Exploring Automation in Digital Customer Success

Alex Turkovic 0:20

I've got an action-packed solo episode for you today , including a bit of a personal announcement , so stay tuned . 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 . Welcome back to the Digital CX Podcast , the show where we talk about all things digital in CX . This is episode 80 . As you know , every fifth episode is a solo episode , so you're getting all of this all day today . Here we go . We've got a pretty action-packed agenda for you , but before we get into the meat of the show , first off I want to thank a new sponsor on the show , so if you're listening the audio version , you know . Please help me in welcoming Thinkific Plus , which is an awesome customer education platform . You'll be hearing more of them , or about them throughout the show but want to extend a really warm welcome to them .

Alex Turkovic 1:42

A bit of housekeeping before we get into the show . First and foremost , we have some awesome guests coming up in the next cycle , including Samantha David from Mondaycom . If you listened to the Scott Wilder episode , you'll know that she and I and Scott are doing the Digital CS meetup once a month , so definitely check that out . If you're not already signed up for those events , you can do that at digitalsuccessgradualus . There'll be a link for that down in the description of the show . We also have Marlee Wagner , who is a marketing and digital CS consultant . She's pretty awesome , she does a lot of speaking , and so she'll be joining us in the next cycle along with Alison Barrett of Airtable , who is leading the digital effort there at Airtable . And lastly , in the next series before the next solo episode is Erwin Hipsman . That one will actually come about after the holidays . Actually , we're talking about January when that episode hits , because I've got a couple of plans for the holidays , which includes a little bit of kind of over-the-shoulder play with some new AI technology . So stay tuned for that . Over the holidays . A couple of solo shows sprinkled in there , so we've got lots of stuff coming up for you . If you haven't already taken the Digital CS Maturity Assessment that I launched a few weeks ago , feel free to go and do that . You can do that on the website at digitalcustomersuccesscom . Forward slash DCS maturity or navigate to it from the website . It is an assessment that'll take you through the four pillars of digital customer success that we've talked about and ask you some questions and at the end , give you some results based on how you answered and some suggestions for how you might improve your program . Would love your feedback on that , but hopefully that's a helpful tool for you , depending on , obviously , what stage of digital you're at .

Alex Turkovic 3:48

Now . The big kind of personal announcement that I teased you with at the beginning of the show is I started a new gig last Monday . I'm now leading post-sale or customer experience at Belfry , which is a vertical software solution for the security guard industry Super cool industry , amazing team I'm joining , so I'll be coming in to help build out post-sale motions , and that definitely includes a lot of digital , and that's part of the topic for today , which is all about where to start looking for automations , and so you're kind of getting a peek into my brain as I'm stepping into this role and as I'm starting to discover what the current state is and what the possibilities are , what I'm going to do is share with you a lot of the things that I'm looking at internally right now , as I start this new gig , to try and start to figure out what processes could be automated , because one of the things that I'm really excited about is the opportunity to build and scale a CS function while we are in this kind of massive proliferation of technology and artificial intelligence right now . The things that we're able to do now are vastly different than even two , three years ago , just because there's so many cool use cases , niche little software solutions that are coming to market and so many larger providers that are really investing in artificial intelligence , and , of course , we have this awesome power of integration to make all these things sing together and work together . And so the first step for me is really just , you know , as I step into this role is to try to figure out where are the elements where automation can really make a huge difference , and so I've got a bit of a list that I'm going to rattle off for you as this episode proceeds , on various ideas that you yourself can also go and look at , for areas you might want to look for automation and areas where you might want to look for inefficiencies or where there are overly bloated processes or humans doing a bunch of manual work . Yeah , so , without further ado , let's jump right into it . And so literally this is straight out of my notebooks for the last week or so , as I've been actively just writing down the places where I want to really dig in and look for those inefficiencies that we can optimize . For you know , belfry is a startup stage , so quite early , although there are some pretty sophisticated things that are happening already , you know we don't necessarily want to just throw a headcount at problems . We want to grow in a very efficient way and in a way that really helps the team members that are there to optimize and to work efficiently . So those are the kinds of things that I'm looking at and the categories that I'm looking at that I'll share with you here looking at and the categories that I'm looking at that I'll share with you here .

Alex Turkovic 7:10

So first on the list and this is one that I've mentioned on the show before are support related things and support data around . You know , tickets and whatnot . Now there are all kinds of processes within support that could , you know , probably use some help . And yes , I think a huge part of the equation for an efficient support organization is using artificial intelligence in a customer-facing way that's trained on your internal documentation to start to answer a lot of those level one , maybe even level two issues . And one of the things that I'm looking at are tickets that have essentially an initial touch resolution . Our first touch resolution Ticket comes in , we solve it immediately , close it out , send it on its merry way . Those are the things and those are the tickets that I'm gonna be looking at very closely to see . Are there things that we can offer in a customer facing perspective that can help to deflect those tickets ? So that you know the team is focused on those high value issues and really those issues where a human is absolutely 100% necessary to solve some of those issues . So , definitely looking at that from an optimization standpoint , but I'm also looking at support data around . What kind of questions do we repeatedly get in support and how can we offer proactively some content to the customer base that alleviates some of that ticket volume coming in , because the last thing we wanna do is spend our entire day answering the same question over and over and over again in a support capacity , and so the first step of that is really just looking to see are there repeated things that were asked over and over again and that could either be solved by distributing a piece of content , could also be solved by a bit of feedback to the product organization for some changes , getting on the roadmap that way , any number of ways to go about solving those kinds of things .

Alex Turkovic 9:11

Now , the next thing that I'm looking at this is going to be perhaps a little bit unpopular when I initially mention it , but I am looking at hours tracking to some extent , and I'm not looking at it from the lens of oh , this person spent this many hours doing this and this person spent this many hours doing this . Shout out to Rob Zambito for this one , actually , because he has a brilliant hours tracking template . It's actually it's quite simple with that has one little tweak on it , and it includes a column for sentiment . In other words , what sentiment did you have about this particular activity ? Did it leave you energized and is it something that you really enjoy doing ? Did it leave you , you know , drained ? Are you absolutely drained after this kind of activity ? And I think that is a very important twist to traditional hours tracking where you're literally just seeing okay , you know how many hours a week are we spending on these activities and those activities and whatnot , which is one element of it . But you're missing some depth when you only do that . By adding sentiment into that template , we're able to quickly see you know what areas our teams are struggling with . What are those things that you know ? When they open up , whatever it is to go do that activity , that they leave just feeling completely drained and you know maybe need a long break afterwards . And I think that's a very important nuance , because part of what we automate for is the customer journey . We're always looking for customer-facing motions to automate and those kinds of things , but that's not the entire picture .

Alex Turkovic 10:59

Something that a lot of us overlook and are guilty of overlooking is the employee experience as well , and automating for the employee experience can be a massive , massive morale boost . If you're an individual contributor today , think of those things that take you several hours to do on a weekly basis or a monthly basis and what a drag that is sometimes . And what a drag that is sometimes and what a relief that is when those things are lifted off your shoulders , at least partially , if not entirely , for those of you who are in leadership position . Think back to your individual contributor days . I guarantee you you had a task or a set of tasks that you dreaded on a weekly basis , and how wonderful that feels to alleviate some of those things from your plate . So I think , as digital folks or as ops folks , I think it's very important that we look at those activities within our teams that are leaving our team members drained and demoralized after completing them as prime opportunities to pull in some automation to help alleviate some of that . So , support , data , hours , tracking , cool .

Automating Distributed Documentation and Onboarding

Alex Turkovic 12:12

Another place that I'm looking at is frequently distributed documentation . Are there bits of documentation , pdfs or articles or technical documentation that is being sent out on a repeated basis , maybe to every customer , maybe to every customer at a specific stage in their lifecycle ? If the answer to that is yes , well that is a prime territory for automation . You know , for instance , if we know that we are going to distribute a certain set of documentation as part of the onboarding process , let's automate some of that . If we know that there is a certain milestone that a customer hits , that they will need a certain bit of documentation , you know , let's automate that . Let's automate some pre-renewals informations and maybe some contract distribution , like . Those kinds of things where we are predictably sending something to a customer are ripe for automation . If a customer turns something on in the platform and it requires a little bit of technical documentation to fully understand it , let's automate the distribution of that so that we can be ahead of the customer a little bit and display that you know you as a brand are in partnership with your customer . So that's another thing I like to look at is what is that frequently distributed documentation , distributed Documentation content .

Alex Turkovic 13:36

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 . Now back to the show and that leads nicely into the next .

Alex Turkovic 14:20

Really two things , which is onboarding briefly mentioned that and renewals , which I also mentioned briefly . Let's start with the onboarding bit a little bit . You know a lot of us have onboarding teams , which I celebrate because we all know that successful onboarding is one of the best things , I should say , that you can do to secure the renewal down the road . By being really focused and really intentional on your onboarding activities , you can make sure your customer's time to value is as fast as possible . And so , when it comes to onboarding , you may have an onboarding team . Maybe they're doing a bunch of stuff manually . What bits of that can you automate ? What parts of the onboarding process can you automate also for your team members so that they don't have to make sure to you know , remember everything they need to do ? Maybe there is some sort of system that you already have in place where you can build in some automation for your internal team members so that they you know it makes their job a lot easier to get their customers moving along . Another area to look at for onboarding automation is if a customer is missing milestones , what kind of automation can you build in there to nudge your customers along and , again , avoid your team members having to do that ? So just really think about not just the customer element of onboarding , but then also what activities your team must do internally to support that onboarding .

Alex Turkovic 16:03

Speaking of team , if you're onboarding new team members into your organization , there might be a little bit of automation that you want to look at there as well . You know , if you have somebody starting and you know week one is going to be X , y , z , why not automate some of that ? Automate the distribution of their weekly to-do list or something like that , you know . Automate some of the check-ins . If you have an LMS that you're using . Automate some of the content assignment based on somebody's start date . There's all kinds of things that you can look at and of course , I'm just giving you a couple of examples here . It's going to vary greatly on what it is you actually do , based on how you're set up and what your systems look like . But think about your team members , please .

Automating Customer Success Processes

Alex Turkovic 16:48

When it comes to onboarding and that leads me into renewals and also upsell opportunities let's actually start with upsells . If there are , let's say , modules that make sense at a certain point in a customer's journey , you may want to automate some things about the upsell . Or if you know that certain signals within your platform will generally lead to the upsell of other modules , you may want to automate some things around that . And this is where the line between marketing and digital CS kind of blur a little bit . But ultimately , what you're trying to do is is is , you know , lead your customer to successful outcomes while at the same time looking out for the for the company and really trying to drive as much account value as possible . And so if there are natural places within the customer lifecycle where a bit of automation could potentially lead to some upsell opportunities , I highly highly encourage you to look at that , because otherwise it it falls on your CSM or your account manager or whoever to kind of mentally recognize that within their accounts and whatnot and ideally they would anyway . But you might as well automate around it as well .

Alex Turkovic 19:40

When it comes to the renewal , those pre-renewal workflows are critical , both internally and customer facing . You may want to send your customer some you know , t minus 90 day renewals alerts like , hey , you're , you know your account's going to renew in 90 days , etc . Etc . So you may want to do that . But internally as well , you may want to set up some reminders for your team members to do check-ins at a specific time , for instance . Or you know , just start getting renewals contracts drawn up and whatever your process is around there , really think through the renewals process and do it from the lens of automation . Okay , that's quite a list so far . We've talked about support data , we've talked about hours tracking , we've talked about frequently distributed documentation , we've talked about onboarding . We've talked about upsell , we've talked about renewal , got like three or four more for you and then like a big , huge kind of red flag for you at the end . So stay tuned for that red flag for you at the end . So stay tuned for that .

Alex Turkovic 20:54

Next one on my list is data cleaning , and this may be one that isn't super obvious right off the bat , but I'll give you a couple examples of why you might think about automation in your data hygiene process . One of them is in your data hygiene process . One of them is duplication . I'm willing to bet that a lot of you , if not all of you , struggle with account duplication , contact duplication , maybe even dealer op duplication . Whatever that may be . Chances are your customer data has some semblance of duplication in it and there are opportunities for you to automate around that duplication , whether it be an automatic merge of certain contact records within an account , for instance , if they meet certain criteria , or an alert for a team member to go check out that duplication .

Alex Turkovic 21:53

Two more examples of how you could automate around data cleaning . One is just data standardization . If there are certain fields that aren't , say , of a standard format let's say it's a first and last name , that is , all caps or all lowercase , for instance you could automate some alerts around that and really try to drive some cleanliness around that , Automating things like do you have phone numbers for all of your contacts ? Or making sure that you can't save something you know without actually having the right format , or certain things in a certain way . You just have to think about what standardization you want to drive as part of your automation as well .

Alex Turkovic 22:41

And the last example of automation and data in data hygiene is the removal of outdated entries . If there is a bit of data that is just ancient , chances are it's not going to be relevant and chances are removing it from the system will actually give you some clarity . Now , I don't think the removal of data or the deletion of data is necessarily a popular thing , but you know , one example might be certain statuses . If there is an account status field or an account update field that hasn't been updated in like half a year or a year or five years whatever that comfort threshold is for you chances are that update is no longer relevant and no longer needs to be in the system , and so if you set up an automation to automatically purge that kind of data out , and then maybe another automation that alerts the CSM or somebody else to go provide an update because the update field is empty or somebody else to go provide an update because the update field is empty , you know , that could be one example of how you would use automation to actually remove outdated entries from your customer set and keep things a little bit cleaner for yourself . So that's data cleanliness Scorecards . We could probably do a whole episode on customer scorecards , health scores , all of that , and maybe I might . That's actually a good idea . We could spend some time on customer scorecards but fundamentally speaking , there's a lot of automation that can go into that .

Alex Turkovic 24:25

I'm a huge proponent of scorecards that have a nice mix and blend of different types of information from around the business . That could include , obviously , ideally some product telemetry . It's always great to have within a scorecard . Maybe there is some you know knowledge base indicators that come based on you know how often an account or a specific content logs into the knowledge base or the community or access as a piece of learning what you know . What are those elements that you can pull in from those resources for your scorecards . Obviously , sentiment is a big one . If you do NPS , if you do CSAT , definitely pull those in . Pull in the CSM sentiment or the account manager's sentiment or whatever that may be . All of those things are , yes , automations to get them into the scorecard , but then also , in some instances , they are also automations to prompt someone to provide a bit of data , whether it be the customer or somebody internally to provide data to feed the scorecard .

Alex Turkovic 25:34

The other part of scorecard automation that I want to talk about is the proactive motions that then come out of a scorecard , because that is ripe for automation . You don't want to wait to look at a scorecard before actioning the scorecard . Don't want to wait to look at a scorecard before actioning the scorecard . You want the scorecard to be predictive enough to where you can automate actions off of it to actively engage with your customer if something goes south . A classic example is if you see a spike in support tickets . Another example that's related is if you see zero support tickets over a period of time . To me that's an element of danger as well , if you have zero support engagement from a customer . Classic example two is I mean overall if your health score takes a nosedive , you're going to want to set up some alerting around that . Product telemetry if your logins take a dip , you're going to want to set up some , you know , some alerting around that as well . So think about what those proactive elements of a scorecard are that typically predict trouble or predict success . If your customer has achieved a certain milestone you know , uploading 50 widgets before their third anniversary I'm making that up . If they do that , and that is typically a sign of success for your customer set up an automation to send them a written note or , you know , send them a piece of swag and , you know , really help celebrate the customer and especially the admins . Show the admins some love .

Alex Turkovic 27:16

Last category is really just a broad one , and that is to look for all of the manual processes that exist . What are people doing manually that could easily be automated ? And this kind of goes hand in hand to another section where we talked about team members that are doing those mundane things , but really take a broader look at it . So one example might be the handoff of pre-sale to post-sale information . Is that being done manually today and could it be done automagically to help support the team , have more productive conversations and reduce some of manual work to be done today that could ideally be automated and easily automated . I mean , look , a lot of the systems that we use today . Most of them have API integrations and that is no longer a really big , scary thing because of the proliferation of platforms like Zapier or Makecom . Like Zapier or makecom , those are all platforms where building automations is literally as easy as clicking and dragging boxes into a flow . Okay , it's a little bit more complex than that , but automating things and integrating systems to trade information between each other has never been easier , and so they're .

Alex Turkovic 28:48

Really . If there is a process that exists where data is being , you know , pushed from one system to another manually , that is . I have very little patience for that kind of thing because it's so easy to automate around it . So , point being , look for those manual processes , either within your team or outside of your team as well , because there are probably other people doing some manual processes to help support your team that you could also help them automate . So , support data hours , tracking , distributed documentation , onboarding , upsell , renewals , data hygiene , scorecards , predictive motions , manual processes that's quite a lot we could probably you could probably add five or six to the list . In fact , email me if you have others , because I'd love to hear from you if there are other areas of your business that you have helped automate and perhaps we'll do a follow-up to this episode . Automate , and perhaps we'll do a follow-up to this episode .

Alex Turkovic 29:59

But here's the big red flag no-no , when it comes to automation , there is a huge , huge draw towards just automating for the sake of automating , and I've been guilty of that myself and I still have to kind of slap my wrist once in a while if I'm tempted to go automate something that isn't being done manually first . I think there's a couple of exceptions here , but for the most part , if you're going to go automate something , ideally it would be something that someone has done manually before . Ideally it would be something that someone has done manually before , because they have already learned all of the lessons for how not to do it . They've already learned all of the lessons that you need to make a successful automation , because otherwise , if you just step in to automate something , you are likely going to have to redo it Plain and simple , and so expect to spend some cycles on it . Plain and simple , and so expect to spend some cycles on it , and I have found that the most efficient way to spend those cycles is to do it myself first .

Alex Turkovic 31:01

I'm going to literally take , if I'm automating , a flag in this system to be set from this particular action . I will literally go do it in those different systems to see what happens and to see , you know , is it feasible first off , am I breaking other things ? If I go do that ? Ideally , you know , your automation shouldn't break stuff and really , is it achieving the desired result ? So I will go and do things manually a few times . I might even do it manually for a month just to see , a , how annoying is it ? And B , can it be done ? And C , what are the lessons that I'm learning by doing it manually , so that then I can build those certain guardrails into my automation so that I don't break stuff . Because we don't want to break stuff , we want to build stuff right . So that is the big red flag warning . So yeah , that's my list of stuff that I'm looking at as I step into this new business and this new gig to start automating various things .

Alex Turkovic 32:09

I hope you have found it helpful . Automating various things . I hope you have found it helpful . It's definitely been a fun exercise for me of digging into these things and doing that with a fresh set of eyes , and I've really tried to , you know , go into this with eyes wide open , because I know , you know , in six months to a year , you know , I'm going to be kind of in the weeds on a bunch of other stuff , but at least I'll have a roadmap planned out for some of the automations that I observed at the beginning , uh , that that we want to go put in place , um , but anyway , I'm now I'm rambling , so I wanted to share this list with you . I hope it's been helpful .

Alex Turkovic 32:47

Thank you so much for the new sponsor , thinkific plus . Thank you for those of you who are listening and for your feedback on these solo episodes . It means a whole lot . Thanks to the many , many people that congratulated me on LinkedIn . That was kind of crazy . It's so funny how the job change notifications in LinkedIn are the ones where you typically get the most engagement . Obviously , the algorithm has a little bit to do with that , but anyway , I'm super appreciative of all of you . Stay tuned .

Alex Turkovic 33:19

Next week we have Samantha David joining us , and for now , I hope all of you have a lovely Thanksgiving , because this is literally coming out the Tuesday before Thanksgiving . Hope you get a little bit of time off if you're US-based . If you're not US-based , hopefully you get some time off too . Let's put it that way , because your US colleagues aren't yapping at you over a Zoom call . But for now I'll leave it there . We'll see you next week . 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 and get more information about the show and some of the other things that we're doing at digitalcustomersuccesscom . I'm Alex Tergovich . Thanks so much for listening . I'll talk to you next week .