Building Digital Customer Success at 15.5

Natalia Andreeva 0:23

I think that's probably pretty common among many companies that our main problem was not that we didn't have enough content . It was almost the opposite . It was like we had too much right and the customers were lost .

Alex Turkovic 0:37

Once again , welcome to the Digital Customer Experience podcast with me , Alex Turkovich . So glad you could join us here today and every week as we explore how digital can help enhance the customer and employee experience . My goal is to share what my guests and I have learned over the years so that you can get the insights that you need to evolve your own digital programs . If you'd like more info , need to get in touch or sign up for the weekly companion newsletter that has additional articles and resources in it . Go to digitalcustomersuccesscom . For now , let's get started . Hello and welcome back to the Digital CX Podcast . My name is Alex Cherkovich . You're listening to episode 73 . And welcome back to the show where we talk about digital in CX .

Alex Turkovic 1:21

I'm joined today by Natalia Andreeva and Kalen Russell , who are a phenomenal team at 15.5 . And a huge shout out to Sarah Roberts , actually , who introduced me to Natalia and Kalen . And the reason why I thought it was pertinent to have them on the show is because they are in the mix of it . They're in the throes of building out digital at 15.5 . And it's not every day that you get to have insight into folks that are in the middle of building stuff , you know . So I definitely wanted to have them on because really , what I'm trying to do more and more on the show is to invite operators on , people who are doing the thing , so that you can get the insights of what they're doing to build your own programs that they're taking at 15.5 , how they're addressing certain things , how they're approaching you know building the program and you know their own approach to digital maturity as well . So it's super cool . I really hope you enjoy this conversation with Natalia Andreeva and Kalen Russell of 15.5 , because I sure did Very pleased to welcome to the show Kaylin and Natalia from 15.5 .

Alex Turkovic 2:49

We've got a really cool episode lined up for you guys today , but I figured , first and foremost , I would love for you to kind of introduce yourself , give a little bit of background . What's your story ? What led you into CS and all that kind of fun stuff ? Natalia , why don't we start with you ?

Natalia Andreeva 3:05

Yeah , definitely . So . My name is Natalia Andreeva and I've dedicated pretty much my entire career to customer success , and I think it's been 14 years I counted yesterday and originally I started in smaller startups , and one of which was acquired by Slack , and I spent a few years there , and after that I moved on to lead a customer success organization at Gorgeous , and now I am building a digital customer success organizations for 15.5 , along with Kalen and other amazing human beings .

Kaelon Russell 4:00

Cool Kalen . Who are you , cool Kalen ? Who are you ? I started as a customer experience career as what they call a wellness coordinator or wellness strategist for Cerner Healthcare . So you know , kind of got some experience with just a massive organization doing something a little bit different and then moved into some CX consulting and program management for benefits companies . I had the opportunity to found a few small companies and then took a break from tech for a little bit and did some volunteer work with AmeriCorps . Kind of inadvertently became the co-owner of a CrossFit gym , sort of by accident .

Kaelon Russell 4:38

And then around 2018 , I felt the itch to get back into tech and CX and found 15.5 , moved up to the Bay Area and it was . You know I wanted to do something that felt entrepreneurial , without having the pressure and financial stress of being the co-founder . So 15.5 was series A and I've been here for five years and had an opportunity to work in a few different roles , all under CX , yeah , and most recently just came back from paternity leave in January and , yeah , lucky enough that Natalia tapped me for helping stand up and build this new function . So it's been a lot of fun so far .

Alex Turkovic 5:15

I think that that's an amazing kind of correlation from entrepreneur to standing up digital CS , because it is very entrepreneurial . Like you have to be kind of scrappy . You got to you know kind of make do with what you have and tie some things together that might not kind of naturally fit together . So do you feel like that experience in your entrepreneurial past has served you well ?

Kaelon Russell 5:40

Yeah , I mean , I think anyone who works in small stage startups has to have a little bit of that entrepreneurial spirit , right ? So for me for sure , it scratches that itch of getting to build something new and take a little digital CS practitioner .

Alex Turkovic 5:56

That's pretty cool . So , as you guys know , I think you've listened to the show a couple of times at least . One of the things that I do ask all of my guests is kind of their own elevator pitch of what digital customer success is , because , as we well know , it changes with . You know , every kind of organization or every function that you , you work in , it's a . It's a different beast , right . So I'd love to hear from both of you I don't know if you want to tag , team it or single file line it , but you know what what would be your definition of digital CS ?

Natalia Andreeva 6:42

Yeah , definitely . So I think that digital customer success is a motion that leverages digital tools and strategies to ensure that all our customers are achieving their desired outcomes right . I do think that it's a new standard for customer success organizations . I do think that it enables scalable , personalized and proactive customer engagements .

Alex Turkovic 7:07

Yeah , I like your kind of tie to the new standard Because it kind of is , you know , like even a few years ago , two , three years ago , it wasn't necessarily the norm to have digital CS as a bespoke function . Sure , you had some automations and you know whatever in place , but you didn't call it digital CS as a as a bespoke function . Sure , you had some automations and you know whatever in place , but you didn't call it digital CS . You didn't have people you know necessarily hired for digital CS , or you didn't have an ops function that was focused on it . It was like let's hire a bunch of CSMs and let's call our customers .

Natalia Andreeva 7:39

Yeah , and I also think that there is a lot of you know these terms flying around , like the pooled CS , right , Then the scaled CS , then you know digital and all of that . So I think , as an industry in general , we're evolving into distinguishing what each one of those is and how do you tie it together and how do you differentiate digital from all of them .

Alex Turkovic 7:59

Yep .

Natalia Andreeva 8:00

And I think that's been a very interesting journey to be trying to differentiate that .

Alex Turkovic 8:05

Absolutely , Kaylin . Anything to add to that ?

Kaelon Russell 8:09

Yeah , no , I mean , I definitely agree with what Natalia shared . I think she captured it really well . I'll just say , like , our approach at 15.5 is definitely under the banner of digital for all . So the mantra I keep telling myself , our team , the rest of the organization , is you know , can we get the right people at the right account , the right information and the right channel at the right time so they can get the highest possible value from our product ? And like , obviously a lot of right has to go right there for that to work .

Kaelon Russell 8:39

So I think , right , we can sit at the intersection of a lot of different functions , but we are definitely trying to , and as we found our footing over the last year to six months , you know , aggressively last year , sort of as a slow roll in testing , moving from that sort of mentality of pool or scaled into a true digital for all motion where you can think through okay , how does this apply not just to long tail or SMB customers , but regardless of price point product ? And then for the human , the high touch , the human led team , how are we supporting them in getting the most operational efficiency out of the products and the tech stack that our CSMs use so they can take that same digital toolkit . We would deliver , put a more personalized spin on it , but have those things served up just in time for them as well . So we have our customers and then our sort of our internal customers with the rest of the high touch team .

Alex Turkovic 9:40

Yeah , you guys are preaching to the choir on that . One Like this is something that I've been screaming about for like a year now is the fact that your digital motion isn't just customer facing . Your , your customers include your internal CSMs , because we need to make those , those folks like , as efficient and and kind of streamlined as as humanly possible . So I super appreciate you bringing that to the table . One of the reasons why I was so excited to talk with both of you and I'm super grateful to Sarah Roberts , by the way , shout out , sarah for introducing us was the fact that you are in the throes of building this thing . Right and granted , I think a digital program is never built Like you're never , you're never done . But you know you mentioned you're like six months to a year down this path of building digital . What you've shared with me so far is really cool . It's it's .

Alex Turkovic 10:37

I feel like you all have approached it with a very kind of mature and well thought out manner , including doing you know your own like maturity assessment and those kinds of things as well . So if you wouldn't mind , you know , take a few minutes and walk us through that journey of deciding strategically . Okay , now we really need to focus on digital CS ? How are we going to start thinking about this ? How are we going to start implementing these things ? You know , what did you start with ? How did you prioritize ? Like , just walk us through that journey a little bit .

Natalia Andreeva 11:13

So I began advocating for this program back in Q4 of 2022 . And the first step that we took was for me to take over our content team . Right , because content is the foundation for everything digital and everything AI . Really , right , and I remember when we did that , the first thing we did is we sat together with a team and we re-evaluated our approach to content in general , right , so we realized that we were producing a lot , but it wasn't quite part of a bigger strategy , if you will , right , and it also wasn't very data-driven , right . So our new mantra from that moment on was like okay , does the piece of content contain a CTA and can we measure it ? Right , so the answer is not always yes , but that reframing helped us get to the next phase , which was , okay , let's run a few experiments to see if there's something bigger here . Right , this is something more tangible that we can then tie to business metrics that will allow us to build this whole , you know , beautiful digital world that we were all like dreaming about .

Natalia Andreeva 12:24

So we ran a few experiments . Among those were the digital-led onboarding and office hours , and what we saw is a pretty significant increase on mail . So monthly active users count was going up , and you know , at that point I pretty much had everything to build like you know , the business case and I was able to tie it to our retention numbers and luckily , you know , we were fortunate enough to have a CCO who is very like into digital and he was supporting this whole transformation , so it wasn't a very hard battle to win to be fair us like this like gradual process of like , okay , take a small piece , then tie it to metrics and then kind of earn the right to do the next thing .

Natalia Andreeva 13:10

And then you go step by step and , as a result of that , today we have two teams within our digital led engagement organization . One team is the content team that produces the content that then is being distributed by Kalen's team , the team of digital customer experience managers , and I'm sure , kalen , you'll share some more about your experience of building that team as well .

Alex Turkovic 13:35

That's really cool . I want to hit before we hit into that . I'm going to put a pin in that because I want to hit on a couple of things that you talked about , Because I think this notion of an MVP for the program is a really cool one and , and I think it it's it I guess it's kind of obvious , but a lot of people still don't go down this route . They like plan this whole big thing out before it's really kind of proven out . So you , you started with , you know , digital onboarding . You started with office hours , which I think are , you know , two very , you know , easy , low kind of effort places to start Absolutely . And then you know , attribution to that was your proof point to go , you know to , to go then sell the , the , the program as a whole . So what I'm getting at is what did that onboarding look like ? Or what does it look like ? Was it a drip campaign ? Was it video ? What was it and how has it evolved ?

Natalia Andreeva 14:34

maybe yeah , definitely . Well , to your point . It's never quite built , but the first iteration was we've gone through maybe five by now , really and it's constantly evolving . So the first one was a drip series of videos that were where we were trying to hit what we thought at least we hypothesized were the most important pain points for the customer throughout that stage .

Natalia Andreeva 15:03

So I think that's probably pretty common among many companies that our main problem was not that we didn't have enough content . It was almost the opposite . It was like we had too much Right and the customers were lost into okay , wait what ? You overwhelm me with all of these . You know numerous help center articles and you know academies and whatnot , but like what is that one thing that I need to do ? And , to be fair , for that very first iteration , we didn't even have any like data analytics team right , so it wasn't very data driven . We just said like , okay , like we have common sense , we know our customers . Let's create a hypothesis right On what it is that at every single stage of the customer journey that we believe the customer needs to be unblocked from right .

Natalia Andreeva 15:54

And that's literally all we did , and yeah , and that was successful enough for us to justify the next iteration , which was much more elaborate , right , which was already like a combination between drip emails and in-app ops and guys . Right , and what we're working on right now is even the next stage , which is we're trying to add AI into it . Right , we have our own Spark AI tool , which is part of our product actually . Right , so we're partnering with R&D . We how do we power it by ai ?

Alex Turkovic 16:27

using your own stuff . I love that a novel idea .

Developing Digital Customer Success Strategy

Alex Turkovic 16:32

You said something very important that I feel like um is something that everyone should take away from this conversation , which is um . The purpose of your emails or your onboarding flow or your in-app notifications shouldn't be to let your customer know about a tool . It should be to let your customer know about an objective or an outcome that they need to reach as part of their onboarding journey . There's so many drip campaigns I've seen that's like oh , here's our LMS Great , you can go take some courses and they never do . Here's our community Go ask some questions . They never do that .

Alex Turkovic 17:12

Versus step one set up your profile . Step two set up this integration . It's like those things that you know are the barrier to entry that all of your customers face , yet so many onboarding flows fail to really hit that hard . So kudos , nice one , awesome , thank you . That's really cool . So okay , so fast forward . You've you've done some basic things some office hours , some onboarding flows . You've proven some basic things . Some office hours , some onboarding flows . You've proven some success there . What did the attribution of that look like ? In other words , how did you measure that ? How did you feed your business case to then prove out . Okay , we need to go build this out at scale this out at scale .

Natalia Andreeva 19:42

Yeah , so I think the easiest metric to tie to were , like , monthly active usage of our customers , right . But in addition to that , we do have the health model in place that we can probably talk a little bit more later if that's interesting . So we the reason . So I think , in general , when I'm building business cases like that , what I'm trying to take into account is how do I connect the very granular , very tactical user behaviors with high level business needs , right ? So what are the top line metrics that the business cares about , right ? And how do I paint this picture for them in numbers , right ?

Natalia Andreeva 20:18

So , again , it's not always possible , especially when you're beginning , right , so it's . You don't have enough resources . You definitely don't have a data team to support you on that , when it's just an idea , right . But you can . You can run an analysis in the spreadsheets to see , okay , of those , say , customers who attended office hours versus didn't , right , what their mail rates are , right , and so pretty simple things like that . Of course , then you get more sophisticated as this gets more and more attention , but at least to paint that picture and paint what that future can look like if we do this , right , I think , was the story .

Alex Turkovic 20:56

Yeah , that's really cool . That's really cool , okay . So you built the business case , you presented it . They're like go to town , get digital with your customers and now fast forward . You have essentially two teams . You mentioned a content team , which makes perfect sense , and then digital cx managers . Kaylin , do you want to run us a little bit through ? You know your team , you know how big it is . What are the daily tasks of your team ?

Kaelon Russell 21:23

I guess yeah for sure . So when I sort of joined on this team , the business case was proven out and the business need improved obviously soon followed right . So we were moving from an experiment and idea to now 50% , or roughly right 50% , of the business is going through this digital treatment . So we had a pretty tight turnaround to assemble a team back in January and I think when you know , when speed is the name of the game , you kind of have to build the plane while you're flying and that's probably not news to anyone listening here . But I knew we wanted to have a diverse skillset . Right , there had to be people who are familiar with the product and wanted people who had some CX experience , some CSM experience , right . Digital kind of sits at this crossroad between ops like traditional CSM activities , customer marketing , customer education , product design , right . So I wanted to go and find you know , how can we build up a team where we get representation of a little bit of all of that you know ? Luckily , natalia had already stood up kind of the content team . So we had customer education , webinars , academy , success centers up and running . We had some in-app design already going on and that made my life a little bit easier to say , okay , we have this operational side , we need to look at data , we need to design campaigns and we need to be able to staff some of these webinars one-to-many or one-on-one in order to successfully like , streamline and deliver that content across the customer journey . So we had four seats and I was able to hire two CSMs from the high touch team , were interested in exploring digital and kind of wanted to be at the pointy end of the spear in customer success right , I do something a little bit new and also was able to bring on one technical account manager . So we had a support engineer who'd been sort of in this TAM type role and really knew the back end , the more technical nature of the product , whereas the CSMs knew a bit more of the persona , the customer journey , how to run a meeting effectively , right , some of the basic CSM skills .

Kaelon Russell 23:30

And that left one open spot . We really wanted to go external for that . So we had three internal hires and we were standing up the team . And then we had this big long wishlist of a job description and it was a little harder than I anticipated to find somebody who could check all those boxes . I think , alex , you mentioned right , this is an it's a newer job title that you're seeing out there . So we had a lot of really interesting candidates but nobody really ticked all of the boxes who are coming in through our traditional recruiting channels and we actually ended up hiring a great referral who had zero background in customer experience . She was a program kind of a program manager at a really large organization . She'd been in , you know , had experience working in college , recruitment and admissions , and she had experience kind of in this program management with a really large organization .

Kaelon Russell 24:19

So it was fun bringing in , kind of opening our horizons up instead of putting blinders on and saying we need a digital CX program designer . Right . That narrowed the pool quite a bit and so far it's been working great , yeah , and then like , okay , so what do we do in the day to day , right ? So I think for our team , I imagine this dial between kind of high touch human intervention and fully digital . And for sure , at the beginning we definitely had to dial a little bit more onto the human side minimum effective dosage of human required to elicit the behavior change that we wanted with our customers . So we ran an example campaign of what we called our abandoned cart , right . So somebody went into our product . We're not e-commerce , but it works in e-commerce , and so , as I was jumping into this role , I tried to think about like B2C is a really good use case . B2b it's relatively new , but B2C has been doing digital forever right , that's all they generally have , and doing it well forever .

Kaelon Russell 25:24

Yeah , I can't tell you how much Instagram ad merchandise I've ended up buying with some kind of follow-up campaign .

Alex Turkovic 25:31

TikTok shop will be the death of me , yeah 100% .

Kaelon Russell 25:35

So , yeah , so we did this abandoned cart style campaign and we ran three different cohorts through it , with the first one being like hey , notice , you started setting up an engagement survey . You didn't finish it , let's jump on a phone call . And the second one was okay , let's give you a video , a video walkthrough , and then we'll offer the office hours after . Are you able to do it with the video ? And the third cohort went through like , hey , here's a great webinar we're running . The second week they got a video . The third week we got the office hour . We were able to sort of dial in by product a little bit how much human was needed . And I would definitely say in the early days , I think our organization , our cross-functional partners , were a little bit unclear on exactly what we did . We were a little bit unclear exactly where we would fit . And it was a lot of experimentation and a lot of shotgun kind of approach , like a lot of one-time campaigns where we discovered a data gap . Right , someone from our analytics team would call up a table and say , hey , we found X percent of customers are only doing this . Like what can you do with that ? All right , well , go after that . So we're kind of running around a lot of tasks switching and as we got our feet under us and got some data back from these campaigns , we started moving into a much more strategic programs , clearer journeys , proving out the impact and sharing the success story , also across the organization of . Hey , this is the campaign we're running . We're not just over in the wild west firing off emails to all of our customers , but like here's our strategy , here's where we're plugging it in , here's what we're seeing . And that allowed us to partner a lot closer with product , with our partnerships teams , with our sales teams , because they could understand the journey a bit better and kind of what the team did and didn't do . So that was super helpful and I think that allowed us to start converting some of our high-performing one-time efforts or experiments into evergreen journeys and campaigns . Right , and doing a little bit less experimenting and a little bit more fine-tuning .

Kaelon Russell 27:31

And then I think you know from a day-to-day perspective what we're shifting to now moving into the back half of 2024 , from a day-to-day perspective , what we're shifting to now moving into the back half of 2024 , is from a CXM . So my teams are DCXMs , our Digital Customer Experience Manager , moving from sort of a jack-of-all-trades to more specialization . So we have a variety of digital channels . Now each team member will be responsible for the strategy and delivery of that specific channel , in addition to staffing , copywriting , supporting the other team members . So that's allowing us to say , okay , we know these are good channels . They just need to be well-maintained , with clear strategy what they're for , what they aren't for , which customers go to one-on-one , which customers go to group sessions , which customers go to webinars .

Kaelon Russell 28:16

So that's definitely been a shift for our team and , I think , for our organization , really stepping now into this digital for all . So I have OKRs this quarter on reducing inefficiencies for CSMs . We're measuring . How much time is it taking you to do all these things ? How aware are you of all this content creating opportunities for CSMs ? To you know , run a Ghostbuster play that we're designing and maintaining and running at scale and they can just drop people into it that are queuing for alerts , for emails , for templates , right , anything we're doing at scale , we want to be able to do in a high touch way as well .

Alex Turkovic 28:53

Yeah , so that's kind of the new challenge . Yeah , that's super cool and thank you for walking me through that . It's a cool journey to witness kind of the birth of a team and it's kind of scrappy and figuring stuff out , slowly becoming a little bit more established . Some things work , some things don't . You iterate on it before , and I think the key takeaway for me from what you said was , before you go automate a bunch of stuff ,

Scaling Personalized Customer Success Strategies

Alex Turkovic 29:18

go do it manually first , because chances are it's not going to work the way you think it's going to work . And so by doing it manually and by getting a human behind it , you know you can monitor , you can see what's working , what's not working , and then when it does work , when it does start humming , at that point then you can turn it into like a fully digital , automated thing that point , then you can turn it into like a fully digital , automated thing .

Kaelon Russell 29:40

For sure .

Alex Turkovic 29:41

Definitely a lot of .

Kaelon Russell 29:42

Wizard of Oz automation right In the background .

Alex Turkovic 29:45

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Alex Turkovic 30:24

Now back to the show . Let's go back on the human element of this a little bit , because what's interesting about you know what you guys have built so far is , you know , there's kind of these pockets of teams that a lot of digital functions have . So you've got like the content thing happening . You've got the program management thing happening . Where does the what people sometimes call a scaled , you know team or like the human element of those motions , the customer facing element of those motions ? It sounds like you know the CX managers are that today . Is that something you guys plan on continuing on doing ? Them hosting the office hours and them doing that one-on-one customer engagement ? Or , you know , does that slowly morph into its own thing ? Or talk to me a little bit about that .

Kaelon Russell 31:15

Yeah . So I think for sure there'll always be a need for that one on one engagement , particularly in our , in our space , right HR tech people who are our persona , our admins , are our HR practitioners and leaders , and they're in the business , the people business . So at the end of the day , there's always going to be a need for humans , right . And I think what we're experimenting with now is in conjunction with our community , which will be launching soon . We're going to be doing more small group working sessions .

Kaelon Russell 31:42

We've experimented with that over the past quarter and that's been really helpful , I think , for folks to not just be one-on-one and obviously there's times where you need to be but to be in a group of peers all working through a similar challenge together . So we'll be leveraging some cohort-based groups to allow a bit more scalability and a bit more camaraderie . It can feel , I think , in HR , quite alone sometimes . So to have other people who are going through a similar journey with you , sharing wins and challenges , can be really helpful , and that's been a really positive experience so far . I think . From the webinar's perspective , Natalia , you can share a little bit maybe on how we're approaching our education at scale as well .

Natalia Andreeva 32:23

Yeah , definitely . I do think that , like Caelan said , there's always going to be the place for this one-on-one interactions , right , even in the digital world , right ? I think our main differentiation from the high-touch motion , though , right it's we don have that relationship-building aspect , right , we're not telling our customers , hey , you'll never talk to a human , that's not the case , right ? So , like , we want to talk to them . What we're saying is that , you know , our emotions are more like scaled-oriented , right , and we assumingly we figure this out and we do this , right .

Natalia Andreeva 32:59

uh , we , we will provide you with the right level of engagement at the right time of your journey right so that's kind of like our mantra , right , and sometimes it does mean a one-on-one interaction and that's okay , yeah , right .

Natalia Andreeva 33:12

So so to to the webinar strategy .

Natalia Andreeva 33:16

We we are building a curriculum , right , so like , and we do have that curriculum built out right now on the account level . But what we quickly realized , along with our actually maturity model or , like I think we just call it , the health model , the maturity model , internally , we quickly realized that , while the account level , health modeling is definitely the right first step and is an absolutely mandatory one , right , what happens when you start to actually execute on that and run those campaigns at scale is that you start to miss the mark on the personalization aspect . So I think previously I mentioned that to me , digital success has a few components and personalization , scalability , proactiveness are definitely one of those . So , while with the account level maturity model , you do get the account coverage part down right , so you can proactively and at scale reach out to as many accounts as you like , where you do start to miss the mark is the personalization , all right , and in order to , when we started to realize that , right , we actually got a little scared that we will start to lose trust from our customers right .

Natalia Andreeva 34:37

In the type of content that we're delivering to them right .

Natalia Andreeva 34:40

And we definitely don't want that . So we that's when we started to kind of pivot towards , like , user level approaches and our content strategy is all persona-based right now . Right so , when you build curriculum for an admin , and especially in our world , we can have like up to 10 admins per account and all of these admins are going to have very different responsibilities , right , but I know not all businesses are the same . But think your admins versus your exec personas versus your end users , right ? Messaging level of permission , what's in it for them is going to be different . Right ? Messaging level of you know , permission you know what's in it for them ?

Natalia Andreeva 35:15

It's going to be different right For each one of those personas , so we are tailoring our webinar programs to those personas . At the moment , that's cool , yeah , so important .

Alex Turkovic 35:27

And I think the fact that you have that level of data to where you actually know who your personas are , or know the users that fall into those persona categories to be more precise , is amazing .

Alex Turkovic 35:44

Because , I mean , you would be surprised at the number of orgs and leaders that I talk to that just don't have that data . They don't know who their users are and so you know they're left to try to figure it out based on you know what their users are doing and all the kind of backing into that , and it's just a it's a huge mess . So that's that's really cool , that you're able to start personalization this early Cause , I think . I think a lot of orgs don't get there until they're very mature in , you know , in in terms of length of time with with a program like this . So that's super cool . And it kind of takes me to my next question around health scoring , because I understand from you know our prep conversation , that that you know you , you have built out some health scoring . I'd love to know kind of what that looks like for the account level . But then you also have , like user level , health scoring in place . Is that correct ?

Natalia Andreeva 36:39

Yeah , I can walk us through that logic . I think I started a little bit already by sharing this experience of like , okay , first building this account-based health mechanism , and that's , I think it's like pretty standard , perhaps , right . So , like , we're looking at customer behaviors and whether they are doing the things that we know correlate with their success , right , right . So that's , that's step number one . And then , yes , we decided to realize that that's not enough . All right , and while it's okay , perhaps for the entire company which is actually the case , which I think is pretty cool about 15.5 , I think our leadership was able to unite us all by this like concept and the importance of the maturity model . Everyone within the company , whether it's an engineer , you know , or a salesperson , know what our maturity model is and they are you , you know , aligned to it . So that's definitely super helpful and important and huge kudos to our ELT team for that . But , yeah , again , on that level , that's enough , but it's definitely not enough for us when we are talking about scale and when we're talking about delivering value at scale , right .

Natalia Andreeva 37:50

So the next logical thing was to start building user journeys , right ? So Kaelin can probably talk a little bit more about the tactical things there , but I think , conceptually , we're thinking about it like per persona , right , we have different sets of expectations and we have different ways of measuring that . So we are working , for example , so , like we have different NPS scoring per personas and we have different targets and baselines . And another cool thing that I think is related to that that we're working on right now in partnership with our data team is building the engagement score . That will be tracking the in-product behaviors , which , of course , is very important . We want to understand how . Does it help or not ? Right , if our users are interacting with our webinars , they're consuming our content , they're posting in our community , right ? Is this helpful for them to achieve their desired outcomes with us ? So that's the question we're posing and we are instrumenting it as we speak .

Alex Turkovic 38:58

Yeah , that's super cool . I mean , it makes a lot of sense right , ideally , you would want a correlation between active community users and healthy kind of usage data in the platform and vice versa . You know that's super cool and , and I love that , you've built essentially an internal , you know maturity model that you know you've evangelized , which is super cool . I , you know a lot of folks kind of look at at you know their , their customer health in terms of you know straight up telemetry or you know straight up engagement data and they don't really take into account , like where does this customer actually fit in the user journey in relation to that data ? So so , so I guess my next question is is data Like we ? We haven't gone down that path and path and everybody struggles with data . You just mentioned a data team and I want to dig in on that a little bit . Like what is that ?

Kaelon Russell 39:59

Yeah , so I would I mean I can share a little bit . We certainly do not have the luxury of a fully staffed CX data scientist or anything like that . It's definitely a shared resource across the entire organization . So within product there's a specific product team solely focused on data science , data analytics . They're using that to drive our AI product in-app .

Alex Turkovic 40:25

Like a data warehouse situation .

Kaelon Russell 40:28

Yeah , so we have effectively a full data warehouse . I mean , we can get into tools and tactics , for sure , but we pipe data from our platform , from Salesforce , pendo , from SkillJar , where we host our academy courses , right , zoom for webinar data , so we have everything dumps into a data lake and then we have DBT piping data back through like a reverse ETL cool into into churn zero and into Pendo . So we're collecting the right level of metadata and that has been . I've been here for five years and it's certainly been a five year journey and ongoing .

Kaelon Russell 41:05

And we have . We do have a great partnership , though , I will say , with , with the data team . So we have our product

Cross-Functional Data Collaboration for Success

Kaelon Russell 41:11

data and they kind of sit in their own world , focused really on leveraging our AI tools , feeding it the right content , continuing to help Spark AI and co-pilot deliver great content and value to our end users . And then there's more of the business analyst side , which we work a little bit closer with . Those two worlds are actually coming together in a big way , which I think will unlock a lot of additional insights for us . So , you know , I think , when it comes to those cross-functional partnerships with scarce resources again very similar to everything we've talked about every step of the way , you can't come in and ask for a thousand things , and understanding how data is structured , how tables work , how teams flow and what that information is representing , so to effectively better communicate with , with folks has been , I would say , something worth investing in as a digital team . If you have anyone on your team who's curious about SQL or Python like there's a lot of great courses out there that will just give you a basic understanding , and then , if you get access to at least an explorer view in your data warehouse where you can run some queries and get some initial findings and then say , hey , we have this one . Ask , very concise I'm seeing this information here . Can we get this fed into a pipeline and here's what we're going to do with it ? Or better , here's the challenge we're trying to solve .

Kaelon Russell 42:36

You know , we really need one data point at an account level or one data point at a user level . What do you think the best way is ? To go and let them help engineer a solution , rather than coming up with a list of demands and requirements for a team that's generally very stretched and understaffed in many organizations . So , yeah , I think I'll say we're in a good position . I think there's obviously always layers you can , you can use to to make things better , but certainly compared to where we were , a year ago or two years ago , it's much better it's , it's , it's been my experience .

Alex Turkovic 43:07

Um , you know that . Well , I'll say the obvious thing Product usually needs something completely different out of the data lake than customer facing teams or sales teams , whereas product is , you know , looking at things maybe a little bit more on the aggregate , maybe looking at feature adoption on the whole , like usage data on the whole and things like that , whereas CS teams are really looking at the , you know , the minutia , the per account , the per user level , and looking for indicators there . And I think you know it's so important to be able to articulate that in a cross-functional kind of engagement with cross-functional leaders , to say you know , this is what we're after , this is the data that you know that we need or that we like to see . But also , I understand , this is the data that you need because I think there are , you know , it's a two way street .

Alex Turkovic 44:01

Yeah , sure , the data team may live in product , but guess what ? You are creating insights out of your own data , out of the data that you get and out of the tool sets that you have , that you then like feed back to the product team if you know what they're looking for , right ? So I just think it's it's so cool that you have that established relationship , because I think that's a lesson to you . Know a lot of folks to say , hey , really spend some time on those relationships because that can be like the first thing to ignore , like it's super easy to just not and and , I think , building collaborative OKRs or goals .

Kaelon Russell 44:38

However you set goals , your organization with product managers and product leaders right .

Kaelon Russell 44:43

Ultimately , they are accountable to some degree for the usage and adoption of the tool they're investing in and if they're going to invest in improvements , we need to show that , like where the need is right . So , yes , there may be differences in the data need but ultimately , again coming back to like , hey , what problem are you trying to solve and how can we help you solve that ? So , hey , product manager in charge of feature Y , you know you're hoping to get this amount of revenue or customers or whatever through the data system . Hey , I have got three great ideas . Let's align our goals that you're in support , we're in support of each other . And you know , on a literal pen and paper level , where you have a shared , you know , a collaborative or a cross-functional OKR for the quarter and both teams can work on the same direction . And you know , occasionally those will diverge or can feel maybe opposing or a healthy level of tension right Between what a customer needs and what product wants them to use , maybe at a given time .

Kaelon Russell 45:41

And that's okay , I think that's a healthy . Tension between teams is always good to some degree , but the more alignment upfront you can have , the easier . That way you come with one effectively . One ask to a data engineer or a data scientist you know sort of two different dashboards and if they can build from the ground up , hey , I know we need to double click on this graph and get a list , and I know that list needs to be piped back to whatever crm you're running out of .

Kaelon Russell 46:07

Yep , if they can engineer for that from the beginning , it's much easier than having to go back and rebuild everything they just did , because now CS wants to use it for something else .

Alex Turkovic 46:15

Right , right , right , yeah , exactly , that's super cool . Look , I think we could freaking go on forever because there's a lot of cool stuff to unpack here and , you know , maybe we should do a part two at some point . But I feel like just these little insights into like it started here and it's grown into , this thing is is super powerful and I can't wait to share this with the audience . But , as you guys know , you know we want to keep it a little bit concise , and so I wanted to kind of get to my closeout questions , which you probably know . The first is I want to know what's like in your content diet . What are you paying attention to ? Podcasts , books , white papers , whatever .

Natalia Andreeva 46:53

Yeah Well , I am not exaggerating when I say that when I was building this team , I was using this show as my go-to resource . So thank you very much , Really appreciate all the insights that I personally gained from this show . So definitely number one on my list . I also follow Unchurned as well . I know , Alex .

Natalia Andreeva 47:17

I think you were in one of the latest episodes yeah , so I haven't checked that one yet , but I will , so I think those are my regular go-tos . But in addition to that , what I personally find helpful is following , like , some adjacent functional like leaders , specifically any PLG teams or growth teams . I am a huge fan of Elena Verna of Dropbox . She has a Substack subscription , so I learned a ton from these and I do think that we have a lot to maybe , you know , borrow from each other and like apply into our world . Yeah , and I think , in addition to that , I'm right now at the stage where I'm trying to continue to work on storytelling with data , so any books that are related to that , I think I bought them all . So , yeah , I think that would be my top five .

Alex Turkovic 48:16

Very cool , Kaelin . What are you paying attention to ?

Kaelon Russell 48:20

Yeah , I mean I'll double click on both those . I think Gain Grow Retain , jay Nathan's stuff has a lot of great content and I just also want to . You know , he was one of the first people I reached out to and he made a lot of great introductions and honestly , I think , as I was stepping into this role , there's a lot of content out there , but the highest value I had was just reaching out to anyone who would talk to me about digital customer experience and it's amazing , the people who are doing cool things and wanting to share their lessons learned along the way . So I've found a lot of .

Kaelon Russell 48:52

There's some helpful Slack communities . Customer Success Collective and DCS Connect are have been great resources to find people who are interested in , you know , setting up a 30 minute coffee chat and just picking their brain and interviewing them a little bit on like what are you doing ? How do you approach this ? You know , how did you fail fast and how can I , you know , stand on the shoulders of giants , so so those have been great . Pre-flight is another Slack community , more focused on onboarding , but those are the folks over at Rocket Lane and they're a fantastic community and really good events . I think , similar to Natalia , like following adjacent functions is helpful , also , just being an end user and putting , like you know , not you in their shoes , them in their shoes .

Kaelon Russell 49:33

What does it feel like to be a user in a digital experience , and particularly in B2C applications ? Like it's a great place to spark ideas . I really love that email . Let's bookmark that yeah .

Alex Turkovic 49:45

If you're like me , you have a whole folder of stuff that you're like oh man , that's cool , I need to save that and then you know you might reference it again . You might not , but it's there . If I can add to y'all's list , the new automation mindset is a book I just finished . It is way , way , way , way good . Lots of people talking about it right now , but it is . It is a fantastic read about , you know , ai in , you know , in today's era of automation and building a culture around this stuff which is super cool , so highly recommend that one .

Alex Turkovic 50:25

Thank you , any shout outs ?

Kaelon Russell 50:29

I mean I I know I mentioned Jay earlier , but through those conversations I I want to . I know specifically Aaron Hatton over through those conversations . I wanted to specifically Aaron Hatton over at Gainsight has doing some really cool stuff , running great events and put together , I think , a good little free , free , maybe free course on digital customer experience . Erica Ackroyd over at Pendo her episode and then also we had a little coffee chat really helped us shift our mindset from account to user and how do you approach that . And then Dan Ennis I think it was at mondaycom for a long time and over at workado now was a great resource and is doing a lot of cool stuff and running some programs with success pandas and a few other areas where kind of sharing that knowledge , but all great follows on linkedin and have been awesome resources as we're getting stamped stood up here on my side .

Alex Turkovic 51:13

Yeah .

Natalia Andreeva 51:15

Yeah , well , definitely yeah . Second , all of those kudos . I think one that I would add . So Elena Balagush from Gorgias team is , in my opinion , doing some cool things , building this almost like experimentation engine for R&D , so they're testing different experiences for customers prior to sending that as a request for their engineering team , and I love this approach a lot because it allows you to like , as a digital team , we're a very like agile engineer so we can like really learn very quickly and then pass only those things that work to like you know a more expensive resource like R&D .

Alex Turkovic 51:58

Yeah , that's really cool . Okay , I have to look into that one . Well , awesome , I've really enjoyed this conversation and walking us through the exciting stuff you've built . I think maybe in another six months or another nine months or maybe another year , we should do a check-in and be like , hey , that stuff you were building , how's it going ? And check back in . That might be cool , but where can people find you and reach out to you guys ?

Natalia Andreeva 52:28

Yeah , alex , please keep us accountable . Yeah , all the things that we're seeing , we're building right now , check back on us . That's right . Yeah , linkedin is the perfect place to find me personally . I'm Natalia Andreeva there . I love our community . Whether you are in CX or in , you know growth teams or HR , which is where you know what our company does . Please connect . I'm happy to have coffee chats or join any events . I love our community , so please reach out .

Alex Turkovic 52:56

Awesome and Kalen .

Kaelon Russell 52:58

Yeah , I quit the algorithms this year , except for LinkedIn , so you can definitely find me on LinkedIn . It's just a Kalen slash , kalen Russell and , yeah , the Slack community , as I mentioned , definitely DM and Customer Success Collective or DCS . I keep those up as open tabs .

Alex Turkovic 53:14

Yeah , amazing , that's cool . Well , thanks again for the time , much appreciated , and yeah , I'll be checking back in .

Kaelon Russell 53:22

Absolutely . Thank you so much , Alex . It's a great chat .

Alex Turkovic 53:27

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 word map 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 Trukovich . Thanks so much for listening . We'll talk to you next week .