Digital Customer Experience Strategies and Insights

Joe Di Grande 0:23

I mean , you have to think , at the point before I started building out my team , I was roughly managing around 500 companies on my own .

Alex Turkovic 0:30

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 . Greetings and welcome back to episode 74 of the Digital CX podcast . My name is Alex Turkovich . So glad you could be here this week and every week as we talk about digital in CX .

Alex Turkovic 1:14

Today's guest is none other than Joe DeGrande , who is VP of Customer Success at Business Insider and also founder of a consultancy called Joe Does Tech Touch . Insider and also founder of a consultancy called Joe Does Tech Touch . Funny story about how he got the name Joe Does Tech Touch , but I think you can probably figure it out . Joe has been involved in Tech Touch since it was called Tech Touch and now it's called digital . So we talk at length about his approach to things , how he advises people on their digital strategy , what his own strategies look like around automation and data and those kinds of things . So it's a really , again , insightful conversation into somebody who's an operator , who knows the ins and outs of what it's like to build and run a digital program . So I really hope you enjoy my conversation with Joe , because I sure did . Joe , it's so awesome to have you on the podcast .

Alex Turkovic 2:12

We've rescheduled a couple times my fault , so thanks for dealing with it , but I'm super stoked to have you on .

Joe Di Grande 2:19

No , thanks for having me . Life happens . You know what are you going to do . That's it .

Alex Turkovic 2:22

It tends to yeah , Sometimes I wish it didn't , but it tends to that's how it goes . Yeah , for sure , we have a connection that we discovered . I don't know how did we discover this . Anyway , I don't remember .

Joe Di Grande 2:39

I don't remember either . I mean , it's my brother-in-law , my brother-in-law , matt , and I think you just saw a mutual connection , and I think we were both in TechTouch , digitalcs or Automation . I think , that's what it was . It was my title , something like that . Yeah , exactly .

Alex Turkovic 2:54

And then I saw you were connected to Karante which I will forever call him Karante who was my college roommate Not college roommate , but he and I went to college together . Who was my college room not college roommate , but he and I went to college together we practically college roommates because I think I lived in an apartment on like the fifth floor of our apartment building and he was like on the second floor or something like that . So we were always basically hanging out with the group . So that's cool anyway , small world .

Alex Turkovic 3:19

That's a very small world . Yeah , for sure . Yeah , so he's your brother-in-law and he still hasn't reached out . Yeah , I still haven't talked to him recently , so we've got to fix that situation .

Joe Di Grande 3:31

For sure .

Alex Turkovic 3:33

But you're currently leading , I guess , automations . And what are you currently doing ? Yeah , yeah . No , I'm going to stop putting words in your mouth .

Joe Di Grande 3:42

No for sure . So I'm Joe DeGrande . I'm the founder of Joe Does Tech Touch . I have a lot of background . I could go on my origin and all that kind of stuff , how I got into it . But long story short , I help companies with their tech touch or digital CS strategy , essentially going to market . Just based on my experience , it's roughly , I would say it's we're coming on 10 years , if not longer , and given that I kind of know like what basis to hit before you get things going , I'm a lot of companies and leaders . When I talk to them they just don't know where to start . They don't understand Sometimes they don't understand that it's all based on data , or at least that's a big proponent of it , and then , of course , the technology , the strategy piece of it , and then helping them once we figure out all those different essentially bottlenecks or areas of opportunity .

Joe Di Grande 4:26

How do we implement ? Make those changes , and then you know , hit the ground running for sure .

Alex Turkovic 4:31

Yeah , how'd you ? How'd you um wind your way into this line of work ?

Joe Di Grande 4:36

so I've always been , um , I've always been a worker like I always like fixing stuff just like personally on my on my own , and I've always kind've always been actually email marketing and just marketing in general . It's where I went to college for and I worked at a company , eventually at eMarketer . It was a research company , SaaS , and essentially it was an account management . So account management as it's known now pretty much as CS kind of working up the ranks , onboarding CS to account manager kind of the entire account lifecycle . Starting that job was a great opportunity for me because I got to see all the different pieces of how to manage an account post-sales .

Joe Di Grande 5:14

And then what was something that was more unique to me ? Because I was just a grinder , I was a hustler . They saw me as like the guinea pig and I was like , hey , you could work on . We had like two different segments of accounts unlimited or enterprise accounts and then like individual seed accounts .

Joe Di Grande 5:30

And it's like hey , you're gonna manage both . I'm like , all right , yeah , let's do it . And that was pretty much it . And what came of that , though ? Is it forced me to be like , hey , how do I manage these at scale ? And it was just a more of an inherent thing for myself , and it was just a more of an inherent thing for myself . So I would find , like free tools Like there was one Outlook add-on called , like Easy Mail Merge or something along those lines Any way to communicate with these users and points of contact . Lo and behold , our strategy changed as an organization where we're focusing on SMB Longtail , right , so it's kind of a familiar story when we associate TechTouch . From there . They said , hey , we need to manage these subscriptions . We think you're the perfect fit for the role .

Alex Turkovic 6:10

Yeah .

Joe Di Grande 6:11

Start to launch this program and that's when we started to look at like , hey , what's our , what was our tech stack look like ? What can we use to implement ? This Started out at about 60 customers like accounts and then it blew up to , by the time I left , about 700 plus companies and then that's in addition to managing and building out that team , increasing nrr all that good stuff , but it was fun to say at least it's fun to build that's really cool , yeah , and then you know you've also been obviously working with other other clients of yours via joe does tech touch , which is a great name yeah because that's you .

Joe Di Grande 6:45

you , because you were telling me when we were chatting a couple months ago , you were like yeah , joe does TechTouch , that's what people just always said to you right , it was in the office I was closing , we were using Salesforce , we're closing Salesforce Ops all the time and people would ask who's this ? I think we had . I forget what it was . I think it was like a PDF , like weekly newsletter that went out . It was like all the deals for tech . Who's this guy ? Joe , he's like . Joe's the guy that does tech touch yeah .

Alex Turkovic 7:15

Joe does tech touch .

Joe Di Grande 7:16

Thought it was fitting .

Alex Turkovic 7:17

Yeah , that's super cool , that's super cool . So , given that Joe does tech touch , would love to get kind of your insight . As you know , I ask all my guests about you know their their kind of own definition of digital cs , which is curated on the website and stuff . But what would you say to somebody who you just met in terms of , like , what is digital cs and what does that we do here ?

Joe Di Grande 7:40

100 , yeah , so I think , I think , I think you could even break it down to two different buckets .

Joe Di Grande 7:45

Now , when there's tech touch and digital CS , but like as a whole , like we're talking about digital CS and tech touches , you know , collectively it's the . I view it as the strategy of managing customers at scale first , and then it's by doing so . The execution piece of it is using that technology , the data , in order to personalize that communication . That communication could be email on site and then also in , you know , in the use of like a knowledge base , you're still communicating with your customers , informing them but and it's also a lot of people go back and forth between proactive and reactive .

Joe Di Grande 8:18

I believe it's both proactive and reactive absolutely , yeah , yeah , data for sure .

Alex Turkovic 8:23

That's , I mean , spot on right . A lot of people are like you know , oh , we're too reactive , and and then they go guardrail to guardrail or whatever . But it's like that balance , because you want to be reactive , like when stuff goes sour , you want to know about it and you want to . You know , maybe you're stepping in a little late , but the proactive element of it comes in is to , like you know , try to avoid those situations at all cost and get ahead of those things .

Alex Turkovic 8:48

Yeah , no , definitely for sure yeah , that's cool , I dig it and I like , I especially like your kind of statement that it was a it's a strategy and not a segment , right ? Yeah , that's , that's the whole , the whole thing , right ? I mean , no matter which customer it is , they can benefit from it , whether they have an account manager or csm or not yeah no 100 .

Alex Turkovic 9:09

Yeah , so you and I've , you know , discussed , you know , I think you're incredibly passionate about just automations and getting in there and making stuff work and , you know , sticking stuff together in ways that it maybe wasn't designed to do cool stuff . Are there some ? I would love to just get right in the weeds of some of the stuff that you've done and some of the wacky kind of combinations of , you know , tools and automations that you've built that are really cool .

Joe Di Grande 9:38

Yeah , no , it's funny . I've been thinking about

Optimizing Automation in Marketing Campaigns

Joe Di Grande 9:40

this for a while . Like all the scrappy stuff , I kind of take notes too , because sometimes you could forget , but they are useful in the future , I think , something that is underutilized , no matter what the solution is . Obviously it depends on how each of the solutions work , but like canned responses , snippets , templates it's something that helped me in my career personally and then I've , of course , like , worked with my clients was , hey , what's repeatable , what takes a less you know , what takes not that much brainpower , and then what's you know you could send to your customers but , the point of like the snippets and templates , where you take it to the next level , is like hey , at least if it's set up in this fashion , what can I pull ?

Joe Di Grande 10:21

What data can I pull from those templates ? So , for example , I was using Sales Loft at the time , so sales engagement platform and it was connected to our Salesforce instance . I would go in just from the sheer , not even using like an in-app , like now you have Salesforce and HubSpot has like in-app solutions and Gmail where you pull all your account information , right . I had a scrappy way at the time early on , where I was like all right , I need to know my account details , what are they going to renew , how much are they paying , what's their health score ? And I would just go into the Gmail before reaching out to my POC and then bring it in and that way .

Joe Di Grande 10:57

I'm kept on one screen . I mean , you have to think , at the point before I started building out my team , I was roughly managing around 500 companies on my own , so I had to be quick on my feet to figure out hey , all right , how do I ? And I have , of course , like , automated those renewal touch points which you could talk about , but of course the onboarding and things of that nature . But in the beginning we had to test out a few use more of that , like you know , again that sales , sales loft or even gain site or turn zero process where it kind of queues it up just to see what was working first before we fully automated the appropriate touch points . But I think it's a big one . I think it's a big one that's not utilized and it's simple too . I think a lot of people overthink automation . That's something where automation is happening behind the scenes and just bringing the data .

Alex Turkovic 11:42

I think a lot of people have automation capabilities and don't even know about it .

Joe Di Grande 11:46

Totally . Oh my gosh , it's crazy . It's crazy to think there's so many free solutions out there too I mean , Zapier being one of them and you could easily whip something together and you could do some damage . You could do some fun stuff with it and make your life a hell of a lot easier .

Alex Turkovic 12:04

So I've been I've been playing with makecom a lot Do you know about ?

Joe Di Grande 12:08

make ? I have not heard of it . No it's .

Alex Turkovic 12:10

It's it's basically as a Zapier competitor , but they have a , in my experience anyway , a much cleaner like integration into AI , like you can integrate into perplexity or you can integrate into chat GPT in interesting and meaningful ways . It's definitely not as user-friendly . Sure , I would not recommend it to the lay person . But it's all those Like the other day I built this bot that on a weekly basis sends me news digests of digital CS stuff that's been happening , you know , and and it'll scrape perplexity and pull it all into a Google doc that it sends to me and all that kind of stuff . But it's like before those kinds of things would have taken me like hours and hours and it's just like you know , googling and stupid . I , I , in fact I hate Google these days like yeah , I can't look at it anymore it's so true .

Joe Di Grande 13:09

I I actually my first , my first spot is always chat gpt . Now I think I pretty much almost I'm like 75 chat gpt , 25 google , you know , depending on what I'm looking for . It's just more efficient , you know .

Alex Turkovic 13:22

It's way more efficient and you get . You don't get a bunch of links to stuff that may or may not be relevant and you don't get advertisements and you don't get all this noise that Google . I think Google's trying , but it's not there .

Joe Di Grande 13:39

No it's not there yet . No way , it's not there .

Joe Di Grande 13:41

It's funny , I was thinking of another , it just dawned on me in another scrappy way of automation too . It's also pretty well , I think , pretty simple . I think it depends on your org and I just don't want it to run away from me , but deal stages , deal stages are sediment . Something that I thought was always pretty useful was basing automation off of those different stages . So you know , for example , like at the base , basic , basic level , right , let's say you have a company where you have an open up , right , it's 50 , 50 probability . You have likely . Where it's on the higher end right , probably 80 to 90% close , one close loss , you have unlikely right , we'll keep it at that .

Joe Di Grande 14:23

You could launch certain campaigns off of those different stages , based on you know you have your rep updating it , right . So if they have a you know , not so great conversation with their POC , okay , they might be at risk or unlikely Great . Well , we should be potentially firing off either more campaigns to users , whether it's maybe to get user feedback , whether to let them know like , hey , their account is at risk of expiring , depending on certain timeframes . It's something that I've used quite a bit . It's been pretty useful in a sense of like hey , you have a little bit of control , I guess you could say , when it comes to the automation .

Joe Di Grande 14:57

Because , I know a lot of people fear that . It's like , hey , something's running in the background way of like navigating it , yeah I mean , that's an interesting to me .

Alex Turkovic 15:14

Where my brain goes with that is is , you know , we are basically marketers and and that control that you were talking about with regards to those flows is so , so critical , because just firing stuff off , great , it's awesome to have the ability to do that .

Joe Di Grande 15:34

But is it effective ?

Alex Turkovic 15:36

Does it represent your brand ? Is it the tone that you want ? Is the tone regionally applicable ? All those little variables that go into it ? Really you need the technical brain to build all that fun wacky stuff . But then you need the market . You know the marketer kind of emotional intelligence type . You know person to really help make it look good and make it effective .

Joe Di Grande 17:35

A hundred percent . Yeah , I think I think a lot of people forget that it is . It is marketing , especially on the automation piece Like , and I think I've heard this a number of conversations , I've said it myself . It's like . It's not to downplay it , but it's like we've been doing this . Companies have been doing this for a long time , especially B2C . I mean , if you have the data , you're able to fire it off . The one thing I would add to it , though when it comes down to especially like on the comms piece of like , obviously you know it's , it's great , right , we are marketers , we're selling the product , but I feel like , on that sales piece of it , right , we're now potentially post-sales CS . It adds that element of like , humanizing it , right .

Joe Di Grande 18:18

And that content and then , obviously , you know , you kind of take it from there . But yeah , I think it's a lot of people got to remember too and work with the marketing teams too . I think that's something a lot of people forget when they're starting this , and I think it's almost like the first place they should be looking .

Alex Turkovic 18:32

Right , yeah , and it can be hard , it can be super hard to do that too , cause the marketing team is like you know they're , you know they own certain elements of that and it that and it can be . If you're not , you know , if you don't have a good relationship , it can be like seen as , oh , they're coming in and trying to take over and whatever , and it's like peace , like you do your thing . We're just doing this thing , so it sounds the same as what you're doing yeah , no , for sure .

Alex Turkovic 19:01

Oh , cross-functional relationships , it's work it is work and I think I think it's it is more work than a lot of folks who get into digital really anticipate . Because I mean , in cs , yeah , you have to , you have to , you know talking about enterprise like high touch cs absolutely , you have to deal with that kind of stuff and you know advocacy and those kinds of things . But when it comes to like these campaigns because we are running , we're essentially running marketing campaigns , right .

Alex Turkovic 19:30

So it's like it's like it gets trickier , for sure definitely one of the things that you and I talked about you know in in prepping for this show was just the general concept around like data and how you can't do any of this without like some semblance of clean data . I think you know . I would say that I'm guessing that a lot of what you work with your clients on is like do you have the foundational data that you need to go like , run some of these motions and do some of these campaigns and things like that ? So I'm curious , what would you prescribe to a company who wants to get into a lot more digital stuff but maybe has some data hygiene issues ? What approaches do you like to take ?

Joe Di Grande 20:20

Yeah , no , it's a good question and I would say , at my best guess , 80% of companies don't have it together and that's okay . I think the biggest piece is taking a step back and it's not about the tech . It is , but it's not primary , it's not the primary focus . It's like all right , what's the strategy and what's the problem I'm trying to solve , Just like a business . It's like okay , I need to . What's taking the most time ? So let's say it is maybe .

Joe Di Grande 20:47

In my opinion , I think renewals could easily be automated , but typically , what I see , industry standard , at a minimum , you should be doing like welcome emails . Something should be happening there and you should be communicating your customers as soon as they register , as soon as they come on board . All right . But let's say it's either of those you have to take a look at , and there's two different buckets of how data is being potentially updated , right ? So you have to get an understanding of it . And first it's like okay , what is ? Do I have a process in place with my team , right ? So what does that process look like ? Okay , am I going ? Is there like an account transfer process from new business to account management or customer success ? That's number one . If there isn't . Okay , well , maybe we should start there and working with sales , just creating that foundation , right ? And when I say that information should be like all right , who's your point of contact ? Right , they're going to be the first person to tell you , hey , this person's the decision maker and this person maybe has been going to spearhead if it's a technical solution , spearhead the implementation . Great , fantastic . Now you just saved a ton of work . Now you're obviously going to potentially save that within Salesforce or HubSpot or you name your CSP and then create a process around that . The second piece of data is going to be hey , what information is being updated , if at all , on the backend ? So that's going to be like usage data . Information is being updated , if at all , on the back end . So that's going to be like usage data , right , Something you have no control over and should be automatically updating on its own .

Joe Di Grande 22:13

When's the last time someone's registered ? Do we have ? Maybe you have ? You're sophisticated enough to identify who's a power user , who's not a power user , right ? Just , you know opposites from there . But the point is , get an understanding of how your data works first and then go with the problem first understanding what the data is and start with one problem Time is also your best friend . I think a lot of people underestimate the importance of time . What do I mean by that ? When did they renew ? All right , you have 365 days . Work your way down from there . You don't have to go crazy , in a sense of , like you know , health score right away .

Joe Di Grande 22:50

You can just be very time bound and just get a lot of like work off of a CSMs back or just , you know , in order for them to focus on more strategic conversations . Just get comms out . And then , of course , there's the other piece of it , right , cause it's not just email , it's also like hey , do we have instructions for people , you know , for user , end users , to know how to use a solution ? That stuff should be happening anyway at a startup , maybe not so much if they're very , very , you know , in the beginning stages . But yeah , I would say , to start , there is really understanding the data first , how you can also audit . A good way is running like Salesforce reports Salesforce reports , you know ,

Data Audit and Digital Transformations

Joe Di Grande 23:28

csp reports , whatever it is , just to see if there's any gaps . Right , like hey , if I need to know the contract end dates or my POCs .

Joe Di Grande 23:38

Not every account has them . Okay , great . How trustworthy am I to launch some said campaign ?

Alex Turkovic 23:43

on it .

Joe Di Grande 23:44

That's how you're going to start . It's not to get you know . The main thing is not to fall stagnant and just be like , oh no , I can't do any of this .

Alex Turkovic 23:52

Sure .

Alex Turkovic 23:52

Small buckets small pieces of the pie , yeah , hey , I want to have a brief chat with you about this show . Did you know that roughly 60% of listeners aren't actually subscribed to the show , on whatever platform they're listening to it on Now ? As you know , algorithms love , likes , follows , subscribes , comments , all of that kind of stuff . So if you get value out of the content , you listen regularly and you want to help others to discover the content as well , please go ahead and follow the show , leave a comment , leave a review . Anything that you want to do there really helps us to grow organically as a show . And while you're at it , go sign up for the companion newsletter that goes out every week at digitalcustomersuccesscom .

Alex Turkovic 24:35

Now back to the show . I think that's so smart . I was recently chatting with Percy Rose I don't know if you know him and he was a very good guy and he was talking about how , basically , they had the CSP ripped out from under them at HPE and he's actually seen it as a blessing in disguise , because what it's forced them to do is to go look at the source data and really interact with that data the source data and really interact with that data . And as they're doing various things in digital , they're going through and systematically , one by one , kind of you know , cleaning some of it up and that's going to serve them so well when it comes time to you know putting in a new CSP and you know really getting the system stood up . Because you know , how many times have you talked to somebody that says we've got the CSP but I don't trust my data , or I don't trust the data . I don't trust the data .

Joe Di Grande 25:34

Everybody doesn't trust the data , but if you've been , in the weeds in the data .

Alex Turkovic 25:38

Maybe you do .

Joe Di Grande 25:40

For sure . No , I think it's so funny too . It goes back to have conversations with people and it's crazy to think that it still happens today , especially where the economy is going , especially for tech companies , but where they think of tech first , data second , totally . They don't understand . Like , hey , are you even ready to take on a CSP or sales engagement platform , whatever it might be ? And that's awesome to hear that they're thinking that way . I mean , percy's a great guy , so I'm sure he's leading a proper charge there , yeah .

Alex Turkovic 26:09

Yeah , I mean the tool . The tool really doesn't matter . I mean you know the tool doesn't matter period , like sure , some are going to be better than others , some are going to do what you want them more than the other . But the trick is a yeah , you got to have the data to support it . But I think more fundamentally and you alluded to this earlier is like what are you trying to do ? Like let's be like crystal clear on what your program objectives and outcomes are , because once you've nailed that you know the rest kind of comes naturally 100% yeah .

Alex Turkovic 26:43

Yeah , are there some cool like digital things that you've seen that you like to nerd over like I ? You know , I interact with certain companies here and there that just have like really cool digital motions and I'd be like oh wow , how'd they ? You know , I want to like know more , um , in terms of like how they built it and stuff like that . Is there anything like that that you've come across recently ?

Joe Di Grande 27:08

Yeah , it's interesting . I've seen also like the transition of certain from surprising companies . Actually , when it comes to digital . I could give an example there . This was actually from a personal standpoint . So Google , I mean crazy to think that a company at one point had tech support as large as they are on the phone . So I swear I wish I could make this up . So it's always a challenge , to say the least , even for me , given my background and email automation so on . But like setting up DNS records , it always runs away from

Digital Tools Empowering Customer Experiences

Joe Di Grande 27:39

me .

Joe Di Grande 27:39

You got to take the time or otherwise you're going to get caught up in spam folders . It's not going to end well , you got to do the work . But a while back I was working with a rep at Google . I'm like , get out of here . This guy's calling me . I'm like I was going online and it just like gave me a phone call Now they don't offer that and I was like , well , that makes sense because they're so large . I mean , I didn . I had like a concrete way of explaining this .

Joe Di Grande 28:16

But essentially , when setting it up because I was using Gmail as my you know , my email client , and then obviously for hosting I think for hosting domain , but it doesn't matter Point is it was linking to the appropriate pages , every setting , you know , right down to every item . I was able to do it like that , versus I was on a 30 minute phone call with a guy a couple of years ago and it was just far less efficient . Now it just gave me step-by-step , just sent me to the right page , sent me to the right article and I was done in less than 15 minutes . I did DNS , dmarc , spf , the whole nine yards . So that was a pretty good example . I think a lot of B2C companies have always been doing it well , you know , and I think there's opportunity in B2B . I think one recently I stumbled upon was Blinkist , it's like .

Alex Turkovic 28:55

I don't know if you've ever heard of it .

Joe Di Grande 28:56

It's kind of a summary of books for kind of your modern day Sparknotes and you know , maybe I'm dating myself Totally , yeah , no , but basically it summarizes the book . It also does audio but it picks up what I'm . Obviously it gave my interest , but it picks up what I'm listening to more , it gives me the right content and so on . I think there's a lot of even marketing solutions that are doing this . Now I know Iterable's doing it , I'm sure a couple of others yeah , and there's a ton of opportunity there . But you can use that , of course , within DigitalCS , techtouch , depending on what your product is , of course , right .

Alex Turkovic 29:32

Yeah , I had an interesting experience just today with the host of the website . So I used like what do I use to host a website ?

Alex Turkovic 29:50

It's WordPress on Namecheap or something like that and I had to re renew my ssl certificate so that you know , yep , gotta keep , gotta keep it safe , yeah , and um , and I had my dns records wrong in there , whatever , and so I used the chat bot in there , fully expecting to get a person , but in fact I got a robot and the robot said , yeah , your , your dns record's wrong , so you need to fix it .

Alex Turkovic 30:07

To this and I was like , wow , cool robot just did what a human , you know what a human could do in a lot less time . Like the human would probably take 15 minutes to go , you know , go search and figure it out , whereas this robot did it really quickly . That obviously gets us into dangerous territory where it's like you know well , robots are replacing humans and , and you know , I always maintain that , like this kind of stuff is here to help the help the human , whether it's the human customer , the customer , the human , or whether it's the employee , because now it hopefully helps that company to like focus their employees on having like value add conversations instead of just like looking at DNS records for a broken SSL certificate yeah no , definitely I'm .

Joe Di Grande 31:00

I'm a hundred percent on board with that , I think . I think that's definitely you're on the money when it comes to how to reframe it , because I think a lot of people do get worried , especially right now , given the climate .

Joe Di Grande 31:11

But , at the end of the day it's going to give more time back , I mean at the time when I was building out that big program . I mean it technically replaced the headcount Not replaced , but it freed up the headcount of around eight people that it would typically take to manage that scale of a book you know yeah but it's also too .

Joe Di Grande 31:29

It kind of goes back to and this is just any sort of whether it's technology or any sort of like , you know , innovation . Right , it's like the . You ever see pictures of the meme of like , where it's like , oh , people are glued to their phones or their computer and then it shows a picture back on the train and call it the 1960s or 50s , and everyone's reading a newspaper it's just it's , it's .

Alex Turkovic 31:49

You know , it's just it's evolution .

Joe Di Grande 31:50

It's just how it goes , you know , and people are gonna . You know they're gonna gear to like I think a lot of people also have that sentiment about right now with ai . You know people worry about people becoming complacent , but at the day you're gonna be able to do more , and yeah , and focus on areas that you have your strengths on , and then all right . I don't know , for example , like not so great on setting up DNS records . Chat GBT , send me in the right direction .

Alex Turkovic 32:15

Can totally do it .

Joe Di Grande 32:16

Yeah .

Alex Turkovic 32:17

Yeah , it's interesting too , because I think the one thing where people should be worried is that , if they're not actively using things like chat , gpt or perplexity on a daily basis or weekly basis , let's call it that , because you know , while you may be struggling with ways to implement it into your day to day , the skillset of using these tools is one that is going to become durable because that shit's not going anywhere , and and . Durable because that shit's not going anywhere , and and and .

Alex Turkovic 32:52

so I think those that are comfortable with ai tooling versus those that aren't are going to be better positioned in in the job economy yeah , 100 agree yeah , I sometimes like to like ask if there's's any things that you've learned from blunders that you've made or others have made where you've been like oh my God , that was stupid .

Joe Di Grande 33:20

I mean I've had my fair share . I think the best . This is dating real back .

Alex Turkovic 33:26

I can say this now .

Joe Di Grande 33:27

Yeah , this is a good one .

Alex Turkovic 33:28

I'm 43 . Let's go .

Joe Di Grande 33:29

Yeah ,

Tech Challenges in Customer Success

Joe Di Grande 33:35

cool , let's go . Yeah , this is a good one . I'm 43 , let's go . Yeah , so going back to the days , of using like easy mail merge .

Alex Turkovic 33:38

It still exists today by the way you google it .

Joe Di Grande 33:39

It's , it's a plug-in , it you know .

Joe Di Grande 33:41

I don't recommend it anymore I mean not just like personally that's my opinion but just given understanding and now how email works , getting caught up up in spam , so on and so forth . But the point is I was using that technology a while back emailing customers , and it's the point of understanding one the tech , but also the data and making sure it's clean . Yeah , I don't know how it happens still to this day , but I emailed a large account and for some reason , caught up in that account was the CEO's wife and it and thankfully it was just like hey , register for your access , your company has enterprise . And she responded . But I mean , it was all good fun . It could have went sour quick and I was also very junior . My role is crappy , but you got to be careful . But I think it's being careful , but also , too , I think it's also being self-aware that things can happen , especially when you're launching automation . I think a lot of companies forget that , hey , there's a risk involved , no matter what . But yeah , like you're sending stuff to the wrong contact .

Alex Turkovic 34:53

Maybe you're like accidentally spamming the entire company , yep . Like it's just , I mean , it's the dangers of like email marketing , which is , I think , yet another reason why you know user-based reach-outs in product are so much like better and cleaner . But yeah , man , it's a wild world out there .

Joe Di Grande 35:17

No , it is no for sure , and what's crazy about it is that you try to keep up and there's always something new . I feel like every time I pop up online , which is great . I mean , I stumbled upon actually the other day was well one . I always use this . In the past it's called . I think it's called . Unless they rebranded . It's been a while since I used it , but tangous or us . It's like an app where it tracks your steps to create like documentation . Yeah , but it was . There's a recent one that I've saw . I spoke to the CEO about it , about the product . It's pretty cool . It's a startup called Reveal Automation and it's a product where the biggest challenge when creating your knowledge base is like okay , you went through all that effort and time , what happens when product makes a change ? Oh , you got to update the screenshot .

Alex Turkovic 36:02

So you have to update the video .

Joe Di Grande 36:04

So how the product works . In a nutshell , from what I understood was that it's tracking the code . It'll track your steps , similar to that other app that I mentioned but when you make the changes to your product , the documentation and all those steps , whether it's an in-product walkthrough , whether it's a doc , whether it's a video , automatically updates . I saw live demos . It's crazy . I mean , no matter what , there's something out there still to figure out another problem .

Alex Turkovic 36:30

That's so cool . I love that and I love those practical applications . There's another company I'm trying to pull up . I can't remember the name of it . If I remember the name , I'll put it in the show notes , but it is an app that similarly deals with knowledge-based articles , but it crawls tickets . And it'll basically update update knowledge base articles and also suggest new articles and write them based on like support ticket volume and I'm just like as a as a manager of a knowledge base , like how many times have you been sent ?

Alex Turkovic 37:04

like are this articles out of date ? Or blah , blah , blah , blah blah . It is like totally again it's that proactive versus reactive thing , like if you can use that kind of shit to get like really proactive about stuff , it's huge 100 . Yeah , yeah , what's , what's joe de grande , paying attention to what's in your content diet content diet outside of this .

Joe Di Grande 37:26

Honestly , like I do listen uh , listen to your pockets pretty often . The you know it's funny . Just recently I opened a couple articles . It's kind of random , but not really . Zapier's newsletter really good .

Alex Turkovic 37:38

Oh yeah .

Joe Di Grande 37:39

I like their newsletter . I kind of post our articles here and there . I think , again , just given the fact of scrappiness , you know , I think you could do a lot with it , especially with like AI . Something else I read recently was Nick Mehta's recent book on digital CS . I think it's just called Digital .

Joe Di Grande 37:54

Customer Success . Great book , highly recommended , especially if you're just getting into it and you're kind of tasked with that project . There it is , yep , that's it . It's solid , it's a good book . It breaks it down . It also talks about , like I think , what I was initially mentioning , mentioning earlier about , hey , tech touches . I still like the user word . I think it's a great word . That's just personal opinion . But he talks about how it's no longer tech touch because it was viewed as a segment .

Joe Di Grande 38:20

I 100% agree with that . I think it's more of a strategy than anything else . Is it the tech that people have problems with or the touching that people have a problem ? I think it's because who knows , who knows ? Oh man , no , it's a great read , yeah , but other uh other . Yeah , I mean a ton of podcasts you know too like that have been coming up lately which have been awesome . So yeah , you know I think you mentioned earlier . Like dylan young's , I think I love his podcast , you know , with jp and rob zambito the that have been coming up lately , which have been awesome .

Joe Di Grande 38:50

I think you mentioned earlier Dylan Young . I love his podcast with JP and Rob Zambito .

Alex Turkovic 38:55

The daily stand-up .

Joe Di Grande 38:57

Yeah , good one . Yeah , quick , easy . There's no reason . I mean me personally . I get distracted easily on podcasts . My eyes are looking to my attention , but it's quick , so you really have no excuse . But that's a good one . Yeah , that's what I got going on . Any shout outs you want to give .

Joe Di Grande 39:15

Yeah , I mean I would say yeah , definitely Dylan and the gang . Actually another she's actually a digital marketer by trade and then went into digital CS , marley Wagner . She's been doing some good stuff . She was at I believe it's called ESG . At one point they were customer success consultancy . It's been keeping an eye on her posts , doing some great work there . And actually another podcast I was listening to recently Success Unscripted .

Alex Turkovic 39:42

Yeah , sarah's awesome .

Joe Di Grande 39:43

Yeah , sarah , sarah Roberts , good stuff . Yeah , it takes it to that more kind of , I guess more human approach . That's the best way to describe it , yeah , yeah , it's .

Alex Turkovic 39:54

The shit gets real on that show . Yeah , having been on and , having almost cried , I can attest .

Joe Di Grande 40:04

Listen , it's life , that's it , that's right .

Alex Turkovic 40:08

No , it's good , Sarah . Sarah does such a great thing for the community in you know cause she's not . She's not in CS , she's . She leads a you know a recruiting firm that's focused on CS , and so she , she gets this perspective on the human element of CS that a lot of us who are in the weeds and trying to figure this stuff out don't have , and it's super cool .

Joe Di Grande 40:31

No , totally , and I think it's great .

Alex Turkovic 40:34

Yep , awesome man . Hey look , I've thoroughly enjoyed our time together and have enjoyed the various conversations we've had in the past . You need to give Karante some crap and have him reach out to me , but . I've really enjoyed having you on the show and I super appreciate the time .

Joe Di Grande 40:52

No , I appreciate the time . It's been great Thanks for having me and , yeah , looking forward to staying in touch . It's been great . Thanks again .

Alex Turkovic 40:58

Yeah , cool , thanks buddy .

Joe Di Grande 41:00

All right , thanks , alex , I'll talk to you .

Alex Turkovic 41:04

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 Trichovich . Thanks so much for listening . We'll talk to you next week .