Discover how Voice of the Customer insights help identify new markets and guide product development strategies for greater impact and alignment The Voice of the Customer in Discovering Markets Developing Products | Transcription Kay - The Experience, dialogue, and experience dialogue. We pick a Hot Topic that doesn't have a straightforward answer. They bring in speakers. Will be there to see that but approached it in very different ways. This is a space for healthy. Disagreements and discussions. But in a very respectful way, just by the nature of how we have conceived this, you'll see the passionate voice of opinions and between Martina and me, that would never be an issue. Friends having a dialogue. I'm looking forward to this conversation and thereby interrupting each other and finishing each other's at sentences the end of the dialogue. We want our audience to leave valuable, insights and approaches that you can take to the workplace. And we do want to continue the discoverers in our social media channels, introduction to the topic, we are going to be talking about wise in the customer and how Impacts into product growth and developing markets with that. I would love to introduce my Martina she is the famous opera of loved and how to rethink the marketing of tech products. He has also helped hundreds of companies navigate through product marketing and go to market strategy. And I've had some amazing discussions with her. When we started that often do also she's a partner lecturer advisor and a board member I am interested in going through, not just Martinez's background, but also looking at what she brings in Seminole products. His experience bringing out some inner products into the market, including her background from Microsoft, and Netscape, but also house Founders and can enable customer centricity in terms of growth. Martina welcome. Martina - Thank you so much for this. Kay - It's a pleasure. I enjoyed the book and loved I know you. It was primarily written for product management, but as the founder is that, you know, you end up doing a lot of product and you're listening to customers all the time and you start with this whole thing about is their customer curiosity and it makes me wonder that. He comes in from multiple angles and rights in the beginning. Is there a market afterward? Is their customer curious about resolving problems? Is their customer curiosity in asking for more features, is a customer curiosity and buying new modules, all of that. So could you talk a little bit about customer curiosity? Martina - Yes. Well, I think customer curiosity and helping people understand how you translate that into One of the biggest challenges for any founder, as well as for anyone that's in the product. And we talked about this a lot in the product world. You can't ask your customer to tell you what to do. You must infer from the sharing of their experience, or the observation of the experience, how your product might be able to better solve their problem and where you can add value, that is disproportionate to the work you're asking them to do and using your product. So I think it's really important for people to not be looking at customers, to tell them what they want and need. But you infer how they can better solve problems on behalf of customers because anyone that's a Founder on the product side knows. Oh, I know what's possible with technology. Let me solve this for you. I think I can find a better way and not just look to the customer to tell you what to do. Kay - Yeah. So you're bringing up the standard to be like stool which is you hear from the customer what they want. And you have the vision that you have for the product. And the third thing is what everybody in the team wants to build, which is because it's so cool, right? So, trying to find a balance across all three. If you could address customer curiosity, I have to say the product is in a state where, you know, the feature is out, people love it. People are using it, and then you're kind of debating, is it? Now is this company. Being the go-to-market is product LED growth customer glad growth. What is this, how would you differentiate the different growth cycles, and how does customer curiosity fit in those? Martina - So I am a huge advocate of using the customer Discovery process as you're building to uncover what are the potential channels for going to market. And I think for early stage Founders I think it's very different at different stages. I think in the early stages you don't know the answer and you have to run a lot of go-to-market experience. It's to understand the difference between how the market will act and behave versus what people will say. I often refer to this, as they say, do Gap and you kind of, you can only try things because and I've seen this in multiple companies that try to start with product LED growth because, of course, that's a very efficient way to grow, but they have to resort to standard top-down Enterprise practices to commercialize. So they'll find a user base but they won't be translating it. To actual paying customers. And so certainly in the SAAS B2B space, we're seeing much more of this trend toward plug, which is more of sales assist, as opposed to the primary vehicle for converting people into customers. So you have the product lead user side and then people look at that data to infer where should our high Target sales accounts be based on the usage behavior and that's used in the product. As a tool to figure out what our sales strategy might be. And so that's something that we're seeing much more on the rise on the B2B SAS side especially also for more mature. Companies that might have a more established model where they might have an established sales team or they might have started the other way being purely page. That hybrid model is something that we're seeing a lot of people, consider and move toward Kay - I know in your podcast you did give some examples of those and we've had to talk when we were talking to you, you had a few examples. I would love to hear one of the examples now. Martina - So my day job is I'm a partner at Costa, Noah Ventures. And we work with a lot of early-stage startups and one of our startups as an example is a startup called the past base and so they have something that people can immediately use and based on that the sales team, then does calls and follow up saying, hey, Hey, we noticed that you were getting some use out of this. Are there any questions that we can answer so it's a He'll sales process but they can land anyone that they reach out to typically very quickly within a week or two and there is another company that I just talked to you about yesterday? Not in our portfolio. They have a product Allegro strategy where they get 200 new logos. And essentially, they have that product out there. They have a sales force, just follow up via phone or email and they're usually typically able to close inside of a week. So, these are examples of how that shows up in various models in different types of companies. One is a web three company, and another is a data company. So the models exist in all different categories, Kay - Yeah. So when you look at the product data in itself, you know, from a customer's support customer success standpoint. We look at it as the wise of the customer, right? So that voice of the customer comes in in multiple forms in a product, LED Growth Company. And what are the Avenues that have worked best from your experience for looking at that? Customer data. I mean, talking about install base data, not just Market data alone, right both. Martina - Yeah. And I think that I'm a big Advocate and, you know, I talked about this earlier about the fact that we have quantitative data, which the world has given us, unbelievable amounts of, but the qualitative data matters just as much to and one story that I think I might have shared with. You were one of the workers, their customer's success team kept hearing in there. Conversation. So this is not something that was being captured in product data because the future didn't exist neatly. These SEC Financial professionals who are sitting in front of spreadsheets that they were getting from all across the company, have to compare and contrast data. So, for them being able to use these products across multiple screens, Mattered a lot and their day-to-day productivity. This is not something that would have shown up inside of product data, but their customer success team was heard in their conversations. You know, it would be helpful if we could have multi screen support and so, the customer success team was going to the product team saying, hey, you know, what we keep hearing is that customers need multiscreen support and the product team looking at the product data and doing all of their customers. Recovery work felt that other priorities were much more important. Hey, we have all these jobs to be done and these really important Integrations that need to be done. And so for them, it felt less urgent or important than other things they have prioritized. But to the customer success teams, great credit they said, no, we have to represent that voice of the customer. This is the number one thing we hear. We need to do this. So, the product team said, okay, we'll put in the next major release and, of course. And that next major Release the number one most talked about thing was the multiscreen support. So, that's a great example of everybody's doing their job, but it's important when the product team makes decisions to think about the different ways in which you're receiving that customer insight and to not only rely on the quantitative or just with the product, the team itself has discovered. But to listen to the front lines, customer success, team sales teams where they have to live with the customer every day and hear what they're saying and factor that into how they make decisions on prioritizing. Kay - Yeah, I'm putting some even in the Ascendo, do we enable agents and, and customers to resolve the issue faster, so they'll be called individual trees? But then, what we did is we ended up saying, why do we have to resolve one issue at a time? Why can't we do it in bulk and aggregated in arts and automatically categorize the issues so you can see them here? I wanted to solve these kinds of issues and resolve them in bulk. Interestingly customer triaging agents and people loved it from one angle but we didn't anticipate that support leader. Looking at this going like, oh my gosh, that's my product feedback. So that's exactly it. So now I can go to the product teams and say, this is why I need this, and here are all the interactions of people who are asking for it. So that's something we didn't anticipate. It came up just with the data and that inside. So thank you for that story. I think qualitative and quantitative both are very important to read. And it's so funny. Martina - You mention the bulk feature this happens in another company that I work with where they were looking at one particular. Persona, that, that needed to do bulk edit of all these things, I need to be able to take all these ad campaigns and run and basically, do one huge amount of things that one thing Huge amount of campaign. So hundreds of things and bulk edit for them. For that particular Persona was important and so it was a critically important problem to solve and they decided to prioritize it. And what they didn't know. And I think this is the thing that we all as product teams need to be open to sometimes by solving a problem. That's critically important for one audience, you open up a vector where all these other audiences can find Value. And that's what they found. They thought they were solving a problem for this one persona. But actually by having that feature available, suddenly made it more useful daily to all these other personas inside the company. So it's the same scenario that you were describing that will sometimes solve a problem that will accidentally be much more valuable to many other people that we can't anticipate either, because we, you can't, and there's just a certain amount of serendipity. Or that's just kind of nature. The nature of opportunity that gets opened up. So I think we always have to have big Clean ears on and constantly be paying joint attention to the overt signals as well as things that might be less obvious. Kay - Yeah, it's a good time to introduce a question from Ben who's asking, you know, they give you're bringing up the exact point where a lot of CFOs CEOs and so they are focused on the short term and they don't get the discovery from the Focus mindset or not paying attention to it, or not getting tune to it, right? So how to work with such people? Martina - I think the really important thing is to connect your processes and your data to the business objectives because everyone in the suite is being held accountable for their business results. How are you growing the business? And what does that look like? And how does anything you're investing in translate into the business? All of us are expecting this company to build. Toward. So I think that's the most important thing to show a connection to, as it relates to customer Discovery, that's where you need to show it to us, creating more value and coming up with better products. Here's what we're able to discover or do differently as a result of us having these customer Discovery processes. So you want to draw that direct correlation. For example, you might have put 20 different solutions out and Discovery and narrowed it down to two that are far more useful. Awful, you want to talk about all the things you threw away, and not just the two you pursued, because people won't understand. Oh wow, we considered a whole lot of other stuff and these two were the best by far for these reasons in service of this business objective, that makes a whole lot of sense. So you, not everybody in the suite, understands all of the things that product teams are doing and so drawing that connection and helping them, understand how that work translates into `` Is what's important? Kay - Yeah. You're bringing up a point where that listening has to be some sort that requests back from the customer-facing teams back to. The board has to substantiate that with data and insights. So these are the types of customers. And the other thing that I heard you say and I would love to elaborate you to elaborate on it, which is a lot of times that ends up being Either the squeaky customers. You know. Loud ones are the most Revenue generating ones that are being listened to. But what you are saying makes a lot of sense when it is for the entire larger install base, looking at the larger install base, everything from trials to the highest revenue, and then looking at that insight as a whole is that correct? Martina. Martina - Yeah. And I think you want to look again at that from the business perspective which is not just where we are today. A, but where do we need to go? Where do we need to grow? What is strategically important for us to capture and that helps you make decisions. So I was working with a company just last week, where we were doing, we looked at the company through the lens of the competition, and the competitive market situation. And what you prioritize, when you look at the companies through that lens, versus if you just look at it Bottoms Up from here, our biggest customers. Here's what they're asking for, you'll do different things and because of there, those are different battlefronts and some of them are defensive like the existing install base and you Kristin customers, that's defensive, looking at it from the market vantage point is offensive, where do we need to go? What do we need to make sure we're growing toward, and that will be less obvious stuff? But when you are considering everything you need to look at it through that lens, let's make sure we're investing in both and not one at the expense of the other. I have told you. An example, when I was at Netscape where we were putting products out fast and furious and quality wasn't what it should be for Enterprises. And so the number one complaint across the board everywhere was like, you guys need work on quality, like, stop making features to fix everything because two watches are janky and so we listened to everything that they were saying and this major release became Fix everything that's broken for customers and we were going fix everything. And so took a lot longer than everyone's expecting because things that need to be Rewritten platform, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff to probably six months longer than it needed to. And there was no innovation and in that period, our number one competitor was innovating. So we solve all of our customer's problems but we didn't innovate and that, absolutely, but us in the market, and it was the beginning of us not being seen as So that was a huge lesson learned where you can't just tend to the squeaky Wheels, the problems that you have today. You also simultaneously have to be looking toward where we need to drive the market. And what's important? So make decisions using both those as a lens. Kay - Yeah, what you're bringing up is, do we not doing something and losing the growth? I have an example of doing something wrong and losing growth. So, we were actually at son, we were building a product very similar to news and that particular product. We wanted to get it out to the market. As soon as possible. We were told, no, we have to get this many million users, you know, we have to get the performance scalability to and the that, because that's some culture, right? So we think big in the, but we haven't gotten the partic to the market. There hasn't been a single user, but we were working and we ended up having to spend six months before which I had to put. You know, go back and say, hey, the last six months, now be better Go to the market, we will face this problem as it comes, right? When we get that millions of users will come, but we don't have tens of users yet. So it's one of those things they're not doing that has to be in tune with the market, which is what you're saying. I think this is a great thing in your book. Love that there are four different ways in which you are connecting the insights. So what you talked about connecting the market and the customer Insight seems very close to the Ambassador. You're talking about the Ambassador, the strategist, the Storyteller, and the Evangelist. I'm trying to figure out if I should go. One by one, we should compare and contrast all of them. What would be the best for you? Martina - Well, maybe we give it over to you but your point. Okay, so I talked about the four fundamentals of product marketing, and I think at it, A meta level. It's important to understand that product marketing, whether it's your title or not, is simply connecting. How does your product get to Market through a series of strategic marketing activities that move toward your business goals? So, it's not just a title, or a person doing the job. It's a function that must be done by a company. So, it doesn't really matter where it lives or who owns it. The work must be done and so I try to reduce them., just the four fundamentals. So, people understood this is the work that must be done and The fundamental one to your point was the Ambassador, which is connecting customer Market insights, and that's everything that you. And I was just talking about and that can come from anywhere. If you hold the title of product marketer, it is your job to make sure that all of that market Frontline Market signal gets reflected by the product team as well as that market Insight of okay, what was our competition doing? And what does that mean? to do or respond to some of it might be purely a marketing response. Some might be product responses, but that's a slip. Someone who sits in the role would adjudicate, but all that work is going to be done as a collective effort. Number two is the strategist which is directing the products, and going to market. And that's looking at it through that more strategic lens, that we are discussing, which is okay. How much of our effort needs to be around tending to our existing Market or growing into new ones? And what does that mean? What channels should we Be more plug product leg growth focused versus top down? Or is this a place where our existing channels work, just fine, or do we need new Partnerships? So that's thinking about that from that more strategic vantage point and then all the different helping to guide, all the people on the marketing. Team Number three is the Storyteller, and that's shaping the perception of the product in the market. So it's not just storytelling and that's all the messaging and positioning work. And then Number four is the Evangelist and The key here is that you're enabling others to evangelize about your product. It's not just that you are the one that's doing the talking about your product. And I think that's a big leap and distinction between what I'd say, more modern approaches are versus when you and I were first coming up in the market which is like hey you have a product, you get to talk about it. Now there are five and a half million apps. There are tens of thousands of Solutions across three or four categories. So we're all bombarded. You don't just get to talk about yourself. Is it? Everybody on the team and I. Everybody is confused. No one is cross-pollinating us. Yeah, it's so confusing. So people won't listen to people. They trust, which is not us. Yeah, it's a colleague, it's something on social media. It's something in the Reddit forum and so, how do you enable others to be your evangelist? Kay - Yeah. Let's put this to the fullest, which is the Cinder and the strategist separately because doctors looking for signals from inside the company back into the product. Then the other two, which are to some extent. The story does Storyteller and the Angeles, which is what goes from inside to the external. People are getting the external people involved. So, on the first two, which is what we are talking about, we have been talking about the Ambassador and the strategist there is There is a question from social media in your experience. When you start creating feedback mechanisms to capture and communicate the knowledge of the customer-facing teams back to the product teams, does that have a positive motivational effect on everyone? So, I mean, in a way you answer this by saying the product marketing has to be tuned to all of this. But here, maybe it's a situation where it's sometimes frustrating. Frustrated. If the engineering folks have dull side effects, then what should we do? Martina - Well, I always look at customer Market insight as a positive thing. Not a negative, it should never be like, oh my gosh, this is distracting from the work that we need to do. This is the work that needs to be done. If your product is not in service of the customers and Market that you are in then who are you doing this for? It's never about technology for Technology's sake. Sometimes things are broken and need to be fixed, but products exist to solve problems for customers. And to be in particular markets that are trying to do things, so it's kind of the game that we're all in. So we have to play. So I would say any customer Market Insight should be positive for teams that are trying to make decisions not that it is not a distraction. Kay - If someone is providing a customer-facing team is providing back feedback back into that engineering. Think somebody is not listening. Please go ahead and share this particular life with the engineering team and say, hey, Martinez is that you have to listen. So, I am giving you installed base feedback. So that should help for this question, the, you know, listening to the customer getting the market insights as great. This is also another question that has come up when the customer talks about problems in the prob product. Usually, they're correct. But when they, Talk about solutions, they are usually incorrect. How much truth is there to the scene? Martina - 100% I should say that the vast majority of cases are two. You will always find that exceptional customer that has this Pitch, Perfect insight, and then you're like, wow, you're amazing, and always try and keep working with that person wherever they are because they have amazing product Insight. That person is rare most of the time just because they don't have As much visibility into the full realm of possibilities on the solution side, they're going to look at it very narrowly. They're going to look at it through the lens of their experience base. And so 100% listen to the problems infer, how might I see this in a way that will achieve what they want and there is some signal in the solutions that they are telling you most of the time that signal, my experience of that signal is Don't over solve or overthink this. I'm telling you a very simple way that I know how to solve the problem, and sometimes it might seem overly simplistic to TiVo. We can do this another way, but there might be some signal. They're saying, don't make this hard, don't add a whole new area. Don't, don't make this a big thing. Can you solve this in a very simple way? So there is some signal, Not necessarily the solution, but the intent behind how they want to feel. Accomplishing the task. I know that seems very subtle but it can be profound in terms of how complex we solve things and how we complexify our Solutions I should say. Kay - Yeah, it's you know a lot of times that I also say this to our teams, right? So in this iterative model that we are in, we can have the luxury of solving it simply and seeing how we are in 10th place to be able to go. Ahead and improve on it. So, there is no reason to come up with something very complex, because gone are the days where we, you know, we are not shipping CDs anymore. Martina - So, so true. And I'm so glad that you said that, like we have the, we live in this fabulous era where we get to iterate quickly. We don't have to ship it. And wait, another year before we can put out another release, we can put something out there. This is again the MVP. How do we test our thesis on whether or not this is Solving the problem of whether or not it has value to the customer week and whether or not it's usable? Let's make sure that we are doing all of that work as we build. Kay - Yeah. Me and my cofounder always talk about the know what? They know, how do they know why you write? So they know what they know, why do they know how? So how come we resolve it? The problem comes last. It's if you focus on the right intern and understand the intent very, very, very well, the solution can be very simple. Whoa, to solve that particular problem. I agree. Again. Yeah, so in terms of how an Ambassador understands, just, how are they different in a product LED Growth Company versus a customer learns? Let's take a step back. Tell us what in your words, how you would differentiate a product lid and a customer liquid company. Martina - I would say. Product LED company is one where they are looking very much at product signals to figure out where to grow and how to do things. And the product is where they manifest how they want to move the market. Whereas a customer lead might be we're listening, we're listening more to than not watching their behaviors in the product. We're listening more to the customer's voice overly, not necessarily Through their product actions. And based on that we're making adaptations that might not just be in the product. So a lot of customers LED places, might adjust the sales process, and customer success process brand. There are many other ways to be in service of customers and build a customer relationship product. Like companies tend to put all of that in the product experience, whereas I'll say customer LED ones are, well, they're all these other ways that we can serve. Connect and provide value to the customer and it's not necessarily just through the product. But product lead companies, they're like, well, if it doesn't live in the product and that value can't be experienced then we're not doing our jobs. Well enough, Kay - Have you seen a combination of the two Martina you have seen a lot of startups and I am yet to see, you know, models are also evolving as we talk, right? So because things are becoming a lot more overlapping Have you seen a combination of the two that has worked? Well for any of the companies? Martina - Well, I would not say that Netflix is a classically a product, wouldn't let in the way that we're talking about now, but I would say they were at as an organization. They are tremendous in leveraging and empowering product teams to do both of these things within their Realms. So, the team that was All the product team that was in charge of the home page, which is just one aspect of the product, which is how do we convert people that come here into trial users and then make sure that we retain them after trial. They had to make decisions on when they signaled. We're about to charge your credit card and one decision led to a huge amount of customer support calls. They wouldn't notify them proactively and it's like, okay, there's 10 million dollars worth of Alls. I'm making that number up, but a huge number of calls would come in where people like, oh, I forgot to not have my credit card charged. Can you just take it off? And so, they solve that problem by proactively notifying people in the product, as part of the product experience, was to proactively notify them that we're about to charge your credit card. So people remembered and that wound up. Costing them 50 million in Revenue. So it was a much more expensive decision but it was the right brand choice to do. Right by the customer, and be honest about what was happening. So they made a choice that wasn't the right the best quote, unquote, Revenue Choice, or business choice, but it was the right customer choice and they discovered all this through, the product forward process, they made the right brand decision and of course, this is many, many years ago, they said it's more important for us to be a trusted brand because of what we're building long term. And of course, Netflix is what it is today. And I think, as an organization, they're spectacular at Mining product signals with customer signals. Kay - Yeah, and interesting. You say that. And, you know, I'm, I'm also seeing this with, in my experience that is to say, with companies of all sizes, I recently talked to a company that's only 15 people but they have 115 thousand users using their product. And what I'm noticing is some very large companies that have, you know, Cloud companies and collaboration companies. I've also talked to where they have traditionally been product LED growth, but at some point evolved into customer LED growth for cross-selling, upselling, training product feedback, you know, the voice of the customer input. So even products like growth companies, respect the size as they get The number of users and the number of customers. And I see them moving towards this customer delayed growth for growing within the same accounts or even identifying markets. And I think that's pretty much what you are alluding to with the onion Netflix example. Correct. Martina - Yeah. And then also just exactly what you are saying, which is there. So many other ways in the modern Arena products can feel very equivalent to customers. And so if you To be a retained customer pick. People want to have a sense of affinity and relationship with the brands that they choose to do business with that stuff, is, impacted by the product, but they're all these other places exactly what you were talking about the sales process, customer supports the brand, what's on social, how the company behaves on social? Do you get hit up constantly with like hey come attend this like when you're already a customer, you get to keep hitting up for more? Tough more marketing. Or do you just feel this connectedness in this love of the product and run the company? Those things are not in the product. Those are marketing decisions, sales decisions, many other organizations, the legal team, and now how big the privacy policy is and how frequently that gets updated and put in the experience. Those are all other departments and that is what I am thinking about. What's the customer's holistic experience of us as a company? It might be primarily through the product, but all these other things have an impact too. Kay - Yeah, that's where, you know, and the more accompanied is tuned to that, the better, they build the trust, which is the underlying thing with the customers and that potential prospects. So because then the foundational value is really, you know that flywheel thing where you have the customer in the middle and literally every other department is operating for the customer and everybody is just tuned in to this customer's insight. And, interestingly, you did bring in legal but it is true. It is true every and it's not just marketing, it's not just customer support, not science, success alone, but it is, you know, and not engineering alone. It's every Department. Martina - Yeah, yeah. And I think that what often happens is in any company of any size, everyone's doing their Silo, and we're building a product, and I'm mitigating risk with this, these privacy policies, or with this compliance. Internal rules are all that matters. But from the customer's perspective, like I don't care what's going on inside your company and I want to be, I want to be treated as a human being and that my business to you has value, even if it's small but everyone wants to feel that way. Kay - Yeah, I recently had a call with a customer support person. It was a very, it was not a good situation and I wasn't unhappy as a customer and I did mention it to the support person. I'm not upset with you, but I'm upset with the company that you're not as a whole or a person thing, you know, the entire company. But just saying, this is my department. This is another department, this department. How many times are you going to transfer me back and forth and back and forth? And say, this is not your problem, it should be every one of your problems, right? So, it's frustrating as a customer to be in that position when people you are talking to From present their entire company and just represent a small portion of it. Martina - Yeah, I think that's if you think about all of your favorite companies that are brands that you go back to, I would bet most of them have you've had these positive customer experiences with where they didn't frustrate you, they didn't kind of three like, oh, that's not my thing. That's someone else that thinks about Airlines. No, no one has a favorite Airline because I was like, well that's not my problem. That's somebody else's. Problem or let me go talk to the manager and it's just so frustrating, and that's not what anybody wants. Kay - Yeah, exactly. So when we talk about an ambassador as a strategist, what kind of data is an ambassador qualitatively pulling in to get those quantitative metrics? And what kind of data is a strategist pulling in for quantitative qualitative and metrics, you can answer them one by one. It says, what? Two questions in one? Martina - Yes. So the Ambassador, so I in my Book. I talk about this woman named Allah who now runs all of the marketing across the entire do be Creative Suite. And when she came to Silicon Valley, she made it her business to know the business better than anyone. And so she went to the product teams and she represented. Well, here's what our market share is relative to others, and here's what I'm seeing in the marketplace, she made sure she brought business data, the market data, the competitive data, and customer data and that she brought it to every conversation. That the product team was having and they didn't realize that they were missing. This very important aspect of how they were making decisions until she came. And she was regularly representing those key important aspects. So that's the kind of data as the Ambassador that someone needs to bring and then they're inverse of that you're the Ambassador out, to the go to market teams of the product information. To make sure that the right product information is making it out to the goto market teams. Marketing teams, sales teams, are we talking about legal teams? Hey, we're about to add these new things that change, anything and when their privacy policies, so that's the Ambassador connecting both ends, not just one way in, and it's both in and out in and out. So, that's the Ambassador aspect of the strategist. That is, okay, now that we know and understand all these things about the product, the market, and the customer, how does that translate into the best possible? Go to the market for the product. And that is primarily Crafting a strategy that directs the goto market aspect out. So that's not bidirectional, it's bidirectional in the sense that you take input from sales and marketing teams but it's providing that guidance. So that they are for all the marketing and sales effort that it's maximally effective and strategic and position in the company. Kay - Yeah. And for that strategist, it's, you know, these days sales or I should say, you know, sales kind of is becoming synonymous to customer success. So I just wanted to call that out. So for teens that do that when Martina talks about sales and marketing, in this case, it applies to the customer success teams, who are looking into, Shifting the gear a little bit, A storyteller shaping how the world's think about the product, and evangelist helps other people to tell stories, I can see that what is, how can a founder can utilize both them? Martina - So shaping how the world thinks about product positioning is positioning your product in the market and how you do that. The Anchor Point to that is how your message and talk about it. But many other things ultimately build to the product positioning. So I do want to make that distinction that positioning isn't a one-time event where you, let's here's the sentence. We are now positioned. It's all of the Distant behaviors, that build toward that market position. So that's a really important thing for Founders to understand as it relates to messaging. I think this is also very different than what most people understand. There is messaging that fundamentally positions you as your land here. This is what we do and it's clear to the maximum number of audiences and then there's campaign based messaging, which is what am I saying, in this particular campaign to capture this audience, and you need to have those things separated so that they are not conflated with one another. And what is very effective for this campaign to data Engineers is separate from this campaign to the suite that are the decision makers you have to message different things and so that's how I you have a messaging hierarchy that lets you have appropriate messages for those different audiences. But the primary message, which most people will call a positioning statement is, how do you most simply Articulate what you do and its value, and the big thing there, I'll say is people think that it's a formula or think that it's coming up with a catchy tagline. But the most important thing is, can you articulate it? So others can understand the value that should be extracted from your product and why it might be either important or different. You can't apply a formulaic approach to get there. You have to discover your way to what is Meaningful to the market. Not just how you want to be talking about it. That's what most Founders. Don't know their actual here. The different ways which I think I won't say which is the one that that is pinging or working. It's discovering your way into like oh I'm understanding how the markets talking about it and I'm intersecting between, but I want to say and we have what they are capable of hearing. Kay - Yeah. Our audience is a lot of customer-facing teams and for the customer-facing teams, the messaging comes in from the product marketing. You also know the messaging. After all, you are so much in tune with the customers because you're talking to the customers on a basis, what is the kind of messaging that you would suggest as a Storyteller or as an evangelist That customer-facing teams can utilize to build better trust. And with relationships, Martina - I think it is super crucial for customer-facing teams and customer success sales. Anyone that deals daily with the customer to bring in what they are hearing to those that are crafting the mothership positioning or messaging. Like there's no product marketer that should feel they could do their job. Well, Without consulting those teens and it's not just you're looking very specifically for what words they use when they're talking about it because we have this tendency to talk using our jargon and in a way that presumes understanding and knowledge on behalf of our customers by listening to it, they say in real situations, either back to a sales rep or back to customer success. Rep, kind of like that work, you've example where it's like, hey, We're looking for multiscreen support. No one's asking us for this but this is how we talk about it and this is what's important to us. You're looking for that type of Market signal to Message that's resonant that lands with and is clear to those customers. And so everyone that works in that function, takes these very specific words that you hear again and again, back to the marketing teams because that's what they need to know. And that will help lift them from the habit of trying to be cute or I'll say jargony or coming up with a value statement that anybody could say. And find things that are explicitly meant to you, your company and your product, and people's experience with you. Kay - Yeah, it's funny. We at Ascendo our messaging, you know, we are a support experience platform, but then our customers relate to us saying, oh my gosh, you are an expert in every one of my agent's back pockets. Whoo, you know, that's the level of messaging that when they say hit it feeds back into the messaging itself. And it's awesome. It's like Physicians carrying his little book in their pockets, right? Martina - So, and I, that is a beautiful example of how you guys articulate. Like, were customer experience platform by the way platform. My least favorite word. And like, everyone was like, oh, for not a platform, we're not talking about what we do. Like 4:30 means nothing to anyone, anyone, anyone, it's meaningless. And if you're relying on it to communicate anything, you do not have Strong messaging of what you said. Your customer said, do you like does brilliantly? Because that was clear, it was, it was clear, a clearly articulated to him to them, the value that you were providing, and why it might be different as opposed to declaring of category or declaring the platform you are and which is what everyone's habits around. Kay - Yeah. And I would love to see your next book be for everybody else around them and seeding or the customer-facing team. Around the messaging. Not just the product Market. Here's Tina. Loud is fantastic. um, I think the other look is also going to be fascinating and would be very interesting. So I enjoyed it. Martina - Thank you. And I did write it with the intention of anyone who isn't a product marketer, would get as much value. So, the feedback that I've been getting that stood most validating is I had someone who is ahead of school read, Loved, and say like, oh, this is making me rethink some of the things that we say about our school. I had a controller in the finest Department, read it and she said, I had no idea what our marketing team was doing. And now, I have strong points of view on how these are just numbers on a spreadsheet. Now, I have a point of view on whether or not we're doing the right stuff and I think we're saying the wrong things. So it's just been delightful to hear people outside of the domains of marketing realize. Oh, I can participate in this because Sometimes because you are not in it, you might see things a little bit more clearly. So it gives people foundational tools. So that anyone even outside of the product marketing practice can learn the tools of the trade. Kay - I'm sure when you rotate, you are thinking about the technology sector and there you are listening to the market and the customer insights, even for the book and you're like, oh my gosh, people who run the school are looking at it, even though you wrote it, it comes in that feedback comes in from very many places, it's amazing. It's there is a fantastic example of customer-facing teams, listening to that market inside. So thank you. You know, one of the things we talk about is looking at the sentiment of every interaction and saying, okay, this person is very happy with the product. Is there a way we can engage them into, you know, a marketing activity? Maybe, you know, coming up with a case study. Anything else right or speaking or whatever it is? So there, is that part of engaging with the others is being an evangelist that you talk about in the book. So how are the customer-facing teams get those insides on who can be a good evangelist and what are the best ways that customer-facing teams can approach and can make that viable? um, What is the right word? How do you translate that into something? Leave. It's Mark, that creates Market momentum where it's something that you can use sweets my good woman time. Yes. Martina - So, one of my favorite examples of this was a company that would listen to customers that were like, that is who this customer is engaged? They would have someone systematically at everyone on the marketing team. This is everyone's job, at least one or two interviews, a week that they would talk to customers that were like, That and do interviews and say, hey I'd love to do a 15minute interview. I've heard that you are an engaged or Innovative customer and we love to hear your stories. So again, it's not like I want to do a case study. I want to hear your story and that they're tiny little ways of phrasing. This just makes it something people want to do as opposed to this extraction that feels like it's a burden and says, like, okay, so tell me what life was like before you were using our product. So then you're capturing a Standing more deeply, the problem surface, as well, as what, what they were trying to do better, what was the straw that broke the camel's back that made you decide to do something about this? So there is your understanding, of what is the activation force and that provides incredible. Insight to all the goto market teams going, oh, oh, this is the thing that finally makes them do it and then they start a search, or the what made them take action because that's what you're always looking to find. And thenI's heard that you're doing particularly Innovative things with our product, what are you now able to do that? You weren't able to do 24 before this helps you articulate and find those areas of difference. And then you spend these up as stories, not as case studies that everyone that is customer-facing can use in their conversations. So you have bullet points of? so the next customer success conversation, I'm having where some say, oh yeah, I've experienced this problem. I know because I read a story where someone articulated that problem by saying, oh, you know what, we have another customer experience, that same problem, and here's how they're using the product. I didn't send you a case study that sounds very structured. And inauthentic I'm sharing a story of someone that feels like they're like you. And so that's what and then people if it's shared it as a story, it's much easier for others to share. I can now share that story with one of my colleagues saying oh, you know it I was just talking, I just Had a conversation this morning and someone who experienced this problem. They solved it this way. Using this product, this very thing happened to me. I was in a product Huddle House where we brought together all of our product leaders. And someone was talking about how they were trying to measure and get the telemetrics inside of their product. And one of the customers said art with one of the customers, and one of our product leaders said we just implemented pain, and it could not have been easier. We just Implement this API, and we get me to see all the data, and we transition away from this. Somebody else in that Forum said, oh yeah, well I'm a big fan of amplitude. I'm you I've been using it for years. We to do all this setup and she's like exactly. We used to do that too, but we didn't have to do any of that customization. It was so much easier he's like yeah well I haven't used pain, do because it didn't do X Y and Z. She's like yeah, we didn't think it did that either but it does. So no one from Pain do was there, but someone was sharing their story. Someone wasn't sharing their experience and there was this can-force dialogue so that every single person that was in that call went away saying, I guess I should be looking at Penn do even if I'm a fan of these other things because somebody else had said we had this great success it was unexpected and it was this very organic dialogue. After all, they had made it super easy for them to have a direct experience with PLG that took away all of the barriers of Entry because they understood what made it hard to have an experience with I know and they solve those problems. So that's an example of it being applied. Kay - Thank you for the Insight. That is two aspects of it, right? One aspect of it is the storytelling part where the actual storytelling can be resonated. Second thing is, you know, connecting and customers and doing best practices. We tend to do it even across Industries and we have found that customers love talking to people, even outside of the industry to see how they solve their problems. And you are giving an example of product-like growth. So that's awesome.Martina I think, you know, this, this is wonderful. We had a very, very, very good discussion concerning quantitative qualitative data products. LED customers like Growth Company and we talked about the four anchors in which anybody who Messaging. Can utilize, do you, would you like to add anything else before we fully wrap up? Martina - All of us, that no matter what city seat, you sit in at an organization, all of us can help our companies are more customer and Market forward and the more companies that That the better it is for every customer and also for the market writ large. So, I would just encourage everyone to get a little more customer Savvy a little more Market Savvy and let's all do a better job of Translating that into how we act and behave towards customers so that they can make better decisions more easily and get more value from our products. Kay - Thank you very much. This is going to be very useful for all our customer-facing teams to understand articulate and respond to customer requests. Thank you very much for your time, Martine. I enjoyed this conversation with Tom professing. Martina - Great, thank you for having me. And for, for driving the conversation and having these stories, hopefully, be told with it to others. Absolutely. Thanks. Previous Next

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

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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Join Ascendo AI Peak Conference to explore intentional AI, empower service teams, and drive smarter, measurable outcomes in field support. Peak Conference August 14th and 15th | 2:00 PM - 2:40 PM EDT Session ID : S330G Pre-book a 1:1 Executive Meeting With Us Request a meeting Mark your calendars for August 14th and 15th as Ascendo AI hosts its inaugural Peak Conference , a groundbreaking gathering for field service and customer service leaders, chief customer officers, and service visionaries. This isn’t just another tech showcase; it’s a mission-driven forum to explore how to implement AI with intention. Dive into actionable strategies that solve real-world service challenges, empower teams with smarter tools, and drive measurable outcomes. Whether you’re reimagining customer experiences or optimizing service operations, Peak Conference will equip you with insights to turn ambition into action. Stay tuned for agenda reveals, speaker announcements, and more. Ready to elevate your service game? Peak Conference is where the future of intentional AI begins. Meet Our Speakers Chuck Kellen Associate Director, Continuous Improvement & Maintenance Digital Product Manager, Asset Optimization, EDFR NA Melissa Hogan Sr. Director, Digital Transformation & Continuous Improvement, Asset Optimization, EDFR NA Karpagam Narayanan CEO at Ascendo AI Chris Dickerson VP Service Planning and Logistics Optimized Inventory, Improved SLA We are able to achieve a 95% SLA with hardly any firefighting. We proactively manage and optimize the inventory of 5,000 unique spare parts across 300 depots. Payam Karbassi Global Service Segment Leader MUST HAVE solution for customer support Easy to setup and configure. The game-plan for remote as well as field support prediction results are right-on. Ascendo AI provides excellent support for initial setup and on-going collaboration. We needed an advanced tool to realize labor and material cost savings while maintaining enhanced experience for customers and partners. We are on the path to realize improved benefits across our product portfolio. Kevin Yang Senior Data Scientist Superb models that provides results With Ascendo AI, we are able to enhance patient experience and predict outcomes. The tool also calls out Top trending issues from all of the Voice of the Customer interactions to provide Product Feedback. Ascendo AI helps us to predict patient churn so we can proactively address to improve patient treatment and therapy. Being proactive will enable us to stay as a market leader. Viktor Kehayov VP, Product Engineering SAP FSM Leveraging Enterprise Data: Our SAP FSM with Ascendo AI Our SAP AI-driven FSM solution, alongside partner offering Ascendo AI, is well-equipped for finding reliable solutions using existing data in SAP and other knowledge content. Brenda Guardado Senior Director Customer Success Innovative product offerings and amazing support The Ascendo AI team is extremely pleasant to work with. They are responsive, they show they truly care about your experience with their product, and were quick to iterate on any feedback provided. Ascendo AI has an amazing product offering that integrates well with shared Slack channels and empowers our team to seamlessly support customers effectively and accurately. Cedric Prevost Service Delivery and Infrastructure Leader for Life Care Solution Must have solution finder tool for Field Service Ascendo AI is extremely easy to add new products. We like the design and the easy of use in terms of getting the solutions to customer reported problems. Ascendo ai is helping to support Field engineers doing field and remote support. This is a very useful tool to support new hired field engineer less experience than the others. Alexandra Pham Senior Customer Success Manager Ascendo AI is a must have for CX! Ascendo AI made it so easy to bring Trending issues, Knowledge intelligence, Quality and Voice of the Customer across our support channels. We used Slack as a channel and Ascendo AI helps learn from the interactions. Automatically coming up with Trending issues that we can feed back to the Product team. It is like having Voice of the Customer in our back pockets. Brenda Bernal Vice President AI-Driven Solutions and Knowledge Creation Ascendo AI solves 88% of customer issues immediately and for the rest, guides us by helping to create knowledge. Atad Bronstein Director of Customer Success Transforming Knowledge Dynamics Anjuna’s Product Support team uses Ascendo AI to quickly assimilate knowledge and rapidly resolve new support requests across a variety of customer deployment environments. Our products are highly-technical and always-evolving, and Ascendo AI helped us achieve and even overachieve Support KPIs such as: reducing Time-To-Resolution and increasing the number of Resolution-In-First-Touch. John Heald Global VP, SAP CX SAP and Ascendo AI Partner to Enhance Customer Support Happy to celebrate this news about having Ascendo.ai on our SAP Store. Looking forward to working with them and our great customers, empowering resolution at every point and channel of service. Stacy McQuestion Sr. Logistics Analyst Absolute must for managing customer support SLA Ascendo AI is so easy to get a proactive measure of where we need to stock spare parts to address potential customer demand. We have very stringent and critical SLA requirements and Ascendo AI helps us to take proactive actions. Infinera products are used in mission-critical environments, and it is crucial to provide top-notch customer service while optimizing for cost. Ascendo AI helps us to do just that. Kiet Dam LCS Service VCP & Product Quality Leader Ascendo AI is transforming field service team delivery The tool is very initutive to use and navigate. The tool also constantly improves upon itself as additional data gets uploaded or as users give input. It gives our field team a great gameplan to resolve customer issues based on previous service records. We are trying to improve labor and parts efficiencies along with reducing customer downtime. We have realized labor and material savings year over year. Deovrat Vibhandik Lead Engineer Service Engineering Best Predictor tool for support and troubleshooting for Field Engineers Easy interface that provides the best solution along with guidance on root cause and solution areas. We can also get the best technician to provide guidance on the fix. Ease of troubleshooting and clear gameplan for our field engineers to solve customer issues. We are getting benefits on both labor and material cost. Matt Mitchell Technical Support Principal Engineer From Reactive to Proactive: Ascendo AI Revolutionized Support Ascendo AI has transformed the battleground of technical support, turning what was once a two-week reactive struggle into a one-day proactive plan, ensuring the right solutions (activity and part) are in place before they're needed. Ahmad Azlan Isa Country Senior Engineer Search Resolution Feedback Ascendo AI is helping resolve GE customer devices and systems problems. I appreciate the search engine, which organizes products into distinct groups. Chandrasekar Elongovan Senior Quality Manager Technical Service APAC Deeper insights on the field usage of our equipment We have complex medical devices and we perform varying types of preventative maintenance (PM). Ascendo AI brought out the insights into the cause and effect of such PMs and the trending issues using inference models. These insights are helping us to make proactive steps in the way we provide services. With the recommendation from Ascendo AI we are able to proactively determine PM offerings. James Fitts Director of Service Planning Perfect Solution for Reverse Logistics Spare parts Support Ascendo was Flexible to support our unique business needs. We are able to address our SLA requirements proactively resulting in enhanced Customer Satisfaction and Less Escalation. We are able to predict how much parts we need, where we need it, in time to meet our SLA. With our current Supply Chain Constraints, Planning moves to the forefront of our customer experience. Amitkumar Parihar Customer Success Manager Easy to use and clear prediction results. It is user friendly Easy to connect with CRM data. We can add knowledge enrichment at any point of time. Ascendo AI self learning engine provides best results for customer support team. We introduced new products and also support legacy products, it is so much easier to use Ascendo for new users to ramp up with products. Using Ascendo AI is like Google search for customer support. Amy Waranauskas Service Product Line Manager Easy to use reliable platform with a robust roadmap Ascendo AI has collaboratively worked with us, meeting with us every week to discuss status and collaborate on new ideas. The use case I am involved in is a spares planning application including predictive algorithms. The Ascendo AI application has contributed to significant improvements in SLA compliance for these services. Chuck Kellen Associate Director of Continuous Improvement Blown away! We were up and running in an hour! EDF has been looking to drive consistency, quality, uptime and productivity across its global Field Service team. Ascendo AI agents had the capability to pull data from within SAP and outside. We were able to set up the initial deployment in less than an hour and start using Ascendo Agents. We are "blown away" by the way Ascendo AI is able to comprehend and provide Generative AI solutions with clear steps. Industry leaders soar with Ascendo.AI it’s your turn to elevate with AI and communications. Trusted by Awards & Achievements We rely on the power of data, and so can you. All G2 ratings Ascendo is extremely easy to add new products. We like the design and the easy of use in terms of getting the solutions to customer reported problems. Cedric Prevost Service Delivery and Infrastructure Leader for Life Care Solution - Europe & Africa at GE Healthcare Pre-book a 1:1 Executive Meeting With Us Request a meeting

This webinar will share best practices gathered from our research that support teams can use to establish communication and avoid customer churn You are also interested in our suggestions below How to unlock the value from every customer interaction with ai This webinar focuses on how AI-powered insights from the entire customer journey can help you be the voice of the customer. You will find that these insights provide proactive rather than reactive support. Watch now Role of support to increase customer engagement and mitigate churn This webinar will share best practices gathered from our research that support teams can use to establish communication and avoid customer churn. Watch now How to make proactive support happen? - Infinera customer support success story with Ascendo.AI Leading customer support organizations are are constantly looking for ways to improve their efficiency and adopt a more proactive to resolving customer issues and improving the customer experience Watch now Become an expert in every interaction with Ascendo and slack Slack is emerging as a key collaboration tool, internally and with customers. Learn how to use everyday interactions, to automate creating knowledge, and spreading knowledge to help colleagues and serve customers efficiently. Watch now Role of support to Increase Customer Engagement and Mitigate Churn This webinar will share best practices gathered from our research that support teams can use to establish communication and avoid customer churn Please fill the form in below link to watch the webinar video click here Previous Item Next Item role-of-support-to-increase-customer-engagement-and-mitigate-churn

This webinar focuses on how-AI-powered insights from the entire customer journey can help you be the voice of the customer. You will find that these insights provide proactive rather than reactive support You are also interested in our suggestions below How to unlock the value from every customer interaction with ai This webinar focuses on how AI-powered insights from the entire customer journey can help you be the voice of the customer. You will find that these insights provide proactive rather than reactive support. Watch now Role of support to increase customer engagement and mitigate churn This webinar will share best practices gathered from our research that support teams can use to establish communication and avoid customer churn. Watch now How to make proactive support happen? - Infinera customer support success story with Ascendo.AI Leading customer support organizations are are constantly looking for ways to improve their efficiency and adopt a more proactive to resolving customer issues and improving the customer experience Watch now Become an expert in every interaction with Ascendo and slack Slack is emerging as a key collaboration tool, internally and with customers. Learn how to use everyday interactions, to automate creating knowledge, and spreading knowledge to help colleagues and serve customers efficiently. Watch now How to unlock the value from every customer interaction with AI This webinar focuses on how-AI-powered insights from the entire customer journey can help you be the voice of the customer. You will find that these insights provide proactive rather than reactive support Please fill the form in below link to watch the webinar video click here Previous Item Next Item how-to-unlock-the-value-from-every-customer-interaction-with-AI

Leading customer support organizations are constantly looking for ways to improve their efficiency and adopt a more proactive to resolving customer issues and improving the customer experience You are also interested in our suggestions below How to unlock the value from every customer interaction with ai This webinar focuses on how AI-powered insights from the entire customer journey can help you be the voice of the customer. You will find that these insights provide proactive rather than reactive support. Watch now Role of support to increase customer engagement and mitigate churn This webinar will share best practices gathered from our research that support teams can use to establish communication and avoid customer churn. Watch now How to make proactive support happen? - Infinera customer support success story with Ascendo.AI Leading customer support organizations are are constantly looking for ways to improve their efficiency and adopt a more proactive to resolving customer issues and improving the customer experience Watch now Become an expert in every interaction with Ascendo and slack Slack is emerging as a key collaboration tool, internally and with customers. Learn how to use everyday interactions, to automate creating knowledge, and spreading knowledge to help colleagues and serve customers efficiently. Watch now How to Make Proactive Support happen? - Infinera Customer Support Success Story with Ascendo AI Leading customer support organizations are constantly looking for ways to improve their efficiency and adopt a more proactive to resolving customer issues and improving the customer experience Please fill the form in below link to watch the webinar video click here Previous Item Next Item how-to-make-proactive-support-happen-infinera-customer-support-success-story-with-ascendo-ai

This webinar focuses on what leaders can do to elevate their Customer Support Experience with in their organization. We will touch up on best practices, tips and strategies that are actionable takeaways. You are also interested in our suggestions below How to unlock the value from every customer interaction with ai This webinar focuses on how AI-powered insights from the entire customer journey can help you be the voice of the customer. You will find that these insights provide proactive rather than reactive support. Watch now Role of support to increase customer engagement and mitigate churn This webinar will share best practices gathered from our research that support teams can use to establish communication and avoid customer churn. Watch now How to make proactive support happen? - Infinera customer support success story with Ascendo.AI Leading customer support organizations are are constantly looking for ways to improve their efficiency and adopt a more proactive to resolving customer issues and improving the customer experience Watch now Become an expert in every interaction with Ascendo and slack Slack is emerging as a key collaboration tool, internally and with customers. Learn how to use everyday interactions, to automate creating knowledge, and spreading knowledge to help colleagues and serve customers efficiently. Watch now Modern Customer Support Experience This webinar focuses on what leaders can do to elevate their Customer Support Experience with in their organization. We will touch up on best practices, tips and strategies that are actionable takeaways. Please fill the form in below link to watch the webinar video click here Previous Item Next Item modern-customer-support-experience

Slack is emerging as a key collaboration tool, internally and with customers. Learn how to use everyday interactions, to automate creating knowledge, spreading knowledge to help colleagues and serve customers efficiently. You are also interested in our suggestions below How to unlock the value from every customer interaction with ai This webinar focuses on how AI-powered insights from the entire customer journey can help you be the voice of the customer. You will find that these insights provide proactive rather than reactive support. Watch now Role of support to increase customer engagement and mitigate churn This webinar will share best practices gathered from our research that support teams can use to establish communication and avoid customer churn. Watch now How to make proactive support happen? - Infinera customer support success story with Ascendo.AI Leading customer support organizations are are constantly looking for ways to improve their efficiency and adopt a more proactive to resolving customer issues and improving the customer experience Watch now Become an expert in every interaction with Ascendo and slack Slack is emerging as a key collaboration tool, internally and with customers. Learn how to use everyday interactions, to automate creating knowledge, and spreading knowledge to help colleagues and serve customers efficiently. Watch now Become an Expert in every interaction with Ascendo and Slack Video Slack is emerging as a key collaboration tool, internally and with customers. Learn how to use everyday interactions, to automate creating knowledge, spreading knowledge to help colleagues and serve customers efficiently. Please fill the form in below link to watch the webinar video click here Previous Item Next Item become-an-expert-in-every-interaction-with-Ascendo-and-Slack