November 19, 2024 • 36 mins
In this episode of the Digital CX Podcast, host Alex Turkovic chats with Scott Wilder, Head of Digital Success at Clari with a wealth of previous experience from Google, Adobe, and HubSpot among others. The conversation explores leveraging AI for customer success, integrating data across platforms, and adopting B2C innovation to enhance digital experiences in the B2B space.
Chapters:
- 04:02 - Transition to digital growth
- 06:57 - Inbound vs. outbound digital CX
- 08:35 - The struggle with platform silos
- 10:01 - AI in Clari’s CX strategy
- 11:53 - Chatbots and federated search
- 13:12 - Building the business case for AI
- 14:32 - Customer-driven innovation in CS
- 16:59 - Tackling data hygiene challenges
- 19:45 - Fun approaches to data cleanup
- 21:01 - Selecting the right chatbot vendor
- 24:05 - Embracing B2C innovation in B2B
- 28:23 - SMS as an untapped B2B strategy
- 30:30 - Exploring AI and educational resources
Enjoy! I know I sure did…
Scott's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wilder/
Join our Monthly Meetup: https://digitalsuccess.gradual.us/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Scott Wilder (00:03):
I have a little bit of an attitude because I'm
from New York and so I'velistened to a lot of your
podcasts and the New Yorker willcome out in me is that, you
know, I just think as digitalcustomer success, digital
success, folks really leaning into how do you drive innovation
with your customers?
In other words, you know,bringing customers in, when
you're even defining a programtowards bringing customers in
(00:24):
when you're even defining aprogram.
Alex Turkovic (00:25):
Once again, welcome to the Digital Customer
Experience Podcast with me, alexTurkovich.
So glad you could join us heretoday and every week as we
explore how digital can helpenhance the customer and
employee experience.
My goal is to share what myguests and I have learned over
the years so that you can getthe insights that you need to
evolve your own digital programs.
If you'd like more info, needto get in touch or sign up for
(00:48):
the weekly companion newsletterthat has additional articles and
resources in it.
Go to digitalcustomersuccesscom.
For now, let's get started.
Greetings and welcome to theDigital CX Podcast.
I'm so glad that you're backwith me this week and every week
as we talk about all thingsdigital in CS.
My name is Alex Turkovich andyou're tuning in on episode 79,
(01:12):
which is staggering that we'regetting closer to 100.
Pretty amazing.
Anyway, today we've got afantastic conversation with
Scott Wilder lined up for you.
Scott is no stranger to digital.
He's been practicing this stuffbasically his whole life.
He's been part of Google, partof Adobe, he's been part of the
(01:34):
HubSpot teams.
Now he's working as a scaledleader at Clary, and so he's got
just a ton of experience and aton of things to draw from.
We get into the weeds aboutactually Clary itself and CS
teams using Clary.
We talk about AI andimplementation of AI.
(01:56):
You know, digital motions thathe's implemented and those kinds
of things.
So very cool kind of in theweeds but lots of experience to
share in this particular episode.
Also worth noting that Scottand I, along with Samantha David
of mondaycom, are hostingweekly meetups Sorry, not weekly
(02:20):
, monthly meetups on the firstThursday roughly of each month,
featuring a guest.
These are meetups that arespecific to digital, and so you
know, make sure you keep an eyeout for those.
We'll be posting about it onLinkedIn, but then there's also
a link down below in the shownotes that you can go to if you
want to go see who's on tap andto sign up for those meetups as
(02:44):
well.
Completely free to you.
It's a good chance to just hangout with digital folks.
So please enjoy thisconversation with Scott Wilder,
because I sure did.
Scott, Kenneth Wilder, as Ifound out, welcome to the
podcast.
It's nice to have you here.
Scott Wilder (03:00):
Great to be here on a easy jazz Friday afternoon.
Alex Turkovic (03:03):
Easy jazz Friday afternoon.
Wilder probably no relation toGene Wilder.
Scott Wilder (03:11):
Nope, nor Thornton , a few other Wilders.
Alex Turkovic (03:17):
Look, we've met several, several times.
We met a while ago, startedrapping about digital.
You had a lot of great stuff tosay.
We met a while ago, startedrapping about digital you had a
lot of great stuff to say.
More recently, we've beenworking together on, you know,
first Thursday, digital andscaled CS meetup type situation,
which is super fun, and so Iwanted to obviously have you on
(03:40):
the show just to to rap aboutdigital in more public.
But would you, would you giveus a rundown?
I mean, your background ispretty insane because you've got
there are a few people who havelike Google and Adobe and
things like HubSpot on their rapsheet.
So would you be so kind as towalk us through a little bit of
(04:00):
your journey.
Scott Wilder (04:02):
Sure, when you say rap sheet, I feel like I should
be in jail.
But yeah, no, yeah, I think thebig thing for me is I've.
You know, when I moved out toSilicon Valley, I came out here
because I was working atAmerican Express doing something
called database marketing,which you know for Sounds
counterintuitive,counterintuitive, exactly.
It's kind of evolved into, youknow, crm marketing.
(04:24):
But I was recruited from NewYork to go work for a company
called Silicon Graphics, whichwas a hot technology company
then, and so I've just spent mycareer working up and down
Highway 101, more or less.
And so I think you know Istarted out doing e-commerce and
direct e-commerce and digitalmarketing.
(04:44):
I started out doing e-commerceand digital marketing and did
that for Apple, silicon Graphics, like I said, and then I went
to work for Borders and rantheir e-commerce business and
e-toys.
Alex Turkovic (04:54):
Cool.
Scott Wilder (04:55):
And after Borders I went to Intuit and it was
really interesting.
So at Intuit one of thebusiness challenges in running
the commerce site was hey, scott, we need lots and lots of
content, like I think we allanybody who's run a website
hears that from you know theproduct managers, the marketers,
the customer success people, etcetera.
And so I would say, well, showme the money and I can hire
(05:19):
people to write, because I'm nota great writer.
But nobody showed me the money.
So then I kind of thought aboutsome earlier projects I did,
but nobody showed me the money.
So then I kind of thought aboutsome earlier projects I did.
And at Borders we basicallycreated small community websites
for their 200 stores and so theidea came up of doing community
.
And Scott Cook, the founder ofthe company, was really big on
(05:40):
user-created content and if yougo back in the archives he wrote
a really inspiring article inHBR in 2003, archives.
You wrote a really inspiringarticle in HBR in 2003, harvard
Business Review, 2003, on usercontribution systems,
user-created content.
And so we created thiscommunity and overnight it just
took off.
And one thing and I was goingdown the community path for a
few companies, but when I wentto.
(06:02):
So I was at Intuit and did itfor Google and then when I went
to Marketo, I realized that tobe a community person is a
little tough these days andtough back then, because you
don't see any CEOs who havecommunity background, you don't
see anybody running a divisionwho had a community background.
So that's when I pivoted reallyinto digital growth growth,
(06:22):
digital growth engagement andthis really led me to, you know,
led me to working at Udacityand Coursera and HubSpot and at
Clary.
I managed the digital success,digital self-serve play, which
basically means from a platformperspective, it's community,
it's the university, it's KBs,it's's in product and I call the
(06:46):
in product engagement, I callall that kind of your inbound,
inbound self-serve, and thenalso outbound, which is email
and ai, and we'll talk a littlebit about ai maybe later on sure
, yeah, yeah, that notion ofinbound versus outbound is is
interesting because they kind ofoverlap too sometimes, you know
, because you need all thatcollateral and not, you know,
(07:08):
articles and content and stuffto feed your outbound stuff too.
Yeah, and also you need to youknow.
One of the things I've tried todo is really understand what's
the right lever, what's theright way to interact with
somebody, so you can ask thecustomers how they want to
interact with you, which Ialways try and do, but then the
proof is in the pudding to seehow they really engage with you
when they come into yourplayground, so to speak.
(07:31):
And when I was at HubSpot, weran some really interesting
experiments, and maybe it'sintuitive, but sometimes I don't
think of these things rightaway.
But the first way that somebodyengaged with you was the one
they latched on to.
So, in other words, if theylatched on to your knowledge
base, that's how they wanted tolearn from you.
(07:51):
If they went to community, itwas community.
So it takes a lot of work toget them to use more than one
platform, or more than their onego-to platform.
And then the second thing is,to your point, whether it's
inbound or outbound, it's allpart of a journey that needs to
be well orchestrated.
Alex Turkovic (08:03):
Yeah, it's so true, and you hit on something
that is near and dear to myheart, which is the different
platforms, because so many of ususe different things for
different reasons.
Obviously, you've got your LMSand you've got your knowledge
base management and you've gotthings here and there your
support tool might be completelydifferent.
(08:24):
And you've got things here andthere your support tool might be
completely different.
And all of a sudden, you'reasking your customers to log in
to five different things just toget stuff done.
Scott Wilder (08:34):
And it's a super crappy experience a lot of times
.
Yeah, no, it's a great point.
There's some mini holy grailsand one of them is SSO or single
sign-on, and a lot of usstruggle with how do you get
that in an organization and alot of us struggle with how do
you get that, you know, in anorganization.
You know, I probably listed sixor seven companies before and I
only half of them was I able toto implement that.
Alex Turkovic (08:51):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then you've got, you know,cool stuff like I mean, ever
After is so known as, so soknown for their kind of single
platform approach, which I thinkis super cool too.
But yeah, so you mentioned themagic word.
So we have to go down that path, with the magic word being
artificial intelligence, becauseit's all the rage and I've been
(09:15):
talking I mean, I've beentalking a lot about AI recently
in the newsletter and otherplaces too because it's it's
interesting to watch to.
You know, we all have a frontrow seat, you know, and watching
it evolve, it kind of feelslike the, you know, the launch
of the iPhone all over again,kind of.
You know, we're watching thishuge shift in technology and
(09:37):
whatnot and it's interesting tosee all the individual platforms
adopt it and, you know, in aco-pilot kind of way.
But then it's also interestingto watch, you know, individuals
adopting artificial intelligenceinto their own workflow on a
daily basis.
But how have you approached AI,you know, at Clary, and how do
(09:57):
you think about implementing itfor customers?
Yeah so at.
Scott Wilder (10:01):
AI at Clary, we think about it a number of ways.
So we do have a product calledCopilot, which is conversational
or customer intelligence.
It's somewhat similar to Gongand there's a lot you can do
from an AI perspective there,which is analyzing calls.
So basically it's recordingyour calls and then you can use
(10:21):
AI to summarize those calls, topull out themes, etc.
So that's one example.
Alex Turkovic (10:26):
Like sentiment analysis and stuff like that too
.
Exactly, Exactly.
Scott Wilder (10:38):
And to be honest you know one digital play I do
is I use it to really understandwho in the company is promoting
our self-serve channels, right?
So I play Big Brother and I'llgo into it and just say OK, like
we all know, like in terms ofself-serve, you need internal
support.
It's a team, team sport, cross,cross-functional.
But it's one thing to you know,create the content or sit down
with folks and talk about how weshould position self-serve or
(11:02):
digital success.
It's another to see if peopleactually do talk about it.
And so I use these tools to playbig brother and listen to them.
And then the second way is wejust use it in the product to
help predict companies' futurerevenue, et cetera.
And then the third thing is sowe recently launched our own AI
(11:23):
chatbot is so we recentlylaunched our own ai chatbot and
basically we launched federatedsearch and the chatbot on
community, the knowledge base,and we're going to do the
university as well.
So it's it's basically onechatbot that appears in multiple
places and is leveraging thesame content that's cool.
Alex Turkovic (11:42):
Yeah, that's awesome.
So it's it's basically trainedon all that content and can
reference it across.
You know, no matter, no matterwhere you are logged in to the
ecosystem exactly so.
Scott Wilder (11:54):
I think a lot of people default to the help and
knowledge based content whenthey're launching these chatbots
, and so what we're doing is to,to your point, leveraging all
this other content whether it'suser created, partner created or
, you know, Clary created andthen the other part of it is
integrating with our back endsystems, whether it's Salesforce
(12:14):
, et cetera, so that you canpersonalize it.
So, Alex, you might be, youknow, an admin versus a
salesperson who's going to useour product Right Two very
different personas and verydifferent needs, and I find that
that's a real, at least for mepersonally.
A real area I'm interested inis how you are integrating not
just content but these backendsystems.
Alex Turkovic (12:37):
Yeah, I mean, my mind goes to two places, so I'll
try to get us to both of thoseplaces.
The first one is kind of likeyou know, for others that are
wanting to do something similar,I'd be curious to know what
kind of business case process,what kind of internal process
(12:57):
you went through in order to,you know, get this in place.
Did you have to win a lot ofhearts and minds?
Was it kind of a no-brainer?
Yeah, we should go do this Likelike what.
What did the lead up to that?
Look like?
Scott Wilder (13:12):
Yeah, so definitely have to make a
business case.
I think so a few things.
One is I was really fortunateto have a report.
I reported to the chiefcustomer officer.
He has really embraced this,but he wanted to know what the
KPIs would be, what the outcomeswould be, some sort of model to
(13:37):
outline that.
And I leveraged active andengagement numbers from the
other platforms.
And then I also looked at thelift that you get for average
contract value or ARR, fromthese self-serve platforms.
But the real thing was quicklybuilding some prototypes and
putting them in front ofcustomers.
I have a little bit of anattitude because I'm from New
York and so I've listened to alot of your podcasts and the New
Yorker will come out in me.
(13:57):
Is that, you know, I just think, as digital customer success,
digital success, folks reallyleaning in to how do you drive
innovation with your customers?
In other words, you know,bringing customers in when
you're even defining a programand getting their feedback on it
, and so a lot of things.
(14:18):
What I did is first talk tocustomers about what they want
from this product, and then thesecond thing is building
prototypes and getting them torespond to it, and then the
third thing is making sure thatyou check in with them over time
.
Yeah, so this kind of customerdriven innovation to me is
really, really important.
And then the challenges part,which I think you're asking as
(14:39):
well.
The biggest challenge isstructured versus unstructured
data, and the second challengeis some of these systems don't
have great APIs, so it's reallyhard to integrate with them, and
so you use some digitalband-aids Sorry, digital duct
tape.
Alex Turkovic (14:59):
Digital duct tape .
Scott Wilder (14:59):
Digital duct tape oh, I like that that conjures,
all kinds of images now weshould go into a dally and write
digital duct tape and see whatimage it comes up yeah, right,
exactly I might do that for theartwork for this episode.
Alex Turkovic (15:22):
Yeah, I mean, I know all about the digital duct
tape.
I you know I've joked beforethat digital CS is kind of like
the MacGyver of of CS, becausewe we just find a way to put
shit together to make it work.
You know.
Scott Wilder (15:33):
Yeah, and I would say, like, as a hiring manager,
that's such a key skill to findin people is that they're,
they're resourceful, they'recurious, they're resourceful and
they can, whether you know, bea be a macgyver.
I was trying to think of for asecond what's the female version
of macgyver, just to bepolitically correct.
Um, you know, but beingflexible to, yeah, you know,
finding that that in person,that person or employee who can
(15:56):
do that, MacGyver or MacGyveress.
There you go.
Alex Turkovic (16:02):
Yeah, yeah, it's so true.
It's so true, that kind of that.
It's almost entrepreneurialthinking, really, because you're
, you know, you just there's youneed to solve for a problem.
You may not have all theresources you need to solve for
a problem, you may not have allthe resources you need to solve
for the problem, but thecreativity comes in and you've
(16:22):
got to figure out how to make itwork.
So it's interesting.
And you did mention data asbeing a big problem, because I
mean, I think I speak for many,many, many people when I say
that you know, we probablycouldn't reliably even tell you
who our admins versus our endusers are, you know, which I
(16:45):
think a lot of people couldsympathize with.
So was there an element of datacleanliness and data hygiene
exercises that you had to gothrough to prep for something
like that, or did you have theluck of just having a good, good
set of data to go into?
Scott Wilder (16:59):
Yeah, I give.
I mean to be transparent.
I give us like a B minus interms of you know what we were
dealing with in terms of data.
There was definitely acleansing process.
I think you know I mentioned myfirst career at American
Express and you know I I alwaystell people that job was the
most challenging of all the jobsI've ever had, because I was
doing programs for like 10 to 20million people.
Alex Turkovic (17:21):
Yeah.
Scott Wilder (17:22):
And there was a huge amount of data cleansing
because you can imagine you'redealing with people's credit
card information and theirspending.
So I learned a lot in thatprocess process but it's
definitely a challenge in a lotof these companies that I've
worked at is to get the you knowthe energy behind, get the
enthusiasm behind I'll come upwith another E word energy,
(17:43):
enthusiasm and excitement around.
You know cleaning the dataBecause you know it needs to be
consistent in these differentdifferent systems.
I mean just, you knowSalesforce is the source of
truth for a lot of people, but Ithink a lot of companies are
not dealing with the best data.
Alex Turkovic (18:00):
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back to the show.
(18:43):
It's so funny because, you know,I've been part of data hygiene
kind of motions where theimpetus or the desire was to
okay this field is now going tobe required to close the
opportunity or whatever it maybe Like.
This is a required field Inorder to do your job, you need
(19:05):
to fill in this information, butthen what invariably happens is
you get crap information inthat field because it's required
and somebody just wants to putsomething in there to, like, you
know, check the box, so tospeak.
And so I really liked what yousaid about just that mentality
and the enthusiasm around datahygiene, because you know,
(19:28):
ultimately you're helping teamshelp themselves.
I love like throwing you know,hygiene parties and stuff like
let's, you know, let's all gettogether on a big call and just
like go through your accountsand fix this one field or
something like that.
You know, like those kinds ofthings make it fun.
Scott Wilder (19:45):
Yeah, when I worked at Udacity, they would
actually block off wholeafternoons or days for beta
testing or for things like datahygiene.
And, to be honest, as a youknow, one of the hats we all
wear is program manager, productmanager, whatever, and trying
to get people on board to do anexercise like that is tough it's
(20:06):
hard but it was really amazingat udacity.
You know, we just put basicallyanoints one person to be
captain and we tackle a problemyeah, yeah, almost hackathon
style really.
Alex Turkovic (20:20):
Yeah, no, exactly .
Scott Wilder (20:21):
Yeah, data hackathons need to have more
data hackathons yeah, and youknow a lot of these companies
you know are relatively small,like american express is huge,
into it was huge hub spots huge.
But some of these othercompanies you know if you just
put the energy into it you canprobably get things cleaned up
(20:42):
and then also just put some youknow business processes in place
.
But if you have you know it'sbeen a while since I've been at
Intuit but if they try thattoday they have zillions of
users.
But if you're talking about,you know, a thousand customers
and they say five to ten peopleat every customer.
I mean it's, it's manageableyeah, yeah it really is do you?
Alex Turkovic (21:03):
if you were, if you were gonna go implement a?
I mean, was there a vettingprocess between some vendors
there?
Um, from a chatbot perspective,is there any insight that you
might be able to give?
Um, not like who to choose andwho not to choose, but, like you
know, what are the things towatch out for as you're vetting
these vendors?
Scott Wilder (21:23):
As much as you can .
Their track record and ifthey're new to AI which a lot of
them are, are new to chatbotsis understanding what else
they've developed.
Yeah, understanding the peoplewho are going to be working on
the project.
So we ended up selectingsomebody who is fairly new to
working with LLMs and chatbots,but they had a proven track
(21:45):
record with search technologyand they also have proven track
record in a few other areas,such as integrations.
And then really looking at thepeople who are going to be,
involved in your project.
The next thing is being reallyclear about what your
requirements are.
I know that sounds kind ofcrazy and obvious, but document,
(22:05):
document, document.
So there's no misunderstanding,especially because a lot of
development is done withcompanies that are overseas.
So that's not a critique, acriticism of anybody.
It's just you know, you have aEuropean influence and I might
say tomato and you Sure, and youknow, thinking through.
(22:28):
I talked about integrations.
If this chatbot or whatever isgoing to integrate with other
systems is, do they haveexperience in those other
systems?
Alex Turkovic (22:37):
Yeah, right, like writing a HubSpot integration.
You kind of got to know a thingabout HubSpot.
Scott Wilder (22:45):
Exactly, exactly.
So it's one thing to hire acompany that and I'm talking,
you know, like a lot of thesechatbots say they integrate with
Salesforce.
Great, you know they can workwith APIs, but I think it goes
deeper than that.
Like, have they actually evenbeen an admin with Salesforce?
I mean, there's so much youlearn and when you're an admin
of a product, you know the good,the bad and the ugly.
Alex Turkovic (23:07):
Yeah, I think one thing I would add.
(23:33):
That's an excellent list.
The one thing I would add to itis also, just like I guess,
practical experience from aconsultation standpoint, because
I new thing.
And so in selecting a vendoryou want to select somebody who
can help you really get in placea strong program at the
beginning, driving the rightinsights, driving the right KPIs
, setting things up to whereknow, to where they can be
usable, like for your business.
(23:54):
I couldn't imagine kind ofimplementing that technology
without a services engagementfrom one of these vendors to
help you navigate that stuff.
Scott Wilder (24:05):
Yeah, that's a really good point.
And I thought of one more.
Yeah, are they willing to talkto customers?
Alex Turkovic (24:11):
Oh yeah.
Scott Wilder (24:12):
Sure, again you're going to hear me talk a lot
about the appetite we have toengage with customers and really
learn from them.
And, you know, even if they'rea so-called partner or vendor or
whatever you know, let's putthem in front of the customers
so they can hear them talk abouttheir problems.
Alex Turkovic (24:31):
Yeah.
Scott Wilder (24:33):
Their job is to be done not problems.
Sorry, the desired outcomesthat's right, but the service
part you put you point out isreally, really important.
Do they know how to handle areal service engagement?
Alex Turkovic (24:46):
yeah, yeah, so know, one of the things that I
do quite frequently just in, butyou know I'm a collector of
digital motions.
Like anytime I see somethingthat's that somebody is doing,
especially in B2C, like, Ialways take a screenshot or I
always kind of like try toremember, like what, what a
(25:08):
certain company might be doing.
That's really cool that youknow that I could use later.
Are there things like that foryou that you kind of always keep
an eye out for?
Like, have you run acrossanything interesting recently in
the wild?
That's, that's digital and cool.
Scott Wilder (25:23):
So I recently bought a Figma.
I'm sorry.
I recently bought a Fitbit.
I was on Figma today and Ibought a Fitbit.
That's funny and my wholefamily's wearing Fitbits now, so
we're all tracking.
Alex Turkovic (25:34):
Oh yeah, there's like a family component to
Fitbit, isn't there?
Yeah?
Scott Wilder (25:37):
yeah, Sharing thing yeah yeah, yeah, okay.
So I really like what they'redoing, both in terms of treating
me as an individual but also asa family.
And then the I'll call it theautomated plays.
They have to follow up on thatand you can imagine I mean I
really enjoy these companieswhere you have.
They're starting to do it,they're starting to learn from
my sleep patterns.
(25:58):
You know how to you know what'simportant to me.
And to your point about thefamily, I'm curious of how
they're going to contact all ofus?
Alex Turkovic (26:08):
Yeah, that's interesting.
Why I mean, I have you mean, Ihave my own kind of opinions
about this, but why do you thinkthe B2C like B2C has just
always been so much better atdigital than B2B and I think B2B
in general is very reluctant toadopt some of these things
because maybe they feel likeit's childish or it's like not
(26:32):
appropriate or whatever.
Do you have strong feelingsabout that?
Scott Wilder (26:37):
You know I've struggled with this since I've
been out in Silicon Valley.
I always tell people no one hasbeen as sophisticated as my
first job in terms of leveragingdata.
I think we're.
You know we watch a lot ofpeople struggling with how
companies focus more on growthand acquisition versus retention
(26:57):
and expansion yeah and I thinkit's because, if it's like a
seesaw, you know most or scale,most of the weight is still on
this acquisition part of thegame right.
So they're focusing on thattrend, that initial transaction
from a even from a digitalperspective.
Sometimes they're focusing moreon the initial transaction
(27:18):
versus that relationship thatcan be built afterwards.
And to build that relationship,data is really important.
But it takes investment rightand, again, most of the
investment is going to go intothe initial transaction yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah.
Alex Turkovic (27:34):
And you know, the one thing that also just comes
to mind a lot for me is just sms, like b2c has always been, has
been kind of always using textand sms and things like that,
and obviously you get yourselfinto issues of you know privacy
and things like that whendealing with sms, but I you know
, I think I don't think b2b isfocused on it enough, especially
(27:58):
among executives, like you know.
I think I think if, if youengaged an executive the right
way via sms, with a short smsthat kind of gave them the you
know the, the quarterly updateof how the team is doing, versus
like a QBR or a deck or anemail, they're way more likely
to engage with that than theyare you know anything else you
(28:22):
send them.
Scott Wilder (28:23):
That's a great call out.
I mean Udacity.
When I was there, we were usingtext messaging and SMS, for we
worked with a company calledBlueShift which basically was
our main email platform and theydid a lot of great stuff around
predictive modeling and AI, butthey also had this SMS
component.
And you know, now, when you,based on what you just said,
(28:45):
you're also having me think,like a lot of times, you know,
you have a company that says Ijust want to focus on the CRO or
focus on the grand prouba onthe company.
Well, they're not going to gointo a community and they're
bombarded with emails butnobody's saying OK, well,
they're on their phone.
Why don't I text them all thetime?
Or they could text me to myFitbit if they want.
Alex Turkovic (29:07):
You got to go work out.
Scott Wilder (29:10):
Exactly In the middle of your workout.
But no, it's a great point andI think I just yeah, I wish we
embraced B2C more often from adata perspective, from a
customer research perspectivefrom a technology perspective.
But yeah, I think it's just thescale is more weight on the
acquisition side.
Alex Turkovic (29:30):
Yeah, I actually didn't have BlueShift on my DCS
tech stack page, so I'm going toadd them right now.
That's a good call out.
Scott Wilder (29:39):
Yeah, they're kind of a sleeper in some ways, yeah
, but they've done great workwith Lendercom, they do great
work with Udacity and they'reprobably into the predictive
modeling for B2B email beforemost companies.
Alex Turkovic (29:54):
That's cool.
That's cool, nice.
So they got some lovely logosscrolling across their website.
Scott Wilder (30:01):
Yeah.
Alex Turkovic (30:02):
And I just saw Udacity there.
Scott Wilder (30:06):
Yeah, you might see me on that site if you do.
Alex Turkovic (30:08):
It's an old picture.
Won't tell anyone, that'sawesome.
Look, as you know, as we kindof start to round things down,
one of the things that I alwayslove to ask my guests is what
they're paying attention to,what's like in your content,
feed and content, diet and booksand all that kind of stuff.
Is there anything particularthat you're paying attention to?
Scott Wilder (30:29):
yeah, so I really believe that for folks in our
world, it's important to getbeyond just prompts and really
understand how AI works.
Yeah, and so I looked at anumber of programs.
So I'm actually going throughUniversity of Vanderbilt's AI
program Cool.
You know, I won't get the coollogo like from Harvard or
(30:49):
Stanford, but the guy who'srunning that is really
interesting and he's doing somereally great things and I just
recommend.
I was speaking to a bunch ofdigital content folks a few
weeks ago and they asked me asimilar question and so I
recommended that.
Alex Turkovic (31:05):
That's really cool.
I looked briefly at the UTprogram since I'm in Austin, you
know, I was like you know,maybe I should look at UT.
And then, of course, I gotretargeted by MIT and Harvard
and all these different placesand that just made me go.
Ah, forget about it.
Scott Wilder (31:21):
Yeah, yeah.
I think also just if people youknow are thinking about this is
like do you want the digitaltransformation theory strategy,
big thought leadership, or doyou want to really understand
how the wheels and the bus goround and round?
I'm more that kind of guy,Right, right, and so that's why
I'm doing.
So the first group go toStanford, go to Harvard, but
(31:43):
you're going to spend $2,000 to$10,000.
Alex Turkovic (31:50):
You're not a wax the car kind of person You're
like pop the hood.
Scott Wilder (31:57):
Let's check out what's underneath.
Yeah, exactly, if you can'tfind me, I'm under my car, so
don't throw me under the bus.
No, but so that you know.
There's other programs, but Ifound that one really helpful.
So I'm looking at that a lot.
And then there's just a bunchof podcasts.
I'm totally I have a problem.
I'm addicted to podcasts, so Ilisten to them all night.
Alex Turkovic (32:12):
So yeah, what do you listen?
To ai and business ai dailybriefing decoder you might have
mentioned I think somebody mighthave mentioned in one of your
shows decoder yeah, totally yeah, so uh interesting I um, I
listen to everyday AI prettymuch religiously and it'd be
(32:35):
curious to listen to I hadn'tlistened to AI daily briefing,
so I might give that one a whirltoo.
Scott Wilder (32:42):
Yeah, they're pretty.
They're pretty good.
I'm so, and then I'm a newsjunkie too, so I listened to.
Actually, I just read.
Every night before I go to bedI read all the New York City
newspapers.
Alex Turkovic (32:54):
Oh geez Wow.
Scott Wilder (32:58):
How long does that ?
Alex Turkovic (32:59):
take you.
Scott Wilder (33:01):
I spend about an hour and a half.
I mean I read cover to coverreading Times, the Wall Street
Journal, even though you knowthese are not just, and then the
New York Post, which is likecomic books for adults yeah,
totally, that's awesome.
Alex Turkovic (33:18):
Well, is there anybody you want to give a shout
out to?
Scott Wilder (33:21):
to you oh um yeah, I mean, first of all, I've
really learned a lot watchingyour shows too, is you know?
I just think you're doing atremendous service for everybody
here.
And then the third thing is I'mreally looking forward to
working with you on this digitalsuccess and scale project,
which is going to be webinarsevery once a month, first or
(33:44):
second thursday every month.
You'll hear more about it, but,yeah, I think I really want to
give a shout out to you, andthen I also want to give a shout
out to you, and then I alsowant to give a shout out to Rod
Cherkus.
Alex Turkovic (33:52):
Yeah.
Scott Wilder (33:52):
Who I worked with at Intuit and Marketo, so I've
known Rod for a long time.
We were in the same group and Ithink he's providing really
valuable thought leadership,especially when it comes to
chief customer officers.
Alex Turkovic (34:06):
Totally.
His new book, Reach, is realgood too.
He is.
I want to look real quick,episode 50 something maybe.
Yeah, yeah, Y'all can.
Y'all can use Google.
I won't tell you here.
That's cool, Rod's a good,Rod's a good shout out for sure.
(34:28):
Nice Well, where can peoplefind you?
Engage with you, hang out withyou, chat with you?
Scott Wilder (34:33):
all that stuff.
You can always hang out with mein any gym in the country.
I'm into pickup basketballthese days.
Are you Other than that?
Alex Turkovic (34:42):
See, my knees can't handle that anymore.
Scott Wilder (34:44):
Oh, mine can't either.
But you just say, you know, youlive once.
Alex Turkovic (34:49):
That's right Pickup basketball is a great
collaborative team project.
Scott Wilder (34:56):
Let me just tell you, yeah, but yeah, linkedin.
I, like everybody, I'm onlinkedin.
I'm, you know, I learned somuch from linkedin so you can
always reach, reach out and findme there and eventually, on
this new platform that you and Iare working on yeah, that's
great.
Alex Turkovic (35:09):
Along with Sam Davis, we should say Sam David.
She's the Picasso of Canva,exactly Cool.
Thanks for the time.
I really appreciate it.
It's always a pleasure talkingto you, but especially now, and
definitely looking forward tokeeping on collaborating with
(35:30):
you and stuff.
So we'll keep it going.
Scott Wilder (35:34):
Well, thank you for making it a great Friday
afternoon.
Alex Turkovic (35:39):
Thank you for joining me for this episode of
the Digital CX Podcast.
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(36:00):
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This episode was edited byLifetime Value Media, a media
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I'm Alex Trukovich.
Thanks so much for listening.
We'll talk to you next week.
I have a little bit of an attitude because I'm
from New York and so I'velistened to a lot of your
podcasts and the New Yorker willcome out in me is that, you
know, I just think as digitalcustomer success, digital
success, folks really leaning into how do you drive innovation
with your customers?
In other words, you know,bringing customers in, when
you're even defining a programtowards bringing customers in
(00:24):
when you're even defining aprogram.
Alex Turkovic (00:25):
Once again, welcome to the Digital Customer
Experience Podcast with me, alexTurkovich.
So glad you could join us heretoday and every week as we
explore how digital can helpenhance the customer and
employee experience.
My goal is to share what myguests and I have learned over
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If you'd like more info, needto get in touch or sign up for
(00:48):
the weekly companion newsletterthat has additional articles and
resources in it.
Go to digitalcustomersuccesscom.
For now, let's get started.
Greetings and welcome to theDigital CX Podcast.
I'm so glad that you're backwith me this week and every week
as we talk about all thingsdigital in CS.
My name is Alex Turkovich andyou're tuning in on episode 79,
(01:12):
which is staggering that we'regetting closer to 100.
Pretty amazing.
Anyway, today we've got afantastic conversation with
Scott Wilder lined up for you.
Scott is no stranger to digital.
He's been practicing this stuffbasically his whole life.
He's been part of Google, partof Adobe, he's been part of the
(01:34):
HubSpot teams.
Now he's working as a scaledleader at Clary, and so he's got
just a ton of experience and aton of things to draw from.
We get into the weeds aboutactually Clary itself and CS
teams using Clary.
We talk about AI andimplementation of AI.
(01:56):
You know, digital motions thathe's implemented and those kinds
of things.
So very cool kind of in theweeds but lots of experience to
share in this particular episode.
Also worth noting that Scottand I, along with Samantha David
of mondaycom, are hostingweekly meetups Sorry, not weekly
(02:20):
, monthly meetups on the firstThursday roughly of each month,
featuring a guest.
These are meetups that arespecific to digital, and so you
know, make sure you keep an eyeout for those.
We'll be posting about it onLinkedIn, but then there's also
a link down below in the shownotes that you can go to if you
want to go see who's on tap andto sign up for those meetups as
(02:44):
well.
Completely free to you.
It's a good chance to just hangout with digital folks.
So please enjoy thisconversation with Scott Wilder,
because I sure did.
Scott, Kenneth Wilder, as Ifound out, welcome to the
podcast.
It's nice to have you here.
Scott Wilder (03:00):
Great to be here on a easy jazz Friday afternoon.
Alex Turkovic (03:03):
Easy jazz Friday afternoon.
Wilder probably no relation toGene Wilder.
Scott Wilder (03:11):
Nope, nor Thornton , a few other Wilders.
Alex Turkovic (03:17):
Look, we've met several, several times.
We met a while ago, startedrapping about digital.
You had a lot of great stuff tosay.
We met a while ago, startedrapping about digital you had a
lot of great stuff to say.
More recently, we've beenworking together on, you know,
first Thursday, digital andscaled CS meetup type situation,
which is super fun, and so Iwanted to obviously have you on
(03:40):
the show just to to rap aboutdigital in more public.
But would you, would you giveus a rundown?
I mean, your background ispretty insane because you've got
there are a few people who havelike Google and Adobe and
things like HubSpot on their rapsheet.
So would you be so kind as towalk us through a little bit of
(04:00):
your journey.
Scott Wilder (04:02):
Sure, when you say rap sheet, I feel like I should
be in jail.
But yeah, no, yeah, I think thebig thing for me is I've.
You know, when I moved out toSilicon Valley, I came out here
because I was working atAmerican Express doing something
called database marketing,which you know for Sounds
counterintuitive,counterintuitive, exactly.
It's kind of evolved into, youknow, crm marketing.
(04:24):
But I was recruited from NewYork to go work for a company
called Silicon Graphics, whichwas a hot technology company
then, and so I've just spent mycareer working up and down
Highway 101, more or less.
And so I think you know Istarted out doing e-commerce and
direct e-commerce and digitalmarketing.
(04:44):
I started out doing e-commerceand digital marketing and did
that for Apple, silicon Graphics, like I said, and then I went
to work for Borders and rantheir e-commerce business and
e-toys.
Alex Turkovic (04:54):
Cool.
Scott Wilder (04:55):
And after Borders I went to Intuit and it was
really interesting.
So at Intuit one of thebusiness challenges in running
the commerce site was hey, scott, we need lots and lots of
content, like I think we allanybody who's run a website
hears that from you know theproduct managers, the marketers,
the customer success people, etcetera.
And so I would say, well, showme the money and I can hire
(05:19):
people to write, because I'm nota great writer.
But nobody showed me the money.
So then I kind of thought aboutsome earlier projects I did,
but nobody showed me the money.
So then I kind of thought aboutsome earlier projects I did.
And at Borders we basicallycreated small community websites
for their 200 stores and so theidea came up of doing community
.
And Scott Cook, the founder ofthe company, was really big on
(05:40):
user-created content and if yougo back in the archives he wrote
a really inspiring article inHBR in 2003, archives.
You wrote a really inspiringarticle in HBR in 2003, harvard
Business Review, 2003, on usercontribution systems,
user-created content.
And so we created thiscommunity and overnight it just
took off.
And one thing and I was goingdown the community path for a
few companies, but when I wentto.
(06:02):
So I was at Intuit and did itfor Google and then when I went
to Marketo, I realized that tobe a community person is a
little tough these days andtough back then, because you
don't see any CEOs who havecommunity background, you don't
see anybody running a divisionwho had a community background.
So that's when I pivoted reallyinto digital growth growth,
(06:22):
digital growth engagement andthis really led me to, you know,
led me to working at Udacityand Coursera and HubSpot and at
Clary.
I managed the digital success,digital self-serve play, which
basically means from a platformperspective, it's community,
it's the university, it's KBs,it's's in product and I call the
(06:46):
in product engagement, I callall that kind of your inbound,
inbound self-serve, and thenalso outbound, which is email
and ai, and we'll talk a littlebit about ai maybe later on sure
, yeah, yeah, that notion ofinbound versus outbound is is
interesting because they kind ofoverlap too sometimes, you know
, because you need all thatcollateral and not, you know,
(07:08):
articles and content and stuffto feed your outbound stuff too.
Yeah, and also you need to youknow.
One of the things I've tried todo is really understand what's
the right lever, what's theright way to interact with
somebody, so you can ask thecustomers how they want to
interact with you, which Ialways try and do, but then the
proof is in the pudding to seehow they really engage with you
when they come into yourplayground, so to speak.
(07:31):
And when I was at HubSpot, weran some really interesting
experiments, and maybe it'sintuitive, but sometimes I don't
think of these things rightaway.
But the first way that somebodyengaged with you was the one
they latched on to.
So, in other words, if theylatched on to your knowledge
base, that's how they wanted tolearn from you.
(07:51):
If they went to community, itwas community.
So it takes a lot of work toget them to use more than one
platform, or more than their onego-to platform.
And then the second thing is,to your point, whether it's
inbound or outbound, it's allpart of a journey that needs to
be well orchestrated.
Alex Turkovic (08:03):
Yeah, it's so true, and you hit on something
that is near and dear to myheart, which is the different
platforms, because so many of ususe different things for
different reasons.
Obviously, you've got your LMSand you've got your knowledge
base management and you've gotthings here and there your
support tool might be completelydifferent.
(08:24):
And you've got things here andthere your support tool might be
completely different.
And all of a sudden, you'reasking your customers to log in
to five different things just toget stuff done.
Scott Wilder (08:34):
And it's a super crappy experience a lot of times
.
Yeah, no, it's a great point.
There's some mini holy grailsand one of them is SSO or single
sign-on, and a lot of usstruggle with how do you get
that in an organization and alot of us struggle with how do
you get that, you know, in anorganization.
You know, I probably listed sixor seven companies before and I
only half of them was I able toto implement that.
Alex Turkovic (08:51):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then you've got, you know,cool stuff like I mean, ever
After is so known as, so soknown for their kind of single
platform approach, which I thinkis super cool too.
But yeah, so you mentioned themagic word.
So we have to go down that path, with the magic word being
artificial intelligence, becauseit's all the rage and I've been
(09:15):
talking I mean, I've beentalking a lot about AI recently
in the newsletter and otherplaces too because it's it's
interesting to watch to.
You know, we all have a frontrow seat, you know, and watching
it evolve, it kind of feelslike the, you know, the launch
of the iPhone all over again,kind of.
You know, we're watching thishuge shift in technology and
(09:37):
whatnot and it's interesting tosee all the individual platforms
adopt it and, you know, in aco-pilot kind of way.
But then it's also interestingto watch, you know, individuals
adopting artificial intelligenceinto their own workflow on a
daily basis.
But how have you approached AI,you know, at Clary, and how do
(09:57):
you think about implementing itfor customers?
Yeah so at.
Scott Wilder (10:01):
AI at Clary, we think about it a number of ways.
So we do have a product calledCopilot, which is conversational
or customer intelligence.
It's somewhat similar to Gongand there's a lot you can do
from an AI perspective there,which is analyzing calls.
So basically it's recordingyour calls and then you can use
(10:21):
AI to summarize those calls, topull out themes, etc.
So that's one example.
Alex Turkovic (10:26):
Like sentiment analysis and stuff like that too
.
Exactly, Exactly.
Scott Wilder (10:38):
And to be honest you know one digital play I do
is I use it to really understandwho in the company is promoting
our self-serve channels, right?
So I play Big Brother and I'llgo into it and just say OK, like
we all know, like in terms ofself-serve, you need internal
support.
It's a team, team sport, cross,cross-functional.
But it's one thing to you know,create the content or sit down
with folks and talk about how weshould position self-serve or
(11:02):
digital success.
It's another to see if peopleactually do talk about it.
And so I use these tools to playbig brother and listen to them.
And then the second way is wejust use it in the product to
help predict companies' futurerevenue, et cetera.
And then the third thing is sowe recently launched our own AI
(11:23):
chatbot is so we recentlylaunched our own ai chatbot and
basically we launched federatedsearch and the chatbot on
community, the knowledge base,and we're going to do the
university as well.
So it's it's basically onechatbot that appears in multiple
places and is leveraging thesame content that's cool.
Alex Turkovic (11:42):
Yeah, that's awesome.
So it's it's basically trainedon all that content and can
reference it across.
You know, no matter, no matterwhere you are logged in to the
ecosystem exactly so.
Scott Wilder (11:54):
I think a lot of people default to the help and
knowledge based content whenthey're launching these chatbots
, and so what we're doing is to,to your point, leveraging all
this other content whether it'suser created, partner created or
, you know, Clary created andthen the other part of it is
integrating with our back endsystems, whether it's Salesforce
(12:14):
, et cetera, so that you canpersonalize it.
So, Alex, you might be, youknow, an admin versus a
salesperson who's going to useour product Right Two very
different personas and verydifferent needs, and I find that
that's a real, at least for mepersonally.
A real area I'm interested inis how you are integrating not
just content but these backendsystems.
Alex Turkovic (12:37):
Yeah, I mean, my mind goes to two places, so I'll
try to get us to both of thoseplaces.
The first one is kind of likeyou know, for others that are
wanting to do something similar,I'd be curious to know what
kind of business case process,what kind of internal process
(12:57):
you went through in order to,you know, get this in place.
Did you have to win a lot ofhearts and minds?
Was it kind of a no-brainer?
Yeah, we should go do this Likelike what.
What did the lead up to that?
Look like?
Scott Wilder (13:12):
Yeah, so definitely have to make a
business case.
I think so a few things.
One is I was really fortunateto have a report.
I reported to the chiefcustomer officer.
He has really embraced this,but he wanted to know what the
KPIs would be, what the outcomeswould be, some sort of model to
(13:37):
outline that.
And I leveraged active andengagement numbers from the
other platforms.
And then I also looked at thelift that you get for average
contract value or ARR, fromthese self-serve platforms.
But the real thing was quicklybuilding some prototypes and
putting them in front ofcustomers.
I have a little bit of anattitude because I'm from New
York and so I've listened to alot of your podcasts and the New
Yorker will come out in me.
(13:57):
Is that, you know, I just think, as digital customer success,
digital success, folks reallyleaning in to how do you drive
innovation with your customers?
In other words, you know,bringing customers in when
you're even defining a programand getting their feedback on it
, and so a lot of things.
(14:18):
What I did is first talk tocustomers about what they want
from this product, and then thesecond thing is building
prototypes and getting them torespond to it, and then the
third thing is making sure thatyou check in with them over time
.
Yeah, so this kind of customerdriven innovation to me is
really, really important.
And then the challenges part,which I think you're asking as
(14:39):
well.
The biggest challenge isstructured versus unstructured
data, and the second challengeis some of these systems don't
have great APIs, so it's reallyhard to integrate with them, and
so you use some digitalband-aids Sorry, digital duct
tape.
Alex Turkovic (14:59):
Digital duct tape .
Scott Wilder (14:59):
Digital duct tape oh, I like that that conjures,
all kinds of images now weshould go into a dally and write
digital duct tape and see whatimage it comes up yeah, right,
exactly I might do that for theartwork for this episode.
Alex Turkovic (15:22):
Yeah, I mean, I know all about the digital duct
tape.
I you know I've joked beforethat digital CS is kind of like
the MacGyver of of CS, becausewe we just find a way to put
shit together to make it work.
You know.
Scott Wilder (15:33):
Yeah, and I would say, like, as a hiring manager,
that's such a key skill to findin people is that they're,
they're resourceful, they'recurious, they're resourceful and
they can, whether you know, bea be a macgyver.
I was trying to think of for asecond what's the female version
of macgyver, just to bepolitically correct.
Um, you know, but beingflexible to, yeah, you know,
finding that that in person,that person or employee who can
(15:56):
do that, MacGyver or MacGyveress.
There you go.
Alex Turkovic (16:02):
Yeah, yeah, it's so true.
It's so true, that kind of that.
It's almost entrepreneurialthinking, really, because you're
, you know, you just there's youneed to solve for a problem.
You may not have all theresources you need to solve for
a problem, you may not have allthe resources you need to solve
for the problem, but thecreativity comes in and you've
(16:22):
got to figure out how to make itwork.
So it's interesting.
And you did mention data asbeing a big problem, because I
mean, I think I speak for many,many, many people when I say
that you know, we probablycouldn't reliably even tell you
who our admins versus our endusers are, you know, which I
(16:45):
think a lot of people couldsympathize with.
So was there an element of datacleanliness and data hygiene
exercises that you had to gothrough to prep for something
like that, or did you have theluck of just having a good, good
set of data to go into?
Scott Wilder (16:59):
Yeah, I give.
I mean to be transparent.
I give us like a B minus interms of you know what we were
dealing with in terms of data.
There was definitely acleansing process.
I think you know I mentioned myfirst career at American
Express and you know I I alwaystell people that job was the
most challenging of all the jobsI've ever had, because I was
doing programs for like 10 to 20million people.
Alex Turkovic (17:21):
Yeah.
Scott Wilder (17:22):
And there was a huge amount of data cleansing
because you can imagine you'redealing with people's credit
card information and theirspending.
So I learned a lot in thatprocess process but it's
definitely a challenge in a lotof these companies that I've
worked at is to get the you knowthe energy behind, get the
enthusiasm behind I'll come upwith another E word energy,
(17:43):
enthusiasm and excitement around.
You know cleaning the dataBecause you know it needs to be
consistent in these differentdifferent systems.
I mean just, you knowSalesforce is the source of
truth for a lot of people, but Ithink a lot of companies are
not dealing with the best data.
Alex Turkovic (18:00):
Hey, I want to have a brief chat with you about
this show.
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(18:22):
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back to the show.
(18:43):
It's so funny because, you know,I've been part of data hygiene
kind of motions where theimpetus or the desire was to
okay this field is now going tobe required to close the
opportunity or whatever it maybe Like.
This is a required field Inorder to do your job, you need
(19:05):
to fill in this information, butthen what invariably happens is
you get crap information inthat field because it's required
and somebody just wants to putsomething in there to, like, you
know, check the box, so tospeak.
And so I really liked what yousaid about just that mentality
and the enthusiasm around datahygiene, because you know,
(19:28):
ultimately you're helping teamshelp themselves.
I love like throwing you know,hygiene parties and stuff like
let's, you know, let's all gettogether on a big call and just
like go through your accountsand fix this one field or
something like that.
You know, like those kinds ofthings make it fun.
Scott Wilder (19:45):
Yeah, when I worked at Udacity, they would
actually block off wholeafternoons or days for beta
testing or for things like datahygiene.
And, to be honest, as a youknow, one of the hats we all
wear is program manager, productmanager, whatever, and trying
to get people on board to do anexercise like that is tough it's
(20:06):
hard but it was really amazingat udacity.
You know, we just put basicallyanoints one person to be
captain and we tackle a problemyeah, yeah, almost hackathon
style really.
Alex Turkovic (20:20):
Yeah, no, exactly .
Scott Wilder (20:21):
Yeah, data hackathons need to have more
data hackathons yeah, and youknow a lot of these companies
you know are relatively small,like american express is huge,
into it was huge hub spots huge.
But some of these othercompanies you know if you just
put the energy into it you canprobably get things cleaned up
(20:42):
and then also just put some youknow business processes in place
.
But if you have you know it'sbeen a while since I've been at
Intuit but if they try thattoday they have zillions of
users.
But if you're talking about,you know, a thousand customers
and they say five to ten peopleat every customer.
I mean it's, it's manageableyeah, yeah it really is do you?
Alex Turkovic (21:03):
if you were, if you were gonna go implement a?
I mean, was there a vettingprocess between some vendors
there?
Um, from a chatbot perspective,is there any insight that you
might be able to give?
Um, not like who to choose andwho not to choose, but, like you
know, what are the things towatch out for as you're vetting
these vendors?
Scott Wilder (21:23):
As much as you can .
Their track record and ifthey're new to AI which a lot of
them are, are new to chatbotsis understanding what else
they've developed.
Yeah, understanding the peoplewho are going to be working on
the project.
So we ended up selectingsomebody who is fairly new to
working with LLMs and chatbots,but they had a proven track
(21:45):
record with search technologyand they also have proven track
record in a few other areas,such as integrations.
And then really looking at thepeople who are going to be,
involved in your project.
The next thing is being reallyclear about what your
requirements are.
I know that sounds kind ofcrazy and obvious, but document,
(22:05):
document, document.
So there's no misunderstanding,especially because a lot of
development is done withcompanies that are overseas.
So that's not a critique, acriticism of anybody.
It's just you know, you have aEuropean influence and I might
say tomato and you Sure, and youknow, thinking through.
(22:28):
I talked about integrations.
If this chatbot or whatever isgoing to integrate with other
systems is, do they haveexperience in those other
systems?
Alex Turkovic (22:37):
Yeah, right, like writing a HubSpot integration.
You kind of got to know a thingabout HubSpot.
Scott Wilder (22:45):
Exactly, exactly.
So it's one thing to hire acompany that and I'm talking,
you know, like a lot of thesechatbots say they integrate with
Salesforce.
Great, you know they can workwith APIs, but I think it goes
deeper than that.
Like, have they actually evenbeen an admin with Salesforce?
I mean, there's so much youlearn and when you're an admin
of a product, you know the good,the bad and the ugly.
Alex Turkovic (23:07):
Yeah, I think one thing I would add.
(23:33):
That's an excellent list.
The one thing I would add to itis also, just like I guess,
practical experience from aconsultation standpoint, because
I new thing.
And so in selecting a vendoryou want to select somebody who
can help you really get in placea strong program at the
beginning, driving the rightinsights, driving the right KPIs
, setting things up to whereknow, to where they can be
usable, like for your business.
(23:54):
I couldn't imagine kind ofimplementing that technology
without a services engagementfrom one of these vendors to
help you navigate that stuff.
Scott Wilder (24:05):
Yeah, that's a really good point.
And I thought of one more.
Yeah, are they willing to talkto customers?
Alex Turkovic (24:11):
Oh yeah.
Scott Wilder (24:12):
Sure, again you're going to hear me talk a lot
about the appetite we have toengage with customers and really
learn from them.
And, you know, even if they'rea so-called partner or vendor or
whatever you know, let's putthem in front of the customers
so they can hear them talk abouttheir problems.
Alex Turkovic (24:31):
Yeah.
Scott Wilder (24:33):
Their job is to be done not problems.
Sorry, the desired outcomesthat's right, but the service
part you put you point out isreally, really important.
Do they know how to handle areal service engagement?
Alex Turkovic (24:46):
yeah, yeah, so know, one of the things that I
do quite frequently just in, butyou know I'm a collector of
digital motions.
Like anytime I see somethingthat's that somebody is doing,
especially in B2C, like, Ialways take a screenshot or I
always kind of like try toremember, like what, what a
(25:08):
certain company might be doing.
That's really cool that youknow that I could use later.
Are there things like that foryou that you kind of always keep
an eye out for?
Like, have you run acrossanything interesting recently in
the wild?
That's, that's digital and cool.
Scott Wilder (25:23):
So I recently bought a Figma.
I'm sorry.
I recently bought a Fitbit.
I was on Figma today and Ibought a Fitbit.
That's funny and my wholefamily's wearing Fitbits now, so
we're all tracking.
Alex Turkovic (25:34):
Oh yeah, there's like a family component to
Fitbit, isn't there?
Yeah?
Scott Wilder (25:37):
yeah, Sharing thing yeah yeah, yeah, okay.
So I really like what they'redoing, both in terms of treating
me as an individual but also asa family.
And then the I'll call it theautomated plays.
They have to follow up on thatand you can imagine I mean I
really enjoy these companieswhere you have.
They're starting to do it,they're starting to learn from
my sleep patterns.
(25:58):
You know how to you know what'simportant to me.
And to your point about thefamily, I'm curious of how
they're going to contact all ofus?
Alex Turkovic (26:08):
Yeah, that's interesting.
Why I mean, I have you mean, Ihave my own kind of opinions
about this, but why do you thinkthe B2C like B2C has just
always been so much better atdigital than B2B and I think B2B
in general is very reluctant toadopt some of these things
because maybe they feel likeit's childish or it's like not
(26:32):
appropriate or whatever.
Do you have strong feelingsabout that?
Scott Wilder (26:37):
You know I've struggled with this since I've
been out in Silicon Valley.
I always tell people no one hasbeen as sophisticated as my
first job in terms of leveragingdata.
I think we're.
You know we watch a lot ofpeople struggling with how
companies focus more on growthand acquisition versus retention
(26:57):
and expansion yeah and I thinkit's because, if it's like a
seesaw, you know most or scale,most of the weight is still on
this acquisition part of thegame right.
So they're focusing on thattrend, that initial transaction
from a even from a digitalperspective.
Sometimes they're focusing moreon the initial transaction
(27:18):
versus that relationship thatcan be built afterwards.
And to build that relationship,data is really important.
But it takes investment rightand, again, most of the
investment is going to go intothe initial transaction yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah.
Alex Turkovic (27:34):
And you know, the one thing that also just comes
to mind a lot for me is just sms, like b2c has always been, has
been kind of always using textand sms and things like that,
and obviously you get yourselfinto issues of you know privacy
and things like that whendealing with sms, but I you know
, I think I don't think b2b isfocused on it enough, especially
(27:58):
among executives, like you know.
I think I think if, if youengaged an executive the right
way via sms, with a short smsthat kind of gave them the you
know the, the quarterly updateof how the team is doing, versus
like a QBR or a deck or anemail, they're way more likely
to engage with that than theyare you know anything else you
(28:22):
send them.
Scott Wilder (28:23):
That's a great call out.
I mean Udacity.
When I was there, we were usingtext messaging and SMS, for we
worked with a company calledBlueShift which basically was
our main email platform and theydid a lot of great stuff around
predictive modeling and AI, butthey also had this SMS
component.
And you know, now, when you,based on what you just said,
(28:45):
you're also having me think,like a lot of times, you know,
you have a company that says Ijust want to focus on the CRO or
focus on the grand prouba onthe company.
Well, they're not going to gointo a community and they're
bombarded with emails butnobody's saying OK, well,
they're on their phone.
Why don't I text them all thetime?
Or they could text me to myFitbit if they want.
Alex Turkovic (29:07):
You got to go work out.
Scott Wilder (29:10):
Exactly In the middle of your workout.
But no, it's a great point andI think I just yeah, I wish we
embraced B2C more often from adata perspective, from a
customer research perspectivefrom a technology perspective.
But yeah, I think it's just thescale is more weight on the
acquisition side.
Alex Turkovic (29:30):
Yeah, I actually didn't have BlueShift on my DCS
tech stack page, so I'm going toadd them right now.
That's a good call out.
Scott Wilder (29:39):
Yeah, they're kind of a sleeper in some ways, yeah
, but they've done great workwith Lendercom, they do great
work with Udacity and they'reprobably into the predictive
modeling for B2B email beforemost companies.
Alex Turkovic (29:54):
That's cool.
That's cool, nice.
So they got some lovely logosscrolling across their website.
Scott Wilder (30:01):
Yeah.
Alex Turkovic (30:02):
And I just saw Udacity there.
Scott Wilder (30:06):
Yeah, you might see me on that site if you do.
Alex Turkovic (30:08):
It's an old picture.
Won't tell anyone, that'sawesome.
Look, as you know, as we kindof start to round things down,
one of the things that I alwayslove to ask my guests is what
they're paying attention to,what's like in your content,
feed and content, diet and booksand all that kind of stuff.
Is there anything particularthat you're paying attention to?
Scott Wilder (30:29):
yeah, so I really believe that for folks in our
world, it's important to getbeyond just prompts and really
understand how AI works.
Yeah, and so I looked at anumber of programs.
So I'm actually going throughUniversity of Vanderbilt's AI
program Cool.
You know, I won't get the coollogo like from Harvard or
(30:49):
Stanford, but the guy who'srunning that is really
interesting and he's doing somereally great things and I just
recommend.
I was speaking to a bunch ofdigital content folks a few
weeks ago and they asked me asimilar question and so I
recommended that.
Alex Turkovic (31:05):
That's really cool.
I looked briefly at the UTprogram since I'm in Austin, you
know, I was like you know,maybe I should look at UT.
And then, of course, I gotretargeted by MIT and Harvard
and all these different placesand that just made me go.
Ah, forget about it.
Scott Wilder (31:21):
Yeah, yeah.
I think also just if people youknow are thinking about this is
like do you want the digitaltransformation theory strategy,
big thought leadership, or doyou want to really understand
how the wheels and the bus goround and round?
I'm more that kind of guy,Right, right, and so that's why
I'm doing.
So the first group go toStanford, go to Harvard, but
(31:43):
you're going to spend $2,000 to$10,000.
Alex Turkovic (31:50):
You're not a wax the car kind of person You're
like pop the hood.
Scott Wilder (31:57):
Let's check out what's underneath.
Yeah, exactly, if you can'tfind me, I'm under my car, so
don't throw me under the bus.
No, but so that you know.
There's other programs, but Ifound that one really helpful.
So I'm looking at that a lot.
And then there's just a bunchof podcasts.
I'm totally I have a problem.
I'm addicted to podcasts, so Ilisten to them all night.
Alex Turkovic (32:12):
So yeah, what do you listen?
To ai and business ai dailybriefing decoder you might have
mentioned I think somebody mighthave mentioned in one of your
shows decoder yeah, totally yeah, so uh interesting I um, I
listen to everyday AI prettymuch religiously and it'd be
(32:35):
curious to listen to I hadn'tlistened to AI daily briefing,
so I might give that one a whirltoo.
Scott Wilder (32:42):
Yeah, they're pretty.
They're pretty good.
I'm so, and then I'm a newsjunkie too, so I listened to.
Actually, I just read.
Every night before I go to bedI read all the New York City
newspapers.
Alex Turkovic (32:54):
Oh geez Wow.
Scott Wilder (32:58):
How long does that ?
Alex Turkovic (32:59):
take you.
Scott Wilder (33:01):
I spend about an hour and a half.
I mean I read cover to coverreading Times, the Wall Street
Journal, even though you knowthese are not just, and then the
New York Post, which is likecomic books for adults yeah,
totally, that's awesome.
Alex Turkovic (33:18):
Well, is there anybody you want to give a shout
out to?
Scott Wilder (33:21):
to you oh um yeah, I mean, first of all, I've
really learned a lot watchingyour shows too, is you know?
I just think you're doing atremendous service for everybody
here.
And then the third thing is I'mreally looking forward to
working with you on this digitalsuccess and scale project,
which is going to be webinarsevery once a month, first or
(33:44):
second thursday every month.
You'll hear more about it, but,yeah, I think I really want to
give a shout out to you, andthen I also want to give a shout
out to you, and then I alsowant to give a shout out to Rod
Cherkus.
Alex Turkovic (33:52):
Yeah.
Scott Wilder (33:52):
Who I worked with at Intuit and Marketo, so I've
known Rod for a long time.
We were in the same group and Ithink he's providing really
valuable thought leadership,especially when it comes to
chief customer officers.
Alex Turkovic (34:06):
Totally.
His new book, Reach, is realgood too.
He is.
I want to look real quick,episode 50 something maybe.
Yeah, yeah, Y'all can.
Y'all can use Google.
I won't tell you here.
That's cool, Rod's a good,Rod's a good shout out for sure.
(34:28):
Nice Well, where can peoplefind you?
Engage with you, hang out withyou, chat with you?
Scott Wilder (34:33):
all that stuff.
You can always hang out with mein any gym in the country.
I'm into pickup basketballthese days.
Are you Other than that?
Alex Turkovic (34:42):
See, my knees can't handle that anymore.
Scott Wilder (34:44):
Oh, mine can't either.
But you just say, you know, youlive once.
Alex Turkovic (34:49):
That's right Pickup basketball is a great
collaborative team project.
Scott Wilder (34:56):
Let me just tell you, yeah, but yeah, linkedin.
I, like everybody, I'm onlinkedin.
I'm, you know, I learned somuch from linkedin so you can
always reach, reach out and findme there and eventually, on
this new platform that you and Iare working on yeah, that's
great.
Alex Turkovic (35:09):
Along with Sam Davis, we should say Sam David.
She's the Picasso of Canva,exactly Cool.
Thanks for the time.
I really appreciate it.
It's always a pleasure talkingto you, but especially now, and
definitely looking forward tokeeping on collaborating with
(35:30):
you and stuff.
So we'll keep it going.
Scott Wilder (35:34):
Well, thank you for making it a great Friday
afternoon.
Alex Turkovic (35:39):
Thank you for joining me for this episode of
the Digital CX Podcast.
If you like what we're doing,consider leaving us a review on
your podcast platform of choice.
If you're watching on YouTube,leave a comment down below.
It really helps us to grow andprovide value to a broader
audience.
You can view the DigitalCustomer Success Definition
Wordmap and get more informationabout the show and some of the
(36:00):
other things that we're doing atdigitalcustomersuccesscom.
This episode was edited byLifetime Value Media, a media
production company founded byour good mutual friend, Dylan
Young.
Lifetime Value aims to servethe content, video, audio
production needs of the CS andpost-sale community.
They're offering services at asteep discount for a limited
(36:22):
time.
So navigate tolifetimevaluemediacom, go have a
chat with Dylan and make sureyou mention the Digital CX
podcast sent you.
I'm Alex Trukovich.
Thanks so much for listening.
We'll talk to you next week.
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