
The Digital CX Podcast: Driving digital customer success and outcomes in the age of A.I.
This podcast is for Customer Experience leaders and practitioners alike; focused on creating community and learning opportunities centered around the burgeoning world of Digital CX.
Hosted by Alex Turkovic, each episode will feature real and in-depth interviews with fascinating people within and without the CS community. We'll cover a wide range of topics, all related to building and innovating your own digital CS practices. ...and of course generative AI will be discussed.
If you enjoy the show, please subscribe, follow, share and leave a review. For more information visit https://digitalcustomersuccess.com
The Digital CX Podcast: Driving digital customer success and outcomes in the age of A.I.
Inside Fullstory’s Approach to In-App Engagement with Talia Root and Brent Hildebrand | Episode 092
Talia Root and Brent Hildebrand from Fullstory join the Digital CX podcast to discuss the evolving role of digital customer experience, from in-app engagement to balancing scale with personalization. They share insights on measuring success, prioritizing product development, and the key skills that make a great program manager in the digital landscape.
Chapters:
- 00:03 - Intro
- 04:18 - Talia’s journey from retail to digital success
- 05:42 - Brent’s path from sales to digital CX
- 07:30 - Scale vs. digital: What’s the difference?
- 09:15 - The push for in-app engagement
- 12:09 - Choosing what to build first
- 16:00 - Measuring success: Metrics that matter
- 21:29 - Balancing in-app and email engagement
- 27:15 - What makes a great program manager?
- 33:39 - Digital wins (and fails) in the wild
- 35:19 - Shoutouts to digital leaders
Enjoy! I know I sure did…
Talia's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/talia-root/
Brent's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brent-hildebrand-422a9397/
Thank you to our sponsor, QueryPal!
QueryPal is an incredible platform for support leaders who want to optimize their operations!
Thank you to our sponsor, Vitally!
Vitally is a wonderfully feature-rich, fast-to-implement CSP that we are proud to have as a sponosr!
+++++++++++++++++
Like/Subscribe/Review:
If you are getting value from the show, please follow/subscribe so that you don't miss an episode and consider leaving us a review.
Website:
For more information about the show or to get in touch, visit DigitalCustomerSuccess.com.
Buy Alex a Cup of Coffee:
This show runs exclusively on caffeine - and lots of it. If you like what we're, consider supporting our habit by buying us a cup of coffee: https://bmc.link/dcsp
Thank you for all of your support!
The Digital Customer Success Podcast is hosted by Alex Turkovic
🎬 This content was edited by Lifetime Value Media.
Learn more at: https://www.lifetimevaluemedia.com
Digital is so much more than focusing on scaled customers. Digital is for every customer, every segment, really focusing on the entirety of the customer journey, and that's been a really fun evolution to break my own mindset around what digital could be.
Speaker 2:Once again, welcome to the Digital Customer Experience podcast with me, Alex Terkovich. 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:Hello and welcome back to the Digital CX Podcast, the show where we talk about all things digital in CX. It is episode 92 and I am elated today to be joined by two people who are in the throes of building digital programs. You know, if you've listened to the show here recently in the last few months or so, you know I've tried to bring on a lot more people who are in the weeds doing the thing, sharing what they're doing and basically showing their work, and we have two examples of that building the digital program at Full Story Talia Root, who has joined the team relatively recently as manager of digital CX sorry, senior manager of digital customer success. She joins me along with one of our teammates, brent Hildebrand, who's actually been at Full Story for a long time, probably eight years or something like that. He's essentially one of the principal digital program managers on Talia's team, and so in this episode we get a sneak peek behind the curtains of how Talia is organizing around digital the kinds of things that they're building.
Speaker 2:We also talk a little bit about career pathing and career trajectory, given Brent's kind of um morphosis into from from sales and to CS, into digital and uh, it's just a fascinating episode full of little insights and tips and tricks and takeaways that you can implement in your own program If you like. I feel like we could probably do a second episode and we might do a check-in episode in the next few months just to see how things are progressing with them, but for now, please enjoy this episode of the Digital CX Podcast with Talia Root and Brent Hildebrand of Full Story. Talia and Brent, I'm so pleased that you're here and thanks for joining me on the show.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having us.
Speaker 3:Yeah happy to be here.
Speaker 2:Of course, the dynamic duo. How long have you guys been working together at Full Story?
Speaker 1:No, I've been at Full Story for five months and it's been me and Brent and a couple others on my team.
Speaker 2:And Brent, you're a vet, you're like eight years, seven years, something like that.
Speaker 3:Yes, In March it'll be seven years at Full Story. So you're like the vet, the Full Story vet. I wouldn't say I'm the vet, but we have this internal tool where you can see what percentage of people that you've been at Full Story longer at. And it is a high percentage. I think it's like 95%.
Speaker 2:All right, do you get like a plaque for that, like one of those fun acrylic plaques, or do you get something like Tali? Maybe you should hook up a gold watch or something.
Speaker 3:I love the sound of that. No, I don't have a gold watch from Full Story right now, so that's an excellent idea.
Speaker 2:Does that still happen, like is there any industry, maybe finance, but is there any other industry where they still give out, like watches, anniversaries?
Speaker 1:probably not yeah, I don't know none that I've been at I was at dell for five years.
Speaker 2:The reason I know that is because I turned my resignation in the same day that I got my acrylic five-year plaque there you go so you guys are a duo at full story, working all through digital stuff and doing some really, really exciting things that we're here to talk about a little bit. But, talia, I'll toss it to you a little bit. I'd love to know a little bit about your kind of background and what led you to where you are today.
Speaker 1:Wow, I've had an interesting career path. I actually started out in traditional retail and did that for a bit. Really was craving more of a corporate retail experience, so I spent a lot of time at Pottery Barn Before I eventually made my way into tech. I first really heard about digital customer success or like one-to-many programs, and I worked at a small startup called Notarize and from there I went on to be the first digital success manager at Service Titan, which was really fun, kind of weaved my way through figuring out what that meant, and then went to Okta for a little bit, spent some time with the fine folks there before making my way over to Full Story.
Speaker 2:That's cool Because I feel like retail and hospitality and food service is like amazing breeding ground for customer service, but then also like the internal mechanisms for dealing with BS.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely customer centric, mind always from Nordstrom. That's just that. Just flows through my blood now.
Speaker 2:And also I like to basically say that I think everyone should spend a little bit of time in either restaurant or hospitality or retail, just because you get to see the best and the worst in people. Brent, how about you? What circuitous path led you down to being at Full Story for seven years? Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3:And I wasn't going to go this far back, but I should mention that I did work at Chick-fil-A for two years. Yeah, totally, and I wasn't going to go this far back, but I should mention that I did work at Chick-fil-A for two years when I was in high school.
Speaker 3:So that was it was my pleasure and you know, as you mentioned, those are valuable on the fly lessons when you're in that environment. So it actually really was an awesome experience. I'm glad I did that. Yeah, yeah, and in terms of what brought me to full Story, I was a project manager at a telecommunications company in Atlanta a big company and was looking to intentionally join a smaller company, but didn't really know what I was looking for. I was looking for tech sales because I wanted to combine my love for working with people with my love and interest for software and technology. I studied engineering in college and just knew I wanted to get closer to that.
Speaker 3:So I joined Full Story as an SDR without knowing anything about how typical SaaS CX orgs are structured. Customer success manager was not even a job title that I could have fathomed looking for. It just wasn't on my radar and I very quickly learned about at the time at Full Story we called it hugging, which we no longer call it that, but there's an awesome blog post that explains why it was called that but quickly saw what the folks on the host sales side of the house at Full Story were doing and it was super clear to me. That was more of the things that I wanted to be involved in and less of the stuff on the sales side. That wasn't necessarily super interesting to me.
Speaker 3:So it became my mission pretty quickly to figure out how I could get over to CX. And yeah, so I was in SDR for like a year and a half and then I started in CX. We decided to break out. Instead of having CSMs cover the entire customer lifecycle, we broke out onboarding, and so I started on the onboarding team. From there I joined what we called scaled customer success and now I'm a part of digital. So I've been in CX the remaining five years and it's been awesome.
Speaker 2:So you're probably really well qualified to answer the age-old question about what's the difference between scale and digital, because I get this question like all the freaking time and a lot of people are like, oh, it's the same thing, just a different word. I'm like no, it isn't.
Speaker 3:What would you say? Yeah, definitely have gotten that question, ranging from internal folks at FullStory, when we've built these new teams, to even connecting with folks like outside of FullStory who are interested in exploring roles in CX and are wondering what they should be looking for. I think for me, without even knowing a ton about like what it is across the industry, I just think it's the core problems that we're solving. It's not the core problems that we're solving, it's the way we're going about doing it. It's very different when it was digital versus when it was scaled. So really, as scaled CSMs, we were almost functioning as rotational CSMs where we interact with customers for a period of time, whereas on the digital side, we're really focused on building those ongoing scalable content-based programs that can live on Digital. In my eyes, this is not a super well thought out thing, but it actually scales farther than scaled customer success. That is what comes to mind when I try and explain the difference.
Speaker 1:I think for me, just having been in digital for a while, separating the two has been a bit of a journey. There's the scaled mindset and there's the digital mindset. Like Brent said, digital is so much more than focusing on scaled customers. Digital is for every customer, every segment, really focusing on the entirety of the customer journey, and that's been a really fun evolution, just for myself to kind of break my own mindset around what digital could be and really embrace what it could be across the whole journey, which has been great.
Speaker 2:That's cool, that's awesome. Well, thanks for sharing that. You know a little bit of background and I know in our prep we talked a little bit about what that journey of digital has been transitioning a little little bit from scale into digital or maybe both coexisting. We talked a bit about using in-app and really jumping on this thing of in-app engagement and you guys have been building stuff like crazy over the last five to six months, if I'm not mistaken. So I'd love to get a quick sense from you all about what you're building, kind of what led you to decide to build that and how it's going.
Speaker 3:Totally, and Talia happy to jump in here first, but certainly let me know if there's anything that I miss here. So we use AppCues at FullStory as a tool that we use to build in-app messaging for our customers, and we've matured a lot, I think, as you mentioned, in the past six months in terms of the types of things that we're building and what we're focusing on. At first, we were using it really as almost like glorified campaigns, like, for instance, if we were running a webinar. We started using AppCues to promote registration in the platform, which has been helpful Like it's worked. We also like.
Speaker 3:There was a project I was working on where we launched a new template in the app and we wanted to make our customers aware of that, so we spun up an app that's related to that. So super simple things. And we're now moving into designing in-app enablement flows, so guided tours within our products, helping customers bring them to the right features, as well as explain how to use those, and that's been super fun and exciting to work on. We wish we could sit down and have a conversation with every single one of our customers about these features, but it's been really fun to work on figuring out how we can scale that and increase the number of accounts we're actually getting to talk to just through in-app walkthroughs. So, yeah, lots of learning through that, but it's been really fun to build those out. So we have like a combination of in-app flows and some checklists for tasks. We'd recommend and that's where we've been really focused in the last quarter is building and launching that side of it.
Speaker 1:It's been a really interesting journey, just from joining FullStory and seeing what we were using AppCuse for and being part of the growth to see how we might be able to use it more. We've started to use a feature for them that just went GA called Workflows, which has been a great way for us to combine email communication with actually connecting people to a flow within the product, and so we're starting to explore that as well. Appcuse has been a great tool for us just to see what we can do digitally.
Speaker 2:What process did you go through to decide what you wanted to kind of prioritize and what you wanted to roll out? Because I think a lot of people struggle with that, like, okay, we bought this thing, we bought this tool, where do we start, what do we do with it? And in your case, I think AppCue has already existed, if I'm not mistaken, and you were just kind of like, okay, what can we do with this thing? How did you go about deciding what to prioritize?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll let Brent kind of go into some deeper detail for his specific program. But we really just wanted to figure out where we could make the most impact. We wanted it to be a relatively lower lift, not something that would take us a whole year to develop. A relatively lower lift, not something that would take us a whole year to develop, and what we could easily score against, like where could we see our impact quickly? And I'll kick it over to Brent to talk a little bit more about where we decided to focus on that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, totally. We call each of our projects programs and full story and each of our programs has a problem statement for, like, some of the most recent projects that I've been working on, like, had the problem statement defined of okay, these are the metrics that we know are important to our customers and this is what we want to help improve. And it was actually a project that I was working on six months ago where I did a combination of two things. There was the in-app template changes combined with a webinar that I led with one of my colleagues, which we saw good results with both, and obviously, I'm sure, as you can imagine, putting something in the app is a lot more scalable than running a webinar. Like, every time we want a webinar, we have to plan the script, we have to promote it, we have to get people to show up and we have to lead the webinar and we can then have the recording afterwards. But it is really a campaign versus the template, which is just available on an ongoing basis to our customers.
Speaker 3:And when I was comparing the impact to feature usage of the things that I cared about, afterwards it was super obvious that we could get, in some situations, even better impact to our customers by the in-app changes that happen. So for me that was like taking my problem statement Okay, I want to impact these things. It was a no brainer to know. Okay, we have app use at our disposal. Let's figure out how we can get more enablement in the app If we're going to get similar results to asking folks to come up and show up for a webinar.
Speaker 2:I love what you said right at the beginning about having a problem statement to go into it, because I think we tend to at least I tend to jump into execution mode right away. A of times I'm just like, oh, this is cool, we should go do that. And a lot of times that gets us into trouble down the road when we kind of lose clarity on what it is we're building. I mean, it really almost takes a book out of product and engineering where typically your tickets will start with the classic statement of as a blank, I want to be able to blank. Is it that kind of mentality and format that you went down?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think I do think so, and I think it probably varies from program to program. Like, some of our programs are programs that help level us up as a team, and so those problems are like we need to be able to do this, or right now we're spending this amount of time doing this and it needs to be faster All the way down to, maybe a program that's more customer focused is hey, we know that customers are using this feature at this rate today and this is the level of correlation it has with renewal, and so we want to improve that. So it can vary from being like the second one, being more outcome focused of like, hey, we're obviously ultimately trying to impact renewal rate and help customers find value in the platform. Or it can be, like you said, more of like a jobs to be done framework.
Speaker 2:um yeah, with that. I think that naturally leads us into the next kind of obvious question, which is like how do you measure the efficacy of all this stuff? And I think that's something also that a lot of digital folks struggle with, because it's not, you know, unless you have a very specific outcome you're driving towards, it can be really hard to measure those kinds of things. Did you design these programs with the intent of having the metric clearly defined on the outset? Is there a global metric you're looking at as well for lagging indicators maybe? And then I mean it's early days right, you guys just started building some of this stuff a few months ago but are there any early indicators of what's working and what's not?
Speaker 3:Totally so for every. You know, this year, when we were building out the digital team, part of our process is every single program in addition to within that program having a problem statement is we have a scorecard. So actually at the beginning of the program, we define input and output metrics, inputs being things like if, for taking that webinar as an example, right Like this is the amount of customers that we want to have attend. Like this, many unique customers attend this webinar. And then maybe output metrics would be like okay, we want to set a baseline for this feature usage today. We want to increase that feature usage afterwards. You know some super simple examples there. But we have that scorecard that we define at the beginnings.
Speaker 3:When we're writing that problem statement, we check in again before we launch to make sure, okay, as we were building this, does this still make sense? And then afterwards we do a check-in to see what those results were. I think obviously like to help answer the question of did this go well? Super, super helpful. But I also actually think it's a really important part of the program build itself, right Like it's super informative for the types of things we're building. It helps us answer questions at the beginning, like can we measure this? Should we think differently about how we're building and if it is measurable and some things we should do even if it isn't, and we just have to make some assumptions. But it's a really, really good exercise just going through it, having to define those things.
Speaker 2: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 Now? 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, um, 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:Now back to the show. Yeah, now back to the show. Enough into. We were like, okay, this customer engaged with this, this customer didn't engage with that. This customer attended this webinar, this customer didn't, even though they registered. Like that's the very surface stuff which is great because it informs you, know how you're communicating, and informs your messaging and your tone and, like you know, did you surface the message at the right time or to the right user? Like all that kind of stuff that's great. But ultimately a book out of the marketing kind of best practices playbook to say like, okay, we did this thing, we did this webinar. Did the people who attend have better feature adoption than the people who didn't attend? Like that's gold, right there.
Speaker 2:So that's cool that you guys are thinking about measuring that way. And then Talia, I guess from a program perspective would love to understand a little bit more about how you're measuring the program as a whole, and then also maybe some insight into how you're using that to kind of validate digital's existence and all that kind of fun stuff.
Speaker 1:Wow, absolutely so. I think overall, like some of the larger metrics that we're tracking to, is monthly active users. So are our programs driving more users into the platform and actually using what we want them to use? And I think that second layer of the feature adoption are they engaging with the features that we're wanting them to do? Of course, renewal we want our customers to be finding enough value that they want to come back. So I think that focus along the customer journey and really targeting them with the right content at the right time really helps make sure that your renewal rates are good. You're not just waiting until the last three months before their renewal and throwing stuff at them. You're showing them that value really early and often and showing them exactly what they need to do, based off of their persona, to use the platform or the product correctly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I'm assuming you're rolling some of that stuff up into kind of the overall CX program or metric set or something like that, and I guess, how are you measuring customer success today?
Speaker 1:Success or digital success?
Speaker 2:Both.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think similar to what I was just speaking about, really the monthly active users, the renewal rates and I think, for digital specifically, we can break it down even further to like the adoption metrics, even some email engagement metrics, tracking who is seeing our content at any given time. We do a lot of weekly analysis to understand how large was our user reach.
Speaker 1:So are we targeting more users this month over, you know, week over week, month over month, and that's been really helpful for me and the team to understand where our impact is, which of our programs are driving the most reach.
Speaker 2:And I love that combo of in-app and you said you were tying some motions to email as well, because there are people who love in-app engagement and there are people who hate it. And there are people who love email and hate it. And there's people who love SMS and hate it, and there's people who love sms and hate it. There's people who love facebook messages and hate it.
Speaker 2:you know it's like you can't build a perfect program for every user, right, right, and we're definitely testing all the waters right now yeah, tell me a little bit about the structure of the digital team as a whole, because there's lots of people who are just trying to build up the digital function, don't quite know what they need to do. It. Don't know quite you know what kind of personnel, what kind of tooling and whatnot. But strictly from a people perspective, how are you structured?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we have. I lead a team of program managers, so Brent is one of the program managers. We have a total of four, so shout out to Chrissy, dijonay and Corey. And on our team they're each responsible for the creation and implementation and upkeep of the programs. So we kind of decide as a team level what everyone's going to work on, based on the customer journey, what channel we're going to use, and then they run with it. And it's amazing, I truly love the program manager title for this team. It works really well.
Speaker 2:Super appropriate, and you know, a lot of times I'll tell people that it's very, very similar to what a product manager really does, because you own very specific things, you know, as as is one program manager focused specifically on one part of the journey or one element of things, or is it just based on interest, or how do you split up that work?
Speaker 1:Well, it's definitely based on interest right now, um, and really focusing. The team does a great job on really. You know the product, they know full story so well and they really understand the signals that they want to focus on. They know the product, they know full story so well and they really understand the signals that they want to focus on, so they see something happening and then we'll create a program based off of that and so far it's worked where we're pretty spread out along the journey. We might have to get a little bit more strategic as we grow, but right now it's kind of worked out where we've been pretty spread across, just naturally.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. One of the things that interests me and I love that both of you are on because you know we can kind of dig into this a little bit is just career trajectory and career pathing a little bit, because, brent, you've had a really cool journey. I feel like and I would imagine correct me if I'm wrong here, but I would imagine that a lot of your experience on the revenue generation side and the sales side maybe informs even what you're doing today in terms of digital, because certain things have to happen to secure the renewal and whatnot.
Speaker 2:But, how much of that sales experience do you use in your daily as digital and do you feel like that was a natural kind of career progression to you through CS?
Speaker 3:Yeah, great question. And absolutely I think starting as an SDR a sales development rep at any company, would be one of the absolute best ways to get a handle on the personas that are using the platform. Depending on your company, maybe you have a really, really targeted ICP where a lot of your users and buyers look the exact same. But at FullStory we absolutely have our ICP and the folks we're designing for. But, as you can imagine, the FullStory customers range in terms of industry and persona and being able to speak to each of those specifically.
Speaker 3:It was so important for me to start as an SDR because I got to learn what each of those user personas cares about and what are the words that are going to help prevent someone from hanging up on me on the phone right now, quite literally. And I mean, when you learn it that way, obviously it could go away where it doesn't go well, but on the flip side, going through that, I learned so much about the broad set of our personas. That has been super helpful to me in each of my roles at FullStory. And then I think to the second piece of your question which you're asking about is I think there's probably a funny analogy of trying not to get hung up on and also designing CTAs and messaging that is going to get customers to pay attention and that's a hugely important skill. We also have amazing folks on our marketing team who help us with writing and designing copy and the design and that's stuff that we have even experts at Fullsphere who can help us with that even more. But having that mindset of hey, if a customer only glances at this quickly, are they going to pay attention and is this going to speak to them specifically, I think it's the right mindset and certainly learned that as an SDR that there's a way to land and there's a way to be ignored.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the attention span is so limited a lot of times. That's a really smart observation, I think, because I mean we are marketing for customers. Because I mean we are marketing for customers basically, I mean it is it's. You know, let's call a spade a spade. It's digital customer marketing which is so interesting to think about, because really, the programs and whatnot are essentially campaigns, really sophisticated campaigns based on a lot of your customer data and things like that, but we're operating campaigns.
Speaker 2:The reason I love the career conversation is because I feel like digital can draw from so many different things, but then also can lead to so many different things as well. Brent, I have zero idea of what your career aspirations are, but it's completely plausible that you go follow something in product next, or you go do something in marketing next, or you go do those kinds of things that make digital a really cool thing, because you're already working with all these different departments, you get to see what's going on cross-functionally, which is cool. Talia, I'd love to understand a little bit more. Maybe for somebody who is building their career, really wants to get into digital, what do you look for in a program manager for your team?
Speaker 1:Wow. I think what I look for is someone who is not afraid to take risks and not afraid to experiment, being really deeply rooted in data. So if you can look at data, you can look at future adoption, for example, and say, okay, know that something needs to be done. I don't know exactly what we can do. I have a general idea. I'm being willing to just do it and iterate on that. I think the great thing about digital customer success as a whole is it still feels relatively new and we're all still trying to figure something out, so curiosity and being able to make data-backed decisions is something that's important.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, for sure, for sure. And like somebody who can really mess with like three different sets of data and make sense of it, that's golden. Yeah, for sure. This is one thing that I love to ask folks who are in the weeds on digital, because I have these moments all the time now where I see, like, a notification come from an app or I see a text message that I got or an email that I got. That's pretty intelligent, it knows something about me, something's happening in the background. Are there, like digital motions that you guys have seen, either in the wild or ones that you've done yourself where you've been, like?
Speaker 1:oh, oh, that's really good.
Speaker 1:I think for me it's probably the opposite. Like I'll get something and I'm like, oh, come on, like you should have known that I was just looking at this. Like why are you not telling me that I should either continue doing what I was doing, finish what I was doing and, I think, putting on my full story lens I'm? I'm probably more looking for, like what people are not doing correctly, which you know might be posing me off to seeing something good, but there's a lot of room for improvement in my eyes.
Speaker 2:What about you, Brent?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking about it and I think, similar to Talia, I feel like I definitely think that the emails or offers that maybe I noticed because they don't seem to resonate. You know, I don't know how applicable it is for this conversation, but I will say I have been using Spotify for the longest time and it does feel like they have gotten a lot better at showing me things that are aligned to what I care about.
Speaker 2:Super applicable. Yeah, spotify routinely comes up on this show just because, look, maybe we won't even talk about unwrapped, but that's unlocked, a whole thing that people are like how do I?
Speaker 2:do that? How do I do that? But I mean, in general they have a really great recommendations engine. They know how to message it appropriately. They figured that out and they you know, I guess they've been around for a while and they've been in that business for a while, so I would hope that they would be good at that day that was like your playlist in a bottle and they don't all land, because I don't even remember making that, but it was maybe even asking me to do it again for next year.
Speaker 3:But I think in general, like that ties me into thinking about me using, you know, spotify in a year and even if that specific moment was not like a huge win for me I I can't remember what it was called, but something happened the other day where they unveiled something that I had zero memory of doing.
Speaker 2:But you're absolutely right, like all of the, the rap thing was super smart and has drastically changed everybody's relationship with what they're listening to throughout the year it has, and everybody is now doing that like, in fact, I got one I forget what brand it was, even if I did remember, I wouldn't say because I don't want to throw anybody under the bus, but like I got a 24 unwrapped thing in my inbox over the weekend and it's february. I'm like snoozing on that one a little bit, but that's cool. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's great. What about? Um? I love learning from stuff that either I've done wrong or other people have kind of done wrong, and wrong is maybe the wrong word, right? It's like what are those things that you've done and haven't? They haven't quite landed, and you end up learning more from those kinds of situations than not. Have you guys experienced something like that recently and things that have either, like, not worked spectacularly or you've just learned and fixed some stuff?
Speaker 1:Well, I would say during my time at Service Titan there was a lot of just trying to figure it out, and I think my biggest learnings from the mistakes that were made were just like not having a clear signal, not having a really clear data set that you were using or a really clear problem statement, and to me that was just the impact wasn't as strong as it could be, and so I think that's the kind of like the theme through some of the mistakes is just like not having a strong enough signal. But it's all learning, so we're all still just trying to figure it out.
Speaker 2:That's an important one, because there's a lot of times where you go in and you have the expectation that I'm going to have everybody's first name in exactly the right format, to just send a mass email to all 150,000 contacts within the CRM and be just fine. When in reality that's never the case.
Speaker 1:And ampersand.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it just happens, you know and you see it all the time and it's like one of those things that's super unfortunate, but luckily, I think we live in an age now where there's enough tooling to help you get through some of that. I don't know if this is y'all's experience, but it's almost like the programs that you want to go put in place dictate the data hygiene programs that you need to implement to be able to execute on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. And data hygiene, I mean it's going to be a problem, no matter where you go. I think we're lucky at Full Story with our product, telemetry, but it's still not perfect and we're still going to have to put guardrails in place to make sure that something crazy doesn't happen.
Speaker 2:Yep, for sure, absolutely Well, as we kind of round things out, I love folks kind of sharing what they're paying attention to and whatnot. So we'd love to know from each of you, maybe Tali, first, what's in your content, what are you paying attention to and reading and listening to?
Speaker 1:Wow. So I based off of your recommendation the new automation mindset. So, listening to that on audio, which has been very good. I also love going on LinkedIn and plugging in digital customer success or digital success and just seeing what people are doing. I think everyone's just doing such amazing stuff and it's cool to see how other people are approaching things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a lot of people in digital that are showing their work.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Really cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:What about you, Brent?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so actually the main and, admittedly, only thing that I follow was your newsletter, slash podcast from Googling digital success somewhere along the way and subscribing, so that's awesome. I definitely have a plan to incorporate some more digital and I'm learning about the automation mindset now books into. I am a reader, but I will admit that I actually gravitate very strongly towards fiction dorky fiction books so I want to incorporate more nonfiction books, so I need to move that direction. But, yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have a bone to pick with Google. Actually, as you were talking, I Googled digital customer success again and for the first time in a year and a half, I'm on page one of the search results. But for the longest freaking time I was like on page three and it's just like come on, people.
Speaker 1:We're all good together.
Speaker 2:So okay, I'll take it. But that's cool that you found it via Google. I appreciate that, tali.
Speaker 1:I know you gave kudos to the rest of the team a little bit earlier, but is there anybody else that either of you would like to give a shout out to? Is doing cool stuff in digital. I'll put a soft spot in my heart for the Okta digital team. They're doing such cool stuff with Matic specifically. I really love the AI that they're using with Matic to surface new insights for the customers. I'll always be trying to see what they're using with matic to surface new insights for the customers. I'll always be trying to see you know what they're doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I need to have someone from octa on.
Speaker 1:They've come up a lot yeah, yeah, alana, if you're listening. Expect an email shortly tell her, I sent you and also I said hello.
Speaker 2:Okay, I will Brent how about you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I definitely want to echo the shout out to my fellow program managers at Full Story. Truly, our team is each of our individual program holes and emerge with a finished product. Really enjoy working with these folks as Hupins, but also really enjoy having folks that I can bounce questions off of. So a shout out to Chrissy, corey and Dijonay from Full Story.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd love to be a fly on the wall on y'all's team huddles.
Speaker 3:It's great, it's a good time. Would definitely recommend.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks both of you for joining. It was awesome having you on and I really appreciate you again. Both of you for joining. It was awesome having you on and I really appreciate you again sharing your work and telling us a little bit about what you're building at Full Story. I would love to have you all back at some point, once another six months has passed, to see how things are going and do a program update.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, That'd be great. I know we'll have good stuff to share.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. Well, thanks both for joining. Really appreciate the combo.
Speaker 1:Thank you, thanks for having us.
Speaker 2: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.