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Today, we talk about an age-old question in digital customer success of how do you transfer a high-touch, one-on-one relationship with a customer over to your self-serve digital emotions. Stay tuned.

Framing The High-Touch Dilemma

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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 digitalcustomer success.com for now. Let's get started. Welcome back to the Digital CX Podcast, the show where we will talk about all things digital in CX. My name is Alex Turkovich here listening to episode 102 of the show. I'm so glad that you're back. Before we get into the meat of today's topic, just a quick reminder that I am going to be launching a digital CX masterclass in the coming weeks that is going to give you an end-to-end kind of guide to establishing a digital CX program. Great for established leaders, new leaders, those wanting to break into Digital CX. It's really meant to cover a broad swath of people. So if you're interested in looking at that a little bit more, I do have a wait list up on the site. Go to digitalcustomer success.com forward slash masterclass. Reserve your spot and join us on the uh first cohort when that launches. For today, um, there is an age-old question that comes up over and over and over again, um, and that we have all kind of tackled in one way or another. You have a customer who has maybe they they were an early customer, so they got a uh a customer success manager and they've enjoyed that one-on-one relationship and that availability to their customer success manager. Um, but businesses grow, things evolve. You have to start thinking about scaling your CS team, and a big part of that means

Masterclass And Housekeeping

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um moving certain customers over to a digital motion instead of that one-on-one relationship because you are trying to reserve your customer success manager's time to high value activities. And let's face it, high value means high revenue, right? And so if your customer success managers are spending a lot of time with lower value uh customers, that isn't necessarily a good use of that investment. Now, in a perfect world, we would give everybody a CSM, we would give everybody that one-on-one attention uh that they deserve, but bottom line just doesn't support that, right? I think that's a business reality that we all understand, and so we're not gonna go uh deep into that. But then the natural evolution of that is how do we divorce our customers from their CSM? Uh, how do we prepare our CS motions for digital rejection, right? Because if you tell a customer flat out that they're losing their customer success manager, uh that is setting you up for instant digital rejection, as I'll call it. Um, whereas you, you know, you you're you're not necessarily gonna want to go forward with that message of, hey, you're losing this. And so

Why Move Accounts To Digital

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fundamentally speaking, the the message is it needs to be shifted away from what they're losing to what they're gaining, right? That's the fundamental thing. So we'll talk about that in a little bit. But first, I want to talk a little bit about segmentation because I would venture a guess that the majority of you listening or watching this podcast are uh segmenting your customers strictly by ARR. And look, right or wrong, we all do it, right? Um, because again, I opened the show talking about your higher value customers. ARR is a massive, massive indicator and a massive driver towards how you serve that customer base. You're gonna want to treat your high value customers differently than your low-value customers, or maybe in a different way, maybe not differently, but in a different way than your low-value customers. We all get that. Um, I would challenge you to think about customer segmentation slightly differently or in a modified way. Think about the other factors that go

Shift The Message To Gains

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into your customer relationship. Some of you work in companies that have a wide variety of product offerings. You know, let's say, for example, you have 10 different SKUs, and each one of those SKUs is a different module or add-on to your product. With those additional SKUs comes complexity. With that complexity comes more questions. With that complexity comes more frustration sometimes. And so in that instance, it may make sense for you to actually assign a customer success manager to an account where the revenue may not be up where it is, where it should be for a CSM kind of threshold or cutoff, but the complexity is. So you might think about assigning a customer success manager to someone who has that complexity, but isn't quite at that revenue stage yet. Another instance where you're going to want to think about assigning a customer success manager is with a customer where you know or where you're fairly certain that massive growth is going to occur. You know, this can be an example. Uh, for instance, if you know that a new customer is uh has a

Beyond ARR: Smarter Segmentation

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very aggressive acquisition strategy. You know they're going to be acquiring additional businesses and hence more customers and more team members and those kinds of things. Uh, in those instances, you know, you may decide also to assign a customer success manager so that they can help prepare that customer for that growth. And they can look ahead and make sure that the offering that you've installed into that customer is the appropriate one for that growth that they're going to experience. That's just two examples. And that's where where everyone starts to get a little bit unique. Every business has its own circumstances where they may consider assigning a customer success manager. And so one of the things that I've seen uh rolled out successfully quite a bit is essentially a points system for segmentation or for let's let's call that differently, a points system for customer success manager assignment to where let's say, for just for example's sake, let's say if a customer has you know six and above points, you're going to assign a customer success manager. And going into that points total are going to be your ARR thresholds, your complexity, your customer business needs, and any other factor that you may need to consider as part of when to assign a CSM and when to not assign a CSM. You can also think about that points value when you think about your scaled team. Do you have a kind of a lower touch CS motion with humans still involved? Or is it a purely digital motion? So you can start to design that point system that way. And I've seen a lot of people use that very, very successfully so that they aren't just strictly segmenting by ARR. So I felt that was an important thing to touch on prior to talking about this particular topic because you know, any way you slice it, at some point you are going to need to divorce a customer of their customer success manager. Now there are a couple of prerequisites, I think, to doing this successfully. I think the first prerequisite, and it probably goes without saying, is that if you're going to do that, you need to have your ducks in a row for your digital motions. Um, and specifically your self-serve motions. If you're going to divorce your customer of their customer success manager, you need to be able to really sell and illustrate what the alternatives are. So you need to have a really strong self-serve foundation, let's call it. Um, you know, whether it be a really strong knowledge base or whether it be an in-app toolkit and contextual help, whether it be you know a chat bot and you know, something that's really well trained on knowledge, those kinds of things is what I'm talking about in terms of self-serve strategy. That's a whole nother topic. But if you're going to pull customers into that, it has to be something that they can use effectively. The other thing to think about is is your triggering mechanism

Points-Based Assignment Models

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strong enough to where if you lose that CSM relationship, that you can still identify when a customer is either doing something really well or when a customer has gotten themselves into trouble for a reach out. Just because you're you're divorcing your customer from their CSM doesn't mean that they're never going to have human interaction with you. Which leads me kind of to my next point is you know, there always needs to be a human behind the scenes somewhere or a human available to reach out to. Yes, it can be your support organization, absolutely. And depending on your size, that may be appropriate. In other instances, you might have scaled or digital CSMs on standby to react to triggers like that, or to handle inbound traffic if a customer needs something that isn't breakfix related, that a digital CSM can pick up those things. And so that combination of having solid triggering in place and also having a strategy for how humans engage on the back of that triggering is super important. The other thing to consider too is how are you going to help celebrate your customers' wins? Um, have you built maybe an integration into something like Goody that can automatically send your customer, I don't know, a pair of socks when they do something really cool, or a mug when they do something great, or when they achieve a certain level of usage, or maybe finish a certification and those kinds of things, right? Think about what the triggering and what the the action is, not just when your customer gets themselves into a little bit of trouble, but when your customer uh wins and is actually doing something great. So wrapping all of that into one, when you when you talk about getting a strong digital emotion in place, it does not mean that you're completely abandoning your customer from human contact. In fact, what you need to be doing is pulling them into this hybrid motion where they're benefiting

Prerequisites For Self-Serve

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from really strong digital uh motions and automations and triggering, as well as a really robust self-serve option where your customer can get those quick answers very, very quickly without needing to bug a human. And quite frankly, if if I'm being honest, with my interaction with software vendors, I would actually much rather self-serve a lot of times than have to reach out to a human. I view the human engagement as my kind of second step or third step sometimes, even. So step number one uh in all of this is make sure your self-serve is on point, right? You need to make sure that you have that capability to still serve your customer, even though they're losing that one-on-one relationship. Now, for the transition itself, there's gonna come a point where there's an email. Maybe there's an actual conversation that happens. Uh, a lot of times people choose to handle this uh, you know, via an email and kind of like a handoff situation. And again, as I pointed to at the beginning of the episode, this isn't about your customer losing access to their CSM. This is about your customer gaining access to immediate assistance or gaining access to a full team. When you have scaled CSMs or digital CSMs, your customer is being distanced from their customer success manager, but they're gaining access to an entire team that's available to them. Maybe 24-7, maybe not, depending on your size and your maturity, I guess. Um, but they're gaining access to an entire team that can answer any questions that they have, that can still reach out when things happen. And in fact, sometimes your enterprise CSMs are so overwhelmed they can't appropriately react to the triggers that they're getting because they're they're busy doing all this other stuff, right? And so in a pooled um digital scaled CSM model, that's the whole gig, really. It's reacting to those triggers and it's reaching

Human Backup And Triggers

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out to customers at certain times along their customer journey and doing that in a scaled fashion, um, to where, yes, you might lose some of that relationship and rapport building. Yes, you might lose some of that, you know, account contextuality. That's not a word, but you get my drift. You might lose the context of the account with that one single person. Um, but you can solve for that in in various ways, including artificial intelligence and summaries and those kinds of things, right? So that transition script, whatever it is, um, is is something that you know is needs to promote what the customer is gaining, not what they're losing. Now I've put together a couple of samples of the type of email that you might send your customer. If you want to check those out, those are going to be in a link down in the show show notes. Uh, you can go download that and use it for yourself. It's uh you know, free game or whatnot. Um, but you know, take some time and really contextualize it to your own customer's ecosystem and context so that they're getting a message that resonates with them. And again, that makes them feel like they're gaining access to a bunch of stuff, not necessarily losing access to their CSM. Again, make sure there's a bailout option. In fact, one thing that I love to promote is if you're going to send, you know, a certain type of email, whether it be a renewal email or whether it be a uh you know uh an email about a delinquent account, or maybe it's an email about usage dropping or you know, those kinds of things. I strongly encourage you to set up a round robin calendarly group type situation and include those in an e in those emails. So even though the customer is getting a digital uh engagement and and a digitally triggered communication, I'm a huge fan of always including a link to set up a meeting. Your choice as to what that is, you know, whether it's you know a group kind of round robin situation or whether it goes to a specific person, that's your prerogative. A lot of people when I tell them this have a gut reaction of ooh, that's gonna open the floodgates, or you know, that's gonna get us super busy real quick. And there may be a few instances where that is true. But I'm telling you, 95% of the time, uh, when I've seen this rolled out, when I've rolled this out myself, you'd never get the volume off of those

Celebrate Wins With Automation

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meetings that you would expect or that you anticipate. It's it's pretty much always gonna be lower, way lower than you anticipate. But what you are doing is you're giving the customer that option to where if they really need it, they have that availability. Now, of course, one of the one of the knock-on effects here too is um you know the difference between breakfix and the difference between strategy, as I like to call it. You know, breakfast break fix being, hey, I can't log into the software, or you know, this thing isn't working, or I think I've identified a bug, or I can't save this page, or blah, blah. That's all support-related stuff, right? That is 100% support break fix. With a digital customer success motion, I want to try to find a way to differentiate that kind of meeting setup from reaching out to support. And you can do that pretty blatantly, right? You can do that if you if you need immediately immediate technical assistant, reach out to support via this email or this phone number. If you need strategic assistance or if you need, you know, guidance on your account, or if you, you know, if you have questions about new features, you know, whatever the contextually relevant verbiage there is for the email or the communication that you're sending out, and then include the link to that shared calendar, it starts to differentiate a little bit between okay, this is technical break fix and this is strategic assistance or account assistance. So feel free to you know have those two channels of communication coexist. And you can use that, you know, in your uh in your initial breakup email as saying, hey, all of our communications are gonna

Hybrid Motions And Preferences

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include a link to set up a meeting with a human, for example. Um and and use that as a recurring kind of theme as you're talking to customers of hey, most of our emails are gonna have a link to the team. Make sure you use it if you need it. Now, one other factor that I'll mention here, and then we'll wrap up the show, is the fact that you know, CSMs generally run QBRs with a customer. Uh, and a lot of CSMs also own the renewal with a customer. Now, there's some nuances here where pulling a CSM from an account means that they may not necessarily get the same uh QBR, and you as a business, I think, have to be okay with that. Now, the caveat here is there are a lot of businesses that are designing really good uh digital QBRs or virtual QBRs. And there's a lot of bespoke tools that you can use for that. A lot of your CSPs now have this capability as well, where in a landing page or whatnot, you can pull together your customers' vital stats and how they're doing. You can either even pull together um, you know, progress towards objective tracking or outcomes tracking if that is something that you've decided to do as a business. And so there are all kinds of ways to virtually replace the QBR. And I've even experienced a few people who are pulling back on enterprise QBRs because let's all, you know, let's face it, let me we have we've all questioned the efficacy of that for years now. Um, but they're pulling back on those on those QBRs in favor of the virtual QBR, which is kind of like the Khan Academy approach. You're giving your customers, you know, the baseline metrics of how they're doing uh via these virtual QBRs, and then that reserves the actual one-on-one time with their CSM for value add and rapport building and you know, upsell and renewal and those kinds of things, right? So really look into what a virtual QBR might look like for you, and that's something we can do an episode on in the future. Um, so there's that loss of QBR. If you're managing your customers' renewals and you're moving them to a digital motion, the thing to probably consider is contractually,

Crafting The Transition Message

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what does an auto renewal look like? What does an auto renewal flow look like? Now, some businesses just do this in general, right? Um, some businesses require a new contract to be signed at every renewal. So every every business is going to be a little bit different there. But the thing to look at is, you know, maybe what does a what does a auto renewal look like with a built-in uplift, for example? So I totally recognize that there are going to be some things that are going to shift, moving somebody to a digital um account. The thing is that you as a business need to be okay with maybe some of those things going away. Um, but then also have a strong path towards replacing or augmenting the experience with digital motions that still get the same net effect, essentially. So that's my bit about divorcing accounts from their CSM. If you have more questions about this and want to chat about it, happy to do so. Uh just ping me on, you know, the normal channels, LinkedIn or something like that. Also, don't forget to look into the digital CX masterclass at digitalcustomer success.com forward slash masterclass. For now though, uh, hope you've enjoyed this episode and uh we'll Talk to you soon. Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Digital CX Podcast. If you like what we're doing, uh 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 digitalcustomersuccess.com. I'm Alex Drogovic. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you next week.