The Exchanges

Q If I were to listen to the last 200 interviews you've done for People that are in the shape of the CSM you're talking about for kind of a zero to one CS function. Are there other types of questions that you constantly go back to over the years?

A Yeah, there are three. So the first is think of a, a brand that, you know, likely a consumer brand that you think delivers excellent customer service. And oftentimes they'll say something like Nordstrom, Four Seasons, you know, my corner deli. And I'll say, okay, tell me the, the aspects of that great customer service and what does it feel like When you get great customer service, and what does it feel like when it breaks? And that tells me, like, how empathetic are they to a given person's experience, and how, like, reflective are they on their own experience as a customer themselves in some context. So I love, I love that. We use that one very often. The next go-to for me, especially in very fast-growing organizations, both for ICs and for managers, is I'm really looking for some self-awareness, because that drives leadership behaviors, that drives An ability to work well with a very varied set of people internally. And that also gives me a clue about somebody's ability to grow with the organization. So my question there is, tell me about the most impactful piece of feedback that you got in your last performance review, or maybe I'll say in the last two years, depending on their career level. And that's all they, that's all I tee up and whatever their answer is, usually people go to like negative feedback and then I'll dig in and I'll say, okay, so how did that land with you?…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, there are three. So the first is think of a, a brand”

Q What is a V-one? Again, it's super early days, couple million dollars in recurring revenue. What do you think a V-one of the implementation process looks like?

A I think it's in a Google Sheet or maybe a monday.com workplace. It's, it's a templatized, you know, ten-step process. The details of that implementation are different depending on the product, but it always includes something like a kickoff call, a requirements gathering conversation, ideally a conversation about Who is involved on the customer side and who are going to be the users? A conversation about what are the integrations we need to do? And then it's planning out each of those steps. What data do we need to gather and who's gonna, who's on point to actually deliver those files or to build that API? Next is, you know, who's on point to build the communications, the actual communications that are going, going to go out to our users when we roll out this product. The last step that often gets missed is how are we going to measure success? If organizations can get in the habit of asking this question from the very, very early days of the business, they are going to be set up way better when the business starts to scale, because you're going to have a stronger understanding of how, like, what is the path to value for a customer? And you can start to build in, like, more value-based conversations with customers in a way that avoids the CS team being really reactive and only, like, ticket focused. But oftentimes that, that question gets overlooked because it's hard to define. …

AI assessment note: “I think it's in a Google Sheet or maybe a monday.com workplace.”

Q a lot of it. So let's say they have a few million dollars in recurring revenue. They're thinking about formalizing customer success, hiring their first people, but there's nothing really built yet. Well, how do you think about like, here's a roadmap, here are the tenants. If I were to join, here are the first five things I would do and why, what sort of comes to mind for you?

A So the first thing I think you need to ask is, is now the time. And some of the things that you look for in, you know, when to start your customer success organization is where are your early employees spending their time? Are they spending a disproportionate amount of time solving problems for customers, answering questions, getting them up and running? And I think that's a really valuable way to get a business going. But when you have a meaningful volume of customers, you end up Spending, say, more than half your day just resolving problems or getting them going in your product, then that's the time that it makes sense to consolidate that work into a couple of individuals. You know, what, what you need in those early days are people who can work really quickly, are really curious about your technology, and are really curious about the customer. You know, customer success is all about getting your product into your customer's hands as fast as possible, and so all of those qualities of your first customer success People, I won't call them CSMs because I think it can take a lot of forms, is you need people who are really fast at doing that really well. The second thing you need in those early days is you need people who communicate exceptionally well because they're the ones who are going to be your feedback loop to product, engineering, and even leadership to help you understan…

AI assessment note: “your first step is to think about, you know, what are some of the key skills”

Q When a customer churns, what should a company be doing after?

A Well, there's what should a company be doing and what is the pattern I see? The pattern I see is everybody feels really sad and then moves on to the next thing. And of course, that's not what companies should be doing. There should be a retrospective understanding why did the customer choose to either stop solving the problem we were solving for them or choose a different vendor for, to solve the problem that, that we were solving for them. And the answers to those questions will help us design a better product and design a better delivery mechanism. What you can find is, or what I often find is, you know, churn usually has something to do with product adoption, relationship management, which really means we aren't talking to the people who are making the decision and making sure the people who are making the decision know the value we're delivering. And sometimes churn is because of a massive change in priorities. On the customer side, this is actually a really important thing, especially in a cycle where everybody's in a tight budget, is knowing if your product is solving a nice-to-have or a must-have problem. If you know that you're a nice-to-have, then that upfront long-term value conversation and those relationships are critical because that is what is going to keep you in play with that business. Versus if you are a must-have platform solution, it's actually a lot harder …

AI assessment note: “There should be a retrospective understanding why did the customer choose to either stop solving”

Q of rituals, are there any other things that you tend to do across the companies that you work at or when you've built out CS functions similar to what we're talking about that you think might be useful? Sort of anything that you would put in these like little tactical ideas that if someone's building out CS, if they just did these little things, they would probably be better off.

A So as an organization scales, it's the rituals that sort of become part of the culture of the team that make the experience of being on that team and being on the receiving end of the great work of that team that I think can make a huge difference in everything from results you're getting with a customer to what is the reputation of the CS organization within your, within your company. One of the things that I find so impactful Is learning to be very customer centric from the very beginning. Like an example of this is, uh, Aaron Levy at Box. So from the very, very early days, he talked about customers using Box on a weekly basis. Every time the business was making a decision, um, he asked any executive or any IC or any manager, what's in it for the customer? What will the impact of this decision be on the customer? And he made a real point of, Including customer stories and every time he got up in front of the business. And I think that when you build this kind of customer empathy in these small moments, like little rituals, once a week you send around a customer story. Every time you get in front of the business, you talk about a customer outcome. You know, you ask executives to go get in front of customers and talk to them on a regular basis. If you do this early, it builds customer empathy through the entire organization, through the whole life cycle of the business. It's ac…

AI assessment note: “like little rituals, once a week you send around a customer story”

Q Why is that overlooked or still not operationalized?

A I, I wish I knew the answer to that. I, you would be amazed at how many big organizations, like over a hundred million in revenue, That don't have an operationalized onboarding or implementation function. I, I usually see that in products that are kind of easy to set up. And when a product is relatively easy to set up, it doesn't take that long. It's just, it's sometimes it's easier to just like say, okay, you know, Brett CSM, you get this new customer today, get them onboarded, and then we'll just add them to your portfolio. The problem with that is CSM Brett does an implementation and onboarding process once, maybe twice a year. Because that's how many net new customers you get in your portfolio. Versus if you have a group of implementation specialists, they do it all day, every day, and they get really efficient, and they feed information back to the product team on here's where CS is sort of making up, you know, putting band-aids in place and making up for gaps in the product. So here's how we can really improve onboarding and get to value faster. So anyway, I think it's because it's easy to miss The value of onboarding. And I also see it in companies where they're not actively tracking customer health, which is my data point number two, where you're not maniacally focused on product adoption. It's like onboarding is lost because the adoption moment mostly happens in the be…

AI assessment note: “I think it's because it's easy to miss The value of onboarding.”