February 18, 2025 • 37 mins
Talia Root and Brent Hildebrand from Fullstory join the Digital CX podcast to discuss the evolving role of digital customer experience, from in-app engagement to balancing scale with personalization. They share insights on measuring success, prioritizing product development, and the key skills that make a great program manager in the digital landscape.
Chapters:
- 00:03 - Intro
- 04:18 - Talia’s journey from retail to digital success
- 05:42 - Brent’s path from sales to digital CX
- 07:30 - Scale vs. digital: What’s the difference?
- 09:15 - The push for in-app engagement
- 12:09 - Choosing what to build first
- 16:00 - Measuring success: Metrics that matter
- 21:29 - Balancing in-app and email engagement
- 27:15 - What makes a great program manager?
- 33:39 - Digital wins (and fails) in the wild
- 35:19 - Shoutouts to digital leaders
Enjoy! I know I sure did…
Talia's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/talia-root/
Brent's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brent-hildebrand-422a9397/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Digital is so much more than focusing on scaled
customers.
Digital is for every customer,every segment, really focusing
on the entirety of the customerjourney, and that's been a
really fun evolution to break myown mindset around what digital
could be.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Once again, welcome to the Digital Customer
Experience podcast with me, AlexTerkovich.
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
(00:44):
the weekly companion newsletterthat has additional articles and
resources in it.
Go to digitalcustomersuccesscom.
For now, let's get started.
Hello and welcome back to theDigital CX Podcast, the show
where we talk about all thingsdigital in CX.
It is episode 92 and I amelated today to be joined by two
(01:08):
people who are in the throes ofbuilding digital programs.
You know, if you've listened tothe show here recently in the
last few months or so, you knowI've tried to bring on a lot
more people who are in the weedsdoing the thing, sharing what
they're doing and basicallyshowing their work, and we have
two examples of that buildingthe digital program at Full
(01:28):
Story Talia Root, who has joinedthe team relatively recently as
manager of digital CX sorry,senior manager of digital
customer success.
She joins me along with one ofour teammates, brent Hildebrand,
who's actually been at FullStory for a long time, probably
eight years or something likethat.
He's essentially one of theprincipal digital program
(01:52):
managers on Talia's team, and soin this episode we get a sneak
peek behind the curtains of howTalia is organizing around
digital the kinds of things thatthey're building.
We also talk a little bit aboutcareer pathing and career
trajectory, given Brent's kindof um morphosis into from from
sales and to CS, into digitaland uh, it's just a fascinating
(02:16):
episode full of little insightsand tips and tricks and
takeaways that you can implementin your own program If you like
.
I feel like we could probablydo a second episode and we might
do a check-in episode in thenext few months just to see how
things are progressing with them, but for now, please enjoy this
episode of the Digital CXPodcast with Talia Root and
(02:37):
Brent Hildebrand of Full Story.
Talia and Brent, I'm so pleasedthat you're here and thanks for
joining me on the show.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Thanks for having us.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Yeah happy to be here .
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Of course, the dynamic duo.
How long have you guys beenworking together at Full Story?
Speaker 1 (02:54):
No, I've been at Full Story for five months and it's
been me and Brent and a coupleothers on my team.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
And Brent, you're a vet, you're like eight years,
seven years, something like that.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Yes, In March it'll be seven years at Full Story.
So you're like the vet, theFull Story vet.
I wouldn't say I'm the vet, butwe have this internal tool
where you can see whatpercentage of people that you've
been at Full Story longer at.
And it is a high percentage.
I think it's like 95%.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
All right, do you get like a plaque for that, like
one of those fun acrylic plaques, or do you get something like
Tali?
Maybe you should hook up a goldwatch or something.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
I love the sound of that.
No, I don't have a gold watchfrom Full Story right now, so
that's an excellent idea.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Does that still happen, like is there any
industry, maybe finance, but isthere any other industry where
they still give out, likewatches, anniversaries?
Speaker 1 (03:45):
probably not yeah, I don't know none that I've been
at I was at dell for five years.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
The reason I know that is because I turned my
resignation in the same day thatI got my acrylic five-year
plaque there you go so you guysare a duo at full story, working
all through digital stuff anddoing some really, really
exciting things that we're hereto talk about a little bit.
But, talia, I'll toss it to youa little bit.
I'd love to know a little bitabout your kind of background
(04:14):
and what led you to where youare today.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Wow, I've had an interesting career path.
I actually started out intraditional retail and did that
for a bit.
Really was craving more of acorporate retail experience, so
I spent a lot of time at PotteryBarn Before I eventually made
my way into tech.
I first really heard aboutdigital customer success or like
(04:38):
one-to-many programs, and Iworked at a small startup called
Notarize and from there I wenton to be the first digital
success manager at Service Titan, which was really fun, kind of
weaved my way through figuringout what that meant, and then
went to Okta for a little bit,spent some time with the fine
folks there before making my wayover to Full Story.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
That's cool Because I feel like retail and
hospitality and food service islike amazing breeding ground for
customer service, but then alsolike the internal mechanisms
for dealing with BS.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Yeah, definitely customer centric, mind always
from Nordstrom.
That's just that.
Just flows through my blood now.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
And also I like to basically say that I think
everyone should spend a littlebit of time in either restaurant
or hospitality or retail, justbecause you get to see the best
and the worst in people.
Brent, how about you?
What circuitous path led youdown to being at Full Story for
seven years?
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
And I wasn't going to go this far back, but I should
mention that I did work atChick-fil-A for two years.
Yeah, totally, and I wasn'tgoing to go this far back, but I
should mention that I did workat Chick-fil-A for two years
when I was in high school.
So that was it was my pleasureand you know, as you mentioned,
those are valuable on the flylessons when you're in that
environment.
So it actually really was anawesome experience.
I'm glad I did that.
Yeah, yeah, and in terms ofwhat brought me to full Story, I
was a project manager at atelecommunications company in
(06:05):
Atlanta a big company and waslooking to intentionally join a
smaller company, but didn'treally know what I was looking
for.
I was looking for tech salesbecause I wanted to combine my
love for working with peoplewith my love and interest for
software and technology.
I studied engineering incollege and just knew I wanted
to get closer to that.
(06:25):
So I joined Full Story as an SDRwithout knowing anything about
how typical SaaS CX orgs arestructured.
Customer success manager wasnot even a job title that I
could have fathomed looking for.
It just wasn't on my radar andI very quickly learned about at
the time at Full Story we calledit hugging, which we no longer
(06:45):
call it that, but there's anawesome blog post that explains
why it was called that butquickly saw what the folks on
the host sales side of the houseat Full Story were doing and it
was super clear to me.
That was more of the thingsthat I wanted to be involved in
and less of the stuff on thesales side.
That wasn't necessarily superinteresting to me.
So it became my mission prettyquickly to figure out how I
(07:05):
could get over to CX.
And yeah, so I was in SDR forlike a year and a half and then
I started in CX.
We decided to break out.
Instead of having CSMs coverthe entire customer lifecycle,
we broke out onboarding, and soI started on the onboarding team
.
From there I joined what wecalled scaled customer success
and now I'm a part of digital.
So I've been in CX theremaining five years and it's
(07:28):
been awesome.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
So you're probably really well qualified to answer
the age-old question aboutwhat's the difference between
scale and digital, because I getthis question like all the
freaking time and a lot ofpeople are like, oh, it's the
same thing, just a differentword.
I'm like no, it isn't.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
What would you say?
Yeah, definitely have gottenthat question, ranging from
internal folks at FullStory,when we've built these new teams
, to even connecting with folkslike outside of FullStory who
are interested in exploringroles in CX and are wondering
what they should be looking for.
I think for me, without evenknowing a ton about like what it
is across the industry, I justthink it's the core problems
that we're solving.
It's not the core problems thatwe're solving, it's the way
(08:10):
we're going about doing it.
It's very different when it wasdigital versus when it was
scaled.
So really, as scaled CSMs, wewere almost functioning as
rotational CSMs where weinteract with customers for a
period of time, whereas on thedigital side, we're really
focused on building thoseongoing scalable content-based
programs that can live onDigital.
(08:31):
In my eyes, this is not a superwell thought out thing, but it
actually scales farther thanscaled customer success.
That is what comes to mind whenI try and explain the
difference.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
I think for me, just having been in digital for a
while, separating the two hasbeen a bit of a journey.
There's the scaled mindset andthere's the digital mindset.
Like Brent said, digital is somuch more than focusing on
scaled customers.
Digital is for every customer,every segment, really focusing
on the entirety of the customerjourney, and that's been a
(09:02):
really fun evolution, just formyself to kind of break my own
mindset around what digitalcould be and really embrace what
it could be across the wholejourney, which has been great.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
That's cool, that's awesome.
Well, thanks for sharing that.
You know a little bit ofbackground and I know in our
prep we talked a little bitabout what that journey of
digital has been transitioning alittle little bit from scale
into digital or maybe bothcoexisting.
We talked a bit about usingin-app and really jumping on
this thing of in-app engagementand you guys have been building
(09:37):
stuff like crazy over the lastfive to six months, if I'm not
mistaken.
So I'd love to get a quicksense from you all about what
you're building, kind of whatled you to decide to build that
and how it's going.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Totally, and Talia happy to jump in here first, but
certainly let me know ifthere's anything that I miss
here.
So we use AppCues at FullStoryas a tool that we use to build
in-app messaging for ourcustomers, and we've matured a
lot, I think, as you mentioned,in the past six months in terms
of the types of things thatwe're building and what we're
focusing on.
At first, we were using itreally as almost like glorified
(10:15):
campaigns, like, for instance,if we were running a webinar.
We started using AppCues topromote registration in the
platform, which has been helpfulLike it's worked.
We also like.
There was a project I wasworking on where we launched a
new template in the app and wewanted to make our customers
aware of that, so we spun up anapp that's related to that.
So super simple things.
And we're now moving intodesigning in-app enablement
(10:39):
flows, so guided tours withinour products, helping customers
bring them to the right features, as well as explain how to use
those, and that's been super funand exciting to work on.
We wish we could sit down andhave a conversation with every
single one of our customersabout these features, but it's
been really fun to work onfiguring out how we can scale
that and increase the number ofaccounts we're actually getting
(11:02):
to talk to just through in-appwalkthroughs.
So, yeah, lots of learningthrough that, but it's been
really fun to build those out.
So we have like a combinationof in-app flows and some
checklists for tasks.
We'd recommend and that's wherewe've been really focused in
the last quarter is building andlaunching that side of it.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
It's been a really interesting journey, just from
joining FullStory and seeingwhat we were using AppCuse for
and being part of the growth tosee how we might be able to use
it more.
We've started to use a featurefor them that just went GA
called Workflows, which has beena great way for us to combine
email communication withactually connecting people to a
flow within the product, and sowe're starting to explore that
(11:38):
as well.
Appcuse has been a great toolfor us just to see what we can
do digitally.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
What process did you go through to decide what you
wanted to kind of prioritize andwhat you wanted to roll out?
Because I think a lot of peoplestruggle with that, like, okay,
we bought this thing, we boughtthis tool, where do we start,
what do we do with it?
And in your case, I thinkAppCue has already existed, if
I'm not mistaken, and you werejust kind of like, okay, what
(12:04):
can we do with this thing?
How did you go about decidingwhat to prioritize?
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Yeah, I'll let Brent kind of go into some deeper
detail for his specific program.
But we really just wanted tofigure out where we could make
the most impact.
We wanted it to be a relativelylower lift, not something that
would take us a whole year todevelop.
A relatively lower lift, notsomething that would take us a
whole year to develop, and whatwe could easily score against,
like where could we see ourimpact quickly?
(12:30):
And I'll kick it over to Brentto talk a little bit more about
where we decided to focus onthat.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
Yeah, totally.
We call each of our projectsprograms and full story and each
of our programs has a problemstatement for, like, some of the
most recent projects that I'vebeen working on, like, had the
problem statement defined ofokay, these are the metrics that
we know are important to ourcustomers and this is what we
want to help improve.
And it was actually a projectthat I was working on six months
ago where I did a combinationof two things.
(12:56):
There was the in-app templatechanges combined with a webinar
that I led with one of mycolleagues, which we saw good
results with both, and obviously, I'm sure, as you can imagine,
putting something in the app isa lot more scalable than running
a webinar.
Like, every time we want awebinar, we have to plan the
script, we have to promote it,we have to get people to show up
and we have to lead the webinarand we can then have the
(13:17):
recording afterwards.
But it is really a campaignversus the template, which is
just available on an ongoingbasis to our customers.
And when I was comparing theimpact to feature usage of the
things that I cared about,afterwards it was super obvious
that we could get, in somesituations, even better impact
to our customers by the in-appchanges that happen.
So for me that was like takingmy problem statement Okay, I
want to impact these things.
(13:38):
It was a no brainer to know.
Okay, we have app use at ourdisposal.
Let's figure out how we can getmore enablement in the app If
we're going to get similarresults to asking folks to come
up and show up for a webinar.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
I love what you said right at the beginning about
having a problem statement to gointo it, because I think we
tend to at least I tend to jumpinto execution mode right away.
A of times I'm just like, oh,this is cool, we should go do
that.
And a lot of times that gets usinto trouble down the road when
(14:10):
we kind of lose clarity on whatit is we're building.
I mean, it really almost takesa book out of product and
engineering where typically yourtickets will start with the
classic statement of as a blank,I want to be able to blank.
Is it that kind of mentalityand format that you went down?
Speaker 3 (14:30):
Yeah, I think I do think so, and I think it
probably varies from program toprogram.
Like, some of our programs areprograms that help level us up
as a team, and so those problemsare like we need to be able to
do this, or right now we'respending this amount of time
doing this and it needs to befaster All the way down to,
maybe a program that's morecustomer focused is hey, we know
(14:51):
that customers are using thisfeature at this rate today and
this is the level of correlationit has with renewal, and so we
want to improve that.
So it can vary from being likethe second one, being more
outcome focused of like, hey,we're obviously ultimately
trying to impact renewal rateand help customers find value in
the platform.
(15:11):
Or it can be, like you said,more of like a jobs to be done
framework.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
um yeah, with that.
I think that naturally leads usinto the next kind of obvious
question, which is like how doyou measure the efficacy of all
this stuff?
And I think that's somethingalso that a lot of digital folks
struggle with, because it's not, you know, unless you have a
very specific outcome you'redriving towards, it can be
(15:35):
really hard to measure thosekinds of things.
Did you design these programswith the intent of having the
metric clearly defined on theoutset?
Is there a global metric you'relooking at as well for lagging
indicators maybe?
And then I mean it's early daysright, you guys just started
building some of this stuff afew months ago but are there any
early indicators of what'sworking and what's not?
Speaker 3 (15:58):
Totally so for every.
You know, this year, when wewere building out the digital
team, part of our process isevery single program in addition
to within that program having aproblem statement is we have a
scorecard.
So actually at the beginning ofthe program, we define input
and output metrics, inputs beingthings like if, for taking that
webinar as an example, rightLike this is the amount of
(16:21):
customers that we want to haveattend.
Like this, many uniquecustomers attend this webinar.
And then maybe output metricswould be like okay, we want to
set a baseline for this featureusage today.
We want to increase thatfeature usage afterwards.
You know some super simpleexamples there.
But we have that scorecard thatwe define at the beginnings.
When we're writing that problemstatement, we check in again
(16:43):
before we launch to make sure,okay, as we were building this,
does this still make sense?
And then afterwards we do acheck-in to see what those
results were.
I think obviously like to helpanswer the question of did this
go well?
Super, super helpful.
But I also actually think it'sa really important part of the
program build itself, right Likeit's super informative for the
types of things we're building.
(17:03):
It helps us answer questions atthe beginning, like can we
measure this?
Should we think differentlyabout how we're building and if
it is measurable and some thingswe should do even if it isn't,
and we just have to make someassumptions.
But it's a really, really goodexercise just going through it,
having to define those things.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
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(17:40):
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Now back to the show.
Yeah, now back to the show.
(18:17):
Enough into.
We were like, okay, thiscustomer engaged with this, this
customer didn't engage withthat.
This customer attended thiswebinar, this customer didn't,
even though they registered.
Like that's the very surfacestuff which is great because it
informs you, know how you'recommunicating, and informs your
messaging and your tone and,like you know, did you surface
(18:38):
the message at the right time orto the right user?
Like all that kind of stuffthat's great.
But ultimately a book out ofthe marketing kind of best
practices playbook to say like,okay, we did this thing, we did
this webinar.
Did the people who attend havebetter feature adoption than the
people who didn't attend?
Like that's gold, right there.
(18:59):
So that's cool that you guys arethinking about measuring that
way.
And then Talia, I guess from aprogram perspective would love
to understand a little bit moreabout how you're measuring the
program as a whole, and thenalso maybe some insight into how
you're using that to kind ofvalidate digital's existence and
all that kind of fun stuff.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Wow, absolutely so.
I think overall, like some ofthe larger metrics that we're
tracking to, is monthly activeusers.
So are our programs drivingmore users into the platform and
actually using what we wantthem to use?
And I think that second layerof the feature adoption are they
engaging with the features thatwe're wanting them to do?
(19:39):
Of course, renewal we want ourcustomers to be finding enough
value that they want to comeback.
So I think that focus along thecustomer journey and really
targeting them with the rightcontent at the right time really
helps make sure that yourrenewal rates are good.
You're not just waiting untilthe last three months before
their renewal and throwing stuffat them.
You're showing them that valuereally early and often and
(20:02):
showing them exactly what theyneed to do, based off of their
persona, to use the platform orthe product correctly.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
I'm assuming you're rollingsome of that stuff up into kind
of the overall CX program ormetric set or something like
that, and I guess, how are youmeasuring customer success today
?
Speaker 1 (20:25):
Success or digital success?
Speaker 2 (20:27):
Both.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Yeah, I think similar to what I was just speaking
about, really the monthly activeusers, the renewal rates and I
think, for digital specifically,we can break it down even
further to like the adoptionmetrics, even some email
engagement metrics, tracking whois seeing our content at any
(20:48):
given time.
We do a lot of weekly analysisto understand how large was our
user reach.
So are we targeting more usersthis month over, you know, week
over week, month over month, andthat's been really helpful for
me and the team to understandwhere our impact is, which of
our programs are driving themost reach.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
And I love that combo of in-app and you said you were
tying some motions to email aswell, because there are people
who love in-app engagement andthere are people who hate it.
And there are people who loveemail and hate it.
And there's people who love SMSand hate it, and there's people
who love sms and hate it.
There's people who lovefacebook messages and hate it.
you know it's like you can'tbuild a perfect program for
(21:30):
every user, right, right, andwe're definitely testing all the
waters right now yeah, tell mea little bit about the structure
of the digital team as a whole,because there's lots of people
who are just trying to build upthe digital function, don't
quite know what they need to do.
It.
Don't know quite you know whatkind of personnel, what kind of
tooling and whatnot.
(21:50):
But strictly from a peopleperspective, how are you
structured?
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Yeah, so we have.
I lead a team of programmanagers, so Brent is one of the
program managers.
We have a total of four, soshout out to Chrissy, dijonay
and Corey.
And on our team they're eachresponsible for the creation and
implementation and upkeep ofthe programs.
So we kind of decide as a teamlevel what everyone's going to
(22:18):
work on, based on the customerjourney, what channel we're
going to use, and then they runwith it.
And it's amazing, I truly lovethe program manager title for
this team.
It works really well.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Super appropriate, and you know, a lot of times
I'll tell people that it's very,very similar to what a product
manager really does, because youown very specific things, you
know, as as is one programmanager focused specifically on
one part of the journey or oneelement of things, or is it just
based on interest, or how doyou split up that work?
Speaker 1 (22:52):
Well, it's definitely based on interest right now, um
, and really focusing.
The team does a great job onreally.
You know the product, they knowfull story so well and they
really understand the signalsthat they want to focus on.
They know the product, theyknow full story so well and they
really understand the signalsthat they want to focus on, so
they see something happening andthen we'll create a program
based off of that and so farit's worked where we're pretty
(23:13):
spread out along the journey.
We might have to get a littlebit more strategic as we grow,
but right now it's kind ofworked out where we've been
pretty spread across, justnaturally.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
That's awesome.
One of the things thatinterests me and I love that
both of you are on because youknow we can kind of dig into
this a little bit is just careertrajectory and career pathing a
little bit, because, brent,you've had a really cool journey
.
I feel like and I would imaginecorrect me if I'm wrong here,
but I would imagine that a lotof your experience on the
(23:46):
revenue generation side and thesales side maybe informs even
what you're doing today in termsof digital, because certain
things have to happen to securethe renewal and whatnot.
But, how much of that salesexperience do you use in your
daily as digital and do you feellike that was a natural kind of
career progression to youthrough CS?
Speaker 3 (24:08):
Yeah, great question.
And absolutely I think startingas an SDR a sales development
rep at any company, would be oneof the absolute best ways to
get a handle on the personasthat are using the platform.
Depending on your company,maybe you have a really, really
(24:35):
targeted ICP where a lot of yourusers and buyers look the exact
same.
But at FullStory we absolutelyhave our ICP and the folks we're
designing for.
But, as you can imagine, theFullStory customers range in
terms of industry and personaand being able to speak to each
of those specifically.
It was so important for me tostart as an SDR because I got to
learn what each of those userpersonas cares about and what
(24:57):
are the words that are going tohelp prevent someone from
hanging up on me on the phoneright now, quite literally.
And I mean, when you learn itthat way, obviously it could go
away where it doesn't go well,but on the flip side, going
through that, I learned so muchabout the broad set of our
personas.
That has been super helpful tome in each of my roles at
(25:17):
FullStory.
And then I think to the secondpiece of your question which
you're asking about is I thinkthere's probably a funny analogy
of trying not to get hung up onand also designing CTAs and
messaging that is going to getcustomers to pay attention and
that's a hugely important skill.
We also have amazing folks onour marketing team who help us
(25:40):
with writing and designing copyand the design and that's stuff
that we have even experts atFullsphere who can help us with
that even more.
But having that mindset of hey,if a customer only glances at
this quickly, are they going topay attention and is this going
to speak to them specifically, Ithink it's the right mindset
and certainly learned that as anSDR that there's a way to land
and there's a way to be ignored.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
Yeah, and the attention span is so limited a
lot of times.
That's a really smartobservation, I think, because I
mean we are marketing forcustomers.
Because I mean we are marketingfor customers basically, I mean
it is it's.
You know, let's call a spade aspade.
It's digital customer marketingwhich is so interesting to
(26:22):
think about, because really, theprograms and whatnot are
essentially campaigns, reallysophisticated campaigns based on
a lot of your customer data andthings like that, but we're
operating campaigns.
The reason I love the careerconversation is because I feel
like digital can draw from somany different things, but then
also can lead to so manydifferent things as well.
(26:43):
Brent, I have zero idea of whatyour career aspirations are,
but it's completely plausiblethat you go follow something in
product next, or you go dosomething in marketing next, or
you go do those kinds of thingsthat make digital a really cool
thing, because you're alreadyworking with all these different
departments, you get to seewhat's going on
cross-functionally, which iscool.
(27:03):
Talia, I'd love to understand alittle bit more.
Maybe for somebody who isbuilding their career, really
wants to get into digital, whatdo you look for in a program
manager for your team?
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Wow.
I think what I look for issomeone who is not afraid to
take risks and not afraid toexperiment, being really deeply
rooted in data.
So if you can look at data, youcan look at future adoption,
for example, and say, okay, knowthat something needs to be done
.
I don't know exactly what wecan do.
I have a general idea.
(27:35):
I'm being willing to just do itand iterate on that.
I think the great thing aboutdigital customer success as a
whole is it still feelsrelatively new and we're all
still trying to figure somethingout, so curiosity and being
able to make data-backeddecisions is something that's
important.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
Oh, yeah, for sure, for sure.
And like somebody who canreally mess with like three
different sets of data and makesense of it, that's golden.
Yeah, for sure.
This is one thing that I loveto ask folks who are in the
weeds on digital, because I havethese moments all the time now
where I see, like, anotification come from an app or
(28:16):
I see a text message that I gotor an email that I got.
That's pretty intelligent, itknows something about me,
something's happening in thebackground.
Are there, like digital motionsthat you guys have seen, either
in the wild or ones that you'vedone yourself where you've been
, like?
Speaker 1 (28:30):
oh, oh, that's really good.
I think for me it's probably theopposite.
Like I'll get something and I'mlike, oh, come on, like you
should have known that I wasjust looking at this.
Like why are you not telling methat I should either continue
doing what I was doing, finishwhat I was doing and, I think,
putting on my full story lensI'm?
(28:50):
I'm probably more looking for,like what people are not doing
correctly, which you know mightbe posing me off to seeing
something good, but there's alot of room for improvement in
my eyes.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
What about you, Brent ?
Speaker 3 (29:02):
Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking about it and I think,
similar to Talia, I feel like Idefinitely think that the emails
or offers that maybe I noticedbecause they don't seem to
resonate.
You know, I don't know howapplicable it is for this
conversation, but I will say Ihave been using Spotify for the
longest time and it does feellike they have gotten a lot
(29:24):
better at showing me things thatare aligned to what I care
about.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
Super applicable.
Yeah, spotify routinely comesup on this show just because,
look, maybe we won't even talkabout unwrapped, but that's
unlocked, a whole thing thatpeople are like how do I?
do that?
How do I do that?
But I mean, in general theyhave a really great
recommendations engine.
They know how to message itappropriately.
They figured that out and theyyou know, I guess they've been
(29:49):
around for a while and they'vebeen in that business for a
while, so I would hope that theywould be good at that day that
(30:12):
was like your playlist in abottle and they don't all land,
because I don't even remembermaking that, but it was maybe
even asking me to do it againfor next year.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
But I think in general, like that ties me into
thinking about me using, youknow, spotify in a year and even
if that specific moment was notlike a huge win for me I I
can't remember what it wascalled, but something happened
the other day where theyunveiled something that I had
zero memory of doing.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
But you're absolutely right, like all of the, the rap
thing was super smart and hasdrastically changed everybody's
relationship with what they'relistening to throughout the year
it has, and everybody is nowdoing that like, in fact, I got
one I forget what brand it was,even if I did remember, I
wouldn't say because I don'twant to throw anybody under the
bus, but like I got a 24unwrapped thing in my inbox over
(30:55):
the weekend and it's february.
I'm like snoozing on that one alittle bit, but that's cool.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, that's great.
What about?
Um?
I love learning from stuff thateither I've done wrong or other
(31:16):
people have kind of done wrong,and wrong is maybe the wrong
word, right?
It's like what are those thingsthat you've done and haven't?
They haven't quite landed, andyou end up learning more from
those kinds of situations thannot.
Have you guys experiencedsomething like that recently and
things that have either, like,not worked spectacularly or
(31:37):
you've just learned and fixedsome stuff?
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Well, I would say during my time at Service Titan
there was a lot of just tryingto figure it out, and I think my
biggest learnings from themistakes that were made were
just like not having a clearsignal, not having a really
clear data set that you wereusing or a really clear problem
statement, and to me that wasjust the impact wasn't as strong
(32:00):
as it could be, and so I thinkthat's the kind of like the
theme through some of themistakes is just like not having
a strong enough signal.
But it's all learning, so we'reall still just trying to figure
it out.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
That's an important one, because there's a lot of
times where you go in and youhave the expectation that I'm
going to have everybody's firstname in exactly the right format
, to just send a mass email toall 150,000 contacts within the
CRM and be just fine.
(32:33):
When in reality that's neverthe case.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
And ampersand.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Yeah, it just happens , you know and you see it all
the time and it's like one ofthose things that's super
unfortunate, but luckily, Ithink we live in an age now
where there's enough tooling tohelp you get through some of
that.
I don't know if this is y'all'sexperience, but it's almost
like the programs that you wantto go put in place dictate the
data hygiene programs that youneed to implement to be able to
(33:02):
execute on.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
Yeah, absolutely.
And data hygiene, I mean it'sgoing to be a problem, no matter
where you go.
I think we're lucky at FullStory with our product,
telemetry, but it's still notperfect and we're still going to
have to put guardrails in placeto make sure that something
crazy doesn't happen.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Yep, for sure, absolutely Well, as we kind of
round things out, I love folkskind of sharing what they're
paying attention to and whatnot.
So we'd love to know from eachof you, maybe Tali, first,
what's in your content, what areyou paying attention to and
reading and listening to?
Speaker 1 (33:38):
Wow.
So I based off of yourrecommendation the new
automation mindset.
So, listening to that on audio,which has been very good.
I also love going on LinkedInand plugging in digital customer
success or digital success andjust seeing what people are
doing.
I think everyone's just doingsuch amazing stuff and it's cool
(33:59):
to see how other people areapproaching things.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Yeah, there's a lot of people in digital that are
showing their work.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
Really cool.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
What about you, Brent ?
Speaker 3 (34:09):
Yeah, so actually the main and, admittedly, only
thing that I follow was yournewsletter, slash podcast from
Googling digital successsomewhere along the way and
subscribing, so that's awesome.
I definitely have a plan toincorporate some more digital
and I'm learning about theautomation mindset now books
(34:30):
into.
I am a reader, but I will admitthat I actually gravitate very
strongly towards fiction dorkyfiction books so I want to
incorporate more nonfictionbooks, so I need to move that
direction.
But, yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
Yeah, I have a bone to pick with Google.
Actually, as you were talking,I Googled digital customer
success again and for the firsttime in a year and a half, I'm
on page one of the searchresults.
But for the longest freakingtime I was like on page three
and it's just like come on,people.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
We're all good together.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
So okay, I'll take it .
But that's cool that you foundit via Google.
I appreciate that, tali.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
I know you gave kudos to the rest of the team a
little bit earlier, but is thereanybody else that either of you
would like to give a shout outto?
Is doing cool stuff in digital.
I'll put a soft spot in myheart for the Okta digital team.
They're doing such cool stuffwith Matic specifically.
I really love the AI thatthey're using with Matic to
surface new insights for thecustomers.
I'll always be trying to seewhat they're using with matic to
surface new insights for thecustomers.
I'll always be trying to seeyou know what they're doing.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
Yeah, I need to have someone from octa on.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
They've come up a lot yeah, yeah, alana, if you're
listening.
Expect an email shortly tellher, I sent you and also I said
hello.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
Okay, I will Brent how about you?
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Yeah, I definitely want to echo the shout out to my
fellow program managers at FullStory.
Truly, our team is each of ourindividual program holes and
emerge with a finished product.
Really enjoy working with thesefolks as Hupins, but also
really enjoy having folks that Ican bounce questions off of.
So a shout out to Chrissy,corey and Dijonay from Full
(36:18):
Story.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Yeah, I'd love to be a fly on the wall on y'all's
team huddles.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
It's great, it's a good time.
Would definitely recommend.
Speaker 2 (36:26):
Well, thanks both of you for joining.
It was awesome having you onand I really appreciate you
again.
Both of you for joining.
It was awesome having you onand I really appreciate you
again sharing your work andtelling us a little bit about
what you're building at FullStory.
I would love to have you allback at some point, once another
six months has passed, to seehow things are going and do a
program update.
Speaker 1 (36:44):
Oh yeah, That'd be great.
I know we'll have good stuff toshare.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
Yeah, for sure.
Well, thanks both for joining.
Really appreciate the combo.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Thank you, thanks for having us.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
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
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It really helps us to grow andprovide value to a broader
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You can view the DigitalCustomer Success Definition
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(37:18):
other things that we're doing atdigitalcustomersuccesscom.
This episode was edited byLifetime Value Media, a media
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(37:40):
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I'm Alex Trukovich.
Thanks so much for listening.
We'll talk to you next week.
Digital is so much more than focusing on scaled
customers.
Digital is for every customer,every segment, really focusing
on the entirety of the customerjourney, and that's been a
really fun evolution to break myown mindset around what digital
could be.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Once again, welcome to the Digital Customer
Experience podcast with me, AlexTerkovich.
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
(00:44):
the weekly companion newsletterthat has additional articles and
resources in it.
Go to digitalcustomersuccesscom.
For now, let's get started.
Hello and welcome back to theDigital CX Podcast, the show
where we talk about all thingsdigital in CX.
It is episode 92 and I amelated today to be joined by two
(01:08):
people who are in the throes ofbuilding digital programs.
You know, if you've listened tothe show here recently in the
last few months or so, you knowI've tried to bring on a lot
more people who are in the weedsdoing the thing, sharing what
they're doing and basicallyshowing their work, and we have
two examples of that buildingthe digital program at Full
(01:28):
Story Talia Root, who has joinedthe team relatively recently as
manager of digital CX sorry,senior manager of digital
customer success.
She joins me along with one ofour teammates, brent Hildebrand,
who's actually been at FullStory for a long time, probably
eight years or something likethat.
He's essentially one of theprincipal digital program
(01:52):
managers on Talia's team, and soin this episode we get a sneak
peek behind the curtains of howTalia is organizing around
digital the kinds of things thatthey're building.
We also talk a little bit aboutcareer pathing and career
trajectory, given Brent's kindof um morphosis into from from
sales and to CS, into digitaland uh, it's just a fascinating
(02:16):
episode full of little insightsand tips and tricks and
takeaways that you can implementin your own program If you like
.
I feel like we could probablydo a second episode and we might
do a check-in episode in thenext few months just to see how
things are progressing with them, but for now, please enjoy this
episode of the Digital CXPodcast with Talia Root and
(02:37):
Brent Hildebrand of Full Story.
Talia and Brent, I'm so pleasedthat you're here and thanks for
joining me on the show.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Thanks for having us.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Yeah happy to be here .
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Of course, the dynamic duo.
How long have you guys beenworking together at Full Story?
Speaker 1 (02:54):
No, I've been at Full Story for five months and it's
been me and Brent and a coupleothers on my team.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
And Brent, you're a vet, you're like eight years,
seven years, something like that.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Yes, In March it'll be seven years at Full Story.
So you're like the vet, theFull Story vet.
I wouldn't say I'm the vet, butwe have this internal tool
where you can see whatpercentage of people that you've
been at Full Story longer at.
And it is a high percentage.
I think it's like 95%.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
All right, do you get like a plaque for that, like
one of those fun acrylic plaques, or do you get something like
Tali?
Maybe you should hook up a goldwatch or something.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
I love the sound of that.
No, I don't have a gold watchfrom Full Story right now, so
that's an excellent idea.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Does that still happen, like is there any
industry, maybe finance, but isthere any other industry where
they still give out, likewatches, anniversaries?
Speaker 1 (03:45):
probably not yeah, I don't know none that I've been
at I was at dell for five years.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
The reason I know that is because I turned my
resignation in the same day thatI got my acrylic five-year
plaque there you go so you guysare a duo at full story, working
all through digital stuff anddoing some really, really
exciting things that we're hereto talk about a little bit.
But, talia, I'll toss it to youa little bit.
I'd love to know a little bitabout your kind of background
(04:14):
and what led you to where youare today.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Wow, I've had an interesting career path.
I actually started out intraditional retail and did that
for a bit.
Really was craving more of acorporate retail experience, so
I spent a lot of time at PotteryBarn Before I eventually made
my way into tech.
I first really heard aboutdigital customer success or like
(04:38):
one-to-many programs, and Iworked at a small startup called
Notarize and from there I wenton to be the first digital
success manager at Service Titan, which was really fun, kind of
weaved my way through figuringout what that meant, and then
went to Okta for a little bit,spent some time with the fine
folks there before making my wayover to Full Story.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
That's cool Because I feel like retail and
hospitality and food service islike amazing breeding ground for
customer service, but then alsolike the internal mechanisms
for dealing with BS.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Yeah, definitely customer centric, mind always
from Nordstrom.
That's just that.
Just flows through my blood now.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
And also I like to basically say that I think
everyone should spend a littlebit of time in either restaurant
or hospitality or retail, justbecause you get to see the best
and the worst in people.
Brent, how about you?
What circuitous path led youdown to being at Full Story for
seven years?
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
And I wasn't going to go this far back, but I should
mention that I did work atChick-fil-A for two years.
Yeah, totally, and I wasn'tgoing to go this far back, but I
should mention that I did workat Chick-fil-A for two years
when I was in high school.
So that was it was my pleasureand you know, as you mentioned,
those are valuable on the flylessons when you're in that
environment.
So it actually really was anawesome experience.
I'm glad I did that.
Yeah, yeah, and in terms ofwhat brought me to full Story, I
was a project manager at atelecommunications company in
(06:05):
Atlanta a big company and waslooking to intentionally join a
smaller company, but didn'treally know what I was looking
for.
I was looking for tech salesbecause I wanted to combine my
love for working with peoplewith my love and interest for
software and technology.
I studied engineering incollege and just knew I wanted
to get closer to that.
(06:25):
So I joined Full Story as an SDRwithout knowing anything about
how typical SaaS CX orgs arestructured.
Customer success manager wasnot even a job title that I
could have fathomed looking for.
It just wasn't on my radar andI very quickly learned about at
the time at Full Story we calledit hugging, which we no longer
(06:45):
call it that, but there's anawesome blog post that explains
why it was called that butquickly saw what the folks on
the host sales side of the houseat Full Story were doing and it
was super clear to me.
That was more of the thingsthat I wanted to be involved in
and less of the stuff on thesales side.
That wasn't necessarily superinteresting to me.
So it became my mission prettyquickly to figure out how I
(07:05):
could get over to CX.
And yeah, so I was in SDR forlike a year and a half and then
I started in CX.
We decided to break out.
Instead of having CSMs coverthe entire customer lifecycle,
we broke out onboarding, and soI started on the onboarding team
.
From there I joined what wecalled scaled customer success
and now I'm a part of digital.
So I've been in CX theremaining five years and it's
(07:28):
been awesome.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
So you're probably really well qualified to answer
the age-old question aboutwhat's the difference between
scale and digital, because I getthis question like all the
freaking time and a lot ofpeople are like, oh, it's the
same thing, just a differentword.
I'm like no, it isn't.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
What would you say?
Yeah, definitely have gottenthat question, ranging from
internal folks at FullStory,when we've built these new teams
, to even connecting with folkslike outside of FullStory who
are interested in exploringroles in CX and are wondering
what they should be looking for.
I think for me, without evenknowing a ton about like what it
is across the industry, I justthink it's the core problems
that we're solving.
It's not the core problems thatwe're solving, it's the way
(08:10):
we're going about doing it.
It's very different when it wasdigital versus when it was
scaled.
So really, as scaled CSMs, wewere almost functioning as
rotational CSMs where weinteract with customers for a
period of time, whereas on thedigital side, we're really
focused on building thoseongoing scalable content-based
programs that can live onDigital.
(08:31):
In my eyes, this is not a superwell thought out thing, but it
actually scales farther thanscaled customer success.
That is what comes to mind whenI try and explain the
difference.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
I think for me, just having been in digital for a
while, separating the two hasbeen a bit of a journey.
There's the scaled mindset andthere's the digital mindset.
Like Brent said, digital is somuch more than focusing on
scaled customers.
Digital is for every customer,every segment, really focusing
on the entirety of the customerjourney, and that's been a
(09:02):
really fun evolution, just formyself to kind of break my own
mindset around what digitalcould be and really embrace what
it could be across the wholejourney, which has been great.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
That's cool, that's awesome.
Well, thanks for sharing that.
You know a little bit ofbackground and I know in our
prep we talked a little bitabout what that journey of
digital has been transitioning alittle little bit from scale
into digital or maybe bothcoexisting.
We talked a bit about usingin-app and really jumping on
this thing of in-app engagementand you guys have been building
(09:37):
stuff like crazy over the lastfive to six months, if I'm not
mistaken.
So I'd love to get a quicksense from you all about what
you're building, kind of whatled you to decide to build that
and how it's going.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Totally, and Talia happy to jump in here first, but
certainly let me know ifthere's anything that I miss
here.
So we use AppCues at FullStoryas a tool that we use to build
in-app messaging for ourcustomers, and we've matured a
lot, I think, as you mentioned,in the past six months in terms
of the types of things thatwe're building and what we're
focusing on.
At first, we were using itreally as almost like glorified
(10:15):
campaigns, like, for instance,if we were running a webinar.
We started using AppCues topromote registration in the
platform, which has been helpfulLike it's worked.
We also like.
There was a project I wasworking on where we launched a
new template in the app and wewanted to make our customers
aware of that, so we spun up anapp that's related to that.
So super simple things.
And we're now moving intodesigning in-app enablement
(10:39):
flows, so guided tours withinour products, helping customers
bring them to the right features, as well as explain how to use
those, and that's been super funand exciting to work on.
We wish we could sit down andhave a conversation with every
single one of our customersabout these features, but it's
been really fun to work onfiguring out how we can scale
that and increase the number ofaccounts we're actually getting
(11:02):
to talk to just through in-appwalkthroughs.
So, yeah, lots of learningthrough that, but it's been
really fun to build those out.
So we have like a combinationof in-app flows and some
checklists for tasks.
We'd recommend and that's wherewe've been really focused in
the last quarter is building andlaunching that side of it.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
It's been a really interesting journey, just from
joining FullStory and seeingwhat we were using AppCuse for
and being part of the growth tosee how we might be able to use
it more.
We've started to use a featurefor them that just went GA
called Workflows, which has beena great way for us to combine
email communication withactually connecting people to a
flow within the product, and sowe're starting to explore that
(11:38):
as well.
Appcuse has been a great toolfor us just to see what we can
do digitally.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
What process did you go through to decide what you
wanted to kind of prioritize andwhat you wanted to roll out?
Because I think a lot of peoplestruggle with that, like, okay,
we bought this thing, we boughtthis tool, where do we start,
what do we do with it?
And in your case, I thinkAppCue has already existed, if
I'm not mistaken, and you werejust kind of like, okay, what
(12:04):
can we do with this thing?
How did you go about decidingwhat to prioritize?
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Yeah, I'll let Brent kind of go into some deeper
detail for his specific program.
But we really just wanted tofigure out where we could make
the most impact.
We wanted it to be a relativelylower lift, not something that
would take us a whole year todevelop.
A relatively lower lift, notsomething that would take us a
whole year to develop, and whatwe could easily score against,
like where could we see ourimpact quickly?
(12:30):
And I'll kick it over to Brentto talk a little bit more about
where we decided to focus onthat.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
Yeah, totally.
We call each of our projectsprograms and full story and each
of our programs has a problemstatement for, like, some of the
most recent projects that I'vebeen working on, like, had the
problem statement defined ofokay, these are the metrics that
we know are important to ourcustomers and this is what we
want to help improve.
And it was actually a projectthat I was working on six months
ago where I did a combinationof two things.
(12:56):
There was the in-app templatechanges combined with a webinar
that I led with one of mycolleagues, which we saw good
results with both, and obviously, I'm sure, as you can imagine,
putting something in the app isa lot more scalable than running
a webinar.
Like, every time we want awebinar, we have to plan the
script, we have to promote it,we have to get people to show up
and we have to lead the webinarand we can then have the
(13:17):
recording afterwards.
But it is really a campaignversus the template, which is
just available on an ongoingbasis to our customers.
And when I was comparing theimpact to feature usage of the
things that I cared about,afterwards it was super obvious
that we could get, in somesituations, even better impact
to our customers by the in-appchanges that happen.
So for me that was like takingmy problem statement Okay, I
want to impact these things.
(13:38):
It was a no brainer to know.
Okay, we have app use at ourdisposal.
Let's figure out how we can getmore enablement in the app If
we're going to get similarresults to asking folks to come
up and show up for a webinar.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
I love what you said right at the beginning about
having a problem statement to gointo it, because I think we
tend to at least I tend to jumpinto execution mode right away.
A of times I'm just like, oh,this is cool, we should go do
that.
And a lot of times that gets usinto trouble down the road when
(14:10):
we kind of lose clarity on whatit is we're building.
I mean, it really almost takesa book out of product and
engineering where typically yourtickets will start with the
classic statement of as a blank,I want to be able to blank.
Is it that kind of mentalityand format that you went down?
Speaker 3 (14:30):
Yeah, I think I do think so, and I think it
probably varies from program toprogram.
Like, some of our programs areprograms that help level us up
as a team, and so those problemsare like we need to be able to
do this, or right now we'respending this amount of time
doing this and it needs to befaster All the way down to,
maybe a program that's morecustomer focused is hey, we know
(14:51):
that customers are using thisfeature at this rate today and
this is the level of correlationit has with renewal, and so we
want to improve that.
So it can vary from being likethe second one, being more
outcome focused of like, hey,we're obviously ultimately
trying to impact renewal rateand help customers find value in
the platform.
(15:11):
Or it can be, like you said,more of like a jobs to be done
framework.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
um yeah, with that.
I think that naturally leads usinto the next kind of obvious
question, which is like how doyou measure the efficacy of all
this stuff?
And I think that's somethingalso that a lot of digital folks
struggle with, because it's not, you know, unless you have a
very specific outcome you'redriving towards, it can be
(15:35):
really hard to measure thosekinds of things.
Did you design these programswith the intent of having the
metric clearly defined on theoutset?
Is there a global metric you'relooking at as well for lagging
indicators maybe?
And then I mean it's early daysright, you guys just started
building some of this stuff afew months ago but are there any
early indicators of what'sworking and what's not?
Speaker 3 (15:58):
Totally so for every.
You know, this year, when wewere building out the digital
team, part of our process isevery single program in addition
to within that program having aproblem statement is we have a
scorecard.
So actually at the beginning ofthe program, we define input
and output metrics, inputs beingthings like if, for taking that
webinar as an example, rightLike this is the amount of
(16:21):
customers that we want to haveattend.
Like this, many uniquecustomers attend this webinar.
And then maybe output metricswould be like okay, we want to
set a baseline for this featureusage today.
We want to increase thatfeature usage afterwards.
You know some super simpleexamples there.
But we have that scorecard thatwe define at the beginnings.
When we're writing that problemstatement, we check in again
(16:43):
before we launch to make sure,okay, as we were building this,
does this still make sense?
And then afterwards we do acheck-in to see what those
results were.
I think obviously like to helpanswer the question of did this
go well?
Super, super helpful.
But I also actually think it'sa really important part of the
program build itself, right Likeit's super informative for the
types of things we're building.
(17:03):
It helps us answer questions atthe beginning, like can we
measure this?
Should we think differentlyabout how we're building and if
it is measurable and some thingswe should do even if it isn't,
and we just have to make someassumptions.
But it's a really, really goodexercise just going through it,
having to define those things.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Hey, I want to have a brief chat with you about this
show.
Did you know that roughly 60%of listeners aren't actually
subscribed to the show, onwhatever platform they're
listening to it on Now?
As you know, algorithms love,likes, follows, subscribes,
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So if you get value out of thecontent, you listen regularly,
um, and you want to help othersto discover the content as well,
(17:40):
please go ahead and follow theshow.
Leave a comment, leave a review.
Anything that you want to dothere really helps us to grow
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And while you're at it, go signup for the companion newsletter
that goes out every week atdigitalcustomersuccesscom.
Now back to the show.
Yeah, now back to the show.
(18:17):
Enough into.
We were like, okay, thiscustomer engaged with this, this
customer didn't engage withthat.
This customer attended thiswebinar, this customer didn't,
even though they registered.
Like that's the very surfacestuff which is great because it
informs you, know how you'recommunicating, and informs your
messaging and your tone and,like you know, did you surface
(18:38):
the message at the right time orto the right user?
Like all that kind of stuffthat's great.
But ultimately a book out ofthe marketing kind of best
practices playbook to say like,okay, we did this thing, we did
this webinar.
Did the people who attend havebetter feature adoption than the
people who didn't attend?
Like that's gold, right there.
(18:59):
So that's cool that you guys arethinking about measuring that
way.
And then Talia, I guess from aprogram perspective would love
to understand a little bit moreabout how you're measuring the
program as a whole, and thenalso maybe some insight into how
you're using that to kind ofvalidate digital's existence and
all that kind of fun stuff.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Wow, absolutely so.
I think overall, like some ofthe larger metrics that we're
tracking to, is monthly activeusers.
So are our programs drivingmore users into the platform and
actually using what we wantthem to use?
And I think that second layerof the feature adoption are they
engaging with the features thatwe're wanting them to do?
(19:39):
Of course, renewal we want ourcustomers to be finding enough
value that they want to comeback.
So I think that focus along thecustomer journey and really
targeting them with the rightcontent at the right time really
helps make sure that yourrenewal rates are good.
You're not just waiting untilthe last three months before
their renewal and throwing stuffat them.
You're showing them that valuereally early and often and
(20:02):
showing them exactly what theyneed to do, based off of their
persona, to use the platform orthe product correctly.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
I'm assuming you're rollingsome of that stuff up into kind
of the overall CX program ormetric set or something like
that, and I guess, how are youmeasuring customer success today
?
Speaker 1 (20:25):
Success or digital success?
Speaker 2 (20:27):
Both.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Yeah, I think similar to what I was just speaking
about, really the monthly activeusers, the renewal rates and I
think, for digital specifically,we can break it down even
further to like the adoptionmetrics, even some email
engagement metrics, tracking whois seeing our content at any
(20:48):
given time.
We do a lot of weekly analysisto understand how large was our
user reach.
So are we targeting more usersthis month over, you know, week
over week, month over month, andthat's been really helpful for
me and the team to understandwhere our impact is, which of
our programs are driving themost reach.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
And I love that combo of in-app and you said you were
tying some motions to email aswell, because there are people
who love in-app engagement andthere are people who hate it.
And there are people who loveemail and hate it.
And there's people who love SMSand hate it, and there's people
who love sms and hate it.
There's people who lovefacebook messages and hate it.
you know it's like you can'tbuild a perfect program for
(21:30):
every user, right, right, andwe're definitely testing all the
waters right now yeah, tell mea little bit about the structure
of the digital team as a whole,because there's lots of people
who are just trying to build upthe digital function, don't
quite know what they need to do.
It.
Don't know quite you know whatkind of personnel, what kind of
tooling and whatnot.
(21:50):
But strictly from a peopleperspective, how are you
structured?
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Yeah, so we have.
I lead a team of programmanagers, so Brent is one of the
program managers.
We have a total of four, soshout out to Chrissy, dijonay
and Corey.
And on our team they're eachresponsible for the creation and
implementation and upkeep ofthe programs.
So we kind of decide as a teamlevel what everyone's going to
(22:18):
work on, based on the customerjourney, what channel we're
going to use, and then they runwith it.
And it's amazing, I truly lovethe program manager title for
this team.
It works really well.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Super appropriate, and you know, a lot of times
I'll tell people that it's very,very similar to what a product
manager really does, because youown very specific things, you
know, as as is one programmanager focused specifically on
one part of the journey or oneelement of things, or is it just
based on interest, or how doyou split up that work?
Speaker 1 (22:52):
Well, it's definitely based on interest right now, um
, and really focusing.
The team does a great job onreally.
You know the product, they knowfull story so well and they
really understand the signalsthat they want to focus on.
They know the product, theyknow full story so well and they
really understand the signalsthat they want to focus on, so
they see something happening andthen we'll create a program
based off of that and so farit's worked where we're pretty
(23:13):
spread out along the journey.
We might have to get a littlebit more strategic as we grow,
but right now it's kind ofworked out where we've been
pretty spread across, justnaturally.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
That's awesome.
One of the things thatinterests me and I love that
both of you are on because youknow we can kind of dig into
this a little bit is just careertrajectory and career pathing a
little bit, because, brent,you've had a really cool journey
.
I feel like and I would imaginecorrect me if I'm wrong here,
but I would imagine that a lotof your experience on the
(23:46):
revenue generation side and thesales side maybe informs even
what you're doing today in termsof digital, because certain
things have to happen to securethe renewal and whatnot.
But, how much of that salesexperience do you use in your
daily as digital and do you feellike that was a natural kind of
career progression to youthrough CS?
Speaker 3 (24:08):
Yeah, great question.
And absolutely I think startingas an SDR a sales development
rep at any company, would be oneof the absolute best ways to
get a handle on the personasthat are using the platform.
Depending on your company,maybe you have a really, really
(24:35):
targeted ICP where a lot of yourusers and buyers look the exact
same.
But at FullStory we absolutelyhave our ICP and the folks we're
designing for.
But, as you can imagine, theFullStory customers range in
terms of industry and personaand being able to speak to each
of those specifically.
It was so important for me tostart as an SDR because I got to
learn what each of those userpersonas cares about and what
(24:57):
are the words that are going tohelp prevent someone from
hanging up on me on the phoneright now, quite literally.
And I mean, when you learn itthat way, obviously it could go
away where it doesn't go well,but on the flip side, going
through that, I learned so muchabout the broad set of our
personas.
That has been super helpful tome in each of my roles at
(25:17):
FullStory.
And then I think to the secondpiece of your question which
you're asking about is I thinkthere's probably a funny analogy
of trying not to get hung up onand also designing CTAs and
messaging that is going to getcustomers to pay attention and
that's a hugely important skill.
We also have amazing folks onour marketing team who help us
(25:40):
with writing and designing copyand the design and that's stuff
that we have even experts atFullsphere who can help us with
that even more.
But having that mindset of hey,if a customer only glances at
this quickly, are they going topay attention and is this going
to speak to them specifically, Ithink it's the right mindset
and certainly learned that as anSDR that there's a way to land
and there's a way to be ignored.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
Yeah, and the attention span is so limited a
lot of times.
That's a really smartobservation, I think, because I
mean we are marketing forcustomers.
Because I mean we are marketingfor customers basically, I mean
it is it's.
You know, let's call a spade aspade.
It's digital customer marketingwhich is so interesting to
(26:22):
think about, because really, theprograms and whatnot are
essentially campaigns, reallysophisticated campaigns based on
a lot of your customer data andthings like that, but we're
operating campaigns.
The reason I love the careerconversation is because I feel
like digital can draw from somany different things, but then
also can lead to so manydifferent things as well.
(26:43):
Brent, I have zero idea of whatyour career aspirations are,
but it's completely plausiblethat you go follow something in
product next, or you go dosomething in marketing next, or
you go do those kinds of thingsthat make digital a really cool
thing, because you're alreadyworking with all these different
departments, you get to seewhat's going on
cross-functionally, which iscool.
(27:03):
Talia, I'd love to understand alittle bit more.
Maybe for somebody who isbuilding their career, really
wants to get into digital, whatdo you look for in a program
manager for your team?
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Wow.
I think what I look for issomeone who is not afraid to
take risks and not afraid toexperiment, being really deeply
rooted in data.
So if you can look at data, youcan look at future adoption,
for example, and say, okay, knowthat something needs to be done
.
I don't know exactly what wecan do.
I have a general idea.
(27:35):
I'm being willing to just do itand iterate on that.
I think the great thing aboutdigital customer success as a
whole is it still feelsrelatively new and we're all
still trying to figure somethingout, so curiosity and being
able to make data-backeddecisions is something that's
important.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
Oh, yeah, for sure, for sure.
And like somebody who canreally mess with like three
different sets of data and makesense of it, that's golden.
Yeah, for sure.
This is one thing that I loveto ask folks who are in the
weeds on digital, because I havethese moments all the time now
where I see, like, anotification come from an app or
(28:16):
I see a text message that I gotor an email that I got.
That's pretty intelligent, itknows something about me,
something's happening in thebackground.
Are there, like digital motionsthat you guys have seen, either
in the wild or ones that you'vedone yourself where you've been
, like?
Speaker 1 (28:30):
oh, oh, that's really good.
I think for me it's probably theopposite.
Like I'll get something and I'mlike, oh, come on, like you
should have known that I wasjust looking at this.
Like why are you not telling methat I should either continue
doing what I was doing, finishwhat I was doing and, I think,
putting on my full story lensI'm?
(28:50):
I'm probably more looking for,like what people are not doing
correctly, which you know mightbe posing me off to seeing
something good, but there's alot of room for improvement in
my eyes.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
What about you, Brent ?
Speaker 3 (29:02):
Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking about it and I think,
similar to Talia, I feel like Idefinitely think that the emails
or offers that maybe I noticedbecause they don't seem to
resonate.
You know, I don't know howapplicable it is for this
conversation, but I will say Ihave been using Spotify for the
longest time and it does feellike they have gotten a lot
(29:24):
better at showing me things thatare aligned to what I care
about.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
Super applicable.
Yeah, spotify routinely comesup on this show just because,
look, maybe we won't even talkabout unwrapped, but that's
unlocked, a whole thing thatpeople are like how do I?
do that?
How do I do that?
But I mean, in general theyhave a really great
recommendations engine.
They know how to message itappropriately.
They figured that out and theyyou know, I guess they've been
(29:49):
around for a while and they'vebeen in that business for a
while, so I would hope that theywould be good at that day that
(30:12):
was like your playlist in abottle and they don't all land,
because I don't even remembermaking that, but it was maybe
even asking me to do it againfor next year.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
But I think in general, like that ties me into
thinking about me using, youknow, spotify in a year and even
if that specific moment was notlike a huge win for me I I
can't remember what it wascalled, but something happened
the other day where theyunveiled something that I had
zero memory of doing.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
But you're absolutely right, like all of the, the rap
thing was super smart and hasdrastically changed everybody's
relationship with what they'relistening to throughout the year
it has, and everybody is nowdoing that like, in fact, I got
one I forget what brand it was,even if I did remember, I
wouldn't say because I don'twant to throw anybody under the
bus, but like I got a 24unwrapped thing in my inbox over
(30:55):
the weekend and it's february.
I'm like snoozing on that one alittle bit, but that's cool.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, that's great.
What about?
Um?
I love learning from stuff thateither I've done wrong or other
(31:16):
people have kind of done wrong,and wrong is maybe the wrong
word, right?
It's like what are those thingsthat you've done and haven't?
They haven't quite landed, andyou end up learning more from
those kinds of situations thannot.
Have you guys experiencedsomething like that recently and
things that have either, like,not worked spectacularly or
(31:37):
you've just learned and fixedsome stuff?
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Well, I would say during my time at Service Titan
there was a lot of just tryingto figure it out, and I think my
biggest learnings from themistakes that were made were
just like not having a clearsignal, not having a really
clear data set that you wereusing or a really clear problem
statement, and to me that wasjust the impact wasn't as strong
(32:00):
as it could be, and so I thinkthat's the kind of like the
theme through some of themistakes is just like not having
a strong enough signal.
But it's all learning, so we'reall still just trying to figure
it out.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
That's an important one, because there's a lot of
times where you go in and youhave the expectation that I'm
going to have everybody's firstname in exactly the right format
, to just send a mass email toall 150,000 contacts within the
CRM and be just fine.
(32:33):
When in reality that's neverthe case.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
And ampersand.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Yeah, it just happens , you know and you see it all
the time and it's like one ofthose things that's super
unfortunate, but luckily, Ithink we live in an age now
where there's enough tooling tohelp you get through some of
that.
I don't know if this is y'all'sexperience, but it's almost
like the programs that you wantto go put in place dictate the
data hygiene programs that youneed to implement to be able to
(33:02):
execute on.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
Yeah, absolutely.
And data hygiene, I mean it'sgoing to be a problem, no matter
where you go.
I think we're lucky at FullStory with our product,
telemetry, but it's still notperfect and we're still going to
have to put guardrails in placeto make sure that something
crazy doesn't happen.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Yep, for sure, absolutely Well, as we kind of
round things out, I love folkskind of sharing what they're
paying attention to and whatnot.
So we'd love to know from eachof you, maybe Tali, first,
what's in your content, what areyou paying attention to and
reading and listening to?
Speaker 1 (33:38):
Wow.
So I based off of yourrecommendation the new
automation mindset.
So, listening to that on audio,which has been very good.
I also love going on LinkedInand plugging in digital customer
success or digital success andjust seeing what people are
doing.
I think everyone's just doingsuch amazing stuff and it's cool
(33:59):
to see how other people areapproaching things.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Yeah, there's a lot of people in digital that are
showing their work.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
Really cool.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
What about you, Brent ?
Speaker 3 (34:09):
Yeah, so actually the main and, admittedly, only
thing that I follow was yournewsletter, slash podcast from
Googling digital successsomewhere along the way and
subscribing, so that's awesome.
I definitely have a plan toincorporate some more digital
and I'm learning about theautomation mindset now books
(34:30):
into.
I am a reader, but I will admitthat I actually gravitate very
strongly towards fiction dorkyfiction books so I want to
incorporate more nonfictionbooks, so I need to move that
direction.
But, yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
Yeah, I have a bone to pick with Google.
Actually, as you were talking,I Googled digital customer
success again and for the firsttime in a year and a half, I'm
on page one of the searchresults.
But for the longest freakingtime I was like on page three
and it's just like come on,people.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
We're all good together.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
So okay, I'll take it .
But that's cool that you foundit via Google.
I appreciate that, tali.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
I know you gave kudos to the rest of the team a
little bit earlier, but is thereanybody else that either of you
would like to give a shout outto?
Is doing cool stuff in digital.
I'll put a soft spot in myheart for the Okta digital team.
They're doing such cool stuffwith Matic specifically.
I really love the AI thatthey're using with Matic to
surface new insights for thecustomers.
I'll always be trying to seewhat they're using with matic to
surface new insights for thecustomers.
I'll always be trying to seeyou know what they're doing.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
Yeah, I need to have someone from octa on.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
They've come up a lot yeah, yeah, alana, if you're
listening.
Expect an email shortly tellher, I sent you and also I said
hello.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
Okay, I will Brent how about you?
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Yeah, I definitely want to echo the shout out to my
fellow program managers at FullStory.
Truly, our team is each of ourindividual program holes and
emerge with a finished product.
Really enjoy working with thesefolks as Hupins, but also
really enjoy having folks that Ican bounce questions off of.
So a shout out to Chrissy,corey and Dijonay from Full
(36:18):
Story.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Yeah, I'd love to be a fly on the wall on y'all's
team huddles.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
It's great, it's a good time.
Would definitely recommend.
Speaker 2 (36:26):
Well, thanks both of you for joining.
It was awesome having you onand I really appreciate you
again.
Both of you for joining.
It was awesome having you onand I really appreciate you
again sharing your work andtelling us a little bit about
what you're building at FullStory.
I would love to have you allback at some point, once another
six months has passed, to seehow things are going and do a
program update.
Speaker 1 (36:44):
Oh yeah, That'd be great.
I know we'll have good stuff toshare.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
Yeah, for sure.
Well, thanks both for joining.
Really appreciate the combo.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Thank you, thanks for having us.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
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
(37:18):
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
(37:40):
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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