In this episode, our host Anika Zubair chats with Daniel Ennis, Scale Team Manager at Monday.com about scaled customer success and explores its significance in today's ever-evolving business landscape.
Customer success at scale has been a longstanding practice, but it has gained even greater significance in the current economy. So, what are the initial steps to consider when establishing a scaled CS team? How can we strike the perfect balance between automated interactions and maintaining a genuine human connection with customers? And what are the key metrics and KPIs that your team should track?
Podcast enquiries: sofia@planhat.com
In this episode, our host Anika Zubair chats with Daniel Ennis, Scale Team Manager at Monday.com about scaled customer success and explores its significance in today's ever-evolving business landscape.
Customer success at scale has been a longstanding practice, but it has gained even greater significance in the current economy. So, what are the initial steps to consider when establishing a scaled CS team? How can we strike the perfect balance between automated interactions and maintaining a genuine human connection with customers? And what are the key metrics and KPIs that your team should track?
Podcast enquiries: sofia@planhat.com
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Speaker 2:Hello everyone, I'm your host, Anika Bert , and welcome back to the next episode of the Customer Success Channel podcast, brought to you by Plan Hat , the Modern Customer platform. This podcast is created for anyone working in or interested in the customer success field. On this podcast, we will speak to leaders in the industry about their experiences and their definitions of customer success and get their advice and best practices on how to run a c s organization. Today we are chatting with Dan Ennis , who is the manager of the Scaled Customer Success team@monday.com. Dan is no stranger to CS and he has been a CS professional for over 10 years and has worked at places like Think HR and Sterling Administration, and has been awarded the top 100 CSS strategist Award from Success Hacker. He has worked as an individual contributor, as well as in leadership and is currently running the scale team@monday.com, which is a new team building out scaled customer success function from the ground up. He works closely with a subset of customers and help them achieve their goals with product at scale while increasing adoption expansion and mitigation loss in revenue. Dan has tons of advice for anyone starting off their scaled CSS team or anyone who wants to take their digital CSS team to the next level. So let's chat with Dan today. Welcome Dan to the podcast. I am so excited to have you here with us today. I think this is a long time coming, but before we get into today's topic, can you please tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself, what it is you're up to, how you kind of started in your role, how you ended up in customer success, give us your story. Yeah,
Speaker 3:Happy to hear that. So I've been in customer facing roles my, my whole career starting with just typical kind of call center customer service based roles for an insurance administration company and a very traditional industry. So always been customer facing . Uh , took a a keen curiosity into the account management side of the business and so quickly moved from call center representative to account manager, just loving to help customers take advantage of the full plans that they had with us. And for context, it was, I was in that role during the time that a c a was rolling out in the US so a time when insurance and benefits were as complex as they've ever been in the us . So a time to some people fled from the industry. For me, it was something I, I thoroughly enjoyed getting to help people make sense of this thing that felt so foreign to them that they didn't understand with changes going on, and help them take advantage of things that were really important to them . And you can even hear a little bit now I describe that how you can probably hear some of the seeds of what would eventually lead to, you know , wanting to connect to customer success. Did that for a number of years and the company began to roll out their own in-house software platform for customers to use to file claims on the company. Didn't view themselves as a SaaS company because they were a services company that just made their customers use this software to save money from paying an external vendor for another software. But I noticed as an account manager that if our customers did not enjoy using our software, they weren't renewing their contracts for the services side. So I began to employ a lot of what I didn't know at the time was considered customer success, best practices to try to help them take advantage of using this software. I did that for a number of years and then I began to hear about this thing called customer success. And I had this light bulb moment of, oh wait, what I've been doing has a name. This is a formal discipline <laugh> , I love that. And so I immediately, I got caught with that bug, wanted to make that transition, and so jumped into a pure play SaaS company that it was in the HR tech space to leverage some of my industry knowledge and what I'd been doing because I realized that's what I cared about doing. I didn't know this had a name, I didn't know this had a thing. And so jumped into the customer success industry and haven't looked back. So I've been doing that for about 10 years now with customers of all sizes. First as an individual contributor with SS m b , mid-market enterprise, all the way on up the chain. Uh , and then as a people leader as well, managing teams, both as a player coach as well as as a a pure people leader. Building processes is something I'm very passionate about. And in every org I've been a part of have really been a part of that inflection point of building out specialization within customer success. So , um, that's the quick two minute version of, of who I am and the journey that got me into customer success and then the ride it's been since then.
Speaker 2:I love that. I also love that you are a pioneer of customer success. You did it before it was coined or named anything and you were just trying to figure it all out yourself, which I think any of us who've been around in customer success for over 10 years, it sounds like a similar story. I also took on an account management role because that opened up at a company I was at. Little did I know that that would then be called customer success and I would have to explain to my family and friends what I was doing at the time, but it sounds like you're in the similar boat of like, Hey, let me pick up what I love doing. And then it was called something that we all know it today as customer success. So I do really love hearing everyone's story and yours is particularly unique because I think you've really transitioned and scaled in your career in the last 10 years and you've ended up as a manager of the scale team@monday.com, which is awesome. Congratulations on that. But could you tell us a little bit more about what it is your team is about, what you guys are doing, what does scale team mean to anyone that's listening?
Speaker 3:Love that question. And despite some of our, our best attempts as an industry to nail down really precise definitions on everything here, I would say that that is something that we do not have an overly precise definition of. So when I say scale, it is for monday.com at least it's working with the higher volume of maybe lower a r r customers for each individual customer, but a high volume to help with a larger scale of customers to increase the scale of impact from our team , um, without necessarily increasing the, the headcount one-to-one with the same way we would with our high touch motions. So that's the like really bare bones elevator pitch. How do we increase the scale of customers our team is working with without moving that same lever of the exact same scale of CSMs that we might traditionally have. Um, and it's really helping meet this nexus of how do we provide the right service level for the way that matches what we can justify from a like a unity economics perspective as a business, but also transparently keeping the customer at the center. What does the customer actually need? Because a lot of these customers are inherently less complex, so they don't need the same level of engagement. And so it's not just a business-centric decision, it's also something that is very much for the customer, not just for our unit economics of it all.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it makes sense for the customer too , not just like you said, business or unit economics, which we'll jump into in more detail as well.
Speaker 3:Exactly. We'll , we'll dive more into the team really owns , uh, a mix of customers that we kinda have this quadrant of growth potential current a r r , all these things that go into it , um, that factor into that. And so they own customers that are either low a r r , low growth potential or even like a, a higher a r r , but still low growth potential up to a point like they are on, they've been mature with Monday. They've used our product for a number of years, and so they don't need nearly as much strong level of engagement , uh, as others. So that would be at a, at a high level, what my team does, they work with this wide array of customers across a wide array of company sizes, types, industries, and that's one of the , the fun parts. But working for a company that's so industry agnostic with where we sell our tool to , um, you just get such a wide net of customers that we work with. And then from there , um, of course they are , you know , working to help these customers secure value and then secure renewals on, on our end, and
Speaker 2:We're gonna dive so much more into this, but I really also even wanna know how you guys work with so many different industries. Like you guys just said, you're industry agnostic, whereas some CSMs, even in a scale team like you're building, they're in HR tech or they're in property tech or they're in insurance tech, they're in a specific sector and it's a little bit different when you're building for specific sector. So we'll go into the details of that, but one more quick question on who Dan is before we jump into today's topic. You already kind of gave us a hint into what put you into customer success, but also what keeps you there, what makes you super passionate about everything it is that you've been doing over the last 10 years? Yeah,
Speaker 3:I would say for me, what keeps me in customer success truly is it's a , a twofold component. And one of them , it really sounds overly idealistic, but I , I can't get away from it . It's one of the things that at the beginning , and I truly believe that while yes, customer success is the mission of the whole company, blah, blah, blah , all the things that are yes, yes and amen to all of that, right? Not to downplay that
Speaker 2:<laugh>, I love that. Yes and amen to all of it. <laugh> , yes.
Speaker 3:However, at the same time in practice, the actual customer success team truly is the one who is on the frontline of seeing the way a company's promise and value and pitch meets the road where they really see the company's promise become a reality where they are able to see that for a customer and help them achieve that. And so that's one is I love getting to be on the front lines as a team, as an organization of where the value proposition that we say we believe in as a company takes root and becomes reality for our customers. Seeing that firsthand. And at the same time, on the flip side of that, internally it's the same thing as an organization because of the nature of us being so on the front lines , advocating for customers, with customers, working with them. And because it's the mission of the whole company to help make customers successful, we touch and work with so many different departments and teams. And so the dynamism that that comes with that of working with so many parts of the organization to really help see how they all work together, is just an exciting prospect. And I think that that's something that regardless of all of the maybe net specifics that come up from one company to another, whether it's who owns what part of revenue, who owns the renewal transaction, or all the different components that can play out from one org to another, those two core principles are pretty consistent across the board for almost every CS team I've heard of, at least in in theory, when they're not, you know, totally underwater, right? That's a , that that can happen. But in general, those two ideas have just kept me stuck in customer success in the best way possible.
Speaker 2:I love that I can hear so much passion behind your voice as you just explain all of that and I hope everyone else listening heard that as well. But that is such an ex amazing explanation of why it is we do what we do and also then make sure that we're delivering value for customers and why we keep being passionate about everything we're doing. So I wanna jump into what our topic is today, which is a lot around monday.com scale team or digital CSS as some people might call it as well. Can you explain the concept of scaled or digital customer success and why it's so crucial in the business landscape that we find ourselves today? 'cause people listening might not even know why it's so important in, in the world that we live in today in SaaS.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. So I would say it's taken on a particular importance this time of the current economy that we're in and everything that's going on with that, taking a step back, even just from the current economic climate that we're in, what makes scale so important is, or digital customer success, which is they're really related and I think they go hand in hand while not being the same. So just a quick clarifier here just to kind of give that kind of table stakes definition. We talked about scale CSS being the motion of increasing the scale of customers that a team is working with or that your organization is supporting without increasing the same scale of one-to-one on headcount. Digital customer success tends to be talking more about the mechanism, the tools, the asynchronous journey, all the levers that you can pull to help your customers achieve their value and interact with your product and achieve their desired outcomes that don't involve a human intervention. As you can imagine, these two topics work hand in hand so closely together, which is why you often hear them talked about simultaneously, especially because digital customer success motions most often are built out initially to go hand in hand with a scaled motion that's trying to support a larger pool of customers. Despite the fact that digital customer success motions are beneficial across your entire customer base. Think about your largest enterprise customers. The majority of their users are quote unquote no touch from a C S M perspective because you're not interacting with them as you should not be . So these topics are closely interacted and they come close together. So taking that step back now that we've got those definitions on on the table, it's important as your company grows and as your customer base grows to be able to meet your customers where they want to be met with the level of support that they actually need to accomplish their goals. That's not the same for every customer. That's not the same for every type of customer for every segment, fill in the blank. It's important to be able to do that as you continue growing because as every organization grows, you hit a point where if you want to continue accelerating growth, you can't just throw the same C ss m headcount at the same customers, both from a unit economics perspective, but again keeping the customer at the center also because the customers don't need that. They don't want that necessarily. Um, and that's one of the ideas that's at the, the core heart of this. And so why it's been so hot this year, well many companies have been able to because of rich VC funds being thrown around a lot more and cash being a lot more of plenty prior to our current economic climate. You've been able to just throw bodies at problems. You've been able to see accounts come in and just add C S M headcount because you've got another round of funding coming your way . As companies are realizing they can't count on that anymore, they're suddenly forced to do something that should have been there in the first place, which is it's forcing the question of, okay, how do we get more efficient in how we support our customers because we can't just count on another headcount. So that's kind of where, when in your point about where it's becoming crucial in today's landscape is this is the direction that I think if you, you talk to a lot of forward-looking companies, CSS has been moving in for a number of years, but 2023 and the end of 2022 really forced this upon a lot of other orgs that weren't already heading in that direction. Um, 'cause they just need to be able to find ways to help their customers be successful when you can't rely on the same levers you've been able to pull one, you were always able to count on another round of funding or another round of hires.
Speaker 2:Definitely. You have said so many things that have gotten me so excited and I wanna just ask you a million more questions, but I also wanna be mindful of like we need to think of the listeners here. I'm getting way too excited. But you said some amazing things that I think are critical to highlight, which is scaling process, not people. So like you said, not throwing bodies at the problem. You are thinking more let's say critically or creatively in the current business landscape that you, everyone finds themselves in and you're no longer like, let's just hire more bodies to fix the problem. How do we build a process around that super key and I think is important to scale, but I think what you just said between digital and scale is so key to highlight as well. Everyone just thinks digital CS is the way to do one to many , but like you said, digital CSS applies across so many different types of customers. Your enterprise customers that are getting email marketing, that's a level of digital CSS that's happening there as well. So I do love that you highlighted all of that, but all of this being said, it can be really overwhelming to take your first steps in building out a scaled digital customer success team. So where did you begin with it@monday.com, where does someone begin? Where do we start when we're trying to build it out?
Speaker 3:Fantastic question. So I can share a little bit about how we started and then from there kind of suss out some of the principles that I think apply across the board because while I think what we did was great and worked for us , uh, two things to say on that front, just as kind of qualifiers number one, I don't think that there's only one way to approach the topic. It
Speaker 2:Depends which is the number one thing in customer success.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. A shout out to my friend , uh, Sherry Renick for that one. Of course that , yeah, it depends. So I'll share what we did and some of the principles that are drawn out from there. 'cause while it worked for us, I don't think it is the only way for all orgs, but also because transparently we began approaching this before the current economic climate, we were able to be a bit more proactive. So we were able to, I think maybe take a certain cadence to our approach that others starting now might have certain external factors that are, you know, forcing maybe a different approach to it. So just keep that in mind as we talk about this. So we began by identifying customers based on, we had feedback from implementation teams as well as sales teams on certain customers as our product was growing and becoming more complex , uh, that despite it being a very product-led growth company and having a very high kind of natural growth rate among customers, that there was a certain segment of customers that were below what would qualify for getting a full traditional C S M support, both from a complexity standpoint because again, they didn't need that level of support. But also, again, from a unity economics perspective, if we began supporting that, it would just, it would not make sense from a business sense. You hear me saying that a few times in this conversation because I think it can get really easy to get idealistic with how we talk about it and ignore the reality that leader's facing where we have to make things add up from a business perspective. Um , so that was the reality we were facing and we received feedback that this certain cohort of customers that was below that threshold needed more than just the asynchronous support that they were getting at that time. They needed something. So we began to build out a model of customer success where what we wanted to focus on was quick interventions with these customers where A C S M would not be as involved with them as much as with a more traditional high-touch account. And it was in essence it was a, a sort of pooled, non pooled model where we approached it where from our perspective, CSMs had their portfolio of accounts that were assigned to them in our C R M they were working with. However, the customer didn't have a named C S M, which is by design. So it was pooled from a customer perspective. We had ownership internally. And so what we did with that was we identified the customers that made sense to fit in this cohort and we looked at a lot of what worked in our high high-touch traditional customer success motion. And I wanted to make sure I call that out because a lot of times we think when we're approaching scale or something like that, we need to reinvent the wheel. You don't need to look at what works for your traditional segments. And then we had two questions that we wanted to answer about what was working in our high-touch segments to apply to this segment that we were trying. Number one, what's automateable? What can we automate from this? What works here that we can have a version of that's automated that we can then roll out more en mass to, to this large cohort of customers? Second question, what's repeatable? What is not just an ad hoc, you've built a really strong account plan with an individual account that's less repeatable, but you found that walking a customer through X, Y , Z use case really quickly got them up to speed in two meetings. Great. So we identified what was repeatable and then what was automatable, I don't even know if that's a word. What could we automate? There we go. That's the second question. What could we automate? So we answered those two questions and then we looked at this cohort of customers and then of course the, you know , million dollar question, where do we start? Who do we start with? So we began by looking at our customers that had churned in the past. And so we began as we were, we were building the plane while we were flying it a little bit. So our CSMs were directed to look at customers that were lower on our existing health score metrics to reach out to them to offer quick intervention as a C S M to intervene with some of these repeatable plays. Well we began building out some of the automations for the, the more broad based one to many components. So the CSMs were beginning to target some of these accounts that were lower health according to our metrics to reach out to say, hey, reaching out from our customer success team wanna help you be successful. Let's connect do some of those repeatable plays. Then from there, at the same time we were also looking at our data to more strongly identify who are our truly at risk customers, looking at all of our customers that churned in the past, what were the markers of a customer that was likely to churn so that we could then make sure we were following up with them accordingly so that we could target the right customers. And we had begun building out different mechanisms to reach the masses of those customers. So we began building out from a really tactical perspective, office hours that we began hosting right away with these cohort of customers that we could then just invite as many of them too as wanted to attend on specific topics where they'd get a short demo on a particular topic or use case or function. And then from there, just use the rest of the time to ask questions, learn from each other. It was always hosted by a C SS m immediately that multiplied a CSMs efforts where with the same amount of time investment, rather than benefiting one customer, they're then benefiting a hundred customers with this literal same time investment on their end. Uh , we began building out what are the features that we know were the, the stickiest when we look at our most successful customers. Great, how do we build out campaigns that we can send out to all of these users at these customers that encourage adoption of those features? And we began working on those at the same time. And so we really were tackling a lot of those fronts at once, measuring everything because that was key is we said, look, we need to experiment quickly because we want to make sure we're finding out what works and casting a wide net to begin focusing our, our efforts on and not just do something really narrow overly specific, but at the same time we wanted to measure everything. So we wanted to know what was actually successful, what was actually moving the needle for our customers. So that's a lot of how we started. Uh , as far as a principle goes for where to where to begin what you're trying to start, I would say, and it might sound really obvious when you hear it, but how often in practice I don't think this is done, what do you want to accomplish as your first goal with this motion? Is it a leaky bucket of customers that you really need to just get someone working with? Is it you want to accelerate growth with customers that you're just not seeing traction with despite everything seeming like they should? Is it you've got certain features that you just know are sticky that customers aren't adopting? Whatever that is, start with identifying what that goal is and who you want the audience to be. You can use data to identify that. You can use human validation to identify that initially, but make sure you're starting with those two components because that's what will help you identify what are the most important first steps to take.
Speaker 2:Awesome. I love that you said so many things, but I love that you really said you should really know your why and what you're trying to chase and what is it the problem you're trying to solve. 'cause then you can then build on that as well. And you mentioned a number of different tactics, which I've already taken notes on, but you said campaigns, office hours, measuring everything. That's a lot to do at once, which I know can be overwhelming. But let's say you did do all those bits already and you are starting to build out your scale team and you're getting things up and running, you're automating things, you're creating repeatable processes like you said, all critical to building out the the scale team. But what if you've kind of got the team already up and running, which some people might have at this point and they might be let's plateau or a bit stuck. Like how do you take your scaled CSS team to the next level once you've gotten some of these processes up and running and, and how do you know, you said measure everything, but how do you actually know you've measured up to everything that you're supposed to be measuring up to love
Speaker 3:That. So that's a fantastic way, that's a great segue into the next component here, which really is, that's how you start, right? Then how do you improve and grow? Uh , there's a few different components to this. Uh , number one, I would say as you're beginning to roll out this motion, one of the things you'll need to adopt in addition to a traditional CSS mindset is a little bit of a marketer's mindset in terms of how you measure attribution and how you measure what's successful or not. And so you need to be able to really drill in. So let's say you've got your, your campaigns up and running, whether that's a proactive digital journey, whether that's something that's coming in reactively based on triggers. Amazing, you've got office hours up and running, fantastic. You've got designated customers that your CSM <inaudible> , okay, you've got all these things going. Alright . So when it comes to how to go about improving that, you start with making sure you've identified what is the north star that this team is supposed to be moving the needle on. Again, presumably that's some form of retention for most orgs, whether that's gross or net depending on how your company is set up for your CSS org. Maybe it's adoption of some sort. I'd imagine if it's, if it's just adoption, it should probably roll up to retention at some level. Identify that north star, then you take that next step back. Okay, so what are the, the leading indicators that point to this metric? Again, typically that's product adoption. Typically that is verified outcomes from customers that they're accomplishing certain outcomes that they've set out to achieve with your product. Fill in the blank. Okay? Then if those are the measures, you then do that next step. Okay? What are the leading behaviors that customers take that indicate that they're achieving these things? So you're continually gun and going upstream there, right? They're using X feature typically indicates that they're achieving y outcome, right? That's just, that's just an example. So you're measuring all of that. Okay, you've got the , these are the behaviors you're trying to get customers to take 'cause that's what you're trying to get to from there. You are now going to look at your inputs, whether that's what your CSMs are doing in human intervention, whether that's the digital journey you're doing, fill in the blank and you're, you're going to want to take that step of complexity and maturity of mapping. What is it that I'm expecting these inputs to map to ? And that is a , a difficult thing to do sometimes 'cause it's easy to just say, let's just start doing something. But that's what I mean when I say measure. What is it that I'm hoping is going to be accomplished on the customer side that then leads to these leading indicators that all roll up into my big North star metric when I send out this email, when I host this office hours when my C S M meets with this customer. And then you can start to, and this is where the marketer mindset comes in, great. We're expecting that emails we're sending, for example, are supposed to help encourage usage of feature y so that they can be accomplishing outcome X. Great. We're not seeing any increase in that feature adoption despite us sending this email out. If you're not applying a marketer's mindset, you would immediately just say, okay, great. Email's not working, we need to do something different. But if you're measuring things, the marketer mindset would then say, okay, great. Are people opening the email? 'cause if they're not, it's not the content of the email that's the problem. 'cause you could be sending exactly what you need to be sending to customers. Is it the channel that you're sending it via? Is it that you're sending a subject line that's not getting a customer? Are you sending it at the wrong time? But that's what I mean by a marketer mindset is you apply some of those marketing attribution methodologies to thinking through, are we accomplishing, are we sending the right message via the right channel to the right audience? And that incorporates all of the different things you're doing. And then you can begin to pinpoint where it's broken or where it's not working like you want it to. Okay, great. Maybe we need to change the subject line because the emails aren't being opened. Okay, maybe you discover that the emails are being opened and then it's not accomplishing what you want it to. Okay, great. So we're having emails that are working in the sense that they're being opened and engaging enough to get a customer's attention, but they're not taking the behavior change that we want. Okay. Then you can identify from there. So those are some of the ways that you can use some marketing mindsets. And same thing with c s m behaviors. It , it applies across all. Email is the easiest, the easiest one to use an example of, but it across applies across all of your channels. Uh, and then the last way I would say , uh, from there is combining quantitative and qualitative feedback from customers. Uh , because it's all about the customers at the end of the day. Do not hesitate to get that feedback, get that quantitative feedback, of course via things like CSAT via things like surveys that are sent out. But leverage that quantitative feedback to then also target customers to get qualitative feedback. You get such good insights when you talk directly to customers. Hopefully I'm not needing to , to pitch anybody in the audience of this podcast on the benefit of talking to your customers directly <laugh> . But as a leader, and I say this as a CS leader, talking to my team's customers gives me such insights onto the way our service is being done. Because typically if there's a gap, it's not in a CSMs individual component, it's in what we're providing to the customer as a, as a structure. Um, so get that feedback as well. And I'm, I'm talking all this like data-driven methodology first because I know that's what people kind of want to eat up, but at the same time, don't overlook the the very straightforward, simple, just talk to your customers as well. 'cause they, they will be the best indicators. <laugh> .
Speaker 2:I love that. And I also love that you've just indicated the human part of all of this. At the end of the day, even though you're a scaled customer success team, there's still customer in there. So it does not hurt to have those meaningful conversations when they are necessary. It doesn't always just mean automation processes, emails, digital, that is all critical and super important. But like you say, the human and the actual element of talking to your customers is critical. That being said, scaling customer success efforts end up being a lot of automation, a lot of maintaining the right balance between human interaction versus automated interactions. So what are some of the ways that you guys are making sure that you don't compromise the quality of customer interactions because they've now become digital or automated rather than that human piece. How are you guys finding that balance and making sure that your customers really feel like they're getting the full service of of a C SS M without them actually having that one-to-one relationship?
Speaker 3:Love that. So there's a few different components to that. The first is the automations are all meant to be done in service of the customer. So again, it sounds cliche, but it is so important to to say that because if you're starting with just what can I automate to get off of my team's plate, you'll end up with a service level that a customer feels very automated. But if you're thinking what can I automate that makes sense for a customer to, to receive or how can I help a customer not need to reach out to A C S M? That's where your starting point should be on the automation side. And then it doesn't feel compromised . Putting yourself in your customer's shoes sounds cliche, but it is, it is so needed when you're doing this because think about it from your customer's perspective. Have you ever been excited to have to pick up the phone and call A C S M at any vendor you've worked with, no matter how great your C ss m is? No <laugh> ,
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 3:Like that's not what you want to do. You want to be able to figure things out on your own. You want to be able to go in, try to do something in the product you're trying to do, can't quite figure it out, click on a button or two, get some additional info, get something asynchronously, maybe look at a a community post or something. Great. Now you've spent maybe 15 minutes and you figured this out as opposed to needing to pick up the phone, call someone, explain what you're trying to do. Like nobody wants to do that process. So if I'm putting myself in their shoes of how do I enable them to do that, that's where it starts. Because then if I'm keeping them at the center with how we're building that component, suddenly I'm not trying to take something from them by removing human interaction. I'm trying to set them up for the most success possible. Yep . So that's where it starts. From there. I would say it also goes very strongly into leaning into the data to identify when it makes sense for a human intervention to come into play when it is needed. Because the idea with scale is not to remove the human component, but better to focus it at the time that it's most needed for the customer in terms of what they, they're actually needed.
Speaker 2:Ooh , I love that. That's another great line from today's podcast. Like not to remove but right when you need it is that human interaction piece. <laugh>,
Speaker 3:We've joked that internally that we, we refer to as our, it's a just in time customer success model in a lot of ways from the customer's perspective.
Speaker 2:Definitely a hundred percent . I would agree with that. Yeah .
Speaker 3:So that's how we approach it. And so really what that just in time is looks different from org.org product to product. But we've done a lot of work into identifying that. And so that's a big way of how is we make sure we're achieving this with customers at the right point before they are totally disengaged with the product, but we've seen enough behavior changes and just a , a little kind of clueing in there for, for some of the listeners here, our approach has found that the just in time is most successful when it's based on changes in behavior as opposed to benchmarking against artificial benchmarks that we've set up for what quote unquote good looks like. Maybe that's in part because Monday is such a broad product where usage can look so different for one customer to the next, maybe your co your product does have one very strict specific usage profile, but if a customer's been successful with a certain level of usage, you don't wanna be suddenly flagging them as oh my gosh, like you need to support with something when they probably don't. They're content, right? So we've found that our best model is based on changes in behavior is much more indicative of when there's a just in time , but not just from a risk perspective, but a growth perspective too. If a customer suddenly has a flurry of of increase in one way, that's a prime opportunity that maybe they're trying to implement something new that we can just in time support them with. Yeah,
Speaker 2:Definitely. I love that for both churn as well as upsell opportunities just in time . Making sure you have that human component when it is necessary, but not at every opportunity because like you said, you wanna enable your customer to be independent, to be successful, to really understand your product. Which I totally am nodding my head. I know no one can see me, but I'm totally nodding my head to everything Dan's saying to us. But I do wanna ask the controversial question, not really controversial. I think it's more the hot question of 2023 is like, what about AI and chatbots? Like what sort of AI or tools are you guys using to scale and grow? Because I think a lot of people are thinking when it comes to digital or scaled css, right? Let's have a chat bot or let's use some sort of AI tool and you know, optimize our processes even more. Is there something you guys are doing or anything that you wanna share that that would benefit anyone considering AI in their scaled teams?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we haven't gone the the chatbot route. No, I mean that's, yeah, no secret there. We haven't, we have not gone that route. Maybe, maybe one day. Who knows. Uh , that's not the route we've gone as far as how we've leveraged AI internally. We've used AI a bit more on our internal processes to help us. We've used uh , one tool where for example, it's just easier. It's connected with all all of our databases, slack channels, all these different things where someone can just type in a question into it like very just kind of conversationally like as a question and it'll pull, it'll synthesize from all these different places helping just reduce the friction of A C S M needing to look at all these different places.
Speaker 2:Ooh , I love that. It's like an AI intranet by the sound . Exactly.
Speaker 3:But I mean it's so saying and the fact that it's just , it really, the value comes also from the fact that similar to what everybody's been saying about Chad G B T, the benefit that it's conversational, where it's really truly that layer to it more than almost the underlying component is that like you're right that using Chad g P t feels so natural 'cause people feel like, oh I'm just talking to something and I'm getting what I want out of it. That's what this tool has done internally. It's just oh I'm looking for this synthesizes all of that brings it together. That's one way we've used ai. I would say that's the biggest way so far. Um, as well as when trying to build things , uh, I encourage the team that a good use for something like AI is in refining. If you're trying to send something out to a a lot of customers, you can use AI pretty simply to refine. You're not an email marketer and that's okay. Sure
Speaker 2:Makes sense.
Speaker 3:Yeah, nothing groundbreaking, but it's the simple things that add that efficiency of what you then would've spent like great, you can in 10, 15 minutes knock out a good kind of rough what you want to get into an email, but you're not an email marketer. So you don't naturally necessarily think on what's gonna be the best way to position this, how do I pare down some of the things you can quickly use AI to get that paired down. There's a million tools you can use for that. Um, something to help you with your writing. So those are also ways that we're using it. And the zero to one I think on some things, if you're just stuck on how, how to begin saying something, just use that. Yeah,
Speaker 2:You don't have to work harder. You can work smarter by using AI for things like you're just saying the zero to one refining emails, maybe even asking it to refine a process that you've already started or anything like that. I think that's a great use of AI across the board. You did mention North Star metrics and I wanna come back to that topic as well 'cause I think data and analytics are so important. It's in customer success in general, but particularly in a scale team where you don't have that qualitative feedback as much as you have the quantitative, like you met everything you're measuring. So how are you guys, what are you tracking? How are you tracking it? What are some of your key metrics and KPIs? If I was starting a scale team today, what would be my north star metric? <laugh>?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so for us, it, everything, it rolls up to retention . No overly big surprise to that , uh, our approach. 'cause we've got a really robust account management team that handles some of the, the sales side for, for upsells and everything on that end. So from that perspective, we use gross retention for our customer success teams as the North star from an ownership perspective. 'cause again, if we're talking ownership, obviously we play a big role in upsells and partnering with AMS and an AM team plays a big role in helping guard revenue because they can't sell to an account that's turned , right? Like so they , they help with all of that as well. They partner together very closely. But from an ownership perspective, gross retention is the kind of big, big north star. But from there that's so lagging. You need to then go upstream.
Speaker 2:Yep . You need to have some things to point you towards that direction too as well.
Speaker 3:100%. And so to that end, one of them that we've used, like I I identified before, how we use a system that's really gotten a great job at flagging when customers are at risk and their risk level. So one of those that we we measure is reducing the overall risk level of your portfolio, things like that. That's one. So that's an output, that's not just one behavior, right? Um, so that's an output that's a bit more of a , a leading indicator because that's something that updates monthly. And so it's something that can truly be done over the course of of time. They can yeah . Make an impact on that with their overall portfolio. Um, where the idea is, well sure maybe some new ones will come in at risk that you didn't work with all of that. The idea is your portfolio should be overall getting a lower level of risk as you're working with it, right? And if not, then where do we , where do we focus on what do we wanna work on that's a , from a system perspective or a A C SS M perspective because those are, as a leader, it's incumbent on me to make sure that I'm not just saying, great, this is what you do, you're on your own. This is what we're measuring.
Speaker 2:<laugh> no, you definitely have to lead a team. You can't just say here's the metric, good luck. It's you are a leader to lead the team to that success. And I do love that you guys are measuring something that's not, well it is revenue, it's towards revenue like you said, but it is reduced not just the total number of accounts saved, but it's like how much risk did you reduce or how much opportunity did you create? You are , you're almost creating a metric in between metrics, if that makes sense. It's , it feels like that
Speaker 3:Absolutely <laugh> and that's, and that's what I love about it. That's what I love with what we've done is it's something that is tangible and especially from a scale perspective, it feels more connected to your day-to-day if you're A C S M. Yep , definitely. 'cause nothing's harder than like a metric that feels so great. I worked with that account six months ago 'cause they were flagged as at risk . They're not since , but they churned . So this is a weird thing that, right? Like obviously at the end of the day North Star book , we care about that but as an individual that's, that's harder to get that direct buy-in to that on our scale motion that we are doing for example . Yeah,
Speaker 2:Definitely. Definitely. And it makes you feel more bought in as well as A C S M and more connected and that you've made a difference that in between number rather than hard churn it's gone. That's revenue lost versus I've grown this account or I've saved this account. There is that, like you said, that bit in the middle that's important to quantify because as a C S M with hundreds if not thousands of accounts, how are you quantifying the work you're doing day in and day out?
Speaker 3:100%. And as far as, it's not a K P I , but one of the things I think that also , uh, just as far as like rituals that we build as a team, we have a way that where we can track some of the anecdotal success stories also with CSMs are ENC encountering with their customers. Whether it's uh , a risky account save that they were able to do, whether it's an improvement in metrics, whether it's something they did where they can directly see where the, the growth opportunity came from. So we've got rituals of really getting to highlight those and share those and celebrate as a team. I think that you're gonna hear me kind of mention that human component to it because I think that when we think scale, we just go straight to to data. We go straight to these, you know, mass things. Don't forget that like with your team as people too. So finding those kind of rituals and ways to celebrate their wins that they're highlighting and they're floating up makes it just this culture of getting to celebrate each other's wins. And then as far as from systematized perspective, when it comes to things like upsells, while we're not responsible for upsells, we do have a A C S Q L process. So you know , nothing too unique or fancy there. So our team does do that and they flag that and work closely with our account management teams to identify when they're seeing those opportunities as well. And we do also have formal risk flagging processes from when say validated a risk to help kind of raise the flag on something that might need another team's intervention. Hey, here's a commercial risk that I've encountered that I can only do so much on because it's a pricing thing. And then in a scale role , you're not gonna be the one getting into the weeds of negotiating pricing with a customer. Right. Okay great. We'll flag that to somebody who's more commercially trained. Yep . They'll come in and help with that. Or this is escalating up the chain on the product side, fill in the blank. We've got levers we can pull for the different categories.
Speaker 2:That makes complete sense. And I do love that you guys have a TAG team approach with all your KPIs as well. 'cause it seems like it's not one north star metric for just the team, it's for the whole company. But I also do love that you mentioned case studies. I wanna highlight that I think a lot of teams do not appreciate that you should be giving a number of case studies to be done by each individual C SS m I think that's a great metric for A C S M to achieve. 'cause a yes, it makes the business look way better as a whole. You have more customers that are raving about your product. But like you said, it built so much team morale to know that you've, you know, saved this super at risk account and now they're an advocate for monday.com or whatever the, the outcome is. It's just such a good part of feeling the value that you've been able to drive as a C S M and I think having those in actual written case studies super critical. I have one more question for you, Dan, before we go into our quick fire round. And that's, if you were to build a scale team all over again, let's say you're starting from scratch, what are some of the biggest learnings that you would do or share with our listeners or maybe do differently?
Speaker 3:I would, and this is something I've come back to before and anybody who follows me on uh, LinkedIn will probably recognize some of what I'm about to say. Uh, I would try to do a much better job at actually listening to the data and not just approaching my data with confirmation bias. Ooh ,
Speaker 2:I like that. Actually,
Speaker 3:I've been really, I can say personally as a leader who was involved in building it, there was at least one or two times where I went to the data with an assumption and 'cause I was coming at it with a confirmation bias perspective. I thought I was quote unquote being data driven and following the data, but I was really just being confirmation bias driven . And an easy example is if I thought feature X was really key to customer success and I go and to validate my assumption, I look at our customer's return and I say, aha C , they had low usage of feature X that confirms it for me. I'm following the data we need to work on increasing feature X and that's gonna move the needle
Speaker 2:<laugh>
Speaker 3:A lot of effort into that. See an increase in feature X don't actually see a meaningful change in the retention rate. What the heck, if I was listening to the data, I might have also looked and realized , yeah, you're success. Customers don't have a meaningfully higher usage of that necessarily either or they do, but they're using it when you follow the data in conjunction with these other features that point to, oh, they're actually using it for a use case that's tied to a core business outcome for them. Okay. Like, so that's just an easy example of where my confirmation bias led me to feel like I could have this false confidence of, oh yeah, I'm being data-driven, I'm following the data. But no, in reality I was just validating my assumption. <laugh> .
Speaker 2:Yeah , no , but that's, that's such a good point though because honestly, like coming back to the whole, it depends. Like even anyone listening to this podcast don't have any sort of confirmation bias when you're like building out your scale team with what Dan and I have talked about today. Because don't go in like, like Dan just said, assuming that because X feature isn't used, you need to build a scale team around that feature. You need to come back to the data. And that only makes sense that your business, what Dan's doing at his business or what any other leader is doing at their business doesn't necessarily apply. And thanks for being honest with us on that. 'cause I think all of us, whether you're on a scale team or just a customer success leader or a a business leader, to be honest, not to take confirmation bias into building processes is so, so important. So thanks Dan. That's really honest and open and I appreciate that
Speaker 3:<laugh> , you, pat , I'm happy to , if others can learn from my mistakes , please. I'm , I'm , I'll be an open book <laugh> .
Speaker 2:Awesome. Okay, let's jump into our quick fire discussion where I'm gonna challenge you to answer the next few questions in one sentence or less. I know it's gonna be tough, but are you ready, ready
Speaker 3:As I'll ever be?
Speaker 2:Awesome. My first question is, what do you think is next for the customer success industry?
Speaker 3:What's next is a solidifying of actual best practices and not the ad hoc approach that I think many different organizations are taking. And I think that that will arise more organically from customers and companies that have been doing this for a long time as opposed to just external people looking at it and identifying a trend.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Interesting answer. I love that. Next question is, which SaaS product can you not live without as a CSS professional?
Speaker 3:It's gonna be as cliche as as possible, so I'll have to give two answers. But first is Monday. I've, I've cannot imagine how I reorganized things.
Speaker 2:<laugh> . That makes sense
Speaker 3:Now I became so reliant on it, but I , I'll have to give another answer just so I don't seem biased because I promise it's not because I , I work at Monday, but it really is because , uh, I, I do see all the benefit to it. Yep . But secondly, I would say I've come to rely on the, the AI tool that we use, the open ai . Uh, and so what we, we use there ask ai. And so that tool has become just a, a lifesaver when trying to figure things out. Fair,
Speaker 2:Very fair. And it's always nice to just ask one question and get what you need back out of it and especially out of an internal resource. I do love that you guys are using that. Next question is, what is your favorite customer success learning resource? It's
Speaker 3:Gonna be probably pretty cliche, but LinkedIn. Both because of the formal content that's shared there as well as the individuals that you connect with through there. And if you're only using LinkedIn to asynchronously learn things , uh, you're missing out on the real value of it because the, the value that comes from the actual relationships built and conversations had out of there are truly second to none and better than any book I've ever read on, on any topic. Definitely.
Speaker 2:I totally agree. The reason why Dan and I connected in having this conversation is 'cause we actually connect and chat through LinkedIn. So here we are. I completely believe that you can do more than just like, and comment on the content you see out there. You can reach out to everyone who's creating it or have conversations with everyone, which is really valuable. Totally agree. Last question, Dan, is who is inspiring you or whom do you think we should have next as a podcast guest?
Speaker 3:I'm gonna give two names on this one 'cause they're both very inspiring for me. First, Daphne Costa Lopes , uh, one of the heads of CSS at HubSpot. Uh, I've always joked, oversimplifying the Daphne's who I want to be when I grow up. So that's one big example there. Just someone who is very tactical and not just pie in the sky strategy gives someone who's able to back up their theory with ideas and examples that show that she knows exactly what she's talking about. Uh, second one I would say on there would be Angeline Grace Gino . She is a VP of CSS and support over at a company called Catalan . She's out of Vietnam. Um , but she's someone who, again, as a, a leader, has a , a broad perspective on the way that CSS and support relate together, as well as the cutting edge of trying to get ahead of the curve on things like digital CSS and how to continue scaling her CSS org .
Speaker 2:Amazing. Thank you so much, Dan, for sharing all of your insights, all of the takeaway tips, everything that was shared on today's podcast. I really appreciate your time. If our listeners have any more questions or wanna follow up with anything or wanna connect with you, what's the best way to reach out?
Speaker 3:No surprise here. Best way would be just simply follow me on LinkedIn, connect with me. They're always open to a conversation and love to, to hear from anybody who's listening. Amazing.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Dan, for your time. Really appreciate it. Thank
Speaker 3:You.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening to the Customer Success Channel podcast today. We hope you learn something new to take back to your team and your company. If you found value in our podcast, please make sure to give us a positive review and make sure you subscribe to our channel as we release new podcasts every month. Also, if you have any topics that you would like me to discuss in the future or you would like to be a guest on the podcast, please feel free to reach out. All my contact details are in the show notes. Thanks again for listening, and tune in next time for more on customer success.