Speaker 1: 0:31

The outcomes are that at the end of the day, to what extent do you raise the likelihood or the probability that a customer is going to stay or buy more, and you can measure that difference in probability and you can put a dollar value against that, and then you can add up your costs and say are we getting our money's worth here?

Speaker 2: 0:51

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.

Speaker 2: 1:24

Hello and welcome to the Digital CX Podcast, the show where we talk about all things digital in CX. My name is Alex Turkovich and this is episode 87, where we have an amazing interview lined up with Ed Powers, who has been in and around CS for a long, long, long, long time, has consulted many, many, many leaders and organizations and businesses on how to successfully run and scale CS and all that good stuff. In this episode, we talk about things like availability bias and how the customer experience as we perceive it isn't always how our customers perceive it and also just basics of understanding the why behind why customers make certain decisions and how that impacts digital and all that kind of stuff. So really fascinating conversation with someone who's been around the block a time or two and I just realized I'm wearing my beanie. It's cold here and I've been wearing a beanie all day and, as much as I like you, I didn't feel like fixing my hair.

Speaker 2: 2:26

So you're getting this today. Anyway please enjoy this conversation with Ed Powers, because I sure did. Anyway, please enjoy this conversation with Ed Powers, because I sure did. Well, look, ed, welcome to the show. I'm so pleased we're on. I'm grateful that we actually met in person. You know, it's rare that I actually do one of these shows without having met the person in person before doing the show. But we met at Churn Zero. So that was a fun Churn Zero and I guess it's called. We met there and had a good time.

Speaker 2: 2:59

But yeah welcome to the show. So pleased to have you.

Speaker 1: 3:01

Great to be here and thanks for the invitation.

Speaker 2: 3:04

Absolutely so. I you know, obviously I did a little bit of LinkedIn stalking and, as you do, obviously I did a little bit of LinkedIn stalking and, as you do, would love to get a little bit of your background. But you spent a pretty huge portion of your early career at HP. Was that your first big boy gig or did you do stuff before then?

Speaker 1: 3:28

No, that was my first big boy gig then. No, that was my first big boy gig. I was fresh out of college and joined HP back in the day a hundred years ago and I was, I was, was in sales. I sold test equipment, uh HP's test and measurement organization, when it was all part of one company back then. So I had a territory in uh, northern Illinois.

Speaker 2: 3:50

Wow, so you were. You were on the ground selling this stuff on site probably.

Speaker 1: 3:57

Yeah, for about six years. So then I did some marketing, field marketing. Really enjoyed that. And then I got interested in quality and in operations, so then I wound up going into that too.

Speaker 2: 4:09

Yeah, yeah, interesting. So I mean, since then, like you know, you've obviously been over the last few years like crazy focused on, on, you know, post-sale and customer success and all that kind of stuff. What is it about you and your persona and your psyche that draws you to or towards just CS or CX in general?

Speaker 1: 4:33

in general. Well, you know it's interesting. I spent, of all things, 10 years in the luxury hospitality industry and doing some startups there, and I knew nothing about hospitality. I'm an engineer by training and so I wound up, just by happenstance, starting a business, a couple of businesses, and growing that.

Speaker 1: 4:49

And what struck me, having completely shifted industries, is you know there are some, there are things to be learned from hospitality and technology and you know it was quite a learning experience to understand when you're in the hospitality business, it's customer experience is not a thing, it is everything right, you have to do that. Well, there's just too many other options out there, too much competition and you have to just deliver there. And very different from tech, where it's more of a nice to have. You know, people rest on their technology and the pricing and they're trying to compete on that aspect of it. And you know, okay, we don't want to be jerks in our customer experience and that is about as far as it goes. So when I came back into tech, I sought to maybe apply some of those lessons and customer success seemed to be a really good place to do that.

Speaker 2: 5:46

It's interesting because I do feel like you know it's interesting, because I do feel, like you know and this has been a recurring theme on the show too is like taking lessons from B2B. But in this case, you know, luxury hospitality into or I should say, b2c into B2C arena that for some reason we're kind of afraid to go down that path in B2B, or just you know it hasn't, it maybe doesn't feel applicable to a lot of people, when in reality there's a lot of things that B2C is doing that we should and could absolutely implement to, you know, to help that customer experience.

Speaker 1: 6:31

And in some cases they're actually expected Exactly. And you know what strikes me about software is it's pretty insular as an industry. You know people grow up and stay in software and don't have other industry perspectives, right, and what I've been doing, especially over the last 10 years or so, is applying lessons in radically different verticals into customer success. And people are like where did you learn this? There's a whole other world over there where this is being done, right, yeah, and I'm always surprised that they're surprised.

Speaker 2: 7:07

Yeah, exactly Exactly. I mean, you know there's little things too, like what was it? You know, I recently ordered a new pair of of glasses, cause you know glasses and it was through Warby Parker and they have a really seamless kind of experience between their stores, their website, their SMS and all of that. Like you know, the status updates that you get when you place an order with them across all the platforms is super highly integrated. You know, and those are the kinds of things that always impressed me about B2C, that have their stuff together and you just don't really see that same level of, you know, integration between customer systems in B2B as you do in B2C.

Speaker 1: 7:58

It's not a thing really there's a few that do it and there's so much you can learn from that. You know so many great examples and what they do to do, what they do at tremendous scale is what we're struggling to do in customer success.

Speaker 2: 8:12

Constantly. Yeah, exactly, kind of a downer when you think about it. But you know, the thing that I find fascinating about that is that is the crux of digital CS.

Speaker 2: 8:26

you know it is what it is all about and it's. You know, a lot of people kind of pigeonhole digital CS into this bucket of oh you do, email campaigns and you know all this kind of stuff, but really what it is it's. It's the entirety of the digital experience and how it's integrated and and and also how your humans are integrated into it. You know, it's not just tech touch, solely tech touch. So so I guess where that leads me is is the natural. Next question is is is something that I do ask you know, the majority of my guests who've been on the show which is you know what would be your kind of boilerplate, elevator pitch of what digital cs is if somebody off the street were to ask you.

Speaker 1: 9:14

I would just say it's using electronic means to ensure customers realize the value they expected.

Speaker 2: 9:28

Yeah, simple, very simple, and you know what I like about that it's wonderfully specific.

Speaker 1: 9:32

Yet very ambiguous too.

Speaker 2: 9:32

I've been accused of that a few times uh, but I I think that there's there's, there is a a validity to the ambiguity, because you know, what one company or person does digitally is going to be completely different than what another company or you know does digitally like it's there's different than what another company or you know does digitally Like it's. There's so many it depends moments when it comes to designing this stuff that you kind of have to be ambiguous.

Speaker 1: 10:01

Well said, yeah, and it's. It's the approach and it's the the method that's used to get there. That makes all the difference. The devil's in the details, as they say. But if you approach it in a consistent way, you know that gets you home. But the path may be entirely yours.

Speaker 2: 10:19

Yeah, exactly, Exactly so. Yeah, so the success element so using technology to drive your customer success, which is great, I mean, ultimately, you try to have those success outlined like what does success mean? Driving success we're driving revenue retention and those kinds of things. As part of our prep, we talked a little bit about how CS can have a much more direct impact on revenue retention and I think, first and foremost, I think it would be great to get your take and your input, because I know you have a lot to say about this in terms of the impact that a CS org in general can have on NRR in a more, you know, maybe more direct way, because I feel like a lot of us kind of look at it in a passive sort of way.

Speaker 1: 13:24

Yeah, and I guess what I would say is the magic all happens when you start asking a very simple question. It's why? Why are customers renewing? Why are other customers leaving? Why are some customers buying more? Why are some customers buying less? When you really understand why, then you understand what context customer success has and what you can contribute to it Right? So a lot of the work I do with clients is to go ask that question and to ask it in such a way that you really get the answer. You know, a lot of times people will ask for churn reasons and they'll have a form or whatever They'll. You know it's secondhand and people will check a box.

Speaker 1: 14:08

Yeah but they don't really understand what's behind that. Why did you decide what you did? What led up to that? What were the drivers in that decision? So you ask a certain set of questions that really reveals why they made the decisions they did, and then so with that context, then you can go quantify that You're going to hear common themes if you talk to enough people.

Speaker 1: 14:30

I just did this with a client a little while ago where, you know, you asked two sets of people those that did renew and bought more and those that left. And what's striking is a lot of times they talk about the same reasons, right? One of them, they're staying because they got X and the other folks left because they didn't get X. Well, guess what? X is a factor. It's a very important factor, right? So you can pretty quickly, if you interview customers, narrow down that list of real drivers in that decision and then you can go quantify that and when you do that, you collect that data. Then very quickly you see a distribution where it's a Pareto distribution or PowerLock distribution, where you have a small number of factors that explain the vast majority of the behaviors.

Speaker 1: 15:20

And when you look at those factors, what you find is that there are certain things that customer success can do and influence, and there's a whole lot of things that you can't influence. For example, you don't set the price, you don't determine who's a good fit for your product. That's in sales and marketing. You can't change the product or the features, right. But things like as we've well, no one have talked about for years, didn't get enough value out of it, didn't get enough usage, and you can still quantify that.

Speaker 1: 15:51

And if you can match that in terms of revenue, frequency, probability, now you can quantify what your contribution is right. So that is just a question of well, how much impact do we make? And what does that look like when we look at the operations of customer success compared to what the outcomes are at the end of the day, to what extent do you raise the likelihood or the probability that a customer is going to stay or buy more? And you can measure that difference in probability and you can put a dollar value against that. And then you can add up your cost and say are we getting our money's worth here? And if you go through that exercise, surprise, surprise, just getting customers to that next level to increase those odds, usually more than pays about the kinds of things that I will track in a digital program, you know.

Speaker 2: 16:58

I think there's like your classic CS. You know retention metrics and all that kind of stuff. But I'm also looking at marketing. You know metrics in terms of what campaigns are you running and are they effective? Open rates, click-through rates, engagement rates, all that kind of stuff. But I think what you just hit on as well is kind of that magic third bucket, which is the attribution In the digital realm, maybe campaigns and maybe whatever. But just in general, which of your CS motions and CS actions had direct attribution to revenue? That's notoriously difficult for a lot of people. It's elusive.

Speaker 1: 17:42

I mean, either you don't have the data and you need to go collect that data, or you have the data and you don't understand how to analyze the data. Right yeah, this is a mathematical, this is a statistical argument, and if you have the data, you can show it very quickly. With the right set of statistical tools, you can demonstrate that and I do that all the time with my clients is to show exactly what the difference in probabilities are. And don't take it from me. This is out of your data, right?

Speaker 2: 18:10

Yeah, exactly, difference in probabilities are and don't take it from me.

Speaker 1: 18:12

This is out of your data, right? Yeah, exactly. And when you're working in the facts, people don't debate it so much.

Speaker 2: 18:18

Yep, yep, yep, just as long as they trust the data that it's coming from which is another whole can of worms which is a whole another can of worms. I take it you are a fan from your earlier answer, that you're a fan of the exit interview in general, like a customer exit interview. Have you seen that implemented particularly well and do you mind sharing some of that secret sauce?

Speaker 1: 18:45

I rarely see it done well by a company themselves. Rarely see it done well by a company themselves, and the reason being is that the people that you typically ask to go collect that information. If it's the qualitative form of that, you know they actually talk to somebody. Usually the people that do that have a lot of biases, and it's completely understandable, right. They tend to look at things from their own perspective. Having an outside person come in and ask that very, very much helps to eliminate some of that.

Speaker 1: 19:14

You can be, you know tell me more about that and what happened and why did it happen. And you know you ask a different set of questions than someone working for the company would. And the person you're interviewing is a little bit more comfortable because they know they're not going to offend anybody, right? This isn't no one's going to take what they say in the wrong way. They can be completely candid and explain all of it to you and feel completely safe doing it right. So almost always when I've done this, you know we surface things that people had no idea, had no idea that was what was really going on, right? So I think in good companies they have a healthy dose of outside people doing it for them, understanding that they have their own biases. And we we all go through life with our blinders on, and one of the gifts we give each other is we say, hey, you know you got a blinder on that. I had no idea, you know.

Speaker 2: 20:06

Yeah, absolutely. I have yet much like you have yet to see an internally run exit interview process that A persists and doesn't die quickly after it's launched and B is, to your point, that successful Because, honestly, if I were to receive a call from a vendor that I had churned out of, I probably wouldn't really want to spend any significant amount of time on the phone.

Speaker 1: 20:33

Right, and it's a trick to get people, even as a third party, you know, because there's kind of this window of opportunity. After that They'll ignore you. When it's still fresh, yeah, they're willing to talk because they just made that decision and they want to share that Right. They're still processing it themselves.

Speaker 1: 20:50

But, you know, I think one thing that's very important as well and I've seen this several times is that it doesn't you don't have to do this qualitative interviewing all the time, but you do need to do it frequently enough. One of the clients I work with, you know, was absolutely sure. I know these customers, I've been in this space for 15 years, I know all about this, and I had to really really push them and say please, please, please, let me go talk to your customers, because I think we're missing something.

Speaker 2: 21:18

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 21:19

And finally relented. And then I went and talked to them and huge surprises, right, I mean their. His whole market had shifted and he wasn't even aware of it right they were selling to an entirely different segment that he was unaware of, which explained what he was seeing in terms of his churn behavior, right, and so you need to do this enough that you have that visibility frequently enough, because markets are always changing.

Speaker 2: 21:45

Yeah, this reminds me I was advising a company not long ago that was really, really hesitant to launch like new digital outreach campaigns because they were afraid of rocking the boat.

Speaker 2: 22:02

You know, I don't think they had and much like kind of you alluded to.

Speaker 2: 22:07

There wasn't this culture of let's just go talk to our customers.

Speaker 2: 22:11

You know, it was just like let's, you know, wait till they reach out to support or something like that.

Speaker 2: 22:15

But there was this massive hesitance to even like think about distributing, you know, digital comms for this fear of the customer, you know, responding, and I just thought that was so it throughout that entire organization, that this kind of hesitancy to reach out. You know that I've never really encountered anything quite like it, and so you know there's a lot of kind of change management that has to go into those kinds of things as well and to open yourself up, you know, to that kind of feedback. And that kind of leads me to my next question just around the customer experience in general, because one of the things as a CS leader that I like to do periodically is to insert myself into the customer experience and go secret shopping, if you will, in my own processes, and it's amazing what you uncover when you do that kind of stuff. But I was curious to get your sentiment on or your take on that sort of thing or how you typically advise your customers. Kind of, stay connected to the customer and the customer experience.

Speaker 1: 23:21

Yeah, that's a great question and I think it is so essential to again go back and talk to customers and ask the questions that you don't normally ask. Back and talk to customers and ask the questions that you don't normally ask. There is Daniel Kahneman, the late Daniel Kahneman, a behavioral scientist. You know one of the things he labels this as what you see is all there is.

Speaker 1: 23:41

You see, that is what that is. So what you see is all there is, and it's about availability bias, whatever you can easily recall. Whatever you can remember defines your reality, and the problem when we think about our customer journey is we think about our customer journey from our own perspective. Right, we talk about it because we know what this is. We see this all the time we interact with these customers and, of course, they follow our process. So we have therefore defined what their journey is. The problem is, that's not the customer's journey, it's just your experience of what that is from your vantage point.

Speaker 1: 24:17

And a lot of what I do, again talking to clients, is to say you know, tell me the story, tell me about the time. You know, from the time when you purchased this product to when you said, aha, there's the value I was looking for. And just you know, just describe that to me what actually happened on your end, what were the things, what steps did you have to go through? What were the things that you were doing that maybe your vendor wasn't even aware you were having to do, right? And when you unpack that, you find all kinds of surprises that there's certain things that were easy for them and quick and they loved it. And then there's certain things that were easy for them and quick and they loved it. And then there were other things that were a huge struggle. And then there were another whole set of things that they had no idea and those kinds of opportunities that's, new products and services for them.

Speaker 1: 25:03

Right, there's an abundance of things that you can get from that that will smooth that journey and make things faster, more effective. One thing we typically, for example, tend to overlook on the technology side is we're hyper-focused on the technology. We know how our tools work and we know the data and how it all connects and integration, blah, blah, blah, blah blah. We know how to run these projects. We're extremely technology-focused. We know very little about the customer's process, what they have to change in their process or their policies or the behaviors of their users. Right, when you change technology, by definition you change the process and you change the people that are interacting with it, and we tend to forget about that, ignore it. Hey, that's a customer's problem and yet there are so many things that we can do to make that easier and faster for them and more likely to get the results they're after.

Speaker 2: 25:59

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Speaker 2: 26:43

Now back to the show. That's so true. There's also this extension of being hyper-focused on the tech and the speeds and feeds and the how-tos that we miss a lot of times, which is that consultancy layer of injecting what expertise you've gleaned from how your other customers are doing certain things and what processes that they've implemented. A lot of times, I think we miss out on the opportunity for us to not just drive value through, like the software, but drive value through advice and general guidance on how to do certain things in a way that you know, makes sense based on what we've seen, right, yeah, and I think digitally add to that.

Speaker 2: 27:32

We miss out on doing that digitally a lot of times. Because you know you outcome that a certain customer is trying to achieve, or you know an activity that usually leads a customer into a dark path, that's prime time for you to digitally intervene, either like in product or with an email or just as an internal alert, to say, hey, you know, go check out Acme, they're about to screw themselves. Yeah, kind of speaking of digital motions and whatnot. You know, I'd be curious to get us. It's always great speaking with people who are active in the consulting world, because you see a lot of different things and you see a lot of different CS orgs like operate in different ways. Are there? Are there cool like digital emotions that you've encountered, you know in the past few years that you feel like you know are things that other people could kind of pick up on and and and track down, or things you've seen in the wild that are just like really cool.

Speaker 1: 28:48

Yeah, and I can't get too specific because every client I work with is under NDA so I can't really name names. Of course, I can say that, yes, there's a lot of the work I've been doing the last couple of years in particular probably not surprising to anybody is all about that. It's how do we do this at scale, how do we drive out costs? You know, a lot of times when I work with clients, the tiering isn't really clean. Of times when I work with clients, the tiering isn't really clean, In other words, understanding the financial trade-offs. Not every customer is the same. You have some that spend a whole lot of money with you.

Speaker 1: 29:18

Again back to the power law distribution. You have a small number of accounts that make up a monster part of your revenue and you typically have a long tail of a lot of accounts that make up very little. And where you draw those lines from a financial perspective really, really is important. Right, it's not only the past performance, but what is the future potential is the white space too, but how you allocate those accounts and how you understand the investment and return of those tiers is critically important, because that gives you the guard bands or the guidelines for what you're going to do in each one of those groups of customers.

Speaker 1: 29:56

Right and a lot of times people just they have no concept that they've never done that analysis and and when you draw the line really matters. So that's part of it. I will say and we started talking about this is that in the B2C space, if you really want to see how it's done, well, holy cow, look at what's happening in B2C. And the problem I've seen in software is that it's way too complicated, right, and it's made to be way too complicated. It's very, very hard to make things simple. It's really hard to do that. You have to invest a lot of time and a lot of effort and you have to do something to make a solution better than to take something away. And they've actually proven this.

Speaker 1: 30:52

A fascinating study in behavioral science is that that is one of the blinders that people have in product and in engineering is that we'll just add more and we'll add more and we'll add more, and then you have this huge feature bloat going on. Way too complicated, people can't deal with it. It's way overpriced for maybe the majority of the use cases that people really need it for. You know, like Excel, most people only use about 20 to 30 features. It's got 450 features in it, right? I mean why? Right? So there's this in software in particular. It's easy to add stuff, so people are always adding stuff. They're not making it simpler, they're not making it better that way. So contrast that with the B2C space, where it's a very simple product to begin with most times, but they go above and beyond to make it even simpler. Right? Apple's a great example. Peloton blows me away, peloton. I know they've had their ups and downs, sure, but you want to look at a company that's got that dialed in. Look at Peloton, holy cow. Right, from a digital approach to renewals, to keeping customers in the fold. Yeah, all the stuff that they do in community and they're athletes, and I mean it goes on and on and on. And if anybody has really cracked that code, look at what they're doing, and all that stuff is highly leverageable.

Speaker 1: 32:19

But think about what's really required here and you mentioned this before too it's not just email campaigns. You have to design your whole business around this. You have to have simple, easy-to-use product. You have to design them that way. You have to design them to be simple and that anybody can pick it up and use it. And the more stuff you throw on there, the less simple it is. Right, yeah, right. So being really crisp about that and you design it all in as much as you possibly can into the product and I think that's another barrier for software is that you know the dev people and the product people. They're in their own world and they throw it over the wall and we don't. That's, we're not measuring. But who cares about that? Customers that's, that's customer success at sales. We're doing the cool stuff right. So they don't think in terms of we have to design and build our products for those customers, right, that's right. And they're not necessarily as focused as they really need to be or to any extent, how it's done in B2C.

Speaker 2: 33:13

This company I just joined. One of the cool things that we do on Friday afternoons is just a demo jam where all the engineers and product guys show off what they're working on live, before it's done, to all of the customer folks and sales folks.

Speaker 2: 33:33

And it's a luxury that you can do in a smaller company, right. But it's such a cool way, you know, not only for product and engineering to get that kind of early feedback from the people who are embedded with the customer, to get that kind of early feedback from the people who are embedded with the customer, but it also just helps, you know, helps make sure that we're designing things and we're building things in a way that are intuitive to the customer. Or, you know, maybe if it's built for one or two customers, we know five or six others who could really benefit from that kind of thing. And it starts to kind of formulate how we message things, and you know, but also call out some obvious areas where it doesn't quite make sense this way or we should do it another way. And I think it's a really healthy thing to think about, obviously, products from the lens of customer success, because, to your point, the best PLG motions are built around a solid product. That is just kind of dead simple, right.

Speaker 1: 34:32

Yeah, I loved your yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 1: 34:34

Well, I was just going to say a great lesson. There's a, you know, you look at Intel, right, intel in the early days of Intel, transistors were still lab projects, right. Right were still lab projects, right. And Andy Grove and all the early leaders at Intel, they talked about copying McDonald's and they were very specific about that. How do we get from this lab project very small yield on our devices to banging these things out by the millions? Right, and they made that shift and a big part of that was just simplicity, make it simple. Make it simple and design design for volume, design for manufacturability and for supportability, right. So that changed their whole mindset about how they design those products. And you know again, huge lessons can be learned there going from the science project, the really cool stuff in the lab, to actually doing it at tremendous scale and making a whole bunch of money doing it Right.

Speaker 2: 35:38

This reminds me of something I saw recently about Ben and Jerry's as well, because they they make I forget the exact number number, but it's literally millions of gallons of ice cream a day, like, but it's still just cream and sugar and chocolate. But but you know, part of part of their process is is so automated and you know, from a supply chain management and then all the machinery that you need like, there's a ton of automation, but there's still that human element all along the way, like. There's people you know literally slicing open a pint and testing it. They really pay close attention to, like how big the chunks are, because you know they're big on. You know, big chunks in your ice cream or whatever. So there's these core tenants. That still exists.

Speaker 2: 36:30

Where I think it's, there's a cool parallel to digital customer success, because they've built all this automation and all this sophistication around churning out literally millions of gallons of ice cream a day. However, you're not using your humans to like, do it. You're using your humans for quality control. You're using your humans to like, do it. You're using your humans for quality control. You're using your humans to like, you know, make sure that your machinery isn't just, you know, pumping out a substandard product. The human element is still very much part of that brand, which you see, you know, and it's all that socially conscious, mission driven stuff that they do. That's all driven by automation. I think that I love that kind of parallel. Yeah, and they do, that's all driven by automation. I think that I love that kind of parallel.

Speaker 1: 37:07

Yeah, and they do, I'm sure, like like really good, well-run B2C companies, they don't. They don't start day one in scale. They go and they do a lot of experimentation, a lot of test marketing, a lot of hey, we came up with this new thing, let's run us do a small run on that and see how people respond to it, Right? So don't just go from engineering to push it out.

Speaker 2: 37:28

You know and scale like that.

Speaker 1: 37:30

No, find out what's really going to work, test it, shake it out and then go scale it.

Speaker 2: 37:35

Nail it, then scale it right, same with your digital motions, like you know. Test test.

Speaker 1: 37:39

Test test break stuff If it doesn't work then redo it, do it a different way A, B testing.

Speaker 2: 37:47

Make it better. Yeah, they were saying they do something like a couple hundred flavors a year, but only like three or four of them make it to market.

Speaker 1: 37:52

So there you go, because they're testing and it's better to.

Speaker 2: 37:55

It's better to weed out the bad stuff and stick with the good stuff yep, I loved your peloton example from earlier because I used to have a hydro, which is like the rowing version of Peloton. But they did a really good job of, I'd say, you know, digital customer success, because you would reach certain you know meter milestones in your rowing, your cumulative rowing. So, like I got, you know, they just sent me like swag every milestone that came along. So it's like a pair of socks at 50,000 meters or something like that, and a flask, whatever it was, and I think that's such a cool combination also of you know there wasn't a human behind any of that. It happened automatically, right?

Speaker 2: 38:40

But the real human emotion of receiving something and celebrating those milestones, I think is a huge thing and also a massive miss for a lot of companies is celebrating the wins. I love to ask this question because it's somewhat vulnerable. So, you know, feel free to plead the fifth, but, like you know, are there, are there, like mistakes and blunders that you've learned from. You know in the past that you carry forward with you maybe, particularly as they relate to customer success or otherwise, but are there things that others can? How can others learn from your mistakes?

Speaker 1: 39:19

Well, you know, I asked my wife because you'll get the unabridged list of all the mistakes I've made, because, it's a long and impressive list of mistakes. You know there certainly have been mistakes in my career along the lines. I certainly have made that mistake of what a lot of teams are making right now is that you're trying to make you know there are certain individuals on a customer success team we're not talking about digital right now, but in customer success team and force them into being salespeople.

Speaker 2: 39:51

Right.

Speaker 1: 39:52

And there are some people that just don't want it, they're not ready for it, they're never going to go there, right? And it's no matter how you want to incentivize or train or whatever, you got to recognize that people are all motivated differently, right. So I've certainly made that mistake. I think a lot of people are making that mistake right now, and a lot of customer success organizations is oh, everybody sells, right, make everybody a salesperson. And I remember one employee I had when I was going down that path. They said look, if I wanted to be a salesperson, I'd be in sales Like duh. And it's so simple, I mean. But I think a lot of times the mistakes that people are making by and large are just hey, we haven't done a good job of quantifying, we don't even know how to show the value of customer success. So let's do the easy thing. Let's just give everybody a quota and let's just go right and everybody's responsible for a number and if you don't make your number, you're gone. Okay, that's not going to work in customer success.

Speaker 1: 40:47

It's just go right and everybody's responsible for a number, and if you don't make your number, you're gone, okay.

Speaker 2: 40:50

That's not going to work in customer success.

Speaker 1: 40:51

It's just not, and I think you know there is something and special and unique about customer success that's very different from account management. It's very different from, you know, hunter salespeople. And trying to blend them all together and mix them up, I think, personally, is a recipe for disaster. So that's one thing. That's a mistake I have made and that's a mistake that I think a lot of people are making, I would say, in terms of digital, in particular, one of the things that I see people do all the time is they are treating symptoms and not root causes, right?

Speaker 1: 41:24

Sure, Some of that is because of when we measure behaviors and we talked about this before we can correlate. Well, when we see this, we see that, well, correlation is not causation, but a lot of times we conflate those two. Well, we you know, for example, engagement often is linked to renewal probability, right? So higher, higher engagement, higher renewal probability. So what do people do? They try to grow the engagement, but that's not the root cause, that's the symptom.

Speaker 1: 41:53

What causes people to be engaged. That's the root cause, right? So I see a lot of times, in digital in particular, because of availability bias, because of what you see is all there is, you tend to just say, well, that's my little world, that's my universe and therefore I'm going to optimize around what I can see, and that is a huge, that's a big problem. I see a lot of people making that mistake.

Speaker 2: 42:19

Yeah, yeah, that's very interesting, I think. When it comes to digital and building digital programs, I think you're right. There's a lot of like, quote, unquote, no brainers that you go after Like, okay, another example would be high support ticket volumes. Right, sure, you're going to want to flag that account. It's an account to pay attention to. Does that account need an email campaign against it? Probably not. But do you want to do some root cause analysis to see what it is about that particular account that's causing the high ticket volume? Yeah, probably, and maybe that's the same root cause that's causing five other accounts to have a high ticket volume. It's such a big part of digitization is like having the telemetry and the data and the insights necessary so that you can uncover those things that might not otherwise be correlated or obvious within your business.

Speaker 1: 43:20

Exactly, and it goes back to the simple question of why People do not ask why. Nearly enough they know the what and the where and the who and the how, but they don't ask the why. The why is where all the magic happens. When you keep asking why, you come up with it. Yeah, that's the path to understand causal relationships, you know five wise the shit out of it. There you go, that's it, that is it.

Speaker 2: 43:46

Oh man, this is, this has been good. Hey look, as we, as we kind of round down, one of the things that I love to get from everyone is just their content, diet, love to understand what you pay attention to. You know, both for CS but then just otherwise. Like you know, podcasts, books, all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1: 44:07

Yeah, I, I, you know I do with I'm sure a lot of folks do. I'm on a bunch of mailing lists and I look at LinkedIn just to kind of get a pulse on what's happening in the industry. I do go to conferences, things like that. That's pretty much, um, you know, table stakes to be to keep up with your industry. Uh, but me I'm kind of weird. I'm kind of a geek, so I read a lot of neuroscientific journals.

Speaker 1: 44:27

I read a couple of research papers a week just because I'm fascinated by that and I think there's so much that we can do in customer success that scientists are discovering about human behavior right, and just applying some of that in customer success. I'm fascinated by that. I've worked with clients to do that and seen some amazing results. So I do read a lot of neuroscientific journals. I also read Medium. I do a lot of analytics and data science and they have a lot of good stuff on Medium people writing about data science so I read that pretty religiously. So it's really those three. I think that's pretty much my diet of content.

Speaker 2: 45:10

Yeah, that's great, that's great. Is there anyone that you'd like to give a shout out or some kudos to? That's doing something particularly great?

Speaker 1: 45:20

in digital. You know, I without, without betraying an NDA, I probably can't. So without their permission in advance, I should put it that way.

Speaker 1: 45:31

But I can say that I'm working with a client right now very impressive. I wish I could tell you their name, but they're doing some cool stuff and it's all back to that. What we have just talked about is asking why and experimenting. Don't jump into a commitment. Just try it out, small scale, you know. Do a do a proof of concept with the technology and just give it a go and see what you can learn from it and weed out the bad stuff. Don't commit to something that's mediocre right Pivot quickly.

Speaker 1: 46:00

There's so much out there, so much, especially right now in the space all kinds of technology that you can use for doing digital customer success, all different ways of doing it, all different. I mean it's it's a smorgasbord of stuff, but don't just pick one and run and just blow it up. You know, try out a bunch of stuff, be constantly experimenting and innovating and trying different things and asking why before you commit to anything. I think that is the secret. That really is the secret, right there.

Speaker 2: 46:28

Yeah, that's great. That'll be the. That's going to be the title of the show. It's five wise, love it. Finally, where, where can people find you, reach out to you, learn more about you? All that stuff.

Speaker 1: 46:42

Connect to me on LinkedIn. I do a micro blog once a week, if you're interested in in that. I would also say I have a website. It's at se-partnerscom, so se-partnerscom is my website and then my email is ed at se-partnerscom, if you want that.

Speaker 2: 47:02

That's great. Link will be down in the show notes if you want the easy route, the digital route. Ed, it's been a pleasure having you. It's always great talking to you. Thanks so much for carving out the time and yeah, it was awesome having you on the show.

Speaker 1: 47:16

Well, it's been delightful. I always love talking to Alex and I appreciate the invitation.

Speaker 2: 47:24

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.