There is a small but mighty bunch of customer success leaders who are tasked with operating a Digital Customer Success program within the confines of an on-prem software product - and Stacie Chaney of VMware and I happen to be two of them!
So of course we talk about that in this episode and Stacie provides some amazing insight and tactics from her own DCS practice that have very real and practical implications now.
Stacie also discusses her background in Marketing and how well it translates into a career in CS.
Enjoy! I know I sure did...
Stacie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stacie-kaufman-chaney-360339b/
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
Today's episode is sponsored by Vitally. If you're in the market for a feature rich, easy-to-implement CSP - go sign up for a demo at vitally.io/digitalcx. If you take a qualified demo with them, you'll receive a free pair of AirPods!
Thank you to our sponsor, Vitally!
Vitally is a wonderfully feature-rich, fast-to-implement CSP that we are proud to have as a sponosr!
+++++++++++++++++
Like/Subscribe/Review:
If you are getting value from the show, please follow/subscribe so that you don't miss an episode and consider leaving us a review.
Website:
For more information about the show or to get in touch, visit DigitalCustomerSuccess.com.
Buy Alex a Cup of Coffee:
This show runs exclusively on caffeine - and lots of it. If you like what we're, consider supporting our habit by buying us a cup of coffee: https://bmc.link/dcsp
Thank you for all of your support!
The Digital Customer Success Podcast is hosted by Alex Turkovic
There is a small but mighty bunch of customer success leaders who are tasked with operating a Digital Customer Success program within the confines of an on-prem software product - and Stacie Chaney of VMware and I happen to be two of them!
So of course we talk about that in this episode and Stacie provides some amazing insight and tactics from her own DCS practice that have very real and practical implications now.
Stacie also discusses her background in Marketing and how well it translates into a career in CS.
Enjoy! I know I sure did...
Stacie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stacie-kaufman-chaney-360339b/
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
Today's episode is sponsored by Vitally. If you're in the market for a feature rich, easy-to-implement CSP - go sign up for a demo at vitally.io/digitalcx. If you take a qualified demo with them, you'll receive a free pair of AirPods!
Thank you to our sponsor, Vitally!
Vitally is a wonderfully feature-rich, fast-to-implement CSP that we are proud to have as a sponosr!
+++++++++++++++++
Like/Subscribe/Review:
If you are getting value from the show, please follow/subscribe so that you don't miss an episode and consider leaving us a review.
Website:
For more information about the show or to get in touch, visit DigitalCustomerSuccess.com.
Buy Alex a Cup of Coffee:
This show runs exclusively on caffeine - and lots of it. If you like what we're, consider supporting our habit by buying us a cup of coffee: https://bmc.link/dcsp
Thank you for all of your support!
The Digital Customer Success Podcast is hosted by Alex Turkovic
Do you want to be an advocate? Check. Well, are you going to give me a T shirt? No. Yeah. Do I get some swag? And once again, welcome to the digital Customer Success Podcast. I'm alex Turkovich. 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 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 digitalcustombersuccess.com. But for now, let's get started with today's show. Welcome to this episode. Nice to have you here. Welcome to August of 2023. Had to think on that for a second. June and July were two awesome months for the podcast, and we've grown exponentially, thanks to you. August is shaping up to be pretty cool as well. We have some awesome conversations coming up, including Mr. Joel Passen. We've got Simon Chris on the podcast. We have Nick meta and kelly capote of gainsight coming on. We have Michael Bajanski on the podcast as well. For today, though, pretty special treat. We have Stacey Cheney on the podcast, who is at VMware currently. And I was excited to talk to Stacey for a couple of different reasons. The first one is that she and I share a challenge within our respective environments in which we operate digitally, which is to say, she has the challenge of operating a digital program in an on prem environment. And turns out there are quite a few of us who do operate in that environment. And so she and I get into some of the particulars of what that means to operate that way without the luxury of telemetry or inapp notifications and those kinds of things. So that's definitely a treat. The other reason I was excited to talk with her is because she has a very rich marketing background, and I'm finding that more and more and more CS folks who come into, especially digital CS have that marketing background and understand things like marketing automation and whatnot. So we get into that and much more. So please enjoy this conversation with Stacey Cheney. I know I sure did. Stacey, welcome to the podcast. I'm so, so happy that you made the time to join. The reason I'm so excited to have you on is because you are at VMware in a Digital Customer Success function, which is a really cool place to be in digital CS, I believe. But also you have a massively rich marketing background, which I think is a hiring profile that you see more and more and more in CS roles as we start to go digital and whatnot. So I'm really excited to talk with you today and to share your wealth of experience with the listener. So welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Really excited to talk about this and talk with you. Cool as obligatory. Got to start a little bit with your background and kind of call it the CS origin story. Where you came from, what you've done in previous lives, what led you to CS, what keeps you in CS, all of that fun stuff. Sure. That's interesting. I feel like everybody kind of either falls into it or they're just now kind of getting into it totally. Everybody's mind's. The former all over the place. I think for me, I think going way back for a bit. I always knew I wanted to be in marketing. I was one of in junior high, knew I wanted business and then had a little bit of a creative brain. So I was like, what better way to marry the two but marketing? So I knew that was the direction I wanted to go. Pretty young, I thought I was going to go kind of like the marketing firm, be a big wig, go that route. But after college, thought I had done all the things right, got a job right out of college, did all the right things, and then the recession hit. So the reason I talk about that though is that actually opened me up because at that point I was just desperate to get anything. I had never really thought about, one, marketing within a larger company, but two, marketing for tech. So tech really wasn't even on my radar. But when I had gotten an interview for marketing for a tech company, I was like, okay, this could be interesting, but also I need a job. That's kind of how I fell into doing marketing for tech. And then while there, I spent eleven years at this company just working my way around and eventually ended up in customer success. But at the time started with marketing for an education program, which then looped into what was known as Global Services and watched that organization evolve from Global Services into what is now customer success. So it was very cool to see from the inside how somebody is molding into a customer success, like which groups get brought in. So kind of seeing that organically from the inside. And then while I was there, so I was in customer success at that point. And then how I got in the more traditional CS CSM piece was they actually started a group, was called Success Management. This is six, seven years ago. So it's very early days CSM, maybe 1015 people. And at the time I was marketing, I was a customer success Marketer was my title. And I was trying to figure out how to market this Success Management group. So how do I explain to a customer that they're advocates, they're trying to help them with value. These are all things that weren't out there yet, right? So I was trying to figure out how to develop the messaging for that group while also figuring out a monetization strategy because we were very early days, how do we monetize customer success or success managers? What tiers should they be? So this is, like I said like seven years ago, before, what we know as today as customer success. Right. That's how I kind of fell into customer success management, and then that's how I segued into digital customer success and customer marketing. So kind of a backwards way to end up there. But now I can't imagine not being in tech. Yeah, it's interesting, I would imagine as a marketer of CS, which I think is great to begin with, just because it's usually kind of like on the back burner from many a marketing not a common title, so that's really cool. But I would imagine you probably spent a good amount of time embedded with leadership and learning kind of the motions and learning the segmentation and doing all that kind of stuff. So you really got kind of probably a top down view of it and then before jumping in full stop. Right. And it's interesting with that segmentation piece is that that's how we kind of fell into the digital CS piece was we were looking at how do we help support these CSMS? So we were trying to go that how do we automate some of their work? We've heard this before. How do you automate some of the CSMS work so they can be more strategic? But it was so early days that they wanted to kind of keep that in their hands, understandably. And that's where we segued into more of a I call it customer journey marketing. Customer marketing is kind of a tough term because some people think of that as advocacy only, but I see that as much more broad than just advocacy alone. But we developed a customer marketing and journey marketing, and what we did is we actually complemented the CSM communications with a more high level air cover, driving them to adoption messages that were coming from a marketing group, driving them to one, to many events. So that's kind of how we went from working with that success management team, trying to help them to digitize what they're doing. And then how do we actually pivot to be more customer journey marketing focused to complement everything they were doing in CS? People right now in CS are talking about the things you just mentioned as if it's like this new concept. And I may be saying something slightly controversial, but I don't care. We'll go there. We'll go there. Because it used to be like the assumption was digital was a segment and digital was emails and inapp, and it was all customer facing. Whereas now the more common thread is around the fact that digital yes, it's those things. Maybe less on the segment side, but it's also enabling the internal team to communicate effectively and have the right resources to do XYZ and have the right automations in place so they're not sending the same email 500 times. And all those kinds of things that are now being talked about, because I think digital is really taking a hold, but are really things that you've been doing for a decade. Yeah, right. Well, that's what's funny. And my team is so tired of me hearing this. I feel like the old person that talks about the good old days, but I tell them all the time. I remember going to pulse. It would have been like five years ago, if I remember right. And I went there as a customer success marketer and talking to folks. We were trying to get stand up, this type of communication journey, how do we leverage this? Most people were talking about surveys, which we were trying to get beyond that. But the funniest thing is when I said I was a customer success marketer, they looked at me like I had five heads because they're like, what is that? And then when I was trying to get feedback of what we were trying to do, and it was just still so new. But it's just so refreshing to see how much this is coming to the forefront. I mean, I'm on a podcast about Digital CS, so it's great to see that other companies are coming on board with it and all the things that I think we've done. This is a great opportunity to get this out because these are things that we've done, like I said 510 years ago. Yeah. One of the things I ask all of my guests is what is your definition of Digital CS? And I'm very curious to get your answer to this because I'm collecting everybody's answer, turning it into a massive word map on the website and all that kind of stuff. But I have a feeling you might have maybe a unique spin on it. I don't know. We'll see. Well, I did think about this one a little bit beforehand, and it will probably greatly give away that I have a marketing background, because it's probably a little cliche. But to me, Digital CS is getting the right message to the right person at the right time to drive customer value. No matter how you do it or which way you get to them, it's driving value with what they need in that moment, that's shortened definition, I think. You get the award for the most concise definition, and absolutely no complaints here. That makes sense. So that leads me to kind of my next question, which is how does your approach differ to these kinds of motions from someone who may have come from a more traditional sales or support call center background? Obviously you're thinking differently because you have that marketing background, but what does that tangibly look like in the things that you implement and the work that you do on a day to day basis? Yeah, it's a great question, and it's interesting because we see it just even in people that I hire, depending on what their background is, which direction they kind of shift. So if they have more of that sales support, account management, they want to go straight into talking to a customer, getting stuff out there to them. And even we see a lot more people looking for digital CS folks to have marketing backgrounds. But I think they're looking at it a little limited in how they can leverage that expertise. I think most people are sought after marketing folks for communication skills, marketing automation, running a webinar, things like that, which are all super valuable to have if you have somebody that has marketing expertise. But I think more so and this is kind of what we're leveraging more with the team I'm on now is leveraging that marketing expertise for persona customer journey, really understanding our customers, getting an idea of, if I'm talking to this person, what are their pain points? What is the value we need to drive to that person? What questions should I ask them? What should I send? When? What's happening with this customer outside of the product? And a lot of that already exists at your company. If you have a strong marketing organization, they already have all that because they develop it for their prospect and demand gen campaigns. But being able to pull that post sale to help understand our existing customers better, how do we understand what's happening in onboarding? Who should you be talking to? What should you say to those folks just getting a better understanding of the customers themselves? I think that marketing expertise should be where, in addition to the communication aspect of marketing, where you can really leverage a person with marketing experience. For digital CS. Yeah, it's not just the tangible tasks. It's not just the webinar, as you say, or the automations that you're putting in place. It's the whole jokingly said strategy behind it. I almost feel like digital is solving for things that a lot of companies implemented voice of the customer groups for, which is to say, like, hey, we need to listen to our customers, not just pre sale, not just right after onboarding. But it's like, what does the whole lifecycle look like? And I think Digital CS is well poised to do that probably in conjunction with marketing. And that's also where I think you get some of that hopefully interplay and less confrontation. But do you see that kind of how does that work for you in terms of the things that you're focused on versus the things that the marketing specifically might be focused on? Yeah, it's a great question, because I think when we first started doing customer marketing, that even of itself was pretty new at the time. I mean, that would have been, like I said, probably about five years ago or so, because traditionally, any marketing or communications that was going to an existing customer. For the most part, there are definitely exceptions to this rule, but for the most part was buy more. Right. So once you buy, you don't hear anything from us besides maybe your onboarding email, which that even was rare, but nobody kind of came back to them until it was, okay, who has this product now? I'm going to go resell them to something else. It's like your renewal is coming up in two weeks. Yeah, exactly. I didn't talk to you for nine months, but buy this new products. But I have no idea if you're successful. Who are you? Well, that's why we started the customer marketing piece, was to be able to kind of fill that gap, like I said, to provide kind of that air cover of what do they need to be doing in onboarding? Can we send them communications to get up and running? Okay, how do we get them to adopt more? How can we have events that make sense that they can go to or a community that they can go to to keep that connection going digitally? And then so then they're actually primed for that expansion conversation. And we worked very closely. It took us a while to get there in previous roles to get that connection point between the more pre sale focused marketing team and us, because it's hard not to step on each other's toes, especially when if you don't have connected systems. If CS is working in one tool, marketing is working in another, that happens a lot. How do we ensure somebody's not in escalation and we're trying to sell them something at the same time? Or I'm trying to onboard somebody and they're trying to send them a new product. So having that connective thread between CS and the marketing folks from a digital communications perspective is vital, but it also can work closely together because if you have that engagement through that onboarding and adoption, they're actually getting value. They're better candidates for whatever's going to happen on the marketing side, so they're not casting such a big net. I can say I have these x amount of customers that are really engaged. They have good adoption. They're actually a better candidates for this campaign than just saying they have x product. Yeah, it's so important, but also hard to do. Yeah, it's really hard to do. And it's really hard not to step on each other's toes when it comes to customer facing comms. So if you've been able to solve that, that's amazing. Maybe not solve. Well, then you throw in the other layer of like, you have the marketing folks, and then if you have a customer marketing piece, then if you have the true sense of digital CS, like the pseudo CSM. That looks like they're one to one, but they're actually one to many. You have those communications coming on top of it that's probably leveraging similar data. How does that feed in? And I think that's another layer that you have to have working together, whether know swim lanes, because I think they can actually complement each other. So if you have customer marketing pushing out, hey, there's this webcast coming up. Follow up with that Digital CS communication that looks like I'm sending you Alex, my customer. Hey, did you see this email? I think this actually might be relevant based on the support ticket you just entered or something like that. So they can actually work together. If you are on the same page. You coordinate and actually talk to each other. Yeah, that makes sense. Amazing what happens. Amazing what happens. Yeah. One of the things that you and I have in common as Digital CS leaders is the fact that we help a lot of customers who are on Prem, which I think is a rarity these days. Working with on Prem customers has its unique challenges because you can't really do the in app stuff like you can in SAS. You can't really get as much telemetry because of firewalls and things like that. I'm sure there's others out there that are working in that environment too, and it's a completely different beast. So maybe we could get a peek under the hood of kind of what you're working with and how you're engaging those customers effectively. Yeah, it's interesting because I've actually seen both sides of it, even on one team where I had Digital CSNS that were working in a product that we recently acquired that was SaaS native, and I looked at them as so lucky because you have all the telemetry you want, you have all the contacts. You know what the sticky features are, you know when their renewal is, you know, their like, not that it's not hard, but you kind of had the platter there for you to work with and Omnichannel on top of that, so you have multiple ways you can reach out to them, which makes really interesting Digital CS campaigns. But on the flip side, I had another team member that was working with a legacy product that was 1015 years old, that 95% of the customers were on Prem, and they were just starting to get to the cloud. How do we work with those customers where we might not know their entitlement, we might have one contact for them, we have no idea where they're at in their journey. How can we actually work with those folks to get value for them as well, digitally? And I think there's kind of three ways to kind of target this. I think one thing that we did that I thought worked really well was we had a really great customer experience team. And what they did is they brought together folks from all departments. We literally took two days per product, depending on which one it was. And folks from we had marketing, we had sales support, people that did accounting like Renewals CS, everyone that would touch a customer brought into one room and developed the customer journey for that product. Like the ideal best case scenario and what we did was define what is the best case scenario for that customer and then underneath that the swim lanes for the personas. Because what's happening with say a C suite person in onboarding is very different than what's happening with an end user in onboarding. So figured out what were the key points in that customer journey for those personas where we can drive value both and it's not just things that they needed to do in the product, it's actually what's going on outside of the product too. Like do we know that they have to do X communication to the CEO at this point or do they know this person's thinking about they have a lot of pressure coming from the middle if they're a director they have to communicate up and down. So having the understanding of that best case scenario for all those personas was kind of the first thing. So if we can't tell what they're doing based on what the product is telling us, can we leverage all of our expertise collectively as an organization to try to at least put that on paper? So that was kind of the step one but that's all fine and good but what if you can't actually talk to them if you don't know who those people are? Right? So that second piece is we got really scrappy on contact data so if we don't have like you do in SAS where everybody logs in, you can tell them their role, you kind of have that right in front of you. Where else can we collect contact data? So is there support tickets we can pull from? Is there community we can pull from? If sales is willing to give up their contacts, which is a whole nother podcast getting them being willing to share their contacts. Sure having dated content people have to put in their email to find it webcast logins. So we used all of that to kind of build our own database because we didn't have that readily available in the product and then with that not being afraid to ask them are you the right contact? If not, who is and what's your role? I think we shy away from understandably, want customers to think we know everything about them and they're our unique snowflake. But I think they also understand, especially with on prem products, we don't know all that. So we can actually make them have a better experience if we have that contact piece and what they're actually seeking out of the product to make this personalized to what they need. That's two. And then the last piece is most on prem products have some type of phone home or ability to pull data back. One approach that we did is kind of combating this on two ends is run it. If you know you have customers that perhaps don't know that that's a feature, they usually have like customer experience programs at every company about this. Run an actual campaign on it, like push them to turn on that button, tell them what the value is, tell them what you've actually been able to change and what value you've driven by having that data come back. So that's kind of the proactive, the existing customers and reactive and then proactively put that as instructions in your onboarding, like log in, do this, do this, turn this on. So at least the ones that are coming back in the funnel already have that on. So then you can kind of take that data that's coming in from that phone home to supplement that customer journey or validate it or edit it, but then you can kind of use that as your source of truth on how you can communicate with customers. And then the tricky part of that is you might not have, say, our trigger based campaigns, so we're not going to have telemetry that's going to automatically shoot an email off. But what that allows you to have is time based campaigns. So if you know, hypothetically it takes 30 days to get to X use case or 60 days to deliver this, can you at least time it generally right and then leverage the data from that interaction to know if you're off or not? Did they open it? No, they're probably not there yet. If they clicked everything, they're either past that or they loved it. So leverage the data you have to help influence everything before that. So hopefully that's helpful. For those in the on prem world, it's amazingly helpful. And there's so many scenarios I myself am thinking about related to that. I really like the concept of just kind of lightly falling on your sword and saying who are you. Right? And more importantly, also not just who are you and what's your contact info, but what do you do? Because you need to engage the executives in a much different way than you need to engage your admins or your whoever. And so I think that's important. I think the other thing that you hit on, which I think is spot on, is just getting scrappy with the data. I think there's so many people who and a recurring theme on this podcast has been people just get a tool because it looks cool and they stand up some digital motions because that's what everybody's doing without getting some hygiene into the data and some hygiene processes into the data to actually make sure that you're doing it correctly. Because otherwise you're just spending money without the ability to be effective at it. And then you're probably annoying customers at. That point, hugely annoying customers. And I think it's much to your point earlier, it's much better to just kind of lightly ask, like, who are you and what do you do? And how can we support you better rather than to send them an email that obviously says, I didn't know nothing about you, like, you are the wrong. We've done that before too. Everybody's done that before. That's cool. With that in mind, what are you currently working on? What are some of the kind of automations digital workflows? You do have innovation in your title, so what are you innovating on? Well, we have a really unique team here because it's kind of a combination of we're in customer success, but we're a combo team of both the digital CS piece that includes innovations we can bring to the Holistic Cs.org in addition to digital CS, and we also have voice of the Customer in our preview. So we have an interesting combo of a team. So right now, one of the things we're working on is kind of going back to what I mentioned around really understanding personas and their use case and how do we drive value. Right now, we're developing persona based prescriptive use cases. So leveraging at what point does it make sense for somebody to do this use case? If it is that use case, how do you position it? So it's both human led leverageable. So as a CSM, I know my customers at this point. How can I go have a conversation with them? And I know the persona I need to talk to, I know what I need to say to them. How do I position this use case for more value? So it's really up leveling the human led piece to have a more value driven conversation. But the beauty of this work that we're developing is it actually allows for a greater digital motion too. So if somebody's coming in and saying, I'm at this point or this use case makes sense to me, they can actually walk themselves through that use case as a self serve motion. So it helps not only those that maybe don't want to work with a CSM, because that's the thing, I think that's really resonating right now, is not everybody wants that handhold or that white glove. So even those customers can't come in and do self serve, but it also allows us to address, we have a very long tail that we want to get value for as well. So those folks, we can do more of those proactive campaigns. What are they doing in the tool? We can see where they're at in the use case. Hey, they're hung up. Where can they raise their hand? So it's really driving, like I said, prescriptive persona based use cases to drive further adoption, more consumption, more maturity. How many of those things are time based? You've built out this journey with a cross functional team. You know generally what you would like to see from customers at what point in their journey. Are you literally looking at time based triggers or are you looking at other indicators, support indicators. What are you looking at there? Yeah, so it's actually a little bit of both. So one of the things that we do once we have that kind of top level journey is, okay, what are the communications that are going to happen no matter what that are time based, like product releases? We know that they're probably going to be at this point, at this date, renewals, those type of things. So that kind of goes along the top. But underneath those are what we call more like intervention campaigns or trigger based campaigns. Like, we see support tickets or we see they're lagging where we do have telemetry, we can see that they're lagging at this piece. So there's these communications that are actually feeding off each other. So we have kind of that broader air cover that's going to go out no matter what. But if there's something very specific that's happening with that customer, that's when that more trigger based, time sensitive, or situation sensitive type of communications are also coming through. I always get so giddy when I log in and look up a customer and they have their phone home on and I can actually see how many logged in over the last 30 days. Right? Yes. The SaaS folks are like, oh my gosh. It's like oh, God. Dark Ages. There's more of us than I think that's out there. And there's a ton of content for us. I think so too, to be fair, I think there's also a lot of SaaS providers that don't have telemetry installed. There's, especially scrappy kind of new to market tools because it is expensive and. Actually being able to work with it too. You might have that data, but can you do anything with it? Right? Can you get it into your tool? Being able to actually leverage something through automation with that data, even if you have it, is a whole nother piece, even if you are SaaS. Too we've hit that on both accounts. Absolutely. Speaking of tools, what does your tech. Stack look like right now? We're definitely a Gamesight house. That's where we do journey, orchestrator, all of that. That's the primary one we work with right now. Yeah. Shout out Gamesight. We try to be tool agnostic on the podcast, but I am right there with you. Lovely. So look, obviously you have studied a lot of things, you've experienced a lot of things, but it's always good to kind of stay abreast with what's happening in the industry and what's happening within CS and tools and all that kind of fun stuff. So what does your content diet look like? What are you reading? What are you listening to? All of that fun stuff. Well, I'm definitely a podcast junkie, so I'm not listening to the non business related ones. I love the typical ones like the Game Grow retain. I like unchurned. So the CS specific ones. But one that I did want to call out for folks that are trying to get more of that customer marketing knowledge. Beat the Drum is a really good podcast. If you haven't heard of that one, it might have to parcel through a lot of its advocacy related, but there's really good content on understanding your customers, getting them to events. The journey piece, like I talked about, Lifecycle campaigns, a lot of good content there. If you don't have any marketing folks on your team, those would be great ones to push to your team to get a little bit more marketing knowledge. Something you just said kind of hit a place in my brain. I think we might want to talk about it for just a second. Sure. Which is the advocacy thing, because so much of what we do is like protectors of the journey and intervention if something goes awry. But I don't think a lot of digital motions start with advocacy or really even focus on advocacy, either driving advocacy or just recognizing advocacy. And I'm curious if you had any opinions on that. Yeah, so we did the previous world. That was kind of one of our main tenants of our customer marketing team. So it was kind of the data piece, the Lifecycle piece, events, and then advocacy. And one of the ways we kind of look at CS is I want to say the gold mine, but if you're going to want to know who's doing well, CS, it's a lead funnel. Basically for yeah, exactly. And I think one thing that I think people get wrong with advocacy is they think, oh, I'm not going to see if they're an advocate until they renew. Well, really, you should be having that conversation earlier. Build them up as an advocate in onboarding. Build them up as an advocate as they're getting value. And it's not just will you be in a case study for us or will you talk to a customer? How are you driving that back to them throughout their entire journey? So as you're developing, it kind of goes back to that customer journey map, pinpoint the places where it makes sense to talk to them about advocacy, or would you want to talk to another customer that's onboarding at the same time as you? Are there places you can connect the dots for other customers to be your champions, not just when they've renewed know or buying more products, but throughout their entire journey with yeah, it's not just a single place in the journey that you should be doing advocacy. Right, absolutely. It's a nurturing thing. It should be a campaign on its own. It should be a campaign because it's not a one day thing. Laurie, do you want to be an advocate check. Well, are you going to give me a T shirt? No. Yeah. Do I get some swag? Are there people that you want to kind of call out and give kudos to that are doing cool stuff in digital CS that you see. Yeah. I think just because it's fresh on my brain from Pulse, I think Gainsight is doing some really interesting things around this. I know they're kind of the champion of It adobe. They're kind of in a similar boat of where I come from, where we've been doing this for quite a while. And they have gotten some advances, obviously, of being moving to Pure SaaS. So they have really good things on how they've done engagement. I'm a user of it, so I can see. I'm sure you're the same when people send you stuff. You're like, this is Digital CS, so we see through that lens. But I've taken a lot of notes on ways that they engage customers, get them to do new things in the product, really innovative ways that they're reaching out to their customers. I saw a post on I think it was your LinkedIn not too long ago about I think the example was Chewy, like the pet food company. They sent out like a onesie to somebody who knew was having a baby or something. Like, what was that? Yeah, they did it well. There's like good and bad ways. Like chewy is really good. I've heard really good case studies on their customer experience where if somebody cancels their subscription to dog food, there's probably only one reason they did that. So they send a very nice gift of their pet's name and things like that. That's how you do it. Right? But I've seen examples where that goes wrong. I can't remember the company off the top of my head, but it was like a credit card company or something like that where they somehow knew that that person had a baby without actually asking them and then sent them a onesie. And it was creepy. You have to tread a fine line on having a good customer experience. When do you use your data? How do you use your data? That actually goes for any digital CS. It's like, congrats on buying your first home. The reason I know is because I looked at your tax credit or whatever. Here's some shutters, because I looked at your picture on Zillow. Yeah, exactly. That's cool. Another example that came to mind is hydro. It's like the peloton of rowing, which I used to do. Used to. And it was cool. They would send you swag every time you hit a certain milestone. Like you would row certain thousands of meters or whatever, and they would send you a motto bottle. And then it was socks, and it was all kinds of stuff. So it's kind of cool. That's how you use data. Right. And that's how you do advocates. That's how you do advocates. Keep them engaged. Yeah. So open up those swag. Budgets, people. Budget, budget, budget. That's the hard part. Yeah, exactly. So I've loved this conversation. It's been very insightful for me personally. I'm sure it's been insightful for a lot of folks out there. Too. How can people find you and engage with you? Yeah, I would love to talk to more folks. I think this is a super interesting community, and I feel like we're all kind of finding each other. So happy to talk to anyone, especially, like, in the legacy space of what we've already done. If it's been helpful, you can find me on LinkedIn. It's under Stacey Cheney Kaufman in parentheses. If you knew me back when but don't hesitate to reach know, shoot me a DM. I'm happy to talk to anyone. Cool. Sounds good. Well, thanks for the time, Stacey. Thank you so much for having me. I think I'm keeping you from your maybe so. Still some more work to do, but I can see it on the horizon. Thanks for being on. Yeah, thank you. 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 word map and get more information about the show@digitalcustomasuccess.com. My name is Alex Turkovich. Thanks again for joining, and we'll see you next time.