Chad Horenfeldt [00:00:00]:

The customers would sign up, and we take them through this webinar, and we'd intentionally make mistakes in the webinar so that it would appear to be live, but it's actually a recorded version. But we would also have someone that's listening into the chat, and it would be able to respond to the chat. And so that way we could scale our operations, we could bring customers in on a cohort basis, and it was a great way of getting people to go to these onboarding webinars.

Alex Turkovic [00:00:30]:

And once again, welcome to the digital Customer Success Podcast. I'm Alex Turkovic. So glad you could join us here today. And every week, as I seek out and interview leaders and practitioners who are innovating and building great scale CS programs, my goal is to self educate and bring you along for the ride so that you get the insights that you need to evolve your own digital customer success program. If you want more info or you need to get in touch or sign up to get the latest updates from us, go to digitalcustomersuccess.com. But for now, let's get started with today's show. My guest on the podcast this week and I had a fantastic conversation. We we talked about all manner of subjects related to digital customer success, including pretty deep discussion on metrics specific to digital CS. There were a lot of real life examples and failures shared on the podcast as well. We talked about the gap in the gain mindset. We talked about digital and human moments of truth. So I think you'll get a lot of value out of today's conversation with Chad Hornfeld. My guest today probably needs very little introduction because you've probably seen Chad before on either the Customer Success and Failures podcast that he has hosted, consistently named, I think, a top influencer, and, you know, contributes regularly to all kinds of communities both on LinkedIn and otherwise. I think you're part of the CS mentorship program, catalyst, founding member of CS Angels, advisor to the Success League, CS instructor at Sales Academy, all kinds of stuff. Most recently, leader at CS, leader at Meta and customer. And tonight, at time of recording, which would probably be two weeks ago, if you're listening to this, you'll be on the CS office hours hosted by Jan Young. So you're all over the place. Chad, welcome to the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here.

Chad Horenfeldt [00:02:32]:

Yeah. Thanks so much, Alex. Really happy to be here and happy to talk customer success and specifically digital customer success.

Alex Turkovic [00:02:40]:

Absolutely sounds good. There's the obligatory, like, what's your background, where'd you come from? You know, where what led you into CS, but you know, that that you're probably used to giving on these these sorts of events. But I'd love to hear a little bit about your history and really what led you into customer success and what it is about yourself that drew you to CS.

Chad Horenfeldt [00:03:07]:

Yeah, actually, talking about history so I have a master's degree in history. So that was a while back. But I would say what drew me into customer success was probably when I realized that I love to help customers solve problems and specifically with technology, and to get there was obviously a journey like most people, but did not stay in history. I just didn't realize I could not make money doing that and went back and right. Yeah. I don't know. There's some great historians out there, but just didn't see that as a career path.

Alex Turkovic [00:03:44]:

Yeah, unless you're like, you're hosting a show on whatever channel, the History Channel, which isn't a History Channel, by the way. It's hard to make money. I have a degree in the arts and audio engineering and stuff. And we all do different things than our degrees, I think.

Chad Horenfeldt [00:04:01]:

Yeah. I mean, what I saw was when I realized was that the Internet, and specifically business applications built on the Internet would change the way that companies did business. And so I did a boot camp and learned to become an engineer. So this is going way back, but did a 15 month boot camp and realized that I was not a very good engineer and that I didn't necessarily like that either. But again, loved the idea of using technology and eventually got myself into consulting and then eventually got myself into customer success. And I'm actually originally from Canada, so I grew up in Toronto and really built my career there in customer success, working for a company called Eloqua in the marketing automation space. And that eventually went public, and then it was bought by Oracle and then eventually was recruited out to the New York area and sold my house, brought my whole family here and have been here now for about seven years. And in customer success, leadership roles, that's a massive change.

Alex Turkovic [00:05:05]:

Massive change. I think we talked about this briefly, but obviously you're a massive Maple Leafs fan. Is there a big Maple Leafs community in the New York area?

Chad Horenfeldt [00:05:16]:

I don't know. Actually, there probably is, but we're probably all ashamed to wear our Maple Leafs gear because we just are just so terrible in the playoffs. But, yes, I am a devoted fan and probably always will be. Hopefully one day we'll have our time.

Alex Turkovic [00:05:34]:

Yeah, absolutely. It's all cyclical, right? Looking back at your experience in engineering boot camp, obviously you mentioned that obviously you didn't turn out to be an engineer, which I'm right there with you. Like, I wish I had the temperament and the creativity combined with the reason needed to be a solid engineer. I don't have that either. But thinking back on that, what of that experience influences what you do today as a CS leader?

Chad Horenfeldt [00:06:10]:

Yeah, I think that it was really important to have that background for a few reasons. One is that because I covered kind of all aspects of the engineering lifecycle, so from the database level, to middle tier to front end. And even on the project management side, I definitely have an appreciation for the complexity in terms of building complex technical products. And so where that's helped me is, let's say customers are asking for certain features and I'm not just bringing them to the product team and say, here you go, this is what the customer wants. One is that I'll look to ask some more in depth questions in terms of what they're asking for, why they need it, and then when I'm communicating to the product team, I think having that background really gives me a lot of empathy so that I can think through, okay, what is this feature? What are they asking for? How long is it going to take? Is this something that we could really reasonably provide? So not only is there that understanding of how technology can be used, and I think having that deep understanding in terms of actually building products, what are those things that customers are looking to do, but then being able to communicate that back to the product engineering teams I think has been really, really helpful. And it's definitely something even going on into leadership roles. Just the idea of when teams are communicating things to me and saying, hey, we need this feature, really pushing back in a lot of ways and just trying to rethink about what does the customer actually want, do we actually need to build a feature and what should that actually look like? So those are things that are advantages. And then the lastly is using technology and I think that's some of the stuff we'll probably talk about today is leveraging that technology to engage our customers to deliver value. Having that engineering background has been really helpful because I've taken that understanding and knowledge that I have and kind of put it into how do I use complex products? Not only to help serve our customer in terms of the business that I'm working for and helping to help our customers achieve their outcomes, but just also the technology that's out there and being curious because it's definitely an area that's growing in terms of customer success. Technology.

Alex Turkovic [00:08:15]:

Yeah, it is. The tool set is exploding for sure. And it's interesting you mentioned, I think, a key word, which is empathy, right? You have the empathy of the customer going through their challenges and trying to meet their objectives, but also you have the empathy of the engineering and product teams trying to put forth the best product and roadmaps to manage and resources to deal with and all that kind of stuff. So it's interesting that you can, with that experience, kind of marry the two empathies if you will. So that's cool. So this is the digital customer success podcast and I would be remiss if I didn't ask some of the same questions across my entire group of guests that come on. And one of the questions that I like to ask is really your elevator pitch for digital CS? Because for those of you who are regular listeners, I'm putting together a wordmap based on everybody's elevator pitch of digital customer success, and I would love to hear what you have to say about it.

Chad Horenfeldt [00:09:23]:

Yeah, I think right now my elevator pitch on digital CS is delivering the right type of information to the right person on the client side at the right time and in the right channel. And it's a simplistic way of looking at it. But if you think about it in a more kind of holistic way, in order to deliver that information, you have to capture information that you know about the client. You need to be setting up those listening posts. You need to have the technology in place in terms of knowing what the customer is doing, where they're at in their customer journey. But ultimately, I think right now, if you're able to deliver that information in that different ways that I described, you can really be knocking the ball out of the park in terms of delivering your CS strategy from a digital perspective.

Alex Turkovic [00:10:12]:

Yeah, for sure. I love that perspective. That's the trick, right? It's marrying what you know about the customer with what you want the customer to know. Let's shift just slightly to the topic of metrics, because I think that CS metrics are a fairly well trodden path in terms of topic of conversations. We all kind of know what we're measuring from a revenue retention standpoint and just more tactical metrics like CTAs and those kinds of things. But when it comes to digital CS, what do you see as kind of the stakes in the ground metrics to measure as a CS leader?

Chad Horenfeldt [00:11:05]:

Yeah, I think there's always the two main types of metrics. So there's lagging indicators and leading indicators. And your lagging indicators, many of those stay the same. So gross dollar retention, for example, your net dollar retention rate, you want to know are you actually moving the chains, are you improving retention? Are you improving retention in terms of including expansion and upsells, so just generating additional revenue for the company? And then on the lagging indicator side, there's adoption, and adoption could be also a lagging indicator too, but usually I look at it as a leading indicator. So, for example, usually there's key metrics that you're trying to get your customer to achieve. And those are the metrics that from your analysis, you've determined that your most successful customers, the customers that are going to stay with you in the longer term, they're doing these key things. And it goes beyond the basics like are they logging in or something like that. It's usually that they're either maybe integrating with other systems or they're using some more of your complex things like workflows or automations or something to that effect. And so I like to measure those types of automation metrics, and then I'd say the ones that are more specific to the whole digital CS world are around engagement. And so those things could be are they signing up to your webinars? Are they responding to your emails? Are they responding to your surveys? Anything around those engagement metrics, I think that will give you a good indication as to whether your campaigns are actually having significant impact. And community Engagement could be another area that you could measure. I think another kind of periphery metric is just around NPS. Although I never really hold out a lot of water for NPS, I think I look at it more fully.

Alex Turkovic [00:12:53]:

We're going down a rabbit hole here.

Chad Horenfeldt [00:12:56]:

Yeah, no, those are the typical metrics that I would look at. And I think what's important is that you look at small incremental changes and you're not going with Digital CS, there are times that you'll see immediate change. So, for example, if you're trying to push, let's say, for trial conversions for a secondary product that you're trying to sell, you can see those secondary trial conversions right away. But necessarily those trial conversions actually converting to paid customers, that's something else, and that might take a little bit longer. And then any impact on retention would again be something that's even further down the road. So I think with Digital CS, you really need to be patient. You need to start small and look at those incremental changes and then see from those changes what are those long term impacts that you're going to have.

Alex Turkovic [00:13:49]:

Yeah, iteration comes to mind. So just constant iteration. And I've found that to be extremely true because you can spend a whole lot of time doing something and creating automations and workflows and things like that, and then they fall flat on their face. So yeah, I'm definitely there with you on that. Okay, I'm going to ask a question. Are you an NPS fan?

Chad Horenfeldt [00:14:19]:

I'm an NPS fan. From the data that I get, that's not the actual MPs score, although I do look at the score in terms of trends, and I do break it down by segments. So I think it's helpful from a segment perspective, but I think it's more helpful in terms of the actual responses that you get from customers. So in the open text area, that's where you learn the reason why they might be upset and just from the other kind of periphery benefits from it. One is that it can give you an indication who your advocates are, who you may not have known. It can give you also, on the flip side, indication of those customers that may churn. I'd rather ask them a question. What are the chances from zero to ten? Are you going to renew? I'd rather be more explicit that way. But this can give you some indication there, depending on who you're actually serving, that there is a problem. So for those reasons, I definitely think any information, any feedback is helpful. But I wouldn't necessarily measure your team based on that, because there's a lot of factors involved in what that response might be.

Alex Turkovic [00:15:28]:

Yeah, it's so true. I've also found that you can have extremely high NPS scores from end users, for instance, versus lower scores from executives and vice versa. I agree with you can't necessarily measure your team on that, but I suppose on apples to apples comparison, it's a good way to see how one customer is doing or one segment is doing versus another.

Chad Horenfeldt [00:15:57]:

Yeah, I mean, on that note, as an example, I know our product team would just launch MPs surveys in specific areas of the product, maybe new features they've launched, and it would give them a good indication. It's like, okay, does our customer, like, feature A and what is their feedback? So I definitely think if you're using it for point areas, it can give you that information. And going back to that definition of digital CS, it's like delivering that right information at the right time, in the right place, in the right channel. So we would deliver NPS to the end users via in app survey, and we could gain a lot from that. So, yeah, it's just interesting. But yeah, I wouldn't give it more than we've probably given it in terms of the benefit that it can have.

Alex Turkovic [00:16:41]:

Yeah, right, exactly. So when we're talking about engagement metrics, we talked a lot about engagement with certain flows or community engagement and things like that. Where does the CSM fit into that? Or like a pooled CSM fit into that? Because a digital motion doesn't necessarily a lot of people go into the assumption of a digital CS is just for your smaller tier customers, when in reality, it can be just as beneficial for largest customers and just as beneficial for the CSM themselves as well. So kind of what's your hot take, I guess, if you will, of the interaction of the CSM with those kinds of measurements?

Chad Horenfeldt [00:17:26]:

Yeah, I think there's a few things. Like one is that we would use part of our health score would be our engagement score, and we would blend that in, and we would know, hey, are these customers actually engaging with us? And if they're not, then we would have a flag where we really need to try and engage with them and just to learn, are these materials not helpful? Do you not find our community something of a benefit? Do you not find something like office hours something as beneficial? So I think that's one part of it in terms of how to use your engagement metrics so that you can give an indication to the CSM, like what's not resonating. And then on the flip side, you can also get an indication of what is resonating. So, for example, if part of your digital strategy is maybe a survey where you're asking particular questions, it could be NPS as an example, and it could be more of an expanded VOC survey where you're asking specific questions around what feature do you like the best, what feature do you not like the best? How can we better work with you? Those are the ways that you can take that information, serve it to the CSM, and then they can leverage that. I think the key through all of this, as many people in digital CS would know, is like, how do you capture that information? And how do you make sure that you've bundled it up in a way that the CSM can use? Because they've got so many other things that are coming at them, and now you've got something else that's coming at them. So it's really important that they don't see it as noise, but there is a clear call to action so that they can actually act on what the situation is telling them.

Alex Turkovic [00:18:57]:

Yeah, quality, not quantity, definitely makes sense. So you've built out some digital CS functions, and you've been involved in kind of the creation or the standing up of digital CS. And I love talking with people that have had that real world experience and pain of getting into scaled motions and whatnot. So I'd love to hear from you, yes, about some successes, but I think what's even more valuable is what are some of the pitfalls that you yourself have encountered in trying to build these things, and what can people learn from those things?

Chad Horenfeldt [00:19:45]:

Yeah, I'd say the first thing is don't send a survey to the wrong segment. So that was something that I did and I was trying to send. It was like an MPs survey. I think it was like just a general MPs survey. This is going back a few years, and I was trying to send it to all of our clients that had been with us for a period of time. I ended up sending to the right audience, but I sent the wrong survey. I sent, like, a post onboarding survey. So it said something like, how was your onboarding experience? And then on top of that, I had scheduled it for a particular day, but I believe I sent it on memorial day, which is funny because we're right around memorial day when we're taping this. So I had two whammies against me, and I had clients writing back, I ran boarded with you, like, a year ago. Why are you sending this to me? And, yes, I might as well just.

Alex Turkovic [00:20:39]:

Sent an email out that said, we know nothing about you.

Chad Horenfeldt [00:20:43]:

Yes. And then I had other people saying, like, you're completely disrespecting this holiday. I can't believe you would send it on this day. Here's the hilarious part. The hilarious part is that our actual conversion, like, the actual people who responded was, like, their response rate was so much higher than probably other surveys we had sent, because and our theory on that was that nobody else was sending surveys or anything on the holiday. So it was just funny. And this is total digital CS success in some ways, but not really where you have to experiment and try different things. But I don't recommend sending the wrong survey, et cetera. But it's funny because you think about emails that you get, and it says like, dear first name, and those are always the ones that people respond to and see, and it's like, oh, I can't believe that Goof sent this to me like this. Don't do that. That was my failure. And I think what we learned from that is that I should not be using these tools and sending them out. And that what we really needed was someone to help run this. And again, this is going back a number of years before I would say ops became more prevalent, more accepted. But it just shows you that you cannot run these campaigns and do this motion on a whim. It really isn't even a campaign. It's really something that's a holistic part of your entire customer journey. And yes, you might be adding campaigns into this, but just as you said, digital CS shouldn't be a segment. This should be part of your overall approach to customer success. And the technology is not enough, and it can't prevent essentially human error. You really need someone who's doing it day in, day out, understands the technology, understands the needs, understands the customers. And so those are things that we learned over time. But if I go into successes, I'd say that some of the successes that I've seen in the past and going back one of our startups, once we actually put somebody in place, one of the things that we did, which I thought was really interesting, is we did this sort of fake live onboarding experience. And we did this for certain cohorts of our customers that would onboard them. And what I mean by that is it would seem like you could sign up for a webinar, and we offered it like, four times a day, and the customers would sign up, and we'd take them through this webinar, and we'd intentionally make mistakes in the webinar so that it would appear to be live. But it's actually a recorded version. But we would also have someone that's listening into the chat, and it would be able to respond to the chat. And so that way we could scale our operations. We could bring customers in on a cohort basis. And it was a great way of getting people to go to these onboarding webinars, because I think we all know that if there's an onboarding webinar, a lot of us sorry, not an onboarding webinar, just a recorded video, like a training video. It's like, oh, I can watch that anytime. There's no pressure, then that's right. Then you don't. But when you're actually signing up for something, and then let's say your colleagues are signing up as well, then there's more pressure in terms of peer pressure and you've committed that you've got on your calendar. And by giving that flexibility, you're giving that person options like, hey, okay, it's not like they're just offering it one time a day. They've made it really easy for me. And so we found a lot more success in getting people to actually take that first live session and not having to have people run it live, but getting the information that we wanted to get to the end customer, and that being really successful.

Alex Turkovic [00:24:23]:

That's a super cool use of that technology. And it highlights another conversation that I was having the other day, I think it was with Mickey Powell actually, where we were talking about the fact that CS tools are kind of few and far between, but there's a ton of sales tools and ton of marketing tools, and really that's an awesome use in CS. And onboarding of fundamentally a marketing webinar tool where the webinar is pre recorded, it's fake, it's got some human elements built into it, but the chat is live and you can still engage at scale. That's awesome.

Chad Horenfeldt [00:25:03]:

Yeah, I'd say one more success. And this is kind of getting back to thinking of delivering the right message and the right channel. And we started Digital CS here at Customer. And one of the things that we did, it was a really simple use case where we had a bit of a flaw in our system where you could reduce licenses, but we wouldn't necessarily kick you off our system at renewal time if you didn't necessarily pay for those licenses that you had reduced from. So it's a flaw, we knew of it, I'm sure the product team is all over it. But what we did was we would push that data into our system so we would know that they had only purchased X, they were actually using Y. And this became obviously more prevalent in the economic downturn when companies were reducing the amount of seats that they had. And so we created a really simple in app message that said, hey, you've paid for X amount of seats, you're using Y, you need to get them off by this date, or we're going to charge you for them. And just by delivering it to that right person. In app, the movement that we expected from users, it was much higher than doing this through email. So those are the things that there's lots of things you're trying to do. Maybe you're trying to increase adoption or you're trying to do this, but sometimes these little, just specific use cases, in this case, we don't want our customers, like, leveraging our product and not paying for it. Those little things could save a lot of time. The CSMS don't have to reach out, billing doesn't have to reach out, and it could cause maybe some tension later on if a customer gets charged for using seats and they weren't aware. So it's just like those little examples to look for. Those low hanging fruit can really drive a lot of value for the business.

Alex Turkovic [00:26:45]:

Yeah, I've been walking a lot and walking, running, trying to get myself back into half marathon shape. Right. And that has allowed me to listen to a lot of books, listen to a lot of podcasts. A couple of weeks ago, I binged your podcast. I think what you're saying is very relevant from a mindset perspective. So on one of the episodes, you talked about the gap and the gain mindset, and I was curious to get your take on. I think we can all get our heads around what that means for CSMS and the CSM function traditionally, but what does that gain mindset mean in the realm of digital?

Chad Horenfeldt [00:27:35]:

Yeah, I'll just talk about what the gap and the gain means, just to give you some context there. So the gap mindset is you're kind of thinking about the things that you don't have. And if you look at your life, you're like, oh, this person over here, they have, like, a big car, and they have this really nice apartment. And the gain mindset is the opposite. It's really being happy with what you have, being grateful for others, and things that you've achieved rather than focusing on what you don't have. And I think in terms of digital CS, the way I think about it is you're thinking about, let's say, actually even that example that I just provided in terms of that accomplishment that was made where we indicated to customers, hey, you're using these licenses and you shouldn't. When our first digital CS person, a customer, came in, one of the things that they were thinking about was this really massive endeavor where they're trying to increase renewal rate. And it was just a multi pronged digital CS strategy, which is great, and I think that's really important. But as the first digital CS person, really what I was trying to impart on this person is that, hey, let's just get some small wins. Because once you get those small wins, you can get the momentum going, and then that can help us actually get more resources once we show that we've made some progress. And in terms of that gap and gain mindset, my concern was that if you're trying to take on some really ambitious product, a project, and you're not seeing those results right away, and it's a lot of prep time, and you're going to be in the gap because you're not seeing progress. But if you start with just a smaller project and you start to get some of those incremental results really quickly, then you're going to be in the gain mindset because you're going to see the results. You can show those results. You can communicate them, and you can just build off of that. And as part of digital CS, one of the unique parts of it, and I'd say one of the more complex. Part of parts of it is that you really are interconnected with other functions. So product and marketing sales a lot of the times, and you're interdependent on them. We talked about the marketing technology, but there's so many other parts of it. It could be leveraging money that marketing has to pay for gifts that you might want to send to clients. It might be using marketing for some of the content creation for product. You might want to leverage some of their knowledge. Maybe you do an ask me anything as part of a webinar or on your community. So you really have to be mindful of those different pieces that's involved. Because I remember when we started Digital CS, a customer, our customer marketer was like, hey, what about me? How is my role going to change with this new person? And so we really had to be mindful and say, listen, it's not going to change. Like, we're actually going to help you because we're going to focus on specific use cases that we haven't even thought of, and we're going to help drive more value. But we do need to make sure that we make those lines really clear so nobody's stepping on each other's toes.

Alex Turkovic [00:30:47]:

Yeah, that communication. It's so easy to operate in a vacuum, and I think the larger the organization, the easier it is. But you mentioned something near and dear to my heart, which is the swag budget. It's good stuff. Swag budget on point. Another one of your episodes that I felt was wonderful. And you had a little bit of a hot take as well on that episode, was around The Moment of Truth or the Moments of Truth, because so many times we talk about that in the CS realm to mean that every customer touch point is a moment of truth. And I thought your words around that were very refreshing to say that it's not every interaction. It's like when it really counts, we show up, and we show up in the right way. That shows the customer that we have their back and we're on their side and support them. And I think now more than ever, given the economic issues we have and the post COVID and all that kind of stuff, it's important to be there for our customers in that way. So you can probably say it a little bit more eloquently than I can, but I would love also for you to expand on that a little bit and really define what in your mind those perfect moments of truth digitally might look like.

Chad Horenfeldt [00:32:21]:

Yeah. So if you read The Seven Pillars of Customer Success by Wayne McCullough, he definitely talks about moments of truth, and he sees moments of truth, I think, kind of how you described it. It's these different times on the customer journey when you're engaging with your customers. But back when I was at Eloqua, I had this phenomenal head of sales. He was our CRO. His name is Alex Shootman, and I believe he's I think the CEO at Akamai now. And he sort of imparted on us is that this idea of moments of truth is this time when you're almost at an impasse with your customer. And in this particular moment, the action you take is going to determine whether you're going to be successful with that client or you're going to fail with that client. And it's really kind of a key moment where you're like, okay, my next email or my next thing that I say on this call is really important, and I really need to think about that very carefully. And as you said in this economy, oh, my goodness, I have been in so many moments of truth where just had a severe impasse. And I remember one specific moment with a particular customer, and the customer wasn't happy because they were at a particular moment in their business, and they needed to ramp up very quickly. And we had a particular way that we charged for our licenses, and they only needed, like, this quick burst, let's say maybe it's a week of additional licenses, and we sold it in increments, let's say, of two months or something like that. And that was our policy. That's kind of how we did things. And this person was at our mercy, and they just said, okay, whatever, I'll pay it. And then this person wrote me this super long email just explaining how disappointed they were. And so I was in a moment of truth. And I failed. But by sending me this long email, I got into a second moment of truth where I could try and salvage the relationship. And so what I did was I actually went to our finance team and said, listen, I want to give this person a credit. I think they're 100% right. I think our policy is wrong here. We need to relook at how we're charging our customers. And I was able to get them a credit. I got on the phone with them, thanked them for their feedback, and delivered the feedback and delivered the credit. And that went a long way because this PP was able to go to their CEO, and this got all the way up into their senior level of their team just saying that they were really unhappy with our practices, but the way that we handled that really helped there. So that's an example, let's say, just of CS as a whole. I'd say when it comes to digital CS, the area that I would focus on is how do you make sure that you have that human element built into your digital strategy? So as an example, you might have a chat bot or you might have a help center or knowledge base where customers can get help. But how easy is it for your customers to get a hold of somebody when they need to because they've struggled to get the answer that they have, or how easy is it to escalate it to a manager or someone like myself in this situation where the customer wasn't happy? And then I'd say a third part of it might be, do you have some sort of mechanism where, let's say you have a webinar or let's say you have some sort of en masse approach that you're doing with customers? How can they schedule time with you using something like Chili Piper or something like that? So if you have those elements built in, then you can develop that human side to whatever it is that you're doing, and then you can make sure that you're creating that emergency escape valve for your customers so they can interact with somebody from a human perspective. And I think that if you have those in place, then that can safeguard the digital strategies, because I think we've all been in situations where we're texting with some sort of support or chat, and you're just like, I want to speak to an agent. You're on the phone. I want to speak to an agent. And then you're put on hold for, like, three years, and I can tell you that that's just and not only you're put on hold for three years, then you're hung up on or something like that.

Alex Turkovic [00:36:32]:

You've failed the moment what your magic word is to get through to a human, basically.

Chad Horenfeldt [00:36:36]:

That's right. Yeah. You have failed in that moment of truth, and you're probably going to lose that customer.

Alex Turkovic [00:36:42]:

As you were talking to me.

Chad Horenfeldt [00:36:48]:

It.

Alex Turkovic [00:36:48]:

Almost feels like a customer shouldn't even know that you have a digital customer success strategy. It's like the customer should just feel like they're being communicated with. They have someone to reach out to when they need to besides a support queue. They have a relationship with you rather than just these regular kind of touch points or just break fix calling support.

Chad Horenfeldt [00:37:13]:

Yeah, I agree. It's interesting because Meta had this very large layoff back in November of 2022, and I had created a very unique segmentation of our customers because I was owning all of CS. And when we had that layoff, I had to adjust our segmentation because I had to have the right coverage model for our customers, but I could not provide dedicated CSMS for all of our customers, and I had to change that bar. But what we were able to do is someone's like, well, how did you communicate to customers that they're no longer getting a dedicated CSM? And I did not write that in our communication. I don't think that's the right message. But what I did communicate is, what are they actually getting? And I communicated like, hey, you have access to our community. You have access to our knowledge base, our office hours that we're doing. And we introduced a new concept, health checks, which we had been doing customer health checks for our customers, but we gave customers a way that they could sign up for them through that communication, that transition communication. And so that way we're really trying to provide a lot of things for our customers. We're just delivering value in a different way. And just like you're saying, building that relationship in a different way, and most likely in a better way, because I can say that through communities, through pooled CS models, a lot of times your customers are getting access to different people, different perspectives. It's not just their particular CSM, and in a lot of ways they'll get more specialized assistance, but it's just a matter of how you're communicating that and making sure that you're delivering on what you're promising.

Alex Turkovic [00:38:54]:

Yeah, you spoke briefly about your experiences at Meta and especially what happened kind of last year. And I know that you were part of basically an acquisition of customer into Meta. And from a career standpoint, I'd love to kind of get your sense on what that was like for you as a CS leader and how you adjusted the things you were doing as part of Meta and then being kind of absorbed into this behemoth and what that experience was like for you, what adjustments you had to make to your strategy and those kinds of things.

Chad Horenfeldt [00:39:31]:

I think anyone that's been through any acquisition knows that there's definitely a lot of weirdness, a lot of strangeness, and really trying to understand what's expected of you. And I think that one of the big things, the change that customer went through is that customer was more focused on the enterprise. So we mostly had larger customers that we're working with. But with Meta, we were trying to tie into their customer base, and their customer base is mostly SMB, so mostly those smaller to mid sized customers. And so we actually shifted from mostly like an enterprise play with a longer implementation cycle to a product led growth trial strategy. So that was a very big change in terms of how we did things, how we went about onboarding our customers, how we went about servicing our customers. And so I think that what's important for CS leaders going through these types of transitions is knowing what that change is, how it's expected of you, what's expected of you. And for myself, I love those types of situations because I see them as challenges and just interesting, like, hey, I love strategy, and then leveraging new technology. So some of the things that I did is that I had one CSM in our commercial, which is our SMB segment, and so we went from one person to five people. And so I built out a CS model. I built out essentially two account managers who were handling on the commercial side, like the renewals and looking for upsells, and then I built out the digital CS side. So we had one digital CS person, and it was really interesting to have build that out and see what those results were. But I would say that was the biggest transition. And how we work through that, not only from a customer success. There's obviously support, there's obviously the services the services organization has to shift their approach. And then how we work with the product team, how we work with the marketing team, how we work with the sales team. So that was from just a pure customer success. That was definitely a big transition. I was definitely a fan of food that Meta had, but other than that, sure. Yeah, other than that we actually were able to maintain most of the systems that we had and so that allowed us not only to initially, so that was really helpful too, so that things weren't too foreign for us.

Alex Turkovic [00:41:50]:

Yeah, I guess that was going to be my follow up. Like how much autonomy were you given versus being kind of swallowed a whole? And it sounds like it was more on the autonomy side versus having to all of a sudden change everything.

Chad Horenfeldt [00:42:03]:

Yeah, it was definitely more on the autonomy side. I'd say that there was more red tape like any large company that you're working within. And it was not only that. I mean, we're joining Meta at a time where the economy is having trouble. Meta is going through a lot of transitions. It's the year of efficiency. So there's a lot of outside factors that were kind of, I'd say hurting us in terms of what we were trying to achieve. But through all of that, I think one of the things that we haven't talked about, but one of the key things that we had going for us was just the culture. We had a really strong culture within the company. We had a really strong culture within the customer success team. And for any leader that's there, that's really the thing beyond the technology, beyond the goals and accountability, if you have a strong culture, your team is going to win out over that and whatever happens, they'll be in a good place.

Alex Turkovic [00:43:00]:

Couldn't agree with you more. Speaking of kind of culture and community, you're so well plugged into the CS community and have been for a lot of years. Just a couple of kind of rapid fire things as we kind of round out our conversation. But I'd love to know what resources, books, podcasts, YouTube channels and things like that that you listen to regularly follow closely and kind of what fills your bucket of info.

Chad Horenfeldt [00:43:31]:

Yeah, lots of stuff. Listening and learning from lots of great people out there. I'd say that from a podcast perspective and some of the podcasts I'm listening to more these days. From the customer success perspective, I love the unchurned podcast. I think that's Josh Schechter, it's a really great podcast. I love kind of more intellectual type podcasts and I find that he kind of has those types of guests on there and gets pretty deep in his subjects I love the Gain Grow Retain podcast, another good one. It's very hands on, typically, and learning from different perspectives. And Kristen Hare's Success League radio is a really good one as well. Some really good interviews, some good book reviews. I think from books I mentioned seven Pillars of CS. I think it's a really good, more recent book. And other people specifically, maybe things that are happening in the digital CS world. I'd say that Catalyst has actually done some really neat things as of late in terms of some of their plays that they've documented. And specifically, like, two people that I'd point out are Dan Ennis from Monday. So he's someone that's sort of taking the time to detail out some of the things that he's doing, which I think are really important and obviously things that we don't necessarily have. And it's why I love this podcast, Alex, and what you're doing. And the other person I point out is Lane Hart over at Heap. So he's leading their operations team and doing some really neat things there. And he's also outlined some of the strategies that he takes in terms of his work at Heap and specifically, I believe, on their health score.

Alex Turkovic [00:45:11]:

And then building on top of that, what's in your ideal customer health score? How do you balance kind of the predictive analytics versus the reactive stuff? What's in your health score?

Chad Horenfeldt [00:45:22]:

Yeah, it's a good question. I think that your health score is going to be as good as obviously the data that you have, but also the breadth of your operations team to help you do that analysis. And some of these other toolings. And we talked about like AI tooling that could be really helpful. But I think that this is a starting point. I would look at key things like your adoption metrics. I look at things like your engagement metrics. And if you're able to actually pull in all the different ways you engage with your clients and know which clients are engaging with you and which clients are not engaging with you, those are really key metrics. And the other thing is obviously sentiment that your customers might be providing you through various sources. It could be surveys, it could be in app where you could just detect the sentiment that still could be an AI component, but just knowing that sentiment is really important. And then the area that we're starting to see more and more of is this idea of value realization. Are your customers actually achieving value and are they achieving outcomes? And I think that's trickier, and I think that's probably more of a high touch component and more still of a manual component, but that's sort of that final area. If we can somehow improve that, make it easier, it could be implied, let's say, from the adoption metrics. But the more we can blend that in, I'd say the more holistic your health score is going to be.

Alex Turkovic [00:46:43]:

Yes, so interesting because with an account that has an assigned CSM, there's regular meetings, there's regular contact, you can lean a lot more heavily on the sentiment that your CSM has about the account and tracking towards objectives and outcomes and those kinds of things versus customers who are wholly part of your digital flow. I think that's where some interesting stuff with AI can come into play, where we might start being able to do the coveted virtual QBR in a very meaningful way. So that's cool. And I guess, lastly, before I give you some airtime to kind of tell us what you're all about and what you're doing and what's exciting you right now, I'd love for you to highlight maybe a few people who are doing some really great things in digital CS right now.

Chad Horenfeldt [00:47:44]:

Yeah, I had mentioned a couple of people. One was Lane Hart over at Heap, and the other one was other person was Dan Ennis over@monday.com. I highly recommend following those individuals. They're just sharing some really important information to help people. And it's not just them as well as their teams, like specifically Monday, I'm really impressed with just their team in general, and they've kind of started from more of that digital approach, like leveraging AI to drive digital CS. So definitely I'd look at them.

Alex Turkovic [00:48:20]:

Sounds good. We'll do well. I want to thank you so much for taking time out of your day and joining us here. I'm sure everybody is going to get a lot out of this conversation and would love for you to tell us a little bit about what you have going on, what's going on in your life and career, and where people can find you and get in touch with you.

Chad Horenfeldt [00:48:42]:

Yeah, in terms of myself, please connect with me on LinkedIn. As I get ideas into my head, I like to talk about them and throw them out there and see what other people feel about them. I also write on my blog, which is Customer Success and Failure. So it's a substac, but those are the main areas. I've got a bigger project going on in terms of writing a book, but it's actually funny. It's opposite to digital CS. So in this one, I'm looking very specifically at the CSM and trying to take kind of things that I've learned and wrap them up into one book, which is a momentous and really difficult thing to do. But for myself, kind of things that really drives me is helping other people, and specifically when it comes to customer success and just more complex technical things. And there's no better way for me that helps me get my gain, I would say, is to help others. So love doing these types of podcasts and love the fact that you're focusing on digital CS. It's just a really big area and a really important area.

Alex Turkovic [00:49:49]:

Well, thanks for joining. I appreciate the insights and the comments. And we'll have to have you back once you write your book, even though it's not digital CS focused.

Chad Horenfeldt [00:49:58]:

Sounds great, Alex. Thanks again.

Alex Turkovic [00:50:00]:

All right, thanks. Thank you for joining me on this episode of the Digital Customer Success podcast. If you like what we're doing, or don't, for that matter, consider leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice. You can view the Digital Customer Success definition wordmap and get more information about the show@digitalcustomersuccess.com. My name is Alex Turkovich. Thanks again for joining, and we'll see next time.