Emotional Intelligence in Digital and Treating Customers Like Humans with Jenelle Friday | Episode 051

Speaker 1: 0:03

and he broke down. His job was on the line, he was gonna get fired and no one had ever pushed to that point to ask him some of those tougher questions that I was asking and he's like nobody's cared to the level that you've cared before, and I just thought to myself this is not hard caring about the people that we are responsible for and once again, welcome to the digital customer success Podcast with me, alex Cherkovich.

Speaker 2: 0:26

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 digitalcustomersuccesscom. For now, let's get started. Hello and welcome to the Digital CX Podcast. It's great to have you back.

Speaker 2: 0:59

As always, today I am joined by Janelle Friday who, among other things, is Customer Success Collective Leader of the Year 2023. She is VP of CS at Forecastable is. She has been crazy focused on EQ, emotional intelligence in customer success and just in general in professional setting For the last few years. She's building out her own framework all around EQ and we talk about kind of that lovely intersection between humans and digital emotions in CS and actually making sure that whatever you're doing digitally has an element of awareness and emotional intelligence.

Speaker 2: 1:55

She was recently the emcee at the Customer Success Festival in Austin, which is where we met and hung out for a while and had great conversations, and so I wanted to invite her on to the show, uh, to continue those conversations, uh, with you along for the ride. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Janelle Friday, because I sure did. Oh crap, janelle Friday, it's nice to have you on the show. I'm so pleased that you're here and that we made it happen and you and I met a couple of times virtually, but then face-to-face, at the CS Austin festival, where you did a phenomenal job of emceeing. It's good stuff, and the customer success collective has been good to you because you got CS Leader of the.

Speaker 2: 2:44

Year award, like six months ago or something like that.

Speaker 1: 2:49

And crazy.

Speaker 2: 2:50

It's good stuff, but I'm excited that you're here because I think you're one of the realest people in CS and that's a good thing.

Speaker 1: 3:00

Thank you. That's a really great compliment, Alex. I appreciate that I think that's why you and I connected the way we do, because you are very real as well. So I feel like if you're in the tribe, you find your tribe members and you just stick together, knowing that you're part of the tribe and, yeah, I appreciate that. It's being authentic.

Speaker 1: 3:20

My husband made this comment just the other day about how you're just unapologetically yourself all the time. I don't change from my husband to my family, to my neighbors, to my work. It's just, it's hard, it's too hard. I heard someone say they send their representative Every single aspect of their lives. They have a different version of themselves that they present and I'm like that's exhausting, I can't, no. And obviously you edit and you filter the best you can for certain circumstances.

Speaker 1: 3:51

But yeah, it's been an important part of my personal brand for a couple of years now.

Speaker 2: 3:55

Yeah, it's wonderful because you do. When you start interacting with people that are real, it's easy then to spot the people that aren't being real. Yeah, unfortunately, that's true. Look, I people that aren't being real. Yeah, unfortunately, that's true. Look, I'd love to give everyone who may not know you, give us a little bit about your history and CS origin story, because you've been in CS for a long time. You were frontline CSM for a long time and I think that makes for great leadership. But I'm putting words in your mouth, so I'll let you talk about yourself.

Speaker 1: 4:24

Sure, I went to college to sing opera, and that was not a good fit, because I liked the drama on stage and I don't like it off stage, and so I stumbled my way into executive support and that I then just fell into customer success haphazardly. Honestly, I didn't know that's what I was doing until I moved from Washington state to Colorado. It'll be nine years this summer, which I can't even believe it's been that long.

Speaker 1: 4:48

To be a full-time aunt my nephews are 13, 10, and 5, and got my first CSM role official titled CSM role, then a couple years at Adobe. I have just found myself in positions where I'm coming into something fresh and they're looking for creative ideas on how to connect with customers at a very authentic, genuine way, and that's been me in my life. I have always been called the family member that keeps ties with everybody and I'm the person people come to for things, and so I feel like CS is such an extension of who I am and sitting in an admin role, thinking, is this the best it's going to get? Not that it's a bad thing if you're an admin and there are some people who were called to that and I love that but I just felt like I was stuck and CS opened a door that I didn't even think was possible.

Speaker 1: 5:40

So I've really just decided to embrace all of the opportunities that have come across my path with customer success, and most recently I suffered a pretty severe trauma several years ago that forced me to look at myself very critically.

Speaker 1: 5:55

I took three months off of work, I was in therapy, I just did the thing, and it helped me realize that I was lacking some pretty important emotional intelligence skills, one of them being self-awareness in specific areas, and so I have poured myself into research and reading and everything I can get my hands on around emotional intelligence for myself, because I want to be the best version of me and put so much good back into our community, because it saved my life, it gave me a career, and so if that means that I'm spending my extra time giving back, then that's what I want to do. So, really, the path within customer success also helped me find emotional intelligence, and that's where I'm really heavily embedded myself these days is talking about emotional intelligence, raising awareness about emotional intelligence and helping individuals who are looking for professional and personal development from an emotional perspective or a soft skill perspective find their way.

Speaker 2: 6:52

So cool. Yeah, I think in the course of your own research and things like that, you've you've de facto become I would classify it as expertise. Because you spend a lot of hours on something, you become an expert in it. Your approach to it is wonderful, and you spoke about it at the CS Festival as well, about the application, the implication of emotional intelligence, which is cool and also just. I guess what I find refreshing about your approach to things is you normalize being human in scenarios, and I think so many of us want to put on this perfect facade and kind of just present in the best, most professional, polished way possible, et cetera, et cetera. But at the end of the day, we're all human and my personal opinion on this whole thing is that the more human you can present, the easier it is to build rapport and to connect with somebody on a human level so that you can have the conversations that would otherwise be hard to get to.

Speaker 1: 7:54

You're exactly right, and I think really the interaction that I had with a specific customer at a former employer really was what sort of cemented my approach for me. And so it was. He was a C-suite, he had selected the product. We were in year three of their three-year contract and I received them in year three. No one had been able to get them successful in the first two years and he was angry, he was demonstrative, he was pushy, he was demanding all of the above, and yet I'd get glimpses of him during meetings where he was this really nice guy.

Speaker 1: 8:30

And so trying to reconcile these, my observation I'm really trying to find ways to help and to really help us figure it out. And so can you help me understand where you're coming from? And he broke down. His job was on the line, he was going to get fired and no one had ever pushed to that point to ask him some of those tougher questions that I was asking, and he's like nobody's cared to the level that you've cared before. And I just thought to myself this is not hard Caring about the people that we are responsible for, the relationships that we're responsible for.

Speaker 1: 9:12

It's not a difficult thing when you're being true to yourself, which I think is really hard sometimes if you don't really know yourself well enough to say well, I'm being true to me. How do you do that? I think there's an element of accepting yourself for who you are good, bad, ugly and then figuring out what am I good at, how do I lean into my strength to benefit those around me? And then, what do I really suck at? Where am I struggling and commit to doing the work to help yourself get better.

Speaker 1: 9:42

That's not a common thing a lot of the time in business because we don't want to get vulnerable with each other, but I've learned that through vulnerability in the right moments with the right people, is what cements those relationships and cements or creates an environment, fosters an environment of true collaboration, of trust for someone to open up to you about that kind of stuff. So I think it was the perfect example for me to go. I'm going to keep going, I'm going to keep pushing, because I've often been told you can't keep up this pace, you're making the team look bad, nobody can keep up with you and I just maybe I'm giving too much because I invest of myself, but I don't think I don't think you can really make genuine connections without investing part of yourself without investing part of yourself.

Speaker 2: 10:22

Yep, I totally agree. My hunch is that this contact that you were working with had always because I've worked with people that are kind of like this but he probably always intimidated everybody else that he worked with. That was his way of protecting himself is through intimidation and fear, and you were just like, hey, what else is going on here? And it's like, yeah, I get that. You know, you put your trust and whatever in the solution and so your career or your job is on the lines.

Speaker 1: 10:55

One of the things I talked about in my keynote in Austin was how any negative emotion, whether it's anger, whether it's frustration most of the emotions are driven by fear, if they're negative emotion, and so if you can ask yourself at a regular interval, what is this person afraid of, and get to the root cause, it just means it gives you a better foundation to know how to work with that individual and how to maybe subconsciously address their fears without calling them out and be like why are you so afraid? You don't have to say that, but you can get to a better place to work with that person. So that's where I try really hard, and not everybody is everybody's cup of tea either. I think you also have to acknowledge the fact that I want everyone to like me, Part of who we are, especially customer success. You're not going to get everybody that likes you and to be okay with that and understand that. You know you do the best with what you can every single day and you leave the rest to life because it's too much to carry.

Speaker 2: 11:52

Yeah, that's so true.

Speaker 2: 11:54

It's so true. Yeah, I really appreciate that perspective and that humanizing of things. I'm curious. One of the things that I know that you've been working on and we've talked about a little bit is a certain framework around emotional intelligence. By the way, I feel stupid because I've known about an emotional intelligence for a long time but I never really put two and two together. Why it was EQ and not like IQ EQ. Okay, finally I get it, but I feel so stupid because it took forever. What is this EQ thing you're talking about? Also, I'm an audio engineer and EQ is equalization.

Speaker 1: 12:34

But anyway, acronyms in our world are crazy.

Speaker 2: 12:36

So stupid, yeah, but I know you're working on this and obviously this is the Digital CS podcast, and so, as a follow-up to this, I do want to ask you the implications on digital. But, fundamentally speaking, what's this emotional intelligence framework that you're working on and how has your own kind of research formed your definition or your thought around EQ?

Speaker 1: 12:59

So technically, there are multiple definitions of emotional intelligence. The one that is the most consistent across all of the organizations who have done all of the scientific research and kind of put the foundations in place is there are four pillars within emotional intelligence Two that focus on yourself, and those are self-awareness and self-management, and there are two that focus on others, so that is social awareness and relationship management, and the concept is very simple it's that you have to love yourself and accept yourself and know yourself to then love and help other individuals right and so I think that when emotional intelligence comes into play, specifically for customer success, relationship management is one of the four key pillars, and we are relationship managers.

Speaker 1: 13:44

So to me it was why aren't we digging into eq within customer success, specifically because it's such a core part of how we should be approaching business relationships, and not just customer relationships, but our own internal cross-functional relationships as well. And so, through all of the reading, I was struggling with okay, I struggle with self-awareness in certain areas, but how do I become more self-aware? There's so much reading and there's so much knowledge out there that there was nothing tangible for me to hold on to, to say do this thing once a day and you're going to increase your self-awareness there was really nothing.

Speaker 1: 14:20

So I started doing research and I started building databases of okay, this is behavior that you would define as unprofessional, these are behaviors you would define as emotionally intelligent, and then coming up with a grid for each pillar, coming up with a database of action items or things that somebody could do to increase that specific pillar of emotional intelligence. For me, I have a list of things to do on a regular basis to keep my mind sharp within self-awareness, to constantly check myself, to constantly evaluate am I being sensitive to this, am I being aware of this? And I'm working on a new framework called emotional intelligence mapping, the whole idea being I want to help an individual go through an EQ assessment, to then determine where do their strengths lie, so that we can help quantify that and build some confidence and a sense of conviction in their presentation, and then obviously identify the areas that they're struggling through, like an evaluation gap or an emotion intelligence mapping exercise, to then produce that grid of action items that they can do to help themselves and just help them get through that.

Speaker 2: 15:28

Cool. That's so cool and interesting because so much of like self-awareness and getting to the core of what drives you but then also what drives your relationship with others is. There's some work involved. There's very few people where I think that comes naturally right. There's a lot of times where you have to put in the work to figure out how you interact with the world and how you interact with other people and what their relationship looks like. And what I like about your framework is that it maybe takes some of the guesswork out of it and gives a little bit cleaner path to really understanding what are the things that you might need to work on from an EQ perspective.

Speaker 1: 16:08

Right, because concepts are great for me, but if they don't have a tangible outcome or result, that's where I'm like that's nice, but I got to move on. And that's where the concept of emotional intelligence is really profound, especially in our digital era today, where we're looking very critically at the functions a human can perform and asking can we shift that function to an AI of some kind or to a digital approach? And so I get a lot of people that are scared that we are going to be replaced, and I believe that, as long as there are human beings involved in business and it's not one computer transaction talking to another computer transaction, the human spirit will absolutely continue to be necessary. The other thing that I think we have to acknowledge is that we live in an age where we look at our phones more during the day than we look at anything else. Right, and we're raising a generation where my 13 year old knows how to get into the settings and code my phone.

Speaker 1: 17:05

I don't know what you're talking about. They are growing up with technology in a way that we never did, and the consequence of that is that there's a lack of knowledge in the human-to-human interaction and some things that you inherently knew growing up as a kid when I didn't have a cell phone, we didn't have cable TV or internet. Growing up I was an 80s kid. Right there are that person-to-person relationship relating, understanding, reading, body language, all those things is more difficult now for the kids growing up with this technology than not, and so we also have to realize that in our business world we are getting now that new generation of workers who struggle with relating to people and the common courtesy or common sense. Things are not common and we have to be, then, the responsible parties to say they only know what they know. We have to be better at helping, encourage, educate, be kind and lead them into what is normal and professional, human to human interaction.

Speaker 2: 18:09

Yeah, so interesting. Um, I and and I feel like it's this whole I'm going down a rabbit hole here, but this whole Apple vision pro thing, I think is a massive step towards the continuation of like let's avoid people and let's just live in our own like digital world, like I've seen a few users of these things now and it's like I get that's the future of our interface of computing. Okay, we've got a glimpse of. At some point this minority report thing will be a thing. Okay, I get it not a new concept, but do you need the thing?

Speaker 2: 18:50

All the time crossing this, I swear to god, saw somebody crossing the street with the thing, doing the motions and doing all that kind of stuff. I'm just like, let's look at some trees, breathe some oxygen, talk to a. I've made it a point and this is me probably being old, but I've made it a point to at least acknowledge or do something nice or say hi to a stranger at least once a day. I know that's a very American thing, but whatever, but it's it for me. That fulfills a part of me and I I feel like you're right. There's a whole like group of folks that are younger, that probably don't place as much value in those things, and I'm generalizing, sure, but I think that's true. Anyway, that's a whole. That's a whole rabbit hole.

Speaker 1: 19:40

We can totally go on that tangent for a long time. I feel like yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2: 19:45

But what I do want to hit back on something you said because you teed up the segue very nicely and then I shot it to hell which is when you said earlier hey, in this digital age we've gotten used to looking at our phones, but in this digital age we have unprecedented access to all kinds of tools and technology and things like that and, ideally, to help us achieve some of these things that you're talking about. So I want to first start off with a question that I ask all of my guests, which is to say what would be your elevator pitch of digital CS If you were to meet somebody on an elevator, somebody that didn't know about it. What would you say? It is.

Speaker 1: 20:22

Yeah, digital customer success is using data and automation to proactively support your customers, freeing your customer success managers to focus on strategic growth, right.

Speaker 1: 20:33

So it is the ability to automate a lot of the maybe touch points that would be required with some of your larger, more enterprise strategic customers and really meet your customers where they are from a digital perspective. So, whether that's through an automation marketing campaign, whether that's really building out your customer community and your knowledge base and the voice of the customer program, which I think really has more importance than we place on it, in a lot of ways it's using tech to reduce the physical administrative work that takes away from your ability to spend quality time with your customers and address the customers that are smaller, paying a smaller dollar amount fee, or we all have those customers that are paying for the basics and we don't physically have the headcount or the resources to have a regular ongoing call with those customers. And so, in order to support them and make sure they have what they need, digital customer success makes sure that they're taken care of as well as best you can.

Speaker 2: 21:35

Yeah, totally, I love it. I love it. And so, taking it back to where we were talking about earlier, I think there's two key things here. I think one, fundamentally, is you're freeing your CSMs or you're freeing your teams up to actually have those human interactions that are meaningful and not just filled with got to get the deck ready and I got to set this email out and I got to do all these things but you're actually then freeing your team up to really have value based conversations and real conversations where it's like a, a human to human, that the kind of the interaction that you were talking about earlier. So I think that's one element of it. The other one that I'm curious to get your input on is okay, if we're really trying to pull elements of EQ into perhaps some of our digital communications and whatnot, what does that look like Practically tangibly being socially aware in a digital medium?

Speaker 1: 22:38

I actually came prepared. What I did was I created two different emails. These two different emails are for an introduction for a new customer with a new customer success manager. So it could be a new customer or it could be a new CSM, but it's that first kind of touch intro, digital touch point. And so the two emails cover the same things. The one is a very standard email template that I have used in the past that I know other companies are using right now. It's very standard, there's nothing wrong with it.

Speaker 1: 23:10

And then I put my emotional intelligence hat on and said okay, if I was creating a digital engagement model, how would I approach this differently? And the result is why it's lacking emotional intelligence. Right, there's a lack of personalization. We're not really allowing for any kind of indication that we're connecting on a personal level. There's an absence of empathy in this email. Right, we're not acknowledging challenges, the tone is transactional, there's a limit on customer focus and the call to action is so generic. Really, that first digital touchpoint should be much more warm, much more personalized, showing that there's an extra sense of effort going into our wanting to connect, even though it is through a digital touch, where the second email is using an emotional, intelligent approach to be a little bit more specific and much more emotionally intelligent, driven in the complete approach and breakdown of how that email is written. Now, granted, you're going to have a lot more content if I'm putting this into a company version because you're going to call out things within the company.

Speaker 1: 24:15

And maybe there's a lot more to add for the resource part of this Because, again, a good digital customer success engagement model has a robust self-learning community empowerment model, and so that probably is going to be a part of this. But I just wanted to give a really clear breakdown of the difference between the two. So, even though you've got a digital program, you absolutely can use emotional intelligence to make sure that every single engagement and touch point with your customers is very carefully thought out. It's driven through emotional intelligence to indicate to your customers at a very basic level that the truth is that you care. You're here to help you understand they're going to go through things. You're going to provide them with the resources that they need, because it's not their fault that they've been put into a digital program. It's your organization's choice and so you need to be responsible with that choice and make sure that those digital customers have as many tools as you can possibly offer them, since they're not getting that one-on-one regular touch point.

Speaker 2: 25:15

Yeah, I especially love the empathy bit where you're calling out that, hey look, I get that you might not be totally down with this, or your leadership has bought a product and you just learned about the fact that you're going to have to implement it all by yourself, right.

Speaker 1: 25:31

A lot of times.

Speaker 2: 25:33

Yeah, it's that acknowledgement of hey look, this is going to be a little painful, but I'm here for you and I'm in there with you. I really liked those examples and, funny enough, one of the things that jumped out at me first and foremost is that kind of impersonal email. It's welcome to the blank, blank family.

Speaker 1: 25:51

I'm like oh, You've grown up because you've seen that, haven't you?

Speaker 2: 25:58

I'm not part of your family. I don't want to be here. I don't want this email Go away.

Speaker 1: 26:06

Yep, yeah, way, yep, yeah. But I've gone through this experience now with so many different people and companies that I always try to assume positive intent, right, which is always how you want to approach something. And so, yeah, when you see this email template to me, my first thing is, at least I have one. Right, there's an attempt here to connect and offer a really positive first point of contact. But to me now, knowing what I know, it also says we can do better than just offering a very standard, basic, generic welcome email. Let's get a little bit more personal, let's be more robust in the way that we acknowledge the person on the other end.

Speaker 1: 26:44

To your point, that probably wasn't part of the decision-making process. They were told hey, we have a new tool, figure it out, here's your contact person, and so we need to keep that person in mind. And part of emotional intelligence, right, is social awareness, which is you have to be aware of how your actions, your behavior, affect other people, and that's on a one-on-one basis, but it's also on a company to customer basis. So if you are an organization that you're not thinking about how you're impacting your customers at a very basic level through a simple email communication, then you're missing a step that's really crucial, especially in the world that we live in today, where building solid critical relationships within your organization is part of your growth model, because a customer centric organization gains more ARR through already customer accounts than through net new logos.

Speaker 1: 27:33

And so we have to be more customer focused and understand our impact to our customer community.

Speaker 2: 27:38

I have an interesting example of kind of social awareness and digital, which is to say, we were designing an onboarding email and we were approaching it from a very casual kind of perspective and it was very friendly and very just, almost b2c kind of language instead of language, and it went over really well in the americas, went over really well in APAC, bombed in EMEA, absolutely bombed in EMEA, especially the Dach region, germany, and very literal people who were like nope, just I just want the information and it was yeah, it was just very interesting. So we ended up for EMEA, we did a completely separate onboarding email that is just very to the point and not super friendly, and it worked well.

Speaker 1: 28:34

That's a great example, right? Because, again, if you're being socially aware, this is a perfect example of one of the gentlemen that you and I both met at that event was a former product manager. No-transcript tell you, the last time there was any kind of cultural conversation within leadership around our various approaches to customer success and I think that's such a great call out because approaches to customer success.

Speaker 1: 29:30

And I think that's such a great call out because, yeah, we have to think about things like that and how we are presenting ourselves, understanding that cultural differences are important to keep in mind.

Speaker 2: 29:39

Totally, absolutely, and I think culture also expands beyond region right. For instance, right now where I work, it's very much focused on the IT space and you communicate differently with an IT crowd than, let's say, a previous gig where we were communicating primarily with hospitality and restaurant managers. Yeah, different worlds and cultures and environments and all that kind of stuff and you have a little bit more leeway with one than the other. I won't say which one.

Speaker 1: 30:12

I won't ask.

Speaker 2: 30:14

When you think of just digital and digital motions and digital plays. Are there any that kind of stick out to you, at either your own or others, that you've seen in the wild, that you particularly like and that you've been like?

Speaker 1: 30:27

oh yeah, this one's cool the wild that you particularly like and that you've been like. Oh yeah, this one's cool For me when I think about what is a really great digital experience because we are working on that at Forecastable. For me, it's the question of I need to sit in the shoes of the customer. I need to be able to be a customer and understand, if I'm not going to get a live person to talk to, then what do I need to be successful? And so, when you think of it from that perspective, for me, I partnered with Pendo. I chose Pendo because Pendo was really amazing at tracking user data and user adoption metrics, things like that.

Speaker 1: 30:57

And so I spent time building out in product guides so that if they had a question about a specific area of the product, there were white papers attached, there were product papers attached, there were product notes attached. There are in-product guides to get them through with question help bubbles just building out a really robust digital program so that if something is really going wrong, if there's a fire, if the product isn't working at all, if there's an outage, do they have the ability to submit a raise hand and say, hey, we need help, something's really wrong. But outside of those really dramatic things. Can we provide them with the resources and the tools that they need to be successful? And so it's to me. It's that voice of the customer build out your customer community that is so critical, and during my time at adobe, that was one thing I came. I was actually actually hired into Marketo before Adobe acquired Marketo.

Speaker 2: 31:49

Oh, interesting and so.

Speaker 1: 31:51

Marketing Nation, through Marketo, was a pretty profound community of users.

Speaker 1: 31:57

When Adobe did their Adobe Summit in 2019, and that was the first time Marketing Nation was invited to an event they shocked Adobe leadership with their participation and their eagerness to come together, and that's when I realized it's because Marketo had done such a brilliant job at creating the community of resources, of forums, of in-person events, of customer-led sessions.

Speaker 1: 32:21

They just empowered the community to help themselves and really promoted internal knowledge. That could be found, yes, through our website and through all of our free resources, but, truthfully, the best knowledge was the other customers that had been using the platform or using the product and gone through all of the work. And how could we get all of that knowledge to the surface to help everybody else? And I think that's the right approach, especially these days with all of the digital products that are out there and the multitudes of products that have come that are now direct competition with some of these organizations that have not had a lot of competition. So, even now, it's more critical that you have a really robust customer community outreach program, because the best of the best already have those, and that's why they're the best, because they know the secret sauce to make their community thrive.

Speaker 2: 33:09

Yeah, totally Absolutely. And one of the things that, um, I was thinking about is, as you were talking about this, was it's staggering how many times we fail, as cs or cx leaders, I should say, to do our own research in terms of secret shopping, our own experience. That's true, because you can get out of control quickly. You've got marketing doing some comms, you've got sales doing comms, you've got product doing comms, you've got CS doing comms. They're all doing it from different platforms. You buy a new tool, you don't really think about how it's going to interact with the others. You can get out of control quickly, and I'm guilty of this as well. There's been times where I haven't secret shopped my own stuff, only to come to find out from a customer that, hey, this is a little confusing. I'm like, yeah, you're totally right, and so I would challenge anyone that's thinking about this to, every six months or so, just put yourself in the flow.

Speaker 1: 34:08

Yeah, totally. I agree with that 100%, and especially from a customer success perspective, right, I think we stand at a very interesting time within the SaaS industry. You're seeing companies like Google and Amazon, microsoft, coming up with partner marketplaces that are having companies come together to create joint listings of their partnership together and why they're better. Together stories are the reason that you should choose their option together with all of the competitors in the spaces. If you go to Google marketing automation, you're going to get so many more results today than you would have in 2019, because that's the market right. So we also have to acknowledge that the marketplace is pushing us away from direct selling and into a partner ecosystem of sorts, where we are connecting and relying on our internal vendors, our internal partners, to help us understand the best kind of relationships to form, and so, even more so, customer success is very uniquely positioned at the front lines to be understanding what does your company look like from a customer perspective, what's the impact that you're making to then make sure that you're staying competitive, that you're aware of what's happening in the market, that you're thinking through if your competitor has a better together story with another vendor and a joint listing.

Speaker 1: 35:34

Are you keeping that in mind as well, I think you have a great point and I've actually never done this, and now I'm probably going to rethink this Creating an account from a customer perspective and disconnecting from myself, from the tool, and coming in as a customer to really go through the entire experience from start to finish. And it's a checks and balances for me as the leader to think what am I not thinking of? What am I missing? It's not even on my radar because I've not sat in the customer's shoes to that perspective. And so you bring up a really good point that I will probably deploy myself, because that's a really good point that I will probably deploy myself, cause that's a really great perspective.

Speaker 2: 36:10

Maybe we could start a business called SaaS shopper, where all we do is secret shop companies.

Speaker 1: 36:15

I love it, let's do it.

Speaker 2: 36:17

Gonna do it with all my free time.

Speaker 1: 36:21

I have so much free time.

Speaker 2: 36:23

Yeah, let's go, let's go. I've been thinking about this the whole time, ever since you mentioned the opera thing. I need to find something real quick.

Speaker 1: 36:30

Oh boy I love that you have records. Yeah, I think that was one of the first things I said to you too when we first met was like oh my gosh, you love records. I have my grandmother's record player and I play records all the time.

Speaker 2: 36:45

Yeah for sure. So my sister studied opera in college. She went to uc, didn't do anything with it, became an airline pilot okay, which is phenomenally left turn. Regardless, we've had singers in a very musical family or whatever, and for some reason this record has stuck with me throughout. It's something we always had and it's one of these. It's an interesting story. If I have it correctly, this is a record of Florence Foster Jenkins. Do you know who this is?

Speaker 1: 37:17

Of course I do yeah.

Speaker 2: 37:19

I figured you did. It's this very from what I understand-do woman from I don't know what the the 50s, 60s, something like that who I don't know if she was convinced she was an opera singer or whether she was doing it as a farce I'm pretty sure she was bored and just throwing money at stuff. But she made these records of her singing these arias and things like that are phenomenally horrible.

Speaker 1: 37:54

You know, they made a movie about her.

Speaker 2: 37:55

Did they really? I need to see this the movie is.

Speaker 1: 37:59

I think the movie is called Florence Foster Jenkins and Meryl Streep.

Speaker 2: 38:04

Oh my God, I haven't seen this.

Speaker 1: 38:07

To your point. She was horrible. She was totally tone deaf, but totally on it, and I just think you know such a bold place to come from and I'm one of those people. So we actually went and saw a musical last night called Come From Away. It's a Tony Award winning musical. It's based on the true story of 9-11. There were like 38 planes that were rerouted from landing in new york. They landed in a tiny little town in newfoundland, canada, and that tiny little town has to take care of 7 000 passengers for like four days. Wow, and it was absolutely incredible. And because I have classic training and I'm a soprano, so I'm high up there, when I hear other sopranos sing and they're not on key, I'm like, oh it hurts, oh it hurts their soprano. She just made my heart soar the whole night. But yeah, it's living a life that is living boldly and living courageously, a term that I'm using for a company that I'm working on called Lionheart Customer Success. Lionheart means bold and courageous.

Speaker 2: 39:15

And.

Speaker 1: 39:15

I think, when you can accept yourself and all your flaws and all your ugly as I like to say, because we all have it when you're able to accept feedback from people that you know care about you. So for me, my husband was the one that finally broke through the wall that I had very carefully built to protect me from various things, to really hear him say you know, babe, did you hear yourself on that call?

Speaker 2: 39:43

Yeah, I'd be like.

Speaker 1: 39:44

No, I'm fine and he's like. I really need you to listen to me. I think it's tough for us to accept that we have blind spots, but the truth is that you can see the blind spots when someone that you love and that you trust can point them out to you and you don't immediately jump on the defense. To live boldly, with courage, means I'm not perfect. I do have blind spots and I'm going to trust that the people I love, that I know love me and they know me can come to me and say hey, you know, and they may not come to you lovingly, right, but they're the voice that you should listen to. It really has changed my whole perspective, and it's hard to hear when you don't fit a mold or you've made a mistake or you need correction, especially within business.

Speaker 1: 40:28

We're not training mid-level managers to proactively help when something goes wrong. I think all of us have been on a pit at one point. All of us have probably gotten too emotional on a conversation or we've written an email that we shouldn't have written and, instead of helping us understand wow, where were you coming from? Help me understand your thought process. Here's where I would suggest we make changes in the future. You know that level of coaching isn't happening because those managers are not trained to help develop skill sets. We have to then own it ourselves. We have to own our own development, we have to own our own process and be willing and acknowledge the fact that we are constantly growing, constantly having to change, and feelings matter, but in business specifically, facts matter more.

Speaker 1: 41:18

And to use facts to drive and tell stories to help your customers see what's possible and really make sure you're building a real connection is important. That we need to stress at a higher level and the customer voice. If the customer voice does not have a seat at the table, you're missing something. And that seems to be open for debate, because even at the conference that you and I were at and we asked the room what is customer success, you're going to get 10 different answers, cause even with our own industry, we still can't figure out one solid definition. So it's a moving target, so to speak, that we have to just acknowledge it's a moving target. We're not going to nail down any one thing that works for everybody.

Speaker 2: 41:57

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Speaker 1: 42:00

But the ones that are the people that do the work the people that are the boots on the ground that are building those relationships. Even if the program might look different, they all need professional soft skill development, every single one of them. And so that's where, from company to company, industry to industry, emotional intelligence is the baseline that everybody can work from, and if we address the individuals, the boots on the ground doing the work, and empower them, then we all win the individuals, the boots on the ground doing the work and empower them, then we all win.

Speaker 2: 42:34

Yeah, I love that and I think, um, leadership has a huge part in that. Obviously, it's not up to the individual to self-steady on this stuff until they're unless they're really like into it or whatever. I think making it okay to be human in the workplace is something that I hope gets more and more traction, because, um, I don't know, I remember there.

Speaker 2: 42:50

There's a moment in my career that sticks with me where, um, it was very early on, I didn't take a piece of feedback particularly well, I got crazy emotional about it and that affected how others viewed me. But it also affected my actions afterwards in terms of being a little more reserved, being a little bit less myself in the workplace, and it took me years to really realize the fact that, hey, it's okay to get emotional about stuff, as long as you do it in a way, that's that that you're still displaying the fact that, hey, you're still in the game. Like you're, you're still in the game. This one just hits you a little bit hard, and I think I really want to foster an environment with my teams and with and I hope to be part of organizations where you know those kinds of things and being emotional and being reactive to certain things. As long as it's not damaging or harassing to somebody else is okay, because we're all human right.

Speaker 1: 44:02

Yes, and emotional intelligence does not mean you don't feel. I was just on a podcast this week about how, if you think that emotional intelligence is the ability to ignore your emotions or bury your emotions or overcome your emotions, that's not what it is.

Speaker 2: 44:17

No.

Speaker 1: 44:17

It's the ability to identify, accept and harness your emotions to be the best version of you, and so I got overly emotional on a work call last week because something was said that really hurt my feelings and I'm not afraid to cry Like you hurt my feelings. I'm emotional, but, to your point, it's what you do with those emotions that speaks to your level of intelligence. And circling this all back to digital customer success, I think when you first talked about, I really want to talk about emotional intelligence and digital customer success. I'm like that's a stretch, because emotional intelligence is human to human and digital customer success is not always that. However, we have brilliant people in marketing who are crazy good at presenting beautiful displays of things that entice a reader to want to read. You have beautiful thought leaders that are great, communicating certain concepts in a more robust connection driven way, so that all of your email campaigns, all of your self-help guides, are easy to navigate. They're very simple to understand. They're enticing the reader, exciting the reader, showing the reader that your organization truly does care.

Speaker 1: 45:29

And I think there's one more step I wanted to mention too before we wrap, which is segmentation. So when I say segmentation, I think a lot of people immediately think segmentation is about grouping your customers by how much they spend per year or by the industry that they come from. And I think that there's a further level of segmentation that is important, which is where is the customer in their journey? Are they a novice, meaning they're a brand new customer? Are they intermediate They've been through a first or second year renewal, getting their feet in the race or they're an advanced, expert user, and your approach to those different segments should be very different.

Speaker 1: 46:05

So, even from a digital customer perspective, you can't send the same intro email to every customer. You have to get more granular and really take a look at meeting your customer, where they are within the different journey that they're in or the different needs that they have, and cater and tailor your digital approach to that as well. So it's not just write an intro email. Make sure it's written through emotional intelligence and you're good to go. You got to take all of the lessons from emotional intelligence as the leader of that digital program to ask how can we be more emotionally intelligent in our touch points with our customers, even if that's written communication, through a standard delivery marketing email campaign.

Speaker 1: 46:44

Man I couldn't have said it better myself.

Speaker 2: 46:46

I couldn't have said it better myself. That's really good and I know it's the top of the hour and I know you probably have a hard stop and you probably need to get off the call.

Speaker 1: 46:56

But real quick. What content are you?

Speaker 2: 47:04

paying attention to. Who do you want to give a shout out to, and where can people find you?

Speaker 1: 47:08

So really it's LinkedIn. I ditched Facebook, instagram, social media a while ago. Linkedin is the best place when it comes to digital customer success. You, my friend, are who I would call our industry expert, so I listen to your podcast. I do a lot of one-to-one coaching, and so when I'm not working and I'm not coaching, I'm with my nephews and with my family. I don't listen to podcasts. I don't get it. I don't have that. But I'm reading a book right now and it's so interesting.

Speaker 1: 47:41

It's called the myth of normal oh, okay and it is such an amazing breakdown of how, when we say normal, what do we want to be normal? What do we think is normal? It's a construct that there is no such thing as normal. The way that my husband talks about growing up in Colorado, what was normal to him as far as technology and the way we relate to each other and how we look at business and look at society in general, that was normal.

Speaker 1: 48:08

What's normal today is very different and we can't continue to dig our heels in against it. We have to be aware of what our kids know to be normal. What are our college grads coming into our workplace? What do they know to be normal? Because it's incumbent upon us to meet people where they're at. And so if we're not educating ourselves on the current version of what society calls normal, and how do we who don't feel like we belong, how do we find our place and find our voice and offer value at the same time? And for me, I do one book at a time right now because I breeze through them very quickly and I want to stay very targeted, but this book is this thick.

Speaker 2: 48:47

Yeah, that's a big book.

Speaker 1: 48:48

I picked it up in the airport on the way home from Austin, actually. But yeah, one book at a time, but I've finished all of the customer success books. I'm obsessed with anything that talks about emotional intelligence, but right now I'm really trying to wrap my brain around how to better connect with individuals that are coming into this community from different experiences or wanting really better soft skill development with a one-on-one kind of sense. Those are my resources right now.

Speaker 2: 49:15

I love it. I love it. Thank you for sharing and thank you for your time and thanks for being you. We appreciate you. I think you're one of the one of the bright and lovely voices in CS and I really appreciate your friendship as well.

Speaker 1: 49:29

Ditto man, I was so delighted to meet you at the conference and just find another member of my tribe. And, besides, what you're doing with the podcast, I just feel like, as we continue to build out this network of people that are dedicated for giving back to our community, and all of our unique ways coming together to support each other has been an honor.

Speaker 1: 49:47

So thanks for having me and hearing me out, but I want to say thank you to what you're doing for our community as well because digital customer success is running headlong very fast and we have to not just keep up, we have to stay ahead, and so all of the awareness and the driving that you're doing in that space, I'm very grateful for.

Speaker 2: 50:05

So thank you. Thank you I appreciate the kind words and happy Friday, janelle Friday. Happy Friday. Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Digital CX Podcast. If you like what we're doing, consider leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice. If you're watching on YouTube, leave a comment down below. It really helps us to grow and provide value to a broader audience. You can view the Digital Customer Success Definition Wordmap and get more information about the show and some of the other things that we're doing at digitalcustomersuccesscom. This episode was edited by Lifetime Value Media, a media production company founded by our good mutual friend, dylan Young. Lifetime Value aims to serve the content, video, audio production needs of the CS and post-sale community. They're offering services at a steep discount for a limited time. So navigate to lifetimevaluemediacom, go have a chat with Dylan and make sure you mention the Digital CX podcast sent you. I'm Alex Terkovich. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you next week.