A digital customer success reckoning (Part 2) | Alex Turkovic

[Alex] (0:00 - 0:40)

Actually experiencing what your customer experience is from pre-sale all the way through to whatever support, that's something we just fail to do a lot of times, myself included. And it's key because I guarantee you, anyone who hasn't done that, you're going to find out there's probably five or six emails that go out that probably shouldn't go out at stupid times and those kinds of nuances where you can start to refine the experience and also unify it against your brand. You need a, you need a clapper.

[Dillon] (0:43 - 0:54)

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 Rob here. Rob, do you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:55 - 0:55)

What's up people?

[Dillon] (0:57 - 1:09)

He's chilly. Just put on his sad, sad Jets hat. Does it double as a paper bag?

I look like a toddler in this thing. And we have JP with us. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (1:10 - 1:12)

They call me the clapper.

[Rob] (1:15 - 1:16)

Clap on.

[Dillon] (1:16 - 1:21)

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

[Alex] (1:22 - 1:23)

What's up lifers?

[Dillon] (1:23 - 3:10)

This is a continuation of a conversation we literally just had. So I'm not going to bother to have Alex introduce himself.

I'm not going to have Alex tell us where he works or even that podcast he likely wants to promote. And we're just going to jump right into it, because in our last conversation, we talked about the need for people to pump the brakes on digital CS. And we talked about how a lot of folks see it as binary.

They think they've got to build this entire ecosystem of tools and solutions, and they have to be customer facing, and they've got to be this, and they've got to be that, when in fact, it is a bit more nuanced than that. And in that last conversation, a couple of things came up. Rob, one thing you said near the end was this experience you had with an app that won't be named so that we can maintain all of our sponsorship opportunities.

You mentioned how you tried to sign up for this app. It was a self-provisioning experience. So there was nobody helping you on the other end.

And what I found incredibly interesting is you referred to that as a digital customer success experience, when as far as I can understand, that's actually a product-led growth experience. Mm-hmm. Good distinction.

And maybe not a distinction. Maybe they're just two ways of saying the same thing in many cases. I mean, PLG is often more like you can sign up by yourself, but then you can also buy stuff by yourself.

And you did mention that they tried to force you to buy stuff. Yes. They did.

I want anybody to jump in here and talk about whether they saw the same thing or what distinctions you see in that experience. And maybe, Alex, since you're the guest, we'll start with you.

[Alex] (3:11 - 4:44)

I mean, look, in hosting this podcast for the last year and a half, see, I had to get my plug in. We've been very much focused on digital customer success, and I rebranded in the middle of it to digital CX to try to expand a little bit more. But fundamentally, we've been doing this stuff for a long time.

It's called business automation. Marketing's been doing it forever, right? This isn't new stuff.

The nuance to it is that we want to serve the customer. And I think I'm not poo-pooing digital CS. I'm a digital CS lifer.

Hey. But we've convoluted the thing. We've built this kind of mystique and this thing that has become, itself has become a distraction from actually serving the customer.

Another thing that came up is the fact that humans, I think, are always going to be part of a customer journey and a customer experience. It has to be because we're humans. We like talking to other humans.

And sure, AI is great, stepping in and having some of those real conversations. But ultimately, our customers are human. They're going to want to talk to humans once in a while.

And I think where digital really serves us well, and where I haven't seen a lot of stellar execution around it, is where the digital experience is a transparent one that serves the human experience and prompts the humans to engage in meaningful ways at meaningful times.

[JP] (4:45 - 6:29)

I definitely think that last part of what you said is so key. I'll call out that I remember when you mentioned burnout, I realized that the reason my mind also went to scaled more like is because I literally think about scaled CS and burnout. I mean, I haven't lived that enterprise CS life yet.

So I don't know, but I'm assuming they give burnout too. But I'm like, if you have a hundred something accounts, maybe you're more primed to burnout. So I think that's why I sort of had an equivalency in my head.

But that last thing you said about having meaningful engagements, I think is really important because that's what I want to be doing with my customers. Sometimes I can feel in between a weird place where if you haven't talked to a customer in a while, it's like, I should talk to this customer. In general, in a vacuum, I think that is a good idea.

But there's definitely customers that don't want that in their experience. Yeah, totally. I know that people have talked about, depending on how much value they're providing, like how much their contract is, their ARR, that the company begins to, of course, get a little more like, no, we need to be talking to them.

But I did sort of think about that element of what you said, of like what's causing the burnout. I'm thinking it's not just a matter of the scale, but that if you feel as if you're just sort of doing what you're told and there's a massive amount of it, but you kind of don't understand the why. It feels as if you're not doing anything particularly meaningful.

It feels like you're just sort of running errands. And I think there's a lot of CS folks that want to feel like they have some sort of agency, some sort of input, some sort of strategy behind what they're doing.

[Dillon] (6:30 - 7:06)

I want to kick it to Robin one second. But what I think I picked up on is this idea of humanity or human connection. And if I tie it back to the example that Rob had given in that previous conversation and that I recapped at the beginning of this one, the horrible onboarding experience that he had does not necessarily need to be solved for with a human, but likely with somebody who has experience understanding the customer journey, which it sounds like they did not.

[Alex] (7:07 - 7:18)

We as CS leaders, a lot of times fail to insert ourselves into our customer's experience. So I don't know how many...

[JP] (7:18 - 7:21)

You got a lot of hot takes. That's a whole nother thing.

[Alex] (7:22 - 7:29)

And I'm guilty of this too, right? Like, you know, inserting yourself into your customer's experience as a secret shopper kind of situation.

[Dillon] (7:30 - 7:31)

Oh, I got you.

[Alex] (7:31 - 8:02)

Like actually experiencing what your customer experiences from pre-sale all the way through to whatever support. That's something we just fail to do a lot of times, myself included. And it's key because I guarantee you, anyone who hasn't done that, you're going to find out there's probably five or six emails that go out that probably shouldn't go out at stupid times.

And those kinds of nuances where you can start to refine the experience and also unify it against your brand.

[Dillon] (8:03 - 8:16)

Or how about noticing an email that was created two plus years ago and no longer applies to the way the customer experiences your product anymore?

[Alex] (8:16 - 8:20)

Or the video that was shot, like when your platform was green and now it's blue.

[Rob] (8:22 - 9:40)

Yeah, yeah. Rob, jump in here, please. You're reminding me, Alex, what you just said of there was a time where I had to beg a product team I worked with to go on site with a client and it was the polar opposite.

Alex, when you started this recent role that you just started, one of your first agenda items was I have to get on site with a client. I have to meet them. I have to feel what they're feeling, understand what they're thinking, what they're going through, what their day-to-day looks like.

And so I'm so glad we had a part two here because it's like it's added this layer of depth where now I'm thinking about what is PLG versus digital? What is the human side of digital customer success and how digital can enable the human versus how it can be external and client-facing and actually deprive the human experience? That's a useful lens.

Is your digital experience enhancing or depriving the human experience that your customers are seeking? And I'll give you a different example, an opposite example of my app experience yesterday because the app experience came after I had the most delightful, not seemingly digital, but secretly digital CS experience. When I woke up in the morning, went to get an oil change, Valvoline, future sponsor, Valvoline.

And every time I go to like, if you want to know how much I love Valvoline, ask Lana.

[Dillon] (9:40 - 9:42)

So much overlap with our listening audience.

-: 10:39

No, I know. By the way, 20% off for a limited time only. No, if you want to know how much I love Valvoline, ask my wife, Lana, because she knows anytime we pull up for an oil change, I'm like, watch how they try to upsell me.

Watch how they walk me through the process. Watch how good their checklists are. They have these playbooks for customer experience, including upsell down to a T.

And what makes their playbooks good? First of all, they're highly practiced and methodical. And they're clearly based on a true customer journey map that somebody built.

You can see it in the experience. They set super clear expectations about what they're trying to, you know, what they're offering to sell you on the upsells, how long it's going to take, how much it's going to cost, what the risks are if you don't do it. And third, they don't push back if you say no, which is great.

That's a sign of a human experience and not just a purely digital experience where you have to jump through hoops. And then there's also just super fast time to value. I mean, it is an instant oil change after all, but...

[Alex] (: 10:39

So true or false? Playbooks are digital CS, true or false?

[Rob] (: 10:45

Both. A playbook can be written on a sheet of toilet paper with a crayon, or a playbook can be in a CSP. Like a playbook is a series of steps and protocols to handle a situation.

All right. Where it lives to me... Look, look, look.

All right.

[Dillon] (: 11:01

Part three incoming, but I've got a couple of things to say. First, Rob has got to be the absolute most thrilling dinner party guest, with the way he rattled off academically the best way for the Valvoline experience to go. Secondly, did anybody else get the image in their head that Rob's sitting at the counter of the Valvoline place and he's got the most disinterested clerk helping him who says, and you could save 20% and put it on a Valvoline credit card today.

And Rob's like, is that on the list? And he's like, yeah, you see what you just did?

[Rob] (: 11:43

That's exactly what happened, except it was in my car. What was your training like? You don't get out of your car at Valvoline.

You sit in your car. Oh, great.

[Dillon] (: 11:50

It's delightful.

[Rob] (: 11:51

You can have the heat on, the AC, the seat heaters, whatever you need.

[Dillon] (: 11:55

All right. That is our time. Alex, thank you so much.

An absolute pleasure. Love you to death. Please come back soon.

But for now, we've got to say goodbye. Thanks for having me.

[VO] (: 12:11

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