Noun soup | Andrew Henderson

[Andrew] (0:00 - 0:26)

It just becomes, for lack of a better term, noun soup. And it's not helpful. It's not lying.

It's not stretching the truth. It is quite literally, this information is not relevant to you. It is just going to confuse you.

And finding that fine line between what is enough information to accurately display what I need to communicate without getting them trapped, looking for red herrings, looking for this, looking for that.

[Dillon] (0:35 - 0:46)

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] (0:46 - 0:47)

I'm off mute.

[Dillon] (0:48 - 0:52)

He's off mute. And we got Rob with us.

Rob, can you say hi, not muted?

[Rob] (0:53 - 0:54)

That makes two of us.

[Dillon] (0:54 - 0:59)

Yeah.

And we've got Andrew with us. Andrew, can you say hi, please?

[Andrew] (0:59 - 1:00)

Hey, hello.

I'm not on mute.

[Dillon] (1:01 - 1:09)

None of us are. Fantastic.

We know how to do this thing. I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

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

[Andrew] (1:09 - 2:16)

Yeah, Dillon, thanks for having me. Hi, everybody. I'm Andrew Henderson.

By day, I am one of two senior managers of client success at a company called GoodRx, where we offer cash offers, pharmaceuticals, and for other generic and branded drugs. If you've heard of us, great. If you haven't, that's probably for the better, because you don't need it.

Cool. Yeah. And then by night, outside of work, I am also a podcaster.

I co-host a podcast called Debate This. It is a comedy show about comics and video games. Our format is we try to do the video game podcast differently.

So basically, one of us brings a very hypothetical question to the table, like, what's the best color of Yoshi? Or if you had one item from The Legend of Zelda that was going to save your life and you're trapped on a deserted island, what would that one item be? And then the other three bring an answer, and we argue it.

It's all for fun. It's all for laughs. We've been doing it for eight years now.

Yeah. So that's a good time. It's been a really fun hobby to have, a good creative outlet, as I'm sure that you guys can attest.

[Dillon] (2:16 - 2:23)

The answer is the Ocarina of Time, correct? That is the lame answer, Dillon. It's the only one I know.

[Andrew] (2:23 - 2:30)

Does he have a sword, too? Is that what you were trying to say? Anything that can warp you out of the island is the quitter's answer.

[Dillon] (2:31 - 2:32)

Okay. Yeah.

[Andrew] (2:32 - 2:32)

Well, I'm a quitter.

[Dillon] (2:33 - 2:46)

Anybody who listens to this podcast knows I'm a quitter. Anyway, Andrew, you know what we do here? We ask one question of every single guest, and that is, what is on your mind when it comes to customer success?

Can you tell us what that is for you?

[Andrew] (2:46 - 3:23)

Yeah, I love this question. I think for me, thesis behind what makes a really good customer success, client success, account manager, whatever... We have a lot of words for the same thing.

This is inherently a communication job. It is. Whether that is verbal, whether that's written, however you're communicating, this particular role is all about how you are delivering a message.

What level of information you give, how you give it, and what you are saying that's going to both satisfy and also not lead to more questions. I got JP on that one.

[Dillon] (3:24 - 3:34)

Period? Is that... Okay.

All right. I want to give this to JP because he's nodding his head. He's got a big old smile on his face. JP, what do you have to say about this?

[JP] (3:35 - 6:04)

So I always try to avoid what I would call tennis with a customer. This is like, a lot of the communication happens via email.

And so with email, it's like many forms of communication, it's an imperfect form of communication. There's things that can get lost in the sauce very easily. And if there's anything that's going to save you time as a customer success manager, when you are, especially if you're dealing with, you have multiple demands, your customer's not the only people you're getting emails from either, right?

Like you're getting sort of getting it from like all sides here. I think that the less tennis you play, in other words, the less sort of points you have in resolving an issue with a customer, the more effective that communication was. And so when I respond to a customer, part of what that is, is also what's not said.

For example, depending on the type of message I get from a customer in context, I could answer them right away. Maybe I'll answer them right away. But I may also, maybe I'll wait an hour depending on what it is.

Maybe that makes some sense. Maybe if they ask me a larger question, understanding that context, I may take a little bit more time to respond because I want to give a more sort of thorough and robust answer. Sometimes I have to choose between, do I, if I can recognize the can of worms earlier, where a customer is asking me a question, but maybe like Rob talks about the whys that, you know, that they get asked, if I can cut them off at the whys, that sounds brutal.

But if I can cut them off at some earlier whys, so that they don't, it doesn't extend that chain, right? Maybe I say, oh, I really need to put them in contact with someone else. Like maybe this is actually the most effective thing.

And so I believe that that is actually a sign of, I don't want to say high intelligence, as if like not doing that means you're unintelligent. But I think that the ability to think ahead in that way, that as Andrew said, like communication is primarily like what we're doing. And I was tempted, I was tempted to be like, well, don't we all communicate, right?

Like, isn't that a large part of everyone's job? But then when you think about it, it's like, no, no, no, no, for customer success, this is like a super important part of what we do.

[Andrew] (6:05 - 6:11)

So communication is like swimming and running. Everyone does it. Everyone can do it.

It's the difference of doing it well.

[Dillon] (6:12 - 6:55)

Agree. What I thought of with tennis is this is like a standard tech support concept is how many touches does a ticket need before it gets resolved. And so support folks are trained to think in those steps of like, oh crap, if it's taken more than three, four or five touches, we got to figure something else out because this is going, we know that we're going to get bad satisfaction scores on this ticket.

Andrew, I have a question for you, maybe around as a manager, how you teach better communication or what questions do you prompt a CSM to think about or an account manager to think about to get better at this?

[Andrew] (6:56 - 8:38)

Yeah, it's an incredible question. And that, so the number one, above all else, the thing that I've seen the most in teams, and this is, I'm on my second team, it's a different team that I've trained in, with varying skill levels. The number one hardest thing for people, and I experienced myself to get used to, is finding the line of enough information that makes sense, but not too much that gets in the weeds.

Now, this is why this is really hard because people come in, look, and I came from the advertising agency world where like, you just throw proper nouns and stuff until people stop asking questions because you're just trying to make yourself sound smarter than you are. Trust me, if you're an agency out there, I see you, I hear you, I get it. But that's just that world, cool, fine.

But when you make that transition, like I did, now I found myself, I worked at a, prior to my current role, I was at another company called Cover My Meds, which again, if you know about it, if you don't know about this, congratulations, it's all about prior authorization in the healthcare space. It's a nightmare, we don't need to go there. But trying to explain these like very nuanced, very difficult things that nobody not in that space would have any frame of reference to, right?

It just becomes, for lack of a better term, noun soup. And it's not helpful. It's not lying, it's not stretching the truth.

It is quite literally, this information is not relevant to you, it is just going to confuse you. And really finding that fine line between what is the, what is enough information to accurately display what I need to communicate without getting them trapped, looking for red herrings, looking for this, looking for that.

[JP] (8:38 - 8:43)

This is also something that, just to mention, AI does a poor job of emulating.

[Andrew] (8:43 - 8:44)

Incredibly poor job of.

[JP] (8:45 - 8:45)

Just to put that out there.

[Andrew] (8:45 - 9:11)

Yes, I've seen in this like, again, another thing we don't need to get into right now, but like, God, it drives me crazy because I've seen people be like, yeah, you can have AI write this email for you. You know what that email is going to do? It's going to say, hi, I hope this email finds you well.

And it's going to be three paragraphs of nothing. And who's reading that? I'm not reading that, I don't have that kind of time.

kind of attention span. It's: 2025

[Dillon] (9:12 - 9:18)

I put that email back into my AI so it can translate for me. Rob, why don't you jump in here?

-: 10:42

You know what I'm thinking about? Speaking of tennis, I was working with a team once and the guy, I got into an argument with this client, believe it or not. And I believe it.

So this is interesting. I want your opinions on this, everybody here. So the task of the engagement was, let's get our first response time down from our support team.

And we took a while to look at years of historical data. And what we realized is first response time was supposed to get under an hour. But what happened was there was a very high first touch response, or sorry, first touch resolution rate on tickets.

Very high, one of the highest I've seen. And so I was like, well, what's happening here is actually not a first response time problem. It's actually a protocol.

It's just a protocol choice that you all have made. You all have instructed your team to resolve on the first touch. If you want, we could change that protocol and we can get first response time down tomorrow.

All we do is we train the team, just respond and just say, got it, looking into it. Easy peasy. You don't have to be paying me for this advice.

But they were like, well, we don't want to do that. And I was like, well, you're going to have to kind of just pick your poison. And I think you've picked the right answer.

I think what you're doing is actually the best client experience. I, as a client, would much rather receive a response within a couple hours than just get some vanity metric response that's just meant to get your first response time down.

[Dillon] (: 10:43

I don't know if I agree with that. But that's more, maybe it's a personal choice. I mean, you could do both.

You could absolutely do both. So what they, was it, were they unaware of that? Or was it what they really wanted was them to solve their tickets faster?

[Rob] (: 10:58

No, they were unaware of that initially, because they weren't really looking at the comparison between. And they also just didn't have a frame of reference necessarily for what a good resolution time was. In an ideal world, sure, first response time would be a resolution.

And it would be under one hour. But in reality, it's a bit harder to do that, especially with more complex products.

[Dillon] (: 11:21

Andrew, we're going to get out of here. Do you have any last words before we do?

[Andrew] (: 11:24

Yes. If you are client facing and you deal with nuanced things, if you deal with something that requires a little bit of explanation to handle, I challenge you, I encourage you to do this. Find something that you're passionate about that is not related to your work.

It has nothing to do with that. And try and explain that and get somebody excited about it in under five minutes. That is the core, in my opinion, that is the core of being able to direct a message and speak the way that people want to be spoken to.

People do not want to get proper nouns. People want connections. People want to similes, metaphors, right?

People want to be able to understand something quickly. If you can practice that, if you can get that, if you can nail that down, you will find that that will be such a bigger help in your day-to-day work life.

[Rob] (: 12:20

That's cool. That's good advice.

[Dillon] (: 12:22

Yeah, I think that's great advice. Well, that is our time, Andrew. Thank you so much for joining us.

Come back in the future. And I would love to talk more about communication and how exactly we can all get better at that. But for now, we do have to say goodbye.

Take it easy, guys.

[VO] (: 12:57

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