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Gain in-depth insights into building a Voice of the Customer playbook that drives engagement, product alignment, and actionable feedback strategies Deepdive Voice of the Customer Playbook | Transcription Kay - Welcome to the experience dialogue. This webinar is a place for healthy discussions and disagreements, but in a very respectful way, just by the nature of how we have conceived, this, you will see the passionate voice of opinions, friends. Having a dialogue and thereby even interrupting each other or finishing each other's sentences at the end of the dialogue. We want to make sure you are the audience to leave with valuable insights and approaches that you can take to your work. continue the discourse on the other social media channels. Today's topic is specific to going into a deep dive in specifically on the voice of the customer Playbook using wise of the customer data to enable us to understand that customer Journeys, which facilitates the ability to keep our customers satisfied and retain our customers to avoid treating our customer's Murmurs, we needed to set up and guarantee the level of support quality, which comes through the voice of the customer Playbook system. There are multiple levels of this Playbook and playbooks generally provide step-by-step guidance that's needed for the standard ways in which an agent, any customer success individual, or anyone who's involved in the customer journey responds in a standardized way. With that I would love to introduce the speaker today, Ashna. Ashna is an emotionally intelligent coach, who came across very well in the first decision that she had. I was also very intrigued with her background coming in from sales and she is a community Builder 4 Cs and as part of Cs Insider and would love to hear from her experience on the voice of the customer Playbook. Welcome, Ashley. Ashna - Thank you so much K. Good to be here. Excited to be here. Thank you. Kay - So we can start T off concerning. How do you see it with a customer Playbook and you know what faces, do you see that the revised estimate program? Ashna - That's a great question. So I think, now, when we talk about what to the customer Playbook, it's really about, I mean, it's kind of, in the name, it's really about that. Capturing those feedback, capturing those moments from the customer set, those expectations with the customer, and then having your processes built around. That so you know as part of your customer Journey which again it was the customer placed throughout your customer journey and as part of your customer Journey, there are many different areas now, we, when, you know, every part of it, there's Playbook But then there's Playbook Within the and these playbooks are processes and the way that voice of the customer plays around is in each of this area of your Customer Journey. How are you capturing information from your customer? And then, you know, making sure that you have Your processor built around it. So to answer your question it means there are different parts but you can start with the onboarding, you know, within the onboarding. There are multiple different playbooks that we can talk about. There's kickoff, there's sales to see as Playbook.And then, you know, as we progress with the onboarding implementation, you know, configuration and pushing the customer to long term success. That's kind of like the ongoing part of the things, then just a high level. There are some other Business Reviews. Play bulk, you know high Outscore lower Health score playbooks.So, really about the health score are asuh of customers journey. And then also, you know, renewal playbook which contains, you know, turn playbooks and even, you know, when there is an expansion and cross those opportunities. So, throughout that Journey, the voice of the customer plays, because you're capturing data from your customers, you have your processes built out so that you can Capture those data, and then you react against it. Kay - When you talk about processes, Schneider you come from a CSS background, you come in from a sales background, are you going to be covering those two specific areas so, when they hear your experience, do we look at it from those two contexts? Ashna - Yes, hundred percent. That's a great question. K. Because I believe that, you know, the success of your customer, really starts at the very beginning and also, you know, We see it starts when your customer, your prospects are knocking the door, but to kind of answer your question is that, you know, the hand of that the structure that you need to have defined a design that goes from cells to see s, it needs to be something that, you know, at that works. And you want to make sure that, you know, everybody, all parties involved, all stakeholders involved are on, you know, they understand that structure. You want to make sure that everybody's kind of on the same page. And so, Likely cells to CS handoff. That's something that even we have, you know, done quite a bit of work to implement and we continuously revise and redefine.You know what, we have just to kind of give you an idea in that specific Arena. What we have done is particularly different for a larger scale of the largest customer so Enterprise Sheedy, customers and then also different for SMB, mid market customers, there's a different type of, you know, the handoff and then the playbooks that we created there are a few changes. A little bit of a difference in those, but the sales to CS is about, you know, who's doing, what during this cycle, you know, Celsius playing some part of it, CSS playing some part of it, and I'll give you my example company, we have everything post cells is the customer. Success is handling so onboarding to up, to Renewal to some part of it. Customer success is handling it.So, the cells to see, we make sure that as soon as a prospect becomes a customer the end, CSM is a sign that to onboard that customer csm and sales members are coming together before connecting with the customer. And having that particular hand-off. Now for the, you know, midmarket and smaller team, we have just that, you know, it could just be book questionnaires that salespeople can answer for the CSM.uh What we recommend with the Strategic Customer because a lot is involved, there's a lot of stakeholders. The customer side but they're also involved. We recommend that you take that 1530 minutes on your calendar and have that proper hand-off between, you know, cells to CS. So it's a knowledge transfer session that happens between the cells and CS. Where cells are saying, you know, here's you know, how the deal went years what they want, this is the expectation, this is what we talked about, and here's the plan, here's the end goal for the customer and then CS is taking that. And then, you know, it's almost kind of like, you know, you're going into a war with all the tools and everything that you can. So see us. So that when they do get on that kickoff call, which is the next Playbook After that, they are prepared, they're confident and they know exactly, you know, how to get to the next stage. Kay - So that's the process that we have so a couple of things that I want to note down, right? So once we look at it as a joint partnership with the customer, it's not going on the water. Every experience we want to make sure our audience hears that the speaker speaks from their background and experience because we had previously, and the handoff, actually, sometimes in some companies, especially to be technically oriented starts much earlier, even at the solutioning, but space. And so the door kind of really, you know, is not a fact. They become a prospect to a customer, but even when they are prospects certain points to that because they are also trying to buy offers and everything. So, when we look at hand-offs, we have to remember the business model. We also have to remember that they support the business model. We also have to remember the product business model. Yeah. Both in mind before the hand of happens, um so in terms of, Setting the right expectations. Is this the fact that you look at it from a value-driven standpoint, are you defining the values here or you're doing it as a next step? Ashna - That's a great question and just to kind of redo what you mentioned. You're right. I think we also have some areas and some customers that we also try to, you know, do that hand off before that? So I think, generally speaking, it depends, you know, business to business, but you're right, you know, handoffs can be happening beforehand, too. And it's all about. Just make sure that you present that plan that you have in place in front of your customer and you're coming together as a team coming together, you know, from the customers and from the from your business, Community standpoint coming together as a team to Andrea, got another question, I mean, great question. I think the value proposition is throughout the journey. I think you're real, you're defining and redefining the value, you're making sure that you know, the end goal of the customers is continuously discussed and, and some help. Protective Services exactly kept kind of in the center of it. But I would say that you know, part of the onboarding Playbook as I mentioned, one of them, the biggest part is the Celsius handle, but also the kick off that you have with your customer. Now business, this could be different from the way that we have it. You know, after our hand we have ourselves reach out to our customer schedule that time. And what we're doing is we're officially handing off the customer on that kickoff call. CSM and in that kickoff, the call is all about. Here's what we know, here's the expectation, where are you in this process? Where do we need to go? Let's Build That Joint plan, as you mentioned together, and let's build out those timelines around it. And you know, you kind of go from you go further. So the main portion of the beginning, you know, at the beginning of the cycle, or when you are setting and realizing and understanding those values of your customers that ends at the kickoff level. But even before that, you know, cells, and see, we have already been talking about because cells know a lot about, you know what the customer's expectations are, what do they need, what the success looks like for them. So that's, that's been part of the conversation. It's coming together. Now, with the customer at this stage at the kickoff and you know making sure that we're all on the same page and we understand what is success for you and what's going to be the plan going forward? Kay - Yeah, I love them and always love the findings. W framework, right? So who what? Why how? And then there is a hitch there, but the interesting part in the entire hand-off is defining who is going to play? What roles are we in this together? What is it that we want to achieve but I do want to know how usually the definition of the customer does this? We do this. All of that gets defined, that's perfect. And when is very important because when are we going to achieve it? That's when the right expectations that you talked about earlier come. Yeah, play, right. So yes. When are we going to achieve something like this? And I know you had aum sample here that you would like to share with the audience, which will be there when we have the fine. um, Things. And you can also reshare it, so we will go from there. Soin then you talked a lot about health scores. So tell me from your experience. What defines the health score here? Ashna - Yeah, that's a great question. And, you know, help scores could be different from company to company, business, or business. I think, there are some generic major parts of Health scores or criteria for say, you know what makes a health score, but how you wait for it, you know, how you wait for your, your score per how you know what criteria are included in the health score. It could be different based on, you know, business requirements and based on the type of products you are based on the type of customers. The way that we have it is we have a higher Health score defined and then lower Health score defined and it's just you know, the criteria that we have included in the health score includes all sorts of it, not just about CS it is as We were discussing earlier. It's also about you knowing those support areas to you because the customer is getting, you know, customers getting support from all parts of the business, you know, from the CS a little bit from the sales as well and also from the support. So we want to make sure that we're capturing all of those into the health score as well. So he'll score for us is, you know, usage adoption their main ones and a 1 is also product and marketing, right? Kay - So there is yes, well, yes, so there are experts, for example, security companies. There's usually a security person from, you know, compliance companies and stuff like that. But please continue. Ashna - No, no, that's great Great. great. Correct. Correct. Just wanted to run that. Yes, Lily. uh, That's great. But no, I think it's a lot around usage adoption for us, you know, but we're also kind of doing, you know when was the last time you had an activity with this customer? That's something that we also Target the amount of Engagement that you had with them. You know, Finance is also somewhat involved. Have they paid their views already, you know, then you have support? As I mentioned, what we include from support, is what we call bugs, and other people like we call warranties and warranty. So, you know, how do they have active warranties and effective bugs with us? That's also included and waited somehow if they have cases that many cases open with us or tickets per se and for more than you know, 30 days or whatever, it's for that. That's also defined for us and so that's and also you know main parts surveys. You know we also support doing surveys. We want to make sure that those surveys are also as part of you know what's there whatever. You know The NPS RC sad or satisfaction score sentiments. Do you know what they look like? Then we also include gum. Check, you know sometimes your health score could be high but you know your CSM or your ccsm has a feeling kind of like well I'm not too sure about this customer for this many reasons. There is that then you have you know, if the champion has left that's also involved in the health score, then you have Acquisitions and mergers. If they've gone through that, we want to also, make sure that that's involved. Another major thing that we have is competitors, you know, have they, you know, if we have some insight into competitors that they've been looking at or been working with whatever? That's also something part of them, the health score that we have. So we have waited for this differently based on, you know what we find important. And like I said, it's business. A business could be different, but most of the time, some of these are, you know, really important ones that I have a feeling that you know, a lot of the companies include these types of criteria in their health score two. And then it's just about creating processes and these scenarios and which will be called playbooks. So, what we have is, if the health Or is about the certain line of a certain number. We consider that higher if it's below that then that's lower. And we're continuously tracking those and our CSM's have, you know, Cadence's and playbooks created around those so they can continuously, you know, make that as part of their schedule and going behind them, and then we have built out resources and libraries, you know, accordingly. So that we can pull those resources also and then send it to the customer based on where they are, you know, if they have a for Sample, they have a higher Health score. I mean, that that's an indication that you could be talking about, something more that you can do with the customer. There is some more value that you can provide me. There's an expansion opportunity, maybe there is a cross selling opportunity, you know, in this area or even to help marketing with some, you know, getting some reviews for them or whatnot. And so these are the areas that we have defined, okay? If this is a scenario, this is what you do. This is a scenario, that's what you do. But then again it could change over time. So we're continuously revising and redefining You know, I'd create different processes areas where our csm'scan work. Kay - That's right. That's the client creating that knowledge, not just creating the knowledge, but also making sure understanding, of which knowledge needs to be improved. Then examined, updating that piece of knowledge as required and that goes, comes back into the feedback from them, saying, hey, this helps us didn't help this needs to. Yeah, so yeah, is it in itself a journey. Ashna - Yeah, yeah, exactly. I hundred percent and I think and it's a queen back to the topic of the hour west of the customer. It's particularly in this area. Like just imagine how much feedback you're getting, you know, from the customer with all of these. There are different criteria that define a health score but that's also a way for you to get that feedback from your customer, you know. And then you kind of have your processes built out around it. Kay - So it's I think healthcare is one of the most of the voice of the customer playbooks uhscoring should definitely. It, you know, provides a standardization that nonscoring is not right. So there is a standard way to measure everything. Yes, right? So how is the support experience? How is the customer experience? How is the onboarding experience? was so each one of those, I think scoring definitely helps concerning Sizing and looking at data from multiple angles and also doing analysis on top of it. I loved how, you know, you did touch upon the feedback. So he's right. So there's a lot that can be done by surveys, but now we are also moving towards understanding sentiment in every tourist, and then bubbling up the actual sentiment of that interaction. So, we don't have to necessarily just rely on surveys alone. So 100 on, it's amazing how where the industry is going and there is a lot that we see that's happening on the right path, right? So yeah, that's present, yeah.ThemeForest, just brought out a couple of research and we shared them with our social media, and to State how much customers support customer support experience and customer experience. And Intertwine is at the lowest level in the industry right now. So and how that presents an opportunity to make Leaps and Bounds in that area. So glad we touched upon the Health's scoring part of it in detail. So yeah. So when we talked about onboarding sales to see someone off, we talked about the kickoff process. The five wiseW'sthing.Then we talked about the health scores. Anything else that you would like to see? Have you seen the covered invoice for customer Playbook? playbooks Ashna - Yeah, I mean, I know, I think it's fun because playbooks have playbooks within them. So it's kind of like, there's just so many that could be involved in it, but I think one of the other ones that I would say is the renewal which is also kind of like, coming back to the circle of the customer's life cycle. Renewals are also really important because and you're going to capture a lot of, you know, a lot of information from your customer whether they're renewing, whether they're churning, whether they're reducing, whether they're, you know, Expanding whatever that may be at the time of renewal, there's going to be a lot of data that is going to be captured from your customer. That's going to Define how your relationship with your customer is going to progress going forward, you know. So I think renewal is also a thought important part of it to kind of give you some more into it. I mean the way that we handle Virgo is all two different parts of it. We have Auto Renewals and then we have manual renewals either way. I think it's important that you are putting enough I guess, you know, you have a process defined so that you are capturing, you know, forecasting. First of all four rules are for scat forecasting. For your customers ahead of time, but then you also kind of like, you know, reaching out ahead of time to make sure that you have enough time and customers also have enough time to work with you. But you also have time to understand where they are and where they need to go. And then you have those options to present them. So I feel like when it comes to renewables, That's why I always recommend that those parts are implemented. Well within your, you know, playbook renewals. Kay - Let's go a little deeper into this, right? So at the end of the day, support and success professionals are the ones talking to customers. They are the ones who know the gut of the customer. They are the ones who know we did. We provide them the value that we signed up for and are we continuing to provide the same level of value to the customer? Right. Soso during renewal times that value assessment comes back into play, right? So if you can drill a little bit more into tying the value back into the renewal cycle, it'll be great. Ashna - Yeah. Yeah, 100%. So like I, you know, we talked about throughout the cycle, you know, there's even at the onboarding part of the journey, there's going to be that value assessment. You can be doing that value assessment. Whether it's a, you know, one of them, one of them, one of the practices again. Is also studying whether it's a survey or just like, you know, doing a little bit of a gut check at, you know, how successful this customer is? At the end of that onboarding cycle, when you're moving them into long-term success. So, that's kind of like the value that you've taken from them. If you're going through a business review if you look at Health scores, that the midjourneymade part of the Journey of customers' Journey. When you're looking at a health score, that's also a part of the value, you know, if they're held score is high, but if they have Champion, that's Left. I mean, you know, then that's kind of an area where, you know, I would like to consider that as like, you know, I'm going to put this customer or renewal at risk. Or I'm going to put a little bit more pressure on this, or more attention to this because there might be an area where I might have to resell. We sell it to them, if I don't have the champion that I used to have, things like that, it's important. I think. So all of these areas where you capture this information come back to that rule. And so that what we do is well, we're Advanced and I think a lot of companies are Advanced. You can have triggers and things created. What we have done is based on the health score and based on other criteria that had been talked about. You know, you could have triggers created that indicate that fork at that it's forecasting. Your renewal already. So that, you know, you already have a different set of customers that you can work with. And the way that I it's, you know if the health score is low, I want to Target them at risk, you know, already. And then we're tracking those separately and we're targeting those separately already. So there is a whole different Playbook that we played with that customer ahead of time. One of the things that we also like to do is, you know, sending them out sometimes, you know, for a certain segment of our customers, not all of them, but send six months in advance, whether it's a survey or just a question, like, hey, if you had to renew tomorrow, would you renew with us? And if the answer is, yes, well, then that's your opportunity to do. Castelo Expansions, and other areas that you can work with them. If the answer is no, well, then that's your opportunity and you have six months now to work with them rather than, you know, knocking on their door about renewal 30 days or 60days in advance. So it's kind of like, you know, creating those processes in place, which can kind of help you based on this information that you're capturing based on the value discussions that you've been having, maybe you've had a business review, where you talked about some of the values and you kind of understood that maybe something's happening on the customers business side of the things that might have. Effect in the future, that's your indicator. You know, that's what you want to kind of, you know, take it separately and work towards you knowing that that's almost kind of like marking at risk or maybe, you know, that could be a best case, we're not sure yet. So I think that's a whole another playbook right there for you that you want to, you want to kind of work with them. So that's valuable. The proposition is really important before renewal and also at the time of renewal because even at the time of renewal, you are going to be learning so much from your customer, maybe they will reach out to you six. It's or 90 days in advance that they're like, hey, we're ready to renew but we want to reduce our whatever the contract that we have now, that's a type of whole other discussion that you need to kind of go back and maybe you might have to resell to them on a certain level. So it's continuously looking at the data that you're capturing. And about, you know, what type of process is what are you going to do about them? And that's part of the plate. But that's all about those processes that need to be in place. Guidelines. You know, when I say processes their guidelines because you don't want to be stuck in that kind of like this is it, but their guidelines. So at least you know what the next steps are, and then you can kind of go from there. Kay - Yeah. Hardware upselling Hardware was always with a lot of benchmarks and with a little more value-driven even decades ago, I'm so happy to see that software is also getting More value driven because at the end of the day you know gone are the days where you're just buying it for a workflow like buying a database or something like that. So It's wonderful to see that value-driven aspect in every step of the way in a customer's journey and the customer and the transparency right to be able to do that. So thank you so much for your time Ashna. Really appreciate it. Appreciate the time you took to share. ThePlaybook and specifically drink-driving around the voice of the customer. Thank you for your time. Ashna - Thank you so much for your pleasure. Previous Next

Explore how customer support can drive business growth, emphasizing the importance of understanding customer needs and utilizing various communication channels in a globalized market. Growth Through Support | Transcription Today, so this is pretty good. I think we missed a recording until now. So we do have God. He's so it's what I love about. The two of you are there is a data piece for which there are tools and stuff. And I can imagine corroborating data from many many data sources. What you were talking about more and probably weeks, and How far personal time to even bring out the data or maybe you have encountered other simple ways of doing it and giving that data to substantiate the argument and Ahmad from a change management point. There are tools and mediums and think you use the word medium here. So, mediums that have worked very well for you, and have you picked that based on what the You know about the company culture or have you seen certain things that fit in better? I mean, there are so many dependencies there, right? This is a variable-driven decision, right? A goes, whatever, your Omni-channel structure and model is today, cost capability maturity model where you are in growth. In terms of the organization. There are so many levers there to be had and discussed. What we do know. Fundamentally. You want him, you want to ultimately meet people where they engage you most want to do. You want to optimize That. Wow. Through some of my experiences, you know, we aim to sort of increase the scope of this idea of omnichannel, but yet, we're not meeting the thresholds of performing or optimizing in the channels that the people want to introduce themselves or engage Us in to be given. So it goes back to what I said earlier. A lot of this is kind of cyclical. Let's optimize and win on the basics. And so it depends where you're going, what you're trying to do, but I think it'll be on the culture. Right? And then it's also the willingness to either be Innovative, disruptive or lead the way, or if you're just looking to be status quo. Neither is incorrect, right? You just need an innocent comment upon us. When writing, we're coming up with these ideas and they strap, your stopping points might give me a few tools. If that has worked for you before we listen, we are social media by far today as the biggest reach is everyone using it properly or optimizing numbers. We know if you don't, you have to have that presence, but let's not let us know. And understand there's the good, bad and ugly with that. Because if something goes wrong, it's going to go. Buy something that goes right. They can go by. But if it goes wrong, also, I was just going to say that's so funny because I feel like social media is Full for the direct consumer but it's not that's not the channel for B2B. So it's just really really interesting. Anyway, continue. Yeah. I was going to go down, go down, and go down the path there, and then obviously we know despite what everyone may say and Depends. It depends on where you are global because there are nuances in terms of cultures and geographical locations. Self-service. Is this a huge push, right? Depending on where you are, we know at the end of the day, The phone human contact is so desirable now, right? Because we were locked up for two years, it's still the most costly. So how do you find that balance between human contact? Human touch and automation. This is where a lot of folks are focusing on and then let me then I'll this is a nice dovetail, which I'll pitch to you Mo are talking about B2B a lot of this is creating a Marketplace or a platform for that discussion to happen organically and you'll what you'll find is a lot of the And or challenges will be solved with either. Only You facilitate or handoff and it'll figure out at the very least. You'll know where you have an opportunity for improvement. So, what does that mean? We're talking blogs, right? We're talking in a chat room, we're talking, whatever it may be where you can create this Marketplace for great minds, think alike and by just buying organic and innate nature, we're going to solve things collectively because you're never alone. You're trying to figure something out. So I think that dovetails nicely into what you're talking about. going to be a perspective but no one understands. They are at the 80th percentile, whether it's B2B or b2c solving a problem and people want to get done fast, efficiently, and cheaply. That's the Crux of it. The 20% is the difference between B2B and b2c. Yeah, so I'm just going to go back to channels just briefly and I love what you said about Community because that's like totally. At the top of my mind as well. And it dovetails nicely just into like, kind of the fusion of between like Typical growth channels because like Community is, like, in that marketing realm, right? Like and it's but it's also a help Channel, it coaching Channel and, and one a one-to-many, your support of Coach. Exactly. And it needs to be moderated and needs to be like, discussions need to be facilitated and all this stuff, but I think so, I think channels are really interesting because you have to, and I'm going to also use this to segue into that follow-up question about. Where are you? And how are you collecting this data? Do I agree 100% with what you're saying if you have to meet your customers where they are? And so that channel, what channel that they prefer is going to depend on, like your industry is going depends on your vertical. It's going to depend on. If you have a product LED Growth Company versus to be specifically like product LED Growth Company versus like more of like Enterprise or if you do both like because you have an Enterprise segment and like more product Leche. A segment. And so, like, for example, for us like, we have, we work with Hollywood film studios and people love the phone. So, like, we like people who just love the phone. You have to make the phone a channel that is not typically super popular and customer support for product LED growth companies. The other thing is when you have an Enterprise segment like honestly, most of my day is in coaching calls and face-to-face. Zoom calls, working through problems and helping people, like troubleshooting how to organize their account, or how to, how, to, structure things so that they can accomplish certain workflows. And so it's like for us most people are reaching out by email. We don't have any social media presence at all, but our customers are not there. Like, I mean, honestly, like so many times I try to, like, make friends with my customers on LinkedIn and like, I can't even find them. And so there. It's just not the channel for those types of conversations. However, they all expect to have a Cadence needing they all expect to have, you know, be able to jump on a screen share if they need to work something out. So to go into that data. The question is, how are you? And where are you collecting this data? I think the most important thing for making these sorts of cases is essentially aggregating all of your conversation data, no matter. ER, what channel? It's from if it's on the phone if it's in chat if it's in social media if it's in the email aggregating, all of that into one single source of cosmic, solid interactions. Yes, interactions are conversational truth. You will. And then use that to you. Can. Then going back to what you were saying before about segmentation as well. Customer segmentation is super, super important to segment or use all of that data and segment it by, for example, an operational process. So like we have a high-touch process for Enterprise and then we have a low touch velocity process for, you know, like for lower complexity customers. So we segment it by that and then we segment it by and then we segment it by personalization segmentation. So for example for us, that's a use case like how they're using. The product is going to be personalized. And then also just kind of different. Things for us about their verticals. Like whether or not, they're like reality, or if they are episodic, or if they are, you know, a feature that has some differences to it as well. And then the other quadrant is what it's like like their role in what they're doing because how admins perceive the product is different from how, workspace you know, the collaborators are contributors perceive the process product which is different than how the like viewers perceive the Which is like almost like a different kind of user Persona. So when you can aggregate all of this conversation, all data in one place, then you can segment this data in all of these ways and the piece that's usually missing for the support team. What's so important is revenue. So you need to be able to take this conversational data that you're having of all this, these customer interactions in all these different places. Put that in one place and then put that in a place where you can either pump it into Like some people know it helps get, we use looker at Moxie and we, you know, we have we were a start-up until like just very recently when we required it. So like we were just, you know, putting our cross-dressings are conversational data and HubSpot with the revenue because we were tracking our deals in there because we didn't have, we don't have an automated process around that but just wherever you need to be able to cross-reference this, all of this conversation data, have its Goodbye. Operational segment and also personalization segment and then cross-reference that with revenue. And if you can do that, that's when you can start getting insights into seeing Trends emerge, and it's important to cross-reference your support KPIs and your conversation Trends and all of the data that you do on the support side with how that impacts Revenue because then you can start making those lines, right? Like you can make those lines that when our reply time goes, And we lose money when our satisfaction rate goes down. We lose money. And or like, because people are like, so we need to work on internal enablement to make sure everybody's an expert in knows what they're talking about. We need to properly resource this so that we can staff this because like people expect to have answers within 2 hours or 15 minutes if it's an urgent issue and we need to be able to accommodate that. And if you don't cross reference, that traditional support, KPIs with Revenue, It's like you can't make any of those arguments and so just having a place where that's possible is probably the very first step to yeah, and the other dimension to it is the business model itself, which is what you touched upon where SAS companies come up with freemium models. And actually, that's not just a B2B phenomenon, b2c phenomenon these days, you get salons asking for memberships, right? So and building on top of it. So definitely I think this does This model has an impact on what a CS person does concerning taking on how much responsibility for the cross-sell or the upsell is, providing the value of the product to the End customer Etc. So, I think it would be great to take this and see my bear on the b2c side. How have you seen that? Stolen up. So this kind of SAS model goes into B to C and how you have seen taking care of those customers. Why depends on how it depends on where this vertical sits in the organization? I've been in organizations where it sits on the post-sales side, which is a little more difficult. There are other hurdles to jump across to work closely with sales, but then I've also seen this, you know, there it depends on the structure door where they feel like there is a value there, right? And it's easier to facilitate than the 360 feedback move. If you're on the forward side and work more closely with the market and sales. And so depending on what that is in Australia, I'll give an example. If you're on the second part of that or the first part I should say, it's really about just again delivering on the promise and making sure that there's this whole seamless and frictionless interaction post-sales because that quite frankly is where your network effect begins. And people are going to brag and share with others about their experience and whether it's wrong or indifferent, the product may become. Secondly, there's no, I just had a fantastic experience. Oh, by the way, the product is great. The platform is great. The service is great. But man, they take care of you. That's where that Network effect and where you can contribute to that beyond the product. But if it's only another side, the way to facilitate that is to work very closely with sales, right? And make sure I'm not just sales by the but also your product teams, right? Whether it's the platform or the engineering side and say, Hey, listen, here. We are the voice of the customer here. The things that we're hearing and saying here are some opportunities that we think might be a value-add, and either contributing to or including in anything that's in this product roadmap going forward, right? And so you can only get better and better, but that does get require that one you lead the way and change management to that, second you're very good at building relationships and three, you gain the trust and so, therefore, you have the data and the know-how which is the Art Science resources to facilitate that and they get it because I've been to the day, it's really about making sure that we grow, whether it's the daily, average user weekly, average monthly, average users product, adoption optimization, whatever those metrics are used to measure. The idea is to grow that and that's our contribution. If in fact, we can contribute to that now if you Have done well and established these relationships. You have gained the confidence and the trust of those who are typically quantitatively driven and very technical, right? If you can gain that, that respect, that footing in that relationship. Now, you guess what you've gotten pulled in earlier? In this product roadmap, you get greater visibility, right? And therefore you can prepare and plan better as it pertains to developing workflows and escalation paths and anticipating those things that may occur. When it is lost, what I've seen on the other side of the house is if that hasn't occurred. Remember I said those are larger hurdles. If you're on the other side of that post-sales side. Now you're scrambling at the 11th hour to create that frictionless and seamless and delightful experience and now you bear the brunt of trying to catch up, right? You stress the word, the team, and the vertical out all these other things and then you finally catch up. But guess what? There's another product coming, right? Yeah. Depends on where you structured and how it's structured. Think this is part of, you know, in with us. I think this is part of the challenge for us. Particularly. If you're on that post-sales side, how do you communicate this value proposition? We have a jump start. We've had a springboard called the pandemic, in? Folks, know that experience is important. But now are you going to capitalize leverage that and keep that voice as loud as it is not as loud as it was then today. So that folks will understand and know how to connect those dots and make sure life. Daddy's here. Yeah, mon, before you go on this. Could you say the same thing? What if Matt was talking about this bigger size company? I think it would be wonderful to hear it for much smaller-sized companies and how the same thing can be implemented within a very small size. Well, we are very small. So it will not be so okay. So first of all, I want to say that I love what you said about value-added. Herbs because honestly, I think when people get icky angry about the idea of and cross-selling it's because they feel sleazy like they're selling something that a customer doesn't need. But actually, I would argue that you're the best. When you're in custom-like post-sales customer-facing teams or you were just working closely with the customer. You are in the best position to recognize when something is a value-add. So, you know, when I was at help Scout, for example, you would get into these situations where people would have these messed up situations with how they're using tags, and they were using tags the way that you should be using custom fields, which is on a higher, tier 2 plan. So, it is more of, like recognizing these problem areas. And being like, Oh, actually, I can deliver more value to you. You have an easier time with this product. I'm helping you fix a support problem, but it happens to be something that is more money. Look, it's not, like, I don't Like to think about it as upselling or cross-selling so much is, it's recognizing opportunities that you can increase value for your customers who already are like loving and adapting your product and finding ways that they can, you know, just it's I think of it as like helping them more. Just helping them more. And so the way it's so okay. So we're in a very small team and it's funny because like I've been thinking about this a lot in terms of scaling but or also like Potentially mapping this to how things would work in a large organization because I think it's considerably easier in a small organization because like the way that we're structured is we have so I have a team of six and I'm one of them. So technically we have a high high-value team and a high-velocity team like a high-touch team and a high-velocity team, but my high-touch team is really like one person. Is handling the high-touch enterprise process. Assisted by me as his Superior and like, help-help her helper in ways that I can. And then we have a high-velocity team. Now, the high-velocity team currently has four people that are spread out across time zones and I strategically hired people who are both excellent. Technically and also love coaching and educating and teaching people and helping people solve problems. Because I honestly think education is the new sales and I don't think sales is a skill set so much. It's a strategy. It's all just about putting the people in front of the customers at the time to help them solve a problem. Which to me is like we're this problem-solving team. So as you scale, yes, I agree that some people are going to be more interested in having more customer-facing conversations, and then there's the other kind of people who are going to be more interested in doing things like the Nitty Gritty. Deep dive troubleshooting stuff now because we're strategically placed across time zones to be able to deliver a 24/7 exported support experience. Everybody's a little bit of both. But also, I hired people whom I think can be essentially the heads of these different types of Specialties. So the types of Specialties we break out into our product growth operations and engineering. And So eventually the engineering He will be a little bit closer to like that tier 2 technical type of support, of, like more, like the people who just are like, really good and really into troubleshooting as they will do it, and it's great. And then the people who are on the growth side are going to have more of the customer-facing conversations, but what it is more about for me is unifying tools and processes in a way that you can create a seamless experience and that's hard when you have completely different departments because they use different tools. They have different KPIs. case They have different goals. The differences are just like having different processes. And so when you have that is you fraction all you fractionate fragments. I don't know you break apart all your data and when you break apart all your data and you have all these hurdles and handovers, you also break apart the customer experience and create friction, and it's not like the cut. Is it Because it's like it's all internal friction? But that internal friction. It's like when you're having a bad day and like people can tell and it has nothing to do with them. It's just like customers feel, the internal friction that's happening between these like roadblocks and silos between departments. They feel it. Even if it's like a year, internal teams don't realize that the customer is feeling it. That's when you get things like, I don't know whom I should reach out to, for this. I don't know what it's like. This is, you know, like people who feel shuffled around because they ask their salesperson a question or like, let me get me to support. And then suddenly the person, even though they're in the evaluation stage, wanted to add one more angle. To what you're saying that angle is, you're looking from support out. There is also from other teams in which is, you know, one of the things that I've seen that's been done very successfully and that teams that I have are bringing in And the different teams and have them rotate into support. Hmm, right? So that's a fabulous thing. It's like, yeah, so both it's looking from support out and outside and I think that's exactly what you're bringing up. Absolutely. I'm a huge advocate of whole company support and I honestly want as many people as possible to pay attention, collaborate on, and like reviewing support in the business as much as possible. But like, I'm that's that can be a harder sell but I think, but the nice thing about having these like Liaisons and these arms that go into the other business, is it also creates a nice environment where then like, if you need to, like, if you need to hire a new product manager, that's like, maybe on like on you know, doing a product, you have like an expert who's already been working with this team completely. So it is almost like a support organization. Like I don't say a training ground because Self is so complex since it, I mean, it's viable, like, lifetime goal be like, I mean, that's my lifetime go. Like, I love that work. But it is also for people who are invested in support and have these other interests like marketing or product or engineering. It puts a product expert in all of those existing, like a product and customer expert who already has all of that, internal knowledge of that stuff into those. Parts of the business. So, yeah, it's also just a great way of making sure that you have, like, when you need new Talent, you're recruiting Talent, who are already Experts of your customers, and that's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. This conversation is going so fluidly. They still have two more topics that came up that we needed to cover. Let's see and I think to augment this one. will be great because it's bigger. It's also more. So I'm sure geographies and the globalized nature of companies add a factor to all of this, right. So just by the fact that the company is very Global doesn't mean things have to be decentralized. Our centralized areas cater to the geographies. What is your thought on it? Let me just want to repeat back your question before I was to make sure that I answered properly. And so you're saying there's a thought that things do not need to be catered if they are if you're a global company. Is that what I heard? Do you say? No. No, I was a global company. Is the catering go-to words, a centralized model versus a decentralized model because there are cultural and other nuances that are very specific to geographies, right? So how much of that is important. And versus the culture of the company and a centralized way of doing operations or supporting our support operations. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, grey. Appreciate it. Thanks for reading. Thanks for the clarification. But so, let me start by saying two things can be true at one time. Right? And so it doesn't have to be black and white either or it can be together. Right? So, if you think about a plus sign in the equation, and it's adding to, and so I, what I would say is this, while the company culture and what it stands for, right, that that Ethos right. That mission statement. Those tenants and values that an organization stands for should permeate every factor and every interaction whether it's business or customer B2B or B2C. That being said there is this, there's this profound confirmation, that's in place. Now that you have to find this. Happy medium with personalization and part of personalization. Includes. Right, and stuff, you know, I don't want to be or be perceived or be presumptuous and say, because we're our company when you go to go through my checkout cart, or you go to get help. It's going to be all-English, i.e. King's English, right? And it's going to be in US dollars and I'll leave it up to you to convert, whatever that may be. If you're going to buy some, that's absolutely the wrong take. And so localization means just that now, but you can, let's be very clear. You can still meet the criteria, Right? And the requisition of being scalable, right? Because now you're talking about the 80th percentile of what you do should be replicable, right? And then you use that, twenty percent for those nuances, that I give you a very explicit example when you're talking about support and your help if you're talking about those who are in Asia that she was East Asia in particular. They're very driven by self-service. They're very technically Savvy. And in fact, quite frankly. If we must be honest with ourselves. They're ahead of us when it comes to early adoption. Right? And so, therefore no one's looking to pick up a phone and contact you, right? They want you to make sure that you have enough content, your fa Q's are Stellar, or if at the very most I can reach you by virtual or real chat at best. Let's contrast that with, if you're a truly global company and you go to Latin America, Brazil, very specifically, why Brazil? Because they're the only Portuguese-speaking country, everyone else speaks Spanish, and some shape form, or fashion, which lets, you know, there is a nuance and a differentiation in and of itself. And so, if you go to Brazil, their culture is very concierge, feel White Glove hand holding nothing wrong with that, that just happens to be the way that culture likes to operate. So, therefore you need the opportunity for folks to either contact, someone establishes a voice. Okay, real live chat or a quick turnaround or SLA, whether it's an email or social media. And so the point I'm making here is, if you are truly Global, there is no one-size-fits-all albeit. You do want the pillars and your foundation to permit. All of your interactions. You have to be considerate enough. You have to remove the arrogance that we're going to make people adapt to us. We went downtown. And then you're Going to address and approach each one and each interaction respectively. Now, let me close with this. I think this is a nice cherry on top. If you will, you still have to find this happy medium between human interaction and automation. The right should not be the only driver. It is a variable in a key driver model, but it should not be the end. All to be all because if you're using cost own, You're going to fail in several Mrs. Wright that will offset any W's that you get in other places where you can use that mouth. 100%. So I like, okay, you seem to touch on so many things that I'm like, so on the same page with you and I can't wait to talk about it. So first of all, I frequently say you have to help customers the way they want to be helped. So that means yeah exactly. Like if you need to have an able mint and resources and videos and guides and the like all the in-app stuff for the people who want to be helped that way, which is like I mean like 50 percent of customers like to prefer to have like that sort of help at least from my direct experience. And then if you optimize on that way to be able to help the people that want to be helped that way. Then you can. And then you have time freed up for the people who do need the hell of hand-holding and they do need to jump on the coaching calls and they do need to have like A strategic discussion about how they're going to apply this product to accomplish their goals. So 100%, they're going back to localization though, and also, cultures and everything. Oh my gosh, that's so like I have so many feelings about this. So as you might have mentioned, as I might have mentioned earlier, I have team members that are across time zone and that is A to give Global support, but be the reason I'm so adamant that support in any organization should be remote even if the rest of the organization is not, I mean unless you have like a bajillion dollars and you have offices in like a hundred thousand different countries, is exactly what you're saying in terms of cultural Nuance because when you hire people who are in a geographical region, and of course, there are variances like poor like Brazil. And you know, the rest of Latin America is going to also be different culturally, but if you hire people in geographic regions, they're at least a little bit closer to what the expectations are culturally in handling these conversations. I know I did do a conference in Europe and everyone was like, you're very American. It's a very American approach and I feel that. way but I have Katya and Belarus who is like very like that Eastern Europe, you know Centric and so it's like it's very in love if we hire someone else in you know, and other areas like I have someone in New Zealand we are probably going to get some more film in production work in like Japan. And so that is you know, I'm going to need to hire someone who's Japanese because it is super important to be able to understand those cultural nuances. And no one is going to do that as well as people who are from there. Yeah. It's, you know, the kind I think to squeeze in one more topic. That's thank you for the globalization inside because I think these days every even start-up starts off Global, right? So the customer is our Global. So at all, companies and all business models are Global. I have globalized these days. So that perspective is very helpful. We talked about models. We talked about how to advocate for growth through support. We talked about how the customer experience portion is in the middle and everything else around the companies tying into it. What kind of people do we hire? And what kind of qualities are important? We talked about the compensation that comes in the center. How have you guys seen it? Play from everything from resources to onboarding? Outsourcing Etc. One of you can go first. It's easier to have resourcing conversations if you are tying dollar amounts to like, essentially, if you own a revenue number, like, if you own that retention revenue, or if you own expansions, if you own renewals, if you own for more companies, child a paid conversion. Sometimes it is in that realm of like support but also sits like that sort of customer-facing team, sort of world. If you own one of those numbers, Then you mean that is how you're not perceived as a cost center because you're literally bringing in revenue and you can tie it back to the work that you're doing. I think that's super. That's like that's the first step. Now. I can say personally from a resourcing perspective, our velocity team. Is probably between like 50 and 80 K and then our high-touch team isn't like the 100K range. If it were up to me. The last City the team would also be 80 100 K like purely. But I think I kind of like getting there. I don't I might get in trouble for giving these numbers. I don't know how but I'm trying to slowly make those cases kind of like Bridge those gaps together. A lot of it though does have to do with examples, like the high touch, the high touch team of one, and it's closer to the skill. Sets are closer to account management or Enterprise customer success management. And those salaries from a market perspective, tend to hit a little bit higher like I know everybody whom I hired on my team. They got a relative again. I don't know. I might get in trouble for saying this but got a red, a relatively significant pay increase from where they were coming from. I think that the other thing is too, is like, I again, I don't know. I have no idea if I'm allowed to say any of the stuff that I'm saying, but I'm just making sure that I'm okay. So I was just like, oh my god, do you want to do it? Yeah, bring the public via a yeah, bring up yourself and ask. What do you want to comment on? While most Gather her thoughts and then we do a wrap-up. Sure. going How's that to take you to an adage? My grandfather used to say you get what you pay for? Yeah, that is not and so fundamentally the days of just putting what's in seats. If you're sincere and true about what this customer experience truly means, then you have to incorporate agent experience. Right? And these are the folks who are going to be supporting that experience that you're designing and Energizing and have the vision for. So what does that mean? It means you have to get involved a lot. Earlier in this process, your scope has increased in some roles. I have had vendor management and as a result, it is fantastic. So now I get help deciding, not only, what bpos we partner with, what gets involved up to what that profile should look like for hiring said folks, right? But if you don't own that and you still live, I'll go back to the change management piece, right? You have to have some influence. Most have to gain by and you have to create a narrative and a story on why all of this is important, all the way from deriving or building out that job description. Looks like you're going to get what you pay for. And so if you're talking about having this higher frictionless, seamless multi-channel, real-time meet SL lays kind of experience, then you have to hire the folks that can help you do. This is called an investment. You just need to make sure you're getting a Roi on it. If you're coming from a cost perspective which by the way as finance, major P&L management, and budgeting is everything but you need to just make sure that you have a Roi on that what you're going to expect you'll get it back tenfold whether that's through met for net Network, effect, morality cross-sells, upsells retention and or loyalty. If you invest in all of the folks that are going to help you drive and deliver. The liver that customer experience that you design. So again, I'll close with this. You get what you pay for. I love that. Yeah, you truly get what you pay for yourself. Truly. You also get what you strive for. So, what we are talking about here is that customer support experience can be defined in multiple ways. And we got the strategies that we needed to do more. I was going to close, but you have seen a quick comment if you have a comment. That is not related to directly actually giving numbers out because I probably shouldn't have done that. So everybody just forgets that I said anything but I will say to that point if you get what you pay for it is. Also when support is treated as a cost center, it becomes 1, and here's how if you are not I mean product experts are expensive, empathetic people who are a great problem. Solvers are expensive like people who like and People can solve these problems and building resourcing to create enablement and videos and guides like all of that stuff costs money. And if you are not investing in that, then you get hundreds of support tickets, then if you're like not building those feedback loops and listening to sport. Then you get hundreds of support tickets. If you're sending your emails with no replies and customers are super frustrated because they try to reach out and they have no idea how to because you're guarding your Tech channels then it becomes a cost center because people just drop off and you never see them again. Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. I want to do it. I will want to finish quickly. It was excellent to hear your perspectives on the growth through support. I think anyone contemplating the question of should support leaders advocating the Revenue generation portion, have some tips that they could gain take home. So thank you both more. Thanks, agreement. Thank you. I appreciate it. It is a humbling honor. Yeah, it was so wonderful to talk with you. The experience that I will continue with. The next one is going to be Thursday, the 24th. Same time. We will iron out all the glitches, the technical glitches. We had today outside of that. There are some specific newsletters blogs. Stuff that we and we will be transcribing. This discussion also and getting it out to everybody who extended interest and there have been quiet and we will continue the discussions. Both in slack and the LinkedIn channels. Thanks, everyone. Thanks. Bye. Thank you. Bye. Previous Next

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Explore strategies for managing difficult situations with key customers. The speakers discuss the importance of understanding your customers' needs and anticipating potential challenges. They emphasize the need for strong communication and collaboration between teams to effectively address customer issues and maintain positive relationships. Strategies to Manage Difficult Situations with Key Customers | Transcription Kay - Is to connect more than ever before. But how do we Define our key customers? Is it simply someone who's bringing in the share of Revenue? Is it someone who is making us more profitable? Is it the customer lifetime value? The level of partnership? We are having the product feedback. We are getting the referrals. They are making. Maybe all of the above at some point, every company leader looks at their best. And then they'd see, okay, how bad it would be to lose one of these accounts. And how do we protect these relationships with these customers with that, that we have experts and we have experts from lean data Is to connect and more than ever before? But how do we Define our key customers? Is it simply someone who's bringing in the share of revenue? Is it someone who is making us more profitable? Is it the customer lifetime value? The level of partnership? We are having the product feedback. We are getting the referrals. They are making. Maybe all of the above at some point, every company leader looks at their best. And then they'd see, okay, how bad it would be to lose one of these accounts. And how do we protect these relationships with these customers with that, that we have experts and we have experts from lean data today? And what struck me first is the diversity of experience from this team here. We have Alex who directs the lean Data customer support team and he runs the daily operations. And he has scaled the team from One person to multiple people and is still the scaling and he runs the technical support organization and US escalation. So it's wonderful to have you here today, Alex. Thank you for being excited to be here. Next is Ravi, Ravi is running the CX and the customer success and the technical support teams and Robyn comes in from a very strong operations background. It has 25 years of experience from nineteen years of typical and growing the customer base there and looking into Revenue as part of the support. So have revealed, here. Thank you. Glad to be here. Rachel is the chief customer support, its Chief, customer officer of lean data. She is very passionate to lead customer and employee experience and substantiate. That with big data and data at the edge. What fascinates me? Talking to Rachel, was her experience with clients? All across B2B, B2C staple Goods, retail, Tech, fashion, and Finance. So that was pretty interesting. Rachel and her measures have extreme success in how they deliver. Great customer experiences. And importantly, net revenue retention. Like, any other SAAS company? Rachel. It's Careful to have you today. Rachel Thanks for having me. Great to be here. Okay? Kay so it would be great to find out here from all three of you, why are we here? And how you say and your experience and how it matters to these strategic customers and having the most difficult scenarios are handling these most difficult scenarios with strategic customers. Rachel. Let's start. You. Rachel - Sure. No, I think just so the audience knows my role in perspective. I do lead the entire post-sale team at lean data which includes our support and services organizations. And I think, as we think about how we set up to manage these difficult situations, we try to anticipate what are going to be the challenges. You might see key customers. I think we have to Set up and work to back off. What kind of experience? We're going to need to deliver. And what are going to be the areas, in which we anticipate that they're going to, you know, come to us? Did we lose you? Okay. Sorry. Oh, there you are. Kay - I was told that I have to stop my camera to start live streaming. So I'm trying to figure out what it is. So please continue. Okay. Rachel: No, sorry about that. I thought maybe we dropped. , yeah, so I think just from I see it's you know, how do Set up and sort of anticipate ahead of time. What we're gonna need in terms of those situations. And I think just from a CCO perspective. There are two things that we think about sort of fundamentally. One is when we think of the customers, we think about them in a multifaceted way. As you said in your introduction it is, of course, the a, you know, the amount of Revenue to bring in for the cup company we want to protect that Revenue, but there's also the potential Revenue that they have. So, what's the overall customer lifetime value potential? Those customers? So there's always the business side of it. But I think we also think about those key customers from a market segment perspective. And that might be more Behavioral, or more of our, we serve. A, can we meet their needs, right? Are we, how do we think about them, their business or their business model, and do they best represent? You know, the best-fit customer, so I think it's not just dollars, but we're also thinking about how we make sure we're set up to serve the sort of the key Market or ICP that we go after. And you had design experience. And we know from lean data that our software is very flexible in terms of your ability to set it up to meet your business needs. So it's very configurable. We align with the customer's business process and help them set up their business rules. So we have to have a support team that can go in and understands that customer. On text. So I think it's super important to think about, you know, what are you going to do? Who are you serving? And how do you set up your support team to work back from to serve those individuals in our cases Operations Professionals for setting up Automation in their sales force and that Alex and team have to be able to go in and understand what they are trying to do? So, I think as you think about key customers you are also thinking about how we break down and understand how we serve them. So as I'd like to think about the more behavioral and business needs, we meet not just the AR are dollars, that makes sense. K. So Kay, Absolutely it does and I love that you touched upon the market segments because early on and Lily data is also a smaller company. You tend to not have the market segments, very clearly defined, and you end up having people who are on the fringes who join in. They become key. They become key customers, even though they don't fit into some of those. So I think, as we move through this conversation, it will be great to know how the people are the customers, who are on the fringes of the market segments, and how to deal with them. Keep them happy. Even though the core product is growing deeper into a segment. I think that would be wonderful for our SAS audience. Rachel Also is here and I think that's a good point. And I do want to raise, you have to identify, are they Fringe or are they your next step in your Market evolution? Shannon, because it might be, hey, you always attract those early adopters, those innovators. Are you starting to see more of that late majority, who needs a different kind of help? They're not, just that. Hey, I'm a DIY. I just need a little bit of help from the support team, not just technical issues, but just support and questions, right? To. Hey, are we starting to see more of them with me? Do it for me, kind of audience. And is that an indicator that we're starting to grow the company? So I think that's a really good point. Okay, but it can be an indicator, not a fringe, but maybe e of a new market opportunity opening up as we start to, Kay Yeah. So, how rubbish, in this particular case, concerning bringing in these market segments are going deeper into a few market segments. How do you manage the product feedback that comes in from the Cs team and the customer success team? Ravi- So, what we do is we are closely tied with our engineering team. We have to work. I mean, let me take a step back. B2B software support has evolved over the last course of years. Right? So you have to be very closely working with your Product and Engineering teams as well as within the support. I mean those days are gone where you have cured support where you have level 1, level 2 level 3. mean you have to respond very quickly and make sure that we're listening to customers and taking their feedback and pushing it into our product team so that they can prioritize. In terms of how they do road maps, which is what we do. So when a customer logs a ticket, if it happens to be, we hear that there are new features. New enhancements. We're constantly working with our product team, meeting with them regularly, feeding them information, from what we're hearing from customers to how to make that into the product roadmap. We're constantly working on that. So it's a tight connection between product support and Engineering. It's not you know, we have to kind of move away from the fact that support is labeled as a help desk. We are closely tied with the products that book the product team. And that's how we make sure that the feedback from customers is hurt back into the product and, you know, hopefully, we can influence it to make it into the roadmap. I mean, the product is always challenged by what to put on a road map. So I just want to recognize that that's always a challenge. But at the same time, you know, they look at us at this point as being the voice of customers. So that's basically how we use it. Kay, It's the voice of the customer. Angle too, this is very interesting and I want to tie this into escalations here, Alex. So for most SAAS companies, the product is evolving so fast and in a growing SAS fast, company. The product is evolving so what you're touching upon is one of the things we do very, very well. As those bring out the voice of the customer to be able to interface with the product team. But like you said, there are times you find you do everything you even though, Becomes one of the most, you know, you look at the top two or three and you look into what is the next evolution of the product and how it fits in and do it. So there are going to be escalations that there is a customer. Who's going to icky customers who may want, who may want a particular feature or particular thing within the product and it gets escalated and you know that we cannot satisfy it. How would you deal with this situation? Alex: Well, I think it's a few things first. You have to take some time to understand the business use case, for why the customer is requesting that feature in that functionality. Once you can best understand what exactly they're trying to accomplish. Even if you can't accommodate it in the immediate future, you can at least get an understanding of what they want to do. And then start to think. Okay. What workarounds do we have available in our product today that we could get the same results? Maybe not through the same medium. So it's a few things. It's understanding the business use case. And then one, if you can accommodate it right away ensuring that the customer has a short-term workaround to get them what they need in the short term, right? And then from there, it becomes communicating internally. As Robbie said, the support team at lean data is very close-knit, with our Dev team in our product team. So depending on what we hear from the customer, if we're not able to Accommodate a certain use case, we file a product feature request. And then we sync up with our Devon product team to discuss the request and get a timeline on if it can be built out or not. And if it can how soon can the customer expect that that's all a multifaceted process that we carry out on a daily, but it all feeds back into our product and Dev team and the importance to make sure that the customer. stands the steps that you're taking to address their request in the short term and the long term. So it's okay if it gets escalated as long as you follow those patterns and keep those thoughts in mind to convey the steps that you're taking and the actions that are going to be done to address Kay - Be honest. Right. Be honest with what they are saying here. This is the timeline. This is what it is here is the reason why we are doing what we are doing, but we want to work with you to give you a short-term, short-term workaround. And So you can continue doing the business while we prioritize this and get this going. It brings a pair. I think it would be great to hear a story from a large Customer because these things escalated so fast, Rachel, can you give us a story and um of how things get escalated so fast, and how that can be dealt with very um um seamlessly, Rachel - so, I have to shout out to our product team and our team overall. I do not. With a lot of escalations, I did not spend a lot of time dealing with great customers. It does not get to me very often. So that's a shout-out to this team here. KAy And actually um I have to face every experience which we discussed. Before um this life. We did discuss the experiences that you're sharing. Does not have to come in for just Lindy Dykstra coming from any of your previous experiences. To preface, uh with that yeah, please continue. Rachel - Yeah, no uh fair. Enough. I think, uh um you know, think that one of them, there's two, two things that we focus on here, which is, let's figure out the speed. Let's get to a speed of response. So really, if we, if a customer expresses an issue, let's uh let's get to them right away with, you know, let them know that we hear them, let them know that we're on it. The second is what is that type of response or accuracy and think Alex and team. Ravi does a great job when we have a customer where we can see that the issue is going to Mentally impact their business, uh making sure that to escalate it more from the perspective to me. So that the client knows that this is getting the top attention of our organization because it's critical to them. As Alex said, he's very good at listening. Is this something that is going to impact their ability to run their go-to-market process, right? We help our clients with one of our use cases is lead management. If your leads aren't getting to the sales team, the sales team isn't selling. That's pretty significant. We don't have the luxury. And let that sit for days. So letting the customer know we're on it, letting them know that it's been escalated to senior leadership is super important for them knowing that we're on it and that we care like, that's, you know, one of the things that I learned Kay, When I worked at Cisco we analyzed our support process and we learned that getting the, you know, the quick response and getting to the right people. So that the customer knows that getting taken care of was more critical to Tension, than the time it took to solve the problem. So that's so critical. So, an example where I will give one from the beginning of covid. When there were certain of our customers that saw a huge influx of leads into their business as a result of covid, right? We had the other extreme work, companies just halted entirely. They came to us saying we have a crisis that we need your help to manage. You know this. This manager is in crisis in the business and can help people get through this and navigate through it. I thought that was a great example of our team needing to Rally as a company and data, it's a team sport support is a team sport. Escalated to me to our senior leadership team to say how do we help evolve and address the needs of this cohort of customers that need us to help manage their business and that was, you know, bringing together. Both the engineering teams and the support team CSM to say how do we understand this new business needs? How do we help them? And then we rallied to make those changes for that cohort of customers within weeks. So that's where you can make it. If it gets escalated to me and the leadership team, we can make some strategic decisions to invest to solve those problems in the short term with those big clients because they're super critical to us. And if we can help them pivot quickly, that might be kind of an outlying use case, but I think that the point has to be taken if you're fundamental, if you're fundamental to that customer and their success, and they need you to address an issue. To move forward. You will gain long-term brand loyalty, if you rally and fix that problem, and ensure you're there with them like that. Trust that transparency, that partnership. And I think we have one of those customers for life because they knew we were there when they needed us. Kay - Yeah. It's not so much of an outlier so to speak, right? It's covid and made things very interesting for a lot of people. So we had a lot of interesting Lee to see. People are spending more time in homes. So we had, we ended up with quite a bit of b2c customers because people who had their support tickets, overflowing they came to us and they were like, I'm desperate. I can't manage our backlog. We are at a point where we can't even respond to them in a timely fashion. So you are right. You bring out the trust in you, bring out the partnership and you put that up front. There is a question that came up on a social media channel regarding this topic. So instead of bringing it to the end. I'm going to bring it in. Bring It Now, how do you identify a broader customer requirement? requirement. Any one of you, Ravi - I can take that. So I think when you do so just to make sure that I'm understanding the correct question correctly. When Bunch, when a lot of customers are reporting the same type of issues. I'm just putting it practically. What do you say? Hey, there's a bigger problem going on. I think that's the intent or the context of this question. And I think it has to do with, you know, we it's just basically monitoring the tickets and kind of, not tickets. It's not wrong, but If we're getting the same kind of request from each customer, right, then there's a broader issue where you know, it's having. So for example, I'll go back to what Rachel was saying. During the covid time. We had a few customers that came back and said, hey, we have a large influx of leads that are coming through. We need your help. She just mentioned that, right? And we had some, boom, customers that came back. What that showed is a basic product enhancement that we needed to make in the product. And so what we did is our CTO went back and adjusted the system so that we can, you know, open up the pipe if you will, and improve the overall throughput. So it allowed us to look at it because there was not only one customer. There were a few boom customers that were coming to us and saying, we need the larger scale. We need to scale our products. We need to make sure that we're able to meet our SLAs. And so we were brought up so kind of coming back to that if we see things like that. It's an again partnering with our product team and making sure our product team is aware that saying, hey, we're hearing all this stuff coming from that all hands on deck and looking at it from a product standpoint and looking at it and saying, okay, we have a broader problem that we can solve by fixing this. That's how we address it. I think it's again. It comes back to a collaboration of engineering and making sure that your engineering team. It's not 10. I think one of the things that we are getting Alex and I are working towards is having a regular meeting with engineers to show them the trends of what we're seeing and supporting. What kind of tickets was I getting? What types of tickets were getting. Why are we getting those tickets? I think proactively doing that will bring up some of these things and we'll help, you know, will help make your products better. I hope I answered that question for you. Kay - Yeah, it definitely will be in a lot of the times that LinkedIn and some of these questions. you don't know the full context behind us, Justin, but it ties back into the voice of the customer and things that we talked about before, right? So, having a continuous dialogue and one of the things that we see our customers do is since we automatically populate, here are the top trends of issues that are happening, pop root causes of issues happening. You substantiate this with data. That's the one that we were talking about Rachel in how you're leading with data. Say you have this many interactions across like an email. And what's happened about everything that is bubbling up to bring out. There are the topics that we need to focus on from a product perspective and here are the root causes which it's happening. Some of it will become bugs. Some of it would enhance some of it. So it goes back to having that pulse of the voice of the customer. Ravi - And I think with B2B if I can just add one more thing. He's with SAS software. We're, it's a boon for us rather than a curse because as a software vendor, we basically can, you know, add more metrics and more logging and things like that. We have a lot more insight into what the customers are doing. Then. You know, I've been on the on-prem side where customers would install and you have zero ideas of what they're doing and no idea at all with SAAS. You're able to put metrics for your point, wood products, like yourselves, and things like that. You can add additional metrics to be able to show if you're seeing commonality and common Trends. So, to your point. Kay - I think now is a good time, you know, to shift from the product to the metric side. So Rachel, if re, you know, for any CCO who wants to lead their entire sales and support revenue operations and support operations teams Based on data. What are the top metrics, you know, we can stop with three tops, but when we can Drill Deep dive down and I'm sure that answer is going to be different at different stages? So, Ravi and Alex, we would love to get that input from you. But Rachel, let's start with you. Rachel - Think at the top. There are three things to look at when we always sort of look at, we do a CSAT survey for our support, and how our customers feel about the experience is super important. We can also look at our g 2 review. Oohs and the fact that we get highlighted for support being a differentiator at lean data. So on, as you know, how does the customer feel about the experience, they feel they're being supported. Then the other is the Practical side of the business. Are we seeing a, you know, can we see a relationship between support issues and retention? So we do, look at churn, we do say it is a result of not dealing with issues or they're other, you know, or is it feature gaps or we wanted or that? Because we want to make sure that these issues aren't resulting. The customer leaving that, we know we're going to have issues. Right? Our software stuff's going to happen. We integrate with a bunch of different platforms. The customer does stuff that's going to happen. But you know, we hope we will throw that as a partnership, so it's really important. I think to make sure that you look at, you know, the key metrics of retention and then the third piece is the employees mean Alex and team. Amazing. There was a point where they had such. We kind of went through a sort of great state of resignation. I think somebody called it the great reshuffling, you know, you'd go up and down in terms of your Staffing or people decide to completely change careers or they moved so poor, you know, Alex was down a couple of headcounts at some point. It's super important. I think to say, hey, can your team have a decent workload, you know, because Alex ends up working around the clock too, you know, so yeah, I think you also just have to look at the metrics. Of making sure that you're taking care of your employees. So just to recap, you sat think you want to tie it and make sure that it's not resulting in ensuing or down cell or you know because that is an indicator of your success. And then looking at the team and their capacity. Kay - Yeah, the CX metrics are all three are evolving, right? So the CX metrics that you talked about CSAT the G2 reviews. Now, people are starting to bring out the Overall sentiment of the customer's customer effort score. How long does it take for them to reach out and get the answers for what they need to get, whether it supports, or our customers' success? Right? So that portion of it, there is plenty of discussion around it. So I would love to focus on the next thing that you talk about, which is the retention part and focusing on the retention and the churn. And, then the employee experience part. So, Ravi, I would love to get your opinion on the retention part, especially around what the preacher talked about. Concerning. If we are measuring churn. I think that's the words. You used Rachel. It's gonna happen, right? So, how, what is the best way to measure churn? And to, you can take it to any level concerning, whether it is going goals that you Our customer's Sexes are training that you used for customer success. Are in terms of measurement, would just like to get your brain DB blonde in Ravi - absolutely sojourn is a very important part, you know, and turn is not always attributed to lack of support necessary. So you have to beat down deep in terms of what's causing your charm, right? There are several things that we turn now is its ease of use the customers don't and are not using it, you know, not using the product are not able to use the product or are experiencing too many difficulties, whether it's installation, customization, whatever it might be, it's just the ease of use the bottom line, right? So there's a lever and several things that you have to look at into the churn to figure out why customers are turning. If you're trying to level too high. It could be. What customers are not adopting. So your onboarding process itself is broken, meaning, you know, from a lean data side. What we're doing is we're making sure that the customer is opening up the box. So to speak and make sure that they are using the product, right? We need to get them to use the product first. And then, basically, it's up to my team with the help of other people. It takes a village. I can tell you that it is to make sure that the customers can achieve the output that they are signed up for, right? So you have to look at the onboarding to say, okay, onboarding is the first part. You look at the saying is the customer using the That's number one metric. The next question is, are they using it? Successfully? Are they able to use them successfully? Meaning? Are they able to achieve what they're doing without? You know, what's the total cost of ownership? If I may use that word, right? mean, in terms of how much time they have to spend on a lean day? One of the feedback we get from lean data is they set it up and forget it. Now, there is another side of it about the problem, we have with that, but that's a different story. Right? But the point is, they don't have to maintain. system too much. It runs. It's easy to maintain a dozen requires heavy lifting from IPS and things like that. So, you know again effort and ease of use are the next pieces, right? And then there are other organizational challenges that people might have that might result in churn, which we have no control over. So I think one of the things that Rachel has looked at, is saying how much is an avoidable and unavoidable chart. So avoidable is what we focus on because that is something we can control. Unavoidable is our organization, things that are beyond our control that are going to cause turns. And this we have no control over. So that's how we measure churn sojourn is a, there's no one metric. I think you have to look at it. You have to slice and dice it in different ways to figure out what's causing that t n to address the problem. If you will Kay - In one of the interesting, you know, so of the three things you mentioned, I have follow on and on all three. So let's wrap that up. So, one of the interesting parts that you mentioned is the And the outcome during the onboarding process, right? So it's freemium. I don't know if it has it, but you're familiar. You've been in the industry longer. There's people who make freemium models and then build on top of the freemi models. So it would be wonderful to understand how the outcome is measured even in a freemium model, right? So is it like, hey, kindly AKA you signed up for the product. What is it that You want to achieve with the product and that's docented and that's followed through or something else. Ravi - Yeah, so we don't have an official premi model necessarily, but you know, just just based on what I have seen. The freemi model is basically making sure that you're in front of the customers, right? Because you can't be a model. So you have to invest a lot of money in it, to make sure that the end goal of the premi model is to convert, right? You want to convert those to a paying customer and Question is, how do we guide the customer? So once the customer downloads the product or starts using the products, what level of help can we give this customer to make sure that they're able to basically use it? And then, you know, you have to kind of nurture them to say. Hey, are you using the product? Look at it, the backend, send them, you know, information about, hey, you're not using this product. This is something we can do. You can potentially do like to wear one too many webinars as well, to kind of onboard, the customer makes sure that they're successful. With it and kind of convert that freemium model. So, that's the extent of what I know about premi model, but it's a very different model because you could have thousands of customers. And so you have to have a onetomany motion to make sure that you are nurturing those customers to get this. I mean, that's the other thing with the freemium model. It's really hard to gauge what they got. Then, why did they start using it? The product is very difficult to do? Kay - Yeah. I'm I'm, I think I should have made it. It's not Outside of Premi, do you how do you measure outcome? Ravi - Yeah, the outcome is basically, you know, they are implemented in production and you know, are they using their licenses? You know, they bought a certain number of licenses, right? And basically out of the gate as soon as they Implement how many licenses are they using already? And what is their plan? And you basically speak with them and kind of say what's your plan? You know, how are you doing this? And are you, are you the right trajectory? So we have adoption metrics that we look at, right? So there's a certain number of adoptions that we look for, like the first year, we want our customers to be at 80% of their licenses, for example, right? Or we want that to be the metric. So, that's how we measure it saying, you know, how are they doing in terms of what they bought from a utilization product usage standpoint? And then you basically have a conversation with the customer and say, okay, are we? Here's where you are, are you rejecting in the right way? So it's just measuring that and Kay - That poison back into the total cost of ownership. So so Rachel, if you could give a scenarios for the avoidable and the unavoidable example, so even in an unavoidable, I can, you know, think about an example where, you know, maybe it was a smaller customer, but the management completely changed and they don't know what the product is about. It's completely unavoidable and so the need wasn't there. Anymore, whatever it may be is because of the growth. So how many strategies on mitigating avoidable was and the unavoidable in Rachel - A great question. And I think we didn't discuss this ahead of time. But you're hitting on something that again as we see this a great reshuffle and going on, that loss of that point of contact has definitely been something that's been on the rise that we have to get, you know, ahead of and, you know, recognizing if somebody new comes in through the Or team. We're going to need to jp on that. Right. We need to get them educated. We need to make sure they understand the why behind their company purchasing and Ravi's actually been working on up leveling our Playbook around, you know, that shift when we get a new stakeholder in. So I think that is absolutely critical and I think something that all SAAS companies kind of struggle with, and we consider that your right to be an unavoidable. We consider there might be product feature gaps that we put into the product category that we say. We should have been on top of this if we did lose customers and I tend to kind of look at it over a course of time, not quarter quarter, but let's look at it over the course of a year. We had a couple of customers leave because we didn't have a certain feature. We would consider that to be maybe something that was unavoidable because we didn't sense the need for that. Yeah, or you know, we hate to lose the competition. We feel like that should be unavoidable quite honestly K like no. No, that's not, that's not great for whatever reason. But You know, I'm sorry. Hmm, me a sec. Kay - So we're doing this. First of all, you're just getting out of covid. I appreciate you so much. Rachel - Yeah, sorry about that. Audience and pretty as I sometimes. I'm still testing positive, but I feel great. I don't know. It's probably going to test positive for another week, but they had. Thanks, you know, I think it's just, it's super important to, you know, to be tracking and figuring out what that looks like for your organization because You know, again, I think it's over time or I kind of look at those patterns and and see what we might call is as unavoidable. I'm pretty harsh actually, in the way that I assess it. I pretty much only consider a merger and acquisition or they're not using Salesforce anymore. He's nodding his head because he knows I'm super harsh like everything else. I expect we're going to be able to keep these customers. But yeah, working back from that, you know, super important. I think, you know, I want to bring up a point. About some of the support. I really think we're at a very interesting time when everything is so digital right. People are remote. Support is really becoming a much more strategic organization. Like I think Alex is feeling it. It's becoming so much of the Hub because when customers that I have a problem, I need help. They come to support the team. It's not just a crisis of technical issues. It's hey, I just, you know, I need help and it's really Only thinking about how you, you know, set up the team to be able to respond whether that's okay. I can see this person needs help. You know what, they're not certified data users. I really need to make sure that we flag them and get them certified because we need to be able to get them up skilled. So I think we're thinking more strategically about how we get customers into the training, the certification, make awareness of the health center and really bring the community together. Or hey, we see you're trying to move to this new go to market model. We have another customer doing it. That's already done, you want to talk to them. So I think really having that strategic mindset and you know, that's I think as we move forward, being able to put that front and center to the support team is something we need to think about because it requires a lot of data and analytics. And I know there's new capabilities out there that can help us to empower the team to put them on, you know, more of like, hey, let me help be. Savannah recommends versus, just troubleshooting and salt. Kay - Yeah. Support has definitely become the center. It was interesting. I was talking to a CFO of a customer and he was saying how gone from the days that it was a cost center. Now. It's like especially in covid. Everybody recognized, we are all doing remote, but the people who are talking to the customers are the support beam for. Yes, so it does really become and there is a lot of interest in harvesting the data and bringing out the patterns and helping with the employee experience. Ravi. I think you have a thought to axonal, Ravi - Just wanted to double back on what Rachel was saying. And I wanted to see if this has been a trend going on. For some time. We're a custom. A company is measured about how much Self Service you have. Right? So, you know when a customer is evaluating your products, they also see how much knowledge is out there. So the first thing you would do is when you're evaluating the customer, this is a customer way back. When telling me this, The first thing I did is I went to Google and I typed an error and saw if I was able to find that information on my own. And so, to Rachel's Point, support is available. I think the self, the whole area of knowledge based on self help and making sure the customer is able to self help customers don't want to talk to support when they're having issues, and I'm saying that in a good way, if they're able to find it on their own. They're more than happy to find it. So the challenge for us is to be able to identify. What is the type of information that we need to provide to our customers more in a more proactive manner, whether it's to our knowledge Center or whether we are basically approaching them saying, hey, do you know you're having an issue? So that's where the most supported model is evolving. And I know that's where you guys are as well. And so that's why I'm trying to bring this up. Kay - It's interesting. That's why we call it an interaction, right? A and, , customer. Going in and looking on a website for a training or a help video or even getting an answer for a question. That's still an interaction, even though they are not talking to a hand and what can we learn from? Even that interaction to say, hey did we surface them? The right type of knowledge, if they do it the first time and when they want that information, can we give it to them? The first time? Can that new piece of knowledge? Should that piece of knowledge? Be improved? How many more customers as it served or has it not served it all goes. To that knowledge, intelligence aspect. And I really wanted to touch on the employee experience Alex, but the topic is moving towards the data aspects of, maybe we do the data aspect and then we come into the employee experience aspect. It brings back to how do you know there's a lot of discussions around understanding all of these interactions and understanding the customer sentiment. And bubbling that up. Could you Rachel, could you tie that into, how many of those can be utilized to us as business impact or severity? Rachel - not sure, I understand that Kay - you can use all of these interactions and use of the data to bring out escalations you touched on it right in bring it out. So if you can relate a couple of scenarios in which it can be utilized to bring out. They severity that, you know, they are an escalation that's going to happen and being proactive about it, right? Rachel - Yeah. I think we when we do start to see a product issue. We do have a, you know, a process that we can follow to flag it and to maybe identify other customers that might have that issue and Alice can speak specifically to that process to where we can monitor. There's a couple of fronts that can Happen. It. Usually I think as we think about as we roll out, a lot of features, we have a lot of releases and we do that in waves, if we see an issue, starting to happen to be able to get in front of that, if it's something, that's not new that starts to impact certain customers who have certain setups. So that's one way. We kind of get, get ahead of it. Yeah, in terms of that escalation. I don't know. Alex, if you want to talk little bit about what you have in place with the dev team, Kay - The advice back into the You know, the on premise was assessed to write, sort of time to Market so fast that brings out. So Alex, if you could tie that in what Rachel said and type that into the employee experience? That would be great. I'm just being mindful of the time even though we are trying to introduce all the social media links in the topics, please. Yeah, Alex - no problem. Well as Ravi said in SAS, it's much easier to remotely monitor what the customer is doing. Is leveraging your solutions for right and from a support perspective in terms of monitoring escalations. It's keeping a pulse on what sort of issues were seeing how frequently they're occurring and what types of subject matter those tickets that are coming in from these. Customers are concerned if we see a trend where a certain question is being asked more than once will surface that to our CSM because this might be an indicator that this customer was not properly in a Old or is having trouble getting the hang of our system. And we don't want that. Of course. We want to escalate that and make sure they get what they need from a wider product operation perspective. It's also keeping an eye out for critical operations that are ongoing and may be affected by issues that come up. So like, for example, our Dev team, we have monitoring alerts configured that will let us know remotely in a customer org, whenever a critical piece of functionality in our product Suite is not working as optimized or as intended and what we'll do actually to bring out an escalation. So to speak, before the customers are They are deaf. He monitors that and creates an action item for our team. The support team follows up and reaches out to the customer proactively so we can get in front of them and say, hey look, are you aware that you have this issue going on? No worries because here's how you resolve it and we'll walk them and guide them through it to a happy resolution. So I think it's a few things that tie back together, but the greater visibility and SAS is definitely a big boost in these interactions including Rachel - They just just to add a comment too. I think you know, we do have all that visibility. We also have you know, we track and look at customer health. And one of the dimensions of customer health is when they do not upgrade in SAS where they start lagging behind analysis, like, oh boy. This customer is like a couple releases behind so That's also an indicator. You want to get proactive Robbie and team working to make sure that all those do not upgrade or laggards who are hesitant or just you're too busy to, you know, kind of do that up. Grade path. I think it's another one that we kind of look at and it's a flag. I mean obviously they get too far behind in terms of all of the improvements. We made it. We know we're going to see issues. So it's one that's another use case, but Ravi - Ellis is also adding one more thing that you know as software vendors. You have to look at it from a customer's point of view. You customers are dealing with all three million vendors and I'm just saying that. And so they are getting alerts from Linda. They're getting alerts from Salesforce. They're getting me, you know, they're, you know, the themes there who are supporting all these systems and business systems, you know, they have to prioritize as well. So I think sometimes how we work with our customers, how we alert them, make sure that they're not overwhelmed, you know, we have to keep that in mind that we are not the only vendor they're dealing with and so therefore I think keeping that in mind. I always keep that in mind because you have to look at it from that perspective because I was getting bombarded by all these vendors. I'm going to prioritize, right? So something that is something that we have to keep in mind in terms of how we communicate with customers when we communicate, you know, we're just not bothering them every single time, you know, and when there's a fire, there's a fire. It's not like, oh my God, there's a fire. There's no fire at all from their perspective. It's not a fire for us. It's a fire, right? So you have to kind of be Kay - absolute. Play. Alex, what brought you know, what you mentioned is we call it the three, right? So within a customer environment, they are having a problem mr. Customer. It looks like you're having this issue. Let me help you solve the issue even before they reach out to us, right? So that's the scenario. You talked about it. It's fascinating, it brings up an interesting story. We call that forest what we were talking about, looking at the month, all the customer trees and looking At the scenario as a whole, we call that before. That's the forest and this is the trees in the tree scenario as the support leader. The other, they mentioned to me, we do the three scenarios. So well, our customers don't even know that. We are solving all these problems for them. They think we don't know, but they were charging a preemie support and they didn't know what they are getting for the Premi support selfie started, selling and sending the newsletters on what all we did behind that back. So when they were really sleeping, if you could elude, you know, actually add anything to it, it would be great to hear. Alex - Yeah. So basically the question is like what do we do Beyond those proactive measures that we discussed? I think we talked about the proactive measures from a tree perspective. Is there anything from a forest perspective? Well, I think it's kind of taking a look at each individual tree as It kind of grows and Sprouts, you know, you have to analyze what exactly the subject matter is of that. Are you seeing a lot of trees centered around product knowledge gaps? Like, is it around training? Or are you seeing a lot of trees around user areas and misconfigurations in the product? Something that maybe the customer is not fully comfortable yet. It's taking all of those, I guess, individual trees and grouping them together to really see what Composition of your Forest is to get a better understanding of how to approach. It had a garden, and it maintained it. You have to really understand the specific requests and the type of request coming up. So you can best formulate a strategy to address those concisely and precisely for our customers. It makes a customer support role itself, you know, a role where you're carrying the ball. All and you're going above EQ and beyond, and there is lot of along with IQ skills, and it's, you know, it's one of the reasons we're actually seeing some teachers moving into serious roles and they are extremely successful Because of that, what kind of training do you offer for people to deal with very difficult conversations and difficult scenarios? Alex - Yeah, so It's a few things first and foremost, the training that we offer to our support agents to get comfortable with that. Is D, escalation tactics, right? Like Rachel said, earlier, its software things are going to happen. Things are going to blow up eventually, right, but you have to be ready for when that does happen. And when a customer is upset and frustrated with an issue that they gauge is severe and critical, even if that's not the actual understanding from the support team in terms of product knowledge, Maybe it's not that severe in terms of how to fix it. But it feels like a major issue to the customer. You have to be ready to empathize with their needs, understand their needs, but also be able to address them in a way where you understand their concern but still move them forward. Saudi escalation tactics are really important to us. If there's a customer that's frustrated inventing to you, you have to be able to have the Savvy to say listen. I understand your frustration and I'm here to help. Here's what we're going to do, too. You resolved, right? Saudi escalation tactics first and foremost. Secondly, it's triage skills, right? So you have to make sure that your employees for troubleshooting are fully well versed on how to troubleshoot the product, and how to look into specific pieces of features. At the same time. They have to also be aware of when the threshold is to escalate an issue to the dev team or the product team to get further assistance on it. So training towards the escalation tactics and triage skills and you know in tandem critical thinking skills to determine when it's time to move it to the next level are our three most important things. One other thing that I will say is important in training is getting the motion down where a support agent can gather as much information about the issue as possible. Prior to jumping on a call with a customer. Right? You never want to jump on a call with a customer half-cocked or half prepared. That is not going to be a good customer experience and they will see that you know, they're going to see that you're not ready for this, right? You have to be sure that your agents know how to collect the necessary data to at least initially triage or understand the issue context, prior to engaging with a further conversation with the customer. So those really those four things are the Most important things we train on, Kay - makes a lot of sense that the data can help with respect to Bringing out the right or, You know, technology can help with bringing in the right set of data. Nber one, nber two is we focus a lot about the root cause category because like you said, if I assign our triage it in a wrong place than a wrong person at the wrong skill, set is working on the problem and until they identify, it's not their area, and then you're moving. on to the next person and the next person so that level of looking into where is the core root cause category, we actually go to the subgroup cost to but root cause category is very critical and then so if the technology can help with that, then the support agent can actually work in empathizing with the customer bringing out the critical thinking and the problem solving ability that is required is . Robbie do You think the same thing is true with a see if it's a serious organization where they are balancing the answering the question, along with net revenue. Ravi - First of all, I totally believe in transparent communication with customers. You have to let the customers know what the truth is, right? That's not hiding behind the trees. If I may call it that way, you have to kind of go out. If it's bad news. Tell them the bad news, if it's good. Obviously, you want to call them, but if it's, you know, transparency is very key. So, going back to what Alex was saying, it applies Cs and general customer communication. When you're talking about, I mean, CS is more of a proactive support site, if you will. And, you know, Alex, unfortunately, sometimes is more reactive than proactive just because of the nature of the issue, right? But at the end of the day, customers need to know. We have to be transparent with the customers. The other thing that is very critical is it's a white box approach. Which means the customer needs to know customers. Sometimes they are not worried about or don't get annoyed by the ladle resolution, but they get annoyed because they don't know how you're resolving the issue. Now, the typical answer is I'm working on it. This is typical support of the people in the audience who have been in support. You will know what I'm saying. When I say I'm working on it and the customer gets very annoyed, right? Because like what are you working on? Because I have no idea what you're doing, right? And so coming out and telling them exactly. Atlee how we're going to approach the issue, but the investigation is they want to know the root cause now and sometimes you're not able to find the root cause, right? I'll give you an example from way back when in my previous experience. It was a Black Friday. There was a retailer called me at 5 p.m. On a Thursday Thanksgiving. And basically, I got on a call, there were 30 people on the call and they basically said, hey, we can do Black Friday sales tomorrow. If you can't solve this issue. It was their issue and we left after a couple of hours. I had to basically tell him I said, look, here's the work around. If you want to go operational tomorrow at 5:00 p.m. 5:00 a.m. In the morning. This is the work around. We're not going to be able to solve the root cause because the root cause is actually very, very deep and you're not going to be able to solve it. So, let's pick our battle here, right? And fortunately, they heard me. And, you know, we were able to move forward. So the point I'm trying to make is that level of transparency. And once I feel like, once they know how we're going to solve the issue. They will partner with you because now they are part of the solution, right? They'll work with us. But if you just keep asking them, one question after another then like, okay, where are you leading to this? Right? What are you doing? Right? So that's the key. So going back to answer your question. Yes, it's applies to CS as well and specifically when you're having at risk customers, you're handling at risk. Customers or your, you know, customers are not happy about a certain feature that they expected things like that. This happens in CS v as well, and it happens as well, but the key thing is just transparency. I think honest and transparent communication always works. Kay - I love it because what I'm seeing is the Synergy between customer support and customer success just in the two answers. So Alex brought up needing to have the problem solving skills and you're bringing up the need to even explain the problem solving skills. Instead of just saying it's and being transparent about it, love that. We are. I just got a note from the teams. We are six minutes in and there is a question that keeps bubbling up in social media. I wanted to bring that up and start to wind down. Rachel. This is for you. How do I ensure my organization is adequately recognized as bad? Brandon the case that I didn't hear and Advocates Advocates, how do you recognize the poor? Advocacy, attractors, brand Advocates? Maybe this poor detractors, or maybe it is positive. I tried to attract. Sighs. I don't know. Maybe take in both. Rachel - Yeah, so I from a lean data perspective. Well first, I will start off by I think that as we get more digital as we get smarter than able to serve up answers digitally and believe me. No one wants to have to get on and make a phone call or talk to a support person if they don't have to. I think we have a huge opportunity to actually create raving fans with our support. actions because the Han by the time they get to a han these days, it's rarer and rarer. So if you do have the opportunity to work with somebody, even if that is a huge escalation, it's an opportunity to build a relationship to be there for them. And to nurture those raving fans. I think where we get the tractors is where we miss when we really should be in there, when it is a huge problem for the client and that from their perspective, right? As Robbie said, really thinking about And really coming in and rallying. As you were talking earlier, it reminded me. I worked at Cisco for many years and we had some of the top companies in the world that, you know, their whole business, relied on Cisco. Like Robbie was saying in his example, we had a Black Ops Team in support who would fly in within hours to get to that customer site to Rally to fix problems, and they were called the network. And they would descend on that customer there. Be like 25 people to fix the problem for the likes of these big, you know, Fortune, 50 companies, but those are opportunities. Yes. We had a crisis. I mean, you know, imagine the New York Stock Exchange ran on Cisco, you know, like the gravity of the situation, if it were, if the network goes down but that kind of rally of support and being there, just creates an advocacy and a sort of, you know, the customer. Up, that is far beyond anything, you can deliver elsewhere. So I say think about your support team. It's an opportunity to create raving fans and Advocates by being there with them when they need you most. Kay - Yeah, thank you. Thank you. I always loved three minutes. We have to stop the conversation, but I'm thinking, oh my gosh, we have so much more to cover in this conversation is really amazing. That's a wonderful way to do an event like this. It's awesome. Thank you. Thanks, Alex. Thanks, Ravi. Thanks Rachel for your insight into it. I know us in those hiring and I know Linda is hiring. So, post your links for customer support, customer success leadership, roles, and I think it will be wonderful. When we talk about difficult scenarios and difficult conversations. This happened 25 years ago. So I can actually say that we had the largest data center from my son. Microsystems was right in Palo Alto and it was running everything from Marilyn Salomon Smith, Barney, a lot of those companies. Yeah. So a lot of that data and the data center guy walks in, I was actually in the data center for whatever reason, the data center guy got oxen and there is this red thing that says it's closed. Do not open. He opened it and he switched off the entire data center. And I still remember he sat down right there. He realized the mistake and he was sobbing and crying. We came out of that beautifully because the big rally behind just like how you are rallying behind, that's covid and everything. So we do get into some avoidable, some unavoidable scenarios with customers. It's a matter of how well we manage and as a matter of how we will come out of it and still keep the relationship strong? , so thank you guys for your input. Thank you for your Insight. Anything last minute before we switch off the light, but stay on the skull. Anything else. Thank you guys. Thank you for having us today. K a good discussion. Thank you for having us. Absolutely absolutely can. Previous Next

A no code way to install Ascendo application within your Slack workspace. Previous Next Slack Install guide Read Guide A no code way to install Ascendo application within your Slack workspace. August 30, 2022 at 10:00:00 PM Track, resolve issues that arise on Slack from within the conversations. Decide if you want your customers to get self service or agents to get help or both from within Slack. Learn and create knowledge automatically from every day interactions. Get entire company involved so customer facing teams are armed with latest information to help customers. A no code way to implement Ascendo application within your Slack workspace.

A no code way to integrate Ascendo AI Search and AI Bot. Previous Next AI Bot and AI Search Implementation guide Read Guide A no code way to integrate Ascendo AI Search and AI Bot. August 30, 2022 at 10:00:00 PM The AI Search and AI Bot implementation guides explain how to configure and automatically add the Bot and Search widget in your application without needing to code. Ascendo prediction service and inference engines are the backbone behind AI Bot and AI Search. They allow normal user types message into context and intent and gets the most relevant solution. They also self-learn to find the best solution without any rules or coding. The power of machine learning and artificial intelligence enables for better customer support experience resulting in faster resolutions.

Rachael McBrearty, Alex, Ravi Strategies to manage difficult situations with key customers Rachael McBrearty, Alex, Ravi May 5, 2022 Previous Item Next Item The pandemic has taught us innovative ways to connect with key customers more than ever before. When an organization thinks about key customers, they also think about how we break down and understand how they serve them. Are key customers someone who brings in the share of revenue, someone who makes us more profitable? Is it simply someone bringing in a share of recurring revenue, a level of profitability we have with them, or someone that also satisfies the following: Customer lifetime value Level of influence and/or authority in the market Number of referrals they make Level of alignment and commitment to shared partnership goals Focusing on the key customer simply allows you to focus on your mission, vision, and products that will be the most influential to the overall success of your business. When we think about managing difficult situations of key customers, we try to anticipate what the challenges are. When we think of the customers, we think about them in a multifaceted way. We should also think about those key customers from a market segment perspective. We align with the customer's business process and help them set up their business rules. Every business or organization has to have a support team. An organization always needs help from the support team, not just technical issues, but just support and questions. As we know B2B software support has evolved over the last course of years, so you have to be very closely working with your product and engineering teams as well as within the support. mean you have to respond very quickly and make sure that we're listening to customers and taking their feedback and pushing it into our product team so that they can prioritize. Take some time to understand the business use case, for why the customer is requesting that feature in that functionality. Once you get the best understanding of what exactly they're trying to accomplish, think about these implementations. Even if you can't accommodate it in the immediate future, you can at least get an understanding of what they want to do. Also letting the customer know we're on it, letting them know that it's been escalated to senior leadership is super important for them knowing that we're on it and that we care. Another important factor is to Identify a broader customer requirement, when a lot of customers are reporting the same type of issues, the support team must understand what kind of tickets they are getting and why they are getting those tickets. When we do this proactively, doing that will bring up some of these things and will be helpful, this helps make your products better. Top CX Metrics: The first important metric is to do a CSAT survey for our support, and how our customers feel about the experience is super important. The other is the Practical side of the business, the relationship between support issues and retention is also a factor, look at churn, we do say it is a result of not dealing with issues properly. The third thing is for Employees, always keep the focus on a decent workload on the team. More shuffling, ups and downs in staffing due to any reason, also affects so one should be aware of these metrics and make sure that they are taking care of their employees. Best way to measure churn – Customer churn is a SaaS business metric that measures the number of customers that any business loses over a fixed time. Churn or retention is a very important part, and turn is not always attributed to lack of support necessary. We have to beat down deep in terms of what's causing the churn. There are several things that you have to look at in the churn to figure out why customers are turning. You can’t solve a customer churn problem until you’ve identified its source, so understanding Why You’re Losing Customers is an essential step. Strategies for mitigating avoidable and the unavoidable Avoidable and Unavoidable –There are other organizational challenges that people might have also that might result in churn, which we have no control over. Work with a chart of avoidable and unavoidable things. So, one of the things is how much is avoidable and unavoidable. Avoidable is what we focus on because that is something we can control. On the other hand, unavoidable are things that are beyond our control that are going to cause churns and that we have no control over. Freemium Business Model – In this digitization era, we can see a new or transforming concept of B2B or B2C. Now organizations can customize the business to use their operations with different models, like the Freemium model. With this businesses can provide Free premiums for their customers, these basic features of the products would be provided by the organization which helps customers to understand the effectiveness and quality of products or services. Once the customer downloads the product or starts using the services, determine the level of help that can be given to this customer to make sure that they're able to use it. Work on the backend, and send them information about the product or service or other help. Companies measure how much a customer wants services. When the customer evaluates products, they must see how much knowledge there is here. Finding information by hand, or self-help is more appreciated by the customers. The company should be more proactive, and able to identify the most important information that should be provided to them. So, the challenge for the companies is to be able to identify. what they need to provide to their customers more in a more proactive manner, whether it's to our knowledge center or whether companies are approaching them. So that is where the most supported model is evolving. Companies use all of the interactions and use the data to bring out the escalations. if a company sees an issue, starting to happen to be able to get in front of that, if it's something that's not new that starts to impact certain customers who have certain setups. In SAAS, it’s much easier to remotely monitor what the customer is doing. It is leveraging your solutions for the right and from a support perspective in terms of monitoring escalations. It's keeping a pulse on what sort of issues we're seeing, how frequently they're occurring and what types of subjects matter to those tickets that are coming in from these. Customers are concerned if we see a trend where a certain question is being asked more than once will surface in our CSM. Companies should escalate that and make sure they get what they need from a wider product operation perspective. It's also keeping an eye out for critical operations that are ongoing and may be affected by issues that come up. Also think sometimes about how we work with our customers, how we alert them, how we communicate with customers when we communicate, we're just not bothering them every single time, make sure that they're not overwhelmed, we have to keep that in mind that we are not the only vendor they're dealing with. Companies also focus on the training they are offering for people to deal with very difficult conversations and difficult scenarios. When a customer is upset and frustrated with an issue that they gauge is severe and critical, even if that's not the actual understanding from the support team in terms of product knowledge, Maybe it's not that severe in terms of how to fix it. But it feels like a major issue to the customer. be ready to empathize with their needs, understand their needs, but also be able to address them in a way where you understand their concern but still move them forward. make sure that your employees for troubleshooting are fully well versed on how to troubleshoot the product, and how to look into specific pieces of features. At the same time. They have to also be aware of when the threshold is to escalate an issue. Another thing that is also important in training is getting the motion down where a support agent can gather as much information about the issue as possible. Before jumping on a call with a customer. Should never jump on a call with a customer half-cocked or half prepared because that is not going to be a good customer experience. Believe in transparency, always let the customers know what the truth is, that's not hiding behind the trees. The team has to be transparent with the customers. The other thing that is very critical is it's a white box approach. Which means the customer needs to know what’s going on? Sometimes customers are not worried about or don't get annoyed by the ladle resolution, but they get annoyed because they don't know how you're resolving the issue. Customers want to know the root cause, so the support team should help and tell them about the issue and resolve the investigation process. So as we get more digital as we get smarter than able to serve up answers digitally, that has a huge opportunity to create raving fans with support.

Experience the Power of GenAI for Your Customer Support. Take a self-guided tour to see what Ascendo AI can do for you. Trusted By Countless organizations place their trust in us, knowing that we deliver exceptional results and unmatched reliability. Ascendo Product Tour - Experience our innovative solutions Revolutionize your customer service and support with our state-of-the-art AI-powered copilot. With over 1800 pre-built use cases, it delivers unparalleled support in managing and enhancing your customer interactions. Say goodbye to long wait times and hello to happy customers! AI teammate Cognitive Spares Tour this Resolution Agent Cognitive Search Agent Tour this Resolution Agent AI Bot - Voice Agent Tour this AI Teammates Support Services AI Teammate Tour this Data Integration Privacy Agent Tour this Knowledge Agent Knowledge Agent - KCS Methodology Tour this Resolution Agent How to Use Ascendo AI in ServiceNow Tour this Knowledge Agent Knowledge Intelligence with Ascendo AI Tour this Resolution Agent Junior Agent Troubleshooting a Problem to Resolution Tour this Resolution Agent Agent Assist to Fully Automated Resolution Tour this AI Resolve Expert Agents Using Ascendo to Aid Solution Tour this Resolution Agent Customer Getting Self-Service Tour this Resolution Agent Customer to Agent Handoff through AI Bot Tour this Resolution Agent AI Companion for Zendesk Tour this Knowledge Agent Voice of the Customer Product Insights Tour this Resolution Agent Magic of Ascendo with Confluence Spaces Tour this Resolution Agent Constructing a bridge between Confluence and Ascendo Tour this Resolution Agent AI Agent Assist in Slack Tour this Resolution Agent Automatic Knowledge Creation in Slack Tour this Resolution Agent Using Slack as a Customer Support tool Tour this Resolution Agent AI Omni Channel Inbox Tour this AI Inbox Agent Flow for Bots Tour this AI Inbox Filters in AI Box Tour this Resolution Agent Automatic Agent Assignment Tour this Resolution Agent Agent Swarming through Ascendo AI Tour this AI Inbox Agent-Initiated Ticket Creation for Escalated Interactions Tour this Resolution Agent AI Companion for Salesforce Tour this Resolution Agent Auto Categorization of Issues Tour this Voice of the Customer Unveiling Ticket Intent Tour this Voice of the Customer Setting Abstraction Levels of Ticket Categorization Tour this Voice of the Customer Streamline Product Feedback Tour this Voice of the Customer Building Smarter Knowledge Bases Tour this AI Field Service Fully Autonomous Field Service Management Tour this Cognitive AI for Tickets/Cases Cognitive AI for Next-Gen Ticketing Tour this Ticket Free Resolution for Issues NO TICKETS Support Tour this ServiceNow Constructing a bridge between ServiceNow and Ascendo Tour this Support Channels Multiple AI Bots Tour this ServiceNow AI Companion for ServiceNow Tour this AI Agent for Field Service Ascendo Gen AI Agents for Field Service Management Tour this Data Integration PDF Parser Tour this Testimonials Immerse yourself in the inspiring stories of our customers who have found immense joy in our product.

Speaker: Bret Allinson The Future of Service Support-Unveiling the Power of Knowledge Intelligence Speaker: Bret Allinson April 17, 2024 Previous Item Next Item This podcast explores how Knowledge Intelligence is transforming the way support content is created. By leveraging AI, knowledge can be captured, analyzed, and delivered faster, improving the information provided to both customers and product teams. The video features Bret Allinson, a seasoned service leader with extensive experience. He emphasizes the critical role knowledge plays in service support and the benefits of unlocking and reusing it. AI is highlighted as a game-changer, enabling the rapid creation and publication of highly relevant content. Key takeaways include: Faster, More Relevant Content: AI significantly accelerates content creation and publication, ensuring timely and relevant information is always at hand. Unlocking Knowledge Potential: Knowledge Intelligence goes beyond traditional methods by unlocking and reusing existing knowledge across various customer interactions, leading to greater efficiency and improved customer satisfaction. Multiple Knowledge Applications: The video explores three key areas where knowledge is utilized: summarizing existing knowledge for reuse, generating new knowledge from interactions, and proactively using knowledge during customer support. Measuring Performance: A "business value index" is introduced as a metric that considers knowledge usage, sentiment analysis, and AI utilization to measure knowledge effectiveness. Empowered Teams, Enhanced Products: By leveraging knowledge from closed cases, support teams gain valuable insights to improve their productivity and resolve customer issues faster. Furthermore, knowledge analysis can be used for product improvements, allowing the support organization to play a more active role in product development. About Speaker : Bret Allinson is a visionary and resourceful global technology business leader at Veritas Technologies LLC, a leading provider of data protection and availability solutions. He leverages capital, technology, best practices, and empowers the right people to create long-term value for the organization and its clients. He is passionate about strategically growing sustainable organizations for profitability and service excellence. He had extensive experience at major companies like Avaya, Xerox, HP, and Dell.

We recently hosted an illuminating podcast with the Women in Leadership (WIL) team – and the conversation left us energized about healthcare technology’s future. Three remarkable leaders joined us from the HTM community: 🔹 April Lebo – VP of Demand and Development at Probo Medical and President of WIL 🔹 Amber Sportsman – VP and Quality Manager at MW Imaging and Treasurer of WIL 🔹 Adrianna England – Director of Inside Sales at Advanced Ultrasound Systems and Secretary of WIL Ascendo AI Podcast with Team WIL – Transcription Transcript 00:00 I am actually going to go to Ami for the first time and this is going to be my first HTM conference and I. 00:08 That's something about this WIL. 00:12 And I was talking to people like Grant Hopkins and stuff. 00:14 And I said, okay, I have to really talk to these ladies. 00:17 You couldn't make it, but these three women are able to make it today. 00:21 So thank you guys for coming. 00:23 It will be great to have a introduction about each one of you. 00:28 April, maybe we go with you first. 00:30 Sure. 00:31 First, Kate, let me say thank you so much for having us. 00:34 It is a pleasure meeting you. 00:36 My name is April Lebo, and I am the VP of Demand and Development for Probomedical, as well as the president of WIL, the Women in Leadership Society. 00:49 Through that, I'm also a mom and a wife and have two beautiful, amazing adult children that have been with me throughout this entire journey. 01:00 you for having us. 01:03 Very nice. 01:03 Thank you. 01:04 Amber, you want to go next? 01:06 Yes, of course. 01:07 I'm Amber Sportsman. 01:09 I am the vice president and quality manager for MW Imaging and I am the treasurer of Women in Leadership. 01:18 Um I too am a wife and a mother. 01:22 My children are21 and 31, and yeah, I'm excited about this opportunity you've given us today, so thank you. 01:33 Yeah, and April, you are in Philly. 01:35 Amber, you are in Missouri, is a state I haven't visited. 01:39 I need to. 01:40 And Adri, please go ahead. 01:42 Hi, I'm Adri, AKA Cali Girl. 01:45 I'm from California. 01:47 um I am the Director of Inside Sales for Advanced Ultrasound. 01:52 I sit on the WIL board as the secretary and I also sit as a voluntary secretary for the CMIA, which is the California Medical Instrumentation Association. 02:03 So yeah, I've been in the industry about 18 years, going on 18 years. 02:08 I have a daughter that's 25 and I'm extremely excited for this opportunity and thanks for highlighting WIL. 02:15 It is amazing to meet women not many times. 02:19 First of all, I'm not never in a screen full of women. 02:24 So most likely next I'm going to be in an event with 200 people and I will probably be one of the five women there maybe, right? 02:34 So So it's a joy to connect with women. 02:37 You know, coming, I'm going to be there at HTM and the army for the first time. 02:44 So you guys have any tips for people like me coming in for the first time to New Orleans? 02:51 I do. 02:52 First let me say you are picking probably the Super Bowl of our industry to get your feet wet coming to the AMIE exchange. 03:00 It is an absolutely phenomenal conference. 03:04 A ton of great people that will be there. 03:07 My biggest tip is just meet as many people as you can. 03:11 Everybody in our industry is so welcoming. 03:14 and so open to conversations and networking. 03:19 So just go around and meet as many people as you can and look for the will pins. 03:27 There are so many of us now, you should be able to identify anybody that's in the Women in Leadership Society with the will pin that they will be wearing and we will welcome you in. 03:39 We can introduce you to people that you might not know, we can save youYou a seat at the lunch table, whatever it is you might need. 03:48 We've got different networking events that we do. 03:51 We've got some educational events that we're doing, but one of the reasons was really put together was to make it a very comfortable place. 03:59 four other women at these conferences, because like you said, sometimes you go and you're one of five people amongst the sea of 200 and it's not always comfortable. 04:09 So we wanted to create an environment where everybody felt welcome. 04:14 So just utilize that opportunity to network and utilize us as the WIL members to help you do that. 04:22 Ladies, anything else that you would recommend? 04:26 Thank you. 04:28 Yeah, the one thing I want to bring up, and it's only because April, you totally inspired me on your last podcast on building authentic relationships. 04:35 Kay, I'm going to challenge you because April challenged us on not just collecting those business cards, actually building authentic relationships. 04:43 You can collect 1000 business cards, but if you can't remember who's on the other end of that. 04:47 there's a problem. 04:48 So truly, genuinely have those conversations, meet and greet, and maybe have five authentic conversations versus 5,000 business cards. 04:58 So April, I am listening and I'm taking notes. 05:02 In the land of AI, that's the thing that we as students can do be better, right? 05:07 And Adri, I actually looked at one of your LinkedIn posts where you were talking about your experienceWith awesome customer service where the person treated you throughout the entire journey and was with you throughout the journey, right. 05:23 And that's so important in the land of AI to bring in the humanness and the humanity, right. 05:30 So first April, I'm going to get that pin. 05:34 That's what I'm going to do. 05:35 You know, I'm going to come and meet you and say, hey, that is my thing. 05:39 So I'll get that. 05:41 So April, but there are so many women organizations and many of them have many different goals. 05:49 There are women on boards and this, that, everything, right? 05:52 But why WIL? 05:54 Why just another women's organization? 05:59 So one of the things that I noticedbeing in this industry was kind of like what we talked about before, that you felt alone and it was very intimidating. 06:11 So not only just me personally at my company and being surrounded by a lot of men and wanting to grow and wanting to have a seat at that table, but going to these different conferences and going to the different meetings,As a woman and as a young woman at the time, being able to walk in to this networking event, to this conference, and needing to just randomly go up to older men, very educated, very knowledgeable, very technical, and try and introduce myself, it was extremely intimidating. 06:51 And so I wanted to create aan outlet for women to be able to get that support, to have other women who were going through something similar and be able to create that network where we had each other and to try and motivate and again inspire other women to be a part of this and to know that they weren't alone and that they could have somebody when they went to thesenetworking events, these conferences, these different society meetings, that they could have somebody there that could go do it with them, and also be able to help mentor them if they were having questions, if they were struggling with different things, but then also role models, because you didn't see a lot of women in our industryholding higher level management positions, and we all, and we talked about this in our very first meeting two years ago when we we talked about doing the Women in Leadership Society, it's hard to be it when you can't see it. 07:59 And so without having role models in those upper level management positions, what led us to believe that could ever be something we could do? 08:08 So we really wanted to be able to show womenthat in this industry it is possible, and that there are women that are making it happen and able to navigate this environment. 08:20 So that was kind of the premise. 08:21 I know there's a lot of other women's groups out there, but there really didn't seem to be anything devoted just to healthcare technology management, and I think it just was because there wasn't a lot of women to begin with. 08:34 So we had to really create that um environment so other women could see it,and know then that they could be it. 08:43 So that was kind of why we started. 08:45 It's beautiful because every industry brings in its own challenges, and um especially the ones that are minority in these. 08:55 So I actually have a daughter who is going to be a surgeon in two years, so I knowthat a lot of them are male oriented professionals and having mentors and guides is the best thing. 09:15 In WIL, April, can you run a little bit on started two years ago. 09:22 What have you guys touched so far in HTM? 09:27 So we started out with just this group of women right here on the phone. 09:33 We're missing Kim, who is our vice president. 09:36 But we sat in a room, and I kind of pitched this idea. 09:40 And everybody said, absolutely, this is something we needed to do. 09:44 And fast forward two years, and we now are at about 640 members, which if you would have asked me two years ago, are there 600 women in HTM, I would have said, absolutely not. 09:57 So we have been able to just through going and networking and talking about our mission, we have been able to pull in a lot of support, not just from the women, but from the men, Brian Hawkins, Danny Mobley. 10:15 So many of our male counterparts out there are so supportive of what we're doing, but as we've grown, we've instituted a mentorship program, we startedDoing our war stories, which stands for Women are remarkable. 10:30 to share the journeys of our members so other women can see what different women in this industry have gone through to get where they are at today. 10:43 We have our ambassador program, so we've expanded out to have ambassadors so that there is always somebody at one of these events that a woman who is just starting out or isn't super comfortable knows they cango with, walk around with, be able to connect with that can help them at these shows. 11:04 And then Kim started the No One Sits Alone program so that we have a spot during the lunches, during some of the educational sessions where you can always find somebody within will that you can sit with and you don't have to sit by yourself. 11:19 So we've continued to grow and expand over these two years and we're looking to grow even more in terms of our presence and the things that weoffer. 11:29 We do training, we've done some different webinars based on some of the feedback that we've gotten. 11:35 So really trying to do as much as we can to bring value to the group and help the women out as much as possible. 11:44 That's awesome. 11:45 And one other thing that's common across all three of you is, you know, you folks are working in ultrasound equipment. 11:56 GE Healthcare is a large customer of ours, along with other large ones. 12:01 So I'm familiar with it. 12:02 But what struck me, Amber, is you've been in this company for 18 years, and you actually have been in the industry for over 30 years. 12:13 And one of the terms that we use is a entrepreneur where somebody innovates within the company. 12:21 like an entrepreneur, but within a company itself. 12:23 And now I heard that you're actually helping run the business. 12:29 I would love to hear from you, your perspective on how the journey was and what you feel now that you wish you'd felt before. 12:38 Hmm That's a deep question, Kay. 12:43 Yeah, 18 years ago when I was hired to come into this position,I don't think we had a vision really at that point. 12:54 It's been a very gradual growth. 12:59 One of the things that our company has always focused on is our customer and our customer service and so um I amI am the manager that likes to sit in the background and the ladies will tell you, I'm always like, why do you guys want me on this board? 13:17 You know, what am I going to bring to it? 13:20 So I like to sit in the back. 13:22 I'm a thinker and a planner and an organizer and I care. 13:28 I care about patient safety, I care about quality. 13:32 So those I think are the things that I contributed to the company along with hiring a very phenomenal team of employees. 13:41 We have such a great team. 13:43 So the longevity that I have within this company kind of goes to what Adri was talking about earlier too. 13:51 I too did not graduate from college. 13:53 So in my early years I was afraid to leave. 13:56 I thought whoWho's going to hire me? 13:59 Who's going to want me for Amber Sportsman on a piece of paper not knowing me and giving me that opportunity because I don't have the college education. 14:09 I don't feel that way any longer. 14:12 I know that my achievements speak for themselves, but I would like that kind ofanswers your question a bit. 14:21 It definitely does. 14:22 So we did a podcast earlier. 14:26 I talked to Noel, who also had not had a college degree, but is a executive in the tech industry. 14:34 And you're exactly saying that don't let your education or your background intimidate you to reach the highest highs. 14:42 As long as you have the experience and you have theinertia and the growth mindset, which is very important for me. 14:52 You can reach to the level that you want to, and don't be stopping yourself. 14:57 That's a great message, Amber. 14:59 Thank you. 15:00 You're welcome. 15:01 Thank you for, yeah, thank you for bringing that out. 15:05 Adri, you know, we were seeing how she has this gorgeous smile and and youI started from a full sales background. 15:17 So I can tell you from coming in from a tech background and then going into sales was eye-opening for me because I used to think, Hey, I'm selling you something, whereas it's a big perception I'm helping somebody. 15:37 may have a better life or a better job or something like that. 15:41 It was a big switch that I had to do for myself coming in. 15:47 But you have been doing sales for quite some time. 15:50 Tell me a little bit more about your journey and tell, you know, what you would suggest to anybody who is in healthcare management or even not about sales itself. 16:02 I'm sorry I'm putting you on the spot. 16:04 Put my sales hat on. 16:05 That's the only one I have. 16:08 I've done sales my entire career. 16:10 I started off selling large appliances so I was learning barcodes and different manufacturers and it was a straight commission position. 16:20 So if I didn't sell, I didn't get paid. 16:22 So that's where I learned how to hustle. 16:24 I learned knowledge with power. 16:27 I learned you had to be there, you had to show up, you had to build those relationships. 16:31 So when I had an opportunity 17 years ago to come in as a sales coordinator, I took it because I knew I wanted to start at the bottom. 16:40 I wanted to grow. 16:41 I wanted to learn. 16:42 I wanted to invest. 16:43 I wanted to be mentored. 16:45 And I sat with some very professional people who let me do all the paperwork and let me do all the paper pushing and take notes in all the meetings. 16:54 And I did it. 16:55 And within two years, I became a sales Rep. 16:58 So I was an account manager and actually having the. 17:01 conversations and not just taking the notes, preparing the meetings and about five years into that I became an inside sales manager. 17:09 That's where I learned people matter and um I trained them from the beginning so when they came in I put them through a three month training program because I really want them to understand the company and who they were, who they are because you cannot sell if you don't know. 17:26 If If not you're just a typical salesman. 17:28 Well I'm a saleswoman and I wanted to give them anProvide what we had is what I was selling. 17:36 Um After that, I kind of just started learning and branching and reaching out to people like April and Amber. 17:42 And just building me and my network and realizing my authenticity is what helped me in my career and building those relationships because people buy from who they trust. 17:56 And again, with this will, people join because of who they trust. 18:00 April handpicked us to be on this leadership panel. 18:04 And it's because she knows that we have built these authentic relationships and they trust that and they know it and they see it. 18:11 So one thing that I've learned though, talking about sales is I can sell anything, right? 18:17 I can go anywhere, I can sell anything. 18:19 UhBut I was chasing a title. 18:21 So I was doing sales where my passion was, but I thought I had to continue to climb to have any sense of fulfillment. 18:31 And so I chased the title and I'm now in my director position. 18:35 When I was offered the position, I accepted without. 18:39 any ifs ands or buts about it. 18:41 And then I Googled, how do you become a director? 18:44 And I just figured it out. 18:46 So here I am three years later, hard work, dedication, constantly learning, but I have not forgot where I came from. 18:55 I still, like Amber, put in the work. 18:58 I do exactly the day-to-day that my account managers are doing now, plus sit on the wheel board, do these podcasts,put out the company newsletters, work with the leadership team, but I also am a very team-orientated leader to where I am leading by example. 19:19 That's awesome. 19:19 You know, one thing that comes out talking to all of you is that authenticity, right? 19:25 And who you are as, even though there's so many commonalities. 19:31 between but stay true to who you are, irrespective of how life has taken you. 19:37 And I think that's a precious thing that we needed to preserve. 19:42 And I truly, truly believe AI needs people of various attitudes and aptitudes, and you guys are the examples of it. 19:50 So one message that I would love to spread to the WIL audiences isto some extent, like what Amber said, don't hesitate that to march on AI, because it requires everybody all sorts of thinking into it. 20:12 Otherwise it will be very much like monotone, like how the industries have become, and then we have to change it. 20:22 Why is that? 20:23 Let's be part of it, right? 20:25 That would be my message to everybody who's listening in into this. 20:30 With that, I wanted to thank all three of you for being in the podcast. 20:35 I can't wait to come to New Orleans, get my pin and give you all a hug and maybe share some drinks. 20:45 So looking forward. 20:47 Thank you so much. 20:48 We've enjoyed this very much and appreciate you giving us an opportunity to meet you and to talk about WIL. 20:56 We're very excited about it and can't wait to see what the future brings. 21:01 Absolutely. 21:02 Thank you. 21:02 Thanks, Adri. 21:03 Thanks, Amber. 21:04 Thank you. 21:05 Thank you. 21:05 Thanks. 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