January 14, 2025 • 45 mins
Ed Powers, Principal Consultant at Service Excellence Partners, discusses in depth the measurable impact of digital customer success on revenue retention and long-term loyalty. He and Alex discuss lessons from B2C industries, the importance of viewing the full customer journey, and how companies can embrace constant innovation to scale effectively while avoiding common mistakes in digital CX strategies.
Chapters:
- 00:00 - Intro
- 03:01 - Early career lessons at HP
- 04:01 - Transitioning from hospitality to tech
- 05:20 - The bridge between B2C and B2B CX
- 10:53 - CS impact on revenue retention
- 16:15 - Why exit interviews matter
- 20:50 - Seeing the customer's true journey
- 34:37 - Simplifying scale: Peloton and Ben & Jerry's
- 40:49 - Root causes vs. symptoms in digital motions
- 43:28 - Constant innovation and experimentation
Enjoy! I know I sure did…
Ed's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ed-powers-ab5315/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
The outcomes are that at the end of the day, to what
extent do you raise thelikelihood or the probability
that a customer is going to stayor buy more, and you can
measure that difference inprobability and you can put a
dollar value against that, andthen you can add up your costs
and say are we getting ourmoney's worth here?
Speaker 2 (00:23):
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
(00:46):
the weekly companion newsletterthat has additional articles and
resources in it.
Go to digitalcustomersuccesscom.
For now, let's get started.
Hello and welcome to the DigitalCX Podcast, the show where we
talk about all things digital inCX.
My name is Alex Turkovich andthis is episode 87, where we
have an amazing interview linedup with Ed Powers, who has been
(01:11):
in and around CS for a long,long, long, long time, has
consulted many, many, manyleaders and organizations and
businesses on how tosuccessfully run and scale CS
and all that good stuff.
In this episode, we talk aboutthings like availability bias
and how the customer experienceas we perceive it isn't always
(01:32):
how our customers perceive itand also just basics of
understanding the why behind whycustomers make certain
decisions and how that impactsdigital and all that kind of
stuff.
So really fascinatingconversation with someone who's
been around the block a time ortwo and I just realized I'm
wearing my beanie.
(01:52):
It's cold here and I've beenwearing a beanie all day and, as
much as I like you, I didn'tfeel like fixing my hair.
So you're getting this today.
Anyway please enjoy thisconversation with Ed Powers,
because I sure did.
Anyway, please enjoy thisconversation with Ed Powers,
because I sure did.
Well, look, ed, welcome to theshow.
I'm so pleased we're on.
I'm grateful that we actuallymet in person.
(02:15):
You know, it's rare that Iactually do one of these shows
without having met the person inperson before doing the show.
But we met at Churn Zero.
So that was a fun Churn Zeroand I guess it's called.
We met there and had a goodtime.
But yeah welcome to the show.
So pleased to have you.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Great to be here and thanks for the invitation.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Absolutely so.
I you know, obviously I did alittle bit of LinkedIn stalking
and, as you do, obviously I dida little bit of LinkedIn
stalking and, as you do, wouldlove to get a little bit of your
background.
But you spent a pretty hugeportion of your early career at
HP.
Was that your first big boy gigor did you do stuff before then
(03:00):
?
Speaker 1 (03:00):
No, that was my first big boy gig then.
No, that was my first big boygig.
I was fresh out of college andjoined HP back in the day a
hundred years ago and I was, Iwas, was in sales.
I sold test equipment, uh HP'stest and measurement
organization, when it was allpart of one company back then.
So I had a territory in uh,northern Illinois.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Wow, so you were.
You were on the ground sellingthis stuff on site probably.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Yeah, for about six years.
So then I did some marketing,field marketing.
Really enjoyed that.
And then I got interested inquality and in operations, so
then I wound up going into thattoo.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Yeah, yeah, interesting.
So I mean, since then, like youknow, you've obviously been
over the last few years likecrazy focused on, on, you know,
post-sale and customer successand all that kind of stuff.
What is it about you and yourpersona and your psyche that
draws you to or towards just CSor CX in general?
Speaker 1 (04:05):
in general.
Well, you know it's interesting.
I spent, of all things, 10years in the luxury hospitality
industry and doing some startupsthere, and I knew nothing about
hospitality.
I'm an engineer by training andso I wound up, just by
happenstance, starting abusiness, a couple of businesses
, and growing that.
And what struck me, havingcompletely shifted industries,
(04:26):
is you know there are some,there are things to be learned
from hospitality and technologyand you know it was quite a
learning experience tounderstand when you're in the
hospitality business, it'scustomer experience is not a
thing, it is everything right,you have to do that.
Well, there's just too manyother options out there, too
(04:47):
much competition and you have tojust deliver there.
And very different from tech,where it's more of a nice to
have.
You know, people rest on theirtechnology and the pricing and
they're trying to compete onthat aspect of it.
And you know, okay, we don'twant to be jerks in our customer
experience and that is about asfar as it goes.
(05:09):
So when I came back into tech,I sought to maybe apply some of
those lessons and customersuccess seemed to be a really
good place to do that.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
It's interesting because I do feel like you know
it's interesting, because I dofeel, like you know and this has
been a recurring theme on theshow too is like taking lessons
from B2B.
But in this case, you know,luxury hospitality into or I
should say, b2c into B2C arenathat for some reason we're kind
(05:43):
of afraid to go down that pathin B2B, or just you know it
hasn't, it maybe doesn't feelapplicable to a lot of people,
when in reality there's a lot ofthings that B2C is doing that
we should and could absolutelyimplement to, you know, to help
that customer experience.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
And in some cases they're actually expected
Exactly.
And you know what strikes meabout software is it's pretty
insular as an industry.
You know people grow up andstay in software and don't have
other industry perspectives,right, and what I've been doing,
especially over the last 10years or so, is applying lessons
(06:24):
in radically differentverticals into customer success.
And people are like where didyou learn this?
There's a whole other worldover there where this is being
done, right, yeah, and I'malways surprised that they're
surprised.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Yeah, exactly Exactly .
I mean, you know there's littlethings too, like what was it?
You know, I recently ordered anew pair of of glasses, cause
you know glasses and it wasthrough Warby Parker and they
have a really seamless kind ofexperience between their stores,
(07:00):
their website, their SMS andall of that.
Like you know, the statusupdates that you get when you
place an order with them acrossall the platforms is super
highly integrated.
You know, and those are thekinds of things that always
impressed me about B2C, thathave their stuff together and
(07:21):
you just don't really see thatsame level of, you know,
integration between customersystems in B2B as you do in B2C.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
It's not a thing really there's a few that do it
and there's so much you canlearn from that.
You know so many great examplesand what they do to do, what
they do at tremendous scale iswhat we're struggling to do in
customer success.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Constantly.
Yeah, exactly, kind of a downerwhen you think about it.
But you know, the thing that Ifind fascinating about that is
that is the crux of digital CS.
you know it is what it is allabout and it's.
You know, a lot of people kindof pigeonhole digital CS into
(08:05):
this bucket of oh you do, emailcampaigns and you know all this
kind of stuff, but really whatit is it's.
It's the entirety of thedigital experience and how it's
integrated and and and also howyour humans are integrated into
it.
You know, it's not just techtouch, solely tech touch.
So so I guess where that leadsme is is the natural.
(08:27):
Next question is is issomething that I do ask you know
, the majority of my guestswho've been on the show which is
you know what would be yourkind of boilerplate, elevator
pitch of what digital cs is ifsomebody off the street were to
ask you.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
I would just say it's using electronic means to
ensure customers realize thevalue they expected.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Yeah, simple, very simple, and you know what I like
about that it's wonderfullyspecific.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Yet very ambiguous too.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
I've been accused of that a few times uh, but I I
think that there's there's,there is a a validity to the
ambiguity, because you know,what one company or person does
digitally is going to becompletely different than what
another company or you know doesdigitally like it's there's
different than what anothercompany or you know does
(09:25):
digitally Like it's.
There's so many it dependsmoments when it comes to
designing this stuff that youkind of have to be ambiguous.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Well said, yeah, and it's.
It's the approach and it's thethe method that's used to get
there.
That makes all the difference.
The devil's in the details, asthey say.
But if you approach it in aconsistent way, you know that
gets you home.
But the path may be entirelyyours.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Yeah, exactly, Exactly so.
Yeah, so the success element sousing technology to drive your
customer success, which is great, I mean, ultimately, you try to
(10:16):
have those success outlinedlike what does success mean?
Driving success we're drivingrevenue retention and those
kinds of things.
As part of our prep, we talkeda little bit about how CS can
have a much more direct impacton revenue retention and I think
, first and foremost, I think itwould be great to get your take
(10:38):
and your input, because I knowyou have a lot to say about this
in terms of the impact that aCS org in general can have on
NRR in a more, you know, maybemore direct way, because I feel
like a lot of us kind of look atit in a passive sort of way.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Yeah, and I guess what I would say is the magic
all happens when you startasking a very simple question.
It's why?
Why are customers renewing?
Why are other customers leaving?
Why are some customers buyingmore?
Why are some customers buyingless?
When you really understand why,then you understand what
(11:17):
context customer success has andwhat you can contribute to it
Right?
So a lot of the work I do withclients is to go ask that
question and to ask it in such away that you really get the
answer.
You know, a lot of times peoplewill ask for churn reasons and
they'll have a form or whateverThey'll.
You know it's secondhand andpeople will check a box.
Yeah but they don't reallyunderstand what's behind that.
(11:40):
Why did you decide what you did?
What led up to that?
What were the drivers in thatdecision?
So you ask a certain set ofquestions that really reveals
why they made the decisions theydid, and then so with that
context, then you can goquantify that You're going to
hear common themes if you talkto enough people.
I just did this with a client alittle while ago where, you know
(12:03):
, you asked two sets of peoplethose that did renew and bought
more and those that left.
And what's striking is a lot oftimes they talk about the same
reasons, right?
One of them, they're stayingbecause they got X and the other
folks left because they didn'tget X.
Well, guess what?
X is a factor.
It's a very important factor,right?
(12:24):
So you can pretty quickly, ifyou interview customers, narrow
down that list of real driversin that decision and then you
can go quantify that and whenyou do that, you collect that
data.
Then very quickly you see adistribution where it's a Pareto
distribution or PowerLockdistribution, where you have a
(12:44):
small number of factors thatexplain the vast majority of the
behaviors.
And when you look at thosefactors, what you find is that
there are certain things thatcustomer success can do and
influence, and there's a wholelot of things that you can't
influence.
For example, you don't set theprice, you don't determine who's
a good fit for your product.
(13:05):
That's in sales and marketing.
You can't change the product orthe features, right.
But things like as we've well,no one have talked about for
years, didn't get enough valueout of it, didn't get enough
usage, and you can stillquantify that.
And if you can match that interms of revenue, frequency,
probability, now you canquantify what your contribution
(13:28):
is right.
So that is just a question ofwell, how much impact do we make
?
And what does that look likewhen we look at the operations
of customer success compared towhat the outcomes are at the end
of the day, to what extent doyou raise the likelihood or the
probability that a customer isgoing to stay or buy more?
(13:52):
And you can measure thatdifference in probability and
you can put a dollar valueagainst that.
And then you can add up yourcost and say are we getting our
money's worth here?
And if you go through thatexercise, surprise, surprise,
just getting customers to thatnext level to increase those
odds, usually more than paysabout the kinds of things that I
(14:21):
will track in a digital program, you know.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
I think there's like your classic CS.
You know retention metrics andall that kind of stuff.
But I'm also looking atmarketing.
You know metrics in terms ofwhat campaigns are you running
and are they effective?
Open rates, click-through rates, engagement rates, all that
kind of stuff.
But I think what you just hiton as well is kind of that magic
(14:49):
third bucket, which is theattribution In the digital realm
, maybe campaigns and maybewhatever.
But just in general, which ofyour CS motions and CS actions
had direct attribution torevenue?
That's notoriously difficultfor a lot of people.
(15:09):
It's elusive.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
I mean, either you don't have the data and you need
to go collect that data, or youhave the data and you don't
understand how to analyze thedata.
Right yeah, this is amathematical, this is a
statistical argument, and if youhave the data, you can show it
very quickly.
With the right set ofstatistical tools, you can
demonstrate that and I do thatall the time with my clients is
(15:33):
to show exactly what thedifference in probabilities are.
And don't take it from me.
This is out of your data, right?
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Yeah, exactly, difference in probabilities are
and don't take it from me.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
This is out of your data, right?
Yeah, exactly.
And when you're working in thefacts, people don't debate it so
much.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Yep, yep, yep, just as long as they trust the data
that it's coming from which isanother whole can of worms which
is a whole another can of worms.
I take it you are a fan fromyour earlier answer, that you're
a fan of the exit interview ingeneral, like a customer exit
interview.
(16:07):
Have you seen that implementedparticularly well and do you
mind sharing some of that secretsauce?
Speaker 1 (16:14):
I rarely see it done well by a company themselves.
Rarely see it done well by acompany themselves, and the
reason being is that the peoplethat you typically ask to go
collect that information.
If it's the qualitative form ofthat, you know they actually
talk to somebody.
Usually the people that do thathave a lot of biases, and it's
completely understandable, right.
(16:34):
They tend to look at thingsfrom their own perspective.
Having an outside person comein and ask that very, very much
helps to eliminate some of that.
You can be, you know tell memore about that and what
happened and why did it happen.
And you know you ask adifferent set of questions than
someone working for the companywould.
And the person you'reinterviewing is a little bit
more comfortable because theyknow they're not going to offend
(16:55):
anybody, right?
This isn't no one's going totake what they say in the wrong
way.
They can be completely candidand explain all of it to you and
feel completely safe doing itright.
So almost always when I've donethis, you know we surface
things that people had no idea,had no idea that was what was
really going on, right?
So I think in good companiesthey have a healthy dose of
(17:20):
outside people doing it for them, understanding that they have
their own biases.
And we we all go through lifewith our blinders on, and one of
the gifts we give each other iswe say, hey, you know you got a
blinder on that.
I had no idea, you know.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Yeah, absolutely.
I have yet much like you haveyet to see an internally run
exit interview process that Apersists and doesn't die quickly
after it's launched and B is,to your point, that successful
Because, honestly, if I were toreceive a call from a vendor
that I had churned out of, Iprobably wouldn't really want to
(17:57):
spend any significant amount oftime on the phone.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Right, and it's a trick to get people, even as a
third party, you know, becausethere's kind of this window of
opportunity.
After that They'll ignore you.
When it's still fresh, yeah,they're willing to talk because
they just made that decision andthey want to share that Right.
They're still processing itthemselves.
But, you know, I think one thingthat's very important as well
(18:22):
and I've seen this several timesis that it doesn't you don't
have to do this qualitativeinterviewing all the time, but
you do need to do it frequentlyenough.
One of the clients I work with,you know, was absolutely sure.
I know these customers, I'vebeen in this space for 15 years,
I know all about this, and Ihad to really really push them
and say please, please, please,let me go talk to your customers
(18:45):
, because I think we're missingsomething.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
And finally relented.
And then I went and talked tothem and huge surprises, right,
I mean their.
His whole market had shiftedand he wasn't even aware of it
right they were selling to anentirely different segment that
he was unaware of, whichexplained what he was seeing in
terms of his churn behavior,right, and so you need to do
this enough that you have thatvisibility frequently enough,
(19:12):
because markets are alwayschanging.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
Yeah, this reminds me I was advising a company not
long ago that was really, reallyhesitant to launch like new
digital outreach campaignsbecause they were afraid of
rocking the boat.
You know, I don't think they hadand much like kind of you
(19:34):
alluded to.
There wasn't this culture oflet's just go talk to our
customers.
You know, it was just like let's, you know, wait till they reach
out to support or somethinglike that.
But there was this massivehesitance to even like think
about distributing, you know,digital comms for this fear of
the customer, you know,responding, and I just thought
(19:55):
that was so it throughout thatentire organization, that this
kind of hesitancy to reach out.
You know that I've never reallyencountered anything quite like
it, and so you know there's alot of kind of change management
that has to go into those kindsof things as well and to open
yourself up, you know, to thatkind of feedback.
(20:17):
And that kind of leads me to mynext question just around the
customer experience in general,because one of the things as a
CS leader that I like to doperiodically is to insert myself
into the customer experienceand go secret shopping, if you
will, in my own processes, andit's amazing what you uncover
when you do that kind of stuff.
But I was curious to get yoursentiment on or your take on
(20:42):
that sort of thing or how youtypically advise your customers.
Kind of, stay connected to thecustomer and the customer
experience.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Yeah, that's a great question and I think it is so
essential to again go back andtalk to customers and ask the
questions that you don'tnormally ask.
Back and talk to customers andask the questions that you don't
normally ask.
There is Daniel Kahneman, thelate Daniel Kahneman, a
behavioral scientist.
You know one of the things helabels this as what you see is
all there is.
You see, that is what that is.
(21:11):
So what you see is all there is, and it's about availability
bias, whatever you can easilyrecall.
Whatever you can rememberdefines your reality, and the
problem when we think about ourcustomer journey is we think
about our customer journey fromour own perspective.
Right, we talk about it becausewe know what this is.
We see this all the time weinteract with these customers
(21:33):
and, of course, they follow ourprocess.
So we have therefore definedwhat their journey is.
The problem is, that's not thecustomer's journey, it's just
your experience of what that isfrom your vantage point.
And a lot of what I do, againtalking to clients, is to say
you know, tell me the story,tell me about the time.
You know, from the time whenyou purchased this product to
(21:56):
when you said, aha, there's thevalue I was looking for.
And just you know, justdescribe that to me what
actually happened on your end,what were the things, what steps
did you have to go through?
What were the things that youwere doing that maybe your
vendor wasn't even aware youwere having to do, right?
And when you unpack that, youfind all kinds of surprises that
(22:16):
there's certain things thatwere easy for them and quick and
they loved it.
And then there's certain thingsthat were easy for them and
quick and they loved it.
And then there were otherthings that were a huge struggle
.
And then there were anotherwhole set of things that they
had no idea and those kinds ofopportunities that's, new
products and services for them.
Right, there's an abundance ofthings that you can get from
that that will smooth thatjourney and make things faster,
(22:39):
more effective.
One thing we typically, forexample, tend to overlook on the
technology side is we'rehyper-focused on the technology.
We know how our tools work andwe know the data and how it all
connects and integration, blah,blah, blah, blah blah.
We know how to run theseprojects.
We're extremelytechnology-focused.
We know very little about thecustomer's process, what they
(23:00):
have to change in their processor their policies or the
behaviors of their users.
Right, when you changetechnology, by definition you
change the process and youchange the people that are
interacting with it, and we tendto forget about that, ignore it
.
Hey, that's a customer'sproblem and yet there are so
(23:21):
many things that we can do tomake that easier and faster for
them and more likely to get theresults they're after.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
And if you never ask, you never know know that
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(23:51):
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(24:12):
Now back to the show.
That's so true.
There's also this extension ofbeing hyper-focused on the tech
and the speeds and feeds and thehow-tos that we miss a lot of
times, which is that consultancylayer of injecting what
(24:32):
expertise you've gleaned fromhow your other customers are
doing certain things and whatprocesses that they've
implemented.
A lot of times, I think we missout on the opportunity for us
to not just drive value through,like the software, but drive
value through advice and generalguidance on how to do certain
things in a way that you know,makes sense based on what we've
(24:53):
seen, right, yeah, and I thinkdigitally add to that.
We miss out on doing thatdigitally a lot of times.
Because you know you outcomethat a certain customer is
(25:22):
trying to achieve, or you knowan activity that usually leads a
customer into a dark path,that's prime time for you to
digitally intervene, either likein product or with an email or
just as an internal alert, tosay, hey, you know, go check out
Acme, they're about to screwthemselves.
Yeah, kind of speaking ofdigital motions and whatnot.
(25:48):
You know, I'd be curious to getus.
It's always great speaking withpeople who are active in the
consulting world, because yousee a lot of different things
and you see a lot of differentCS orgs like operate in
different ways.
Are there?
Are there cool like digitalemotions that you've encountered
, you know in the past few yearsthat you feel like you know are
(26:08):
things that other people couldkind of pick up on and and and
track down, or things you'veseen in the wild that are just
like really cool.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Yeah, and I can't get too specific because every
client I work with is under NDAso I can't really name names.
Of course, I can say that, yes,there's a lot of the work I've
been doing the last couple ofyears in particular probably not
surprising to anybody is allabout that.
It's how do we do this at scale, how do we drive out costs?
You know, a lot of times when Iwork with clients, the tiering
(26:38):
isn't really clean.
Of times when I work withclients, the tiering isn't
really clean, In other words,understanding the financial
trade-offs.
Not every customer is the same.
You have some that spend awhole lot of money with you.
Again back to the power lawdistribution.
You have a small number ofaccounts that make up a monster
part of your revenue and youtypically have a long tail of a
lot of accounts that make upvery little.
And where you draw those linesfrom a financial perspective
(27:02):
really, really is important.
Right, it's not only the pastperformance, but what is the
future potential is the whitespace too, but how you allocate
those accounts and how youunderstand the investment and
return of those tiers iscritically important, because
that gives you the guard bandsor the guidelines for what
(27:22):
you're going to do in each oneof those groups of customers.
Right and a lot of times peoplejust they have no concept that
they've never done that analysisand and when you draw the line
really matters.
So that's part of it.
I will say and we startedtalking about this is that in
the B2C space, if you reallywant to see how it's done, well,
holy cow, look at what'shappening in B2C.
(27:45):
And the problem I've seen insoftware is that it's way too
complicated, right, and it'smade to be way too complicated.
It's very, very hard to makethings simple.
It's really hard to do that.
You have to invest a lot oftime and a lot of effort and you
have to do something to make asolution better than to take
(28:06):
something away.
And they've actually proventhis.
A fascinating study inbehavioral science is that that
is one of the blinders thatpeople have in product and in
(28:27):
engineering is that we'll justadd more and we'll add more and
we'll add more, and then youhave this huge feature bloat
going on.
Way too complicated, peoplecan't deal with it.
It's way overpriced for maybethe majority of the use cases
that people really need it for.
You know, like Excel, mostpeople only use about 20 to 30
features.
(28:47):
It's got 450 features in it,right?
I mean why?
Right?
So there's this in software inparticular.
It's easy to add stuff, sopeople are always adding stuff.
They're not making it simpler,they're not making it better
that way.
So contrast that with the B2Cspace, where it's a very simple
(29:07):
product to begin with most times, but they go above and beyond
to make it even simpler.
Right?
Apple's a great example.
Peloton blows me away, peloton.
I know they've had their upsand downs, sure, but you want to
look at a company that's gotthat dialed in.
Look at Peloton, holy cow.
Right, from a digital approachto renewals, to keeping
(29:31):
customers in the fold.
Yeah, all the stuff that theydo in community and they're
athletes, and I mean it goes onand on and on.
And if anybody has reallycracked that code, look at what
they're doing, and all thatstuff is highly leverageable.
But think about what's reallyrequired here and you mentioned
this before too it's not justemail campaigns.
You have to design your wholebusiness around this.
(29:54):
You have to have simple,easy-to-use product.
You have to design them thatway.
You have to design them to besimple and that anybody can pick
it up and use it.
And the more stuff you throw onthere, the less simple it is.
Right, yeah, right.
So being really crisp aboutthat and you design it all in as
much as you possibly can intothe product and I think that's
another barrier for software isthat you know the dev people and
(30:17):
the product people.
They're in their own world andthey throw it over the wall and
we don't.
That's, we're not measuring.
But who cares about that?
Customers that's, that'scustomer success at sales.
We're doing the cool stuffright.
So they don't think in terms ofwe have to design and build our
products for those customers,right, that's right.
(30:39):
And they're not necessarily asfocused as they really need to
be or to any extent, how it'sdone in B2C.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
This company I just joined.
One of the cool things that wedo on Friday afternoons is just
a demo jam where all theengineers and product guys show
off what they're working on live, before it's done, to all of
the customer folks and salesfolks.
And it's a luxury that you cando in a smaller company, right.
(31:05):
But it's such a cool way, youknow, not only for product and
engineering to get that kind ofearly feedback from the people
who are embedded with thecustomer, to get that kind of
early feedback from the peoplewho are embedded with the
customer, but it also just helps, you know, helps make sure that
we're designing things andwe're building things in a way
that are intuitive to thecustomer.
(31:25):
Or, you know, maybe if it'sbuilt for one or two customers,
we know five or six others whocould really benefit from that
kind of thing.
And it starts to kind offormulate how we message things,
and you know, but also call outsome obvious areas where it
doesn't quite make sense thisway or we should do it another
way.
And I think it's a reallyhealthy thing to think about,
(31:48):
obviously, products from thelens of customer success,
because, to your point, the bestPLG motions are built around a
solid product.
That is just kind of deadsimple, right.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Yeah, I loved your yeah, go ahead.
Well, I was just going to say agreat lesson.
There's a, you know, you lookat Intel, right, intel in the
early days of Intel, transistorswere still lab projects, right.
Right were still lab projects,right.
And Andy Grove and all theearly leaders at Intel, they
(32:21):
talked about copying McDonald'sand they were very specific
about that.
How do we get from this labproject very small yield on our
devices to banging these thingsout by the millions?
Right, and they made that shiftand a big part of that was just
simplicity, make it simple.
(32:42):
Make it simple and designdesign for volume, design for
manufacturability and forsupportability, right.
So that changed their wholemindset about how they design
those products.
And you know again, hugelessons can be learned there
going from the science project,the really cool stuff in the lab
, to actually doing it attremendous scale and making a
(33:05):
whole bunch of money doing itRight.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
This reminds me of something I saw recently about
Ben and Jerry's as well, becausethey they make I forget the
exact number number, but it'sliterally millions of gallons of
ice cream a day, like, but it'sstill just cream and sugar and
chocolate.
But but you know, part of partof their process is is so
(33:30):
automated and you know, from asupply chain management and then
all the machinery that you needlike, there's a ton of
automation, but there's stillthat human element all along the
way, like.
There's people you knowliterally slicing open a pint
and testing it.
They really pay close attentionto, like how big the chunks are
, because you know they're bigon.
(33:52):
You know, big chunks in yourice cream or whatever.
So there's these core tenants.
That still exists.
Where I think it's, there's acool parallel to digital
customer success, becausethey've built all this
automation and all thissophistication around churning
out literally millions ofgallons of ice cream a day.
However, you're not using yourhumans to like, do it.
(34:12):
You're using your humans forquality control.
You're using your humans tolike, do it.
You're using your humans forquality control.
You're using your humans tolike, you know, make sure that
your machinery isn't just, youknow, pumping out a substandard
product.
The human element is still verymuch part of that brand, which
you see, you know, and it's allthat socially conscious, mission
driven stuff that they do.
That's all driven by automation.
(34:33):
I think that I love that kindof parallel.
Yeah, and they do, that's alldriven by automation.
I think that I love that kindof parallel.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Yeah, and they do, I'm sure, like like really good,
well-run B2C companies, theydon't.
They don't start day one inscale.
They go and they do a lot ofexperimentation, a lot of test
marketing, a lot of hey, we cameup with this new thing, let's
run us do a small run on thatand see how people respond to it
, Right?
So don't just go fromengineering to push it out.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
You know and scale like that.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
No, find out what's really going to work, test it,
shake it out and then go scaleit.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Nail it, then scale it right, same with your digital
motions, like you know.
Test test.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
Test test break stuff If it doesn't work then redo it
, do it a different way A, Btesting.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
Make it better.
Yeah, they were saying they dosomething like a couple hundred
flavors a year, but only likethree or four of them make it to
market.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
So there you go, because they're testing and it's
better to.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
It's better to weed out the bad stuff and stick with
the good stuff yep, I lovedyour peloton example from
earlier because I used to have ahydro, which is like the rowing
version of Peloton.
But they did a really good jobof, I'd say, you know, digital
customer success, because youwould reach certain you know
(35:45):
meter milestones in your rowing,your cumulative rowing.
So, like I got, you know, theyjust sent me like swag every
milestone that came along.
So it's like a pair of socks at50,000 meters or something like
that, and a flask, whatever itwas, and I think that's such a
cool combination also of youknow there wasn't a human behind
(36:06):
any of that.
It happened automatically,right?
But the real human emotion ofreceiving something and
celebrating those milestones, Ithink is a huge thing and also a
massive miss for a lot ofcompanies is celebrating the
wins.
I love to ask this questionbecause it's somewhat vulnerable
.
So, you know, feel free toplead the fifth, but, like you
(36:28):
know, are there, are there, likemistakes and blunders that
you've learned from.
You know in the past that youcarry forward with you maybe,
particularly as they relate tocustomer success or otherwise,
but are there things that otherscan?
How can others learn from yourmistakes?
Speaker 1 (36:48):
Well, you know, I asked my wife because you'll get
the unabridged list of all themistakes I've made, because,
it's a long and impressive listof mistakes.
You know there certainly havebeen mistakes in my career along
the lines.
I certainly have made thatmistake of what a lot of teams
(37:09):
are making right now is thatyou're trying to make you know
there are certain individuals ona customer success team we're
not talking about digital rightnow, but in customer success
team and force them into beingsalespeople.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
Right.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
And there are some people that just don't want it,
they're not ready for it,they're never going to go there,
right?
And it's no matter how you wantto incentivize or train or
whatever, you got to recognizethat people are all motivated
differently, right.
So I've certainly made thatmistake.
I think a lot of people aremaking that mistake right now,
and a lot of customer successorganizations is oh, everybody
sells, right, make everybody asalesperson.
(37:43):
And I remember one employee Ihad when I was going down that
path.
They said look, if I wanted tobe a salesperson, I'd be in
sales Like duh.
And it's so simple, I mean.
But I think a lot of times themistakes that people are making
by and large are just hey, wehaven't done a good job of
(38:04):
quantifying, we don't even knowhow to show the value of
customer success.
So let's do the easy thing.
Let's just give everybody aquota and let's just go right
and everybody's responsible fora number and if you don't make
your number, you're gone.
Okay, that's not going to workin customer success.
It's just go right andeverybody's responsible for a
number, and if you don't makeyour number, you're gone, okay.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
That's not going to work in customer success.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
It's just not, and I think you know there is
something and special and uniqueabout customer success that's
very different from accountmanagement.
It's very different from, youknow, hunter salespeople.
And trying to blend them alltogether and mix them up, I
think, personally, is a recipefor disaster.
So that's one thing.
That's a mistake I have madeand that's a mistake that I
(38:44):
think a lot of people are making, I would say, in terms of
digital, in particular, one ofthe things that I see people do
all the time is they aretreating symptoms and not root
causes, right?
Sure, Some of that is because ofwhen we measure behaviors and
we talked about this before wecan correlate.
Well, when we see this, we seethat, well, correlation is not
causation, but a lot of times weconflate those two.
(39:05):
Well, we you know, for example,engagement often is linked to
renewal probability, right?
So higher, higher engagement,higher renewal probability.
So what do people do?
They try to grow the engagement, but that's not the root cause,
that's the symptom.
What causes people to be engaged.
That's the root cause, right?
(39:26):
So I see a lot of times, indigital in particular, because
of availability bias, because ofwhat you see is all there is,
you tend to just say, well,that's my little world, that's
my universe and therefore I'mgoing to optimize around what I
can see, and that is a huge,that's a big problem.
I see a lot of people makingthat mistake.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
Yeah, yeah, that's very interesting, I think.
When it comes to digital andbuilding digital programs, I
think you're right.
There's a lot of like, quote,unquote, no brainers that you go
after Like, okay, anotherexample would be high support
ticket volumes.
Right, sure, you're going towant to flag that account.
(40:10):
It's an account to payattention to.
Does that account need an emailcampaign against it?
Probably not.
But do you want to do some rootcause analysis to see what it
is about that particular accountthat's causing the high ticket
volume?
Yeah, probably, and maybethat's the same root cause
that's causing five otheraccounts to have a high ticket
(40:33):
volume.
It's such a big part ofdigitization is like having the
telemetry and the data and theinsights necessary so that you
can uncover those things thatmight not otherwise be
correlated or obvious withinyour business.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
Exactly, and it goes back to the simple question of
why People do not ask why.
Nearly enough they know thewhat and the where and the who
and the how, but they don't askthe why.
The why is where all the magichappens.
When you keep asking why, youcome up with it.
Yeah, that's the path tounderstand causal relationships,
you know five wise the shit outof it.
(41:11):
There you go, that's it, thatis it.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
Oh man, this is, this has been good.
Hey look, as we, as we kind ofround down, one of the things
that I love to get from everyoneis just their content, diet,
love to understand what you payattention to.
You know, both for CS but thenjust otherwise.
Like you know, podcasts, books,all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
Yeah, I, I, you know I do with I'm sure a lot of
folks do.
I'm on a bunch of mailing listsand I look at LinkedIn just to
kind of get a pulse on what'shappening in the industry.
I do go to conferences, thingslike that.
That's pretty much, um, youknow, table stakes to be to keep
up with your industry.
Uh, but me I'm kind of weird.
I'm kind of a geek, so I read alot of neuroscientific journals
.
I read a couple of researchpapers a week just because I'm
(42:00):
fascinated by that and I thinkthere's so much that we can do
in customer success thatscientists are discovering about
human behavior right, and justapplying some of that in
customer success.
I'm fascinated by that.
I've worked with clients to dothat and seen some amazing
results.
So I do read a lot ofneuroscientific journals.
(42:23):
I also read Medium.
I do a lot of analytics anddata science and they have a lot
of good stuff on Medium peoplewriting about data science so I
read that pretty religiously.
So it's really those three.
I think that's pretty much mydiet of content.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
Yeah, that's great, that's great.
Is there anyone that you'd liketo give a shout out or some
kudos to?
That's doing somethingparticularly great?
Speaker 1 (42:49):
in digital.
You know, I without, withoutbetraying an NDA, I probably
can't.
So without their permission inadvance, I should put it that
way.
But I can say that I'm workingwith a client right now very
impressive.
I wish I could tell you theirname, but they're doing some
cool stuff and it's all back tothat.
What we have just talked aboutis asking why and experimenting.
(43:13):
Don't jump into a commitment.
Just try it out, small scale,you know.
Do a do a proof of concept withthe technology and just give it
a go and see what you can learnfrom it and weed out the bad
stuff.
Don't commit to somethingthat's mediocre right Pivot
quickly.
There's so much out there, somuch, especially right now in
the space all kinds oftechnology that you can use for
(43:36):
doing digital customer success,all different ways of doing it,
all different.
I mean it's it's a smorgasbordof stuff, but don't just pick
one and run and just blow it up.
You know, try out a bunch ofstuff, be constantly
experimenting and innovating andtrying different things and
asking why before you commit toanything.
I think that is the secret.
That really is the secret,right there.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
Yeah, that's great.
That'll be the.
That's going to be the title ofthe show.
It's five wise, love it.
Finally, where, where canpeople find you, reach out to
you, learn more about you?
All that stuff.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
Connect to me on LinkedIn.
I do a micro blog once a week,if you're interested in in that.
I would also say I have awebsite.
It's at se-partnerscom, sose-partnerscom is my website and
then my email is ed atse-partnerscom, if you want that
(44:31):
.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
That's great.
Link will be down in the shownotes if you want the easy route
, the digital route.
Ed, it's been a pleasure havingyou.
It's always great talking toyou.
Thanks so much for carving outthe time and yeah, it was
awesome having you on the show.
Speaker 1 (44:45):
Well, it's been delightful.
I always love talking to Alexand I appreciate the invitation.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
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
(45:15):
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
(45:36):
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So navigate tolifetimevaluemediacom, go have a
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I'm Alex Trukovich.
Thanks so much for listening.
We'll talk to you next week.
The outcomes are that at the end of the day, to what
extent do you raise thelikelihood or the probability
that a customer is going to stayor buy more, and you can
measure that difference inprobability and you can put a
dollar value against that, andthen you can add up your costs
and say are we getting ourmoney's worth here?
Speaker 2 (00:23):
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
(00:46):
the weekly companion newsletterthat has additional articles and
resources in it.
Go to digitalcustomersuccesscom.
For now, let's get started.
Hello and welcome to the DigitalCX Podcast, the show where we
talk about all things digital inCX.
My name is Alex Turkovich andthis is episode 87, where we
have an amazing interview linedup with Ed Powers, who has been
(01:11):
in and around CS for a long,long, long, long time, has
consulted many, many, manyleaders and organizations and
businesses on how tosuccessfully run and scale CS
and all that good stuff.
In this episode, we talk aboutthings like availability bias
and how the customer experienceas we perceive it isn't always
(01:32):
how our customers perceive itand also just basics of
understanding the why behind whycustomers make certain
decisions and how that impactsdigital and all that kind of
stuff.
So really fascinatingconversation with someone who's
been around the block a time ortwo and I just realized I'm
wearing my beanie.
(01:52):
It's cold here and I've beenwearing a beanie all day and, as
much as I like you, I didn'tfeel like fixing my hair.
So you're getting this today.
Anyway please enjoy thisconversation with Ed Powers,
because I sure did.
Anyway, please enjoy thisconversation with Ed Powers,
because I sure did.
Well, look, ed, welcome to theshow.
I'm so pleased we're on.
I'm grateful that we actuallymet in person.
(02:15):
You know, it's rare that Iactually do one of these shows
without having met the person inperson before doing the show.
But we met at Churn Zero.
So that was a fun Churn Zeroand I guess it's called.
We met there and had a goodtime.
But yeah welcome to the show.
So pleased to have you.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Great to be here and thanks for the invitation.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Absolutely so.
I you know, obviously I did alittle bit of LinkedIn stalking
and, as you do, obviously I dida little bit of LinkedIn
stalking and, as you do, wouldlove to get a little bit of your
background.
But you spent a pretty hugeportion of your early career at
HP.
Was that your first big boy gigor did you do stuff before then
(03:00):
?
Speaker 1 (03:00):
No, that was my first big boy gig then.
No, that was my first big boygig.
I was fresh out of college andjoined HP back in the day a
hundred years ago and I was, Iwas, was in sales.
I sold test equipment, uh HP'stest and measurement
organization, when it was allpart of one company back then.
So I had a territory in uh,northern Illinois.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Wow, so you were.
You were on the ground sellingthis stuff on site probably.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Yeah, for about six years.
So then I did some marketing,field marketing.
Really enjoyed that.
And then I got interested inquality and in operations, so
then I wound up going into thattoo.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Yeah, yeah, interesting.
So I mean, since then, like youknow, you've obviously been
over the last few years likecrazy focused on, on, you know,
post-sale and customer successand all that kind of stuff.
What is it about you and yourpersona and your psyche that
draws you to or towards just CSor CX in general?
Speaker 1 (04:05):
in general.
Well, you know it's interesting.
I spent, of all things, 10years in the luxury hospitality
industry and doing some startupsthere, and I knew nothing about
hospitality.
I'm an engineer by training andso I wound up, just by
happenstance, starting abusiness, a couple of businesses
, and growing that.
And what struck me, havingcompletely shifted industries,
(04:26):
is you know there are some,there are things to be learned
from hospitality and technologyand you know it was quite a
learning experience tounderstand when you're in the
hospitality business, it'scustomer experience is not a
thing, it is everything right,you have to do that.
Well, there's just too manyother options out there, too
(04:47):
much competition and you have tojust deliver there.
And very different from tech,where it's more of a nice to
have.
You know, people rest on theirtechnology and the pricing and
they're trying to compete onthat aspect of it.
And you know, okay, we don'twant to be jerks in our customer
experience and that is about asfar as it goes.
(05:09):
So when I came back into tech,I sought to maybe apply some of
those lessons and customersuccess seemed to be a really
good place to do that.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
It's interesting because I do feel like you know
it's interesting, because I dofeel, like you know and this has
been a recurring theme on theshow too is like taking lessons
from B2B.
But in this case, you know,luxury hospitality into or I
should say, b2c into B2C arenathat for some reason we're kind
(05:43):
of afraid to go down that pathin B2B, or just you know it
hasn't, it maybe doesn't feelapplicable to a lot of people,
when in reality there's a lot ofthings that B2C is doing that
we should and could absolutelyimplement to, you know, to help
that customer experience.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
And in some cases they're actually expected
Exactly.
And you know what strikes meabout software is it's pretty
insular as an industry.
You know people grow up andstay in software and don't have
other industry perspectives,right, and what I've been doing,
especially over the last 10years or so, is applying lessons
(06:24):
in radically differentverticals into customer success.
And people are like where didyou learn this?
There's a whole other worldover there where this is being
done, right, yeah, and I'malways surprised that they're
surprised.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Yeah, exactly Exactly .
I mean, you know there's littlethings too, like what was it?
You know, I recently ordered anew pair of of glasses, cause
you know glasses and it wasthrough Warby Parker and they
have a really seamless kind ofexperience between their stores,
(07:00):
their website, their SMS andall of that.
Like you know, the statusupdates that you get when you
place an order with them acrossall the platforms is super
highly integrated.
You know, and those are thekinds of things that always
impressed me about B2C, thathave their stuff together and
(07:21):
you just don't really see thatsame level of, you know,
integration between customersystems in B2B as you do in B2C.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
It's not a thing really there's a few that do it
and there's so much you canlearn from that.
You know so many great examplesand what they do to do, what
they do at tremendous scale iswhat we're struggling to do in
customer success.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Constantly.
Yeah, exactly, kind of a downerwhen you think about it.
But you know, the thing that Ifind fascinating about that is
that is the crux of digital CS.
you know it is what it is allabout and it's.
You know, a lot of people kindof pigeonhole digital CS into
(08:05):
this bucket of oh you do, emailcampaigns and you know all this
kind of stuff, but really whatit is it's.
It's the entirety of thedigital experience and how it's
integrated and and and also howyour humans are integrated into
it.
You know, it's not just techtouch, solely tech touch.
So so I guess where that leadsme is is the natural.
(08:27):
Next question is is issomething that I do ask you know
, the majority of my guestswho've been on the show which is
you know what would be yourkind of boilerplate, elevator
pitch of what digital cs is ifsomebody off the street were to
ask you.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
I would just say it's using electronic means to
ensure customers realize thevalue they expected.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Yeah, simple, very simple, and you know what I like
about that it's wonderfullyspecific.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Yet very ambiguous too.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
I've been accused of that a few times uh, but I I
think that there's there's,there is a a validity to the
ambiguity, because you know,what one company or person does
digitally is going to becompletely different than what
another company or you know doesdigitally like it's there's
different than what anothercompany or you know does
(09:25):
digitally Like it's.
There's so many it dependsmoments when it comes to
designing this stuff that youkind of have to be ambiguous.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Well said, yeah, and it's.
It's the approach and it's thethe method that's used to get
there.
That makes all the difference.
The devil's in the details, asthey say.
But if you approach it in aconsistent way, you know that
gets you home.
But the path may be entirelyyours.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Yeah, exactly, Exactly so.
Yeah, so the success element sousing technology to drive your
customer success, which is great, I mean, ultimately, you try to
(10:16):
have those success outlinedlike what does success mean?
Driving success we're drivingrevenue retention and those
kinds of things.
As part of our prep, we talkeda little bit about how CS can
have a much more direct impacton revenue retention and I think
, first and foremost, I think itwould be great to get your take
(10:38):
and your input, because I knowyou have a lot to say about this
in terms of the impact that aCS org in general can have on
NRR in a more, you know, maybemore direct way, because I feel
like a lot of us kind of look atit in a passive sort of way.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Yeah, and I guess what I would say is the magic
all happens when you startasking a very simple question.
It's why?
Why are customers renewing?
Why are other customers leaving?
Why are some customers buyingmore?
Why are some customers buyingless?
When you really understand why,then you understand what
(11:17):
context customer success has andwhat you can contribute to it
Right?
So a lot of the work I do withclients is to go ask that
question and to ask it in such away that you really get the
answer.
You know, a lot of times peoplewill ask for churn reasons and
they'll have a form or whateverThey'll.
You know it's secondhand andpeople will check a box.
Yeah but they don't reallyunderstand what's behind that.
(11:40):
Why did you decide what you did?
What led up to that?
What were the drivers in thatdecision?
So you ask a certain set ofquestions that really reveals
why they made the decisions theydid, and then so with that
context, then you can goquantify that You're going to
hear common themes if you talkto enough people.
I just did this with a client alittle while ago where, you know
(12:03):
, you asked two sets of peoplethose that did renew and bought
more and those that left.
And what's striking is a lot oftimes they talk about the same
reasons, right?
One of them, they're stayingbecause they got X and the other
folks left because they didn'tget X.
Well, guess what?
X is a factor.
It's a very important factor,right?
(12:24):
So you can pretty quickly, ifyou interview customers, narrow
down that list of real driversin that decision and then you
can go quantify that and whenyou do that, you collect that
data.
Then very quickly you see adistribution where it's a Pareto
distribution or PowerLockdistribution, where you have a
(12:44):
small number of factors thatexplain the vast majority of the
behaviors.
And when you look at thosefactors, what you find is that
there are certain things thatcustomer success can do and
influence, and there's a wholelot of things that you can't
influence.
For example, you don't set theprice, you don't determine who's
a good fit for your product.
(13:05):
That's in sales and marketing.
You can't change the product orthe features, right.
But things like as we've well,no one have talked about for
years, didn't get enough valueout of it, didn't get enough
usage, and you can stillquantify that.
And if you can match that interms of revenue, frequency,
probability, now you canquantify what your contribution
(13:28):
is right.
So that is just a question ofwell, how much impact do we make
?
And what does that look likewhen we look at the operations
of customer success compared towhat the outcomes are at the end
of the day, to what extent doyou raise the likelihood or the
probability that a customer isgoing to stay or buy more?
(13:52):
And you can measure thatdifference in probability and
you can put a dollar valueagainst that.
And then you can add up yourcost and say are we getting our
money's worth here?
And if you go through thatexercise, surprise, surprise,
just getting customers to thatnext level to increase those
odds, usually more than paysabout the kinds of things that I
(14:21):
will track in a digital program, you know.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
I think there's like your classic CS.
You know retention metrics andall that kind of stuff.
But I'm also looking atmarketing.
You know metrics in terms ofwhat campaigns are you running
and are they effective?
Open rates, click-through rates, engagement rates, all that
kind of stuff.
But I think what you just hiton as well is kind of that magic
(14:49):
third bucket, which is theattribution In the digital realm
, maybe campaigns and maybewhatever.
But just in general, which ofyour CS motions and CS actions
had direct attribution torevenue?
That's notoriously difficultfor a lot of people.
(15:09):
It's elusive.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
I mean, either you don't have the data and you need
to go collect that data, or youhave the data and you don't
understand how to analyze thedata.
Right yeah, this is amathematical, this is a
statistical argument, and if youhave the data, you can show it
very quickly.
With the right set ofstatistical tools, you can
demonstrate that and I do thatall the time with my clients is
(15:33):
to show exactly what thedifference in probabilities are.
And don't take it from me.
This is out of your data, right?
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Yeah, exactly, difference in probabilities are
and don't take it from me.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
This is out of your data, right?
Yeah, exactly.
And when you're working in thefacts, people don't debate it so
much.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Yep, yep, yep, just as long as they trust the data
that it's coming from which isanother whole can of worms which
is a whole another can of worms.
I take it you are a fan fromyour earlier answer, that you're
a fan of the exit interview ingeneral, like a customer exit
interview.
(16:07):
Have you seen that implementedparticularly well and do you
mind sharing some of that secretsauce?
Speaker 1 (16:14):
I rarely see it done well by a company themselves.
Rarely see it done well by acompany themselves, and the
reason being is that the peoplethat you typically ask to go
collect that information.
If it's the qualitative form ofthat, you know they actually
talk to somebody.
Usually the people that do thathave a lot of biases, and it's
completely understandable, right.
(16:34):
They tend to look at thingsfrom their own perspective.
Having an outside person comein and ask that very, very much
helps to eliminate some of that.
You can be, you know tell memore about that and what
happened and why did it happen.
And you know you ask adifferent set of questions than
someone working for the companywould.
And the person you'reinterviewing is a little bit
more comfortable because theyknow they're not going to offend
(16:55):
anybody, right?
This isn't no one's going totake what they say in the wrong
way.
They can be completely candidand explain all of it to you and
feel completely safe doing itright.
So almost always when I've donethis, you know we surface
things that people had no idea,had no idea that was what was
really going on, right?
So I think in good companiesthey have a healthy dose of
(17:20):
outside people doing it for them, understanding that they have
their own biases.
And we we all go through lifewith our blinders on, and one of
the gifts we give each other iswe say, hey, you know you got a
blinder on that.
I had no idea, you know.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Yeah, absolutely.
I have yet much like you haveyet to see an internally run
exit interview process that Apersists and doesn't die quickly
after it's launched and B is,to your point, that successful
Because, honestly, if I were toreceive a call from a vendor
that I had churned out of, Iprobably wouldn't really want to
(17:57):
spend any significant amount oftime on the phone.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Right, and it's a trick to get people, even as a
third party, you know, becausethere's kind of this window of
opportunity.
After that They'll ignore you.
When it's still fresh, yeah,they're willing to talk because
they just made that decision andthey want to share that Right.
They're still processing itthemselves.
But, you know, I think one thingthat's very important as well
(18:22):
and I've seen this several timesis that it doesn't you don't
have to do this qualitativeinterviewing all the time, but
you do need to do it frequentlyenough.
One of the clients I work with,you know, was absolutely sure.
I know these customers, I'vebeen in this space for 15 years,
I know all about this, and Ihad to really really push them
and say please, please, please,let me go talk to your customers
(18:45):
, because I think we're missingsomething.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
And finally relented.
And then I went and talked tothem and huge surprises, right,
I mean their.
His whole market had shiftedand he wasn't even aware of it
right they were selling to anentirely different segment that
he was unaware of, whichexplained what he was seeing in
terms of his churn behavior,right, and so you need to do
this enough that you have thatvisibility frequently enough,
(19:12):
because markets are alwayschanging.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
Yeah, this reminds me I was advising a company not
long ago that was really, reallyhesitant to launch like new
digital outreach campaignsbecause they were afraid of
rocking the boat.
You know, I don't think they hadand much like kind of you
(19:34):
alluded to.
There wasn't this culture oflet's just go talk to our
customers.
You know, it was just like let's, you know, wait till they reach
out to support or somethinglike that.
But there was this massivehesitance to even like think
about distributing, you know,digital comms for this fear of
the customer, you know,responding, and I just thought
(19:55):
that was so it throughout thatentire organization, that this
kind of hesitancy to reach out.
You know that I've never reallyencountered anything quite like
it, and so you know there's alot of kind of change management
that has to go into those kindsof things as well and to open
yourself up, you know, to thatkind of feedback.
(20:17):
And that kind of leads me to mynext question just around the
customer experience in general,because one of the things as a
CS leader that I like to doperiodically is to insert myself
into the customer experienceand go secret shopping, if you
will, in my own processes, andit's amazing what you uncover
when you do that kind of stuff.
But I was curious to get yoursentiment on or your take on
(20:42):
that sort of thing or how youtypically advise your customers.
Kind of, stay connected to thecustomer and the customer
experience.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Yeah, that's a great question and I think it is so
essential to again go back andtalk to customers and ask the
questions that you don'tnormally ask.
Back and talk to customers andask the questions that you don't
normally ask.
There is Daniel Kahneman, thelate Daniel Kahneman, a
behavioral scientist.
You know one of the things helabels this as what you see is
all there is.
You see, that is what that is.
(21:11):
So what you see is all there is, and it's about availability
bias, whatever you can easilyrecall.
Whatever you can rememberdefines your reality, and the
problem when we think about ourcustomer journey is we think
about our customer journey fromour own perspective.
Right, we talk about it becausewe know what this is.
We see this all the time weinteract with these customers
(21:33):
and, of course, they follow ourprocess.
So we have therefore definedwhat their journey is.
The problem is, that's not thecustomer's journey, it's just
your experience of what that isfrom your vantage point.
And a lot of what I do, againtalking to clients, is to say
you know, tell me the story,tell me about the time.
You know, from the time whenyou purchased this product to
(21:56):
when you said, aha, there's thevalue I was looking for.
And just you know, justdescribe that to me what
actually happened on your end,what were the things, what steps
did you have to go through?
What were the things that youwere doing that maybe your
vendor wasn't even aware youwere having to do, right?
And when you unpack that, youfind all kinds of surprises that
(22:16):
there's certain things thatwere easy for them and quick and
they loved it.
And then there's certain thingsthat were easy for them and
quick and they loved it.
And then there were otherthings that were a huge struggle
.
And then there were anotherwhole set of things that they
had no idea and those kinds ofopportunities that's, new
products and services for them.
Right, there's an abundance ofthings that you can get from
that that will smooth thatjourney and make things faster,
(22:39):
more effective.
One thing we typically, forexample, tend to overlook on the
technology side is we'rehyper-focused on the technology.
We know how our tools work andwe know the data and how it all
connects and integration, blah,blah, blah, blah blah.
We know how to run theseprojects.
We're extremelytechnology-focused.
We know very little about thecustomer's process, what they
(23:00):
have to change in their processor their policies or the
behaviors of their users.
Right, when you changetechnology, by definition you
change the process and youchange the people that are
interacting with it, and we tendto forget about that, ignore it
.
Hey, that's a customer'sproblem and yet there are so
(23:21):
many things that we can do tomake that easier and faster for
them and more likely to get theresults they're after.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
And if you never ask, you never know know that
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(23:51):
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(24:12):
Now back to the show.
That's so true.
There's also this extension ofbeing hyper-focused on the tech
and the speeds and feeds and thehow-tos that we miss a lot of
times, which is that consultancylayer of injecting what
(24:32):
expertise you've gleaned fromhow your other customers are
doing certain things and whatprocesses that they've
implemented.
A lot of times, I think we missout on the opportunity for us
to not just drive value through,like the software, but drive
value through advice and generalguidance on how to do certain
things in a way that you know,makes sense based on what we've
(24:53):
seen, right, yeah, and I thinkdigitally add to that.
We miss out on doing thatdigitally a lot of times.
Because you know you outcomethat a certain customer is
(25:22):
trying to achieve, or you knowan activity that usually leads a
customer into a dark path,that's prime time for you to
digitally intervene, either likein product or with an email or
just as an internal alert, tosay, hey, you know, go check out
Acme, they're about to screwthemselves.
Yeah, kind of speaking ofdigital motions and whatnot.
(25:48):
You know, I'd be curious to getus.
It's always great speaking withpeople who are active in the
consulting world, because yousee a lot of different things
and you see a lot of differentCS orgs like operate in
different ways.
Are there?
Are there cool like digitalemotions that you've encountered
, you know in the past few yearsthat you feel like you know are
(26:08):
things that other people couldkind of pick up on and and and
track down, or things you'veseen in the wild that are just
like really cool.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Yeah, and I can't get too specific because every
client I work with is under NDAso I can't really name names.
Of course, I can say that, yes,there's a lot of the work I've
been doing the last couple ofyears in particular probably not
surprising to anybody is allabout that.
It's how do we do this at scale, how do we drive out costs?
You know, a lot of times when Iwork with clients, the tiering
(26:38):
isn't really clean.
Of times when I work withclients, the tiering isn't
really clean, In other words,understanding the financial
trade-offs.
Not every customer is the same.
You have some that spend awhole lot of money with you.
Again back to the power lawdistribution.
You have a small number ofaccounts that make up a monster
part of your revenue and youtypically have a long tail of a
lot of accounts that make upvery little.
And where you draw those linesfrom a financial perspective
(27:02):
really, really is important.
Right, it's not only the pastperformance, but what is the
future potential is the whitespace too, but how you allocate
those accounts and how youunderstand the investment and
return of those tiers iscritically important, because
that gives you the guard bandsor the guidelines for what
(27:22):
you're going to do in each oneof those groups of customers.
Right and a lot of times peoplejust they have no concept that
they've never done that analysisand and when you draw the line
really matters.
So that's part of it.
I will say and we startedtalking about this is that in
the B2C space, if you reallywant to see how it's done, well,
holy cow, look at what'shappening in B2C.
(27:45):
And the problem I've seen insoftware is that it's way too
complicated, right, and it'smade to be way too complicated.
It's very, very hard to makethings simple.
It's really hard to do that.
You have to invest a lot oftime and a lot of effort and you
have to do something to make asolution better than to take
(28:06):
something away.
And they've actually proventhis.
A fascinating study inbehavioral science is that that
is one of the blinders thatpeople have in product and in
(28:27):
engineering is that we'll justadd more and we'll add more and
we'll add more, and then youhave this huge feature bloat
going on.
Way too complicated, peoplecan't deal with it.
It's way overpriced for maybethe majority of the use cases
that people really need it for.
You know, like Excel, mostpeople only use about 20 to 30
features.
(28:47):
It's got 450 features in it,right?
I mean why?
Right?
So there's this in software inparticular.
It's easy to add stuff, sopeople are always adding stuff.
They're not making it simpler,they're not making it better
that way.
So contrast that with the B2Cspace, where it's a very simple
(29:07):
product to begin with most times, but they go above and beyond
to make it even simpler.
Right?
Apple's a great example.
Peloton blows me away, peloton.
I know they've had their upsand downs, sure, but you want to
look at a company that's gotthat dialed in.
Look at Peloton, holy cow.
Right, from a digital approachto renewals, to keeping
(29:31):
customers in the fold.
Yeah, all the stuff that theydo in community and they're
athletes, and I mean it goes onand on and on.
And if anybody has reallycracked that code, look at what
they're doing, and all thatstuff is highly leverageable.
But think about what's reallyrequired here and you mentioned
this before too it's not justemail campaigns.
You have to design your wholebusiness around this.
(29:54):
You have to have simple,easy-to-use product.
You have to design them thatway.
You have to design them to besimple and that anybody can pick
it up and use it.
And the more stuff you throw onthere, the less simple it is.
Right, yeah, right.
So being really crisp aboutthat and you design it all in as
much as you possibly can intothe product and I think that's
another barrier for software isthat you know the dev people and
(30:17):
the product people.
They're in their own world andthey throw it over the wall and
we don't.
That's, we're not measuring.
But who cares about that?
Customers that's, that'scustomer success at sales.
We're doing the cool stuffright.
So they don't think in terms ofwe have to design and build our
products for those customers,right, that's right.
(30:39):
And they're not necessarily asfocused as they really need to
be or to any extent, how it'sdone in B2C.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
This company I just joined.
One of the cool things that wedo on Friday afternoons is just
a demo jam where all theengineers and product guys show
off what they're working on live, before it's done, to all of
the customer folks and salesfolks.
And it's a luxury that you cando in a smaller company, right.
(31:05):
But it's such a cool way, youknow, not only for product and
engineering to get that kind ofearly feedback from the people
who are embedded with thecustomer, to get that kind of
early feedback from the peoplewho are embedded with the
customer, but it also just helps, you know, helps make sure that
we're designing things andwe're building things in a way
that are intuitive to thecustomer.
(31:25):
Or, you know, maybe if it'sbuilt for one or two customers,
we know five or six others whocould really benefit from that
kind of thing.
And it starts to kind offormulate how we message things,
and you know, but also call outsome obvious areas where it
doesn't quite make sense thisway or we should do it another
way.
And I think it's a reallyhealthy thing to think about,
(31:48):
obviously, products from thelens of customer success,
because, to your point, the bestPLG motions are built around a
solid product.
That is just kind of deadsimple, right.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Yeah, I loved your yeah, go ahead.
Well, I was just going to say agreat lesson.
There's a, you know, you lookat Intel, right, intel in the
early days of Intel, transistorswere still lab projects, right.
Right were still lab projects,right.
And Andy Grove and all theearly leaders at Intel, they
(32:21):
talked about copying McDonald'sand they were very specific
about that.
How do we get from this labproject very small yield on our
devices to banging these thingsout by the millions?
Right, and they made that shiftand a big part of that was just
simplicity, make it simple.
(32:42):
Make it simple and designdesign for volume, design for
manufacturability and forsupportability, right.
So that changed their wholemindset about how they design
those products.
And you know again, hugelessons can be learned there
going from the science project,the really cool stuff in the lab
, to actually doing it attremendous scale and making a
(33:05):
whole bunch of money doing itRight.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
This reminds me of something I saw recently about
Ben and Jerry's as well, becausethey they make I forget the
exact number number, but it'sliterally millions of gallons of
ice cream a day, like, but it'sstill just cream and sugar and
chocolate.
But but you know, part of partof their process is is so
(33:30):
automated and you know, from asupply chain management and then
all the machinery that you needlike, there's a ton of
automation, but there's stillthat human element all along the
way, like.
There's people you knowliterally slicing open a pint
and testing it.
They really pay close attentionto, like how big the chunks are
, because you know they're bigon.
(33:52):
You know, big chunks in yourice cream or whatever.
So there's these core tenants.
That still exists.
Where I think it's, there's acool parallel to digital
customer success, becausethey've built all this
automation and all thissophistication around churning
out literally millions ofgallons of ice cream a day.
However, you're not using yourhumans to like, do it.
(34:12):
You're using your humans forquality control.
You're using your humans tolike, do it.
You're using your humans forquality control.
You're using your humans tolike, you know, make sure that
your machinery isn't just, youknow, pumping out a substandard
product.
The human element is still verymuch part of that brand, which
you see, you know, and it's allthat socially conscious, mission
driven stuff that they do.
That's all driven by automation.
(34:33):
I think that I love that kindof parallel.
Yeah, and they do, that's alldriven by automation.
I think that I love that kindof parallel.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Yeah, and they do, I'm sure, like like really good,
well-run B2C companies, theydon't.
They don't start day one inscale.
They go and they do a lot ofexperimentation, a lot of test
marketing, a lot of hey, we cameup with this new thing, let's
run us do a small run on thatand see how people respond to it
, Right?
So don't just go fromengineering to push it out.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
You know and scale like that.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
No, find out what's really going to work, test it,
shake it out and then go scaleit.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Nail it, then scale it right, same with your digital
motions, like you know.
Test test.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
Test test break stuff If it doesn't work then redo it
, do it a different way A, Btesting.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
Make it better.
Yeah, they were saying they dosomething like a couple hundred
flavors a year, but only likethree or four of them make it to
market.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
So there you go, because they're testing and it's
better to.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
It's better to weed out the bad stuff and stick with
the good stuff yep, I lovedyour peloton example from
earlier because I used to have ahydro, which is like the rowing
version of Peloton.
But they did a really good jobof, I'd say, you know, digital
customer success, because youwould reach certain you know
(35:45):
meter milestones in your rowing,your cumulative rowing.
So, like I got, you know, theyjust sent me like swag every
milestone that came along.
So it's like a pair of socks at50,000 meters or something like
that, and a flask, whatever itwas, and I think that's such a
cool combination also of youknow there wasn't a human behind
(36:06):
any of that.
It happened automatically,right?
But the real human emotion ofreceiving something and
celebrating those milestones, Ithink is a huge thing and also a
massive miss for a lot ofcompanies is celebrating the
wins.
I love to ask this questionbecause it's somewhat vulnerable
.
So, you know, feel free toplead the fifth, but, like you
(36:28):
know, are there, are there, likemistakes and blunders that
you've learned from.
You know in the past that youcarry forward with you maybe,
particularly as they relate tocustomer success or otherwise,
but are there things that otherscan?
How can others learn from yourmistakes?
Speaker 1 (36:48):
Well, you know, I asked my wife because you'll get
the unabridged list of all themistakes I've made, because,
it's a long and impressive listof mistakes.
You know there certainly havebeen mistakes in my career along
the lines.
I certainly have made thatmistake of what a lot of teams
(37:09):
are making right now is thatyou're trying to make you know
there are certain individuals ona customer success team we're
not talking about digital rightnow, but in customer success
team and force them into beingsalespeople.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
Right.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
And there are some people that just don't want it,
they're not ready for it,they're never going to go there,
right?
And it's no matter how you wantto incentivize or train or
whatever, you got to recognizethat people are all motivated
differently, right.
So I've certainly made thatmistake.
I think a lot of people aremaking that mistake right now,
and a lot of customer successorganizations is oh, everybody
sells, right, make everybody asalesperson.
(37:43):
And I remember one employee Ihad when I was going down that
path.
They said look, if I wanted tobe a salesperson, I'd be in
sales Like duh.
And it's so simple, I mean.
But I think a lot of times themistakes that people are making
by and large are just hey, wehaven't done a good job of
(38:04):
quantifying, we don't even knowhow to show the value of
customer success.
So let's do the easy thing.
Let's just give everybody aquota and let's just go right
and everybody's responsible fora number and if you don't make
your number, you're gone.
Okay, that's not going to workin customer success.
It's just go right andeverybody's responsible for a
number, and if you don't makeyour number, you're gone, okay.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
That's not going to work in customer success.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
It's just not, and I think you know there is
something and special and uniqueabout customer success that's
very different from accountmanagement.
It's very different from, youknow, hunter salespeople.
And trying to blend them alltogether and mix them up, I
think, personally, is a recipefor disaster.
So that's one thing.
That's a mistake I have madeand that's a mistake that I
(38:44):
think a lot of people are making, I would say, in terms of
digital, in particular, one ofthe things that I see people do
all the time is they aretreating symptoms and not root
causes, right?
Sure, Some of that is because ofwhen we measure behaviors and
we talked about this before wecan correlate.
Well, when we see this, we seethat, well, correlation is not
causation, but a lot of times weconflate those two.
(39:05):
Well, we you know, for example,engagement often is linked to
renewal probability, right?
So higher, higher engagement,higher renewal probability.
So what do people do?
They try to grow the engagement, but that's not the root cause,
that's the symptom.
What causes people to be engaged.
That's the root cause, right?
(39:26):
So I see a lot of times, indigital in particular, because
of availability bias, because ofwhat you see is all there is,
you tend to just say, well,that's my little world, that's
my universe and therefore I'mgoing to optimize around what I
can see, and that is a huge,that's a big problem.
I see a lot of people makingthat mistake.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
Yeah, yeah, that's very interesting, I think.
When it comes to digital andbuilding digital programs, I
think you're right.
There's a lot of like, quote,unquote, no brainers that you go
after Like, okay, anotherexample would be high support
ticket volumes.
Right, sure, you're going towant to flag that account.
(40:10):
It's an account to payattention to.
Does that account need an emailcampaign against it?
Probably not.
But do you want to do some rootcause analysis to see what it
is about that particular accountthat's causing the high ticket
volume?
Yeah, probably, and maybethat's the same root cause
that's causing five otheraccounts to have a high ticket
(40:33):
volume.
It's such a big part ofdigitization is like having the
telemetry and the data and theinsights necessary so that you
can uncover those things thatmight not otherwise be
correlated or obvious withinyour business.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
Exactly, and it goes back to the simple question of
why People do not ask why.
Nearly enough they know thewhat and the where and the who
and the how, but they don't askthe why.
The why is where all the magichappens.
When you keep asking why, youcome up with it.
Yeah, that's the path tounderstand causal relationships,
you know five wise the shit outof it.
(41:11):
There you go, that's it, thatis it.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
Oh man, this is, this has been good.
Hey look, as we, as we kind ofround down, one of the things
that I love to get from everyoneis just their content, diet,
love to understand what you payattention to.
You know, both for CS but thenjust otherwise.
Like you know, podcasts, books,all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
Yeah, I, I, you know I do with I'm sure a lot of
folks do.
I'm on a bunch of mailing listsand I look at LinkedIn just to
kind of get a pulse on what'shappening in the industry.
I do go to conferences, thingslike that.
That's pretty much, um, youknow, table stakes to be to keep
up with your industry.
Uh, but me I'm kind of weird.
I'm kind of a geek, so I read alot of neuroscientific journals
.
I read a couple of researchpapers a week just because I'm
(42:00):
fascinated by that and I thinkthere's so much that we can do
in customer success thatscientists are discovering about
human behavior right, and justapplying some of that in
customer success.
I'm fascinated by that.
I've worked with clients to dothat and seen some amazing
results.
So I do read a lot ofneuroscientific journals.
(42:23):
I also read Medium.
I do a lot of analytics anddata science and they have a lot
of good stuff on Medium peoplewriting about data science so I
read that pretty religiously.
So it's really those three.
I think that's pretty much mydiet of content.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
Yeah, that's great, that's great.
Is there anyone that you'd liketo give a shout out or some
kudos to?
That's doing somethingparticularly great?
Speaker 1 (42:49):
in digital.
You know, I without, withoutbetraying an NDA, I probably
can't.
So without their permission inadvance, I should put it that
way.
But I can say that I'm workingwith a client right now very
impressive.
I wish I could tell you theirname, but they're doing some
cool stuff and it's all back tothat.
What we have just talked aboutis asking why and experimenting.
(43:13):
Don't jump into a commitment.
Just try it out, small scale,you know.
Do a do a proof of concept withthe technology and just give it
a go and see what you can learnfrom it and weed out the bad
stuff.
Don't commit to somethingthat's mediocre right Pivot
quickly.
There's so much out there, somuch, especially right now in
the space all kinds oftechnology that you can use for
(43:36):
doing digital customer success,all different ways of doing it,
all different.
I mean it's it's a smorgasbordof stuff, but don't just pick
one and run and just blow it up.
You know, try out a bunch ofstuff, be constantly
experimenting and innovating andtrying different things and
asking why before you commit toanything.
I think that is the secret.
That really is the secret,right there.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
Yeah, that's great.
That'll be the.
That's going to be the title ofthe show.
It's five wise, love it.
Finally, where, where canpeople find you, reach out to
you, learn more about you?
All that stuff.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
Connect to me on LinkedIn.
I do a micro blog once a week,if you're interested in in that.
I would also say I have awebsite.
It's at se-partnerscom, sose-partnerscom is my website and
then my email is ed atse-partnerscom, if you want that
(44:31):
.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
That's great.
Link will be down in the shownotes if you want the easy route
, the digital route.
Ed, it's been a pleasure havingyou.
It's always great talking toyou.
Thanks so much for carving outthe time and yeah, it was
awesome having you on the show.
Speaker 1 (44:45):
Well, it's been delightful.
I always love talking to Alexand I appreciate the invitation.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
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
(45:15):
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
(45:36):
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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