The Digital CX Podcast: Driving digital customer success and outcomes in the age of A.I.
Building a CS Ops Function Around Clean Data and Automations with Michael Bojanski of Learn to Win | Episode 016
Sep 19, 2023Episode 16
Alex Turkovic, Michael Bojanski
Join us for a compelling discussion with Michael Bojanski, Director of Customer Success Operations and Support at Learn to Win and recent winner at the Customer Success Excellence Awards. Michael’s insights draw from a diverse career journey, ranging from pre-med study abroad and an MBA, to Amazon fulfillment centers and various Operations & Marketing roles.
In our chat, Michael provides a comprehensive view on the ins and outs of implementing client success motions and automating processes for Sales to CS handoff, Renewals & Sales Assistance Requests. He emphasizes the crucial role of clean customer data in building up an operations function.
We also delve into the topic of internal training/change management. Michael shares how he harnessed his own software to introduce new processes within his team, underlining the value of quizzes to identify knowledge gaps.
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!
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.
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
Join us for a compelling discussion with Michael Bojanski, Director of Customer Success Operations and Support at Learn to Win and recent winner at the Customer Success Excellence Awards. Michael’s insights draw from a diverse career journey, ranging from pre-med study abroad and an MBA, to Amazon fulfillment centers and various Operations & Marketing roles.
In our chat, Michael provides a comprehensive view on the ins and outs of implementing client success motions and automating processes for Sales to CS handoff, Renewals & Sales Assistance Requests. He emphasizes the crucial role of clean customer data in building up an operations function.
We also delve into the topic of internal training/change management. Michael shares how he harnessed his own software to introduce new processes within his team, underlining the value of quizzes to identify knowledge gaps.
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!
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.
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
Speaker 1:
What did that look like? Like? I have this picture of you just hunkered in front of a screen and like five spreadsheets open at the same time, kind of ripping your hair out. Is that accurate? Oh, 100%, yeah, okay, and once again, welcome to the digital customer success podcast with me, alex Trokovich. 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.
Speaker 1:
If you'd like more info, want to get in touch or sign up for the latest updates, go to digitalcustomersuccesscom, 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. Hello and welcome to episode 16 of the show. Great to have you back. Got a good one in store for you today. Before we get into that, though, I wanted to plug a Slack community, which now exists, called DCS Connect. It is a community, as the name would suggest, all about digital customer success. It was started by our friend and colleague, marie Loney, who is a digital CS expert, and over the past few weeks, we've seen a whole lot of new members to the community, and I'll put a link in the show notes and the YouTube description about the community and how to join it. So, if you're interested in joining the conversation about digital, join us in that community. It's super fun, informative, there's lots of really smart people in there, and Marie is going to join us on a future episode of the podcast as well. For today, though, I have an awesome conversation with Michael Bojanski to share with you. He's director of customer success at Learn to Win and is also a recent recipient of a customer success excellence award, which, as we know, is the awards program put together by Alex Farmer, who might also be on a future episode of the podcast. So Michael has a lot of great things to share and really, really practical advice about how to operate digitally. In our conversation, we talked about what it's like to build, basically, an operations function within a startup. He shared a lot of practical advice about the automations that he's building for pre to post sale, handoff, some renewals, workflows and some some other really exciting things that he's built, super humble guy but is just incredibly smart and loves to share, and I hope you really enjoy this conversation with Michael Bojanski. I know I sure did.
Speaker 1:
Welcome to the podcast. I asked you on the podcast because of, well, there's a very there's a variety of reasons. You know you're currently director of CS Ops but, but I think, more importantly, you are a very recent transplant into the world of CS and so I love having kind of a variety of folks on there who who have, you know, varying experiences outside of CS and then that then then bring that into CS. But you also recently were a winner of a CS Excellence Award, which is awesome and we definitely want to dig into that. You're very much an operations person, you're into automations and integrations and that's, you know, that's the world of digital CS. So I wanted to welcome you to the podcast and I'm so glad you're here. Thanks, alex, it's fun to be here. Yeah, I would love to start with just kind of the standard kind of what's your background question and really what's your kind of CS origin story, what, what was the circuitous path that brought you into customer success? As we all have circuitous paths and you know what's what's kept you in CS.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so it definitely has been circuitous. I currently work at Learn to Win. It's a light learning and training software. Think of it like dual lingo, but you can create any type of content and then push it out to your learners. So I've been with Learn to Win in a full time role for about two years, all within customer success.
Speaker 2:
I started working with Learn to Win three years prior to that, so about five years total in part time roles and had a whole bunch of different responsibilities, from spinning up our first chart of accounts with QuickBooks, and then I moved into a role in marketing so it's actually our part time marketing director and so spun up HubSpot, did our first email campaigns, first version of our website that had, you know, good flow, automations for funnels and things like that, and so definitely have touched a lot of different aspects of Learn to Win as it's grown from you know, a couple people to now almost 45 and seed round going on a series A.
Speaker 2:
So that's been a joy just within Learn to Win. Before that I worked for a pre-med study abroad company in an internal operations role so finance, accounting, payroll, risk management, a lot of different areas and then again another operations role before that, one where I worked for Amazon in fulfillment center, so working with in person operations, so a lot of boxes, people staffing, things like that. So the operations has definitely stayed with me throughout my career but have seen it in a lot of different areas such as, like I said, finance, accounting, marketing and now customer success.
Speaker 1:
I think that's so interesting because I believe you have your MBA. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:
That's correct. So when I was working part time with Learn to Win, I was also doing a full time MBA at the University of Virginia, at Darden Business School.
Speaker 1:
I'm curious because a lot of like startup founders and tech companies will say you know, like going through rounds of funding and eventual acquisition, but just building a startup from the ground up. It's a little bit like earning an MBA and obviously you know there's differences between the two, but would you say it's a fair statement to say you're kind of getting the second MBA about what you're doing at Learn to Win?
Speaker 2:
I think working at startups or earlier stage startups accelerates learning. I think it's a very compressed stage. When I talk to people in undergrad and they're thinking about, you know, like a very classic decision, is it like do I want to go into consulting or do I do something else? Yeah, if they have any whiff of an interest in startups, I usually nudge them towards startups because I have found it just an incredible learning experience and I've been able to accelerate what I've learned much quicker. So I think like one or two years in a startup is oftentimes the equivalent of maybe three or four years in a standard company.
Speaker 2:
I think an MBA similarly is. You know, you have, you know, two years for a full-time program of very compressed learning and you know you have finance, accounting, marketing all these different things happening simultaneously. So I don't think they're quite the same in the sense of what you're getting out of them, but I would both say they're like very compressed learning experiences and you come out of it with a much higher set of skills and you're able to do a lot more things more effectively.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, that makes sense and I also love the fact that you've you know your previous kind of realm of responsibility was marketing, because you know, traditionally you could say that a lot of CS folks have come from a sales background or a call center kind of support background, which is which makes sense on the surface and in traditional CS models. But now that we're moving into a more kind of digital and automated world, seeing seeing more and more and more and more people coming from a marketing and marketing automation background, so it's cool to see that in your career trajectory as well.
Speaker 2:
So yeah, and I think I think a lot of creativity or value can be derived from connecting things that aren't usually connected. And so if you have different areas of business that you've touched, such as, oh, I've worked in HubSpot and I know that you can have these types of workflow automations, or I know it's standard practice to look at open rates, and you think, ok, well, why don't we apply that same thing for some of the digital touch that we're doing in customer success and this is bread and butter for marketing, but maybe that same thought process isn't applied. But if you've touched that area, then you can bring that line of reasoning. I think that goes for any type of career or innovation is. Usually it's people who are connecting two disparate things and then they come up with something really cool from that.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, it is cool seeing those worlds of metrics collide, where you have your traditional CSM type metrics and renewal rates and all those kinds of things. But doing that in conjunction with click-through rates and all that kind of stuff is an interesting world. One thing that I like to ask all of my guests who are on, whether they're directly involved with digital customer success or not and in your case you are is just kind of the standard elevator pitch of digital CS. What is it in your brain Like what is digital customer success? And the goal is to basically combine everyone's answers into a magical word map that you can view on the website.
Speaker 2:
Love word maps. Yeah, for me, I would say digital CS is utilizing software automations to enable customer success people within customer success to do their jobs more effectively. I don't think it replaces CSMs or replaces the need for some human touch, but it's going to make people more effective. With all of the talk with generative AI and AI in general, one of the quotes that stood out to me is that people won't be replaced by technology, but people with technology will replace those without technology. I think it's the same thing with digital CS.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, that makes so much sense and is very much a cornerstone of where we're headed with CS, and all the platforms are launching various tools to enable that. One of the reasons I was very excited to talk with you is because you have this unique opportunity to build things from the ground up. A lot of digital functions are being installed on top of already in some cases, decade-old CS operations and it's a lot of change management and things like that, but you're able to really focus on some key problems and some key issues and working with systems and operations to solve those problems essentially from the ground up. I'd love to get into your brain a little bit about the approach that you take when implementing some of these things and operationalizing some of those solutions. Also, there's a garbage truck outside, so that's super fun for when you're recording a podcast, but just ignore that.
Speaker 2:
You are correct in that I was able to build things mostly from the ground up, which is a unique opportunity. I also was doing it for the first time, and so you get some benefits from oh, I don't have to worry about what anyone else has done. But then I also didn't have direct experience in building out a customer success platform or installing one. Our CS team started in earnest, I would say in early 2021. That's when Julie Odo, my boss, got brought on, and then I joined full-time in August 2021. One of my first main tasks was launching client success, which is the customer success platform that we use. One of the things I would say about my approach is I am probably more thorough than the average person and I would rather do it right the first time than have to come back later and clean something up.
Speaker 2:
Usually, when doing any sort of big software install or spinning up a CRM or anything that has a lot of records management and you have existing records the thing that's going to take the most time is cleaning your own data.
Speaker 2:
It doesn't actually take that much time to configure the software, but it's configuring the software around what exists. We had three or four years worth of revenue data and I made the decision that I wanted all historic revenue in client success. That's what took the most time and it probably delayed a full implementation by maybe two months, but I knew that was something that we weren't going to come back later and do, especially since a lot of this early data was with relatively small customer contracts. We were working with high schools initially and it wasn't something that I was going to come back later. I wanted to do it right the first time, and so now, two years later, we can look back at historical revenue data with a lot of accuracy, and when we have a question about a customer, we know that that customer will exist in client success because we have all historic records there, and so it becomes a one-stop shop and you don't have to be searching in Slack or in Google Drive for information on this relationship from two or three years ago.
Speaker 1:
If I can interrupt you real quick, what did that look like? I have this picture of you just hunkered in front of a screen and like five spreadsheets open at the same time, kind of ripping your hair out. Is that accurate, oh?
Speaker 2:
100%. I was trying to figure out what do we use as a source of truth, and so I partnered with our accounting team to say I want an export of all of your QuickBooks invoices and since this is what's getting reported on, these are our books. Let's start there. But the QuickBooks invoices don't always have contract dates associated with them. The names that someone is invoiced under might not be the same name that we know them as a customer, for whatever reason. With high schools, it might be because you're abbreviating things different ways, and so it was a lot of just row-by-row data combing, asking context questions to different people who might know something about that account and then making some sort of judgment call. But yeah, lots of spreadsheets open, lots of hair pulling.
Speaker 1:
Wow, okay, gotcha, I figured as much. I mentioned at the outset that you recently were the recipient of a CS Excellence Award. Congratulations, by the way. That's a really cool achievement. And first off, were you surprised? Did you go into that event with an inkling, or were you kind of like, oh, this is awesome.
Speaker 2:
I didn't quite know what to expect when I had written the application. I spent a decent bit of time on it and then I had both my wife, who was an excellent writer she's getting her MBA and she's also getting a Master's in Public Policy, so she's a better writer than me and my boss all both edit it. And so one I think it was a very compelling story of what I had done and, in quick summary, it was using the tool Zappier to build out internal automations and integrations in different parts of our internal tech stack. So, one, it was a compelling story that I think had a lot of business value. But two, I think, because it was well written and there was some story element to it that flowed well. I thought that made it also very compelling, and so sometimes you sit back and you're like man, I wrote a good thing, and at the end of the rounds of edits I was proud of what I submitted.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, you put some time into it. It's a cool little snapshot too. I'm sure you'll look back at it in a decade or so You'll be like, oh yeah, that's cool, absolutely so. Which does lead me into kind of my next question around automations, which is to say, like, what are some things that you've built? I think it's always useful for the audience to get a look under the hood, so to speak, of what are others building out. What kind of automations integrations are people building that help them either solve some customer facing challenges or cause some internal efficiency gains with CSMs and all that kind of stuff? I'd love to kind of understand what are some of the fundamentals that you've built that you feel like would be applicable to anyone? But then, are you know what are maybe some more innovative and out of the box things that you've built too?
Speaker 2:
Sure. So three things that jumped to mind. One is our process of sales to customer success handoff when a contract closes. The second would be some of our renewals workflow that we recently launched. And then third, and this is a little bit more bespoke to us, but a process for helping the sales team as they request assistance from the customer success team. So they have custom demo requests and we sometimes will build out custom content, and so how do we make sure that that process of requesting help from the CS team is organized and tracked effectively?
Speaker 2:
So those are three happy to happy to jump in any of those that you want.
Speaker 1:
So wait, you're actually handing information off from pre-sale to post-sale, yeah wild, isn't it? Yeah, talk to us a little bit about that. What does that look like in your world?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so for that first one, our sales team uses Salesforce and the customer success team is not in Salesforce just because of licensing reasons. We, you know, earlier stage startup Salesforce is expensive, so expensive, and so there's not really a justification for someone to be in there just for kicks and giggles. When someone moves an opportunity to closed one, then that's going to trigger a bunch of automations with the handoff process. So Zapier is one of the things that connects all of this together, and so when that closed one stage is selected on a Salesforce opportunity, several things happen. One is there's a Slack message that's sent to a closed one channel. I think that's pretty typical, but that gives a lot of visibility, their celebration within that.
Speaker 2:
Two, that that creates an account within client success, and so that is automatically created, and so that's helpful that there doesn't have to be manual data transfer into client success, yep. Three, it triggers tasks for Julie and myself to make sure that the data is transferred correctly and that we're aware that there's this new client that needs to be things done with them. And then there are also workflows that are assigned automatically for you know, here's kickoff and onboarding, etc. So a lot of things just on closed one opportunity in Salesforce. But if that was all done manually it wouldn't happen, or it would happen and it would just be really messy, or hey. Can you remind me about this information, or have you created this yet? And that if something is closed, one, it's going to exist in client success?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Are you how, how, engage? Okay, let me back up. So a lot of operators maybe have the tendency to kind of work on things in a bubble and not really socialize it too much and just kind of do some really cool stuff, implement it but don't really socialize it and then have to kind of sell it after the fact or what not. And I don't think you fall into that category, which is why I'm asking you the question of what kind of socialization do you do about the things that you're building, especially with leadership prior to like, how do you kind of project managing that?
Speaker 2:
One thing that helps is that I'm a CSM myself, so I have a book of business that I manage, and so anything that I'm building I'm also having to use, and so if it doesn't, your own beta tester, basically my own beta tester.
Speaker 2:
I'm like okay if I, if this closes and this notification doesn't make sense, then I'm frustrated. I'm going to go ahead and fix it. So it's nice to have agency in fixing the things or upgrading the things that you're utilizing. It's a little bit unique to my role. So in my role I have a book of business that I manage. I manage our support, ticketing, and so that's its own vertical and I have one one direct report that rolls up under me and then I do all of our systems management and. But having that first bucket of managing my own book of business and interacting with clients and seeing the implications of a field change and client success or changing how we do renewals, that is a is fantastic experience to make sure that I'm empathetic with the things that I'm creating and I understand the end result for other CSMs on our team.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, there's a lot of folks who would say do it manually before you automate it. I think you're in a unique position where you kind of automate it and see if it's broken real quick. It's like the SpaceX approach. It's like you build it and you break it, and then you make it better and you break it again.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and I think to your, to your question about leadership support my boss, julie. We have a fantastic working relationship. She's an amazing boss and she mostly just kind of gets out of my way and she trusts me and I think she's excited that there's lots of cool and snazzy things that are happening that make the lives of people on her team easier and she doesn't have to worry about it. And then it's exciting for me because I'm learning skills that are going to be transferable to a lot of different things and my medium term career goal is to be a COO co-founder and so I want to be managing teams and these are these are skill sets that I think are going to be helpful for me long term. So I'm happy to take on a little bit of extra burden to get those reps and to see what those motions are like.
Speaker 1:
Yeah Well, you're making her life easier, so that's cool.
Speaker 2:
It's always good to make the lives of your boss, the life of your boss easier. It's a good way for career advancement, for learning things.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, yeah, exactly, and I know we spoke a little bit briefly earlier this week and you had mentioned also recently getting involved in the renewals process, which I think is interesting because there's kind of steady debate as to where renewals should live and whether it's revenue team or CS team, and I don't know if you have an opinion either way on that. But I know that you have gotten involved in the renewals process specifically with the intent of enabling everyone on the renewals process and being involved in the change management of that, and I'd love for you to speak to that a little bit, yeah.
Speaker 2:
So that was, I think, the second category of automations that I mentioned, and so this was a big project has probably taken almost three quarters to fully flush out. The majority of the time was building all these automations and partnering with sales and accounting to make sure that the flow of contracting and order forms getting signed and invoicing made sense. To your point about who owns what right now sales, if you had a spectrum of customer success to sales, sales owns a little bit more of it. They own any upsell conversations and then they also handle most of the logistics with like a simple renewal that's not changing year over year. I don't think that's universal for every organization, I think, different stages of business, different types of business, so I think you can kind of pick your flavor there. But at the end of this process, once we had all the automations built out and we needed to teach people what is this new process? What do you need to do? We're a learning and training software, and so it made sense that we use our own software for this. We talk about onboarding and change management as one of our strengths, and so I built out a bunch of training in Learn to Win, and the flow that we did was I assigned this training, let's say, june 1st, and then one week later at our team meeting was when it was due to be complete. So we had about five lessons and one quiz, and so people took this training. It wasn't super long, it probably took 30 minutes in total to complete and there's documentation that supports it. So I think there's a difference between documentation and training. Training is usually lighter and the documentation is here's what you would go for if you really want all the nitty-gritty, if you want to know why this works, or et cetera. So those are two separate things in my mind.
Speaker 2:
But the quiz is really critical because I think a lot of times you'll push out training but you don't really know where people's gaps are. It's similar to one of the origin stories of Learn to Win. Is we actually started with athletic teams and you think about an American football coach and they're training maybe, let's say, a quarterback and say, hey, learn this playbook. And then you want to know that that quarterback knows that playbook before the big game, and so how can you figure out if they have, if they're gonna make a mental mistake, before they throw a pick six, and so the stakes are a little bit lower of. You want to know someone knows how to do a new renewal forecast and if they do it wrong, not that big of a deal. But having that quiz in that learning flow is really critical.
Speaker 2:
And so after taking the quiz and before we had this recap and debrief a week later, I was going through all of those quiz answers and looking and seeing if a couple people got this question wrong. Is this because they didn't study well enough, or is this because I as an instructor didn't have good enough material? Or maybe I said it in a confusing way, or maybe it was a bad question and so that's on me versus maybe someone gets 50% on the quiz. That's probably more on them because they weren't paying attention and they might need some individual coaching. And then the actual meeting a week later was a lot more about what did people find confusing?
Speaker 2:
What areas can we still improve? And it had this flipped classroom methodology where you're not giving someone first look at the content in a presentation with slides. The classroom is for discussion, problem solving, working out examples, and it worked really well. And so out of that discussion came here are some areas that are a little bit confusing. We need a checklist and an easier way to remember all these steps, and so that was something we could build out in client success and that rolled out two days later. So I really liked this flow of having the learning happen asynchronously, have a quiz to determine where there's still knowledge gaps, and then be able to have that richer discussion within a team setting.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I love your focus on internal enablement, on these things, cause I mean so many times and rightly so we're focused on the client experience, we're focused on client education, we're focused on outward things, but if we're implementing these kinds of processes and automations and whatnot, it's obviously unrealistic for our teams to just kind of understand right off the bat what you've built and what's in place and how it works and how the human interacts with the automation, and so that's cool and it's also great. You can drink your own Kool-Aid and use your own tools. That's good stuff, exactly. So what's in the future Like? What is your roadmap of stuff? Look like, what are you going to be building at some point? What do you have your eyes on? Where do you think the big opportunities are for you?
Speaker 2:
or Org, but maybe also just in general, One thing that I've been working on this past month is, you know, I talked a lot about how I love to have good base data and be very thorough with it, have regular motions for cleaning data. It's now at a point that we have fantastic data and now we need to have more visibility on the reporting, and so this is something in the last month. I've built out a monthly report which has a huge variety of metrics and they're pulled manually, but they're pulled from a couple of different places, but then I aggregate them into, you know, one slide deck that I can post monthly. It's more geared towards my boss and senior leadership within the company, but it has things on usage, health, revenue, renewals, churn, ticketing, utilization, things like that. And so the next few quarters, I'm thinking about how do we now leverage this great data that we have and how do we now have actionable decisions on what we've sowed, on the work that we've put in?
Speaker 1:
I'm so envious of your great data, as I'm sure lots of listeners are, and one thing that you mentioned just now, which I think is key, is the data hygiene aspect of it, because I think, no matter how you slice it, at the end of the day there's human involvement in keeping data up. You know, up to date and, and you know, I'd love for you to share any thoughts that you have about how to go about doing that. Is that like a you know, a quarterly event where you, you know you, you bring in refreshments and everybody goes and make sure that all their stuff's up to date? Or, you know, are you, are you reporting on it, doing exception reporting like that kind of stuff, like what's, what's where's your head at with regards to that?
Speaker 2:
It depends. It depends on the scale that you're at and probably the size of contracts that you're working with. You know, if you're having, you know, contracts that are a couple hundred bucks and you have thousands of them, then that's going to be a much different problem than where we are right now, where our contract value is a little bit larger and we might have, you know, you know, 10 to 40 contracts a month, and so, because we have fewer than I'm, I still have a manual touch with every single contract and I know what to look for in terms of what people are commonly doing wrong, as one super small example.
Speaker 2:
But I think it's indicative is we had a contract where when I stuck it in client success, it it was like a nine month contract and it prorated what the ARR would be. So it extrapolated okay, when this renews and it renews is like a 12 month contract, it's going to be, you know, XYZ, and our accounting team had not taken into account that it was like eight months and nine days, and so then that ARR calculation is a little bit different. It's not huge difference, but there's still is a difference. And so flagging that and saying, hey, like what are we going to do this $1,000 of difference, and then having a record of that and saying, okay, you know, here's the decision, whether it's a compromise or we just say, you know, accounting gets to get the W on this one.
Speaker 2:
But you know flagging little things like that and those add up over time. So when someone says, why is your ARR, you know, $100,000 different than accountings? It's usually made up of a lot of little things and maybe there's a couple you know big errors that are in there. But I I would recommend having one or two people that really know what they're thinking about be looking through it then saying you know, good data is everyone's problem. It's true, you need to have good training. That you know. That's what the renewal training was all about. But usually you have a couple of people who are a little bit sharper and they can be catching that and that, whether it's through exception reporting or, you know, having guardrails in place for pick list fields or whatever it is. Yeah, that would be my approach.
Speaker 1:
That's great. As we kind of start to wrap up a little bit, I'd love to understand what's in your content diet. What books are you reading, what you know? What podcasts are you listening to? What channels are you paying attention to?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I love to read. In 2019, I read 56 books, so big reader have dropped off a little bit. I think this year I'm at like 20. So I like to read a wide variety of things. I actually don't read that much that many business books, so I like a mixture of everything. I just finished reading a book called maybe you should talk to someone, and it's a fiction book about a psychotherapist and her journey with therapy, as she's also giving therapy to five of her patients. So that was more of like a page turner, but also made me think about, you know, my relationship with my parents, my relationship with my wife, like mortality all these different things.
Speaker 2:
And then I just started the 1619 project, as it's still. You know, race in America is still a very big topic and something that we should all be informed about, and so you know very different books, but I like to have variety. Yeah that's great, do you have?
Speaker 1:
recommendations for me. Oh my gosh, you know I mean my. It's interesting because my, my diet. I fall asleep when I read. I always have, like my whole life it's been a big problem, especially in college it was a huge problem. I got just fall asleep. It just puts me out. So I'm a big audio book guy. I'm a big podcast person. I'm always listening to something on runs, doing the dishes or whatever. So you know there's Unchurned is a great podcast been listening to, you know, quite a while. Lifetime Value is another really good podcast been listening to a while. One of the podcasts I listen to constantly is my First Million and I'm also into like zoning out, not doing business stuff. So like a bunch of comedy podcasts you know, like smart lists, and there's a show with Dana Carvey and what's His Face, david Spade. That's really funny.
Speaker 1:
So anyway, it's, it's all over the place. But yeah, who would you want to maybe give some kudos to or call out somebody who in the industry, who's doing cool stuff?
Speaker 2:
So Christy, who's the chief customer officer of Client Success, she has been a fantastic partner. We've been working with them for now almost two years and have seen tremendous innovation and development with their platform. They've been just great partners for problem solving different things. Their chief product officer, vp of Product JD I don't know his last name has also been great to work with.
Speaker 2:
As we started building out a lot of these automations with Zapier, I flagged that there were a few minor tweaks that could unlock a lot of value, and he was really happy to jump on with me for me to walk through how I was using it. That was some of the impetus for submitting the award, with some encouragement from Christy there, and so it's been fun to work with a company that is so responsive to feedback, and so that's been a pleasure. It'd be like, oh, it would be so cool if we could just do this, and then it happens and that is great. That doesn't happen. If you're working with a sales force, you know good luck, they can probably do it anyway, because they can do everything. But especially with mid-tier software companies, it's cool to see that type of responsiveness.
Speaker 1:
That's great Cool. Those are awesome kudos. And lastly, where can people find you? How can people reach out to you and engage with you? Linkedin is the best, Always the best. Well, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. I really appreciate all the insight and the knowledge bombs that you dropped and I'm sure listeners got a lot of value. But thanks for coming on.
Speaker 1:
All right, thank you, alex, 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.