Speaker 1: 0:31

I want to get our lagging indicators up. It takes a while for things to feel like are we driving an impact? You're doing everything every single day, but ultimately everyone's on an annual contract, and so you're waiting to see, a year from now, what is going to be the impact.

Speaker 2: 0:45

Once again, welcome to the Digital Customer Experience Podcast with me, Alex Turkovich. So glad you could join us here today and every week as we explore how digital can help enhance the customer and employee experience. My goal is to share what my guests and I have learned over the years so that you can get the insights that you need to evolve your own digital programs. If you'd like more info, need to get in touch or sign up for the weekly companion newsletter that has additional articles and resources in it. Go to digitalcustomersuccesscom. For now, let's get started. Hello and welcome back to the Digital CX Podcast. My name is Alex Turkovich. I'm so glad that you're back here with me this week and every week as we talk about all things digital in CX. This is episode 83.

Speaker 2: 1:33

I'm pleased to be joined today by Allison Barrett, who leads digital at Airtable. Many of you are familiar with Airtable. Many of you use Airtable on a regular basis and if you are an Airtable user, it is very likely you will have seen some of Allison's team's work. She joined Airtable quite a while ago. I want to say it's a year or something like that. You'll have to listen to the interview to find out the specifics, but she joined and was tasked with really building a digital program from the ground up, and has done a phenomenal job of really getting in the weeds and is gracious enough to share with us some of the things that she did and the journey that she's been on as she has built this program, because I know many, many of you are in the same boat of having to build up a program and not really knowing where to start, not really knowing what to tackle first, and Alison does a really great job of opening up about her own process and then sharing some of her successes along the way.

Speaker 2: 2:40

Before we get into this conversation, though, I just wanted to take a moment and wish you all a very happy holiday season. Merry Christmas for those of you who celebrate, happy Hanukkah, for those of you who celebrate that and anyone else who celebrates something else. I just hope you get some time off and some rest, because that's something that I'm looking forward to as well. I appreciate every single one of you listening on a weekly basis. I wouldn't be here without you, obviously, and you know I really appreciate all of the feedback and the responses and, you know, and the messages that I get on a regular basis. I want to also thank some of the sponsors that have been along for the ride, this year especially, and looking forward to seeing you next year. We've got some amazing things planned for next year and while we will be publishing a couple more episodes, I won't actually be talking to you until the new year. So with that, have a great break. I really hope you enjoy this conversation with Alison Barrett, because I sure did.

Speaker 2: 3:45

Well, welcome to the show. It's so lovely to have you. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a bit because you're doing some really cool stuff at Airtable. But yeah, super, super happy to have you. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a bit because you're doing some really cool stuff at Airtable.

Speaker 1: 3:58

But, yeah, super, super happy to have you. Thank you. Yes, thank you so much for having me. Honestly, this is kind of a full circle moment for me, because when I started this role back in May of 2023, I went and listened to the DCS podcast, trying to get some ideas of other leaders and what people were doing and what people were talking about, and I actually came to this podcast. So it was really cool that you reached out and it's kind of a full circle moment, saying, you know, been been doing this for about a year and some change, and here we are ready to talk about it.

Speaker 1: 4:32

So that's kind of nice to reflect, yeah, and see what we've accomplished.

Speaker 2: 4:36

So you. I guess that would have been one of the early like.

Speaker 1: 4:40

I think like the very early. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 4:42

Like I was going to say, I think I launched in May of 23.

Speaker 1: 4:46

So I know I went back and looked at your, at the episodes and I was like no, I actually started from the very beginning so awesome thank you for doing this work.

Speaker 1: 4:53

I think it's really important. I don't think that a lot of folks have known a ton about scale and digital. I learned about it from my mentors at slack. Slack had a really wonderful scaled program team there, but it's really cool that you now have created this community of leaders and you have your Slack workspace, which I love to go in there and chat with people. And now we can always kind of like find people to ask questions about, so it's fun. So thanks for doing all this work.

Speaker 2: 5:23

Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's still such a black box for a lot of people you know like.

Speaker 2: 5:27

Dan Ennis and I did a thing at Zero In recently and it was like it was just by the nature of some of the questions that were asked in the room. It was like, oh okay, let's pull it back a little bit, let's dial it back a little bit, because, you know, digital CS or scaled CS or whatever you want to call it, it's like still this, it's like this thing and everybody knows now that you should do it. But what is it really? And it's so funny, different approaches to it and we definitely want to talk about your approach to it at Airtable coming out of Slack and all that kind of stuff. But do you want to give us a little bit of a history lesson on Alice and Parrot?

Speaker 1: 6:11

Yes, definitely so. Started my career at Deloitte, did tech consulting there right out of college. It was like business bootcamp. I was flying all over going on site with customers for a few years working on some really exciting multi-year SAP implementations.

Speaker 2: 6:29

Wow Jeez.

Speaker 1: 6:30

Yes, yes, back in the day, and it was. It was a wonderful experience, but I was drawn to more of the startup environment. I lived in San Francisco, but I was on a flight every morning, every Monday morning at 6am, so I wanted to be, you know, where all the action was happening.

Speaker 2: 6:46

And I mean coming out of college, that's, that's probably super fun. But then at some point you're like okay.

Speaker 1: 6:54

Coming out of college. I would highly recommend consulting to anybody graduating. You get to see so many things right out of the gate and I learned such core skills that I still use today PowerPoint, excel, all day, every day presenting to customers going on site right.

Speaker 1: 7:12

You're working side by side with you know, some senior leaders still have some great mentors from you. Know that experience. And then you got to travel and get points. I still have some Starwood points. So, yes, wonderful experience. But I was really gravitating more towards the tech startup environment. So I started at a smaller startup in San Francisco where I was doing account management at a company called MoveWeb, where we were in charge of helping companies go mobile optimized on their websites.

Speaker 1: 7:47

So this was before people were really even before they even had an app or mobile strategy for their com sites. So I helped to manage those projects and professional services.

Speaker 1: 7:59

So, yeah, a lot of fun. I'm kind of dating myself. Before, you know, everyone had their apps and websites. But then I went over to Mixpanel and Mixpanel is a product analytics company and that's where I actually really started to love data and product analytics and started as a CSM. There was kind of right in the beginning when the CSM function started happening. So really feel like I was part of that beginning cohort of CSMs so it was really really fun.

Speaker 1: 8:32

That was when it was just high touch, right. So we only worked with our most strategic customers. We did onsites with them. It was a very, you know, high touch, very consultative experience for our large customers. I moved into management there, helped to grow the team there, managed a team across the States and via an APAC, and then moved over to Slack. So Slack, I was actually brought on for a very specific role. I was brought on to build the champion program at Slack, which is a community program for our enterprise customers, and so it was an opportunity to kind of go back into an icy role and roll up my sleeves and build out this Slack champion community and it was an absolute blast. I was on the road again, I was talking with customers and we built out the Slack community, which was on on the product, on on Slack.

Speaker 1: 9:29

So I think it was one of the very first Slack communities within a workspace, so it was an awesome experience and that's where I started to get really excited about communities and how community could be a really fundamental way that you can scale your business right. Because what we were doing and what the kind of the core focus there was that we knew we couldn't scale our CSM team fast enough, but we wanted to actually create CSMs within the client, within the customer base.

Speaker 1: 10:02

So, we would train them as if they were CSMs working for us at Slack and they became, you know, slack champions. And then they could, you know, we did a lot of train the trainers and they would go and train their you know their employees. And that was kind of a fundamental way that we could scale what we were doing, because there were so many people that we needed to reach, people that we needed to train. You know, back then, you know, people weren't totally all bought in on Slack. Everyone's still using email. They're like what is this thing Right? And so we really needed these like champions within the company because, you know, if not everybody is on the tool, then it doesn't really work Totally.

Speaker 1: 10:42

So we had to do a lot of change management. So that was the primary first role that I started there and then my remit grew into all scaled programs for all of CSG. So you know, we were doing a lot of back of house. So that was kind of the front of house program and then back of house we my team was in charge of the customer health program, so building out all of our health scoring, red account program, the tools so how to you know the entire CS tools strategy and we brought, we had Gainsight, and then we use some internal tools as well and then the voice of customer program, which I'm super, super passionate about.

Speaker 1: 11:19

Voice of customer programs and that's really where you get your customer's feedback and you can funnel it to the product team and then you close the loop when it's time to go to market with the products that your customers requested.

Speaker 1: 11:32

And so just really building that loyalty within your customer base I think is super important to retention and so give it, giving them a voice to the product team. So we built out the voice of customer program and and then we also built all of the content and playbooks for all of the CS team across the globe. So we had about 400 CSMs that we were supporting CS and services that we were supporting and making sure that everyone was using the standard playbooks and all the kind of the same processes across the board. So that's where I became quite obsessed with standardization and processes, because when it comes to scaling your business, that is extremely important to make sure that everybody is doing kind of the same thing and that you're using the best in class resources. Because you would be surprised, a lot of companies, a lot of CSMs are just, you know, building their own versions of decks, and then you know you're wasting a ton of time there.

Speaker 1: 12:36

So when I think about scale, I think about every single person within the organization and how we are scaling what we're doing and in order to you know, to be more successful internally, to be more efficient internally and productive, but then also to support our customers. So yeah, heavy operations, muscle at Slack, you know very big operations, muscle at Slack operations, change management and enablement. So my team also ran our entire like V2 mom OKR process.

Speaker 1: 15:09

So I'm very into OKRs and how they're really important to ladder up to. What is the company objective and what are we doing? Where are we going? And then how does what I am doing every day, how does that align to the company's core objective? Right, and if you can't see that alignment of like, oh, what is this task and why am I doing it? And if it doesn't actually, you know, align to the company objective, then you know that's kind of a question mark of why is it even on my priority list? So I really feel strongly about kind of the OKR process and making sure that people feel like the work that they're doing is connected to, you know, the company's objective.

Speaker 1: 15:50

So yeah that's a little bit of a high level story of Slack. We got acquired by Salesforce. I stuck that out for about a year and then something was calling me to build again. I'm like such a builder. I love to start from scratch. This opportunity at Airtable came up and I had a friend that worked at Mixpanel with me, reach out.

Speaker 1: 16:10

She said you know, I think you'd be awesome at kind of leading our scale. We're trying to figure it out. We have no idea what to do. What do you think? And I was like this sounds awesome.

Speaker 2: 16:17

Sounds good. Yeah, so that's a little bit of a history. That's so cool. One thing that you said that really struck me about your Slack kind of journey was the fact that you treated your champions as essentially extensions of your team, as CSMs, and I think that is one thing that a lot of companies strive to achieve and they can't necessarily get there. I don't think, because, for whatever reason, I mean it does take a lot of effort and a lot of mindfulness and a lot of intention to, like you know, really build up champions, champions in that way. And you know, I think this is the digital cx podcast, but when you think of it there, it is a digital. I mean, there there's, you're talking about thousands of champions, right?

Speaker 2: 17:11

yes, so inherently it's a digital first program where the enablement is digital and the mechanisms for tracking champions is digital and all that kind of stuff. But I love that kind of methodology. Is that something that you're carrying forward into your state of being going forward?

Speaker 1: 17:30

Yes, yes, absolutely. I think it's vital to every organization. We call it something a little bit different here at Airtable it's our Airtable ambassador program, but the same concept, right? So, extension of the CS team, you have boots on the ground that are within the company. They understand their own processes and what they're trying to accomplish way better than we ever could, right? And so we give them the resources to be successful. And then, you know, you reward them, you recognize them, you give them a platform, you give them a stage. A lot of the champion programming is about up leveling people's careers, right? So you, you show that they are a leader in innovation and that they're be. By becoming a champion of your product, they're able to transform, you know, the business and and therefore they get promoted. They, you know, they take on more, and so we like to kind of give them a platform to stand on and we invite them to all of our conferences, we invite them to speak, and then you can see how this kind of really nicely joins with our marketing programs as well.

Speaker 1: 18:36

So a lot of, like you know, the the work that we were doing within the Champion program. We were able to identify, like wonderful resources for case studies and references, all that good stuff. So customer marketing. We had a wonderful collaboration with them, so they loved working with us as well.

Speaker 2: 18:53

So yeah, yeah, and you know it's cool to do that within an organization like Airtable and I guess Slack as well where it's a platform and it's a skill set behind that platform that is unique to that platform and so, by that nature, enabling those folks to take ownership of these things helps them to be more successful within the business, helps them to grow their careers and whatnot, and helps you guys just be sticky as hell. So yeah, and you talked about.

Speaker 1: 19:26

You know it's a big investment. I actually don't know if I totally agree. I think that you need like one dedicated person to focus on it. Yeah, and so at slack, christina mang she was. She's now the the champion of champions, that's what she calls herself. She's great, you should. Yeah, on building the program, keeping folks engaged. You know she owned the workspace and all the events. We did a lot of gamification of, you know, competitions across our champions and things like that, sharing of stories. So so I think you know, if you focus on it and you have a dedicated I think it does take a dedicated resource or a part of your community team to really focus on it then I think that you can be successful. But you'll see just the amount of scale that you're able to bring to your program through something like this is incredibly valuable Our community program at Airtable.

Speaker 1: 20:32

I was so excited about this because you know, like I said, we I started the program in May. It's been a little over a year. You reached out to me, I think, like in January. You're like hey, can you come on the pod?

Speaker 2: 20:43

And I was like oh, Early, early Right.

Speaker 1: 20:47

Yes, I'm not quite ready yet because our lagging indicators. I want to get our lagging indicators up right. Like. As you know, it takes a while for things to feel like are we driving an impact? Are we driving an impact? You know you're doing everything every single day, but ultimately everyone's on an annual contract and so you're waiting to see you know, a year from now what is going to be the impact?

Speaker 1: 21:07

But it was so exciting I think I emailed you immediately after I got the results of these lagging indicators like, oh my God, we got it when, specifically for community, our community program we saw a 20% difference in NDR for customers that were in our community versus customers that weren't, and I was just like this is what I've been waiting for. I knew that what we were doing is driving impact. But then, seeing that, I was like, yes, this is awesome.

Speaker 1: 21:34

And so we're going to do the same thing for the other programs that I own as well, and hopefully we can share that again.

Speaker 2: 21:41

Yeah. So let's talk about that a little bit, because you know you're, you're, you essentially own. If I remember correctly, community education. I think onboarding was part of that and just in general digital yes.

Speaker 1: 21:55

Yeah, so my purview is Scale CSM, which we provide onboarding services for subset of our scaled segment. So at Airtable I own a segment, right, but it's also our. Our programs touch every customer, right?

Speaker 1: 22:11

So and strategy it is segment and strategy. So yes, and the segment has grown as we've become more successful. So that's been exciting to see as well that we can actually take a little bit of the you know the gas off needing as many dedicated one-to-one, or we can actually reallocate those resources in dedicated CS up higher right so they can have smaller books of business right. So the ratios now are feeling a lot nicer on the high touch side because we can take on more right.

Speaker 1: 22:44

So, um, yes, so my team is a scale CSM, digital CS. So your typical email automation journeys. Community education and AI AI programs for CS. Ooh Ooh, we can talk about that, so it's an amazing team. I feel extremely fortunate that I have all of these pillars.

Speaker 2: 23:10

When I joined.

Speaker 1: 23:11

This was not the story actually. It was a much smaller team, but I made the case to our marketing team, so we have education and community actually in marketing prior. Yeah, but I made the case to bring them over to scale just because I felt like what we needed to do for our customers was not tell them why they should be using air table, because they're already buying air tableable. They've already purchased it. We need to teach them how to use Airtable and how to get the most value out of it.

Speaker 1: 23:44

So, in the case where, hey, let's focus our education less on you know, pitching and less on like why Airtable is great because our customers know that they already bought the product. We need to actually go deep and do some really deep curriculum for persona-based learning, and so I kind of made that pitch to bring the team over. So that's kind of how team assembled into what we have today and I honestly think this is the perfect, perfect scaled setup to have this full ecosystem of programs.

Speaker 2: 24:14

It's cool. I like how you've segmented the team, and so the AI component. Is that like one or two people looking after your AI strategy? What does that look like?

Speaker 1: 24:26

Yes, great question. So I have the most incredible employee. She actually was in support and then she was in product and then she was in education and she started getting just so into AI. You know, paying out of pocket to go to all these AI conferences on her own, which is very expensive, it's super expensive.

Speaker 1: 24:49

You can talk about yeah, just very passionate about the subject. And so Michaela her name, she's amazing she really wanted to focus on AI. Michaela her name, she's amazing. She really wanted to focus on AI and I really wanted to have a full-time dedicated resource, because this industry is changing so quickly that I need someone to understand what's going on in AI and all of the various programs that we should be leveraging within CS. And when we started the organization the scaled org my vision was actually, on the digital side, to actually have more of like an AI agent that was helping you through your entire journey of Airtable, where you have kind of a chatbot that knows you, your use case, you know what you're trying to do with the product, and providing you with the tailored education experience to get you started and then connected back to the product to say like oh you, you haven't quite gotten it yet. Like let's keep you know, try this. And as if you had like a one-to-one CSM sitting next to you.

Speaker 1: 25:56

That's kind of the vision that we we painted, and there's a few products that are like starting to get there. I've been keeping my eye on a few of them and we've been testing out a bunch of them, but Michaela's main role is really to one keep tabs on what's going on in the industry. We're testing out some really cool new technologies like Staircase I don't know if you've heard of Gainsight Staircase, ai, reef as well for basically identifying health signals early and predicting churn, etc. So there's lots of really cool stuff happening there. So we're trying out new technology.

Speaker 1: 26:31

And then we're doing a lot of innovation on our side to improve the efficiency internally of the entire CSG org. So we have a pretty lofty goal of a 10% improvement of efficiency through AI programs within within our OKRs this year, and the way that we do that is actually through implement through our own product. So Airtable has AI built into it and so we can actually use our own product to build out account plans and to do handoffs with AEs, et cetera, and to prepare for meetings, prepare our decks, do all kinds of things like that of all of our newsletters that the digital CS team produces, all the first drafts of our newsletters, all the first drafts of our product go-to-market motion. So what's really nice about Airtable is that we have all of our data Within Airtable.

Speaker 1: 27:29

You have a golden data set like your product roadmap, for example, and now with AI in the product, we actually can take the products that are in you know, that are coming down the pipe and understand exactly what those are. And a big you know challenge that we've had on the education side is actually going into JIRA and figuring out like what actually is this product doing Right.

Speaker 1: 27:56

What is it? I don't understand it. Right, it's you know, an engineer wrote the description and we actually have AI sitting on top of the description to write it in customer facing kind of layman's terms. We're like oh, okay, I get it. So we have AI on that, and then we actually have AI to help draft the first comms for our various personas. So we have different personas and different people that care about the updates in our product, and so all of that's kind of automated, and so we've saved so much time.

Speaker 1: 28:25

So we're tracking all the time savings that we are able to deliver and all the processes that Michaela is helping us kind of project manage.

Speaker 2: 28:33

that 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. 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: 29:13

Now back to the show. So that's fascinating to me on multiple levels, and I think we could go any number of ways on this. But the fact of the matter is is it seems like you are well, you know, we talked about this briefly, but essentially you're operating outside of a CSP, and doing so because you have Airtable, doing all these fantastic things that, honestly, I don't know if you could get a CSP to do, you know like in terms of drafting certain things or taking certain information from other areas of the business, just because you, you have the luxury of having multiple internal teams. You know feeding all this data into the same tool, which I think is awesome, and so obviously you can, you know, train AI to interpret those things in certain ways and do things. I guess, from a metrics standpoint and an OKR standpoint you talked about, you know internal efficiency and whatnot. What other things are you tracking in terms of perhaps leading indicators of? You know the efficacy of some of the digital motions that you put in place?

Speaker 1: 30:25

Yeah, definitely I mean. So each pillar is going to have its own you know, leading indicators. Right, so you know. From a community standpoint, I was so excited about that lagging indicator that showed you know NDR right Totally yeah, but some of the leading indicators that we are tracking on a monthly basis.

Speaker 1: 30:44

So I set this up with my team. We have an MBR. We go through this on a monthly basis. We look at kind of the trends and where we're going. You know you have engagement rate, you have members, right, so we look at membership growth, right. And then we really care mostly about the engagement of those members. So who's coming back and who's actually, you know, asking questions and sharing, right. So we have a community forum, we have a public forum. Everyone can go there, go to communityairtablecom and you can start to ask questions of your peers, et cetera. And then one of the earlier programs that I built when community came over was actually building out that enterprise only community as well. So kind of taking some learnings from the Slack. You know champions, right, and now we have an enterprise closed community, so we have an open one for everybody.

Speaker 1: 31:33

And then we have that closed one where it's a little bit smaller and a little safe space to ask your questions and also tailored to like different business models and whatnot.

Speaker 1: 31:42

yeah, it's exactly exactly so. We're looking at, you know, the engagement we look at also, like who's coming to our events and event uh, attendance rates, stuff, like that sentiment score, and then education. So you, we'll, let's talk a little bit about education, because that was the biggest, that was the biggest rock for me. So when I came in and assessed what we needed to do to scale, to create a scaled program at Airtable the biggest challenge that our CSMs were facing and our customers were facing I did 30 interviews right when I landed and was like what's going on here.

Speaker 1: 32:22

What is the? What do we need to fix? First, right, and it was super clear that not having a formal education program and a certification program where customers can go and self-serve and do self-paced learning for their particular persona was really dragging down them and our entire CS organization. So, the CS team was just spending time training individuals on accounts like not even an entire teams, but like they would do the team and they would do individuals and they would build all these custom trainings. And they were just completely under water Scale at all.

Speaker 1: 32:57

Exactly. And so you know, going back to kind of the you know why did we do this? I mean, that doesn't scale at all. We need to know who is taking our education content and all the courses. And then we need to certify people, because you know what People actually want to be certified on Airtable. They want to add it to their resume and then once they are a certified builder of Airtable, they can actually take that skill set elsewhere and they have that badge of honor et cetera. So I know we're kind of going down a tangent here.

Speaker 2: 33:36

It's fine. I love tangents.

Speaker 1: 33:40

Well, I swear we'll get back to the leading indicators. Yeah, so last fall went through the whole kind of process of procurement. But the thing is that people need to understand about scale and digital programs is just because you're not, you don't have as many, you know head count right, so you're you don't have as many CSMs on the ground servicing customers. It is not a free program. It you still. It still costs money and the money comes from procuring software.

Speaker 1: 34:09

So getting good software, your, your digital program is going to run on data and technology right, and you want to get the and you want to get the good stuff. So I was like I wanted the best education program that we can possibly have Was able to hire an amazing leader who came from HubSpot, kevin Dunn he's amazing Came over and helped to stand up the program. So we brought over Skilljar stand up the program. So we brought over SkillJar and since launching so apparently SkillJar said that we had one of the most successful launches they've ever seen and that just goes to show that there was a huge demand for that.

Speaker 1: 34:47

Yeah, people wanted to get certified, they wanted to show their skills, they wanted to up-level. They don't actually probably even want to wait for a training from their CSM.

Speaker 2: 34:58

Right, right and get in there and get it done.

Speaker 1: 35:01

Just get in there and do it on your own.

Speaker 1: 35:03

Yeah that's why I think, from a scale, you know what the scaled ecosystem if you have all their programs in place, it actually services your customers, you know, providing them the best resource at the best time in the format that they desire, right? Sometimes that format could be self-serve education, sometimes it could be an email, right? Sometimes it could be a community meetup and sometimes it could be your CSM, sometimes it could be an AI chat bot. You're just like I'm locked out. What do I need to do? You don't want to talk to a human, one of the you know things that we did from ai programs. We brought on a chat bot so you can, you know, ask those questions. You can ask questions about the product basics, so you need to have various ways that people can get what they need and therefore the csms can actually do what they do, which is create value and build relationships and go on site with customers. They shouldn't be troubleshooting and asking. You know, helping people answer random questions.

Speaker 2: 36:04

Totally.

Speaker 1: 36:05

So roundabout way of getting to leading indicators, but we're back.

Speaker 2: 36:09

Yeah, we're back. I think one of the most impressive things about your approach just in hearing you talk about it is just the fact that you went in and just listened for a while, which I think a lot of people don't really spend a lot of time doing. But you went in, you listened, you're like, okay, where's the problem, let's go solve. You know. And so there are others who are probably in your shoes where you were last May, jumping into kind of this new world and this new program, and you know either building it from the ground up or, you know, taking the existing program to the next level. Things did you learn about during this process that you might share with others in terms of how to approach? You know how to approach prioritizing, setting the strategy, pulling the teams together, all of that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1: 37:06

Yes, yes, definitely so, came in, listened for a few weeks. I did my tour. Right From there I was able to kind of build a list. I think I had 10 items on that list. At this point in time I only had two program managers reporting to me, so very small team, so we weren't going to be able to solve everything right.

Speaker 1: 37:27

So it was prioritization, impact right, assessing a level of effort and the impact that we were going to get from these programs. So I listed everything out. I kind of said, hey, here's kind of what I think matters the most. Here's the high, here are some quick wins, here are some big bets. Do you agree? I had, you know, all the CS leadership team and sales leadership team kind of vote on. You know what rose to the top.

Speaker 1: 37:51

So that kind of became clear what we wanted to tackle first, yeah, and then shopped around the ideas, of course, to head of product. I had a meeting with our CEO as well and just said, hey, all right, here's kind of where we're at. These are the things that we're going to tackle right now because they're easy to do. But here's actually those big bets that these are going to require. You know, collaboration with cross-functional teams. This is going to be expensive, this is going to be. You know I need help from data engineering and analytics, and you know legal procurement, et cetera. So made those asks as a part of that. So the quick wins that we were able to do, though, because you know when you're starting out this program. There are some low hanging fruit items that you can probably just do right off the bat and there's those are the things that people are just kind of like procrastinating on, which is standard.

Speaker 1: 38:42

I would say start with what your CSMs are doing.

Speaker 2: 38:45

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 38:45

CSMs are, uh, already working with your customers. They already have kind of their onboarding, training decks, their value decks, et cetera. Hopefully, hopefully, people are using the same resources and if they're not, the first thing to do to scale your organization is actually to assess and grade and say who's actually doing this the best on the team and why. Great, let's take that as a starting point and actually package and standardize it. Then let's actually scale that to a scaled resource, right, so you, you can then create a piece of content, um, that you can put on your website, even if you don't have an LMS, that just says like, here's the best way to get started using our product Right.

Speaker 1: 39:29

So those are kind of the quickest things that we did was standardized playbooks right off the bat. It was like everyone needs to be using the same thing. The onboarding journey, right. So that first touch point with your customer of what do they need to know right off the bat, that's a pretty quick and easy one. If you don't have access to the email systems, work with your marketing team. Make friends, they will help you out as well.

Speaker 2: 39:54

I think making friends is one of the most important skill sets of a digital person.

Speaker 1: 39:59

I think making friends is my number one piece of advice, because you know, you, this, this role is so cross-functional and this is why I love this role, because you know we are working with product, with procurement, with it, with, with data, with engineering, with analytics, right everyone, yeah everyone?

Speaker 1: 40:21

yeah, so I do think you know. Luckily I'm a social butterfly, so that helps. But I also just like to hear, like, what's going on? What is your okrs? I always compare notes when we go through planning, like what are you working on? Do you have feedback for me on my roadmap? You know what's coming down the pipe from product perspective. Okay, great, did you put in some of our product requests? Great, we're going to help you out by making sure that people actually use the product that you're building through our education or all of our. You know all of our touch points, et cetera. So, making friends, right, super important. But yeah, so kind of went through that prioritization process. Identifies those quick wins. Uh, we, basically we learned that there was some pain points in our onboarding process that we really just needed to teach, you know, record a video of how to do this in our admin panel and then put that on our website, and that actually saved our CSMs, like a ton of time, absolutely they were like we just needed this admin video.

Speaker 1: 41:22

Thank you so much. So really quick. You know things like that our product launch comms. That also is something that I think is a pretty easy one to tackle. First is that your CSM should not be spending time updating their customers on what the product roadmap is. You know, unless they, unless it's very strategic.

Speaker 2: 41:41

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 41:41

Right, but I think that you can really automate that, especially if you have air table doing a lot of this you know, processing where you have your product roadmap information there and then you can, you know, build it off.

Speaker 2: 41:52

Yeah, like your customers shouldn't be getting the only communication about product releases from your CSM. They should be getting the information from the company and from general distribution and then if it applies to your specific use case and your goals and your outcomes, then absolutely the CSM should drive it home. You know Exactly, yeah, that's awesome.

Speaker 1: 42:11

Yeah. So then, yeah, put together kind of those big bets, those things that we needed to, you know, really put some muscle around and more finances around as well.

Speaker 2: 42:21

So that was the.

Speaker 1: 42:22

LMS and standing up the education program, the community and advocacy program, kind of that was where I made the calls Like I would like community to come over to scale. For these reasons, I really think that, you know, community is such, a such a fundamental part of scaling success. So that's where that came in. And then the AI kind of agent idea that was also part of my big bets that we're still figuring out, but we do have that chat bot, so that kind of you know created the, the, the plan, and then we started to. I think the next order of business is building an amazing team.

Speaker 1: 42:58

So that was like you know the team. I walked in. They're like who is this, what are we doing? And my most important mission was to make sure that people are, you know, doing the best work of their lives. Really, that's what I love to do, and so I'm bringing people together and building out like a mission, our vision and our values for scaled and show them, hey guys, like this is where we're going. We are on a rocket ship. We are a startup within a startup where we can move very, very fast.

Speaker 1: 43:35

I was really excited about this role because I was giving so much greenfield. Really, they were like Allison, you are here, tell us what you need. You have funding, you have resources, you have. I had a small team. Now I have a larger, a little bit larger team, and so it was like go, just go, tell us what your plan is and go, and so that was a huge blessing. It was really fun to be operating that way, and so I needed my team to also be on board. That like guys, we are going to move fast Are you ready Like let's go, and so got the team excited.

Speaker 1: 44:06

You know the things that are really important, I think when you're building out a new team and especially if you're coming in as a, as a new leader, was kind of to set the vision, values, document what the career matrix looks like, right. So for this program's role like how are you going to, what are the expectations and how are we going to achieve greatness, and why do you want to be on this team?

Speaker 2: 44:24

Right.

Speaker 1: 44:25

I think my biggest accomplishment outside of you know, like the business metrics at Airtable, was seeing the EVS scores a year later. After you know we I joined and then we did it again and a year later, evs being our employee voice survey but the highest you know change in the highest employee voice of part of the team, and so it was just really fun to see that, and the reason why is because these people are my team is amazing. They're working so hard, they're working so hard, but I'm not asking them to work hard.

Speaker 2: 44:57

They're doing it because they love it. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1: 44:59

They love it. They love what we're doing. It's so innovative, it's fresh, it's new. We're failing fast, we're learning, we're putting out new programs, and what's really fun, too, is just the celebration that comes along with it, because everything that we do is taking something off of the plate of the high touch team where they're like, oh my gosh, thank you so much. So they get a lot of that and a lot of like standing ovations, you know, through Slack, and so it's, it's been, it's been a blast. So we've been celebrating our wins and we've been sharing what we're. You know what we're working on. I'm a huge proponent of an open roadmap, right, right. So we did like our virtual road show where I got everybody.

Speaker 1: 45:39

You know, we're all over the country, and so yeah we do a virtual road show in slack, which is kind of fun. We did that at slack too, where you kind of you do like a clip, a video clip, two-minute clip of like hey, I'm allison, this is what I'm working on, blah blah, and we posted in, you know, the all CSG channel.

Speaker 2: 45:55

People go that's great.

Speaker 1: 45:58

Um, yeah, so we I share a roadmap we get. We get feedback on what we're working on. But we have just been. When I say that we have been like pedal to the metal jamming. The amount of programs that we have built in the last year is pretty astounding. I mean, it just is because I have an amazing team, so it's been a lot of fun.

Speaker 2: 46:19

That's so cool. I mean, yeah, just to think that you started a year and change ago and the amount of change, that that's a ton of work. And what I was going to circle back on from a comment you made is around establishing vision mission, all that kind of stuff. It's like you know, that's the stuff that makes like the. Those words, those individual words, make me physically cringe because I've been part of so many different like vision mission exercises that have been completely misguided and whatever.

Speaker 2: 46:58

But every time, you know, I've pulled together teams around this kind of stuff and also given them ownership in part of that mission and vision and defining what that is and defining what people not only you know want to achieve, you know as part of the team, but what they personally need out of their employee experience. It is so fundamentally grounding that you remove this layer of just kind of second guessing or you remove this layer of just questioning and it allows you to just like, literally just pick a point and go and execute on that stuff with clarity. So kudos to you for pulling that together and the the follow-on question I was going to ask okay, I'm not going to.

Speaker 2: 47:46

I'm going to pivot to a different question. I was going to ask what your, what your strategy around executive alignment is, but I'm not even going to ask because you are like all over, like communicating and going. You mentioned going to the CEO presenting what you're going to do, you know, and really setting the tone for what the program is, what the program can achieve, and doing that in a very open manner. And I think, ultimately, when it comes to executive buy-in manner, and I think ultimately when it comes to executive buy-in, that's the key. Like you're presenting on, you know what it is that you're here to do, what your plans are, how those will impact the business, you know, and giving those progress reports over time.

Speaker 1: 48:29

So yeah, I mean, I think if I could offer one piece of advice for anybody that's listening document your work. I am a huge fan of putting together a walking deck.

Speaker 1: 48:40

I don't know if you've heard that term but, yeah, so I think it's a Salesforce term, but I've adopted it and I love it. So walking deck is where you document the scope of what your team owns and what you're working on, and it is a living, breathing document that basically shows you know the, what you're currently working on, what your roadmap looks like in the future and what you've done in the past. And so that was one of the other first things that I did was like okay, let's define scale. I think I had a few kind of defining meetings when I joined. That was like what is scale? Why are we here, you know, and sometimes people hear scale. They're like you know, am I, you know, is what I'm doing not going to be as important as a high touch CSM? No, the answer is absolutely not. Like we work together and you have your superpower, which is going in person with customers and driving value, and our superpower is helping you be more successful through all these other programs.

Speaker 1: 49:34

Right, so, really defining what that looks like, but so documenting my walking deck, it's something that I always have ready to go. I found it was really interesting and you got to be audible, ready at all times, understanding you know where you're leading. The indicators are kind of back to that leading indicator. You know, I have a document that we talk about. Every other team meeting where we go through for education, OCSM, digital, CS, AI community, we basically show like here are the numbers, here's where we're at right now so we always have that ready and then we do our QBRs right.

Speaker 1: 50:07

So the QBR is a great opportunity for me to show off the great work that the team has been doing. But yes, so back to the walking deck. I recently got a request on a Monday by our CFO to say hey, do you think you could share what you and your team are doing on at my all hands on Wednesday? And I was like, and she was like I'm so sorry. Usually we give people two weeks to prepare and I was like don't need it, Like we're ready.

Speaker 1: 50:33

We're coming in. That was a. When you talk about executive, you know presentations.

Speaker 1: 50:39

That was the perfect opportunity for me to go into that meeting because she owns finance team, as you know, finance, legal, it data and, like the procurement arm right and so yeah I was in the process of procuring more software and I had a lot of asks of from the data engineering side to make the software work, and so it was actually my opportunity to connect the work that they're doing to support me to the actual business. And it was the first time that they were like oh my gosh, I get it now, like I understand why you need the software and you need our, our team to help, and I was like everything that you guys are doing is actually supporting our customers in this direct way, right. And so they they really felt empowered by that. They were like this is really cool. And so I really take the cross-functional executive alignment meetings.

Speaker 1: 51:31

I try to do those with each core team. You know if I, if I can, once a quarter right Product is another one right when we need to be very tied attached to the hip as well as marketing. So the marketing team we have a lot of cross-functional collaboration there, cross-event strategy and lifecycle marketing, and so, yeah, staying up to date with you know what we're doing, what they're doing, providing each other feedback. And then I have that constantly. We have our roadmap in Airtable of everything that we're currently working on that people can kind of go in and request new things, new pieces of content, new programs, but that's also like a living, breathing kind of area where they can go and check out.

Speaker 2: 52:11

That's amazing. That's amazing. Well, look, we are woefully out of time and I feel like, I feel like we could like keep going on this forever, because you have so much you know wealth to bring, and I think I can probably speak for your team when I say that you know they're lucky to have you as a leader, because you're obviously very thoughtful and and forward with all of this stuff, which is great, just rapid fire.

Speaker 2: 52:38

A couple of quick questions that I always ask which is first off, what's in your content, diet that others can benefit from?

Speaker 1: 52:47

Other than this podcast. I mean this podcast for sure. Honestly, it's going to be pretty boring, but I'm a huge fan of all in. I love yeah, I love listening every week.

Speaker 1: 52:59

I I love the various perspectives that they bring and you know it's always as current events, but also the tech world, how that's going to impact us and what we're working on, and it's always so current and exactly what I'm thinking about from like ai, and I love, I love that podcast. Other than that I, I have a four-year. Than that I, I have a four-year-old who I'm just in a two-year-old, and so I'm a lot of a mom.

Speaker 2: 53:21

So you're watching Bluey.

Speaker 1: 53:23

There's well, yes, a little bit of Bluey but a lot of Dr Becky good inside, because you know we're trying to figure out big feelings and all that stuff.

Speaker 1: 53:32

So, like being a mom is actually my number one, like that is the, that is the job, that is the job and this is actually like my side. You know fun job that you know I go and work with adults and then I have like my number one job, which is at home, and so a lot of my content is around parenting and figuring out you know how to do this right, and that's mostly what I think about to be honest, that's great.

Speaker 2: 53:55

Yeah, no, I sympathize greatly. Are there any shout outs that you want to give out too?

Speaker 1: 54:01

Oh, yes, thank you for asking. Yeah, so I mean, I talked about Slack, my mentors there. Kelly Bray I don't know if you've met her, she is a. She is really a visionary when it comes to digital CS and scale. I learned really everything from Kelly and I am just so grateful for being able to work with her for four years.

Speaker 1: 54:23

Kelly Bray, christina Kosmowski she also led CS at Slack and brought me on to do the champion program. She kind of was the one that envisioned it. And Allison McPhail she's amazing as well. She leads scale now at OpenAI. We're always like texting and sharing ideas and things that we're doing, so those relationships have been wonderful. Scott Kubicki has been a huge mentor and proponent of helping me bring this multi-pillar program into the scaled under one roof, so huge shout out to him. I'm sure I'm missing more, a lot, but also I think, like the, the CS meetup, um, is a great one that the folks are bringing to San Francisco. I think there was one in New York last couple of weeks ago, which, so just getting people together. Nick Mehta does an amazing job. I love going to the Gainsight events too, so the folks that are getting us all in one room. It always feels like a fun high school reunion in some ways, yeah, totally.

Speaker 1: 55:27

Just seeing everyone you've ever worked with and if I had more time, I would love to just spend more time in the community, out there and chatting with friends, because that's what it feels like. So thanks to all those, to you and everyone that's kind of bringing this community together.

Speaker 2: 55:41

Yeah, for sure, that's awesome. Well, where can people find you engage with you? I mean LinkedIn, probably, right.

Speaker 1: 55:48

Yeah, yeah, I would say LinkedIn, definitely that's kind of the main place you can find me.

Speaker 1: 55:53

Yeah, I get lots of questions. I'm happy to answer. I feel like, you know, hopefully today people walked away with a little bit of a toolkit of you know how to get started and it's it can be super daunting when you're, you know, just getting going, and I felt that way a year ago too and I was like, oh my gosh, there's so much to do. And then it's just like, brick by brick, little by little, every single thing is a win and then you fast forward a year and then you have a real program that works. And a year goes by so fast, obviously in startup world. So you know I think anyone that's listening just start small, take those quick wins right, start documenting you know your your it budget and you know and start to build those relationships internally with all of the various cross-functional teams. Motivate your team, tell them it's going to be awesome, they're going to have the ride of their life. You know those types of things. But, yeah, if people have questions about specifics, feel free to reach out. Happy to answer.

Speaker 2: 56:54

Amazing, wise words from none other than Alison Barrett. Thank you so much for being on the show. It was a blast.

Speaker 1: 57:00

Thank you so much.

Speaker 2: 57:02

You're welcome. 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.