Speaker 1: 0:31

I don't think there's going to be a time where we say, yep, we have exactly what we need to measure, we're measuring it correctly and we're good. We're always developing new things to measure and how we're looking at the data and how we're even approaching it.

Speaker 2: 0:47

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

Speaker 2: 1:30

It is December and it's finally starting to get I'll call it cool. Here in Austin, texas, it's not quite cold yet, but typically that didn't happen for us till February. I know a lot of you are in a lot colder climates, but it is December, middle of the holidays. Hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving if you're US-based, and we have a great Thanksgiving if you're US based, and we have a great episode lined up for you today in Samantha David, who joined us a few weeks ago for a quick conversation all about digital program management. She's a digital CS program manager at Mondaycom and you know, if you've listened to the show for a little bit, you know that I've been trying to pull in a lot more people who are tactical at the ground level actually building some of this stuff, and so Sam was kind enough to come and join us and share some of her experiences and some of the work that she's doing at mondaycom as a program manager.

Speaker 2: 2:35

You've probably heard Samantha David's name around a bit as well, because she for a long time has hosted a meetup all about digital and scaled, and she has joined forces with myself and Scott Wilder, who was on episode 79. And you know, we're hosting monthly digital CS meetups which, if you're interested in registering and signing up for some of those, you can do that at digital successgradualus. Again, that's digital successgradualus. I'll put a link down in the show notes for that. We hope to see you there. We've had some pretty awesome guests join us there and a great lineup coming up as well. So, without further ado, I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Sam David, because I sure did. Sam David, a warm welcome to the Digital CX Podcast. I've been looking forward to this episode for quite some time, ever since we started chatting and we met like several months ago. I don't know when it was, but it was a while ago. But yeah, welcome to the show. So great to have you Thank you.

Speaker 1: 3:47

Thank you, I'm happy to be here and chat with you.

Speaker 2: 3:49

Yeah, we were just chatting before we recorded about your recent transplant or reintroduction into the Denver market which is cool, so that you got your move out of the way. That's great. So you're now Denver based.

Speaker 1: 4:03

Denver based, started my tech journey here and I'm back after being in New York for almost eight years.

Speaker 2: 4:11

Yeah, for sure, but you, what's funny? So, okay, I did some snooping, right, as you do some LinkedIn snooping, and what's funny? You triggered a few memories in your background, which is well. First off, you were a marketing assistant at Boston Market for some time.

Speaker 1: 4:35

And the memory that triggered in me is literally college, like destroying, you know, roasted chickens from Boston Market, the best part is I sat right next to the test kitchen, so every day I got to go home with one or two rotisserie chickens, because they just brought it out for all the employees.

Speaker 2: 4:59

So I was a favorite among my friends that just needed dinner as a poor college student, Totally, totally, and then before that you were at Hallmark for a bit as an intern right.

Speaker 1: 5:06

Yeah, I was at Hallmark. I'm from Kansas City. I think Hallmark is a Kansas City-based company, so I was working in marketing analytics there.

Speaker 2: 5:16

Are you from the Missouri side or the Kansas side?

Speaker 1: 5:18

Kansas side, so the suburbs of Kansas City which are mostly on the Kansas side.

Speaker 2: 5:23

Totally. I'm a Missouri native, so we can't talk anymore. Oh no, no, it's cool. See, Hallmark, have you ever read this? This is a total tangent. I told you we were going to get into tangents. Have you read this book called Orbiting the Giant Hairball?

Speaker 1: 5:41

I have not. I've never even heard of it. Highly recommend it.

Speaker 2: 5:44

Okay, so it's written by this guy who used to I guess he worked in corporate Hallmark for like a long time. Used to. I guess he worked in corporate Hallmark for like a long time, and I think Hallmark is known for pretty notorious for not a great corporate culture. I don't know for sure but, whatever.

Speaker 2: 6:02

And he wrote this book all about like I'm paraphrasing, obviously, but like, if you're stuck in a thing or stuck in a position, stuck in a whatever, which is the giant hairball to get out of it, you just orbit it and you create your own projects and you create your own work and you take ownership of something that nobody else had ownership of and you look for, like the gross stuff that nobody wants to do and you go do it and you escape.

Speaker 1: 6:28

Yeah, I definitely saw a lot of that, which has, like, led me on to where I am today. That's a big learning. But I think, with Hallmark just being one of those corporate giants that's existed for decades, there's a lot of people that have worked there for decades doing the same thing, but over and over again and knowing that that's their job and that's what they do. But I think we live in that new environment where things are changing so rapidly that you kind of have to change with what's changing out there, either in your industry or just trends as a whole.

Speaker 2: 7:00

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 7:00

Enter AI, or else you do become disposable, and I think there's a section of home marketing companies just like that. I think Boston Market could be one of those two that still operate in that way, and then there's sections that don't, but I think areas of the company are super innovative. Yeah, but you have a mix of both, because it's such a large organization.

Speaker 2: 7:24

Totally, yeah, absolutely. I mean I can't even imagine, I mean, that Hallmark has been around forever. I mean I remember as a kid going to the Hallmark store, which I don't even know if that still exists.

Speaker 1: 7:33

Oh, they still exist.

Speaker 2: 7:34

They still exist, they still probably sell the same old stuff.

Speaker 1: 7:38

Ornaments yeah, mm-hmm.

Speaker 2: 7:41

Keepsakes. That's a particular smell of a Hallmark store, yes, but yeah, I mean transitioning from, you know, a very physical product, you know, and paper organization, to a digital one. That's interesting. Anyway, we're not here to talk about Hallmark. We are here to talk about what you do today, which is very apropos for the podcast. You're digital program manager at Mondaycom, which is super cool, and you, I think, I think you're the first person on the podcast who's holds the title and position of digital CS program managers, which is super cool, and it's it's it's a role that is growing leaps and bounds. I think recently there's a lot of people hip to like, hey, you can't just throw digital CSMs at it, you have to have people managing the stuff that you're doing. So I'm excited on that front to have you on, but will you talk a little bit about your journey into this world that you live in now?

Speaker 1: 8:44

Yeah. So, like I said before, my career in tech started in Denver and it was right after I graduated where I had a job offer with Boston Market. And then I also found this company called Workiva that was hiring a customer success manager and was looking at both and I really had no idea what I wanted to do. I majored in marketing, did a little in finance, but I wanted to try something new and tech just kind of spoke to me in this way. That was not your big corporate giant where you had one job only and you want to stick to that and we went through the old school ways of doing things in marketing. I wanted something that was innovative, changed all the time, that I could kind of run in the way that, learn a lot but run it in my own little business type of way. And that's how they explained the customer success role to me, like I own this book of business, and that just sounded really exciting.

Speaker 1: 9:44

So I took the leap and started at Workiva as a customer success manager right out of school and really just fell in love with the client relationship side and how much it was changing all the time. I really wanted to work for some of our larger enterprise clients, some of our banks. We handled a lot of banks just through the nature of what we did and moved to New York and was one of the first ones on our enterprise customer success team. So was working with the larger banks out there Fortune 500 companies to do their financial reporting and it gave me a lot of on-site experience and was able to develop those relationships with clients but also kind of see into the back end of what they were doing with clients. But also kind of seeing to the back end of what they were doing and, yeah, spent almost four years there and then move kind of to a little different of a scene. It was with a hedge fund Bridgewater, up in Connecticut to work on an internal startup that they had so lots smaller of a team, not mature as a product at all, so was building and managing their customer support team and had not really seen the reactive side of things in support and success as much because I was so hands on and it was a lot of learning and how to manage a team like that, some of our strategies or best practices as a customer support team like.

Speaker 1: 11:13

Initially I wanted to go in with more of like a white glove service type of handholding situation and and I the way that I learned through working on developing the product and bringing it to market with the rest of the team was that these need to be very quick interactions. We have to get right to the point. This cannot be just like drag on conversation that a lot of CSMs likes to have. So really enjoyed that experience was gave me a lot of hands-on experience of like managing and seeing everything from the ground up and I love that startup feel of teams and positions.

Speaker 1: 11:50

And from there went to moneycom, where I am today. So I've been here with for more than four and a half years which is crazy to say that and I definitely one of the more dinosaurs within Monday and was hired initially onto our mid market customer success team and a couple months in, my manager at the time asked if I wanted to help her start the scale team. Had no idea what scale was digital touch. I just thought it was for customer support. I was like, okay, you know I have that type of background.

Speaker 1: 12:21

That makes sense and the way that they phrase it to us. You know we're getting ready. We're getting ready for an IPO that next year. We had a lot of customers engaged. We were one of those platforms that really made a boom with COVID too. Just with work from home and needing to invest in those tools, Absolutely yeah.

Speaker 1: 12:40

So and starting to gain traction in the US market as well. So develop a scale team because we just needed to scale our resources as CSMs. How do we interact with this many customers and ensure that they're being successful without having a customer one-on-one relationship with every single one? So that's really what started this team and been on this team ever since, seeing it go through so many different phases. No year has looked the same. And also where I started to be more interested in our digital program side because, yes, we can still have human interactions, one-on-one interactions as a scale CSM, which is something we can never really get rid of but automating the other side of things with this many customers and this structure was amazing, really, really valuable to start looking into at that early stage back in 2021 when we started this team. So that's where I took more of a lead on the program side of things and one to many than on our one-on-one side for scale, but been able to watch it grow from the infancy.

Speaker 2: 15:56

So I would imagine, throughout your adopting and adapting to this role and really taking ownership of it, that your definition of digital CS has probably evolved a little bit. How would you describe it in layman's terms to somebody walking on the street or a relative?

Speaker 1: 16:14

Yeah, I think the customer success role as a whole. I've had to explain to my parents multiple times. I'm just not really understanding what I do here and with digital CS. It's kind of the same to others that maybe work in tech, that just don't know what is this role for. I haven't seen it a lot. This is a new term for me. Is this different from customer success? Is this more marketing? So yeah, I've had to explain it a lot, but what I would say is digital program managers, cs programs, whatever you want to call it. We drive those personalized experiences that are going to impact value, impact adoption, using targeted resources to support these customers.

Speaker 1: 16:55

So, whether that's a marriage of resources and content that we're developing just for them, or they're receiving this based on their segment or product usage. In a way, that content we're targeting to them to better improve their experience within the tool.

Speaker 2: 17:16

Yeah, I love that I was having a conversation with my sister the other night because she, she's been binging the podcast even though she's not in CS or whatever. So shout out to my sister yeah, that's awesome.

Speaker 2: 17:29

But she, yeah, she was like I'm learning about, you know what customer success is, and I'm like, oh, that's great, because you probably you could probably define it better than than anyone working in CS sometimes Great because you could probably define it better than anyone working in CS sometimes, yes, I agree, it's like you know, the definition, especially in digital, is so all over the place, but I really like what you said about, you know, targeting specific people at the right time with the right resources, which is, I think, something that we can all get behind.

Speaker 2: 17:57

I think something that we can all get behind One of the things that I'm, you know, I you know this is my first rodeo speaking with someone from mondaycom, although Dan Ennis is no longer with mondaycom, but I remember at the time one of the things that we talked a lot about in relation to his work at mondaycom was utilizing the data to create that segmentation that I would imagine you're still working off of today, which is so important, and also what a lot of people can't really get their arms around in a good way. I think data is the number one problem everybody's facing in digital.

Speaker 1: 18:38

It's just hard.

Speaker 1: 18:40

Yeah, problem everybody's facing in digital. It's just hard. Yeah, I mean there's. No, I don't think there's going to be a time where we say, yep, we had it. We have exactly what we need to measure, we're measuring it correctly and we're good. Um, we're always developing new things to measure and how we're looking at the data and how we're even approaching it, because if we're seeing something in what we're measuring, we tweak a program or change the segmentation of who we're reaching out to, then we have to continue measuring it or look at another way to measure this data to produce those ideal outcomes.

Speaker 2: 19:15

Yeah, yeah for sure. Absolutely, it's absolutely key. So the way that I've described the digital CS program manager role to people in the past has been to basically equate it or call it or compare it to what we traditionally look at as a product manager. It's literally somebody owning a piece of the product and managing you know what the next phase of it is going to be and what the development around it is going to be, and managing the release of it and checking if the data is meeting expectations and those kinds of things. Is that something that you sympathize with and agree with, or would you classify your role differently?

Speaker 1: 20:01

Yeah, I think product managers and digital program managers are very similar in that we are customer focused. Of course, product managers are more on the back end of the product, making sure that this product does what a customer needs, or what our customers need, and a digital program manager is more focused on how the product is influencing these customers or the ability for our customers to use this to achieve those goals.

Speaker 1: 20:32

So they are essential in this. On making sure that I mean. Yeah, obviously product managers are needed. They're very important in making sure that the platform or app or whatever you're creating is doing what your customers need, and then our job is to bring it to them. But it might be in more of a one-to-many focused direction than like a CSM, where they're checking in, they're working directly with them Okay, you started to use it, but let's make sure it works for you than like a CSM where they're checking in there. They're working directly with them Okay, you've you started to use it, but let's make sure it works for you instead of just how you can use it as a as a customer.

Speaker 2: 21:09

Yeah, and I would imagine you're tracking the hell out of it and mondaycom.

Speaker 1: 21:13

Yes, so everything we do is tracked.

Speaker 2: 21:17

On Monday Everything is in Monday, what so? What does your kind of day look like? And part of the reason why I'm asking is because I know a lot of leaders who are looking at hiring for this type of role, like you know. So I guess walk me a little bit through like what your typical kind of workflow or day or kind?

Speaker 1: 21:39

of activities looks like that you're involved in. Yeah, and to be clear, we're still nailing down what this day looks like Things are changing so rapidly and I think that's been great. What's been great with Monday, too, is that they're fine with my role not being defined and also I work better in like a situation like that. That's a little more ambiguous, with the ability to go in a direction that I feel is necessary.

Speaker 2: 22:08

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 22:09

So right now I would say we're nailing down more programs that are involving the majority of customer success, instead of just scale. The last three years this role has just been targeted at scale, but we're seeing this as a strategy that we can apply to all of customer success or every CSM managed account that will give us those same outcomes and not just for scale touch customers. So I love that it's becoming more of that overarching strategy instead of just like a segmented role. Yeah, but I think when it comes to my day to day, it's a lot of managing these programs content wise, because content needs to be changed ever so often. Our product changes so rapidly, so we need to make sure that it's updated to support this, and then also looking at data and seeing what needs to be tweaked yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 23:05

I love that you said it's like different all the time and changing all the time, because it's true, like you know, one day you might be involved in a certain automation flow that goes you know, that does a certain thing and others. It's like helping CSMs be more efficient and I love that that's the direction y'all are going, because I think any solid digital program shouldn't be just focused on the customer experience. They should be focused on the employee experience as well.

Speaker 1: 23:36

Employee experience, our time, because what I really believe in is that programs and every program that we have running will allow for customers to not have as many one-on-one calls that are just training or teaching or very basic, because what a customer success manager is good at is having those high-level strategic conversations and that's what we want to be trained in. So, when it comes to just the very basics of training a customer, we have things to do that we have our support team and our resources out there and I'll talk about office hours later, I'm sure but those are there to fill in those gaps so that customer success can do what they do best and be strategic.

Speaker 2: 24:20

Which shows a lot of the evolution of the program and I think a lot of programs where it kind of sounds like you know, digital it Monday started as coverage for a segment like a lot of them do you know, my program included. It started as coverage for the segment of unassigned accounts basically and has morphed into kind of this more you know strategic thing and set of motions that really cover the entire account base. Is there a particular you know maybe part of that journey or a particular program that is memorable or has been particularly impactful that you might want to call out memorable?

Speaker 1: 25:02

or has been particularly impactful that you might want to call out. Yeah, I would say specifically office hours, because that's been the biggest one that we've built on over the past three, three and a half years. Obviously, other one-to-many strategies email campaigns and app notifications, which are on the roadmap, and other things that we're planning for but office hours have been developed, I would say, to the fullest out of everything that we've been running regularly.

Speaker 2: 25:29

Yeah, that's really cool.

Speaker 1: 25:31

Office hours.

Speaker 2: 25:32

I mean, I don't know if a lot of people knock them necessarily, but they're kind of like glossed over, like oh, that's just a thing we do, like you know, just like check the box kind of activity, but it's way more than that.

Speaker 1: 25:52

Yeah, yeah, I mean, at the beginning we were getting maybe a couple of signups and most of our sessions had to be canceled because we didn't have enough people or nobody showed up and we were like, is this worth it?

Speaker 1: 25:59

Does anybody want these?

Speaker 1: 26:02

We saw them as a great resource because we limited our customers' one-on-one support hours and we had to tell them you only get this many hours a year, but we have office hours and we just wanted to translate that to them.

Speaker 1: 26:14

But since building them out more, advertising them more, spreading the awareness to our customers, finding what exactly they wanted the topics to be in the content to be, we were able to build that awareness and now we have them happening five times a week globally, in every single region and and have a at least I would say, five to 20 per session. I mean, it ranges a lot depending on what campaigns we've sent out and what the topics are and how we're pushing them out to our customers, but just by them being these standing sessions that customers can depend on, that they know exist and that our sales team know that they can promote to our customers too. I've just seen the reaction from our customers and when they do join, it makes even more of an impact for our customers because they need it in that moment and they were able to get exactly what they came for.

Speaker 2: 27:14

Sure. Hey, I want to have a brief chat with you about the 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. 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.

Speaker 2: 27:54

Now back to the show and it probably becomes part of your brand a little bit too. You know, especially you know those that are regular attendees. They probably start to form some relationships with. You know those that are or consulting or sales engineering and all that kind of stuff to staff these hours, because I know that's a huge issue for a lot of people.

Speaker 1: 28:27

Yeah, right now it's actually just our scale CSMs that are hosting them.

Speaker 1: 28:31

But a lot of the work is, I would say, on this role. A lot of things that I do to make sure that they don't have to dedicate so much time is that all of the demos that we are doing for each session are already built, so they don't have to create that on their own, that they can just kind of jump in and go through the product and they're all already in the product all the time and know how to talk to customers. So it's very natural for them. But just educating them on the differences between okay, a working session with one-on-one with a customer versus a small group session where we want them to interact with each other, ask questions to you, you ask questions to them, get them talking, get them sharing, to provide that sense of community, is a little different of a approach than the one-on-one session. So I would say that's the biggest for our scale CSMs to learn, but I mean, they're great at it. So yeah, that's awesome.

Speaker 2: 29:31

I love that they're doing that and it it displays also a level of product knowledge and probably technical knowledge that's inherent within the team, which is which is super cool, I think. I know. You know, in in in my org there's there's like there's a level of product knowledge and then there's a level of product knowledge that's like way up here and you kind of have to tow the toe of the balance between the two to be able to do those effectively.

Speaker 2: 29:57

And you know, invariably you always get your naysayers in those sessions and stuff like that, which is always hard to deal with. So kudos to the team for managing that. That's good. That's good stuff.

Speaker 1: 30:07

Yeah, no, they're great. They're good with rolling with the punches too, when we change things up, and still being these stellar hosts. So, yeah, couldn't do it without them.

Speaker 2: 30:19

That's cool. So maybe a little bit of a scenario for you. Let's say there's a new initiative or a new campaign or something like that and you're tasked with digitally. How do we tackle this from like an automation and a data standpoint? Would you humor us, the audience of the Digital CX podcast, and walk me through a little bit about how you would approach getting a new automation stood up and how you go about testing it and measuring it and all that kind of stuff?

Speaker 1: 30:54

Yeah, definitely, and this is something that we hit probably a couple times a month and try and approach it monthly because things are getting released and changed so often on the Monday platform. And a big one was a release in our project management solution and the ability to take out a lot of the manual work for the customer, and it's something that we've seen a lot of CSMs and we know how to tell them that it's coming soon and that it's going to get better and all of that stuff. But now we actually have this feature out there for them to use.

Speaker 1: 31:28

We know, it's going to be huge, and the main trigger for us to start to think about this in digital programs is that I see our CSMs are being asked a lot to learn more about it. Customers are reaching out to them saying can we have a meeting on this? I want to learn more, but those meetings are probably going to be very, very basic training and walking through the information that's already on our resources online.

Speaker 1: 31:57

So, how do we develop this program to be able to educate customers, to spread the awareness that this is something new and improved. It will make their lives easier, but also allow them for that time to ask questions, if they still have them aside from the training. So what we did is we have monthly email campaigns that the sole purpose there is to keep them very open-ended so that we can use them to target these features that are coming out monthly or okay, or just company initiatives that we want to run. So this one, specifically, was around the portfolio solution and walking through how to set it up. I put loom videos.

Speaker 1: 32:39

I don't know if you've used loom in these instead of more, more formatted or ones that are created by our video team, because those are great, but I think having a little bit of that personalization or human touch behind it is better for these customers on getting the information to them. Yeah, so I'll put a loom video in there, just a demo on how walking through it, how to set it up and benefits of it, and we'll we sent this to, I believe, every customer, every end user, within scale, but the the key part of this and a lot of the email campaigns that we run is allowing them or advertising our office hours.

Speaker 1: 33:20

So, we built an office hour directly related to this new solution, so that our customers that read this, watch the video, see this as a topic that they want to learn more about. And let's say they don't have a CSM, or they do and they're going to reach out to their CSM to ask them can you walk through this with me again? Take another hour of our time. Let's put together a group focus session so that we can answer their questions as that next step, and all of our email campaigns have that next step of office hours or interacting with a CSM. Because if we're sparking their curiosity in any way, if we are opening that conversation, we want to make sure that it doesn't just end with that email, that they're either jumping into the tool or they're able to have that human interaction to close the loop there, so that they can take that all the way through.

Speaker 2: 34:16

I absolutely love two things about all that you just said.

Speaker 2: 34:21

There's a lot to love, love, but there's two specific things that I like to preach about the.

Speaker 2: 34:25

The first one is sourcing the need, or the specific topic or content or or need, yeah, the, the, the motive behind the automation from the team, from the CSM team or whatever team, because part of the goal of a digital program is to really meet the demand of what is being asked, and one of the best ways to do that is by asking the team what are you being hammered on right now?

Speaker 2: 34:59

What are you getting over and over and over again that we can automate to alleviate that pain a little bit for you, but then also to meet the customer where they're at. I think you know monitoring community and support tickets is another great way to do that, but I love that you're engaging the team that way. The other thing that I really love about what you said was the inclusion of a way to interact with a human off of the back of your digital motions, and I think that should be one of the mainstays of operating digitally is, yeah, you have a digital motion in place and yeah, you know it's tech touch or whatever the hell you want to call it, but at the end of the day, you know, having line of sight to a human, whether that's invitation to an office hour or a webinar or, you know, invitation to book a call or whatever absolutely Like.

Speaker 2: 35:54

Whatever that is, it doesn't really matter. As long as that option exists and your customers feel you know comfortable and always feel like that there's a human behind the automation. I think those two things are phenomenal. Yeah, really cool.

Speaker 1: 36:09

Yeah, yeah, I mean, human touch is never going to go away. It's the bread and butter of customer success and it's why some of these larger tech organizations built out customer success and why we're still going to need it. But they could just make our jobs easier with having built out customer success, and why we're still going to need it. But they could just make our jobs easier with having built out programs and even make it easier for our customers to learn information and gain knowledge without having to interact with one of us.

Speaker 2: 36:37

Yeah, exactly, and that's the whole point, the interaction with the CSM or the scale CSM or whoever.

Speaker 1: 36:45

Ideally you're building your program in a way to where those interactions are high value interactions, not just like transactional, like you could have self-serviced something, where it's actually like a value add conversation, which is I think a big, a big purpose behind having some content like this and especially with our email campaigns that are customer journey, that's, reaching the customer at least monthly is making the product more familiar so that when a CSM does reach out, they don't feel like this is coming in from left field or they're not even using the tool, which hey, which that could be why a CSM is reaching out because we can see in the customer data that they're not using specific features or maybe their usage is declining, but at least they're seeing our name. They're seeing the product monthly. They have that familiarity for it to be something that they know that they should be using or that they're curious and learning more about. So it's making a CSM job easier by having these automated and running.

Speaker 2: 37:51

Yeah, absolutely, that's good stuff. That's really good stuff. I just to pivot a little bit, you know I I am in my career let's let's put it that way I'm like super grateful to have landed in the world of digital CX and I've, you know, thoroughly hung my hat there, obviously, and as have you, because you know you have organized, you know meetups and you're working in digital every day and you're doing the thing. Is this a long-term thing for you, career-wise? Do you see yourself transitioning into other things in the future? Like, what's that looking like for you?

Speaker 1: 38:34

Yeah, I think this is definitely for the long-term and, however, this role does develop because I think, looking at customer success as a career, I mean it's still new in this world.

Speaker 1: 38:49

I mean it goes back a long time but I don't think it's been a regular role that people coming out of college know that they can start creating their careers around this for 10, 15 years and and with how tech is is developing year over year and how it's just changing so, so rapidly, I don't think tech's going to look the same in the next five years and I don't think this role is going to have the same qualifications or responsibilities that it does today and I think it's just going with the trends and making sure that, just personally, I'm not stuck in a role that could be changing, where my skills don't change as well.

Speaker 1: 39:35

And I think digital program scale is going to be on everyone's mind and I still see it today that it is starting to be on everyone's mind. And I still see it today that it is starting to be on everyone's mind because we're looking at using less resources to do more work, and that's exactly what this team does and we can use these strategies to make the existing resources on our team's lives a whole lot easier to do more, but it wouldn't be done without developing more skill practices. So it's definitely in for the future of my career. I love working in tech and I love this world and I don't see myself moving anytime soon. But I think if you could be flexible in the rules and responsibilities that you have and if you see a problem you approach it and you start tackling that right away, then then I think you're you're in it for the long run, no matter what?

Speaker 2: 40:29

yeah, totally, I couldn't agree more. I mean, it's like, especially with the proliferation of artificial intelligence and oh yeah, uh, all the automations around that, like it'll be interesting to see even how that affects the C level. Like I'm waiting for, you know, chief AI or something, or chief automations officer or something like that to become a thing, because ultimately that's you know that you you're going to have to focus a massive part of your business around that if you want to really take advantage of all that stuff.

Speaker 2: 41:01

For sure, so that'll be interesting. One of the things that I love doing is just discovering interesting digital emotions in the wild, so to speak, and especially in B2C. There's all kinds of cool stuff that B2C has done and does on a regular basis. Are there things that you've encountered in the wild, maybe recently, where you've been like, oh, that's really cool, maybe we should do something like that.

Speaker 1: 41:28

Yeah, something on our roadmap for next year is a digital success hub, and I've seen some other companies doing this in the past and now we're going to invest just more time and resources into it. So, like I've seen one with Qualics and I've seen one with Pendo and a couple others that aren't coming to mind, but I think the strategy behind it is so needed, because just having all of this content in one place, it to talk to this type of customer is ideal, and we started to create it with our office hour schedule and our customer facing site that we use for them to sign up for these sessions. We had some content on there from old email campaigns and wanted to teach them through this site, but then we were still sending them resources and links, all over the place, we only treated that landing page for scheduling office hours.

Speaker 1: 42:27

But if we kind of approach the idea of this differently and have this more topic or usage focused and what do you want to learn? Here are your options you can either watch this video or attend this office hour or read this article then I think we're going to be able to communicate with the customer better. For these ideal outcomes instead of the main goal of this website that we've been maintaining and we we've worked on building to just be like if you're interested in office hours, here's how you sign up. So, definitely, digital success hub is is on the radar and I've really liked what other companies have put out there and I think it's a great idea to be able to get that customer, their information, a lot easier.

Speaker 2: 43:13

Totally. There's nothing that pains me more than sending a customer an email with links to more than one platform in it.

Speaker 1: 43:22

Like I freaking hate that yeah, and you're just copying and pasting links over and over again and and I feel it for a customer too, like do they even click on these?

Speaker 2: 43:34

I don't even know, but no, what if they knew even?

Speaker 1: 43:38

yeah, exactly like they're not gonna click on this. I know when I get links I barely click on it, totally yeah yeah, and then you know you can't log in and you give up.

Speaker 2: 43:49

That's like you know it's so stupid. Look, we are woefully out of time and that makes me sad because I've enjoyed this conversation, but I do want to give you the opportunity to uh, give us a little bit of an insight into what you're paying attention to and what your content diet is all about.

Speaker 1: 44:11

Yeah, I think a lot of LinkedIn, because there's so many great influencers around scale customer success and customer success that are vocal on LinkedIn. So reading their posts, reading the content that they put out and a lot of what I am saying interesting part of my content diet is talking to others. So, yeah, the what you referenced, the meetup group that I've created. I created it out of not knowing where to start and just asking for advice somewhere. I think it was three years ago that I started that.

Speaker 1: 44:45

I was there on LinkedIn said who wants to talk about this? And now it's grown so much that I know that there's others looking for the same thing. And if we're all doing the same thing, why aren't we sharing our experiences and what's worked and what doesn't?

Speaker 2: 45:00

So a lot of it is just through these types of conversations and brainstorming with others in the industry where you can access a calendar, because we're teaming up along with Scott Wilder to host some regular monthly meetups that also will include some special guests and whatnot. So roughly the first Thursday of every month, roughly yeah.

Speaker 1: 45:37

No, thanks to you. I'm really excited for that too. It'll just change the format of it a little bit, but bring in some of the leaders in this space to share what they've been working on.

Speaker 2: 45:45

Yeah, so cool. I love, I love that community approach to your knowledge. Knowledge, you know, gaining knowledge, because obviously the CS community is like so tightly knit. We, you know, we all kind of know each other either directly or tangentially, and everybody's so forthright in sharing and whatnot, as have you, you know, that's it's. It's. It's really cool and awesome, you know, from a just taking taking ownership and leading with that stuff. That's so cool thank you any kudos that you want to give out?

Speaker 1: 46:20

any kudos.

Speaker 1: 46:21

Probably anybody using ai yeah, I would whenever I see that it catches my eye and I just want to. Nothing, no one comes to mind, but I know I've seen it. Yeah, definitely just the implementation of ai to further automate within this segment or using it to our advantage to help the customer more, just anything with ai, because I think there's so much out there that we don't really know what to focus on specifically within this new wave. So if I see anything on it, then that that really catches my attention yeah, all you ai warriors out there consider yourself, shout it out, reach out um speaking consider yourself shouted out.

Speaker 1: 47:05

Reach out Speaking of which, how can people reach out to you and engage with you? Yeah, I can slide into my LinkedIn DMs. I'm on LinkedIn every day, so just my name on LinkedIn is Samantha David, so feel free to reach out to me and, yeah, I would love to chat about anything, awesome.

Speaker 2: 47:24

Well, thank you again for taking the time and it's super fun having you on the show and, yeah, looking forward to getting this one out there, but appreciate your insights.

Speaker 1: 47:34

No, thanks for having me. This has been great.

Speaker 2: 47:39

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