Welcome To Digital CX Podcast

SPEAKER_00 0:22

But it really is a new world. I was just talking to my digital CS program manager yesterday about like, I can't believe I'm able to build a dashboard, improve the impact of the programs that I'm running as quickly as I can now. And it doesn't have to go through the data team's capacity.

SPEAKER_03 0:40

Once again, welcome back to the Digital Customer Experience podcast with me, Alex Turkovich. So glad you could join me here today and every week as we explore how digital CS and AI can help enhance the customer and employee experience. My goal is to share the insights that my guests and I have learned over the years so that you get what you need to evolve your own digital program. If you'd like more resources, head over to digitalcustomer success.com. There you'll find access to a chatbot that's trained on this content and get information about the Digital CX masterclass where I teach you how to execute and thrive in Digital CX. For now, let's get started. Hello, welcome back to the Digital CX Podcast. It's so great to have you back this week and every week as we talk about all things digital and CX. I am pleased to have this week's guest on the show in Kat Kenny, who you may know from her stint at GainSite, where she spent a lot of time supporting the PX product and a couple other things there. She is now at Drata and leading digital at Drata, doing some really cool stuff, especially in the realm of customer education. She's built a cool new customer education program and some in-app stuff that is very relevant these days as we're all trying to, you know, build the best digital programs possible. And so, you know, it's uh it's great to have her insight on the show. Lots of great nuggets for you to dig into and hopefully you'll pull a couple things out of this conversation with Kat Kenny for your own program. I hope you enjoy it. Because I sure did. Cat Kenny is on the podcast. I'm so glad to have you on the show. Thank you for joining me.

SPEAKER_00 2:20

Thank you. I'm glad to finally be here.

SPEAKER_03 2:23

I've wanted to have you on, you know, for a while. And and you and I met uh, I don't know, a couple of times in your gain site days. Yes. I think that's maybe where a lot of folks know you from and and those events and whatnot. And I know you posted recently about like attending Pulse as a attendee, not as not working the event, which must have been a trip.

SPEAKER_00 2:43

It was awesome. Yeah. And a speaker. So speaker and attendee, but like getting to actually see the sessions because usually you're working and meeting with customers, which is fun in its own way, but it's usually like 14 meetings back to back, running from one room to the next. So it was I saw everybody else doing it, and I was like, oh man, you guys are hustling. But it was great, great to see everybody, and it was fun to be on the other side.

SPEAKER_03 3:08

Did a tiny bit of you want to like go help?

SPEAKER_00 3:12

No, it was so funny. I was sitting, I was sitting with one of my old colleagues at a table with like my coworkers, and we were like, Oh, where's this? Like, they don't have any soda out. And she was just like, I'll go get you guys soda. And I was like, Oh, this is nice. Like, you're gonna just like so yeah, no, not a tiny bit. Yeah, but I mean, I do miss getting to work with everybody and see everybody there, but it was really nice getting to see that side, and I still got to connect with people, some people who aren't at Gainsight anymore either. So it was really great to run into them and old customers who I haven't got to spend time with in a non-customer way, so it was nice.

SPEAKER_03 3:47

That's great. Yeah. Well, look, one one of the things uh we have lots of digital stuff to talk about, which I'm very excited. But one

From Psychology To Customer Success

SPEAKER_03 3:54

of the things that I do like to do is to get to know, you know, cat the person a little bit more. Uh I know I in my limited sleuth thing here that you got a degree in behavioral psychology.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 4:09

Which is cool. Did has that helped you in your career or not at all?

SPEAKER_00 4:15

Yeah, I think psychology can help in any career. I I at the time specialized mostly in in kids towards the end. I had a practicum with kids with like autism or Asberger's, and I didn't really know what I wanted to do right after college. So I yeah, I didn't get into psychology permanently, but I still very much like follow different books and um you know, Carol Dweck and other really great minds of psychology. But yeah, I would say I still apply some stuff that I've learned to the day-to-day when you're managing people and working with people.

SPEAKER_03 4:48

So it's and sales and CS. I mean, that's a lot of that is like behavioral psychology for sure. 100%.

SPEAKER_00 4:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 4:56

So you started your career kind of in in software sales and made the transition over to CS. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_00 5:02

Yeah, actually, my first sales job was in like selling T1 lines back in the day, like for before internet and fiber was a thing. So it was one of those outside sales, every door, every floor, 200 dials a day back in Chicago. So started in sales, went to logistics sales. I briefly worked at a daily deal site back in like the Groupon days during that boom. So, and then I went moved to Austin and I got into like tech. And that's when I first even heard about the term customer success, which was really exciting because I had always, even in sales, it was cradle to grave sales. So you're you know getting new accounts, you're hunting, but you're also growing your existing portfolio. So when I figured out that I could just grow a portfolio and build those relationships, which was my favorite part of the job, I didn't like hunting. I didn't like cold calling. I might like it now. I feel like now it's all inbound leads and you've got SDRs, but you know, back in the day, I definitely loved my existing customers and growing those.

SPEAKER_03 6:06

Yeah, that's cool. And then um, you know, you you I mean, you you spent a fair amount of time in CS at GainSite. How many years were you there?

SPEAKER_00 6:15

Almost three. Yeah. I started as the manager of GainSite PX. So behavior analytics, in-app walkthroughs, pop-ups, the founder, Mickey Alon, very PLG person. Learned a lot from him. He's a great mentor and leader. And then after Easton Taylor, who was my old boss, who I, you know, shout out to him. He's a great, great leader. I learned so much from him. And I then took over one of our acquisitions at the time, which was North Pass, which became Gainsight Customer Education. And then they said, well, you know, why don't you just have all three acquisition products, which were called the emerging products at the time? And then that was including formerly Insighted, that's GainSight Customer Communities now. So that was before the Skilljar acquisition, but I was leading all CS teams for those three products.

SPEAKER_02 7:02

Yeah, that's a big gig.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:05

Huge gig.

SPEAKER_00 7:06

It was cool because like those three products really became center stage of digital CS as you know it. And um, it was a part of the whole, you know, post-COVID over hiring boom that we really drank our own champagne using those products. So I it was it was really fun to get to be in the driver's seat working with my team back then.

SPEAKER_04 7:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:29

Getting to see all those tools actually help companies scale and be more efficient.

SPEAKER_03 7:34

And it probably set you up well for your current gig, which is digital CX focused, right?

SPEAKER_00 7:39

Yes, definitely. Yeah, I was excited because there's times I wanted to experiment with things, but you know, I didn't, I didn't own those programs at GainSight, which but I got to learn from a lot of amazing people. So it was very exciting uh working at Drada to be able to actually implement some of the things that I had been thinking about and get to have kind of carte blanche because they had not had a digital person before. And the leaders at the time had even said, like, we don't come from digital or scale backgrounds. We both come from enterprise backgrounds. So we're looking to you to almost, you know, make your own OKRs, make your own KPIs. So that was that was pretty nice.

SPEAKER_03 8:18

I've been in that situation before where it's like we get we know we need to hire for digital, but

Defining Digital CS At Drata

SPEAKER_03 8:24

we don't really know what it is. So why don't you come in and figure it out?

SPEAKER_01 8:30

Yeah, that was that was basically it.

SPEAKER_03 8:32

Yeah, yeah. So your remit today is I'm I'm just guessing, and you can you can correct me, but it's it's you know, management of a digital segment, but then also, you know, the automations and the you know workflows and artificial intelligence that actually helped the entire CS team, right?

SPEAKER_00 8:54

Yes. So when I started, my job was kind of a hybrid. I was uh director of digital customer success, which was overseeing our emerging segment, which is basically long tail customers. Um that was around 3,500 customers. We had a senior manager of that segment and then six CSMs under her reporting to me. And then separately, I was building out digital programs and trying to figure out ways that we could scale. And um, the first thing I wanted to do because I knew we had an in-app tool in Gainsight PX was, you know, I have a lot of affinity towards PLG and I knew that there were things that we could do. So the fact that that was a owned product and product actually owned the budget of that. But I worked really closely with building relationships with product that I was allowed and very fortunate to be able to build out like an in-app tech list, which I talked about at Pulse, but that was that was my first sort of go-to. And then this this year, in talking with my boss, my leader, Michael Goetz, who's our SVP of CS, I really wanted to like go full on in just building out digital programs. Because splitting my time between the two roles was making it a little bit less effective to be able to spend as much time building programs, because that takes a lot of time to actually like analyze data, understand where the friction's coming from, and the time to actually build. Because I was a team of one when I first started. So being able to actually focus on that has been incredible. And now that's what I focus on completely this year.

SPEAKER_03 10:24

That's great. There's a couple things you said that I want to kind of go a little maybe a layer deeper on. Sure.

Finding Friction With In App Guidance

SPEAKER_03 10:31

So, first off, let's let's talk about you know DAP in general, like digital adoption platforms. Of of course, Gainsight PX and others are, you know, at the forefront of that. You know, I've been in positions where I've built digital programs with and without those platforms. Obviously, in app is gold, you know. Yeah. For for digital, it's like the probably your most captive audience because we all know how effective email is. SMS is kind of questionable. So from a channel perspective, like like DAP is kind of it. Yeah. And I'm I'm curious, did that already exist or did you kind of make the case for it quickly and pull it in?

SPEAKER_00 12:44

It it did exist, but not in sort of use cases that I would say are more for customer success. I would say it was much more, and the product team still uses it. They have their own use cases for product launches, new releases, et cetera, surveys that they want to, you know, either do uh customer effort scores or but for my use case, when I first joined, you know, the the question I always like to ask, and you know, I learned this at Gainsight, it's like the most golden question is like, where's the friction in your customer journey? Like, where is it? And so working with our data team, who's amazing at Drata, I really wanted to look at like where are customers falling off, especially in this emerging segment, as that was sort of my remit at the time. And these people, you know, these customers are usually one to a hundred full-time employees. So a lot smaller startups, and they're typically getting Drata because they just need SOC2 in order to close the whale that they have in their sales pipeline. So they're they're not GRC experts, they're not practitioners, they're usually like a founder or co-founder or a CEO, and they just know they need to get this done in order to close the next deal. So when I realized that we had um chameleon, which I love that product, it's great. It doesn't do behavior analytics. We have amplitude for that, um, as well as now data is really democratized through Claude and Snowflake's Cortex, everything. So that's great. But so building that, I wanted to do something that I knew was pretty tried and true from the Gainsight PX days, which was just an in-app onboarding checklist, because I saw that the drop-off was happening like really early on. And the hypothesis and interviewing customers and interviewing CSMs, interviewing people within the company is really that overwhelm of a customer who's logging into a platform that they don't understand any of it really, because they don't they don't come from that background. I think that would be like me logging in to Launch Darkly and expected to know what to do. And I'm not an engineer. So I think a lot of it would be kind of stressful. And if I'm a founder, I'm wearing a lot of high, a lot of hats, and it's going to be difficult for me to take the time to figure it all out. So I wanted something that would be a bit more hand-holding, where it's just get these things done in this order and providing an app guided walkthrough tours to show them exactly how to do those things, serving up the proactive help articles that we know people are typically going and looking for or submitting support tickets for and giving them that without having it's more of a push motion than a pull motion. So ensuring that they're getting the right message at the right time. And um, yeah, that was my first sort of order of business and as a trial just to work in that segment. So that's yeah, we it was it was great. We actually saw a decrease of like 55% time to value. So actually, and then wow the reason the reason, yeah. The reason that's important too, and working with the data team, I when we did a study on retention, it was like, hey, uh, so we have journey stages in our CSP, onboarding, activation, adoption, value, pretty typical of a lot of companies. We knew that when customers did reach value stage, that they had a 92% chance of renewing. So clearly there's something good happening when they get to the value stage. My goal was to figure out why they weren't even getting out of the onboarding stage and continue to move that up. So it was a 55% decrease in time to the value journey stage, not necessarily time to value that like product teams might be referring to, like an aha moment, but really getting to that journey stage. So that was really exciting. And it was fun to be able to kind of show clout that I did that I've been able to learn and show, hey, I I know what we're doing, and I didn't have to ask for an additional tool right when I started. I wanted to work with what we had, like what do we have access to today that I could make a quick impact with.

SPEAKER_03 16:27

Yeah. Well, I'll add a feather to your cap, and we're recording this so you can like clip it and send it to your leadership. That um, you know, as you were describing your ICP, yeah, it was like, okay, well, yeah, that's the company I currently work for. Like, we're we're small, we're just getting our SOC 2 right now. We use Drive. And and it's like, you know, and and I I actually asked our CTO who's kind of leading the effort, like, you know, what is what did the onboarding look like? And he's like, Yes, yeah, it was great. Walk me through everything.

SPEAKER_00 16:58

So hey, good.

SPEAKER_03 16:59

Sweet.

SPEAKER_00 17:01

That's awesome. I love to hear that. I I will just, I'm sure marketing would want me to say, like, ICP is probably not the SMB. I would say it's we're going more enterprise, but this is some and plan to build more and more, you know, programs to help enterprise customers too. Because you've got two sides of the fence. You've got the long tail of the business, which is usually small teams that you need to help, and then you have larger teams that the CSM might be high touch and meeting with regularly, but they aren't meeting with hundreds of people at the company every day. Like they're they're meeting with maybe the one stakeholder or the admin. So still building programs for enterprise because we're really focused on enterprise and uh, you know, we're the agentic trust management platform for enterprise companies. But yes, my my room at the time was in the emerging segment and trying to help startups like yourself get off off the ground and hopefully increase your sales pipeline and grow revenue.

SPEAKER_03 17:54

Yeah, totally. That's awesome. Can we talk about data for a second? Because it's that's it's the lifeblood of any digital program. And it sounds like you have the uh immense benefit of a uh

Measuring Impact With Data Partners

SPEAKER_03 18:06

you know, of a great data team to h to help you. Um I think there's kind of two questions here. One is like, what's your working relationship look like with the data team? And did you have to do kind of some fostering there to, you know, build the relationship and and you know, make sure that you were kind of you know part of the priority? And then I guess the second question that I'll go ahead and ask, even though whatever, like, you know, what's is is is is artificial intelligence changing the way it's kind of a loaded it's a loaded question, and it's I'm spoon feeding you the question a little bit because you're leading the witness. The answer is yes, but in what way has like you know, using Cloud or ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever changed the way that you approach like data collection and processing and those kinds of things?

SPEAKER_00 18:56

Yeah, okay. So, first question that wasn't loaded. I I I really lucked out. Like this team has been absolutely incredible since day one. I do think it helped to show that I am a data person, I am a metrics person. Like I don't build this, was something I talked about at Pulse 2. Like, don't build programs just to build programs. Don't launch an in-app checklist if that's not where the friction is in your customer journey. Don't build an app guided walkthrough if that's not going to actually help.

SPEAKER_03 19:25

If you don't understand pain point, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 19:28

What's the baseline? Like, what does this look like today? And then know what the metrics are that you're gonna measure in order to show impact to the business. Like if you're just building, you know, that that's you know, I'm kind of repeating some of my presentations. So sorry to anyone who saw it, but the thing that I heard so many times, and this was fun to get to see it from PX, CC, and CE were I'm talking to product leaders, I'm talking to community leaders, and I'm talking to education leaders. And you start hearing kind of the same thing, which was really focused on almost vanity metrics, right? So, like we built 10 new walkthroughs this week, or we built five new courses, we're building two new groups within the community. And the question is always like, great, what are you, what was the problem you were solving, and how do you know that it's made an impact? And that question typically really met with silence or crickets. And I, you know, I hadn't thought about that. I don't know how I'm gonna measure it. And especially during the post-COVID, you know, massive layoffs going on at the time, there were a lot of people on the chopping block that did not know how to articulate what they were, what their programs were doing in terms of the bottom line of the business, and you have to understand that. So just wanted to plant that in terms of like so working with the the data team when I joined, I think I was also able to speak really articulately about those things and help them understand like why I needed data that I needed and like how I was going to show the true business impact.

SPEAKER_01 20:56

You spoke data.

SPEAKER_00 20:57

So that was some Yeah, I spoke data. I think, you know, it's funny. I used to think I was not a data person or analytical person, but I live and breathe by it. I have I am obsessed with data and proving, again, like business impact. I need to know like how be able to prove the value of what I'm doing and what dollars I'm moving or what efficiency gains we're having. Second question, Claude loaded. You know, I it has to be done right. There's things that keep me up at night, but I think our data team, and you know, there's no playbook for this yet. There's no blueprint of exactly

AI Dashboards Governance And Data Layer

SPEAKER_00 21:32

how to have governance within the company because there's so many data tables and schemas that you don't just want to completely open up the floodgates and have anybody in the company be able to build a dashboard here and there because you don't know if it's hallucinating. You don't know if it's picking data from an incorrect schema, which is something that I've thankfully again built a great relationship with the data team. And they've allowed me to be one of the power users, kind of early adopters of having access to things like Snowflake Cortex, um, having access to Claude that is also, you know, immediately uh connected to Snowflake. So I know that the data I'm pulling, but it really is a new world. I was just talking to my digital CS program manager yesterday about like, I can't believe I'm able to build a dashboard, improve the impact of the programs that I'm running as quickly as I can now. And it doesn't have to go through a ticket or a queue and be sort of beholden to the data team's capacity, which is typically strained because they're not just working on customer success. They're working for the whole company and everybody's fighting for data. So I I think if it's done right, it's kind of incredible that it can really democratize and have speed to show, wow, like I just launched an academy and I can already build a dashboard for my ELT and for my CSMs to show, hey, this customer took this course and actually did the action after they took the course. If they're taking a course on policies, I can immediately show how many new policies did they create or publish. So it's that's incredible. I would have normally had to wait months for that sort of data. And you know, we have these visions in our head of what we want like a dashboard to look like, and now I can actually design it the way I want and iterate on it without having to submit another ticket to say, hey, can we actually change the way this dashboard looks? Or hey, can we get different data? I actually need this other way of looking at it, and that would have had to start the whole process over again.

SPEAKER_03 23:34

Yeah, that's yeah, that's fascinating. I I I'm I'm 100% with you. Like, you know, the the even in the last six months, the ability to just rapidly create visualization and dashboarding off of data is is making such a big difference in the way that I go about communicating. Communicating internally and and and things like that because you know, I I was la we were at the CCO summit in Austin two weeks ago, one week ago, something like that. And I was having some pretty, I guess, vibrant conversations with some folks around this kind of thing. And there were two kind of themes that jumped out. One was, you know, this this notion of I I think that kind of a negative side effect is I find myself having a lot less patience for UX UI or software that doesn't immediately do what I want it to do. Like if I'm if I'm scratching my head more than like, you know, a couple minutes on something, I'm just like, this is not great. And so I immediately I find an alternative route via Cloud and an MCP server or something like that. So Exactly. So it kind of points to I think where we're going with all this kind of stuff where, you know, we are we are going to be much more, I guess, beholden to the data and and and less so the UX design design decisions of a specific tool and those kinds of things.

SPEAKER_00 25:05

I agree. Like, what's the point of a BI tool anymore if I can just visualize that and it's so much less maintenance and just overhead? And it I'm yeah, I agree. It's like scary but awesome to be able to have control of that part. And I realize that I'm I am probably privileged or you know very lucky that I do have access to this kind of data, because I know not everybody does, which can be which can be challenging.

SPEAKER_03 25:32

Well, there's a a case in point. We uh you know, we we're doing a beta program with a new feature that we're launching right now, and you know, it's the classic thing of you know, some stuff's being tracked in some Google Sheets, but then we also have some product analytics and we have some you know, HubSpot CRM data from you know, actual deals that we've closed from the from the program. And and you know, in a year ago, it would have building a dashboard on that would have involved like spending time a bunch of pivot tables, like putting stuff together, forget visualization, like who cares? Like we can read a spreadsheet. But now you just you give you know you give Claude all of the source data and ask it to create one of the artifacts that it's gotten pretty good at doing, and it's it's it's it does a phenomenal job of it. So I guess you know that's that's kind of the one thing. And the other thing that kind of relates to the s the snowflake uh example that you gave is that I think it's becoming more and more important for businesses to install a data layer.

SPEAKER_01 26:36

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 26:38

Because uh a recurring theme from the event two weeks ago was it's amazing what we can do, but y you know, the the businesses that really go hard on AI are just flying through tokens. And oh yeah. Without that data layer in place, you know, you're you individuals who are you know using data from various systems are just like it's the epitome of token inefficiency. And so we're gonna start hearing a lot more about that, I think.

SPEAKER_00 27:13

I would agree. Yeah. I haven't run into it yet myself, anyway, but I know that's something that I have to keep an eye on. Because I use like cloud design too for course authoring. Like I've been able to build really creative and cool ideas out of my head into a course that I probably wouldn't have been able to do with a rigid platform. Like I was able to so I mean, yeah, and I'm sure getting tokens on top of Cloud Code, which I also use and cloud co-work and cloud chat. So yeah.

SPEAKER_03 27:43

Well, let's talk about the course a little bit because I know you know in in in talking prior to this, we you know, we did you did mention the fact that you've kind of rolled out this academy and you've you've

Building A Customer Academy Fast

SPEAKER_03 27:53

obviously used cloud design pretty heavily, which is also a phenomenal tool. I would as a as a former, I guess I I I would still consider myself a learning nerd, even though I haven't been an LD for like a decade and a half. But like as a learning nerd, I would love to get kind of a peek behind the curtains as to what your development process looked like for that and and what the output is.

SPEAKER_00 28:18

Sure. Uh so and I I don't come from an LD background. You know, I learned a lot working with a product like Gainsight Customer Education and talking to tons of education leaders. I I hadn't come from that background. I'm certainly not an instructional designer or anything around those lines. I would say I trained Claude on some best practices because they I don't know them as well as the books that I'm reading. But I wanted to make sure those principles were there. So I mean, everybody I feel like knows about chunking, and I think people know about sort of interactive, and you need to make it where it isn't the same all the time. Because if it's the same style, same sort of methodology of learning, it also gets like there's fatigue. So you need to sort of switch it up. Yeah, you need to switch it up. So have like flip over cards, matching icons or matching quizzes, knowledge checks, etc. So I I did that and I built sort of you know the artifact in Claude as a project within Claude Design that I build. I uploaded our you know, brand kit, our template, you know, our fonts, colors, schemes, and made sure to sort of give it direction on what I wanted it to be. So we have a lot of space team. Our CEO was a former uh aerospace engineer, so pretty cool. And I that's what we've really leaned into.

SPEAKER_04 29:34

So uh yeah, that explains the driving UI. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gotcha. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 29:40

Yeah, really leaning into that, which is cool because space is cool. So everybody likes space. So even in the courses that I built, I have like uh almost like a star map, like a flight plan in space where it's all the different courses that you'll be taking, and it all aligns with sort of the the maturity path of the customer journey. Um so I was able to do that in a way that was gamified too, where it's like unlocking future missions after you complete this course, and there's a little bit of whimsy in it, and it's fun and and delightful.

SPEAKER_03 30:10

I I think that first off, I think that's so cool. You know, I cut my teeth in a LD environment that was very it was weird. It was like very by the books when it came to like e-learning content creation and all that kind of stuff, but absolutely wild when it came to like classroom facilitation stuff. So it was this weird dichotomy. But the the e-learning always had to be like this dry, boring stuff. And the reason for that was because the tool dictated what the content looked like and and how the flow of the thing and that you know, I think anyone who uses an LMS and has built courses in an LMS gets that. Like there's limitations to every LMS, and some are better than others. So I'm curious, you know, this this sounds like a really fun experience, which I'm all for fun in learning.

SPEAKER_00 31:04

Very fun, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 31:05

Um how what's the implementation of that look like? Like, is it hosted somewhere? Is it with an LMS? Is it not? Is it SCORM? Like all that kind of fun stuff.

SPEAKER_00 31:15

So we use Skilljar. Uh we purchased GainSight. I, you know, I I have some bias, but I also knew I wanted a platform that would combine academy and community into sort of a single sign-on and not have customers have to remember to go to one platform or another. So I knew that was something that was powerful. And because again, I I led at least the product for GainSight customer communities, I was still jar having after I left, but I I also had known that they were some of the best in the business. So once I heard about the acquisition and that they were putting the products together for a sort of a unified portal experience, I definitely wanted to make that decision to have customers have a better ease of use experience and just not have to remember a bunch of different sign-ins and uh go through those workflows. So when I bought Skilljar, and because I don't necessarily come from like a long L and D history, I didn't realize that I mean, we could build courses with Skilljar just fine, but they were they're kind of flat. It's just like HTML, you know, bridge HTML. And I really wanted some CSS, some interactive elements, like having things like flip cards, having things like matching quizzes. I so I started just playing around in cloud design and realized that it basically can become a course authoring tool. And I'd then export those as form files and upload them into uh into Skilljar.

SPEAKER_03 32:33

Cool. I love it.

SPEAKER_00 32:34

Yeah, it's amazing.

SPEAKER_03 32:36

Yeah, it is amazing because what you're describing, you know, would take you months in something like articulate.

SPEAKER_00 32:45

Exactly. I I had plans to only launch a couple of courses by launch day, and I was able to launch every course that we wanted for at least like a even by phase three. So the basically end-to-end journey from beginning started with Drata to audit, in addition to our trust center product, which was formerly known as SAP based Drata Sape Base Trust Center.

SPEAKER_03 33:06

So and I mean with something like uh, you know, well, let's take SOC 2, for example. I mean, that's important, sensitive. There's probably a lot of sensitive content in there that you had to probably get sign off on. And kind of it what was your process of like curating the content, making sure it was accurate, all those those kinds of things?

SPEAKER_00 33:29

Yeah, great question. So I I wouldn't say there's anything too sensitive in it. I would I'm not I'm not coming at it from a company that's trying to educate you on SOC 2 from like a You're not giving legal advice on it. Correct. Yes, I'm not I'm not giving like something that an auditor would would help you with. That's not really the the purpose of the academy. The purpose is really to help you understand how to do it in drama. So it's very product focused and sort of like how to get there. We do provide best practices along the way. We have an audit alliance team. We work with a ton of great partners that you can lean on. Um, you know, even legally speaking, we can't help customers write their policies. That's something that we we can't do from like even a CSM standpoint. You need to work with like an accredited partner or somebody that maybe like a VC SO or a company that's allowed to do something like that. So yeah, I would say the content was very heavily focused on the product and learning how to leverage Drata in order to get to the point where you have, you know, your rate of passing and controls are at the point where you could get readiness for a top two. The the courses I my shout out to Molly Calhoun, who's my digital CS program manager. I poached her from our emerging CS team because I knew that she knew this one, the customer base really well. She'd worked with these, you know, one to one hundred full-time employees for a long time. The academy courses are approachable to anybody. We kept it a bit more high-level. Um, we do plan to do more advanced use cases and more use cases towards like an enterprise maturing your security posture. But for this first go-around, like she helped really outline the foundations of the of the courses and like the step-by-step. So then I was able to train Claude on her outlines as well as bringing in additional Julie Dirksen. That's the person I was trying to think of that wrote the book.

SPEAKER_02 35:19

Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_00 35:20

Yeah, she and her principles are amazing. I listened to her book on on audio, so I thought that was great.

SPEAKER_03 35:26

I think that is an amazing pin to put into the conversation because you just touched on a a kind of a philosophy or a just a I think maybe it's I guess it's pretty well known in digital circles that anything you do for your smallest segment is going to be just as applicable and helpful for your large segments. And and I think that is a perfect example where you design for, you know, your your folks who really, really kind of need that self-paced guidance, but it can be just as helpful for, you know, someone at a large organization who does have the support ecosystem of an assigned CSM or maybe a technical account manager, but they just want to self-serve or or they want to self-onboard in in the platform.

SPEAKER_00 36:13

Exactly. I mean, that's the real use case there. Like, especially for enterprise, they probably don't need me to be teaching them about SOC2 or policies. They've been doing this for a long time. They're experts, but they they aren't experts in drama yet. So when a new admin joins a company, you know, I think a lot of companies run into this where it's like new admin joins, whether it's a whether it's drama or not, whether it's game site, whatever product it is, new admin joins. Hey, I need to get trained up on the platform. You know, that's a heavy cost to the company to always be training somebody from day one. So being able to do this in a digital motion to be able to help people self-serve and get onboarded as quickly as possible. Not to say that the CSM can't help with you or can't help you with that, but then it's more meaningful conversations that the CSM is having with customers when they're able to take away the redundant, repetitive stuff that they find themselves talking about over and over again that could be in a different format, like an academy course or an in-app guide or what have you.

SPEAKER_03 37:11

Yeah, it's not a value add whatsoever, you know, and and it it doesn't make good use of the CSM's time. I mean, even though you could argue it's FaceTime, it's like, yeah, okay, no, let's have some FaceTime and actually talk about your business and whatnot.

SPEAKER_00 37:26

So Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 37:27

So one of the things that I do like to kind of close out most episodes with is uh first off, like I want to know what you're paying attention to. What's in

What Kat Watches And Closing

SPEAKER_03 37:36

your content diet? Is it strictly LinkedIn? Are you reading some cool stuff? Is there anything that has impacted your your your digital role specifically?

SPEAKER_00 37:47

I try to stay, I love your community. Obviously, I follow a lot of your content. I listen to your podcast. Kat, I don't know how to pronounce her last name. I should know this.

SPEAKER_03 37:57

Frigeman.

SPEAKER_00 37:58

Yes, Brigeman. I finally met her and I've been fangirling her. I know she's wonderful. So I follow a lot of her content. I saw so many good sessions at Pulse that were like from Sales Loft and Okta that I thought were brilliant and can learn a lot from there. So I tend to follow those people. I listen to the daily AI podcast, which is just our briefing, which is like a 15-minute just catches you up on all things AI. Um, so yeah, I'm usually following either education leaders, digital leaders, Carrie Arduin. Yeah, she's fantastic. I met her also through Gainsight. I follow a lot of her content. I talk with her from time to time, different strategies. She's been a really great asset and resource as well. Uh Holly Goodliffe, she's also incredible.

SPEAKER_03 38:47

All three are podcast vets of this podcast.

SPEAKER_00 38:51

That's right. I remember that.

SPEAKER_03 38:52

You're on the list now, too.

SPEAKER_00 38:53

So yay, I'm part of the gang.

SPEAKER_03 38:55

Oh, that's cool. Is there, I mean, you just shouted out of a few people that are doing really cool stuff in digital. Is there an is there anyone else you'd want to shout out? I mean, you gave you gave a couple of team shout-outs too, which is cool. I love that.

SPEAKER_00 39:07

Yeah. You know, I always still follow a lot of PLG folks. So Wes Bush recently, you know, I still follow follow Mickey. Shout out to Mickey. I don't know if he listens to this podcast, but he's really been kind of blowing my mind with some of the way that PLG is also adapting, where and it also makes me a little nervous about the future of digital, to be honest. Like you're getting to the point where you don't have to learn how to use a product, you just tell the product what you want it to do. So I've been seeing some really great content from him. So figuring out how to make your product actually just be able to action it. You don't, you shouldn't need tool tips anymore or anything because now you just tell it what you want it to do. So I think that's pretty mind-blowing. Yeah, I think just honestly, I'm pretty excited about the stuff we're working on. Um, I haven't seen anything recently in the wild in terms of like a tool I've used. I mean, Amplitude's done some cool stuff where you that's a little bit more like that, where you can just tell it, hey, I want to see a chart of our month over month actor, you know, monthly active users in this segment, and you don't have to know how to actually build the chart anymore. So I think that's really cool.

SPEAKER_04 40:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:15

But yeah, shout out to Molly Calhoun on my team, my amazing leader, Michael Getz, who's been super supportive and empowering of digital programs at Drata, and uh all the ELT at Drata as well, who's been really supportive and encouraging. So that's been great.

SPEAKER_03 40:30

So cool. It sounds like you've found a really good home there, which is great.

SPEAKER_00 40:34

Yes, I'm absolutely loving it. It's been fun.

SPEAKER_03 40:37

That's great. Well, where can I mean LinkedIn, anywhere else people can find you? And I'm you probably folks can go check out your GainSite talk.

SPEAKER_00 40:45

Yeah, the pulse, the pulse session is recorded. It's in the pulse library. Would love for people to check that out. Hit me up. I'd love to talk about this stuff all the time and nerd out about digital. Um so happy to happy to connect anytime.

SPEAKER_03 40:59

Well, Kat, uh I'm so glad to have you in the club. Yes. Can't wait to get this episode out there for people to consume because there's a lot of goodness in here that you hopefully turn some people on to. So thank you.

SPEAKER_00 41:13

Yeah, I love it. Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_03 41:15

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. It really helps. Don't forget, digitalcustomer success.com is where you can find extra resources, a chat bot trained on this show's content, and the Digital CX masterclass that helps you master digital and AI in CX. My name is Alex Turkovich. Thanks again for joining, and we'll see you next time.