Speaker 1: 0:03

But then I started thinking about it, and it's not just that it's hard to get, it's that that's probably not even the right argument, Like I don't think we can say that customer education or digital CX is the only thing that leads a customer to renew or to expand.

Speaker 2: 0:19

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 the Digital CX Podcast. I'm so glad you're back with me this week and every week as we talk about all things digital in CS.

Speaker 2: 1:00

This is episode 77, and we have an awesome conversation lined up for you today with Adam Avromescu, who is actually I suppose you could call it an expat. He actually studied here in Austin, which is where I'm based, and now lives abroad in Amsterdam. Another cool thing is he's a fellow podcast host, so he hosts CE uh, which has been a show that's been going on way longer than this podcast, so he has a lot of miles under his belt, um, being a podcast host, so he is obviously focused very much on customer education, ce. We talk about how you know things like learning correlation are hard. We talk about micro learning, which is another buzz phrase in CE. Talk about content creation specifically for digital CS. So lots of great nuggets for you if you're involved in customer education in any way, shape or form.

Speaker 2: 2:02

I hope you enjoy this conversation with Adam, because I sure did. Yeah, so true, it's very true, adam. Welcome to the show. We jumped right into it. Good to be here. We're right into it. But welcome to the show. I've been listening to CELab for a while. I mean, obviously you have way more shows under the belt, I will say, given that you've done it for five years and whatnot.

Speaker 1: 2:32

But I don't know, I think. I think you're going to outpace us very quickly, because you release more often than we do.

Speaker 2: 2:38

I'm just like I said, it's a little bit of insanity and a little bit of nuttiness happening over here, but we like that we like that yeah, why not?

Speaker 2: 2:46

um, but look, you know, I've uh, I've loved everything that you've like put out. Your, your, you, you. You come into the world and into linkedin life and all that kind of stuff with a sense of like, well, even what you were just talking about, there's a. There's a wiseness if that's a word. I just made up a word. There's a. There's a wiseness If that's a word.

Speaker 1: 3:06

I just made up a word.

Speaker 2: 3:06

There's a, there's a sense of just like reverence and wise, like like intelligence behind the things that you say and it makes people listen and I appreciate that about you, so I'm happy that you're here.

Speaker 1: 3:16

Well, thank you, I appreciate that reflection. My, I have a I have a love hate relationship with with social media Cause, like, on one hand, I love attention but on the other hand, you know, we'll probably like a lot of people. I, I read, you know, I scroll through LinkedIn and I'm like that didn't need to be said, that didn't need to be said, like, so my, at least my, my philosophy and I think I, I try to, I try to adhere to this, I think I meet this most of the time is like say something when you have something valuable to say, otherwise, don't worry about it.

Speaker 2: 3:49

That's right. Yeah, I love that. I too have a love-hate relationship with social media because, a I do like the attention as well, I'll admit it, but B I don't like heart palpitations, so there, you go Because it'll do that.

Speaker 1: 4:04

Yeah, true, true. And sometimes, though, you get a, you get a great laugh, or you get a, you know, check, check, this bleep out I don't know for are we allowed to swear on this podcast? Hell yes, great, great then we'll. I'm thinking of that scene from the simpsons where it goes we live like, live like kings. Damn hell, ask kings.

Speaker 2: 4:27

Oh man, you know what it's funny. I showed my son. He's 13. I showed him the Simpsons the other day and I didn't realize how bad that animation we're so used to it, the early seasons. The early seasons are like super, super rough and I don't remember it that way. I remember it as this, like bright, shining star of my youth. And so I was a little disappointed. And then I was equally disappointed when my son was like I don't, I don't really get this well, they were going for a really punk vibe at first.

Speaker 1: 5:02

It took totally a while before they decided they really wanted to smooth out the edges. But okay, this is the Simpsons analogy I always use on my own podcast. We got to get to the fireworks factory. The fireworks factory. We got to get to the fireworks factory. I don't know if people are going to want to listen to us. Just talk about the Simpsons.

Speaker 2: 5:19

Yeah, who knows? Yeah, probably not. But it was a poignant moment in my adulthood life where I was like, okay, I'm disconnected from my youth. Anyway, look a bit about you. I mean, we talked about Slack, you know right off the bat, but you are, I think relatively recently in terms of lifespan, an expat.

Speaker 1: 5:40

Yeah, I'm, I guess at this point, a toddler of a European. I've been living in Amsterdam for a little bit over two years, so getting adjusted, feeling a little bit more, you know, in the Dutch life, now the expat life, but before that I was in the Bay Area. Before that Austin, of course, and originally from Montreal Unreal.

Speaker 2: 6:03

How has the adjustment been?

Speaker 1: 6:08

It's been good. I mean, I walked into this imagining that it was going to be a bit of a new chapter, right, With all the challenges that that comes with, but also all the fun and adventure, and I think it's lived up to that. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of interesting, right. I mean, there are things that are meaningfully different about living in Amsterdam than living in Austin or you know wherever whatever comparison you want to make but at the same time, you know on a day to day basis, you, you know, you wake up, you commute, you go to work right, it's not you go grocery shopping.

Speaker 2: 6:36

Breathe in, breathe out. Everything is different, right.

Speaker 1: 6:38

Yeah, but yeah, no, it's been. It's been a lot of fun and I really appreciate the opportunity to be out here and having this life chapter for sure.

Speaker 2: 6:47

Yeah, for sure. Well, I've asked you on because I mean, obviously you're big into customer education, have been for a long time and you get it in terms of CE. You're currently VP of CE and engagement, which I thought was interesting at Presanio. Talk about the engagement bit. What does that mean?

Speaker 1: 7:10

Yeah, I mean so actually, even internally. Now we just say VP of customer education. But what we wanted to do originally when I started was really pull together all of the functions that either educated or connected our customers at scale, or really that dealt with the idea of learning and enablement. So when I first arrived at Personia, we had brought together three different teams with the intention to add one more, which now exists. So on one hand, it was our educational content team, which was originally called user education, so you could think of them as being responsible for all of our help center, our documentation, our video production and channel management.

Speaker 1: 7:55

So how do we get all of those educational materials out through in-app email everywhere else where you might expect to see it? So that was team one else where you might expect to see it. So that was team one. Team number two was our community team, or customer engagement, and that's where engagement comes from. So you could think of that as our online and offline communities, the community forums, our customer events, our customer advisory board, all the ways that we're really connecting customers to each other and to us as a business and as the people in the business.

Speaker 1: 8:26

And then we were also bringing in an internal enablement team which were responsible for enabling our CX individuals, our CX humans so brought all of those together, added in a customer training team, which is now what we call our Voyager Academy, which is now what we call our Voyager Academy. And so that was the point to bring all of these programs together that educated and engaged our customers under this voyage by Personio Mantle. So that's why we're all together.

Speaker 2: 8:53

Yeah, I love that, because so many times you see all of those functions in a separate maybe not separate org, but definitely different managerial structures and it leads to silos and duplication of effort and all that kind of stuff. And I would imagine that bringing those together just makes sense, you know, from a kind of a voice perspective, like what kind of voice you want to portray in your content and things like that. But then obviously on the tactical level, like you know, you know what content needs to be developed, in what kind of way to go in what certain places. So it probably helps build some efficiencies that way, I would imagine.

Speaker 1: 9:35

Yeah, exactly, and I think it's not only about creating efficiency for ourselves, but whenever we we do something as a company, like a major product launch or the day-to-day release process or even a major initiative like, say, changing our pricing model, it means that instead of going and figuring out how to do that individually for all of those programs, that we actually can build, like you said, some connections and efficiencies not just for ourselves but actually for the rest of the business. So, you know, increasingly I see what we do as being not just and maybe we'll get into this later not just the traditional like skinny customer education right, where we just do customer training and we just have an academy and we just go do webinars or something like that, but but really like moving towards. How do we bring together all of these surfaces into more of a scale? Cx, totally remit, you know totally, because I mean we're building scale for the rest of the business, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 10:34

well, I mean, you know so much of what you know we would classify as scaled cx's is, you know, sure, data automation? You know, sure, data automation. You know customer journey, all that kind of stuff. But one of the massive legs of the stool, so to speak, is content Like what are you distributing, when is it the right, you know, to the right person at the right time? Like all that kind of stuff Like so you're, you're only, and that's why you know yeah, like I, I haven't considered myself a digital customer success expert.

Speaker 1: 11:08

You know, this is something. I'm new to that world and it's something that I've really been digging into. But this was, this was the evolution of our program, right? So so we we came together, brought those programs together, initially under customer education and engagement, and the first year or so was really figuring out how do we work together, how do we bring these programs together, how do we gain those efficiencies that you've just talked about? But more recently it's been hey, okay, we have, we have content and we have actually now a really strong base of content. We have the channels, the rich, to deliver them. Now, how do we start to pull in that automation, that targeting, that relevance? So now, now I think we're moving more into what a lot of people would call traditional Traditional is not a good word for it Proper digital customer success or proper digital customer experience.

Speaker 2: 11:54

Yeah, that's so cool. So I mean, given that you know, one of the things I ask all my guests is like what their own kind of elevator pitch of digital CS or CX would be, so I would love to hear your words on it. Since you're kind of elevator pitch of digital CS or CX would be, so we'd love to hear your words on it.

Speaker 1: 12:11

since you're kind of exploring it, but intrinsically, I think you know the drill. Yeah, so it's interesting, right, there's a lot of ways that you can think about it. But the thing that really clicked for me when thinking about why is there a thing called digital customer experience, why is there a thing called digital customer experience, why is this a function that exists, is is I almost think of it like an equation that has a numerator and a denominator, or you could think of it like a ratio.

Speaker 1: 12:35

So I think of it as a strategy by which you maximize the customer outcomes with a minimum of human effort yep and this is the strategy and the set of programs and a portfolio that uses automation and uses content and uses tactics that scale to meet your customers where they are and drive value. Yeah, but it's about optimizing that ratio to build growth within an efficient business I love.

Speaker 2: 13:06

I love how you put that in terms of driving outcomes. Not a lot of people say that when they come to the table with their definition of digital it's like meeting the customer where they are, with what they need when they need it and all that kind of stuff. But ultimately you're right. The goal is you drive the outcome and you know, ideally you do it in a way that reserves the human capital that you have on the team for those like ultra high value scenarios where, if you're involving a human in this, it means that either you've taken care of the mundane digitally and you know and you're letting the human kind of be that massive exclamation point at the end of the value, or there's some stuff going wrong.

Speaker 1: 13:56

Yeah, and maybe it's because you know I don't come from a high touch customer success background. So I mean I know in customer success it's very common to think about outcomes as as the headline, but I don't know in customer success it's very common to think about outcomes as the headline, but I don't know maybe coming from a different background, I've thought about the function of DCX from a little bit of a different angle.

Speaker 2: 14:14

Which is why I love asking the question. Yeah, I love asking the question because it's different every single time. It's so good.

Speaker 1: 14:22

Well cool. I look forward to being included in the word cloud now.

Speaker 2: 14:25

I need to update the word cloud. I'm way behind on it.

Speaker 1: 14:28

It's like update the word cloud.

Speaker 2: 14:34

Oh God. So look, I think a lot of people when they hear the term customer education, they kind of gloss over it a little bit, because a lot of people think, okay, it's training or it's e-learning or it's like whatever. Um, I'm fortunate that I have, you know, I have a background in learning and development, like, and I know some adult learning theory, I know what the addy model is, I know, you know like that kind of stuff, and so I've always approached it in that kind of way to say, okay, this is performance support versus training, versus certification and all that kind of stuff. But I think the majority of folks just look at customer education, it's like, okay, that's like something I would put. This is what would you describe as a good customer education model? Or you know, a solid CE program?

Speaker 1: 15:39

Yeah, yeah. So I think this goes back to something we were starting to get into a little bit earlier, which is the lines are blurring now around customer education. It used to be that when you said customer well, it used to be that when you said customer education, it meant nothing. It maybe meant your training services program for your on-prem tech company. But things have changed and we've started to evolve what is included in customer education. But I want to say this through the lens of, I think, at some point, what we call customer education today and what we call scale CX or DCX. They're actually not going to look a whole lot different from each other really about making sure that your customers are able to achieve their performance outcomes using a portfolio of programs and strategies to achieve that. So what does that not mean? It doesn't mean limiting customer education to the traditional classroom model, having people sit in day-long workshops or even take multi-hour e-learnings.

Speaker 1: 16:48

I think some people hear customer education and they just think like, oh, this is the corporate university. No, a good customer education program really should have a variety of ways to educate the customer about different topics, to build different skills. So, for instance, in the programs that I've led, often they have included the traditional academy or an academy component. These days a lot more people, including ourselves, are tying those to skill badges and moving towards shorter form courses instead of these multi-hour, multi-day trainings or formal certifications, because a lot of people that's overkill.

Speaker 1: 17:28

But also community has been now a part of our program several times, because it's one thing to teach a skill from zero to 60, but it's another thing to bring people together to learn, to connect, to share with each other, as well as help centers, documentation, knowledge bases, whatever you want to call that cluster of activities, because having quick references and often having them contextual, available in the support flow, that's the key to making sure the customers get what they need when they need it. And then you start getting into things like email nurture campaigns. You start getting into in-app education, contextual help campaigns. You start getting into in-app education, contextual help. All of those are tactics or programs that you see making up a successful customer education program. So that's why I say I think at some point, customer education and DCX, they're going to be almost the same thing.

Speaker 2: 18:20

Yeah, yeah. It's staggering to think about because I think as soon as you blur the lines between traditional e-learning and all the stuff that you know the old school, like learning nerds, will say is learning versus performance support, as soon as you start blurring those lines, then at that point you know CE is all about just like're right, getting the content to the person at the right time, and that can be like a, an in-product pop-up. Uh, somebody I recently interviewed said they're using, or they were using, linkedin ads as part of their digital engagement strategy for unengaged customers, which and and really you're educating your customer on. Hey, you're you have. You know there's this feature in our product. Do you want to you?

Speaker 1: 19:09

know want to go use it. You could.

Speaker 2: 19:10

You could argue yeah, that that's customer education, because it is you know.

Speaker 1: 19:15

Yeah yeah, we just launched a LinkedIn page for for voyage by Personio as well, not just so we can promote new, new things coming out of our program, but also so that we can educate our customers, who might be finding us through those types of channels instead of wanting to come to an owned platform. That's a big debate right now in the community world. But you brought up the traditional learning and development definitions of some of these things. You talked about the Addy model, you talked about training versus performance support and, listen, all these definitions exist for a reason and I think they're useful models. If you're in, say, think they're useful models If you're in, say, an internal learning and development program and you're trying to explain to your stakeholders why you're taking a certain intervention, and that all exists in customer education, but I I try not to use that language or spend too much time on those distinctions, because it really is time on those distinctions, because it really is.

Speaker 1: 20:09

It's closer to what you said. It's about finding the right ways to drive the right performance outcomes for customers, right? So if I talk about performance outcomes, if I talk about adoption, if I talk about building skills that will ultimately lead to higher retention, like those are the things that are more important for for customer education. But at the same time, the other thing that I'm trying, you know, always not to fall into is this perception that customer education is just, you know, any content you throw out there. Yeah, so there's a school of thought, for instance, that, oh, you know what actually like you shouldn't have a a university program or an academy program, because everyone just wants you know super short form, tiktok, micro learning content, whatever you want to call it.

Speaker 1: 20:54

Yeah, exactly. Or like, hey, you know what you should do. You should just like take all of the gong recordings that you have with your customers and cut yourself or, sorry, cut the customer out of it, and just keep the things that you said and put it up on your help center or your knowledge base, and that's customer education. Yeah, if you're just starting, maybe that's a fine way to build a base of content, but that's content. That's not actually customer education. It has to have a purpose, it has to have a strategy.

Speaker 2: 21:18

The word curation comes to mind, because ultimately, I think what you're trying to do and the whole reason why you have this team around it is you're trying to curate an experience in a controlled way, but also maybe in a haphazard way. But ultimately, you're looking at what are the skills gaps, whether it's a high influx of support tickets on this one particular topic, for instance, or whatever, there are skill gaps that exist and you're trying to strategically plug those skill gaps in ways that make sense and in meeting the persona where they are, when that skill gap is happening. And that's a really it's a complex puzzle to put together, and so it may seem like haphazard in a lot of ways, but I think a lot of times-.

Speaker 1: 22:14

But none of it is just making content right Exactly To your point. You can look at unsolved support tickets. You can use that to figure out where the customer is actually experiencing friction and use that to prioritize not just what content you create, but where you serve it, how you create it, how it's delivered to customers, etc. You can do the same thing for an onboarding program.

Speaker 1: 22:41

Where are your implementation managers or CSM spending the most time delivering one-to-one training? Are they doing it because it truly needs to be customized for every single customer? Are they doing it because it truly needs to be customized for every single customer? Or is this something where you can actually create more scalable materials that can be used either as the pre-work or as the homework? And then the humans again are spending their them on the more bespoke thornier, like the stuff that actually needs to be customized. So that's where I see you know, the digital, the digital motion and the human motion playing very well together. But it also informs you know where should you spend your time in terms of creating and curating content.

Speaker 2: 23:25

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 23:26

Yeah, and, by the way, what happens when you know you have more people joining the account and they weren't in the original training? Well, they probably want a way to get up to speed as well, so you need to be able to meet them where they are and sending them recorded training calls is like the quickest way to death Cause like. I don't want to watch a recorded call.

Speaker 2: 23:43

I don't want to watch a recorded call Come on, man, make me feel a little special and get me on board quickly. I don't need to hear your banter pre-training.

Speaker 1: 23:56

There's an art right. Instructional design exists for a reason Exactly.

Speaker 2: 23:59

Absolutely. 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? As you know, algorithms love likes, follows, subscribes, comments, all of that kind of stuff. 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.

Speaker 2: 24:40

Now back to the show. I always thought it was so fascinating. You know the difference between. You know the design and development of a piece of learning. You know, because the two are kind of mutually exclusive, right, but without like really well thought out front end design of what it is. You know what learning objectives are you trying to solve for. You know what would be the best method for doing that. Like there's a whole kind of art to figuring this puzzle out. And then ideally, you know the person developing it kind of has that roadmap and they can just kind of go for it. It's a cool thing to watch happen in an org that hums.

Speaker 1: 25:22

For sure, and a lot of it becomes very close to you know, to UX design when it's happening. Really well, you're figuring out what is the best way for the customer to achieve their outcomes with a minimum of friction.

Speaker 2: 25:32

It's almost like CE and product should have a really close relationship.

Speaker 1: 25:41

CE and product CE and marketing CE and customer success. We, we sit in the middle of all of those and and I think it's a beautiful thing.

Speaker 2: 25:48

I think that's. That's one of the things that cs and ce we'll just call them. What's the combined word? Customer went really really bad place there for a second uh customer sex education. Yeah, nope, I see it, I see it. I don't know about customer sex education, but no but this does, this does remind me.

Speaker 1: 26:14

I now, now that you've you've broken that barrier, I have to. I have to tell you one of the silliest things I ever heard at a conference. Yeah, somebody asked the question how would you define the difference between education and training? Right, because you know we love debating terminology. We've been debating terminology for a while, even even today, and the person responded they go well, you wouldn't send your child to sex training class, would you?

Speaker 2: 26:44

Interesting.

Speaker 1: 26:46

And I thought I thought, well, that's a, that was a pithy response, but I don't know if it really came down to, I don't know that it really answered the question. It was memorable, that's for sure. It was memorable I, I. This was about a decade ago and I still remember it.

Speaker 1: 26:59

So I mean sure, I mean it gets the point across, but like, actually like, maybe, maybe, maybe to like, maybe to dig myself out of that hole, like, if you actually think about the difference between pure training, right, training, as we understand it, that's the very skinny version of customer education. That's the narrowest possible definition we can right. Right, let's take a discrete skill, let's build content around it that gets a learner from you know, zero or wherever they are, to a defined state. Education is a portfolio of activities, right, if you're running a great education program, then you are finding different ways to overall make sure that your customer is not just better at discrete skills related to your product, but as well that they are getting help and removing friction along the way. So it doesn't necessarily need to be hey, I didn't have the skill and now I have the skill.

Speaker 1: 27:50

It could be, I had this problem. Now I don't have this problem. Yeah, as well, as I think in a lot of the best programs, you're also helping them learn how to do their job better, so you're teaching them something about the industry or you're connecting them with other customers who know something about the industry and have something to share with them. So that's why I think all of these things go together, yeah.

Speaker 2: 28:09

I think so too, and also, similarly, there's this whole thing in CS about what's the difference between a digital CS program and your scaled CS program and all the definitions that go into it. And ultimately, my opinion is that a solid digital program is part of scaling your CS, much like education is part of scaling CS and all that kind of stuff. But without getting into those crazy semantics, I think CS and CE share so many things because we're trying to accomplish roughly similar things, right. So there's a natural shared kind of collaboration. There's a natural kind of share of all kinds of different things.

Speaker 2: 28:54

One of the struggles that I feel like CS and like CE and education in general has always struggled with is that ROI Like what by doing this thing, what's the return on investment? And it's a really hard thing to tease out because there's any number of other different factors affecting the exact same damn thing, Right? And so I think in CS that's I mean, that's been the talk of CS for like the last few years is how do you protect your seat at the table and all that kind of stuff. And it's about, like revenue attribution based on the things that you're doing, and so I wanted to get your take on what that looks like for you in CE and maybe what some of the best practices are in CE for you know that kind of attribution.

Speaker 1: 29:41

Yeah, you know, I've been thinking about this for a long time. Obviously it's a big thing for customer education and for a long time I felt like the holy grail was going to be that I could develop some sort of model that showed, with airtight causation that customer education programs directly caused or I guess, were predictive of revenue-based outcomes. So if we can say that customers who took this many courses in our academy or customers who were this active in our community, with some sort of regression analysis, we could prove that that actually led to higher retention or higher NRR via expansion or whatever ultimately we wanted to tie it to at the business level, then we'd be golden. And in reality, first of all, that's really hard to get.

Speaker 1: 30:38

It's really hard to run a regression analysis that shows, with all the other factors that were in there, like most companies just don't have the scale or the volumes to properly show that a customer participating in educational activities upstream, that that was the thing that really inflected their renewal or their expansion.

Speaker 1: 31:01

But then I started thinking about it, and it's not just that it's hard to get, it's that that's probably not even the right argument. Like I don't think we can say that customer education or digital CX is the only thing that leads a customer to renew Because it's not, or to expand Because it's not. Yeah, so, with the whole right, because you try to go and do you show some sort of correlation in the business, you say customers who have been involved with this educational program tend to renew at these rates compared to those who don't. Or you know the average NRR for customers, you know who participated in our programs? Is this compared to those who didn't participated in our programs? Is this compared to those who didn't? Well, great. And then so the next thing that the person who presented that to you asks because they're smart, they go well, how do you know that that isn't a reverse causation? Or if it isn't a false correlation, how do you know that it isn't just customers who already wanted to expand that just took education because they were already engaged with us? Yeah, and I think that's the point.

Speaker 1: 32:00

My position on that for a while has been yeah, I don't think it actually matters, I don't think we're saying that customer education or DCX is the thing that causes the customer to want to renew the product is the thing that causes the customer to want to renew. But we have to help them get there. We have to help them see the value. So like, anyway, like. Here's the thing. I think if you want to prove the ROI of your program, we have to back up from this whole holy grail, airtight equation that's going to prove it very close to business priorities and that we can demonstrate through the programs that we take on, through the stories we tell, through the quantitative and qualitative data that we share, that we are driving the outcomes that matter most to the business and that it's a very obvious, simple story what we're doing to drive those outcomes. I do think it's also really helpful to make good friends with your data science and business systems teams, because there are things that you can prove.

Speaker 1: 33:07

Showing that there's a relationship between those things is important. You just shouldn't claim that it's more than it is. You shouldn't pretend it's causal. If it's not, you can say it's a factor. You can say there's a strong relationship when people engage with our programs.

Speaker 1: 33:22

So therefore, I think we can say that our programs are a strong component or attribute of a customer renewing and, yeah, I think, demonstrating as well, especially in today's economy, that we can do this more efficiently than other teams can, because I think businesses need to get the results that they need to get, but, especially for smaller customer segments, they can't do that by throwing a bunch of humans at it like they could a couple of years ago. So true, so, especially, I think, working with our data science teams, working with our business systems teams, trying to model out, hey, this is what the same motion would look like if we didn't exist. Yeah, you could, you could, you could remove this program and you might not feel anything tomorrow, but in terms of next year's headcount planning and the ratios that you would need to build to accomplish the same outcomes, yep, here's what that would look like yeah, it's funny you say that about the bi folks.

Speaker 2: 34:21

Like, whenever I've joined a new company, there's there's two people, actually three people I always make friends with, like immediately it's the office manager, it's the it person and it's the data people, because, like, those are the three people that actually make stuff happen at the company.

Speaker 1: 34:36

These are your friends these are your friends, but I think to your point.

Speaker 2: 34:41

I love where you're going with it in terms of, like, you know, the stuff that we do ultimately feeds the customer experience. If you have a great customer experience and your product, you know, works, or at least you have the great, you know, you have good support mechanisms to back that stuff up, I mean, that's, you know, that's half half, if not the majority, of the battle to get you to, you know, renewal, you know, I mean, how many times have we, have we in our careers, been surprised by a customer who has, you know, announced that they're churning and everybody goes crazy, but the fact of the matter is the customer hasn't really heard from you after onboarding. They're kind of floating out there without resources, and so I think that's the golden area for CE and digital programs to step in, especially for those smaller customers that, quite frankly, sometimes need way more help than your largest customer.

Speaker 1: 35:43

Yeah, exactly, and and you know, if you model out the number of touches they can have with support or CSM, before that becomes wildly unprofitable, then you know you you need to be able to do this at scale while still, at the same time, not leaving those customers completely in the lurch. So, look, I love that we are moving more now towards using AI to serve content to these customers, intervene more with support. We're experimenting with some cool stuff with AI assistance at Personio as well, so I love that this is where we're going, but you know what? That still relies on really effective content served in the right way.

Speaker 2: 36:17

And good data.

Speaker 1: 36:20

Because? And good data to serve it? Yeah for sure. Right, like I think sometimes we, we assume we have the curse of knowledge about our own product and and we think, oh, you know what, this isn't hard to learn, it's easy, and you just do it this way, and especially if you're if you're, you know you're working at the company, you've been at the company a long time, you just know how it works. But if you read, oh gosh, what's the book? Book with the Heath brothers talking about the curse of knowledge? It is, I want to say, made to Stick. Is the book where they talk about that.

Speaker 2: 36:47

My internet doesn't like me right now.

Speaker 1: 36:50

Okay, it's fine, so I'll give the book recommendation read Made to Stick by Dan and Chip Heath there you go.

Speaker 1: 36:55

And they talk yeah, they talk about this in the book. There's also a similarly titled book called Make it Stick. That is also very good, but anyway, they talk about this, right? The more you are familiar with a certain thing, the harder it is to learn it or to see it again through fresh eyes. So we always talk about wanting to be customer centric and wanting to have customer empathy, and one thing that customer education can do really well is actually help the business see the product as the customer sees it. Yeah, so we can't assume that, oh, the customer is just going to get it because the user interface is intuitive, right, because customer education isn't just about teaching them what buttons to click. Customer education is helping them figure out how this product helps them get their job done. Yeah, and that's where we should be spending our time.

Speaker 1: 37:39

Yeah, customer education also does something interesting that a lot of other programs don't do, and I think we could be talking about more, which is actually building customer advocacy. Oh, interesting, and that's a lofty term. I don't like using it always because it means too many different things, but I'm going to tell you specifically what I mean is that often you can point to the customers who are having a great experience in a well-built academy, or customers who are engaged in the community and building connections with each other. Or you know, in our case, customers who have joined our customer advisory board. Like these become your superstar customers. These become the customers that you invite back to share their insights with the rest of your company, to build customer empathy and to help build a competitive moat.

Speaker 2: 38:22

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 38:22

Right Because they're going out there, they're sharing social proof, they're participating in customer case studies. So I think customer education programs actually give you an opportunity to identify which customers are also having a really great experience with your product. That's cool. Not a lot of other programs do that.

Speaker 2: 38:39

No, not at all, and I think people think of customer advocacy as like this big thing, like you get marketing involved and you do all this kind of stuff. But it doesn't necessarily have to be that.

Speaker 1: 38:48

It can be like you know it's, it's that and it's yeah. I mean, that's why I said customer advocacy, you know yeah, all kinds of different stuff.

Speaker 2: 38:55

Smart person on here to talk about everything it means but like a really uh, you know, a really active community member. I think is is also equally amazing somebody who's I love the people who like have facebook groups about your product, because it's like that's where the real stuff happens oh, I mean like when we were at slack, that was, that was one of the, that was one of the.

Speaker 1: 39:16

the huge things was containing all of the and not even containing, that's not the right word like fostering all of the ad hoc groups that were spinning up all the communities, the communities of practice, the fan clubs, and Slack was super cool in the sense that there was a Slack community with a bunch of local user groups as well as a Slack champions network that was fostered out of our customer success team. So, yeah, it was super cool. A lot of ways to bring together all the organic love for your product.

Speaker 2: 39:47

Yeah, that's really cool. That's cool. Look, I mean we are woefully getting close to time and it's really making me sad because it's been a lovely conversation and there's probably way more we could get into. But a couple of things I do want to just ask that I can't frankly ask everyone is is you know, what are you paying attention to? What do you? How do you keep yourself fresh? Podcast, books, all that kind of stuff?

Speaker 1: 40:11

Yeah, yeah. So I am generally a really big media consumer. I'm a I'm a big reader, but I don't limit it just to stuff that's directly about my field. I'm I'm a big reader, but I don't limit it just to stuff that's directly about my field. I'm a big believer in getting inspiration from areas that are a little orthogonal or outside your day-to-day, but some things that are closer to home I listen to. Well, I listen to your podcast, of course, but I also I listen to this Is Growth by Daphne Costa Lopez. Quite a bit. It's a good one. I'm taking the Cover your SaaS course right now. Cool yeah, nice, yeah, that's a really cool one.

Speaker 2: 40:48

It's really good you had Jay and Jeff on your show, right? Yeah, I've had both on. That course is a little stroke of genius because I don't know of any other course like it. That really explains, you know, sas fundamentals in the way that they do, in a way that's approachable and like pretty much anyone who's in SAS at any level like can use that info.

Speaker 1: 41:13

Yeah, and certainly for me. You know if I'm, if I'm interacting with our, with our CFO or, or, you know well, really any any SAS executive?

Speaker 1: 41:21

it's really helpful to have that background and to understand how those pieces fit together. But you know, I'll say in general, whenever I want to go learn something new, I'll go figure out where people are talking about it and what the podcasts are. So, for instance, when I first took over community, I started listening to In Before the Lock, which is Brian Oblinger and Erica Kuhl, right took over community, I started listening to in before the lock, which is brian oblinger and erica cool, right, uh, experts in the field.

Speaker 1: 41:45

So yeah, that's, that's generally what what I try to do. I just try to, I try to get smart on things if I, if I don't know what they are yeah, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2: 41:52

Do you want to give any like shout outs to folks that are either doing cool stuff in ce or doing cool stuff in digital?

Speaker 1: 41:59

Oh, yeah, great. I mean, I'm a big fan of the doers. I guess, first of all, I'll say there's a lot of people who talk big on LinkedIn, but I really want to call out the doers. Yeah, let's see who can I call out? I mean, first of all, you've had her on your podcast before. Dee from Miro Miroverse. That whole program is excellent, one of the best. Yeah, she's, she's awesome, amazing. Yep, she's amazing.

Speaker 2: 42:27

I love, I love D because she's not crazy active on LinkedIn. You know she's one of those people who are to your point. She's doing the thing and she's doing the thing incredibly well, and so when you do hear from her, it's like gosh, this is like gold yeah, she'll write a medium post and then all of a sudden it'll blow your mind that's right you know she's not going to say something just for the sake of saying something but you know what?

Speaker 1: 42:51

there's? There's millions, not millions, there's there's. There's a lot of people out there. I'm exaggerating, but think about, okay. I'll tell you about okay. I'll tell you some of my favorites.

Speaker 2: 43:01

Like.

Speaker 1: 43:01

Christy Hollingshead from Heap slash Content Square. She's doing great work that bridges together a lot of these disciplines. Alessandra Marinetti, who's at Asana Really the whole team you know on the community side and the education side at Gong. I think they're doing great work. Pendo right, I think you've had Erica on there and Shelly Berkowitz as well over there. Really really great human. And I'm really thankful as well for the folks in the Digital Customer Success Network who have been helping me get smart about this, including yourself, but also Carrie from Qualtrics, marie Lunny, dan Ennis right, totally, really appreciate their wisdom and generosity.

Speaker 2: 43:43

Yeah, dan's a good share. Marie, you're in the community, right? I'm in the community, yeah, in the DCS community, and I have the distinct advantage of being in Amsterdam. Oh yeah, that's right, so we were actually able to meet up for coffee. See, maybe I need to move to Amsterdam.

Speaker 1: 44:01

This is my pitch Everyone should move to Amsterdam.

Speaker 2: 44:04

That's a good pitch. I mean there's no, you know there's very few like arguments that I could make against that.

Speaker 1: 44:11

If you want to have coffee with me and Marie Loney? Move to Amsterdam, that's it.

Speaker 2: 44:16

That's right. Well, look, visiting move, move like fullblown move. I've really enjoyed this combo. It's been enlightening. It's always fun to talk about ce and the broader implications and stuff like that, but where can people find you and connect with you and listen to you?

Speaker 1: 44:35

okay. Yeah, there's the wind up. So you know, I am, as you mentioned, on LinkedIn. I say things when I feel like I have something useful to say, so definitely connect with me there. But maybe in a more structured sense, I host a podcast called C-Lab. Our website is customereducation. You can also find us wherever podcasts are found. So C-E-L-A-B the Customer Education Lab and I wrote a book about customer education. It's now a few years old, but I think a good 94% of what's in there is still relevant for today. So if you check out the customer education book, it's called Customer Education why Smart Companies Profit by Making Customers Smarter. You can find it on Amazon.

Speaker 2: 45:21

On Amazon. Awesome, that's cool. Yeah, I mean, a customer education book probably has way more shelf life than an AI book.

Speaker 1: 45:32

You know I'm thinking about second edition, and second edition's got to talk about AI right, yeah, it's got to. The world has changed, but the fundamentals haven't. That's right.

Speaker 2: 45:40

Yeah, exactly, adam, thanks a lot for the time. I really appreciate it. And, um, yeah, enjoy your Friday evening and your weekend, because I am literally the thing that's keeping you from beer 30, I think.

Speaker 1: 45:54

Well, you know what it's. It's no, no trouble at all, because I've I've been a fan of your show. I've listened to probably almost every episode, so you know it's an honor to be able to be on this side of the podcast now. Yeah, it's always interesting as a host being on other people's shows, isn't it? It's really like everything.

Speaker 2: 46:19

I'm restraining myself not to take over or accidentally start asking me questions. You wouldn't be the first.

Speaker 1: 46:23

All right, man, so listeners if you. Oh sorry, sorry, that's you, it's you Okay.

Speaker 2: 46:29

Yeah, my outros aren't as boisterous as yours. All right, I'm going to stop the recording because we've got enough. 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. 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.