Horse 👉 water | Brittany Yandura

[Brittany] (0:00 - 0:18)

Don't tell me what I can do. I know I can click a button. Tell me what I should do.

Should I click that button? What does that do for me? How does that fit in my process?

How does that impact my day? How does that save me time? Stop telling customers what they can do.

They can read a help center and they can watch a video. They know they can click a button. Tell them what they should do.

[Dillon] (0:28 - 0:29)

Anybody got any questions?

[Rob] (0:30 - 0:31)

What's your favorite color?

[Dillon] (0:32 - 0:43)

Green. 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, can you say hi?

[JP] (0:44 - 0:46)

Hey, CS. This is what's for dinner.

[Dillon] (0:48 - 0:58)

And we have Rob with us. Rob, can you say hi? Where's the beef?

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

[Brittany] (0:58 - 0:59)

Hi, how's it going?

[Dillon] (1:00 - 1:06)

Very good. And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Brittany, thank you so much for being here. Can you please introduce yourself?

[Brittany] (1:07 - 1:22)

Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me. My name is Brittany Yandera.

I currently work as the Director of Customer Success at AuditMiner. And previous to that, I worked as the Director of Customer Success at a company called Field Guide for a couple of years. And then prior to that, I was at Thompson Reuters for about 10 years in customer onboarding.

[Dillon] (1:23 - 1:35)

Very cool. Very cool. Brittany, 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? Why don't you tell us what that is for you?

[Brittany] (1:36 - 1:45)

Yeah, for me, the topic that I really like to get into, and sometimes it doesn't discuss enough is just how to make your onboarding actually valuable and what I would call like consultative onboarding.

[Dillon] (1:47 - 2:07)

We talk about onboarding a lot. It's so funny. I wonder if we do enough of these shows, and is it going to end up where we repeat stuff?

And yet somehow, I don't know that we've ever had the exact same conversation twice. And so it's this idea of the value of onboarding. So I would love for you to talk about how you think of that.

Where have you landed? How are you teaching your teams about it?

[Brittany] (2:08 - 3:03)

Yeah. So when I teach my teams, when I onboard somebody new or join a new team like I am right now, the biggest thing I do when I go through onboarding is look for, like I said, are we being consultative or not? And the biggest sort of test I use for that is, are we telling customers what they can do or are we telling customers what they should do?

Being in customer success, even when you're being onboarded by a vendor, that's probably the worst for them because we're very critical of our own domain here. But even when I'm being onboarded, I look for the same thing. Don't tell me what I can do.

I know I can click a button. Tell me what I should do. Should I click that button?

What does that do for me? How does that fit in my process? How does that impact my day?

How does that save me time? To me, that's how to boil it down most simply is stop telling customers what they can do. They can read a help center.

They can watch a video. They know they can click a button. Tell them what they should do.

Make that impact from the very first interaction.

[Dillon] (3:04 - 3:40)

A user manual and how it just tells, I don't really know that they do this anymore, but like when you buy something new, like a piece of technology or even like, I have a toddler, so a lot of toys and it's like understanding how the toy works, but not at all how to play with it, which for children is a different thing. But in business, when you're trying to stand up a system that you want to derive value from, you want to know how to derive that value. You don't want it to be a sandbox experience.

So JP, you were nodding your head as I said that I'm going to go to somebody who's going to tell me I'm smart first. So go ahead.

[JP] (3:42 - 3:44)

Is that me or is it? Okay. All right.

[Dillon] (3:44 - 3:45)

You're smart.

[JP] (3:45 - 4:17)

You're smart. Everyone on this call is brilliant. Thanks for bringing this topic, Brittany, and actually thank you Dillon for the alley you, because do you know how many manuals that I've gotten from products and that I've opened and read?

I can count on one hand, not very many. The last one that came to mind is I think I bought like Mega Man X from Super Nintendo and on the ride home, me and my cousin were reading the booklet because we were in anticipation.

[Dillon] (4:18 - 4:20)

So it was decades ago is what you're saying.

[JP] (4:21 - 6:26)

It was decades ago. Yes, yes. But if I harken back to that time, right, I was very excited about a product that I had not purchased, which is what happens a lot these days, right?

Usually a lot of times this product's been purchased by someone else, but I, as the user, am very excited for this. If I could teleport home, we wouldn't have read the manual, right? But there's this time in between where there's this excitement.

And I'm mentioning this because I think that part of this is timing, because I think you can have a really robust, great onboarding process. And if it happens at the wrong time, whether that's too early or too late, then I feel like the attention of the customer is compromised, right? You mentioned this thing about if it's more of a technical product, sometimes depending on the involvement, and this is the other part too, I think that the parties involved have to be the relevant ones too.

If you have someone onboarding call, but this is not really relevant, of course, it's not going to the right person. So I think part of this is timing, making sure you have the right audience, because then when you tell people what they should do, I think that they're already ready and willing to listen, and they don't already have an agenda for what they want out of the call. I just got off of a call.

It got hot shots because there were other parties on the call that had different agendas. And these people don't come in and are like, oh, I'm going to be respectful because the CS is running this, and I didn't take it as disrespect, but these are the managers, they come in, they're like, hey, I have these questions, I have you on here, and I'm going to get these answered. So no longer is the call functioning as an onboarding, but it has now become, I have you here, and this is what I'm going to use the time for as a customer.

So I think my two senses, I think that the timing and the audience are just as important as the content, Brittany, which is making sure that it's addressing what you should versus what you can.

[Dillon] (6:29 - 7:05)

Rob, before you jump in, I want to ask Brittany one question. We're talking so much here about language and the ability to communicate, take information in and communicate it out properly based on a number of different things, one being the user type, company type, are they internal or external? This could be as easy as a yes or no answer, Brittany, but do you think you can teach the ability to take information and translate it to fit your audience and to best communicate value to them, or is that the sort of thing that somebody's just got to get before they do see us at this level?

[Brittany] (7:07 - 7:32)

I think you can teach it, and I think the person has to be open to it, and some might be more naturally inclined to it than others, but that's, I think, where best practices come from. You can at least start to teach people best practices, which is almost a decision tree, and then the better they get with that skill, the more they can start to rely on their own listening and figuring out and being creative and actually then consulting with the customer, but yeah, I think you can lead them to that if they're open.

[Dillon] (7:33 - 7:40)

Cool. Rob, go ahead. I have so much to say.

Man, this is so good, Brittany. We're out of time, folks. No, I'm kidding.

[Rob] (7:41 - 9:43)

No, this is so good. What I really love, I think Dillon was right. Brittany, you found a way to take this concept that we all think we know, like customer onboarding, and then just add a whole layer, and I feel exposed because I realized that in all of my consulting programming around onboarding, on the one hand, I'm saying act as a strategic advisor, but on the other hand, if you actually look at my core syllabus that I run through, it's all tactical.

It's not about industry expertise. It's not about truly understanding your customer's business and then actually giving your customer advice. I think I've got a mismatch in my philosophies there.

I started thinking about this once you were mentioning it. I think there's not only an opportunity in onboarding to reshape our customers' businesses in a way that there is nowhere else in the customer lifecycle because when they're changing core systems of record, that's when they can reinvent their roles, reinvent their day-to-day, hopefully work a little less, hopefully have a better time at their jobs. I think there's even an imperative in a lot of our onboarding programs for us to educate our customers.

You have to think about your job differently now that you're using a different system because you're not driving a Honda Civic. You're driving a Ferrari with a stick shift, and that's going to be a completely different experience, hopefully. I'm just trying to bring this home.

I think there's a cool thing I'm going to do after this. I do a post-onboarding survey that I share with clients. It's just a template.

I think what I'll put in the template is this question of extra credit. How many times did your customer ask you for advice during the onboarding process? Organizational advice.

I don't mean like, how do I click this button? How do I do that? That's not advice.

Advice is like, how should I be thinking about growth at my company? How should I think about change management at my company or that kind of thing?

[Brittany] (9:45 - 9:54)

The big one is what do your other customers do? If they're asking you that, they're begging you to tell them, how do I be your best customer?

-: 10:18

The problem is that question, Rob, is typically coming from a certain level of individual. If you're training end users, it would sound more like what Brittany just said. Totally.

Anyway, that is our time, folks. Very cool conversation. Brittany, thank you so much for bringing it to us.

Would love to have you back in the future to talk more about it, but for now, we have to say goodbye. All right. Bye, guys.

[VO] (: 10:24

You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at lifetimevaluemedia.com.

Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value and find us on the socials at Lifetime Value Media. Until next time.