Data-Driven Decision Making in Digital Customer Success with Dan Ennis of Monday.com | Episode 015

Speaker 1: 0:24

A lot of times when someone is trying to build out a scale or digital motion, they think they need to start from scratch rather than say, hey, if this is working at the higher touch side, how can we use data to identify this and then go upstream to then use that for the accounts that we haven't touched as high?

Speaker 2: 0:42

And, once again, welcome to the Digital Customs Success Podcast with me, 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 scaled CS programs. My goal is to share what I've learned and to bring you along with me for the ride so that you get the insights that you need to build and evolve your own digital CS program. If you'd like more info, want to get in touch or sign up for the latest updates, go to DigitalCustomsSuccesscom, and if you have a question or commentary to be used in an upcoming episode, call us and leave a message at 512-222-7381. For now, let's get started. Welcome to episode 15 of the show. It's great to have you back.

Speaker 2: 1:29

Today's conversation is with somebody who is quite present in the CS community, gets a lot of accolades for what he's doing in the digital domain at Mondaycom. If you've listened to previous episodes, you will hear his name being called out several times by guests as again being somebody who operates successfully in a digital space, and the conversation that Dan and I had was just jam-packed with useful tips, tricks and insight into what a great digital program looks like. A couple of things that were takeaways for me that I got a lot of value out of was. One thing was his approach to different contact personas within a company. So many of us struggle from a data perspective knowing who to contact when certain things happen, and Dan has a very innovative approach to kind of letting the data tell him who a contact is. He has tons of value in this conversation with Dan Ennis of Mondaycom. I hope you enjoy it. I know I sure do. Mr Dan Ennis, I would like to welcome you to the Digital Customs Podcast. It's so nice to see you, so nice to have you on.

Speaker 1: 2:55

Amazing, Great to be here, Alex. Thanks for reaching out and I'm happy to be here.

Speaker 2: 2:59

Yeah for sure. Well, your name came about multiple times from previous guests who said you know, I always ask people who's doing great things in digital customer success. And there were like three or four people that said, oh, you need to talk to Dan at Mondaycom. And then you need to talk to Mondaycom and Mondaycom is doing XYZ. So I was like, ok, who's Dan? What does he do? What's in the water? Because you're in the Bay Area and so we need to talk. So I'd love for you to kind of give us maybe a brief origin story. I think you spent a fair amount of time as a CSM and now you're leading, you know the scaled motion at Monday. So I'd love for you to kind of give us a little bit of a history and what led you to this path that you're on.

Speaker 1: 3:52

Absolutely. So yeah, I got my professional start in just kind of a typical customer service call center for a benefits administration company and, while working there, moved into an account management role, but with it being benefits administration. From like a timeline perspective, this was peak right after the ACA rolled out. So if there was ever a time for benefits to go suddenly very complex it was around that time, with all the changes that came with that. And so being in account management for a company that was a kind of combined service slash software company that had a software component but didn't view their software as what they were selling.

Speaker 1: 4:40

So my kind of origin into customer success that got me into that was we had our own software platform that our customers had to use when I was at that company to file claims and to enroll in benefits and all those things that we just built out as our way to avoid having to have another third party involved as we're working with customers.

Speaker 1: 5:01

So we, our company, did not view that as the revenue source. They didn't put a whole lot of stock into it. It was just because we were a service company. We were a benefits administration service company and so I was on the account management team. But I quickly realized if my customers did not enjoy using our platform and our software, they were churning on the service side. So I quickly began trying to apply what I didn't know at the time was basically customer success principles on how do I get them using our software to accomplish their goals. Because the company didn't see itself that way. And after I started doing that for a little while, I got turned on to this thing called customer success and I realized like wait, that's what I've been doing.

Speaker 2: 5:38

Well, that's what I do, yeah.

Speaker 1: 5:40

And so I wanted to make the transition into doing customer success not just informally but to formally taking a dive into that, and so I made the jump into formal CS from there and I worked for a company that sold HR knowledge software specifically to insurance brokers, and in my time there I got like this perfect mix of both enterprise experience but also what again I didn't have the name for it at the time was scale experience, because our contracts that we sold to were these large national insurance companies, insurance brokers.

Speaker 1: 6:19

So the contract negotiation was done very much like an enterprise level and I was gaining enterprise CSM skills, which was fantastic. But at the same time, though the contracts are at this national level, it was all of their regional offices that were hundreds of them that were the ones who were actually using it and getting the value out of it with their customers. So it was having to apply scaled principles there and then again starting to learn that this was a separate thing, like this to scale motion. And so shortly after that time that I made the jump to Monday and have just loved growing there ever since. Growing with the scale team was one of the founding members, first as an individual contributor and then managing the team now. So I've been a part of as they've built that motion out from day one. So that's kind of the quick version of the origin, both from CS and then all the way into the scale side.

Speaker 2: 7:09

Yeah, that's amazing. Well, having dabbled with Monday in terms of trying to manage this whole thing called the podcast, I've been privy to some of the onboarding flows and things like that, which is cool. So, yeah, you've done an awesome job there so far, I would say. But I guess let's dive right into that a little bit because, as I alluded to in the intro, monday has gained a little bit of a reputation with regards to its scaled program, and so I'd love for you to maybe give us a little bit of an overview of the kinds of things you're building, the kind of things you've built. What are some things that you've built that you have seen a lot of success with, and maybe some other things where you haven't.

Speaker 1: 7:58

Yeah, absolutely so. As far as motions, a big part of it, at least initially, was developing a really strong just-in-time customer success approach. So identifying a lot of data at if you're going to be managing accounts at scale and doing CS at scale, you need to be able to identify when and how is the right time to intervene. I know I'm preaching to the choir with this and anybody listening to this podcast has heard this before that digital CS is not meant to replace the need for human intervention. In some cases it's meant to give direction to and allow for only the most impactful and needed human interventions, which is what allows that scale to grow, so you won't have the same level of interaction with the volume of accounts we work with. So we spent a lot of time nailing down two aspects to the motion, in addition to a couple of things I'll explain after, but the two big things were number one what is repeatable, quick and time-bound that we can do with just times? What does the motion look like that actually makes the impact with customers? Then the second part of that is how do we identify using data so it can be done at scale, when that right time is to intervene? So we spent a lot of time working on really both sides of that. Both of those were things that were works in progress, that didn't start at their final state, where, even now, like always, we're always iterating, we're always trying to improve, but it begins with testing things and looking for specific outcomes. How do our actions actually move the needle on the results we wanted to see with our customers? Is it having an impact? Are we seeing the change we want to see? Then, are their customers were missing, which is part of what that just in time is? Are there customers that would have benefited from this that weren't on our radar before? So it started with less sophisticated, by just using the general health scoring that we already had, which Monday, being a fantastic company that is really good at being data driven, which is one of the things that always appealed to me about Monday so they already had a robust health score, even aside from this scale component. So it gave us a good starting point not at all where we would want to go, and we ended up getting more sophisticated.

Speaker 1: 10:12

So we started with okay, if we use this, it just has an outline. Were these customers the ones that needed attention? Then, from there looking at okay, who did this miss? That needed attention. That's the question that for maybe a more high-touch team, they don't need to because they're working with all of their customers so they're not missing customers. It's a red flag if they're not working with any of their customers in a different way, that it's not by scale, where it's feature not bug, that we're not touching every single customer. So that's a big part then was to say, okay, looking at the accounts that are showing you poor usage or that churned or that downgraded or fill in the blank all the negative things, who wasn't caught by using maybe just our standard health score? So then building out data from there to identify when is the right time, who are the right people to do that with. So using reverse engineering in a lot of ways, looking at customers that did churn or that did have drops in adoption and what was common. So a lot of really good things we built out around that component. That's been really helpful.

Speaker 1: 11:16

So, as far as the core of the motion, those are the two big things. We've, of course, built programs around that as well and I'll touch on those in a second here because there's programs that support all of that, because Monday, being a PLG product like Growth Company. We've got a really great product that leads people through a lot of those components and we have built programs to support that even further, to help reduce the need for human intervention. But when it comes to where a lot of the headspace is gone, initially it was around those components, because before we could invest in a new software and build all these things that would go with it, look, we have people already. What can we start with there? What can we do with what we already have and really nail that part down while building programs to support it.

Speaker 1: 12:05

So then, as far as the program side of things, as far as what we've continued to build, it was then emails that started out just kind of generally being sent by CSM's, one to many to accounts in their name, to then more sophisticated to accounts going out to all subsets of certain types of customers on a regular basis to encourage certain types of behavior.

Speaker 1: 12:28

And then even more sophisticated as it now takes into account where the customer is in their life cycle and where users are and sending this to help encourage customers through the customer journey we want them to take. And then the second big part of the programs hands down. We do office hours with customers, which is it's not unique to us by any stretch, but it's been a part of our ethos from day one and as well, that's one of the things that we knew out the gate. We'll let us scale that out, because the customers that may be more generally need some CS support, have a way to get some without like having to go through the one to one, and it's a group of customers coming together that attend those. So those would probably be the biggest things, and we could, of course, get into the weeds on a million small things, but at a high level, those are the big rocks.

Speaker 2: 13:14

Yeah, the office hours is such a such a good best practice, as you know, for I've gotten a few questions here and there about like well, you know where should I start and what are some of the things that you know we can do? That is relatively, you know, light in terms of resources, but very effective, and I always you know, go right towards office hours.

Speaker 2: 13:36

It's like a no brainer because you get so much out of them and it doesn't really cost you a lot in terms of resources to put those on and it's fantastically scalable. So, yeah, that's a super good call out. I'm curious a little bit about your, I guess, customer contact personas, because I think you alluded a little bit to the fact that you're, you know, perhaps doing some things based on who the contact is. I'm guessing it's probably whether it's a decision maker or it's an admin or it's, you know, that kind of thing. What kind of, what kind of? How have you ingrained that, that those different customer journeys into your flows?

Speaker 1: 14:22

Yeah, you've hit the nail on the head. It's champions, which are not necessarily always admins, because we flag that differently. So champions, admins, decision makers, and then kind of all end users. And then, of course, we'll occasionally do things that are more industry specific, because Monday is very industry agnostic as a tool. So we'll, of course, do some stuff that's more maybe industry specific for our customers, because we don't just operate in one vertical. It's one of my favorite things about Monday, it's one of the biggest challenges, but one of my favorite parts about it is we're not just pigeonholed into one narrow use case, and so we'll also occasionally do that a bit as well.

Speaker 2: 14:56

So also probably nails on crazy recession proof.

Speaker 1: 15:01

I mean exactly, it's been great to be a part of, as we've grown yeah.

Speaker 1: 15:07

So, those would be, I would say, the big things, and you hit the nail on the head for the personas. And then for some of the data driven things we've done is we've used, you know, data of looking at people who we already identified as champions, maybe on our high touch accounts. We then were able to use data to reverse engineer when we're working on some of our scale accounts. To float potential champions like that still requires human validation, of course, but it's great to flag hey, this might be someone who's a champion, because it matches some of the user behavior and things that we've seen from other champions.

Speaker 1: 15:37

So it's something that is a great way to help again, and I you're going to use this phrase reverse engineer a lot, because I think that a lot of times, when someone is trying to build out a scale or digital motion, they think they need to start from scratch, rather than say, hey, if this is working at the higher touch side, how can we use data to identify this and then go upstream to then use that for the accounts that we haven't touched as high?

Speaker 2: 16:03

Yeah, that's super smart. You know it's really like regression testing really when and you were talking about that earlier with you know with the scoring as well, but you know if you're, if you're identifying potential potential, I guess, I guess, personas within, within your, your customer, based on typical usage of other personas. I think that's, that's a really smart way of going about it.

Speaker 1: 16:34

Do you think you hit the nail on the head with both that as well as some of the other cross functional disciplines you can use, like things like marketing attribution, like the way that the market marketing team would would use attribution to determine how effective something is.

Speaker 1: 16:49

Leveraging some of that discipline in your one to many asynchronous communications. Things like before you decide that, oh, this email just didn't work, things like going upstream okay, well, did the right people open it? Did they click on what was in it? So before we say that, like, the messaging didn't work in the email, was there something wrong with your, your subject line, because nobody opened the email, so there's not a person you're going to might invest energy to change the copy of this email, when that's touching something that nobody even saw, so you don't know how effective that is right and that those are kind of very like disciplines that a marketing team would typically associate with, and so there's a lot of cross discipline functions you can bring into what you do in the scale space to be able to learn from what others are doing, and there's very little that you are having to totally invent yourself from scratch, and it's a great part from learning from others around you.

Speaker 2: 17:46

Beg, borrow and steal Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 17:48

Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 17:51

One. One interesting thing that I ran into earlier this week is that is actually related to a problem that a lot of digital CS folks have but really marketing folks have and whatnot, which is like, again, this persona, you don't know who's who within the company and so becomes a question of data hygiene and who's going to update those things and how do you keep those things in line. We logged in to, I had a new user log into Gainsight the other day and it they popped up a modal and said which one of these people are you? Are you an exec, are you a VP, are you a director, are you an admin? And I was like, yes, you know that's. I love that because why not have the user kind of self identify, but it leads to my question.

Speaker 2: 18:41

How do you keep up that data hygiene, like, how do you make sure that your champions are identified correctly, and all of that?

Speaker 1: 18:48

Absolutely so.

Speaker 1: 18:49

We have the data that does, for example, that surfaces potentials, but there's there's an element of depending on what it is that the human validation is is needed right, so we can, we can very easily tell the difference between potential champions versus validated champions.

Speaker 1: 19:05

Same thing with risks, same thing with a lot of other components, and I think that that's a really core part of it and it would be great to go that next level down the line to be able to have it fully like done without that, that human input.

Speaker 1: 19:19

From our perspective, it's been really helpful to to have that, and it's one of those, those components where it's as much of, I would say, more about the mindset than it is like the specific actions, like in the, the sense of the payoff for that effort and investment on an individual level, of being able to validate that and help keep things clean, pay so many dividends for you, like down the line.

Speaker 1: 19:53

It's, it's worth it and embracing that as a, as a core part of it, because the trade off, at least with you, with where we have right, would be to you can throw human validation out the window and go with what the data says, and then you're, but then you're just getting less precise and you're getting things that aren't as just aren't as useful, because then you're losing some of the actual ability to tailor to true champions when you're sending something out because this person might not be, they might be someone who is not actually a champion and I'm sure, down the line, as AI tools get more sophisticated, someone's, I'm sure, working on something right now that is already answering that question for us at an even better level. But with looking at the landscape as it is today, that's a big part of what we do is it's just a core part of what everybody has to work on.

Speaker 2: 23:15

Yeah, absolutely, I completely agree. I want to take maybe a couple steps back because we're already touched on some of this stuff. But you know, part of what I do with all of my guests is I ask them for their quick 10 second elevator pitch. Usually ends up being more like 30 seconds. But whatever Of what is your elevator pitch? Of digital customer success in layman's terms, and we're compiling all that on the website and whatnot. But what would you say if somebody asked you like what is it you do?

Speaker 1: 23:49

Yeah, so I'll do my best to avoid using the word to define the word. So I'll do my best to avoid the word digital. I'm trying to follow my wife as a teacher, so she'd be very proud of me for trying to avoid using a word when defining a word. It would get kudos for that at home. So I would say digital CS is the leveraging of software tools, platforms, fill in the blank to enhance the customer's experience and help them achieve their outcomes at a higher level that doesn't require a greater one to one human intervention. That's really boiling it down in the middle. It's simplified, but you said 10 seconds and I took that to heart in the prompt you sent over. And it's what.

Speaker 1: 24:32

I understood the assignment, and what I love with that, though, is it's, it's, it is segment agnostic when you talk about digital that way, because one of my favorite things coming out of pulse this year I had the pleasure of attending that this year was kind of the resounding rallying crime that digital is a strategy, not a segment, and that is absolutely true, and I think, long term, that is absolutely the case. I do think there's some benefit to building it initially around a segment if you think of bottom up, like because you can experiment a bit more with some of your Sure, maybe lower our customers to build something up, but your goal with digital isn't necessarily for one segment, but that's why I like kind of the pitch I was thinking about when we were talking about it.

Speaker 2: 25:27

Yeah, that evolution in the in digital CSS is definitely great and, you know, the further we can get away from tech touch, the better. I think we can all agree the you've talked a lot about your kind of the things that you guys are doing, the things that you've implemented that have worked well for you. Have there been any like colossal mistakes or failures along the way that you've? You've taken some particularly valuable lessons from.

Speaker 1: 26:01

Yeah, there's no particular thing, more than the idea that's gotten in the event of an idea that's gotten in the way, and that is. It's funny because I was actually just posting on LinkedIn about this a couple of weeks ago. But confirmation bias, being data driven is the core of being able to do things at scale, because you cannot rely on that human validation one to one and for every single thing you have to be able to be driven by data. That's a really good thing. The challenge is there's a thin line between being data driven and data justifying. I could say I think X is what's important and I can go find customers that were successful, that had X happen and then that not really be something that's that important because I'm just confirming my, my preexisting thought going into it. So an example is do you think going into it, wanting to prove that feature X is your stickiest feature and therefore you want to increase adoption on feature X? Confirmation bias looks like saying well, let me see if our successful customers who were nude and upsold used feature X.

Speaker 2: 27:10

And if they did.

Speaker 1: 27:12

confirmation bias kicks in and says look, I've done the research, I've looked at the data. Our successful customers do use it. It's a sticky feature, unless you're going to do the follow on steps of seeing what, did your customers who turned in downgrade also use it? Why did these customers use feature X? What was the actual thing they were trying to get out of it? Because then you do this big push for feature X and you see more people using it, but then you don't see any meaningful change to your retention rates, right.

Speaker 1: 27:39

Which is what your actual North Star is. So it's really the idea that going into things with confirmation bias being something that absolutely comes in to really just kind of throw things off, and there's no one thing that I felt like is an example of one thing that we did in building that was off, but more like a thousand little things and if I had to point to the root of it, it's that big thing behind it. It's justifying with data as opposed to letting data really drive that and I think a good kind of practice that's kind of helped me grow past. That is, if I have a hypothesis or something, rather than just try to look for data that shows that one way or the other, try to do the opposite Go in and try to look at our data and see if I can disprove what I think and find a difference. What would I look for if I was trying to prove this wrong, not if I'm trying to prove it right? That helps me be more rigorous and just as a mindset for approaching things.

Speaker 2: 28:44

I almost think of it like you let the data tell the story, instead of having data expand upon your own story.

Speaker 1: 28:53

Absolutely right. That is 100% correct, and I think that that is a challenge. That was there initially, because you're so quick and eager to want to let data drive your decisions. But you're also filled with that confidence that I know what things are to do, and so you quickly inflate that confidence too quick.

Speaker 2: 29:16

Yep, absolutely. One of the things you mentioned earlier on is about iteration, and I'm curious what that kind of looks like for you. Are you someone who goes and tries stuff until it breaks and then iterates upon it, or do you take a slower approach to what you're going to build out and then iterate based on feedback? What does that look like?

Speaker 1: 29:44

I think it depends on the nature of what we're changing and building. So my answer, depending on the nature of the thing, would be different. So there are some things that to get the meaningful result, you've got to just break and build. You just have to. There's not a way to iterate from point A to point B. You need to rip Band-Aids off, jump in and then monitor the effectiveness of. Is your new process, is your new tool fill in the blank? Is it doing what you would expect it to do? And if it's not, that's what you used from that attribution stuff I was talking about earlier to decide what needs changing. Yeah, other things, other processes, other changes can be iteratively done to get there. And I would say things that are that are customer facing, probably try to be a little bit more iterative in bringing them along the journey. If it's facing customers, things that then you look at things like the level of change involved with something, something that's a small impact of change, just to rip the Band-Aids off. There's no need to overly iterate to get there. If something's going to be a low lift for the team to change anyways, just do it, just go for it. There's not a need to build these little steps to get there. But if something is going to have a big impact within reason, do your best to get slowly from point A to point B so that people are brought along for the journey.

Speaker 1: 31:14

And I think a challenge for if I can share this with any of the other kind of leaders that listen to this is when you're making those changes.

Speaker 1: 31:22

You've often been thinking about ruminating on planning, talking with other leaders about this change for a while. So you've had time to adjust to this, you've had time to wrap your head around the change and what's going to come with it and you are fully bought into the why. The challenge sometimes comes when we then, as a leader, then bring that change to our team, that next step. We mistakenly attribute our level of buy-in to it already with our teams when they just don't have it yet because they haven't been having these conversations for a month, they haven't been working on this thing, trying to figure it out and feeling bought into a solution. So, as much as possible, do your best to bring your team along the way, because when you think of the level of risk for making a change, your biggest risks are anything that's directly customer facing and your people. Those are the biggest risk vectors. You don't want to mitigate risk on those by bringing people along as much as possible.

Speaker 2: 32:26

Yeah, absolutely. Jen Young in her CS office hours has been doing the summer of change which is all about change management.

Speaker 2: 32:33

I think that's a huge part of it, because a lot of times we build these things in a black box and it's like well, here it is, and then all of a sudden you're getting questions like where did this come from and why are we doing this? And you end up answering more questions and I think pulling people along for the ride and developing it is a very smart way of doing it and helping people to take ownership of it too.

Speaker 1: 33:00

So super smart.

Speaker 2: 33:02

Shifting gears just a little bit. I did see that you were one of the most creative CS leaders of 23 from Ever After, so congrats on that. That's cool. It's a nice little nod from them. And you recently did a webinar with Ever After on owning revenue as part of scaled motions. It would be great to get your Cliff Notes version of that, because I think a lot of people well, first off, right CS in general, there's this whole do we own revenue, do we not own revenue, kind of debate. That happens right. But I think in digital especially, it tends to be even more separated from that because it's a little less tangible, it's a little less tied to the renewal, it's a little less tied to the conversations and things like that.

Speaker 1: 33:57

So yeah, anyway I'm still on your thunder. But no, we'd love your opinion. It's necessary for you to write.

Speaker 1: 34:05

Yeah, I would say some of it ties in line with some of what we've talked about before, some of that cross discipline related components. So some examples are I'll start with, like you said, the Cliff Notes version Thinking like your sales funnel. So learning to think about your customers the way that a sales team would think about the funnel of a lead and an opportunity. So being able to think about customers in that lens helps you identify where you actually have revenue generating opportunities as you work with them. So it's not just trying to apply your own mentality to things and, again, not starting from scratch which again you're hearing as one of my go-to themes on this. I'm thinking through what are the motions that your high touch teams take that are effective in that, because typically, as they're more embedded, they have more ideas around and more visibility into that kind of impact. So taking what they're already doing that's working and going from there to then find ways to automate some of that or find ways to use data to identify latent examples of what they manually sussed out and then using data to find to grow revenue from. So again, it's a lot of that reverse engineering, regression like you were talking about, like it's using some of what you already know has worked. Take the disciplines from your sales teams that have already worked and then starting with simple things and learning how to kind of where it makes sense from a growth perspective, because it always looks different depending on the nature of your product. Where you're going to have your digital motion capture more outbound versus inbound I think is a big component of how you own revenue. Is it going to be more through pointing people proactively to new use cases or is it going to be through that, those just in time interactions where you're intervening with a customer and you identify wow, this is a fantastic opportunity, because the amount of times that we found that customers who are at risk are actually some of the best candidates to spend, like increase their spend because they just need to get over that hump, because there's a fantastic bolt on feature That'll get them over their hump, and customers that are bought in enough to have the conversation are willing to spend a little bit more.

Speaker 1: 36:23

And so, being not being afraid of that, which I think goes into the broader conversation of CS and revenue that you were talking about before it's funny to me to see this as like a full circle, kind of coming back around where, like you've said it's, it's perceived as this, like, oh, is this something that CS should own or not? Because there were so many years where CS maybe didn't in a lot of organizations. I have called, whatever you want to do, like the benefit or not, that my first CS position was long enough ago that it was at the time when CSMs were, in a lot of ways, had a lot more overlap with what account managers do now, and so at that time my earliest days in CS were, of course, we're owning revenue, so that always like, just was a mentality that was there, a part of it. So applying those mentalities onto the digital side, and so part of it is don't be afraid to ask your sales team, don't be afraid to ask your high touch counterparts.

Speaker 1: 37:22

A lot of times we're in silos of our own making, not because we don't work with people who would be willing to help, but because we get tasked with something and we assume, oh my gosh, I've got to figure this out, I have to do this. Instead of let me ask my cross functional counterparts, who do XYZ really well, hey, what is it that works in this? It's not going to look the same for you, but then learn from them and apply that to the customer base you work with or to your emotions. You can automate something that a high touch team is doing really well. You've got your first in road into into doing that, and so I think those are just some of the examples of what we covered in the Cliff Notes version. I definitely would encourage kind of the full listen there for anybody, because great insights were shared, not just from things that I'm sharing, but from my counterpart on on that webinar.

Speaker 2: 38:14

We'll definitely put a link to it in the description. So if you want to listen to it here, you definitely should, and I think we danced around this, or you danced around this, in kind of answering that question, which is also related to one of the other themes that I felt was very at the forefront of pulse this year, which is to say that digital CS isn't just about customer facing motions. It's just as much about building internal efficiencies and really helping those that are within the team be more effective and whatnot.

Speaker 2: 38:54

And so you know, related to that and what not what, you know, have you been working on internal plays and motions and automations and efficiencies, as well as related to that?

Speaker 1: 39:09

Absolutely. That's something that we do all the time and I love that. In that sense, I've got incredible counterparts across the the whole org, not just within the scale specific sub-segment of, you know, of Monday, because I've got my counterparts in in our scale segment. You know other leaders in the org as well as Cross-functional high-touch counterparts, but we're always working on processes that can make the teams More efficient because, again, while some of those let's use the data entry example that you talked about before like keeping data, claim that's a necessary evil.

Speaker 1: 39:46

That has to be a necessary evil in the sense that sure it has to be done because you need the data to be claimed to be able to rely on it. Nobody enjoys that. We're not hiring people to be, you know, data entry clerks Nobody wants to do that but the necessary thing that has to be done. So if we can find ways to automate pushing some of that in right after a call, or to validate things or to have multiple things done All at once, that's an internal efficiency that then increases the scale of customers people are able to work with. Whether that's automating some of the meeting notes that go in after a call with a customer, or automating identification of contacts on a call or goals Achievement with a customer based on calls and all those kinds of things are internal Motions that are taken that help really drive that forward.

Speaker 2: 40:35

Yeah, that's cool. What does what does your tech stack look like? What are you working with?

Speaker 1: 40:41

Yeah, so, without saying this, are the exact specific tools we use and email tools. So for our one to many, we use that, of course. So both on an individual level as well as for some of our more broad Customer emails. So both for what our individual CSMs would use on the scale side as well as what would be used more broadly from our kind of central formal customer journey emails that I was talking about earlier. We use bi tools. We have a couple in-house tools that overlap a little bit with some bi tools that accomplish a lot of kind of aggregation of kind of customer data. We use a CRM, and then the part that's a shocker to literally nobody is we use plenty of money calm itself.

Speaker 1: 41:28

So that's where we I know right, it's a complete surprise, but we we use it all the time for so many different components and it's been a fantastic tool in the way that it lets it. We integrated with so many of our other tools To bring together that experience kind of in one place. So it's that's really what in a nutshell, what our, what our tech stack looks like.

Speaker 2: 41:50

Yeah, that's cool. I would imagine you know, like most SaaS companies, you've probably learned a few use cases for your own tool from your customers Along the way as well, that maybe you've adopted, I don't know goes both ways.

Speaker 1: 42:05

Yeah, goes both ways. Exactly exactly. We're always, you know, pushing the limits internally and it feels like we haven't had it yet. So I don't know, whatever, we'll find it one day, I'm sure but, we keep pushing that, those limits internally, as well as the outlearning from customers and vice versa.

Speaker 2: 42:19

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, as we as we kind of round out the conversation, I'd I'd love to get a sense for what your content diet looks like. What do you? What are you listening to, watching, reading to keep yourself in the know?

Speaker 1: 42:34

Yeah, so I I go through Spells, so I not a big podcast guy. I've talked before that people about listening to them on a regular basis. As far as there's no podcast, it's like my go-to. If I always listen to this podcast, I'm much more drawn to interview style podcasts. It's kind of like the one we're doing now, so I might maybe jump on to a podcast featuring certain people who I'm really curious to hear their, their thoughts on I do listen to. One of the ones that is probably the closest to Listening to on a regular basis would be the this is growth podcast, which is Daphne Costa Lopes's out of HubSpot. That's pretty fantastic, which, no again, no surprise because it's an interview style and you know she's great with with her guests she has on there. Usually. I more follow that on the podcast side.

Speaker 1: 43:25

Books I Transparenly, it's been a while since I've read anything that's customer success, specific.

Speaker 1: 43:33

Yeah, I've found that a lot more of my reading has either been general, more business helpful books, things like impact players by Liz Weissman Read earlier this year and that is.

Speaker 1: 43:43

If I'm gonna get to plug one book, it's it's absolutely that one which is really focused on how any level of the org you are. What are the mindset shifts to enable you to be someone who has a massive impact in your organization? Things like atomic habits, other general books, dory Clark's books, entrepreneurial you things like that have been really helpful for me in the CS space as well as then just other kind of nonfiction around things I'm interested in. I I'm someone who anything I'm interested in, like I'm just intellectually curious about it. So whether that's you know, reading books about music, movies, things like that, so that's really what my, my diet looks like kind of well or in terms of Like a really broad like reading base. And then I've found that my conversations are where more of the customer success, specific things happen that or that, or blog posts and newsletters more than any specific Like books or things on that topic from my perspective.

Speaker 2: 44:51

So that's my my general content diet. Are you an audiobook person or are you a physical book person?

Speaker 1: 44:58

physical book through and through I I, for probably the same reason, I don't listen to nearly as many podcasts.

Speaker 2: 45:04

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 45:05

It's probably the same. Probably same same stuff there. I don't. I know a lot people and Giving Sherry Srebnyk a shout out for this she always talks about you listening to podcasts on her runs. It looks yeah, it's a great idea, but I don't run. See, that's the. That's the trade off here. See you, you got to start running to be able to listen to podcasts on runs. So that's the. That's the issue despite her great feedback there. So more of a physical book guy.

Speaker 2: 45:31

That's funny. Yeah, a little known fact about me is, if you put a book in my hands, I Will be asleep in five minutes. It, it, it never fails, like it is my melatonin, and so, yeah, I'm completely the opposite to you, like I have to if I really want to absorb a book.

Speaker 2: 45:51

I got to listen to it, man, and then you know, I usually end up buying a hard copy too, because you you miss out a little bit on Some of the detail there and there. But anyway, not that anyone's interested in my sleeping or reading habits- I absolutely. Are you? Is there anyone that you feel is doing cool stuff in the realm of digital CS right now that you want to give some kudos to?

Speaker 1: 46:20

Yeah, a couple names in particular jump out, so I alluded to one earlier, but I intentionally didn't name it, so I knew the kudos question was coming, and that is First person comes to mind Angeline Grace Gavino. She's the VP of customer success and support over at Catalan, and so she is the first person that comes to my mind Out of Vietnam, and she is well, not just in the digital space Someone who is very proactively building out digital best practices for her organization and is very much tip of the spear On a lot of the things she's doing and trying out with her org. The second person would be Angelica mark. She's out of the UK. She's for company called bizarre voice same thing. She runs their digital program and is doing a fantastic job just at really consolidating Knowledge and resources in this area, as well as just really leading the way with the things that she's doing with her customer base and leaning into digital best practices and tying them to her customers outcomes.

Speaker 2: 47:22

Fantastic. Those are the first two that jumped to my mind, of course. Yeah, both both great, yeah, awesome. And I guess, finally, you know where can people find you, engage with you and and chat with you?

Speaker 1: 47:35

Absolutely so. Primary place is LinkedIn is my you know social media of choice. It's why I love to you engage with people, whether I'm kind of posting and then interacting with people there or even just reaching out via message. I take coffee chats pretty regularly. I love just getting to learn from what other people are doing, because one of my favorite things about CS is, despite some of our Desire to overly codify some things, there's a reason. It looks different from org to org, and that's a fantastic thing, and I love learning from people and living people learn from my experience as well. So engaging with me, there's a great way to connect with me.

Speaker 2: 48:10

That's awesome. Well, I've enjoyed you know definitely chatting with you on the podcast. I've also enjoyed chatting with you outside of the podcast and so, yeah, you're, you're a wealth of information and and I love the part of the reason I love the CS community is because it's filled with people like you who are just open and eager to share and, you know, spend a lot of time with others just enabling each other. So You're, you're part of that equation. So thank you very much.

Speaker 1: 48:38

Thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here. Thanks, Alex.

Speaker 2: 48:41

See ya. Thank you for joining me for this episode of the digital customer success podcast. If you like what we're doing, consider leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice. It really helps us to grow and to provide value to a broader audience. You can view the digital customer success definition word map and get more details about the show at digitalcustomersuccesscom. My name is Alex Turkovich. Thanks again for joining and we'll see you next time.