A digital customer success reckoning (Part 1) | Alex Turkovic

[Alex] (0:00 - 0:27)

How you build the digital is very much up to you, up to your organization, up to whatever you have available. But I think that's the key that a lot of people miss. A lot of people think, oh, I have to go buy all these fancy systems and I have to do all this implementation and integration and data and blah, blah, blah.

And while some of that is true, it is a means to an end. Ultimately, you need to serve your customer where they're at with information that they need at the time that they need it. And how you go about doing it is often the overcomplicated part.

[Dillon] (0:37 - 0:48)

What's up, Lifers? And welcome to the Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man, JP with us.

JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:49 - 0:49)

What's up?

[Dillon] (0:50 - 0:55)

What's up?

And we have Rob with us. Rob, can you say hi, please?

[Rob] (0:56 - 0:58)

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good night.

[Dillon] (0:59 - 1:05)

Great. And we have Alex with us. Alex, can you say hi, please?

[Alex] (1:06 - 1:08)

Howdy, howdy, howdy. Keeping it classy.

[Dillon] (1:09 - 1:17)

And I am your host.

My name is Dillon Young. Alex, thank you so much for being here. Can you please introduce yourself?

[Alex] (1:18 - 1:26)

My name is Alex Turkovic, happy to be back here. And I host the Digital CX Podcast and I also lead CX at Belfry Software.

[Dillon] (1:27 - 1:37)

Alex, you know what we do here? We ask one simple question of every single guest and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success? So can you tell us what that is for you?

[Alex] (1:38 - 1:44)

As the Digital CX guy, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

[Dillon] (1:44 - 1:45)

You think that's you?

[Alex] (1:45 - 2:27)

One of the Digital CX guys, sorry, Dan, and Marley Wagner and everyone else. This is gonna be a little bit maybe confrontational, but there's a Digital CX burnout. We're seeing it everywhere.

Folks are just kind of burned out on the topic. And I think there's multiple reasons for that. Part of it is it's just overwhelming to think about and to execute on.

Part of it is that there's so many fricking tools out there now and so many different use cases for those tools that it can be easy just to throw up your hands and not go there. But I think fundamentally we've overcomplicated Digital CX and it's time to get back to basics.

[Dillon] (2:28 - 2:41)

Why do you think it is? Is it because folks think of Digital CX and they think of it as this entire ecosystem that they have to build like entirely before they can reap any rewards from it?

[Alex] (2:42 - 3:28)

It's like this box, right? It's like people think of it a bit like you have it or you don't have it. When in reality, you need to be thinking about the customer journey and the customer lifecycle and your customer sentiment and those kinds of things.

And the digital stuff are just the ways of engaging, right? And how you build the digital is very much up to you, up to your organization, up to whatever you have available. But I think that's the key that a lot of people miss.

A lot of people think, oh, I have to go buy all these fancy systems and I have to do all this implementation and integration and data and blah, blah, blah. And while some of that is true, it is a means to an end. Ultimately, you need to serve your customer where they're at with information that they need at the time that they need it.

And how you go about doing it is often the overcomplicated part.

[Dillon] (3:29 - 3:41)

JP, how do you think about or what does the dialogue look like at Posit when you consider digital solutions? Like how does it come up in your daily life?

[JP] (3:43 - 4:22)

So I think that is certainly an evolving question. I think part of that is definitely due to when I think about the way it's set up for us, we have a certain number of accounts that are just, they fall into that sort of digital bucket. If I zoom out for a second, and I know Rob is gonna appreciate this.

You know, the word digital, like these, how do you get your fingers into these accounts? Because you only got 10 of them. I just counted.

You may have less.

[Dillon] (4:22 - 4:23)

Digital phalanges.

[JP] (4:23 - 4:24)

It's up to you.

[Dillon] (4:25 - 4:41)

So let me clarify here, JP, before you move forward. So when he said these, he waggled his fingers at the camera. And my question for you, I assumed you were gonna make a pun on digits.

Fingers being digits. Was that your goal there?

[JP] (4:41 - 4:42)

Yes.

[Dillon] (4:42 - 4:45)

So that went unsaid. I can't have that.

[JP] (4:45 - 4:47)

Thank you for translating. For those that can't see.

[Dillon] (4:47 - 4:48)

You made a land, Dillon.

[JP] (4:48 - 5:12)

Yeah, I was waggling the wag you, so to speak. So yeah, man. So anyways, I think, and maybe this is not true.

So maybe this is a place where my perception could use some correction. Whenever I think of digital CS, I think about CSS scale. Is that what we're talking about here?

Oof, loaded questions.

[Alex] (5:13 - 6:20)

I mean, you know, again, I think it's just whatever you're using, whether it's the human or the digital, it's a means to serving your customer. And sometimes one is more appropriate than the other. One of the things that I'm, I have the great luxury of doing right now is really building a CX infrastructure that has strong roots in digital.

In other words, we're really focused on what automations need to be put in place, but not necessarily the automations that are like customer facing, but how do we make our team more effective? And ultimately, digital just becomes a tool to help you achieve that. But the problem is, is we've, you know, through all the myriad of conferences that have happened over the last couple of years, I think we've just overblown this digital thing where we see a lot of growth in digital CS, but I'm also seeing some pullback where some organizations are not really building specific teams for digital, but relying on ops teams and things like that.

So it's like this weird ecosystem we find ourselves in right now where just digital is overblown.

[JP] (6:20 - 6:22)

It goes to a lot of conferences.

[Alex] (6:22 - 6:23)

It's wrong.

[Dillon] (6:23 - 6:27)

Well, don't let Rob in here. He's gonna go nuts with this one.

[JP] (6:28 - 6:30)

What I think is- I tried.

[Dillon] (6:31 - 7:53)

What I think is interesting, and I'm gonna try to pull a couple of things together here is first of all, it's not binary. And I think a lot of the dialogue for a long time was binary. Like your customer can only be digital or enterprise basically.

Like one side of the, one extreme or the other, but it's also not binary within a single customer. They should receive digital experiences and they should receive human to human experiences. And I think what we're gonna continue to see is that the weight distribution changes.

What used to be almost 100%, aside from the fact that it was Zoom and email and things like that, it was 100% human to human. And we're going to see it start to increasingly become, maybe it's 70, 30 right now in one direction or the other, but it is going to increasingly become digital first with the opportunity to insert a human, Alex, what you refer to as human in the loop, as often as is necessary. It's important for folks to understand that you're always gonna need both.

Sometimes you only need one. Sometimes you only need the other, but you need access to both. And you need to have the ability to determine when to utilize one over the other.

Rob, go ahead. I got so many things to say.

[Alex] (7:54 - 7:56)

Okay, we'll see you later. You saying bye.

[Rob] (7:57 - 8:07)

Alex, I feel a bit betrayed by your brand. This is like the preacher, this is the preacher getting up and saying, you know, this whole God thing we've been talking about for a while.

[JP] (8:08 - 8:08)

He's evolving.

[Rob] (8:09 - 8:12)

It's kind of overblown. We've really overdone the whole God thing.

[JP] (8:13 - 8:15)

He's not a person, he's really an idea.

[Rob] (8:17 - 8:34)

No, so Alex, it's actually really refreshing to hear you say this. And it's refreshing, especially when I consider our time working together. That was a great example where we had the opportunity to collaborate on a team and systems and processes that were so early stage that there was sort of no choice but to do things manually first.

[Alex] (8:34 - 8:35)

Brute force, yeah.

[Rob] (8:36 - 9:30)

Yeah. I think you saying this about digital customer success reminds me last night, past midnight, I had the delightful experience of trying to sign up for an app, which will not go named. It was one of the worst digital customer success experiences I've ever had.

Because I try to sign up for this thing, it's got all these dodgy ways that they're trying to upsell me, that they're trying to get me to subscribe, that I try to sign up for a free trial and then it makes me donate for their free trial. So that it's like, and then I try to, I do what I do, I sign up for a free trial and I immediately cancel afterwards. And the cancellation process is arduous.

I had to jump through hoops, I had to go through surveys. Because they know you, Rob. I know, I know.

But, and so I did it and I kept taking screenshots that I'm not going to show you because I'm not going to out our future sponsors. It was a fitness app though.

[JP] (9:31 - 9:34)

Oh my gosh, edit, editing, editing.

[Rob] (9:35 - 9:48)

But my point is, they even ended by saying like, when are you going to come back? And we're going to send you a gift. And I'm like, I don't want your damn gift.

Anyway, my point is- Sounds like the Vistaprint model. Yeah, yeah.

[Alex] (9:49 - 9:53)

All I wanted to do was buy some business cards, but you offered me 50 other things along the way.

[Rob] (9:54 - 9:57)

Yeah, I'm going to wrap this up by editing.

-: 10:00

Yeah, Vistaprint, we love you.

[Rob] (: 10:00

I will wrap this up just to say a couple of quick things. I think that you mentioned reasons for burnout. You mentioned overwhelm.

You mentioned tooling. I would add poor execution out in the wild is another thing that I know goes back to our original conversation that we had. So for the young boys and girls in the chat, was it probably two years ago or something like that?

Alex invited me on his podcast where I pulled up my notes. And for anybody new to saying what is digital customer success anyway, what I wrote at the time was, my definition is it's a set of strategies leveraging data and automations to promote customer value, leading to customer retention, expansion, and advocacy. That need still exists.

That needs... I keep notes, guys. That need still exists.

But the big question, the existential question for so many teams right now is, should you be focusing on that or should you be taking the traditional adage of do what doesn't scale and figure out scale later? It's a tough question we're all kind of wrestling with. And I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all answer for the industry.

[Dillon] (: 11:10

All right, all right. That is our time. There is a part two to come for this conversation.

It was just too exciting. Couldn't get it all in the first 15 minutes. Alex, you already came back soon, but let's pretend that you didn't yet.

And please do. Okay. Bye.

Bye. Bye.

[VO] (: 11:59

Socials at Lifetime Value Media. Until next time.