Customer Webcast with HP Enterprise, Pure Storage, ControlUp, and Success Coaching
Customer Webcast with Senior Executives and Cast Customers discussing Automation-first Just-in-time Strategies to Scale Growth and Revenue
from existing customers.
Transcripts
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
Pregame
Carlos: Did anybody feel the earthquake yesterday?
Dickey: I heard about it — I'm in San Carlos far away from San Jose.
Carlos: I was on a video call with Matt who lives at the epicenter and I see his camera moving I'm “what are you doing?” and he goes “I think we're having an earthquake” and it was one of those is it getting worse should I get up is it cool and it actually went on for quite a while and then this camera stopped and then I waited and I'm 50 miles away and all of a sudden my camera started to move I'm there it is.
Rigo: Yeah same thing! I was on a call and the same thing. I was with my ops manager, and I could see her doing this (moves hands left and right) you know I decided do I get up do I run do I say still
Carlos: Because you don't know if it's just getting started or if this is the matter that's going to get right so you just. I always tell people I don't get out of bed for anything less than a 5.0 that was a 5.0.
Andrew: I live in Granite Bay so we didn't we're sitting on granite we didn't find anything.
So hey Rigo do you know Paul Melman?
Rigo: I do I know Paul well actually him and I were on the same team here for about two
years ago.
Andrew: Well Paul and I go back. I’ve known Paul for 25 years.
Rigo: Oh wow
Andrew: Yeah, as a matter of fact, Paul used to live in San Carlos where I used to live but yeah I've known Paul for a long long time we worked together.
We were together at Scopus Technology.
Dickey: Right yeah I remember that. Emeryville? Scopus was in Emeryville?
Andrew: Yeah at the Watergate Towers. yeah.
Rigo: Paul’s awesome it actually gives me a good reason to Circle back and connect with him.
Andrew: Yeah, Paul’s a good guy
Dickey: So Rigo I heard Walrito’s pool got cracked or something from the earthquake?
Rigo: Oh I haven’t heard that one I know he's been dealing with a lot of contractor issues. So one of the guys on my team just bought a house and man I told him that’s lipstick on a pig you better make sure that you start pulling back walls and ceilings and he's just finding one issue after the other.
Andrew: Hey that's what you get when you buy a house.
Rigo: Yeah right exactly!
Andrew: Yeah we we bought a place up here in Granite Bay last year and the day before Thanksgiving when I had a house full of people my sewage decided to back up and so I had to and there was no clean out close to the house which we discovered wasn't disclosed in any documents and I had to pay five grand for Rooter Hero to come out and install a clean out valve that day. That was awesome
Dickey: oh man yeah yeah yeah. Everyone has one of those stories one or the other way.
Andrew: The joy of home ownership!
Rigo: Yeah when I bought my my house my manager at the time he welcomed me to indentured servitude
Andrew: Yeah pretty much. Actually we've been outside of that we've been pretty fortunate we were able to buy this place and it was in moving condition, for the most part, we haven't that was the biggest issue that we've had to biggest issue we've had to deal with so far so the previous owners took really good care of this place.
Rigo: nice
Andrew: Which is important. Where are you Rigo?
Rigo: I’m in Newark here, yeah, but I grew up in San Mateo - Redwood City area until I moved here to Newark.
Andrew: Ok.
Rigo: Which crossing that bridge feels you’re driving into another state sometimes yeah whereas Carlos, Carlos is way out there now how's that commute for you Carlos?
Carlos: about 20 feet yeah
[Laughter]
Dickey: I didn't realize — Carlos actually came to see me — I didn't realize it drove from so far to see me in San Mateo, so thank you.
Carlos: I'll be moving back to San Jose at the beginning of the year so.
Dickey: Oh nice. Okay I'll make I'll wait one more minute and then we'll officially kick off
Carlos: For the record, everybody can see us you guys know that right
Dickey: Yes.
Yair: That’s why I'm keeping silent.
Carlos: Yair is , I'm not saying, nothing!
Dickey: All right, maybe we can begin, really quickly so.
Dickey: I’m Dickey Singh. First of all, thank you for being here.
We have not had a customer webinar in a while. This is the first one in a while. We have been super busy with Cast 2.0, which is well now Cast 2.1. We released Cast 2.1.
Cast is an automation platform to drive growth and revenue from existing customers without having to scale teams.
So today so we have cast.app Customer Executives Carlos Quezada, from HP Enterprise, Rigo Rodriguez from Pure Storage, Yair Bortinger from Control Up, andrew Marks from Success Coaching.
All the guys are really popular and well-known in the industry so I wanted to say a few things about the companies that they represent and I will ask them to introduce themselves after.
So HP Enterprise is listed on the NYSE Exchange and has annual revenues of 28 billion and HP E was split from HP in 2015 and is focused on servers, storage, networking, containerization, software, and consulting and support all now sold as a service and I believe Aruba was HPE’s biggest acquisition at three billion dollars
Pure Storage is also a publicly traded company listed on NYSE developing and selling all-flash data storage hardware and storage products. It has a market cap of 9 billion dollars.
Control up transforms how it manages systems troubleshoot issues and delivers a great user experience. It has raised over $140 million including its most recent series D. Yair, I don't know why you negotiated so hard when we signed. It is based out of Silicon Valley and Israel and year is actually joining us from Israel and it's 8 PM over there. So thank you.
Success coaching very well-known for coaching and educating almost 20,000 customer success managers. That’s a huge number and it teaches CSM's best practices, retention techniques strategy and revenue expansion. There was a question that I just got from one of the audiences, I’ll queue it up for you for later “what are you doing for CS leader training” so you can talk about that as well.
So now let me pass the mic around to the room and let each of the panelists introduce themselves.
So please tell us about yourself.
Andrew: Thank you for those introductions. I’m in great company with HP, Pure Storage, and Control Up. Here as a matter of fact we have students from both HP and HPE on our platform. I've spent my entire career helping customers get value from their investments.
My first job out of college was working for Apple Computer in their customer support center and my focus and ethos have always been about helping customers get a return on their investment. I’ve held a number of operational executive roles in post-sales for various companies both on-prem and in the cloud. I've got more than 20 years of experience post-sales and have taken experience to build and develop this coaching and training program that we offered through success coaching.
Carlos: how's it going everybody again Andrew says you know pleasure to be here with everybody great company great to see everybody I think last time we saw each other was up Pulse.
So Carlos Quezeda, head of customer success and digital service strategy for Aruba Networks, as mentioned Dickey, part of HPE going with the company for five years my background has been in predominantly in service and support as well as big data analytics and machine learning so my role at the company is really combining both you know the customer customer service experience and tech support experience that I have with Automation and big data analytics so you know cast.app absolutely fits really well into our architecture.
Rigo: Yes thank you, Dickey, for having me and great company with the the panelists here good morning good afternoon good evening everyone depending on what you're signing in from.
I'm Rigo Rodriguez I lead the global customer success organization here at Pure Storage have been here for a little over three and a half years now it was actually the first CSM hired to help stand up the as a service for what has historically been known as a hardware Service and the reason I've had that the The Good Fortune of actually being able to do that is my background over the last 20 - 25 years has been a pretty evenly split between startups and Enterprise companies building out post sales service and support organizations are primarily in the Fintech, security, and now Storage space. So privilege to be here and to be with you all.
Yair: Hi guys it's a pleasure being here with you guys so I'm here I've been in customer facing for the last 15 years being various positions and CS leadership and CSA innovation in some of the companies that I've been in and I'm very enthusiast by helping people achieve their goals if it's a companies or individuals and deliver a great customer experience my focus is how do customers absorb the engagement and in hearing control up as well.
Dickey: I should add that I'm Dickey Singh I'm the founder and CEO of cast.app we are kind of focused on scaling growth and expansion using automation first and a just-in-time approach to drive growth, which is: usage, adoption, and retention, and revenue expansion which is renewals, upsells, and cross-sells using automation as I said earlier. And then we can reach both the active users as well as the executives of your customers.
Dickey: So let's begin. The first question I wanted to ask is your organization and your responsibility so where do does your team and you fit in in the company, who do you report to, and all
Andrew: So I'm the Chief Operating Officer also the Chief Product Officer also whatever other hat that they got to throw on my head to address what needs to get addressed that's what happens when you're in a lean company.
My the customer success team though reports up to me so I've a head of customer success who's responsible for our customer success strategy and execution and she has one and a half roughly one and a half full-time equivalents that report up to her to support our customer base.
Dickey: Carlos you know talk about your company your team I know lots of changes that have happened since you joined but go ahead
Carlos: yeah yeah you know coming from a startup world for most of my career you know I think change is constant and I think it's it's helped me adapt well with a lot of stuff is going so as you mentioned I'm part of the Aruba Networks business unit inside of HPE focusing predominantly on networking and software and security which called The Edge business unit.
Carlos: I actually work under the services organization Services umbrella and recently have been moved to report under the Chief Operating Officer for Aruba and so my team currently supports really the kind of more of the kind of Cutting Edge platform which is Aruba Central that's a cloud centralized management architecture that leverages a lot of machine learning and AI to do a lot of automation for Network management and troubleshooting just some context we currently have I would say somewhere around 16,000 customers globally; portfolio a little bit of over 300 million dollars.
We created customer success about four or five years ago, started with the digital-first approach right now we have a couple of different engagement models we have what I call monetize customer success as part of AD service programs we also have the Swarm-model CSM which what goes and engages customers throughout the life cycle opportunistically and then our digital-first motion so 15,000 customers and about eight customer success managers managing those accounts globally.
Dickey: Do you want to expand on the Swarm model, because I've heard it before but I think that our audience would really benefit from that as well
Carlos: Yeah so traditionally in a in a end-to-end lifecycle management model you would have a customer success manager manage a portfolio of customers either by a number of accounts by segment or even dollar value and so when we first started from a customer success perspective there was no organizational that there was no CS team here before and so we really had to start very grassroots and so we had to go digital first we didn't have the money to go and hire a bunch of CSMs and we've kind of kept it that way and so our model is more around if we can go in and proactively manage customers throughout the life cycle and be able to understand if they're on track off track or at risk leveraging those indicators to understand if a customer needs help then we go and we leverage automation to proactively engage with customers digitally and let them know what we need them to do or kind of where they stand compared to their peers but in every one of our digital engagement reach outs which right now put out me through email and now through cast we include links to be able to schedule a call with the CSM and so calendly allows us to do some Resource Management in the background so rather than having a CSM dedicated to an account we have a pool of CSMs available to respond to calendly inquiries right and so that's how we do it so ultimately we have CSM split their time between managing a number of accounts that we assigned but then also predominantly responding to health score changes and calendar requests.
Dickey: Yeah just so that you know whatever you have taught me I plagiarize it completely.
Dickey: And well that's what they're doing for HP.
Dickey: So all right yeah not to be in alphabetical order, Yair, do you want to tell us where your company you where you fit in and your team fits in?
Yair: So the CS organization is under this COO in my team I'm leading the customer success operations and we use a digital touch engagement that has in the customer life cycle and indicators about usage and other there are points where we get in Carlos said there is some touch there it's not full digital but the main engagement is digital and we service 1200 customers and we are a team of three and from onboarding, throughout the life cycle we are in charge of the usage, adoption, rollout, training, and we push people for training, and not so we have some indicators where we go in and of course in any point in time and customers have the calendly link that they can actually book a meeting with us. So we make ourselves available for them but we go digitally first
Dickey: Yeah and then yeah control up has an amazing program which is what we call dripless campaigns because customers don't follow a Customer Journey Map, right.
Dickey: So that's an amazing program we'll get into that in a second. Rigo.
Rigo: We go yes absolutely so the customer success organization is one of the pillars of customer experience I reported into our Chief Customer Officer who is a long time Silicon Valley executive coming from Cisco, Joe Pinto.
Rigo: Our Charter really is focused primarily right now on onboarding and adoption for the as a service programs offering of Pure Storage as I mentioned we are Legacy hardware company we're about three and a half four years ago we offered or stood up and as a service offering leveraging our core products and essentially put the model on its head so I was brought in to really help build the framework and foundation on how do we take this Legacy Hardware business and move it towards a subscription as a service model and that has been my focus.
Rigo: Over the last couple of years, we've acquired another company that is a true SAS company Port works is focused on Kubernetes and containers so I've inherited that account team and across both teams, we have about 18 customer success managers managing about 700 customers ARRs over a 100 million an ARR and we are continuing to grow at triple-digit growth for that as a service business so the focus has really been there and that has been my team's Charter as well as how do we take the framework and structure in the methodology of customer success where we get involved in the pre-sales acquisition phase with customer success plans things of that nature and incorporate them into the Legacy Hardware business to build out a more robust customer life cycle.
Dickey: Thank you and I must add that Rigo's team is very technical. I mean they are a very technical group of CSMs they're you know even writing SQL queries and CSMs Warlito, are very advanced.
Dickey: And I am keeping score so three COOs or reporting into COOs and one reporting into CCO right.
Dickey: I was in a conference just two weeks ago and I was told that customers during an escalation kind of love talking to the CCO but not the CRO or the COO.
Dickey: So we will take a few questions at the end. We have already received a whole bunch of questions from the audience but if you want to send those questions over in our Q&A section, Jon will help us take those.
Business Product Stack
Dickey: So I actually wanted to shift to talking about your product stack — I already know quite a bit about your product stack. And why you chose what you have and what your business product stack as it relates to serving your existing customers. I'm not talking about Salesforce — everyone spends a lot of money on sales tools. So what products and services do your team use?
Dickey: I already know that success coaching does not have a CS platform.
Dickey: So again yeah let's start with Rigo
Rigo: this time yeah absolutely so we're very early on in the development of our CS platform currently leveraging Churn Zero and more recently started leveraging cast.
Also heavy users of Salesforce as well as some other tools that we are considering adding to our Tech stack the approach at the moment is really how do we build a rich and robust Tech stack to offer more digital delivery more digital capabilities more automation and that's and that doesn't necessarily mean for the purposes of minimizing resources that are for the purpose of continuing to drive a high-value, high NPS service engagement for all customers regardless of segment regardless of Revenue contribution so that is those are some of the tools that we're currently looking at I mean there are a number of others that we are evaluating at the moment to really put forward again a comprehensive cohesive strategy around our digital touch and how that factors into our customer engagement.
Dickey: Sounds great. You know our product works with every CRM and every CS tool so that's good to hear.
Dickey: Yair, you want to talk about your stack?
Yair: so yeah so for let's say for my team and engagement that we have basically two teams the high touch — or the high touch segment — which they have a portfolio with a dedicated CSM for that we use actually it started in a startup a personal endeavor of one of the people the first people that start FileMaker and so we actually have our own management CS management tool a FileMaker and every time we we the customization every time we add a feature or product and we want to you know see the adoption of that we we have another file or another field and we found it very useful for us at this moment but for the long tail we are actually using two technologies so basically we use EverAfter which is a platform for engagement engaging with customer or customer engagement platform that has the ability to create for each customer his own personal hub so the based on our Salesforce we use also sales so space of Salesforce I created a dedicated object which I called it a switchboard where a sequence of of those fields that are updated every day according to usage, license, and in the life cycle and it controls the content that they have on their own hub.
Yair: So and we use that and during downloading of each a new product that we have according to all each and new customer as well that they have exactly the steps that they need to take the other so the challenge of that that people needs to log into the Hub it's not there so using actually cast.app in order to have a very minimum you know very short costs with a specific call to action.
Yair: So in cast.app we explain why they need to take that action and in in the Hub in the personal Hub we say how you make that action so it's very specific and once we have indication that they did that or even before the onboarding they already configured some of the you know some of the settings that they need to do we skipped that because they already did that so the way we use cost is basically if they if they did something don't don't talk about that only the the call to action is very specific to the customer and it's very personalized and we found that this is very effective.
Dickey: Thank you it feels I should have a session with each of you separately about what you're doing and the way you're doing it.
Dickey: I know Andrew has a lot to say but let me just bring Carlos in before and then we will switch to Andrew.
Carlos: yeah I was actually just I'm glad I went almost last I was just kind of noting down all the tools that we use because as I mentioned you know my background is in service and support and big data analytics and that's kind of the approach that I took from a CS platform perspective I actually have three I use Gainsight, Totango, and ClientSuccess.
Dickey: All three! together? Different business units?
Andrew: Talk about not playing favorites
[Laughter]
Carlos: Right it's it's awesome to talk about that during the renewal period right so yeah but no so it's it's basically an outcome of acquisitions right and really gives an opportunity to kick the tires and really figure out what's going to work for us longer terms right now we have all three from regards to a tech stack.
I actually think we have a pretty elaborate Tech stack so we actually implemented Pendo inside of the solution to give us some analytics on what the customers are doing while they're in there.
We use Support Logic to go and give a sentiment analysis as customers are engaging within our support.
We also used Red Flare that gives us the voice analytics that we need when customers on the phone with support and then we use Altrics and Automation Anywhere so all tricks to help us really go in and pull a lot of the the speed of getting to the Data Insights and then we use Automation Anywhere for RPA’s robotic process automations to automate some of the manual processes that are out there even to the point of creating MBR and QBRs before we had cast.app.
And then we also use Qualtrics for us to kind of centralized kind of VOC platform and then we also had kind of built our homegrown service automation platform which is really our centralized database of customer data that we can use to really play around with and drive insights and you know for the CS people on the call here really what this is is all the different levers and indicators that you would want to use to go and understand where the customer is on the progression of a life cycle and are they red yellow or green right any of those indicators that you can get that help you understand where the customer is and whether they're on track or off track is important you know we're at different levels of maturity with all these tools but I do think that you know it's it's a pretty good because we're going to start.
Dickey: Note to self, Next time ask Carlos what products he's not using.
[Laughter]
Dickey: Okay thank you that was I actually I'm gonna digitize all that whatever you said so that I'll put it on the post so that everyone can take a look at that
Carlos: Sure
Andrew: So ours so so we've developed our skills development platform infrastructure with scale in mind in every aspect. We run an incredibly lean organization so we OEM an industry standard LMS that we essentially use as a Content management back end but they happen to have one of the best APIs out there that allows us to manage the data from the content wrapped around that we developed a custom user interface a custom SSO solution for Enterprise customers
We integrated a standardized Certification testing engine and a credential management solution so we're using Beryllium for certification and we're using Credly for credential management.
We use Zapier to automate workflows, HubSpot for both Prospect and customer marketing we built our own data warehouse that sits on a secure Azure server running SQL server and that provides extensive usage and learner progress intelligence and we use cast for communicating learner progress and consumption for our Enterprise customers on a monthly basis we've built a custom Administration application for provisioning and course entitlement that will soon be exposed to our Enterprise customers allowing them to self-serve and you know additional access to their to their teams as they scale without us becoming a bottleneck and then we we interact with our our customers via email and intercom in-app using the front communications platform to manage and distribute all of our Communications to team members and finally type form and promoter to track customer sat and NPS
Dickey: Wow look at the list of products! I mean just imagine sitting through every customer's QBR every year that's why you know the sea level is you know exact stop coming for qbrs after the first one and everyone else after the first two or three
Andrew: right so yeah well we had to I mean we had no choice once again there's we have four full-time people I mean we are and we got nearly 20,000 users.
Right so we're doing a lot with and we're leveraging technology heavily which is why when you first came to us with the cast app and you asked me to be an advisor I got really excited about it and pulled my my my head of customer success and they said you gotta take a look at this I think this could be game-changing for us.
Scale CS programs
Dickey: thank you, yeah so I wanted to talk about your scale CS programs now right. So again I will digitize everything that you have said so that it's easy for people to look at the tools again.
So I know that each of you has an industry leading scaled CS program and that's why we love working with you all.
I've heard Carlos talk about his widely successful and often imitated digital success program. You have three programs with cast.app already. I know you expanded fairly quickly including Pro Care welcome, Pro Care kickoff, and then the Monthly Insights Review, which is going live very soon. So the last one is designed to drive onboarding adoption and revenue growth and is implementing his vision of automated onboarding and adoption programs that does not rely on rigid drip campaigns that are kind of tied to a Customer Journey Map, because again, we know customers 60% of the time don't follow a map that you create for them.
Rigo is using automation to share high level metrics and let's each personas customers drill down into details and what they're what they see and then Andrew your team is continuously reaching out to customers to inform them of the usage to drive adoption expansion so I wanted to drill down on each of your scaled programs so starting with Yair tell us about your Just-in-time onboarding and the nudges that you send to customers to complete and then you give-up automatically after two or three times. Talk to talk us through that.
Yair: Okay so basically what we're doing is we have not so straightforward it's not a completely SaaS in that traditional way. You need to there are some components that you need to install an on-prem the firewall settings you know there are some IT elements that you need to prepare and there are some prerequisites for each and every element that you want to integrate with our platform.
And there are various platforms that you can integrate with our platform so each customer has its own technology stack each customer has its own limitation its own you know change Cycles internally so we need to accommodate that when you have when you have a lot of customers and you have a very lean team you need to generate an experience for the customers because we service it admins it admins if if we have we just listed a a long list of tech text Tech that we use imagine how many Tech stack it admins are responsible or not so we are just another another vendor or another technology that they need to adopt so taking under consideration our Champions which they first need to firefight all the P1 you know emergency stuff that they need to take care of and then they have big projects of upgrading systems of migrating for one data center to another and so the I call it the mental bandwidth in the actual time that they can invest in adopting another another system is very limited.
So the way we build this is if you have five minutes with us we'll tell you exactly what you need to do and we combine EverAfter as the Hub of the how to's which is very you know feeding with a spoon okay this is what this is the prerequisite that you need to do to prepare for this specific task and this is what you need to do with video snippets and very easy to digest and we use cast.app to encourage them just to explain them in 20-30 seconds explanation this is why you need to take this action this is the value that you're going to get once you complete this action and so the combination of why click here and then a very short five minutes action that they need to take actually allows us to drive the adoption and the rollout of our product just to fit in their time and of course they can do more than five minutes at a time because they have all their to-do lists in the hub but in order just to you know not to be intimidating okay now you need to invest a whole day or a full hour just to take under consideration that maybe they have five minutes now or during that hour that they wanted to spend they have a emergency that they need to take care of they need to stop and what we have is basically you did that we call to action for one one specific action that you need to take but you were in The Hub and you took five actions the next day we update the data also in cost so if you have let's say 15 actions that you need to take and you completed five and the cost that you got is only on one call to action you won't get the the files that you already completed so instead of you need to do this and then you need to do that we have you need to do this 15 and then you need oh this is already you completed that so that's the way we drive and we consider you know when you move from let's say a CSM mentality which you have your you know your portfolio of 20- 30 depends on you know customers to service a scale of customers you change your mentality of thinking of you know you have these customers you I call it we have a bucket so I'm we are not managing customers we're managing buckets different buckets of customers and our goal is just to drive them from one bucket to another to another and hopefully they will get to this golden bucket which they never stay there because they go over so for when what we are actually creating now is buckets so we start with five and then we increase more and more and hopefully we'll have a hundred bucks different buckets and each one will have its own call to action so that's that's the mentality that's experience that we want to provide our customers you know comic with you know with custom but a light or semi-comical experience and a specific call to action that won't be overwhelming for them to complete.
Dickey: yes and that so and you're also using Oliver which is what we have Oliver 3.0 the person that's behind on your right yeah that's one yeah that's on that animated yes very similar to Steve 2.0 for Carlos so let's switch over to Carlos as well tell us about your scale program.
Carlos: Yes just some context you know we started with our digital first approach from the very beginning and what we want to do is we want to make sure that it's not stale so we're always looking at ways to kind of enhance what we're doing from a digital perspective and so you know we obviously started with email automation which was you know very rudimentary everybody was getting kind of the same message at that period of time then obviously with advancements in the data and advancements in some of the tools we were using we're able to start moving to more customized engagements which I would recall more contextual And Timely messaging right so now we're getting messages to customers with the customer's name and also specifically to where they were in their Journey right so you're an onboarding and you're onboarding red or you're onboarding yellow right and then we've been evolving that to not only are you onboarding red yellow or green but also here's how you're doing from a consumption perspective somebody's trying to bring it in Telemetry so the the data has been getting richer and we've been evolving our engagement between still been purely email right and so the introduction of cast really helps us change that right we're not going to go and start doing things through text message and links and things that and it's more more of an on-demand thing.
I actually feel the use cases for cast.app for us are pretty limitless for starting with an advanced service program where we have some commitments to do quarterly deliverables and monthly deliverables all those are actually going to be delivered through casts which really goes and helps us for a margin profile perspective because we can do a one-to-many approach and really deliver our commitments to customers you know similar to here we also very early on personified or digital engagements we have this virtual CSM named Steve who's the one who shows up and all of our engagements and even Steve's been evolving and we're actually evolving Steve also to consider some of the DEI pieces so we'll actually go in and be including additional characters that as part of that as well what I would say is as we look at evolving what we're doing one is delivering you know cast as part of the commitment to these to these event service programs but when we take a look at you know our Evolution as a CS organization and how we're also transcending that famous Belly of the fish right and going through this layer transformation really figuring out how we bring the rest of the business along with us right and so we started with digital because we had to but now that people in the companies trying to really comprehend how customer success works and the value that it brings through this transformation we've established partner programs as well so we're also now you know building out you know partner success motions as well so there's an opportunity there but as I take a look at FY 23 and kind of what we're going to focus on we recognize that we can't go after every segment in our install base and so and the Kentucky this is kind of news for you but the one of the things that I'd to look at an fy23 is using Cast app internally which means that instead of sending a MVR to a customer when I send it to a cell segment leader so that that signal cell segment leader knows how their patch is doing with regards to the install base right you know one of the things that we try to drive is accelerate the time for subscription activation and there should be no reason why customers go three months without activating their subscription the salesperson sold it they should make sure the customer is activating it right and so giving them performance metrics and how their team is doing and see if there's any themes around specific regions that maybe are better or worse than others I think is super impactful and takes the burden off of a CSM to do it especially because many of the CS leaders on this call probably recognize that sales folks aren't always very open to have CSMs engage into their accounts and so instead of us trying to break through to do that why not empower them to go in and do that and oh by the way if you need help we can help you we can take this off of you but let's go and establish a relationship right so for me next year it's about continuing to evolve our digital engagement so moving beyond just email we already started doing webinars the digitization around cast.app both externally internally to me is definitely a game changer.
Dickey: Yeah so definitely want to talk about that but for some of the other customers who are not here route this and we're also starting to talk to AutoFi we are doing something similar reach out to the customer and the customer reaches back and tells Salesforce or hey I need this information because I got this cast.
Yeah BI as well as CI is what makes a lot of sense.
Andrew: I mean my peers here are just blowing blowing past us I mean we're really just getting started with our digital CS program outside of what you know the what we've cobbled together with the intercom and the email you know we've built some very basic components once again with everything we do with an eye towards scale but I'd say we're really immature at this point we recently launched cast as a solution to push learner progress out to our Enterprise customers but I see a lot of different ways in which we can use we can use the platform you know we're going into what I know you you you've got a question about our leadership track but we're going into going to be releasing a leadership track we are we are getting calls from our existing customers for support as well as partner programs to teach customer success I could see us going in in a direction especially with the cast for those types of programs so that you know for example the partner manager at a at a particular organization sees hey here's the partners that are signing up and they're completing the programs and we have some of our customers are going down the partner the channel partner path and our incentivizing Channel Partners to get certified in customer success and as a result they'll get a bigger discount right so it it plays into their margins and you know so I could see a lot of different ways in which we can use the cast app and I and I I realized that for the first time that you've demoed the thing to me I could imagine all the things but we are very very immature at this point and I just see a lot of different ways that we can use this and we plan on using it especially as we release a bunch of these new programs next year we'll start we'll start growing our usage of cast it's it's a necessity for us.
Dickey: I’ll remind myself to talk to you about what how GoodTime is using some of the you know the customers using it with Partners they share the nrr numbers in a waterfall chart I'll tell you about that.
Andrew: Awesome
Rigo: yeah no absolutely so you hit on you know we originally came to cast because we were looking to automate high-level metrics we have a very very rich Telemetry tool that pure offers to through its customers so it's called Pure one and it has a an endless number of data points but it's very static basically customers are required to log in look at their their their viewers which is what we call the different panels in the in the Telemetry tool and essentially make heads or tails of what they're looking at so there's no education no walking them through what that looks so that that is one of the issues that we were looking to address with Cast app that plus the fact that we were growing at triple digit growth for this as a service business and so we really needed this for standardization best practices and scale I mean we were our customer base just to give you guys an example over the last couple of years has grown by over 300 percent but faster than I can hire CSMs so really the the issue that presented itself was how do we get our customers their qbrs their monthly service reviews whatever Cadence they want and ensure that we're providing those timely updates because a lot of our customers do actually have service slas and slos that we have to deliver by and if we miss any of those key data points for provided proactive monitoring their usage their consumption then we're on the hook and that's exactly essentially the position that we found ourselves in is we have to give our customers an update we have to standardize how we update that content we have to be able to uch all of our customers regardless if there are ten thousand dollar a year customer or a 10 million dollar a year customer and capital is the answer for that how do we standardize in a format that lends them the opportunity to get the updates on demand how they want to when they want them provide the opportunity to do that in a short three-minute two minute video clip without having to sit on an hour qbr where most of the time they're probably looking at their phones and entering emails anyway so this addressed that scale problem it allows us to standardize how we deliver our what we call Pure value reviews and it allows us to do that for all customers regardless of customer size or customer segment there are other use cases Carlos mentioned we are actually looking to extend cast to offer that as a training and enablement tool for our CSMs for their for our customer base as well as for our internal resources we're looking at it how do we actually use cast to provide the sales teams with updates on their accounts updates on their patches updates on certain products and additionally we are actually looking at extending our our CSM delivery capabilities through partners and we're looking at a cast at how do we give Partners the updates that they need on behalf of pure to better service their customers being that they're representing our service engagement so as Carlos mentioned these cases are endless and we every time we you know think we've we've identified a new opportunity there's just another 10 behind it that we're looking to really take advantage of
Dickey: Yeah the way what you said initially you know yeah customers can log in into the dashboard and see their data but when yeah that works for active users when has a c-level executive VP level except logged in into your product to look at the data so instead of asking them to come into your product and become monthly active users yeah put the product to them I think that works very well and you know providing continuous value versus once a quarter is the is a game changer
Rigo: so yeah that you're spot on that we've had a customers flat out tell us yeah I'm not logging into your portal so exactly that Dicky this allows us to bring them the updates and the confirmation or the content as well as the information that they need to effectively manage their products and services
Dickey: Yeah so so so a lot of our customers kind of start with what I call the tier three tier four and then very quickly expand to even the high touch. So I have one follow-up question maybe for a Yair How should we combine digital touch with for high touch customers?
Yair: Okay so in Control Up we are not just yet but with cast it will be very very easy I think so with custom data you can actually you know do a call to action or inform your customers in the right time and I think Rigo you mentioned it if you sometimes it's all about timing and if you miss the timing and if you all about you know the CSM is handling it by himself and everybody is having their own priority but if if you do you know you infuse High touch with digital touch together and set the expectations with the customer so it's very important to prepare the customers to say this is we have this kind of Engagement as well just to make sure that you are in the program and give you the right nudge when when you need it or the advice or something that you know as you mentioned people don't have time to have a one-hour qbr every every quarter or even once a year so if you give them a three minutes you know brief on how they're doing and what your recommendation and you can push it a digital it can service also strategic accounts and not just the low end and if you set the expectation this is not replacing your you know your dedicated CSM this is just enriching the the engagement and the and the value in the ways that we can drive value on your end and and they prepare to it and and you do it in in a lovely way or I call it the comic way and I'll give you an example we send our customers let's say a specific call to action we send three costs one two three if if they didn't do that in the last cost we actually offer them listen you know we are going to call you if you're not going to do that or something that just to you know just in a kind of a humoristic kind of way listen daddy will go he's going to be crossed at you if you're not going to do that something that so if if you set the expectation and say listen this is a light kind of Engagement fun kind of Imagine customers are appreciating that so we are not here in control we are not yet in in the Strategic segment but we do see in you know the benefit of cost dripping up in so to speak.
Dickey: Okay so we've got few minutes left and I wanted to cover automated engagement and then I want to actually go into several of the questions that we had received over email so so we always get a question you know hey our data is not ready right so and then that and our customers the fact is customers data will never be ready yet CSMs get to go to various different systems and pull the data together and produce a QBR right they you know for example a customer that's just joined you would say Hey you bought so many licenses and you're using so many or a customer that has been around for a while they would say hey this is how your licenses have grown over time do you want to talk to an account manager and all so so, in other words, you can use intelligent automation to engage and influence users to do things.
Dickey: So my question is what are some of the challenges you face when automating engagement and influencing your customers what should we take into consideration when designing an automated engagement digital touch maybe we'll start with Yair again.
Yair: okay so yeah so data is a data data Integrity is always a problem so sometimes you need to fill the dots and you know with cast actually the the good thing with cost because is that you can actually code things so it with very granule so if you don't have the specific data you can set up cost to you know fill in the Gap so for instance if you don't have a first name you say you don't you don't say anything you can say yeah Hi friend or hi something and so you can you can you can feel the gaps when you have missing data in with cast using that code so this is this is very helpful and if in some cases if you don't have the data and in a specific scenario you just skip that and waiting for the data to be perfect means that you wouldn't do you would never do anything and sometimes you know you will get the false positive and you you call to an action to customers and you say hey I already did that so so you'll get those those reactions for customers but that's that's okay if they say I already did that you can learn from that as well so there are always blind spots in in data there is no 100 data Integrity in that sense and you cannot stop this from doing what you need to do especially when you want to scale and especially when you want to do automation it would never be perfect but if you engage with your customers and you call them and you ask you know and you investigate then and you know treat your customers as as as as as people and not just as targets or prospects or something that you can make this work.
Dickey: yeah I the last few things that Bali and you we were discussing a few days ago is hey the last time I checked or yesterday when I checked you had not done this right we you preface that and ask people to do it right because we don't know yet whether they have done the same or not so just how a CSM would talk right that's exactly what the product it does anyone else want to talk about the pitfalls of automation automated engagement.
Andrew: I think one of the things that you need to remember is first of all not not all the data that you have is relevant and you may not have all the data that you need right so just because you you know just because you have data doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be helpful so don't try and force fit it into into something I think our bigger challenge when we were rolling out cast well we've been we because we're constantly working on our platform is that we we felt we were missing some pieces and we had to not that they weren't there we weren't just we just weren't grabbing them and putting them in the in the data warehouse in the right way
Carlos: I would say one of the things that that we established very quickly is you shouldn't try to boil the ocean right I think that for the first you know I would say six months when when we were starting up trying to build this customer success program we failed to launch many times because we always had the what if condition and what about condition right and so we ended up evolving and adopting kind of this agile approach leveraging MVP which is we know we have to do all of this but in the next 90 days this is all we're going to do and we just have to be okay with that everything else becomes backlogged so I would say that would be one Mike one of my key takeaways for anybody doing this is don't worry about solving everything at once you know go and chip away at it little by little there's always going to be more to do and then I would say at this level of maturity once we've evolved and actually are driving digital engagement so back to an earlier question you had Dickies we actually used our digital engagement as the foundational Journey map that we build even the high-touch stuff on so a lot of the digital stuff presents itself upwards in the engagement pyramid but the challenge is now that we're doing it for everybody how do we know it works right we can't a B test against a segment that isn't receiving digital so what impact is digital having on customers how much faster are they onboarding because we don't go in and isolate customers saying these customers are not going to get it and we're going to prove this is actually doing more right and so that's the biggest challenge is how do you go in and actually measure the impact of your digital engagement programs when you have nothing to compare it against you because now they're all digital right so for us it's a constant evolution of making sure that these digital engagements are adding value it's almost what if we just stop doing this for 30 days and saw what happened where the customers still survive of course but what would the numbers look right and so for us it's some of those things that we're always trying to figure out how we can how we can go in and really go in and drive those business outcomes and tie what we're doing to either a reduced customer acquisition costs or reduce churn you know those are the challenges especially in the a low touch side.
Rigo: yeah yeah and then the one thing I would add to that too is you know somebody once told me is do not let Perfection be the enemy of progress and very similar to Carlos we were trying to boil the ocean I mean we knew there was so much that we could do we were trying to just bite it all all off at once until we were actually forced to a position to step back and say okay what is our differentiator as an organization as a customer success function and more importantly what's the benefit impact to our customers and what is it that pure needs that could really add the most value benefit internally as well as externally or customers and for us that was the the adoption the onboarding phase so that's really where we kind of scaled it back and started focusing okay how do we get the Automation and the digital delivery for onboarding right how do we connect all those dots make sure that it's adding value and you know the measures that we use for that are time to onboard and time to adopt so that's really where we started to hone our our focus in terms of driving a more agile approach as Harlow mentioned to spinning up some of those initiatives and taking on some of those challenges.
Dickey: this is interesting because you know we a lot of our customers they you know they send it to their managers the managers manager for feedback and then they get feedback and they want to incorporate that but when we put in from the customers customers have different feedback and sometimes we have to undo what the executives and management has said so I I'd say put it in front of your customer because that's the real audience right early on get feedback from them instead of getting feedback from the executives because you know all that is can be incorporated but get that to some degree but get it from the customer.
Dickey: So one of the questions that we are getting a lot of is the difference between the buyer Journey Prospect Journey customer journey and even the churn Journey if you remember the Seven Pillars book right he's talked about it but let's focus on so you know when should CS get involved in the buyer Journey should they get involved so that's the question we get a lot I mean I'm not talking about a sales person asking the Cs leader hey can you step in and you know talk to my Prospect to show that how good we are post sales and all I'm talking about whether the CSMs get involved or so anyone can take this
Andrew: so we've you know even back before customer success was a thing in the in my Professional Services days we insisted especially for more sizable deals that that Services representative was involved in the latter stages of the sales process to ensure that expectations were being set that can be achieved that the information captured about the customer and their desired outcomes are transmitted to the team members who are responsible for making the promise into a reality and as a result creating a seamless customer experience transitioning from a a this this sales process where a bunch of people are making Promises to the group of people that are completely different group that are responsible for making a it a reality and you need to have a very seamless transfer there right this is one of and we talk about this in our training one of the one of the key moments of Truth in the customer Journey right because you want your customer to remain engaged and excited about how the offering is going to make an impact on their business and if both sides there the people making the promises and the people making responsible for making a reality aren't on the same page then that customer immediately feels some buyer's remorse and is thinking did I make the right decision here because the left hand's not it doesn't look the left hand the right hand are talking yeah right so I I think the answer to this is it depends because it really comes down to you the unit economics of the deal but we when I was at Adobe for example there was a a process where if a deal was of a certain size and a certain complexity it had to go to a deal desk and there was a decision that was a third party decision that was made that said okay we're going to get somebody involved in the closing cycle here of the of the sales process and typically in most of the places that I that I that I worked we bring somebody from post sales customer success in somewhere around the 70 to 75 percent confidence range you know when we're starting to talk about contracts we're starting out but people feel good that this thing's going to move forward so that's that's my based on my experience last 25 years.
Carlos: If I can add a Twist to that right because the context of this conversation is also around digital right and what Andrew mentioned is absolutely the key right and I kind of spend that Andrew as we need to understand the why right why did the customer make this purchase decision did they make it based on price a particular feature a problem they're trying to solve the CSM understands that we can deliver on the why what do we do on the digital side right and so historically I've kind of Trojan Horse my way into a lot of the things in most companies and so when you take a look at the platform that any of us have with regards to the digital engagement the framework on which we go in and build adoption playbooks and onboarding and all these other things there are things that lends itself really well during trials and demos and so what I always talk about is let's go in and shift left meaning that let's take an offer the Cs automation platform to the to the pre-sales organization the inside sales Channel team so that they can also now have visibility of when the customer is logging in during in the demo trial and all this because guess what when that customer converts the Cs team now has all that data so from a digital perspective it's kind of the equivalent Andrew is digitally the Cs team has been involved in the pre-sale cycle we know how active they've been on we know what part of the product they were using we know who's been their top people logging in so when that customer converts guess what we now know who needs to be on that call and who doesn't we know what features they were using we know what features they weren't using and we can really go and hone in on driving a more customized onboarding experience so having that platform shift left and allowing us to help them Journey map and drive that experience really then introduces you once you have built that into the conversations Andrew's talking about because we've demonstrated value to the company.
Rigo: Yeah absolutely and I’ll add to that too just we fit right in the middle in terms of our strategy we've started to engage our CSMs at that 70 confidence rate pre-sales where we come in with the customer success plan and our sales teams and our customers love it because it actually indicates that we're providing them added value and added attention earlier on in the process and really a lot of our drivers were to mitigate cases where to mitigate product issues we're to mitigate any potential issues Downstream by making sure that we were aligning the promise of the promises of what had been sold to the realities of the engagement and the deliverables and what the support and Service delivery resources were expected to support so we we've seen great success with that and we actually are using those CS plans as benchmarks throughout the lifecycle journey to say customer this is what you told us this is what we're delivering against and by the way this is what we could recommend to create a better outcome and experience.
Dickey: Yeah so what you're also saying is from sales to CS is not a handoff but it's not a milestone it's there is overlap right the account managers need to continue post
Andrew: yep exactly right handshake okay somebody once somebody once once made said that to me and I'm yeah that's it it should be it's a handshake right
Dickey: yeah okay we are definitely over time we can stop or we can keep continuing we have several questions that people have asked what do you guys
Andrew: I’ve got I can stick around I've got time sit here
Yair: I have I have five minutes
Dickey: let’s do that I know it's pretty late over there and then this should be a quick answer.
Dickey: Kyle who does not want to want his last name to be used says our product is freemium so we offer limited free support but several times support passes free customers to the success team.
Dickey: I think we kind of answer that what suggestions do you have for customer success for free users I think we kind of answered Carlos answered that you know start using digital earlier on. Andrew I thought you had something to also add to that
Andrew: yeah yeah so my I have questions I mean there's I I have more questions from from this question right why is support passing those customers to the success team is it because they believe there's an opportunity to upsell them to a paid version I mean it's it sounds Kyle you need to establish and train on some Rules of Engagement is really what that boils down to right so Kyle, if you want to send me an email I can introduce you to Andrew or I, can forward your question.
Rigo: yeah the one thing I would add to that as well too Dickey is to Andrew's point do they have a paid for service offering somewhere down the line because if you are actually handing over a customer who's used to paying free for something that is later going to be priced that's going to be a hard conversation to have if they do not believe there's value in now having to pay for something that they were previously getting for free.
Andrew: yeah exactly and if they're not supposed to be then tell them to stop it, stop it, stop doing this support because there is apparently a there's apparently a miss there somewhere
Dickey: yeah I think I'd rather get the specifics and send them to you so yeah
Dickey: Brian Burke asked when should I hire a customer success engineer in my team. So he's a VP of CX and CS
Rigo: Carlos, I see you smiling I know you have to answer.
Carlos: It depends it depends what that means right so in my context right my first hire who all of you guys know is Matt Harmon right he was my CS Ops person and he was more around wrangling data and helped me with Automation and platform in my world a CS engineer is actually a technical bench that supports the CSMs meaning that I don't expect my CSMs to be deep technical in the product they're product specialist but they're not product engineers and the CSEs are typically folks that can jump on a call to support a CSM when it gets Technical and when they're not on the call with the customer they're actually understanding the new features and functionality and helping write playbooks to go in and drive adoption right and so I think my answer to that is the first thing I always do as we spin up a new CS program.
Carlos: So within Aruba we have different product lines and so the way I look at it is I'm spinning up a new CS team or new program every time I'm introducing a new product line first thing we do is we what's the charter right is this CS team going to focus on driving adoption and retention or upselling cross-sell right once you understand the dynamic of what you're trying to do then that'll naturally tell you when the right time to introduce an engineer is I also think it also depends on the complexity of the product if you take a look at most companies out there products those are very very easy to use the CSM is usually focused on more upsell and expansion they don't spend a whole lot of time on onboarding and retention right but if the product is difficult to use and it requires a hell of a lot more hand holding the CSMs are going to be a lot more focused on retention and onboarding and not so much on the other so I would say in the latter example you probably could use more of an engineer and an example where the product is super easy to use sounds control UP got that stuff down I don't know that you need a CS engineer right yeah.
Rigo: yeah the other question I would ask is what problem are they expected to solve I was actually considering hiring a CSE as well too and the problem that I was trying to solve is that there was a lot of post sales issues that had not been vetted out in the pre-sale stage by the Solution Architects so when we identified that Gap we just actually started requiring the solution the Professional Services pre-sales solution Architects to ask more questions ask better questions start to gauge and scope for these areas and we were actually able to identify and close that Gap pretty quickly so that we didn't need a CSA or CSE post sales.
Andrew: I had that I had that similar situation it wasn't an engineering issue but I had a sales team that said hey your your post sales team spending too much time with our customers in trying to scope out engagements you know they're taking two or three calls I said okay then answer these 12 questions and what I'll I will do is I will make sure that my team is spending no more than an hour on you know one call with the customer right so I you know you bring up a really good point, Rigo, is what are you trying to solve for right that's the first question you're gonna you need to ask yourself.
Dickey: yeah yeah so it's kind of when somebody's posts a question we do not get the context and the details exactly.
Dickey: Christina so this is I think this question is a webinar by itself you know so Christina is saying what metrics should a team of eight CSMs managing 4200 customers care about for their performance what metrics should I report to my boss the CRO?
Andrew: I read this one I was the first metric is why do you have 4200 customers really you know being covered by eight CSMs?
Dickey: maybe they are you know the lower ARPA [annual revenue per account] lower ACV
Andrew: Here’s a perfect opportunity for cast automating the heck out of everything that you do.
Andrew: You're not effective you're not a customer success manager with 1/8 of 4200 customers.
Dickey: Carlos he's doing 16,000 with yeah how many very few people I forget the number
Carlos: right mine is racing to answer this question right because it all comes down to segmentation to Andrew's point a CSM is not going to be effective across all those customers so you have to segment the install base figure out which customers actually deserve or actually you know can afford a CSM and then figuring out what is it that the CSM needs to do and again it goes back to the product maturity I mean truthfully my CSMs historically have focused quite a bit on onboarding activities not really doing end-to-end life cycle right CSMs will engage customers end-to-end life cycle if it's a very very strategic account but predominantly the CSMs are all about accelerating time to Value so in my case my CSM profile or more onboarding Specialists as we're evolving in growing we're gonna We then start doing more and life cycle management but what we ended up doing to also answer that is we created event service programs that actually fund the CSM so we have the Swarm CSM model for general population and customers who wish to have a dedicated CSM experience would buy an advanced service program where that's already embedded in there right and so that's the way that we've been kind of positioning it is is we really go and put rails on which segment and which customers the CSMs will go to and then we have the calendly and cast.app engagements that can pull a CSM what I call opportunistically but they're they're not there's no way that you know my 8 CSMs can do life cycle management across my entire install base it's just not going to happen.
Carlos: But to answer the question the metrics that I would say is when a CSM is engaged is what are the things that they're managing so what I would say is you know when a CSM is engaged you would expect that you would have a better experience if you're tracking anything CSAT that would be thing a customer effort score (CES) not so much much not so much the you know would you recommend this type of thing because that's not necessarily always going to be impacted by the effort of a CSM right CSM is not going to be able to really change NPS a whole lot right because it it it's more than just the engagement so that would be one.
Carlos: The other one is in an accounts where CSM is engaged what's the what's the retention rate or expansion rate
Carlos: then the last thing is earns the CSM getting any reference customers right I think as CSM is engaged they build relationships with customers those customers would be more open to becoming reference customers
Dickey: yeah at the same point when you ask NPS score or you ask the modern way is on a five point scale (one to five) and somebody give you a 5 and then you process the data four weeks later you ask them can you become a referral things may have changed. So you want to ask them immediately right do you want to be a reference versus us later.
Dickey: yeah so I think you know there's a lot of talk about customer Journey mapping being a living document versus as you know we want to continuously change our results you know and I feel yeah if it's a living document what you're really doing is you're trying to insert yourself in the customer mapping right yes you can create a custom map it looks more a vendor map because you thought of it not the customer and customer will use it use your product anyway choose to do so. They would do step a step B and then do step F and then go on vacation come back and do Step A B C again things that, right.
Dickey: I think that's what we planned on Yair’s control up right using dripless campaigns so this is the final question and then any anything that you want to say after that is great what do you guys think of customer Journey mapping and out of sequence use of you know customers using your product not the way you mapped it for some
Rigo: I think it's important I mean one of the approaches that we've taken is we've developed a process flow that the CSMs and everyone involved internally takes to support that customer and then we've also done a customer facing Journey map and we've married the two to understand what are the touch points what are the deliverables where is there an opportunity to automate and from that exercise quite frankly is where we started to really uncover a lot of the opportunities for cast sticky so I think you absolutely need to know what the customer experience is by having gone through what Journeys do they go through and it'll it'll be pretty enlightening because they will uncover gaps or deficiencies or areas that you were not either privy to or aware of or just maybe neglected but then to take that do a gap analysis and get your process flows that will help you identify what automation what tools what touch points what deliverables what Cadence do you need to marry against that customer Journey so I think it's key and at the end of the day if you do not understand the journey that your customers are going through then it's probably highly ly that you don't understand the gaps the pain points that you need to address and how to close those
Dickey: That last question was from Sylvia, I forgot to mention and you have a great point.
Andrew: I think it is a great point, Rigo. Customer Journeys are important and they're when you when you look at the customer Journeys they're these pretty maps that we share with our customers but but we actually developed a customer success engagement blueprint which is a a tool that we built in in in Google Sheets on purpose because it promotes collaboration and it's a place a central place where everybody on the team can go in and here see the Tactical aspect of what we need to do in order to support that customer journey and we we built it with a Playbook Builder behind the scenes as well so that you can go in and lay out your you know all of the steps and all of the the Key Systems and the racy the diagram that you did you know the racing Matrix that everybody needs to understand so everybody understands who's doing what from the customer all the way down to you know the back end operations team and it's important to be thinking about both the customer journey and that tactical kind of behind the scenes you said Rigo how do you lay out your processes and make sure that everybody's on the same page but also be constantly figuring out how do we evolve this right it's something that needs to constantly be reviewed and evolved
Rigo: You know can I just say actually that's a fantastic point Andrew and actually one of the challenges that we're dealing with right now I the fact that you've made that that document collaborative because the challenge that we face is there's there are different teams and resources upstream and downstream that will impact that customer Journey that customer life cycle nine times out of ten they're working on their initiatives their process their life cycle in a silo so giving them the opportunity to contribute to the shared document allows them the opportunity to see what any changes within their organization what impact it'll have up and down stream as well too and that's the challenge that we've been having is everybody's kind of working in their own respective silos and getting a remitting the impact that it has up or Downstream so I I think that's a great approach.
Andrew: I dropped, by the way, a link to Dickey into chat that you can share with everybody that is a downloadable copy of the customer success engagement blueprint.
Dickey: You have to give me access, but yes I will do that. Nevermind, it says make a copy okay
Andrew: yeah all you gotta do is make it how you just copy that link and you can send it off to anybody.
Dickey: I’ll attach it to the digitized version of this webcast.
Dickey: Cool that's all I had.
Dickey: Do you guys want to say some final words or some advice you know any it could be anything it could be personal…
Carlos: Yeah so I just wanted to maybe add to the last conversation from the journey mapping perspective right what I would say is I think we have to be very specific about what we're talking about when it's Journey mapping I think we always assume that we're talking to customer success leaders and they just know what that means but as you start going across the organization I could tell you from an HP perspective I've seen nine different versions of Journey Maps right and so you know you have what I consider the Customer Experience Journey Maps which not to downplay them but they're the touchy feely here's how the customer felt right meet Jane she's 28 has a master's degree and you know loves to hike and she's a network engineer and she has two kids and so she's going to go through this and this is the stuff that's important to her right we all have seen those those are more from a CX perspective I would say Customer Journey Mapping is what makes this team what it is today and has really allowed us to evolve and actually spread across the entire company but what we've now done is we've renamed our Journey Maps we call them Customer Experience Enablement Maps and the reason for that is is we take that experience that is supposed to be delivered which is defined by product management and marketing and all these other people and we say internally who has to go and deliver that what are all the different teams that have to come together to engage and deliver that and we do a workshop and we walk through what we all need to do and how are we accountable internally to each other to make sure we can deliver that and so the bands that cut across around around that is what are the data and telemetry we need to be able to track the customer's progression right how do we go in and what's the criteria to exit onboarding right how are we going to track customer Health at each one of the phases right and then what are the different assets or tools that need to be created in order to deliver that is it internal templates for the CSM is it a cast.app what I so when you take a look at our Journey Maps what I always tell people is they're not intended to be read they're actually logic that's handed over to the team that does CS Automation to go in and build this right it's not you don't go and sit and read this journey map because it's it's you know it's all this logic statement it's basically programming for CS Ops right I think you know recently tatango announced their conference was canvas that's really the way to look at it operationalized right but the the actual inner workings of what all that stuff means is just this massive flow chart with all these references to all these third-party or exterior documents right so and then the one thing I would say too is don't expect the CSMs to know the journey map off the top of their head and also don't expect them to adhere to it because at the end of the day the CSMs are professionals and they should have the ability to go and apply their own discretion based on their relationship to the customer to figure out what's the right play right the tool may be telling that you need to do this now but the tool doesn't know everything that's going on right and so sometimes you run the risk of you know chastising a CSM for not completing a task but that's really not the play right now and so I would always caution people about over automating and over scripting CSM engagement because you do have to have that human element as a variable
Andrew: That’s a great point Carlos your process should be in general process should be prescriptive yet flexible you're hiring these people you're they're professionals they should have some leeway.
Andrew: One thing though I wanted to add on to what Yair said about about high touch using automation with high touch all of our cast presentations are going to high touch customers yeah what we would construed as high-touch customers we look at it as a compliment hey by the way on a monthly basis we're going to let you know how your team is is progressing how your team is performing because it's it's 100 all about consumption that's how our customers get valued so we want to make sure that the leaders that have gone out and made the investment in training for their team are able to reap the benefits by having their team consume the content that they're expected to consume
Dickey: Amazing thoughts yeah anyone any any other thoughts final thoughts otherwise we will end this
Yair: Yeah I I believe also that the Customer Journey is a dynamic progress any progress not just a you know you have the the basic Milestones of onboarding and renewal and all that that's the building blocks but the customers are maturing the technology is maturing the the CS technology maturing but also the product is maturing all the time use cases economics everybody every element can can change the the Dynamics of your customers engaging with the product with your with your team and and you need to factor it in you need to listen to the customer in in digital it's it's challenging but you have to listen on how they engage with the with the program that you build see what works and whatnot and react always react so if if you think that you know you you need to go to Renewal or you need to do these kinds of steps or these are the Matrix that is determined that they are in that Milestone you always need to check and recheck and just make sure that you know the flavors always change changing and engagement is always changing and needs are always changing especially you know I don't know if it's specially let's take that especially but in our system you know systems and vendors are changing all the time and this impacts our products as well so there is the the whole ecosystem in technology is advancing all the time so you cannot keep a customer Journey that was right six months ago not necessarily is right right now so you have to always constant check yourself and make sure that you're on point with your customers especially with data guy
Dickey: I always said you know you know drip based campaigns don't work because you know you set it up and things are changed but I also learned from Carlos's comment you know even for internal consumption you know you should give the CSMs leeway so they can improve and do the right thing or so
Dickey: This concludes our webinar. I want to thank you a lot. I’ll send you guys an email so I can send you guys something.
Dickey: Thank you so much for joining us we will do more of these customer webinars I already have a list of other customers who have asked me why they were not on this call so so I told them you know this is what we just started we did that a year ago but we'll keep doing.
Thank you so much again
Andrew: Awesome thanks for having me
Rigo: thank you
Carlos: thank you.
Andrew: thanks guys
Yair: bye-bye
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