and service, and customer satisfaction.
In this episode, Shona discusses shifting from an account management model to customer success, the importance of staying curious, and the secret sauce behind the customer success paradox.
--------
“Immediately when moving from the everyone does everything account management model to customer success, whether it's giving someone like one article that's, you know, a thousand words to read or a giant 400 page book, no matter what it was, they could kind of get the idea pretty quickly when they realized that you still had all this ownership over the customer, but it was owning the moment more than owning the customer itself.” - Shona Fenner
--------
*(04:36) - Shona’s journey into Customer Success
*(08:20) - Shona’s review of Farm Don’t Hunt
*(11:18) - Biggest hurdles in Customer Success
*(16:36) - Maintaining healthy customers
*(22:58) - What’s next for CS Ops?
*(27:44) - Competing with big box retailers
*(35:53) - Visibility through Totango
*(41:13) - Advice from Shona
*(42:30) - Quick Hits
*(46:03) - Biggest BS in CS
--------
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.
--------
Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn
Connect with Shona on LinkedIn
Shona: When moving from the, everyone does everything account management model to customer success. Whether it's giving someone like a one article that's, you know, a thousand words to read, or a Giant 400 page book, no matter what it was, they could kind of get the idea pretty quickly when they realized that you still had all this ownership over the customer.
But it was owning the moment more than owning the customer itself.
Narrator: Hello and welcome to CS No BS, your practical playbook for delivering Net Revenue Retention, The Holy Grail of Customer Growth, hosted by Jamie Bertasi, COO and President of Totango. Today's episode features an interview with Shona Fenner, Senior Customer Success Operations Manager at Petdesk.
Designed with busy veterinary practices in mind, Petdesk streamlines client communication to keep staff happy, patients healthy, and practices profitable. With more than seven years at Petdesk in a number of roles, Shona has developed a breadth of knowledge across the company. Prior to Petdesk, she garnered wide ranging expertise in fields such as video production and editing, sales and service and customer satisfaction.
In this episode, Shona discusses shifting from an account management model to customer success, the importance of staying curious, and the secret sauce behind the customer success paradox. But before we get into it, here's a brief word from our sponsor.
Don't get stuck waiting on a rigid time intensive build for your customer success software. Start right away and see immediate value with Totango, the industry's only composable customer success platform. Enjoy a modular platform that enables easy iteration and optimization to drive predictable scale up growth. Start for free at Totango.com
And now please enjoy this interview with Shona Fenner, Senior Customer Success Operations Manager at Petdesk.
Jamie: So Shona, I must ask you about your company because I gotta tell you, I love pets. Of course, I have three dogs, but it's so interesting to me because not often do I get guests who work in kind of the pet arena. So tell us, what is Petdesk?
Shona: We're, we're definitely a group of people that are also obsessed with our pets.
That's, that's why we work here. And we like working people that are obsessed with our pets too. So we're, we're a B2B to C Saas company, uh, that operates in the veterinary space. So our primary customers are veterinarians and veterinary practices. Uh, then we also serve their client base. So the pet parents for the providers, we have a suite of software we give them to help with, you know, crucial time consuming communications to clients.
And then anybody can go to the app store on Apple, Android and download Petdesk to sync with their veterinarian or not, and manage everything for their pet's life in their back pocket.
Jamie: That's amazing. I love that because, you know, I'm forever calling the, the, the veterinarian, trying to find out some information.
It seems very old school compared to everything else that we're doing. So how long has the company been around and can you give us a sense for like, how many vets do you guys have? How many pets do you service?
Shona: Yeah. Yeah. So we've been around since around 2013 and I've had the pleasure of working here for seven years and change.
So I've gotten to see quite a bit of that scaling and adjustment. Wow. Seven
Jamie: years in this arena. That's a
Shona: lot. They can't get rid of me, basically. Uh, but that goes to show you, it, it's wonderful to work in this space. Uh, we've, we've got now. About 3,400 different veterinary practices that are customers of ours.
And that translates to just a little bit over 4 million app users and we just hit that 4 million mark. So feeling pretty excited about that, but always trying to keep that up cause we're looking at like about a third that are monthly active users still. And the idea is that we want our pets to live forever.
So we wanna be able to create software and, and give service that allows veterinary practices to give care that allows everyone's pets to live basically forever. Um, but we're, we're making some progress there with 4 million users for
Jamie: sure. Yeah, it's awesome. And I love the mission component of it, right?
Because don't, aren't we all super so psych when we go to work and we feel like, you know, there's like something great that we're doing with our lives and giving back and all of that. So I love, love, love Petdesk. I think it's super interesting. So now you're in customer success at uh, Petdesk, and I know that you started your career there, as you said, seven years ago and kind of a different arena.
So maybe give us a little bit more about your background and kind of how you found yourself in customer success. Operat. .
Shona: Yeah. Well, I kind of talk about being at a startup sort of as an informal and somewhat free mba. Uh, I, I got this job in the most creepy way possible off of a Craigslist listing. Wow.
And frankly, almost didn't get the job because I don't own a dog and was the resident cat lady for quite, quite some time. Started in sales, admittedly, am no good at sales. I, I, I can't do it. . I spend too long being curious about the, you know, the ways I'm communicating to try to drive results than actually doing the communicating, but was able to sell enough to do basically everything post sale when we were very, very small.
And that meant forming what we called account management. And then we read, uh, the customer success book and realized, Hey, guess what? This, this makes a lot of sense. And at that time there were just four reps and myself operating post sale. So we sort of divided and conquered getting implementation, having actual CSMs dedicated support folks, skilled.
To about a dozen of people at that point. And then I ran off to go join the product team and be a product manager and learn an entirely new skill set because there's anything I wanna do. It's be challenged at work every day. Um, and then a little bit less than a year ago, I rediscovered that I just love operations.
Cause I, I don't wanna manage people. I do wanna manage things and I love being able to look behind me and see all of this crazy stuff that we've accomplished and be able to say that, Hey, I, I pitched in or did something. A lot of these initiatives that I was able to add something to it, hopefully a little bit of sparkle.
And I find you can do that really well from an ops angle. You get to be agnostic to a lot of other people's problems or KPIs or goals and kind of come in and ask a lot of whys and just be curious and, and that's really what makes me happy.
Jamie: Yeah, it's awesome. So we gotta ask you, what do you see is the really the difference between say, customer success operations and customer success itself?
Or said another way for someone who might be listening a little bit newer to this, a customer success manager. What are, what are these differences?
Shona: Well, The part that I always really like is I'm not on the phone , so I get to help everyone else have better conversations. That means I spend a lot of time on Zoom and a lot of time building automations, a lot of time staring at reports.
The big difference is I'm not customer facing, so I want to interpret a lot of what we're hearing on the phone, what we're seeing in emails through live chat, to be able to adapt it, to have better insights, analytics reports, and to figure out what problems we need to solve next. For me in CS Ops, a lot of my first steps have been in, in adding automations and adding visibility where we never had it before.
So it's truly enabling our team to know a landslide more than they ever did before to understand what success really means, what a healthy customer really looks like, and to evolve that as we learn more and more and more. Um, we've just gotten our hands on so much data as of the relatively recent past that.
CS Ops is mostly spent looking at something and having about 17 more questions than you had going into it. Right?
Jamie: So you're, I guess you could say you're maybe like the glue behind the CSMs, right? Putting things together for them to use programs, automations, things like that. Trying to make, make the whole system hang together.
Shona: Correct. I sometimes say I'm the CSM to the CSMs, which I think kind of summarizes it nicely.
Jamie: Right, exactly. So you mentioned that you guys started out in account management and then you read a CS book. What'd you read? And would you say that, was it difficult to convince your company that, okay, we should not, you know, go with like an old account management type of structure, but actually move forward with this new fangled thing?
At that time that was called customer.
Shona: It was, it was very new fangled and there was a few books that we read. Um, but there's the big blue book called Customer Success. Really, really meaty in the middle. Got really good stuff at the beginning and at the end. Uh, and there's a very small paperback that summarizes as really well, especially for the sales folks in our industry called Farm Don't Hunt, and it brought these ideas basically to the table in a very, very digestible way.
So for us, it was easy to get buy in early on because we realized a lot of unknowns that we really couldn't suss out with account management. And a lot of that was just we weren't focused enough to ask the right questions. So as we realized that we could have people focused on that support experience, you know, troubleshooting, having technical acumen, having people that were really adept at setting things up and training people and, and really could talk to anyone about anything.
And then we realized, hey, we've kind of got parts of this model already. Why don't we give this a shot and, and immediately when moving from the, everyone does everything account management model to customer success, whether it's giving someone like a one article that's, you know, a thousand words to read or a Giant 400 page book, no matter what it was, they could kind of get the idea pretty quickly when they realized it's that you still had all this ownership over the customer, but it was owning the moment more than owning the customer itself.
So anyone that went in, if you were focused on setting up a new feature, for example, you'd set that. Brilliantly, but be able to ask questions around the business model, around the goals that customer had, and to have that time with them dedicated to actually focusing on something, actually adding a new feature, changing a, a workflow in their business.
Uh, so it took maybe, I don't know, max two months for our entire industry or entire company rather, to, to buy into this idea. The benefits were everywhere. Feedback loop, time management, , lower churn, all of that kind of stuff.
Jamie: Yeah, it's awesome. And the funny thing, funny, funny thing is that the book that you're referencing, the Farm Don't Hunt.
I don't know if you know this or not, but Guy NEPA wrote that book, who's the founder of Totango. Where I work. I never
Shona: put two and two together at all, which is astounding. And I think there's a copy of it, like literally like 10 feet behind me right now. Yeah. But that's probably why that name sounded familiar.
Jamie: Yeah. Super, super happy to know that he transformed your lives and Petdesks business with his. His a very readable book. We do get a lot of feedback on that book from other folks as well, that it's what it's meant to be is something you kind of quickly read and kind of come up to speed on customer success if it's a new concept for you and all that.
So good. Great. And I'm gonna pass it on to him. I know he's gonna be like thrilled to hear it. Yeah. So, alright, so then you guys got started with customer success. You've talked a little bit more about your, uh, journey, you know, being in customer success itself as a csm, then moving over to product management.
Now coming back into kind of CSOPs and, um, what do you, you know, I guess what do you see as the biggest obstacle when you're in customer success operations? What's, what's the thing that like really stands in your way? I
Shona: think what I've, I hear a lot of people struggling with is, Being able to have their own voice at the table.
So a lot of CS hops people that I've met as of late, they find themselves having to react to what a lot of management or executive level tell. They need to do or need to solve. And what you get when you're in CS Ops, I've found is an amazing view at a lot of different moving parts. So again, you can kind of be a CSM to that, your own executive level and say things like, Hey, I, I know we need to fight churn, obviously.
Uh, but it's not the problem. You see it as here's these small steps we can take that, this added report, this new automated task. These are the things that we can do right now to solve that problem and we can track it together. And so I found. I don't have this problem, thank goodness, but it's this executive level buy-in of just like, do you have someone in your CS ops organization that's strategically thinking, that's minded that way?
Because a lot of what I've, what I've found and how I've found success in the last few months is being able to hear what we're trying to achieve in our demand gen efforts or in sales or even in support, and kind of weave that back into what we're doing in cs, or at least planning to do. And without having that autonomy, I think I, I wouldn't be able to achieve quite as much as quickly.
The, Yeah, go ahead. The advice I'd give any of those people, I would say is like, you've, you've gotta start early with talking about what your objectives are to these and be able to track back to it and, That's been true for Petdesk in CS Ops mindset, just as CSMs with their initiatives in product two.
It's just making sure that we actually have a goal in mind that we can say, did we succeed or fail? And where do we go from
Jamie: here? What was the first thing you did in your CS ops role? What you know, what was your first project? And maybe tell us a little bit more about like, uh, some, if you could do it all over again, what would you do differently?
Maybe what was the biggest mistake? Well,
Shona: we'd love to celebrate failure, , socialize, celebrate. If you don't learn something, then you're not doing it right. Um, my, my first stuff, frankly was getting a CS platform and then that's Totango. So my first steps for working with the team to figure out exactly what was gonna be right for us.
And as a small organization with, you know, one CS Ops person, a lot of that was like, What can I actually do? How can I create something? Well, we're only one person. Yeah, yeah. And not cry about it. So , we were evaluating different platforms, figuring out what we needed, which in many ways we thought we needed a lot more than we actually did to find value.
Immediately after we chose Totango though it was. Getting dirty inside of there, frankly. So it was figuring out like, hey, so, so what is health to us? What is good behavior? What is bad behavior? And realizing that our very fumbling attempts at health scores before weren't actionable, weren't indicative of, of steps we could take to.
Solve these problems, whether it was engagement or product use or anything like that. So I, I, I spent my first little bit staring at a lot of sheets and then basically looking at all of the help articles I could get my hands on and other folks experience on, on what not to do because of, I figure when you're doing anything for the first time, you can at least learn your, sort of, your bumpers around.
Really would be a bad idea and just now do those things and experiment with everything else.
Jamie: Great. And so have you, um, continued to iterate against your health score that you put in place or have you, are you just still letting it kind of soak or what?
Shona: We've been iterating quite a bit and I mentioned we didn't really have data to begin with and, and I.
I can't stress that enough. So we were very gut based and I'd like to say a lot of the thresholds I made for our health score based off my gut intuition, ended up being correct. So that's nice. Or to change, you know, like four data points or something like that. But for us, a lot of it too is, is figuring out.
Are we moving the needle in any of these areas? Like there's a, there's a lot of metrics where we maybe want to improve or talk to a customer about it, but is that part of really what health means to us? And to make it so that if one of our CSM is looking at a customer that's in poor health, they can quickly see why, and they know how to talk to that customer about addressing those needs in a way that actually makes sense for the customer, not just for our end goals.
Jamie: Exactly. So do you guys use Multidimensional health or are you using the more basic.
Shona: More basic health first, you know, walk before we run essentially. And it's, it's such a difference for us that multidimensional is, is you know, kind of the high school level and we're still, we're still very happily in middle school with, with health scoring, but I, I, I, I'm, I'm over the moon about it.
We've been able to like actually create a lot just off of figuring out what good behavior is. I think a lot of organizations and ourselves included, focus so much on what we don't want, that we never really focused on what we do want enough. So finding good health customers and finding the commonalities behind them, not just in what makes up the health score, but what else they do, how they engage, how they talk about our product.
That's been fascinating. Yeah.
Jamie: That's awesome. So do you guys, are you using the health score to kind of set goals for the team? And one of the things I, I, I personally love is to set these portfolio score goals for the various team members, you know, so that they can make sure that their customers are hitting the metrics that we're looking and so forth.
Have you guys tried anything like, Yeah, we're, we're
Shona: really focused on the first few months a customer uses our product after onboarding implementation. And so we have health scores based off different stages of the customer journey. Uh, yeah. And then we can segment like crazy after that, but we're hyper focused on health score during adoption.
So that's the. Day one, using our stuff today, one 20 using our stuff. And that's even part of our CSMs KPIs is looking at, are you driving a healthy as much as you can health score with those customers in their first few steps using the product? Because if, if they're healthy and looking good when they have their first steps, they're gonna keep using our things, right?
They're gonna find value on their own, they're gonna seek out our assets. We can throw them at people all we want, but are they looking for them themselves? All that kind of stuff is just gonna happen. And then kind of little jokes here and there with health scores too. I like to segment just for fun in some cases.
So I like to see like, oh, like who's randomly healthier than other people? Turns out, uh, are Canadians. Much more healthy than our Americans, which goes to show maybe they're not just polite, but also more engaged with our product too. Uh, and then we've been looking at, at health as well for, you know, our independent clinics versus corporate groups.
Those using different product packages, um, to better understand how we should leverage, uh, even talking about the value of adding on something like two way messaging or loyalty with. How does that help the rest of the business too?
Jamie: Right, Right. And health, I know for us is, it's a huge topic. People, this is like a kind of a, like a, let's call it like a foundational aspect, right?
Of a customer success team and a customer success solution. It's interesting because it is kind of basic, but at the same time, it really, I think, just helps you kind of. Open up the whole world to you to really understand what's actually going on with the customers. We also constantly iterate against the health too, because you know, you feel like, like to your point on the gut, you feel like, Oh, I got it.
But then actually when you get in there and really see what's going on, you know, you're thinking, Okay, I need to tweak this, I need to tweak that. And that constant iteration I think is like super, super important as you, especially as you guys evolve, mature, right? The CSMs become better at their jobs, et cetera.
Shona: Oh yeah. I think we'll have some light bulb moments once we get our feet unders a little bit more too. What I, I think is interesting with, With health scoring, with nps, with csat mm-hmm. is the difference in perception. Different groups have with it, and even for us first getting a health score, there was this knee jerk reaction when.
Not everyone was in the green and not everyone was healthy. This sort of like shock or dismay. And I was like, that, that's, that's expected. That's what we want. We're finally able to quantify this kind of stuff. And so it's, it's interesting to see this even as our, our AEs and our sales team can kind of see what happens down the road from the customers that they.
Throw over to, to sees are they healthy? And I've had some folks be like, What's what's wrong with them? It's like, hey, it's not necessarily a bad thing where it's why we have customer success, it's why we're making these calls and sending these emails cuz we wanna make sure that they're doing great using our stuff, using everything that affects our software and our product.
Like it's not, it's not. It's not indicative that anyone did a bad job selling or did a bad job being their csm. It's that they have room to grow and that's why they got Petdesk. I hope so. Exactly. That's, that's been interesting too, just the difference between vanity metric and a metric. We're using together insights to incite change to inform our day to day and sort of embracing poor health and everything It could.
Jamie: Exactly. Yeah. I think in, um, as you guys continue forward, maybe, and if you're not doing it now, maybe one of the things you'll consider doing is really triggering actions off of whatever's going on with health. So when somebody moves into poor health, then something automatically triggers. So there's, you know, new automations and so forth to help them get what they need into attend to the problem.
Right, Right then and there. In a way that, uh, you know, it can even happen behind the scenes right before, before the CS team is even aware that there's an issue. So I think it's that like kind of proactive nature of this, of setting all this stuff up and making it work for your customers so that you can make sure they're driving, uh, and getting that best, you know, driving through their customer journey, like in your ideal way.
Um, I think is super, super powerful. So again, it's just kind of a, like a. Principle. Right. But it, it's really, really helpful I think for a company like, um, yours with, you said 3,400 veterinarian clinics, right? And 4 million users. I mean, that's just huge scale. You guys would be drowning without having anything here to help you, huh?
Shona: Well, that's the thing. We were kind of drowning. So , the CS ops role didn't really exist before we had a. To help with this, it wouldn't have made sense. We were cobbled together. Our CSMs are incredibly creative and driven, so they were making a lot of stuff on their own, struggling to organize it, to manage it, to figure out what data they needed and where to get it.
Um, . So getting, getting a platform was a, a game changer for us. And then, like you're saying with those health score automations, we've just tried a little bit of that, that's gone very well so far. Uh, so for expansion efforts, our expansion AEs get a paying if one, someone, somebody that they're prospecting or have a demo schedule with changes in health.
And so if that goes from. Good to average or average to poor. They get a CSM ride along on that demo or that upsell conversation so we can figure out like, Hey, maybe getting this two messaging product is gonna be what's perfect for that customer, but there may be something else at play that either helps us have a better conversation with them, understand their needs better.
It's a beautiful symbiosis of, of the data that just sits there staring us straight in the face and figuring out how to actually use. Both spur of the moment and you know, later on ad hoc. Um, but all thanks to pretty little automations that that pop up and are in red and say like, You should look at this
Yes.
Jamie: I love that. I love that. And I think, you know, and that's like I, I would just say for people who might be listening who are less familiar with CS and so forth, that's kind of the difference between something that you might call account management or, you know, just being the, let's say the person talking to the customer and customer success where you're really proactively trying to, Mitigate risk, mitigate issues by taking action before the customer even really necessarily realizes that there's a problem.
Um, and kind of doing that at scale, which you guys are with so many, so many, uh, veterinary clinics. Okay, so what's next? What's the, what's the next big thing, um, uh, in your mind in terms of where you wanna take things from a CS Ops point of view?
Shona: Well, coming from product, I definitely have a backlog that is prioritized, and labeled and color coded and all that kind of stuff for us.
There's a few milestones that are coming up that I'm pretty excited about. One of them is bringing our, our onboarding process into Totango. We've done a lot with Salesforce to have dashboards and reporting, but it's more of a managerial oversight piece that it's actually enabling everyone that's working implementation to understand their book of business and what that means.
Today to next month to following that and allowing those folks to better track the customers they set up to understand what their health scores are later on, what they succeed on, which hopefully can help our team give a big pat on the back. The other big initiative is similar to what you guys released recently, which is business reviews.
Oh, yeah. We've, we've struggled with the scaling, as you mentioned, so there were a lot of customers were, because they didn't reach out to us because they didn't exhibit any terrifying, risky behaviors. They haven't heard from us. And it's one of those big Cs no-nos to just never, ever talk to your customer.
So we're basically reimagining what a business review means to us, what it needs to look like, how often it needs to happen, what needs to be involved in it. And it's, it's kind of brilliant because it's finally scalable , and it's less of this cookie cutter approach, which. Bores meet tears, and I work here so I can hardly imagine for a customer why they'd wanna get on the phone with us before.
My hope is now we can make these reviews engaging, personalized, and at cadence that actually makes sense. So they, they expect them, they want them to happen, that we're bringing information to the table that they don't have at their fingertips already. Um, and that should be starting in the next month or two.
So I'm, I'm pretty excited
Jamie: about. Yeah, I think that will be awesome. That whole concept of being able to automate, you know, the kind of the creation of the business review, this is something that I've heard from many folks, is such a time saver for them that it pays for any other investments that they need to make around the customer success team.
Because the team, you know, in the past was doing things like, Cut, cutting and pasting content together, or there wasn't any consistency, et cetera, in hours and hours in the day that are now being saved because the, you know, the, the platform will just automatically create the business review for you once you set that template up and everything.
So it'll be great. I'm sure it's gonna be much like the health score. It'll be very profound for you. So we'll have you back again to talk about that one once you get it up and running. So, and I think. Pretty simple, you know, from what I've seen to get going. So that'll be, I bet your, uh, veterinarians are gonna love that soon.
They're gonna really wanna understand, I'm sure they're buying the software from you guys. Like what value are they getting from it?
Shona: Right? Right. Like, what, what is the roi? Where do they see that? My hope too is that we can better lead them to see that themselves without requiring us to have these business reviews.
Like they can see the signs and the reporting we provide to them. We can take them to the right places. And you know, we've been around for a little while. We also have that, that issue of legacy customers who kind of did the setup and forget it. Kind of approach to some of our software and we need to get back in touch with them.
Even if they're in good health, even if they're happy folks, it still is the right thing to do to, to go back through and say, Hey, is this still making sense for your business? Especially post covid, when Covid hit, veterinarians were essential businesses, so everything closed down and veterinarians got busier than ever.
Crazy like having to communicate in totally different ways. So what we found. Is the people that we haven't talked to in a long time often will have a completely new, shiny thing in their business that we never knew about. Maybe that's grooming or boarding, or a trainer that comes twice a week. And that's something that we can help them promote, that we can highlight, that we can provide in our software too.
And we just never knew because they were happy and they weren't complaining about anything and they weren't reaching out to us. I'm excited to get more in touch with those happy, engaged customers. Cause it's, it's like we were talking about before, it's, it's not the risk stuff. We can talk about risk and how to mitigate it and touching base those people all day long.
But also like, what's, what's going on with your happy people? Why are they happy? What's making them happy? And, and are we doing enough to keep them that way? Which is the thing that makes me anxious. , you can be happy today, but doesn't mean you're gonna stick around until next year. So should be helping with.
Right,
Jamie: Or like to your point of the additional items, maybe there's additional, you know, you can upsell them or cross-sell them something else, you know, that would be appropriate for their clinic and, and by kind of understanding what they're doing, that'll help that come to light, which I think would be super, super helpful as well.
So awesome. Now I understand for Petdesk, you guys have some competition as well, right? There's like some big box people I think I saw like, um, I don't know, there's like a veterinary clinic inside some big box software company. I mean, big box retailer, uh, down the street from our office here. So how, what's going on with the business?
Shona: Well, I'm not surprised you've seen that. It's growing like gangbusters. Like I, I was pretty shocked when I realized even Walmart was doing veterinary care. Wow. And yeah, it, it's, it's, it's changing remarkably quickly. Even just ownership groups and corporatization in this space has changed. Mm-hmm. a huge amount in the last three years.
Like there was more buyouts in 2021 than ever before. Basically. For us though, seeing that helps us kind of double down on that, like personalization that you can have in, in veterinary medicine. A lot of people that probably this today or even you or I have a veterinarian that you've gone to, you know, since your cat or dog was a baby and Right.
Totally. A lot of, Yeah, exactly. A lot of what these folks that go to, you know, Costco or Walmart to find carrier, it's, it's commodification of that care. And when you have your like small town vets, You know, even if it's a larger veterinary practice, they can give you that individual approach. They can work with you through the entire lifetime of your pet, everything that you need, whether it's, you know, issues with what you can financially afford, whether it's like a treatment plan or procedure.
So we're kind of pivoting a little bit of how we talk about the, I don't know, the, the ethos we're within Petdesk and talking about this idea of fostering a care first mindset. So that our veterinarians we're working with are sort of even changing the industry because we, we know people are gonna go to those low cost big box retailers where they get soup and toothbrushes and pants.
Maybe get your veterinary care there too, but that's not the care that I want to receive as a human being. I don't want that care for my cat either, and it's helping their clients understand that. Maybe it is a little bit more expensive to go to Main Street Animal Hospital down the road, but you want to pay a bit more because the staff knows you.
You're not a number, like they're making eye contact with you. They have amazing follow up procedures. You're apprised of everything along the road, and maybe they have a loyalty program or texting or something that makes it just really, really easy for you to go to the vet where you wouldn't. And so we've started to have these conversations where we're trying to not just place Petdesk in that Care First area, but also help our practices foster that in their clients and say like, Hey, I understand if finance is an issue for you, you can go get very, very affordable care there, but they're not gonna see your animal for everything that it is.
They're not gonna have this long term health plan that we can provide to you. And. Fostering that within each pet parent to understand that you can get different kinds of care, and it's not just about how much it costs. That cost pays for more than just like the labs that cost pays for more than just the vaccine that you're getting that consumable.
It's the veterinarian's time and expertise and that veterinarian who can take a personalized approach as opposed to the veterinarian network works where you buy your toothbrushes and your pants and your glasses of wine and all that kind of. Yes.
Jamie: And I, I gotta tell you that you are very compelling here, Shauna.
I'm sold definitely, I got one of those small places too, with my three dogs. And, uh, you know, I wouldn't change it if definitely not. And I'm sure that the passion that you have that kind of comes through in your voice and everything that you guys are doing at Petdesk is something that, you know, is coming across to those veterinary clinics as well.
I'm sure that that is the tone of all of your interactions with them, which I'm, you know, It is awesome . And so I gotta ask you one thing about though the scale of the org. I mean, with 3,400 veterinary clinics, you must have an enormous customer success.
Shona: We're not enormous. And part of that is because we've been trying to keep it relatively lean.
Mm-hmm. , and I've been talking about scaling quite a bit, and that's kind of what it was being a 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. 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 work. Even if something goes home 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.
So we try to make our yeses BSEs, our nos, B nos, our CS team. 20 ish people all be told and we've been scaling that. That's including like implementation and support. We've been scaling that by also recently moving to a pooled CS model. Oh wow. Great. Going from dedicated CSMs to a pool of people to you get faster responses so that we can actually be there.
You don't have to wait for So andSo to get back from her vacation to Italy. You can actually get someone right then and there and that. Been at the very same timeline is when we got Totango and when we added CS Ops. It's making all those changes at once. We can figure out, let, let the dust set a little bit, figure out what we need to still tweak and what we need to do, but it's been going great.
I could say I was pretty skeptical at first. I loved being that one to one CSM to people, getting to know them, knowing my customer, in and out, knowing their secrets, having my favorites. But the pool model's actually going very, very well because we're actually using a software too. So you could pick up or someone left off.
And I'm finding it's helping a lot of the distribution of load. Since some of our customers are super du protect savvy. They might have a person that's got an MBA and social media experience and they're talking to us from a completely separate mindset. Then the veterinarian business owner who. Went to vet school, not because he wants to run a business.
Mm-hmm. , that is not where he's at. He needs help with the most basic of things. Um, so having a pool model lets us share the load. You're not stuck with a customer that's gonna give you a hard time because they're challenging you. You got. Those challenging customers, which I love. But you've also got those customers that are brand new to technology.
And so before sometimes you'd have an uneven book of business and one CSM might have very, very time consuming calls, business reviews. That happened very, very frequently. Um, and the next CSM could have a book of business full of folks that were smaller veterinary practices. Didn't you? Software before, um, didn't come in with any goals at all.
And so it was so different in how you take one call to the. But now we can embrace that. So it's, it's much more luck of the draw a little bit, but it gives a sense of ownership, I think to our CSMs too. Like if I talk to a customer that's challenging us, giving us a lot of product feedback and requesting a lot from us.
It's helping me to leave enough notes, to record enough in the account to make it so that whoever picks up that account after me, whoever talks that customer next knows everything. And. Pick up right where I left off. Addressing those concerns, continuing to build a relationship, but it doesn't always have to be the same person, and I think there's a lot of cases where that's so refreshing.
Jamie: Yeah, it's totally different. So this is, I think, uh, really unique and interesting for, especially for the, um, listeners to hear more about, because a traditional approach is to take a csm, give them a book of business, you know, segment your customer base, decide this is your engagement model for each of the segments.
And this is this, you know, high touch segment gets this mini CSMs, and each CSM has, you know, this many accounts, et cetera, et cetera, which is probably how you did it in the, uh, in the past. I bet. And then what shown is telling us now is all about how they implemented a pooled model where they actually pooled all of their CSMs into one team and have all of the customers managed out of that one team of approximately 20 people.
But as you mentioned, support and some of the things are kind of thrown into that number too. And I've seen even very large enterprise customers also be very interested in this kind of a model too, for the exact same reasons that you're talking about, which. That it allows them to kind of share the load, tap into the whole team.
So it's not that, you know, uh, one person sitting around, another person has something, uh, you know, is over, completely overwhelmed. Um, and so that's super interesting to hear that it's working so well for you guys.
Shona: Oh yeah. And also having visibility through Totango, into like the number of touch points or tasks completed.
It helps us understand, you know, who's going above and beyond a lot better. I always would get frustrated before not knowing who on the team to congratulate, like who was doing an amazing job. You'd get these anecdotal pieces of evidence that. So and so was an amazing rockstar and you could kind of tell, but you weren't exactly sure what they were doing.
That was so great. Um, so now it's been good with the pool model, with it a little bit more even and fair. We can find the reps that are, you know, maybe doing a great job with follow ups versus someone that's like really, really fast off of taking tasks. Um, so it's helping us to better train the team on how to be amazing in all the ways like, Best set yourself up for success with following up with your customers, knowing when to stop , knowing how to leave notes, how to make that clear.
One thing too with more automations, it's, it's helping the team understand like, hey, filling out that one little field, it's gonna have this landslide of benefits that you'll feel, that your coworkers will feel. It's gonna help us show this amazing graph to the executives at the end of the quarter. Uh, so it's a lot of like, Hey, how will we as a team functioning.
I love that about the pool model because it's less of like every man for himself. Like I want my customer to love me. I want my customer to stay. I want my customer to be upsold. It's like I want our customers to love us and to be upsold, and it's, it's much more of a, how are we working together to do this?
Which I think helps. From a lot of different angles. And as a person that was skeptical, the pool pooled approach, it actually the opposite of what I feared. I, I thought that we'd have folks resting on their laurels saying like, Oh, someone else will pick that up. They'll take care of it. But it's been kind of the opposite where it's like, Hey, I wanna make sure I'm doing everything I can so that that customer is set up correctly so they have the right stuff from us as Petdesk, not just me as Shauna.
Right? Sure. I want them to love me. You know, I want to love everyone else too.
Jamie: Right. I totally, I totally love the concept that you're talking about here, which is the kind of, um, less about my individual performance and more about really orienting the group to work for the whole customer base, which I think is really fantastic.
I gotta ask you about one other thing that comes up a lot of times as a controversial point too. So you mentioned that you guys at Petdesk, the CS team does not own expansion and. So I assume that the sales organization owns expansion and renewal, meaning selling customers more stuff and then renewing the customers.
So maybe speak to that a little bit more about the evolution. Has it always been that way? What made you guys decide to go that way? I ask, I hear lots of people asking this question too. Where should these things live? I
Shona: think it's a good question and it definitely isn't a one size fits all approach. Uh, for, for us, we had, we had CSMs doing upsells for quite some time and we were really struggled with that and a lot of that was having some reps that were great at it and they were just more accustomed to it.
Maybe they had a sales background or that was just much more their bag. Created some inequality between reps because we'd have some folks that would have amazing like demo scheduled and like so many upsells, but the other person would be like, I'm really great too. My customers are so happy and so successful, but I'm not upselling them.
So having a different voice has helped us quite a bit to come in and then be that product expert on what else they can do with our stuff. Having Totango added onto that is good because I can actually kind of give them smart prospecting lists so it can be set up from that CSM to say, Hey, upsell ae, we want you to talk to so and so about this for this reason.
Call them on Thursday. But it can also be a space where we can say like, Hey, these are our good health score customers. They're exhibiting these behaviors that say that they would actually really directly benefit them to get these, these add-on products. And it's a much more confident conversation because you're not just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.
It's being able to call in and say, Hey, I see how many appointment requests you're getting day by day. That's gotta be a lot of calls In addition to the digital requests, if you add to a messaging, you can text people, you can get them right then and there. It's conversational. It's fast. I bet the doctor's going to love it, and we can come in with those pieces of data that help like.
Not just legitimize the add-on, but help the customer see that we really know them right for what their business is. That's been fantastic. And then aside from that, renewals for us, um, are barely a thing. We're a subscription model mostly monthly and we don't have any contracts, so we make it a big, big thing to very vocally try to prove our worth with every interaction and every.
So the renewal period is every month. And if we're not doing enough for them, we try our level best to show that we are. And if for some reason they can't stay with us, then we try to allow them to, to churn with ease. But that, that monthly subscription helps us get folks in the door very quickly because, They don't feel locked in by anything.
There's not that crazy fine print of, you know, all these bells and whistles that you have to do if you're not happy. It allows us to walk the talk that we sell on. We, we say our service and support is so great. We say we're gonna prove our value, but we get to show it by saying like, Hey, if you need to cancel, you can, but.
We're gonna make it so that you don't want to.
Jamie: Right. And that's so great. And I bet that wasn't probably entirely obvious at the beginning too. I bet there was some concern with monthly versus annual and all the usual back and forth. And in terms of what is the, what is the right, um, item, you know, length of time and should you lock the customer in or should you not lock the customer in and et, etcetera, et cetera.
So your advice would be, To listeners would be okay. Just go for a short and easy term to get the customers in the door and then use the customer success team to deliver that value. , I
Shona: find a lot of organizations sell on their service and support, and it's so hard to prove it, but that's a way, even in the sales process, you can start to prove it and be very vocal about, you know this.
This is a way where we show you that we're gonna be valuable to you every month, every day that you use our stuff. And if you're not, we've got a team here to either help you find that value, to upgrade or downgrade as make sense for your business, and to do so quickly and efficiently in the veterinary space.
Contracts were everywhere. And it's a, it's a small industry, so like everyone's owned by someone else, a more independent company within all this. So having that differentiation has always, Special for us and always allowed us to actually go a little bit further and not to be like, Oh, we've got great service.
Everyone loves us. It's like, yeah, yeah. You can see that once you start to work with us until then, here's those signs that we're actually gonna follow through on that promise. And it just makes my little idealistic heart so happy that we can actually do that. So I, I would definitely recommend monthly.
It's not as scary as it.
Jamie: Yeah, I, I love it. I love it. I think it's great. So let me ask you a few last things, um, as we're wrapping up here. First, these are our quick hits. Now, what's something you read, watched, or listened to recently that you can't let go?
Shona: One of our new product managers sent me a lecture video, Aby Culvert, I think is her name, and she did a talk about the importance of.
She's like an information architect, I think, for bunch of different companies. And does consultancies, consultants, uh, work with all of them, But she was talking about some of the very basic stuff we take for granted. Like even the, the meaning of the word flow and how that can be so different between product, between marketing, between Cs, and you can have these conversations where you think you're talking about the same thing and you're really not.
Yeah. And so. I love this idea of getting down to basics over what we think our simplest terms may mean. Like getting folks into a different room and saying, So what is an app user? And then getting those definitions from people and you realize there's tons lost in translation. So she's got like a 45 minute talk where she talks about this from a number of different angles, but at the end of the day, it's just understanding what our shared definitions.
And I'm a child of librarians, so obviously I have now built a dictionary glossary for Petdesk terminology that starts to get into all of that and. I like to think helping us be more curious because even taking that app user example, we can now ask like, okay, are, are these app users synced to the data or are they Unsync organic app users?
Like, let's look at those numbers, understand what's inside that number. But her talk was great and I, I see it everywhere I go now where people are saying the same words. But they don't really mean the same thing. And then once you notice it, you start to kind of get a good chuckle out of like, Oh, they don't even know what she's talking about.
Like, okay, let's back up seven steps. I'll get to the same starting point with the words that we're using and the importance of that language, and then go from there.
Jamie: Yeah. Love it, love it, love it. Okay. What advice would you give to someone starting out in your role today? My
Shona: best advice would be to document everything you do and keep it super duper visible.
I think that's one of the ways I've been able to earn trust, both from the CSMs, from our leadership team, cross departmentally. I almost always have things documented before anyone asks for them, and I found that very, very handy in a selfish way in that it kind of gets, allows me to create my own destinies a bit more.
I'm like, this is what I wanna do, here's why. Here's the whole document about why I wanna do this and how we're gonna check it and the objections. Please let me go and do the thing. Uh, but also it's helped us weave in a lot more of the whys behind what we're. , and I think that's something that I've seen other folks fail at quite a bit, myself included, when I don't do it, and it's saying like, Hey, if we're gonna do this new process, if we're gonna start new initiative, why are we doing this?
Right? What's the point? What, what brainchild is this? And, and why does it matter? Mm-hmm. . Yes,
Jamie: totally. It's what problem are we
Shona: solving Exactly. Mm-hmm. . But if you think about it, you can. A lot of the projects that I think a lot of people have been involved in recently. If you were to ask everyone in the project, what's our goal here, again, they would have different answers.
So if you document it, if you keep clear what your objectives are and if you succeed or fail, Hey, guess what , Everyone's gonna know exactly what's going on. You're gonna be seen as super transparent and chances are they're gonna trust your judgment calls. And it's worked for me and I trust it when I see other people do it.
So I would give that advice to
Jamie: anybody. Okay, Awesome. So then I must ask you, since we are no bs, cs, what do you think is the biggest, you know, piece of BS that is out there about customer success that you want to, you know, tell our listeners is not true?
Shona: Great question. 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, 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 like 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 know 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. 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. PS is in bs. All right,
Jamie: so now we know it from Shona at Petdesk. NPS is bs.
All right, so Shona, I gotta thank you so much for doing this. I think you're amazing. Super interesting person. I love that you're the child of librarians as you told us. I'm gonna ask you one last question on all the things you guys are doing with customer success at pet. Really impressive stuff with your health scoring as well as the scale of the, in the success of the business.
I think the pooled model that you are, uh, you know, ex executing against is obviously working super well for you. And I think that's another really interesting tidbit for other people, you know, as well as the fact that this. CS team is not really focused on the renewal or the expansion opportunities.
Those are going elsewhere in the, in the company. And as you mentioned with your monthly model, that's a differentiator for you. You don't really have a renewal. So that's a beautiful thing too, isn't it? So I love all that. My last question to you is, if you were not in cs, in CS operations as you are, tell us, and you could not be in this arena, what would you be doing?
Shona: It's a good question. It's a hard one. So maybe one of two things cuz they're wildly different. Maybe going to politics. I try to change the world in CS quite a bit, and as we've mentioned, there's a lot of idealism in there. I feel the same way politically would love to be able to do that. Maybe I'll have to take like, you know, couple confidence pills to figure out how to actually achieve these things.
But take a great,
Jamie: I think you
Shona: totally could do it. Go ahead. Fostering social change in the inside. I used to live in dc it's a small town too, and if not that painting large scale murals, I don't know if I can do it artistically. They're beautiful eye-catching, San Diego's full of 'em. I'd love to get on a giant like forklift and be three stories in the air, painting a giant tiger or something.
That's probably my second choice.
Jamie: Awesome. All right. Thank you so much. Those are
Shona: great. Thank you so much too. I've had a good time.
Jamie: That's
Narrator: 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 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.