Speaker 1: 0:33

Today, another solo episode for you where we're taking it back to basics and looking inside a renewal flow. 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, the show where we talk about all things digital in CX. This is episode 93.

Speaker 1: 1:19

Got another solo episode lined up for you today and for those of you who I saw at the Customer Success Summit in Austin a couple weeks ago now, I hope you had a great event. I thought it was a great event Lots of great speakers, lots of great topics, lots of great networking. So it was nice seeing some of you out there and there was obviously a lot of artificial intelligence talk, lots of great speakers on that particular topic. I talked about the four pillars of customer success, which we've covered at length on this show and on the website and other places, but overall it was a really good event. I thought one interesting thing that I noticed and actually was a direct comparison between last year's event and this year's event, because I asked the same fundamental question in both years. The question was how many of you in attendance are using chat, gpt and artificial intelligence on a daily basis intelligence on a daily basis and a year ago, I'm going to guess, 30% of the room raised their hand when I asked that question. Versus this year, almost everybody did. I would say 90% did, which I think is a good thing. Right, it's a fundamental shift in ways of working and obviously there's varying degrees to which you are using artificial intelligence in your day-to-day basis. But I think for most of us, popping open chat, gpt or perplexity ask a question or to get some guidance on something has become a norm, and I think that's super, super cool and it represents us, you know, adopting new technology. So pat yourself on the back if you're one of those people who also uses artificial intelligence on a daily basis.

Speaker 1: 3:22

Last week I was on a couple of episodes of the Daily Stand-Up, which is Dylan Young, jp Frost and Rob Zambito's daily CS podcast, where there's a different topic covered in 15-minute increments, just depending on who wants to come on the show. Our conversation ended up going over and talking over the course of two different episodes. I'll link those in the show notes if you want to go listen to those, but one of the things that I brought up to the show was this thing that I've been experiencing where people are way overcomplicating digital and overthinking digital, and I'll let you go listen to the shows because we got into some really, really great philosophical conversations about you know what is digital, what should be digital. The show was that digital tends to be, yes, this kind of black box thing for a lot of folks. However, it is also started to become this overcomplication, if you will, and we see that in the number of tools we have available to us. We see that in the different strategies and things like that that people are implementing as part of their digital strategy. But, fundamentally speaking, I think we've lost sight a little bit of the human element and we've lost sight of the customer element specifically, because, ultimately, your digital strategy should really just inform how you're engaging your customer, based on where they want to be engaged and where you can find them most easily. A lot of times, what I see people doing when they're adopting digital and trying to implement digital is they're making some pretty wild assumptions. They're making some pretty wild assumptions in terms of what they feel like is going to be effective or not.

Speaker 1: 5:44

A couple episodes ago, I talked a little bit about this notion of you know, automate only after you've done something manually first, and I really try to stick to that as much as possible, because if you're doing something manually, it means that you will have a good understanding of what works, what doesn't work, and you won't be automating junk right. That said, I do feel like there is a lot of overcomplication that goes into things, feel like there is a lot of overcomplication that goes into things, into digital, and ultimately, digital needs to support the human. Whether the human is the customer, or whether the human is the customer success manager or an ops person, your digital motion should support those things that the human is doing, not interfere with those things that a human is doing, and sometimes bloated automations can actually cause more workload, and so I am a strong proponent of you know, when you're in the middle of designing these things, hit the pause button for a second and really analyze what the human implication of these things are. I think there's a nuance here that your digital automations should support humans. In other words, you can get your humans involved, but they need to be involved at the right time where they can actually add value. They shouldn't be involved to support the automation, and I see that a lot. I see that a lot where somebody goes and builds an automation but maybe a tool can't quite do this cool thing that they want them to do, and so you interject human inputs into the automation to support the automation, and I think that's completely, completely backwards. Um, I, you know I'm guilty of that too, like I've, I've built some stuff that requires some human inputs for the automation to work, and while net net you're probably still benefiting from that, you know part of me is like why even do it if your humans have to support the automation versus the automation supporting the human? So in that spirit, I wanted to quickly talk you through and kind of show my work a little bit in my current role at Belfry Software.

Speaker 1: 8:06

One of the things that we have recently done is retooled the renewal flow a little bit, or the pre-renewal flow, I should say, and I figured I would take you inside a little bit and just talk through the process we went through, to talk through that renewal flow and what that renewal flow should look like. That renewal flow and what that renewal flow should look like, and the process of putting it in the system and getting it live, and then also what I'm thinking about in terms of next steps, because the other thing about digital automation is that you're never really done right. Even though you have it in place, you're going to want to review it every once in a while to make sure it's still relevant and still doing what you need it to do. As you get more sophisticated, you're going to want to add to it and you're going to want to make it even more effective and allow it to reach your customer where they are Okay. So all this came about. As a lot of you know, I started a new gig in November of last year, so it's been three, four months or so, and one of the things that we wanted to do is just tackle some of the basics first, and so we looked at the renewal flow or the pre-renewal flow as being one of the things to tackle Some fundamentals about the business and I'm not giving away any trade secrets here, so it's completely fine here.

Speaker 1: 9:35

Our contracts work on an auto-renewal basis and our customers have to give us a 60-day notice of churn before the contract end date. So we have a couple of dates here to work with, right, we have obviously the renewal date, we have the 60 day prior to renewal date and then that kind of drove, our decision as to when to start the renewal flow, which is essentially 2x. So we're starting the renewal flow at 120 days prior to the renewal. Now you may think that that is somewhat excessive and I think for some businesses it might be excessive. For some businesses, especially if you're in the practice of doing multi-year contracts, that's probably too short. But ultimately we felt that that extra 60-day window was enough to proactively engage our customers, uncover if there were any issues that would lead them towards a churn event and whatnot, and also, just given kind of like the operational cadence of our customers, it kind of makes sense, right.

Speaker 1: 12:10

So we had essentially toyed with a couple of different flows that were already in place. So one of the tools that we are using primarily on the sales side is outreach. So we had a couple of campaigns built in outreach that were doing a combination of emails and auto dialers, and you know that's cool, but also it's it's yet another tool and it's actually kind of an expensive tool. So we are heavy Vitaly users and so my I had, you know, very kind of selfish reasons for, you know, trying to move the renewal flow into Vitaly, keeping some of the good elements of what we had built in outreach but then adding to it as well and vitally. And that's precisely what we did.

Speaker 1: 13:02

I had an onsite with the customer success managers shout out to Christina and Tajay for a few days, and one of the things we talked about was okay, what should this thing ideally look like? What tone do we want to strike? Um? You know how do we want to engage our customers? And out of those conversations came a um, a relatively, you know, simple flow um that we are implementing at the moment. That is basically a combination of automated emails as well as tasks for the customer success manager to engage via phone, so physically picking up the phone and calling. But I think the meeting element of this is very, very important.

Speaker 1: 13:50

So if you're a CS leader and you're going through and you're designing these things. I highly recommend that you design them, not in a bubble of your own making. Pull your customer success managers in. Let's talk through what the renewal flow should look like. Let's talk about what the tone of voice should be like in those emails, what the tone of voice should be like in those emails you know. Really talk through that and give your CSMs some ownership around the development of that language, those emails, the cadence and those kinds of things. Because A, it means you don't have to, you know, do any enablement down the road on what the flow is, but B, it gives them a sense of ownership and it actually is, you know, represents them and represents a voice that they would like to have as part of these communications. So that's kind of top tip number one when you're designing these digital flows, renewal or otherwise.

Speaker 1: 14:46

Pull your CSMs in or pull whoever it's going to affect in to the conversation in, or pull whoever it's going to affect in to the conversation. Make them a part of that conversation. So what we walked out with is essentially a weekly email cadence to our account owner what we call our account owner, which could be company leadership, could be a champion within the company. It is someone within that customer that we have identified as an account owner, and it is essentially a weekly email campaign that outlines a couple of different options. So option one is they can just coast through. Everything's cool, no need to engage, you're going to automatically renew Everything's hunky-dory. See you later. That's option one. It also gives them option two, which is a, you know, the offer of a strategic conversation. So if you, you know, if they want to engage with new terms or they, you know have, are anticipating a spike in employees or customers and those kinds of things, and they want to, you know, talk about terms and talk about the contract in general, it gives them the option to schedule that call specifically. And I would say, having done this a little while now, maybe 2025% of our customers take us up on an actual conversation about the renewal. Maybe a little bit more, but most are kind of like yep, this is great, let's, you know, let's go, and at that point we consider them, you know, renewed or we've gotten a verbal commitment from the customer that they are renewed. Super easy. Now, this is an.

Speaker 1: 16:26

This is a weekly email flow. The first one is is, you know, quite, quite simple. It outlines those options. It says, hey, if you want to have a chat about it, here's my Calendly link. And we've built this email flow in vitally to where it is coming from their CSM. Their email signature includes their own Calendly invite, so it does seem like the email is actually coming from them, which I think is kind of digital 101, obviously. So that's kind of a weekly cadence. They you know the way those emails go out is actually a reply to the thread. So if we don't hear back from the customer, the automation in seven days will just reply to the thread with a series of other emails as well that are slightly different in language but have the same kind of same kind of language. They do get increasingly kind of more urgent in their verbiage as that 60 day window approaches, for obvious reasons, right? So you know, we want to make sure that our customers are absolutely, you know, aware of the fact that their contract is going to auto renew in 60 days.

Speaker 1: 17:37

Now this automation goes together with a task that goes to the CSM to actually do some outreach to the customer and follow up on the email that was sent. You know, quite simple Give the account owner a quick call. Did you get my email? Great, do you have any questions? Some might say it's a little bit overkill and long-term. I don't really know how sustainable it is. But ultimately we made the strategic decision to use it as a really good time to engage your accounts, and so we're kind of throwing everything at it, both email automation as well as the human connection element of it.

Speaker 1: 18:23

Now there are a couple of caveats here and ways of interrupting the flow, so to speak, where those emails won't go out, the flow, so to speak, where those emails won't go out. The first one is based on kind of an account status that the CSM sets. So we have something in our system called CSM Pulse. It's essentially a way for a customer success manager to describe the pulse of the customer, and if that pulse is set to poor in other words the customer ain't doing so hot, we actually are not going to distribute that renewal flow. I think it goes without saying. But we felt really strongly that if there is an escalation happening, if there's active conversations happening that denote really poor customer health, we felt it was obviously in poor taste to send out automated renewal emails that are relatively friendly in tone. So that is one kind of interruption method.

Speaker 1: 19:25

Another interruption method for that flow is if a customer responds to the emails, it will actually stop the flow full stop, because we are having active conversations with that customer. We do not need to send the reminder emails and bombard them with things when we're already having those conversations. So we do this for about four or five weeks or so, that weekly cadence. If they don't respond at all, they will get all four or five emails right, increasing in urgency. And then what we do is, around the 67-day mark we will send essentially a final kind of warning if we haven't engaged with them, just saying hey, just so you know, you've got seven days till your renewal deadline. If we don't hear from you, you're going to auto-renew. And then there's kind of a more congratulatory note that goes out shortly after that renewal period or that 60-day mark that says, hey, you're all set for the renewal. Let me know if I can help in any way. Now I know what.

Speaker 1: 20:27

Some of you are probably thinking that this is potentially a little bit overkill. And also I think there are probably some that would say well, why are you reminding them about this renewal deadline so vehemently? Why wouldn't you just want it to pass and just kind of I'm not going to say sweep it under the rug, but why would you want to alert them so vehemently about the fact that they do have this option not to renew? And you know, that did kind of cross my mind in the sense of, you know, adjusting the language to where it doesn't really talk about the option not to renew, it just it's, it's mainly just a reminder about the renewal itself. And if there were opportunities for uplift and opportunities for expansion and strategic engagement and those kinds of things, it doesn't explicitly say, hey, you know, do you need to churn? Doesn't explicitly call that out right? So I know some of you may think that is a little bit overkill to do that much communication around it.

Speaker 1: 21:44

My take on it is that I would rather over-communicate than under-communicate the renewal aspect of things and I would rather really proactively try to engage the customer versus just being reactive when something goes wrong. Because in my book there's nothing worse than actually not hearing from customers. Not having customers actively engaged with your brand and your support and your CSMs is dangerous period Like if you don't know what's going on. That's not a great sign. It scares me so. So that's a little bit about that.

Speaker 1: 22:23

I didn't. I didn't feel like it was relevant to specifically read the copy of the email. If you're curious about the copy of the email, let me know, ping me on LinkedIn or ping me via email, alexdigitalcustomersuccesscom, and I'll gladly send you some verbiage there that we're using. But I didn't feel like it was necessary because, I mean, we all have our different ways. The way that I express certain things and the way that my team expresses certain things may be completely different than the way you wish to do it, so I figured that was slightly irrelevant. But if I'm wrong, let me know, call me out on it.

Speaker 1: 23:00

The thing that I do not like about the renewal flow is that it is very email heavy. Right now we are in the process of getting a lot of in-app stuff in place, including chatbots and those kinds of things, and so once that is in place, we will probably shift a lot of that notification over to in-app. I'm also toying with what does SMS look like in that flow, because a lot of our customers prefer SMS. They prefer getting text messages versus emails because they live on their phones right Now. I know that has its own set of issues and I know that with SMS you have to. You know you have to do opt-ins and you have to do all that. My take on this is that you know you implement as many different vehicles as possible that are interconnected so that your customer can choose how they want those notifications. If they live in email and they would rather have email, I will gladly send you those renewal notices via email. However, if you want them via text message, I will gladly send them there, and I think it's important to give your customers that choice. Right now it's kind of one channel for us, but in the not so distant future I fully anticipate us being able to give our account owners the option of whether they would receive SMS like to receive SMS notifications versus email, versus in-app, maybe even snail mail, right? So we're toying with some options around that, especially around thank you cards.

Speaker 1: 24:42

As you know, a few episodes back I had David Wax from Handywritten on the show. If you haven't listened to that episode, I highly recommend it. Handywritten is essentially a service where you can automate handwritten notes to be sent out to your customers, and so when our customers graduate onboarding and when our customers renew, I want to be able to implement a flow there that sends them automated. Thank you notes on the back of that. So, anyway, the whole point of this conversation around renewal flow is because I feel like there is a need for us to get back to basics, and I also feel like there is a need for all of us to show our work when we're doing these kinds of things, and so this is me showing my work and talking about a little bit. I'd like to do a lot more of that, because we are in the throes of building out an infrastructure around CX right now that takes a lot of these things into account, and so I plan to talk a lot more about that in the future on this show, but for right now I'll leave it there.

Speaker 1: 25:59

Last year or so has been to make sure that you know, if you're listening to the show, I always like to tell my guests that I like to have the listener write one or two or three or four or five things down on their notebook that they can go implement in their own program. And so a bit of a plea to you if you are actively working on a digital program, if you are actively getting automations in place, building a program around something that was done manually. If you are in the weeds building this stuff, implementing and testing and A-B testing and all that fun stuff, I want to hear from you because I would love to start incorporating some of your real world examples onto this show. I don't really know what that's going to look like right now, but I think perhaps for every solo episode I might like to have one or two people come on for like five minutes and talk about what it is they're building and share some of their work, because I really like for the show to be a little bit more about you know the community and people showing their work, because I really like for the show to be a little bit more about you know the community and people showing their work. So if you've got something exciting that you're working on that you are excited about, that you want to share with the audience, please reach out to me either via LinkedIn or Alex at digital customer successcom. We'd love to hear from you and let me know what you're building. Super excited to hear from you.

Speaker 1: 27:27

So that's all from me for now. I hope that you're having a wonderful week and I hope this has been a little bit helpful. More interviews coming in the next few days, plus another solo episode coming real soon, so stay tuned for that. For now, have a great day. Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Digital CX Podcast. If you like what we're doing, consider leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice. If you're watching on YouTube, leave a comment down below. It really helps us to grow and provide value to a broader audience and get more information about the show and some of the other things that we're doing at digitalcustomersuccesscom. I'm Alex Tergovich. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you next week.