March 18, 2025 • 31 mins
Justin Neal, a digital customer success expert with a long pedigree in operations, joins the show to break down the fundamentals of digital CS, the power of operational alignment, and how teams can drive impact with limited resources. He and Alex discuss starting small with automation, the key to a successful first 30 days in CS, and standout examples of digital excellence in action.
Chapters:
- 00:00 - Intro
- 03:11 - From sales to digital CS mastery
- 05:00 - Startup vs. enterprise: learning the ropes
- 06:13 - Consulting, Broadcom, and new ventures
- 08:08 - Digital CS explained in simple terms
- 10:30 - Ops and digital: a powerful partnership
- 14:43 - Doing more with less in CS
- 19:39 - Start small: digital CS doesn’t need perfection
- 21:05 - Nailing the first 30 days of CS
- 23:52 - Seeing digital excellence in the wild
Enjoy! I know I sure did…
Justin's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justintneal/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
You don't have to have it all figured out on day
one.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Exactly.
Shine that light across theleaders and let them know it's
okay.
You don't have to be perfectfor day one.
You can work as you build.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Yep, and yeah, stuff's going to go wrong, but
you know that's how you learn.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
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
(00:44):
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's episode 95 and we're backto the interviews today.
Today I'm joined by Justin Neal, who is a digital CS operations
(01:08):
guy and all around super smart,super experienced, lots of
stuff to share.
He's got an incrediblebackground, including stints at
companies like IBM and VMwareand SolarWinds.
He's done some consulting, hasa ton of certifications to his
name, so he's very wellexperienced, super knowledgeable
(01:28):
and brings a lot of greatlittle tidbits to the table.
Please enjoy my conversationwith Justin Neal, because I sure
did.
Justin, I want to welcome youto the DCX podcast.
It's super nice to have you.
I appreciate you joining.
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Thank you, yeah, for sure, I think we super nice to
have you.
I appreciate you, john.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Thank you, thank you, yeah, for sure I think we have
lots to talk about, okay.
So of course, I do a little bitof digging on my guests and do
some, you know, linkedinstalking, as you have to, sure,
and it is insane to look at yourprofile because you have a lot
of cool kind of work experienceright, ibm, vmware, I think I
(02:06):
saw maybe SolarWinds and part ofan acquisition, maybe something
like that.
But you have a crap ton ofcertifications.
You have a master's degree.
I think you're working on yourMBA.
Like do you have time foranything else?
Like what's going on with that?
Like, do you have time foranything else?
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Like, what's going on with that?
Yeah, I try to stay, you know,stay busy, and I found both all
these things to be veryenriching and helpful as I
continue to learn.
And now I think learning is alifelong journey, right, and I
hope to teach my kids that too,and I kind of want them to see
me as a doer dad that's alwayskind of looking for stuff and
(02:45):
finding out information andlearning new things.
So I think it's important toinstill those values, so I
certainly try to live thosemyself as well.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
That's really cool, awesome stuff, like you know.
Obviously a lot of it is opsrelated.
No surprise, there some goodartificial intelligence stuff.
So I love folks who are stayingcurrent with those kinds of
things.
Give us a little bit of a tasteof you know your background and
what led you to where you aretoday and what you're doing
today.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Yeah.
So I would say my experiencehas been a little bit, you know,
it's shifted, it's changed abit through time.
I started out of college youknow a bright, young lad and
wasn't really sure what I wantedto do.
So, you know, got into a littlesales, a little bit into IT.
Recruiting kind of opened thedoors for, oh, this whole world
of tech and IT.
And you know, what can I dowith that?
(03:30):
Where can I go?
I knew I wasn't really lookingto stay in recruiting forever,
but then I kind of landed in anaccount management role at a
really small startup and thenshifted over to the early
version of customer success at asmall startup that was kind of
looking to grow and continuingto grow and I was their, I think
, second or third CSM hire backin 2015.
And that was the company thatthen was acquired by SolarWinds.
(03:52):
So I kind of steered the shiptowards that CS focus again when
CS was brand new but thefunction was kind of being built
out.
And then from there I learnedkind of both the what, what CSM
does and how CS works, and theintroduction to that and the ops
side, or the back side of that,of building out a Gainsight
instance, understanding howthose tools connect and what
(04:14):
kind of the admin type of workis and that sort of interested
me and I sort of gravitatedtowards that and was lucky
enough to then use thatexperience to shift over to a
much larger company than IBM,and this was again back in 2018
when CS, ops, gainsight, digital, CS that was all still in its
infancy.
So I was lucky enough to be apart of that wave and part of
(04:35):
that experience when it wasbrand new, especially at a large
enterprise company like IBM.
So, and since then I've reallybeen lucky enough enough to
again kind of be a part of theindustry, part of those
experiences, part of the growthof all this to kind of what it's
become today.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Yeah, that's cool.
What a what an awesome journey.
Sounds like you got in at theright time too.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
Timing is as I say, timing is everything, and I
think it certainly was a keypiece for me.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Yeah, Timing is everything for sure.
And yeah, and you earned yourGainsight stripes, which is
awesome.
Anybody who's been deeplyinvolved with Gainsight
implementation or managing aGainsight instance.
I have mad props for havingbeen there, done that.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
It's fun the small, like tiny startup to ibm and
like the extreme difference wasso crazy to me, yeah, and I
don't even think I realized howcomplex even an ibm was, because
that was like my first trueexperience with a large scale
kind of crm tool and thoseintegrations and then even going
(05:37):
from there to some of the othercompanies I've been, I'm like
oh wow, ibm was even a morecomplex piece than anything else
even I've seen since then.
So it was a nice first tasteinto that sort of experience.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Yeah, for sure, and you're right.
Like those experiences betweenyou know small startup and large
enterprise business are massive.
It brings me back to my days atDell, where it's like a few
hundred other people within thesame organization doing the same
thing Super fun, cool.
(06:11):
So what are you doing today?
Speaker 2 (06:13):
So today I have been venturing out on my own doing a
little consulting.
My time with VMware wrapped upmid last year.
Vmware part of the Broadcomacquisition, you know I think
that was a pretty big,well-known story.
So that all happened late 2023through mid 2024.
I had a transition role where Ihelped kind of export some data
(06:34):
, some kind of last minutegainsight changes, things like
that.
That was last summer.
I took on a short-termconsulting role at Schneider
Electric.
So they're kind of dippingtheir toes into the CS,
post-sales CRM, saas, digitaltransformation space.
So they were kind of lookingjust for some general guidance
on what does that look like andI kind of realized that I enjoy
(06:56):
doing that.
I enjoy looking at it from alarger scale, from a broader
perspective and with theexperience that I've got at
these enterprise-level companiesI can definitely provide some
insights and value onto that.
So branched out a little bit onmy own doing a bit of my own
consulting at the moment.
So I've had some conversationswith some smaller companies,
some startups and people lookingto kind of get into the
experience.
So that's been great andenjoyed doing that while I'm on
(07:19):
the search.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Yeah, that's great, I love it.
So, as part of your consultingworld that you're in right now,
as well as just in generalhelping others understand what
it is you do, one of the thingsthat I have routinely asked
guests on the show about is howthey describe digital CS or CX
(07:43):
in kind of layman's terms tofolks who don't really get it,
because I mean even some CSfolks there's still some gray
area or some kind of this blackbox phenomena that happens with
CS folks, as well as to whetherwe have digital CS or not.
There's a lot of gray areaaround it.
So how would you describe it tosomebody who you were helping
(08:05):
get their arms wrapped arounddigital?
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Yeah, when I think about this, I think about again
way back to IBM days, when wewere starting to build what now
is digital CS, but at the timewe weren't even sure what to
really call it.
It was basically how do youbuild for the scale, how do you
build for kind of a largermotion than this manual touch
points, these things that ourCSMs are doing?
(08:30):
They're taking all their timeup.
So to me, it's the idea ofusing the technology, the
tooling, things in place tobuild a scale, build for an
automation, build for somethingthat's going to be much more
impactful than just an email orone phone call or one action.
It's meant to be a true digitalor a true automated outreach,
so something that's designed tobe built at scale, built for
many different use cases.
(08:50):
It can be applied to manydifferent things and it can be
through email, in-app you knowdifferent types of communication
tools, but really it's the ideaof building a practice,
building a solution that'sscalable and that can be built
out for different things.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
Yeah, I love that you led with the human element of
it, because I've talked about iton the show till the cows come
home.
But the fact that a lot of folksmake the mistake of thinking
that digital is purely techtouch and it is that right, but
a big part of it is also puttingstuff in place to make sure
(09:24):
that your humans are operatingas efficiently as possible,
which, yeah, I think is superimportant.
And also, I mean it kind oflends to my next question, right
?
So you and I are both takingpart in MADEC's summit that's
coming up April 2nd.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
April 2nd.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Hey, so by the time you're listening to this it's
about three weeks.
So Matica's having the summitwhere you and I are both
speaking at it, and I think oneof the things you're talking
about is related to how ops andkind of digital intersect.
But I think one of the thingsthat I've found with digital is
that, invariably, the work of anoperations team and the work of
(10:05):
a digital team intersectsquarely.
In fact, there's a fair amountof folks who are running their
digital program out of ops, notnecessarily as a separate kind
of situation.
I wondered, without giving toomuch away, because I know you're
talking about this at thesummit, but have you seen that
evolve over the last decade orso with regards to where digital
(10:27):
lives and how they intersectwith ops?
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Absolutely so.
Yes, I do plan on covering thisin detail in about a month from
now.
So, definitely, if you have achance to listen, please join
the summit and if this issomething of interest to you,
which hopefully it is, pleasefeel free to join that.
So for me, I've been luckyenough to kind of again be a
part of that since those IBMdays early on, where we're
looking at a tool like Gainsightand we're building it out as a
(10:53):
CS ops team, figuring out allthe different use cases of it,
the different functionalities,including the email campaign
functionality, and the ways youcan build communication with the
tool, and you're realizing thatis a part of what the strategy
for CS is not just building outa motion of what systems are
going to do with the high-touchaccounts or day-to-day, but also
(11:14):
the scale, the SMB, thetech-touch segment.
Again back at IBM.
This was a ton of customers, aton of different segments that
just had not been touched, hasnot been seen.
We didn't really even know howto start with that right.
So it was essentially buildingthat as a part of the ops arm
and building out these journeysand these plays and all these
different things to kind oftarget those customers for the
(11:35):
first time.
So at that time it was how dowe set this up, how do we build
it out, and then kind of collectdata and gather the information
that we need to then makebetter decisions and kind of
build actions around that.
But it's all built around thepillar of CSOps because you need
those functions in place to beable to truly support that.
So I would say the two can workhand in hand.
Sometimes I've seen it like aUGG and a VMware, where ops sits
(11:58):
in a separate seat and issupporting the CS function, the
digital CS function.
Sometimes I've seen it wheredigital CSMs can come in and
actually I train them on how touse Gainsight and how to use
some of these features and thenthey can do that self-service
support where they're buildingtheir own campaigns and they're
building their own kind ofjourneys, and I'm there to maybe
support that with reporting orwith kind of actions or things
(12:19):
in Gainsight to then help themwith that.
Or sometimes just integratingwith other tools like a Pendo or
a WalkMe or in-app or some sortof tool that also kind of pulls
into the game side and thenyou're seeing it as kind of a
larger CS ops function, butagain all focused on digital
metrics and digital kind ofmotions.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
So I've been lucky enough to again kind of see it
in some different perspectives,in different ways, but they do
go hand in hand and there'scertainly ways to strategically
kind of plan about how toproperly structure a digital CS
team or structure theirorganization around digital CS,
(12:58):
and it annoys people when Ianswer it this way, but my
answer is it really depends onwhat you're trying to accomplish
and it depends on, honestly,who you have on your team too,
because you know a lot of times,fundamentally speaking, right,
when it comes to digital, thereis a customer facing element of
it.
Whether that's a scaled team ordigital CSMs or whatever you
(13:21):
call them, right, there's kindof like this, the human facing
element that is a result of someof these digital motions.
Who are specifically taskedwith creating these motions and
building these motions andplanning out how they're going
to be implemented and what'sgoing to happen, what the
customer experience is, whichtools need to be involved, what
(13:42):
data do you need Like the listgoes on and on.
Right, and I think that's aninteresting thing to think about
, where, ok, maybe you have aprogram manager or a project
manager or a set of programmanager that are tasked with
building these digital motions,and that's like where the
partnership between operationsand the ownership of the tools
(14:04):
and the data comes together asbasically this partnership to
make it work.
But again, like I think younailed it on the head when you
said there's any number of waysto go about doing it, and you
happen to have experience in alot of those ways.
Yep, absolutely yeah, as you'readvising some of the customers
(14:26):
that you're working with, arethere any kind of trends that
you're seeing currently in termsof what people are working on
or things that you feel arecommon misnomers?
I guess what we're trying to dois get a little bit of free
advice to the audience.
But, like, what are you seeingout there?
Speaker 2 (14:43):
I think a common theme, especially this year, is
more with less.
I think it's a lot of smaller,maybe companies that are still
trying to figure out how toinvest in CS whether it's a
startup that I'm talking to,that's oh, they have a CSM and
has CS, but they don't know howto cover all these accounts.
So they need to figure out howto cover more with the limited
(15:03):
technology they have in place orthe least amount of work that
it would take to do that.
So a lot of the time justtrying to solve those issues of
we have all this revenue it'suncovered, all of those issues
of we have all this revenue it'suncovered, we don't have enough
bandwidth to do that.
So they think of things likedigital CS or this type of
motion to kind of solve that.
And I have to kind of be carefulabout that, because until you
(15:25):
have the right again ops motionor tooling in place or the
practices in place where youthink you can kind of deal with
all the different things you'regoing to have to deal with, like
escalations or, you know,renewals or all the different
functions that an ops team or anops tool can support, you may
not want to go down this pathright, because you need to be
(15:47):
able to think through the wholecustomer lifecycle and how to
support that, whether it's Imean, if you have a CSM that can
do that, sure, but if you'retalking about a scale, you may
not have the bandwidth, thedepth of depth.
So even if you can send outcommunication and maybe have
someone that kind of managesthat, you still need someone to
truly build the operations pieceunderneath that, to be able to
(16:07):
support it for getting the fullcustomer's lifecycle.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
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
(16:30):
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Ahead and follow the show.
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.
(16:51):
Yeah that's so, so valid.
And another theme of the showrecently has been like hey, you
can't really do a lot unless youhave the data in place.
But then I think you bring upan amazing point about the
operational back end of that,because if you're going to go
send out a bunch of emails on aspecific thing, you better be
ready to handle some of theinbound responses that come
(17:14):
about.
And that's something you got tothink about Like what does that
?
Speaker 2 (17:17):
holistic lifecycle look like yeah, and you bring up
a couple of interesting pointsthere because you may think you
know, you may think you havekind of this playbook or an idea
and again you may be limited onwhat you can staff, how you can
staff it.
Again, I think a lot ofcompanies are trying to scale on
that as much as they can and Ithink sometimes it's some
alignment where you have toensure that the CS team ops
(17:41):
revenue product, like the ideais truly to grow a customer base
, grow usage and ultimately hitto renewals right.
So if your goal is, ifeveryone's bought into that goal
of we need to keep ourcustomers happy and keep them
around, then great, we can allkind of agree on that and build
the function toward that.
But if sometimes there'scompeting priorities where
(18:03):
revenue is more important or ourbrand names are more important
or pulling in more logos issuper important and they're not
thinking about the long-term,then there can be some friction
there.
You can think about oh well, itactually makes more sense to
shift this way and it's thewhole idea of CS really in
general kind of beingre-emphasized in that way.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
Yeah, and those things can be a massive
distraction too.
I've been part of organizationswhere there's definitely like a
flavor of the month and theflavor of the month gets all the
attention and then the runningthe business piece doesn't get
all the attention, so it gets.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
another really good benefit of having a digital and
an ops team is that you can restassured that while you're
focusing on some of that flavorof the month stuff, that you've
got regular like day-to-daycustomer operations in check
right, absolutely, and we it'sfunny, you also just touched on
data and I'm thinking about how,some of the times, I work with
(18:58):
the team and they would say, oh,we want to send all these
campaigns out, we want to do allthis great work, but we don't
have contact data in place yet,or we need to figure out how to
pull the right data in before wecan do that.
And it's definitely a balance ofyeah, I get you want to wait,
but I also think you got tostart somewhere.
So where is it where you haveenough to work on, but that's
not the final product, so you'rejust kind of starting with
(19:19):
something in it.
It's like a VMware.
We were willing to kind of dosome manual work to just to get
started, right, and we were justwilling to try things, and I
think especially some of thesecompanies like to just be
willing to give it a shot, getsome data in there and then
start working with what you have, rather than waiting for
everything to be perfect, right.
It's definitely a balance ofhaving to figure out where that
point is.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
It's really good advice, and I've been part of
situations where execution hasstalled because we didn't live
in the perfect world that wethought we lived in.
You know where you don't haveto go right out of the gate with
like hyper personalization,right.
You can keep things generalenough in your communications to
(19:59):
where you're still conveyingthe message.
You're still getting theinformation out there.
It might be kind of a spray andpray approach where you're just
getting it out to absolutelyeverybody.
But if you keep it generalenough, I think that's a great
way to start and to learn and tofigure out what's working and
what's not working.
While you work on, you know thedata cleanliness you don't have
(20:21):
to you don't have to have itall figured out on day one.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Exactly, I would shine that light across the
leaders and let them know it'sokay, you don't have to be
perfect with day one.
You can work, grow as you build.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Yep and yeah, stuff's going to go wrong.
But you know that's how youlearn Exactly.
Are there like digital emotionsthat you have seen or
experienced yourself or builtyourself that you think are kind
of top notch or really cool orstand out in certain ways, like,
(20:56):
are there other things thatyou've encountered in your
career or in recent times whereyou've been like, oh, that's a
really cool thing?
You know, I wish more peopledid that.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
Yeah, I mean, I think a few things.
So I think number one is themost important thing to build
with digital motion is thatearly on relationship.
It's when A you have to ensurethere's a clean handoff or a
clean and very much understoodapproach of when the customer
becomes a customer, when thesale happens and we're passing
them over to CS.
What does that mean?
(21:26):
What does that look like?
How is it scaled?
And then, what sort ofcommunication?
Or how are we handling thatfrom a digital perspective,
right Is it?
Do we send an email introducingeveryone?
Do we have kind of a three-stepwhere we introduce you here,
then we set up a time here andthen we do a follow-up here?
And it's very much, I would sayit's very important to be
thoughtful on how that is done,because that is your first 30
(21:50):
days or so post-sale and you'rereally building that rapport,
you're really kind of buildingthat trusted relationship.
So, even if it's a scaled modelor a digital or one-to-many
model, it's still the idea ofyou coming across as, hey, I'm
here for you, I'm here to help,I'm here to be your customer
success person.
And again, whether it's a 100emails you're sending out to
(22:13):
different customers, but it'skind of the same consistent
template and same process.
That should be really ironedout, I think, from the first one
as one of the first motionsthat you create.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Yeah, totally, I dig it.
There was a.
I'm trying to think who thecompany was.
Oh, it was Ford.
I just bring it up because theother day I experienced a pretty
cool kind of situation withFord where I had to take a car
in for some service or whatnotand this dealership had their
(22:44):
stuff, like their digital stuff,just figured out, fully figured
out.
And you don't think about thatwith car dealerships necessarily
, like you think of this likeclunky, disjointed situation.
So I don't, I want to get moreinformation as to what was
behind all of that.
But long story short, I won'tgo into the super details, but
(23:05):
the email communication and thetext communication and the phone
communication were allintertwined in a way where there
was contextual relevance beingpassed between all of the
separate conversations and I'mguessing there's some like cool
transcription stuff happeningthere.
(23:25):
I don't really know, there'sdefinitely probably some
artificial intelligence there,but basically, when I was
exchanging actual messages withmy service advisor, he had kind
of full awareness of everythingelse that was happening with me
in terms of the communicationsand the status of the car and
the status of my loaner thatthey gave me and all this stuff.
(23:47):
I was like Jesus, like whycan't we all do that?
Speaker 2 (23:51):
Yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
But I love seeing that stuff in the wild because
those are the things that giveyou all the ideas and spark
things, and I think B2C hasalways been real good at that.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
Yeah, I think you're right.
I recently had a birthday partyfor my now five-year-old and
about a month ago we were tryingto figure out where to have it
and so we started kind ofnarrowing down places.
We found this play place,locally owned, you know, a
little while from here.
So I inquired.
They were really quick to getback.
They sent very specificfollow-ups.
(24:28):
They sent very specific pricinginformation.
It was very easy to kind of getwhat I needed from them and it
made very easy to kind of getwhat I needed from them and it
made it easy to make thatdecision of okay, here's what I
feel like it's going to be like.
If we have it here, it'll be aseasy as for us as possible,
because when you're kind oftrying to organize this kind of
stuff, you just make sure it's alocation is easy enough for
everyone to get to.
You can get in, get your stufftogether, you know, have
(24:48):
everything ready for you andthen you can get out.
And we learned again as parentsof growing children that having
it somewhere else and havingthat kind of all done for you is
definitely the way to go.
There's a much easierexperience, so being able to
kind of communicate with themdirectly, then sending us emails
and kind of setting up apersonal site for us and and
(25:08):
waiting it's an evite to getinvites out and then following
up with how many are coming, andjust all that communication was
very much done digitally, and Iknow they have like dozens of
birthday parties a weekend, so Iknow this isn't something that
they do manually, right.
So I had to think, man, theymust have some really good
back-end process here to do thisright way and to make me as a
customer feel like I'm importantto them, right.
(25:31):
So I'd say that's a nice shoutout, an example of a company
that is doing it right.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
That is such a churn and burn business.
My wife and I used to run acooking school for kids and our
bread and butter on the weekendwas like kids' birthday parties.
And, oh my God, this was.
I mean, I'm dating myself, butthis is, you know, 15-ish years
ago.
So we were still on paper, man,it was like a paper notebook.
(25:57):
All the details are writtendown there and coordination and
all that kind of stuff.
It took so much time to do thatand uh, I'm guessing there's
probably a vertical sasssoftware out there for, like you
know, birthday events, places,and if there isn't, then we need
to jump on that.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
Oh yeah, and especially like not only being
organizing yourself but going toother people's where you're
like wow sometimes it's greatand sometimes it's like this is
a mess and I don't really knowwhat's going on.
So there's definitely adifference.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Yeah, exactly, that's cool, well, awesome, as we kind
of wind down, you know, onething I always love to do is ask
people what they're payingattention to and what's in your
content diet in terms of booksand podcasts and whatever Like.
What do you pay attention to tokeep yourself up to date?
I know LinkedIn Learning isprobably in that list, I don't
(26:49):
know.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Yeah, absolutely yeah , I've been trying to consume
more content.
You know I've had a little moretime to do that lately.
So, as you kind of hinted at, Ijumped at some certification
opportunities from, actuallyfrom pindo.
They have a series called mine,the product, and well, it's a
little bit of a shift from cs.
It still kind of can be appliedand I could see a direct
(27:11):
application to cs because it wasabout AI for product management
and understanding product dataand how kind of to capture that.
And Pindo is such an interestingtool because of what it is and
what it does and how much itcollects.
And one of the challenges Ithink that I've noticed in a
role where you're dealing withthat is how much data you're
getting, how much noise there isand how hard it is to kind of
(27:32):
dig through that and findrelevancies.
So those minor product coursesfor me were really valuable and
really something I found to betruly helpful.
So that's one area that I foundto be great Obviously, giving
up with all the CS toolsGainsight, hubspot, all those
guys and what they're doing andthat shift especially on like
the AI side and all Nick's postsabout what he learned about AI.
(27:54):
It's like so fascinating tokind of learn how much is
changing even week to week withhim.
So that's been great.
I have a plug for a podcast,rebels of Sass, with Dan O'Brien
.
Yeah, she's great, and yeah,just really cool to hear some of
the stories on differentperspectives, different changes
and kind of the way people areapproaching these issues.
So I love that.
(28:15):
I'm going to shout out my CXExchange folks, so Jan Young and
her newsletter and some of thefolks that are involved with
that.
So that's great.
I'm involved with CX Exchangeas well, happy to be a part of
that group, and that's a greatcommunity.
Also, plug Success Panda, whichis another great resource for
folks looking to either get itat CS or get some mentorship.
(28:36):
I'll be appearing on a panel,uh, in a couple of weeks on
digital customer success forthem, uh, but it's just a great
resource for anyone that islooking to develop in CS.
So lots of great resourcesthere as well.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Yeah, that's awesome.
Those are all real good plugs.
And then also, I mean therewere already some shout outs in
there, you know, but are thereany other shout outs that you'd
want to give to folks doing coolstuff in digital?
Speaker 2 (29:01):
Yeah, I'll say Kat, who was on last week.
I love her weekly post, she'sgreat and of course, all the
other folks that are presentingat the MatTik Digital CS Summit.
So that's going to be great andreally I'm sure a lot of them
have been on here before, but ifnot, then I'm sure you'd love
to have them on but really a lotof great thought leaders in
that space.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
Yeah, awesome, that sounds good.
Well, look, we're doing theMatic thing in a few weeks.
Sounds like you're doing somestuff with Success Panda too,
which is great Always goodresources.
Where else can people find you,engage with you and to learn
more about you?
Speaker 2 (29:34):
Yeah, so my LinkedIn is very active.
I'm on there posting prettyfrequently.
I've got a sub stack that Iwrite pretty exclusively about
CS ops, digital CS.
I post articles in there prettymuch weekly about kind of that
journey, also kind of somereflections on my MBA and how
that kind of correlates to CS.
I've got my LLC set up, myconsulting, so you can certainly
(29:55):
find my website there and kindof learn what sort of services
I'm offering.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
What's your website?
Let's plug it.
What's your website?
Speaker 2 (30:02):
It's just SuccessfulLayoffSolutionsLLCcom.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Cool.
Justin, thank you so much forthe time and all the knowledge
and the insights Superappreciated.
And yeah, see you in a fewweeks, but again appreciate you
coming on.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Thank you, Alex.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Thanks for having me.
Thank you for joining me forthis episode of the Digital CX
Podcast.
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It really helps us to grow andprovide value to a broader
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(30:41):
other things that we're doing atdigitalcustomersuccesscom.
This episode was edited byLifetime Value Media, a media
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(31:03):
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I'm Alex Trukovich.
Thanks so much for listening.
We'll talk to you next week.
You don't have to have it all figured out on day
one.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Exactly.
Shine that light across theleaders and let them know it's
okay.
You don't have to be perfectfor day one.
You can work as you build.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Yep, and yeah, stuff's going to go wrong, but
you know that's how you learn.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
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
(00:44):
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's episode 95 and we're backto the interviews today.
Today I'm joined by Justin Neal, who is a digital CS operations
(01:08):
guy and all around super smart,super experienced, lots of
stuff to share.
He's got an incrediblebackground, including stints at
companies like IBM and VMwareand SolarWinds.
He's done some consulting, hasa ton of certifications to his
name, so he's very wellexperienced, super knowledgeable
(01:28):
and brings a lot of greatlittle tidbits to the table.
Please enjoy my conversationwith Justin Neal, because I sure
did.
Justin, I want to welcome youto the DCX podcast.
It's super nice to have you.
I appreciate you joining.
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Thank you, yeah, for sure, I think we super nice to
have you.
I appreciate you, john.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Thank you, thank you, yeah, for sure I think we have
lots to talk about, okay.
So of course, I do a little bitof digging on my guests and do
some, you know, linkedinstalking, as you have to, sure,
and it is insane to look at yourprofile because you have a lot
of cool kind of work experienceright, ibm, vmware, I think I
(02:06):
saw maybe SolarWinds and part ofan acquisition, maybe something
like that.
But you have a crap ton ofcertifications.
You have a master's degree.
I think you're working on yourMBA.
Like do you have time foranything else?
Like what's going on with that?
Like, do you have time foranything else?
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Like, what's going on with that?
Yeah, I try to stay, you know,stay busy, and I found both all
these things to be veryenriching and helpful as I
continue to learn.
And now I think learning is alifelong journey, right, and I
hope to teach my kids that too,and I kind of want them to see
me as a doer dad that's alwayskind of looking for stuff and
(02:45):
finding out information andlearning new things.
So I think it's important toinstill those values, so I
certainly try to live thosemyself as well.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
That's really cool, awesome stuff, like you know.
Obviously a lot of it is opsrelated.
No surprise, there some goodartificial intelligence stuff.
So I love folks who are stayingcurrent with those kinds of
things.
Give us a little bit of a tasteof you know your background and
what led you to where you aretoday and what you're doing
today.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Yeah.
So I would say my experiencehas been a little bit, you know,
it's shifted, it's changed abit through time.
I started out of college youknow a bright, young lad and
wasn't really sure what I wantedto do.
So, you know, got into a littlesales, a little bit into IT.
Recruiting kind of opened thedoors for, oh, this whole world
of tech and IT.
And you know, what can I dowith that?
(03:30):
Where can I go?
I knew I wasn't really lookingto stay in recruiting forever,
but then I kind of landed in anaccount management role at a
really small startup and thenshifted over to the early
version of customer success at asmall startup that was kind of
looking to grow and continuingto grow and I was their, I think
, second or third CSM hire backin 2015.
And that was the company thatthen was acquired by SolarWinds.
(03:52):
So I kind of steered the shiptowards that CS focus again when
CS was brand new but thefunction was kind of being built
out.
And then from there I learnedkind of both the what, what CSM
does and how CS works, and theintroduction to that and the ops
side, or the back side of that,of building out a Gainsight
instance, understanding howthose tools connect and what
(04:14):
kind of the admin type of workis and that sort of interested
me and I sort of gravitatedtowards that and was lucky
enough to then use thatexperience to shift over to a
much larger company than IBM,and this was again back in 2018
when CS, ops, gainsight, digital, CS that was all still in its
infancy.
So I was lucky enough to be apart of that wave and part of
(04:35):
that experience when it wasbrand new, especially at a large
enterprise company like IBM.
So, and since then I've reallybeen lucky enough enough to
again kind of be a part of theindustry, part of those
experiences, part of the growthof all this to kind of what it's
become today.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Yeah, that's cool.
What a what an awesome journey.
Sounds like you got in at theright time too.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
Timing is as I say, timing is everything, and I
think it certainly was a keypiece for me.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Yeah, Timing is everything for sure.
And yeah, and you earned yourGainsight stripes, which is
awesome.
Anybody who's been deeplyinvolved with Gainsight
implementation or managing aGainsight instance.
I have mad props for havingbeen there, done that.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
It's fun the small, like tiny startup to ibm and
like the extreme difference wasso crazy to me, yeah, and I
don't even think I realized howcomplex even an ibm was, because
that was like my first trueexperience with a large scale
kind of crm tool and thoseintegrations and then even going
(05:37):
from there to some of the othercompanies I've been, I'm like
oh wow, ibm was even a morecomplex piece than anything else
even I've seen since then.
So it was a nice first tasteinto that sort of experience.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Yeah, for sure, and you're right.
Like those experiences betweenyou know small startup and large
enterprise business are massive.
It brings me back to my days atDell, where it's like a few
hundred other people within thesame organization doing the same
thing Super fun, cool.
(06:11):
So what are you doing today?
Speaker 2 (06:13):
So today I have been venturing out on my own doing a
little consulting.
My time with VMware wrapped upmid last year.
Vmware part of the Broadcomacquisition, you know I think
that was a pretty big,well-known story.
So that all happened late 2023through mid 2024.
I had a transition role where Ihelped kind of export some data
(06:34):
, some kind of last minutegainsight changes, things like
that.
That was last summer.
I took on a short-termconsulting role at Schneider
Electric.
So they're kind of dippingtheir toes into the CS,
post-sales CRM, saas, digitaltransformation space.
So they were kind of lookingjust for some general guidance
on what does that look like andI kind of realized that I enjoy
(06:56):
doing that.
I enjoy looking at it from alarger scale, from a broader
perspective and with theexperience that I've got at
these enterprise-level companiesI can definitely provide some
insights and value onto that.
So branched out a little bit onmy own doing a bit of my own
consulting at the moment.
So I've had some conversationswith some smaller companies,
some startups and people lookingto kind of get into the
experience.
So that's been great andenjoyed doing that while I'm on
(07:19):
the search.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Yeah, that's great, I love it.
So, as part of your consultingworld that you're in right now,
as well as just in generalhelping others understand what
it is you do, one of the thingsthat I have routinely asked
guests on the show about is howthey describe digital CS or CX
(07:43):
in kind of layman's terms tofolks who don't really get it,
because I mean even some CSfolks there's still some gray
area or some kind of this blackbox phenomena that happens with
CS folks, as well as to whetherwe have digital CS or not.
There's a lot of gray areaaround it.
So how would you describe it tosomebody who you were helping
(08:05):
get their arms wrapped arounddigital?
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Yeah, when I think about this, I think about again
way back to IBM days, when wewere starting to build what now
is digital CS, but at the timewe weren't even sure what to
really call it.
It was basically how do youbuild for the scale, how do you
build for kind of a largermotion than this manual touch
points, these things that ourCSMs are doing?
(08:30):
They're taking all their timeup.
So to me, it's the idea ofusing the technology, the
tooling, things in place tobuild a scale, build for an
automation, build for somethingthat's going to be much more
impactful than just an email orone phone call or one action.
It's meant to be a true digitalor a true automated outreach,
so something that's designed tobe built at scale, built for
many different use cases.
(08:50):
It can be applied to manydifferent things and it can be
through email, in-app you knowdifferent types of communication
tools, but really it's the ideaof building a practice,
building a solution that'sscalable and that can be built
out for different things.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
Yeah, I love that you led with the human element of
it, because I've talked about iton the show till the cows come
home.
But the fact that a lot of folksmake the mistake of thinking
that digital is purely techtouch and it is that right, but
a big part of it is also puttingstuff in place to make sure
(09:24):
that your humans are operatingas efficiently as possible,
which, yeah, I think is superimportant.
And also, I mean it kind oflends to my next question, right
?
So you and I are both takingpart in MADEC's summit that's
coming up April 2nd.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
April 2nd.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Hey, so by the time you're listening to this it's
about three weeks.
So Matica's having the summitwhere you and I are both
speaking at it, and I think oneof the things you're talking
about is related to how ops andkind of digital intersect.
But I think one of the thingsthat I've found with digital is
that, invariably, the work of anoperations team and the work of
(10:05):
a digital team intersectsquarely.
In fact, there's a fair amountof folks who are running their
digital program out of ops, notnecessarily as a separate kind
of situation.
I wondered, without giving toomuch away, because I know you're
talking about this at thesummit, but have you seen that
evolve over the last decade orso with regards to where digital
(10:27):
lives and how they intersectwith ops?
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Absolutely so.
Yes, I do plan on covering thisin detail in about a month from
now.
So, definitely, if you have achance to listen, please join
the summit and if this issomething of interest to you,
which hopefully it is, pleasefeel free to join that.
So for me, I've been luckyenough to kind of again be a
part of that since those IBMdays early on, where we're
looking at a tool like Gainsightand we're building it out as a
(10:53):
CS ops team, figuring out allthe different use cases of it,
the different functionalities,including the email campaign
functionality, and the ways youcan build communication with the
tool, and you're realizing thatis a part of what the strategy
for CS is not just building outa motion of what systems are
going to do with the high-touchaccounts or day-to-day, but also
(11:14):
the scale, the SMB, thetech-touch segment.
Again back at IBM.
This was a ton of customers, aton of different segments that
just had not been touched, hasnot been seen.
We didn't really even know howto start with that right.
So it was essentially buildingthat as a part of the ops arm
and building out these journeysand these plays and all these
different things to kind oftarget those customers for the
(11:35):
first time.
So at that time it was how dowe set this up, how do we build
it out, and then kind of collectdata and gather the information
that we need to then makebetter decisions and kind of
build actions around that.
But it's all built around thepillar of CSOps because you need
those functions in place to beable to truly support that.
So I would say the two can workhand in hand.
Sometimes I've seen it like aUGG and a VMware, where ops sits
(11:58):
in a separate seat and issupporting the CS function, the
digital CS function.
Sometimes I've seen it wheredigital CSMs can come in and
actually I train them on how touse Gainsight and how to use
some of these features and thenthey can do that self-service
support where they're buildingtheir own campaigns and they're
building their own kind ofjourneys, and I'm there to maybe
support that with reporting orwith kind of actions or things
(12:19):
in Gainsight to then help themwith that.
Or sometimes just integratingwith other tools like a Pendo or
a WalkMe or in-app or some sortof tool that also kind of pulls
into the game side and thenyou're seeing it as kind of a
larger CS ops function, butagain all focused on digital
metrics and digital kind ofmotions.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
So I've been lucky enough to again kind of see it
in some different perspectives,in different ways, but they do
go hand in hand and there'scertainly ways to strategically
kind of plan about how toproperly structure a digital CS
team or structure theirorganization around digital CS,
(12:58):
and it annoys people when Ianswer it this way, but my
answer is it really depends onwhat you're trying to accomplish
and it depends on, honestly,who you have on your team too,
because you know a lot of times,fundamentally speaking, right,
when it comes to digital, thereis a customer facing element of
it.
Whether that's a scaled team ordigital CSMs or whatever you
(13:21):
call them, right, there's kindof like this, the human facing
element that is a result of someof these digital motions.
Who are specifically taskedwith creating these motions and
building these motions andplanning out how they're going
to be implemented and what'sgoing to happen, what the
customer experience is, whichtools need to be involved, what
(13:42):
data do you need Like the listgoes on and on.
Right, and I think that's aninteresting thing to think about
, where, ok, maybe you have aprogram manager or a project
manager or a set of programmanager that are tasked with
building these digital motions,and that's like where the
partnership between operationsand the ownership of the tools
(14:04):
and the data comes together asbasically this partnership to
make it work.
But again, like I think younailed it on the head when you
said there's any number of waysto go about doing it, and you
happen to have experience in alot of those ways.
Yep, absolutely yeah, as you'readvising some of the customers
(14:26):
that you're working with, arethere any kind of trends that
you're seeing currently in termsof what people are working on
or things that you feel arecommon misnomers?
I guess what we're trying to dois get a little bit of free
advice to the audience.
But, like, what are you seeingout there?
Speaker 2 (14:43):
I think a common theme, especially this year, is
more with less.
I think it's a lot of smaller,maybe companies that are still
trying to figure out how toinvest in CS whether it's a
startup that I'm talking to,that's oh, they have a CSM and
has CS, but they don't know howto cover all these accounts.
So they need to figure out howto cover more with the limited
(15:03):
technology they have in place orthe least amount of work that
it would take to do that.
So a lot of the time justtrying to solve those issues of
we have all this revenue it'suncovered, all of those issues
of we have all this revenue it'suncovered, we don't have enough
bandwidth to do that.
So they think of things likedigital CS or this type of
motion to kind of solve that.
And I have to kind of be carefulabout that, because until you
(15:25):
have the right again ops motionor tooling in place or the
practices in place where youthink you can kind of deal with
all the different things you'regoing to have to deal with, like
escalations or, you know,renewals or all the different
functions that an ops team or anops tool can support, you may
not want to go down this pathright, because you need to be
(15:47):
able to think through the wholecustomer lifecycle and how to
support that, whether it's Imean, if you have a CSM that can
do that, sure, but if you'retalking about a scale, you may
not have the bandwidth, thedepth of depth.
So even if you can send outcommunication and maybe have
someone that kind of managesthat, you still need someone to
truly build the operations pieceunderneath that, to be able to
(16:07):
support it for getting the fullcustomer's lifecycle.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
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
(16:30):
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that goes out every week atdigitalcustomersuccesscom.
Now back to the show.
(16:51):
Yeah that's so, so valid.
And another theme of the showrecently has been like hey, you
can't really do a lot unless youhave the data in place.
But then I think you bring upan amazing point about the
operational back end of that,because if you're going to go
send out a bunch of emails on aspecific thing, you better be
ready to handle some of theinbound responses that come
(17:14):
about.
And that's something you got tothink about Like what does that
?
Speaker 2 (17:17):
holistic lifecycle look like yeah, and you bring up
a couple of interesting pointsthere because you may think you
know, you may think you havekind of this playbook or an idea
and again you may be limited onwhat you can staff, how you can
staff it.
Again, I think a lot ofcompanies are trying to scale on
that as much as they can and Ithink sometimes it's some
alignment where you have toensure that the CS team ops
(17:41):
revenue product, like the ideais truly to grow a customer base
, grow usage and ultimately hitto renewals right.
So if your goal is, ifeveryone's bought into that goal
of we need to keep ourcustomers happy and keep them
around, then great, we can allkind of agree on that and build
the function toward that.
But if sometimes there'scompeting priorities where
(18:03):
revenue is more important or ourbrand names are more important
or pulling in more logos issuper important and they're not
thinking about the long-term,then there can be some friction
there.
You can think about oh well, itactually makes more sense to
shift this way and it's thewhole idea of CS really in
general kind of beingre-emphasized in that way.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
Yeah, and those things can be a massive
distraction too.
I've been part of organizationswhere there's definitely like a
flavor of the month and theflavor of the month gets all the
attention and then the runningthe business piece doesn't get
all the attention, so it gets.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
another really good benefit of having a digital and
an ops team is that you can restassured that while you're
focusing on some of that flavorof the month stuff, that you've
got regular like day-to-daycustomer operations in check
right, absolutely, and we it'sfunny, you also just touched on
data and I'm thinking about how,some of the times, I work with
(18:58):
the team and they would say, oh,we want to send all these
campaigns out, we want to do allthis great work, but we don't
have contact data in place yet,or we need to figure out how to
pull the right data in before wecan do that.
And it's definitely a balance ofyeah, I get you want to wait,
but I also think you got tostart somewhere.
So where is it where you haveenough to work on, but that's
not the final product, so you'rejust kind of starting with
(19:19):
something in it.
It's like a VMware.
We were willing to kind of dosome manual work to just to get
started, right, and we were justwilling to try things, and I
think especially some of thesecompanies like to just be
willing to give it a shot, getsome data in there and then
start working with what you have, rather than waiting for
everything to be perfect, right.
It's definitely a balance ofhaving to figure out where that
point is.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
It's really good advice, and I've been part of
situations where execution hasstalled because we didn't live
in the perfect world that wethought we lived in.
You know where you don't haveto go right out of the gate with
like hyper personalization,right.
You can keep things generalenough in your communications to
(19:59):
where you're still conveyingthe message.
You're still getting theinformation out there.
It might be kind of a spray andpray approach where you're just
getting it out to absolutelyeverybody.
But if you keep it generalenough, I think that's a great
way to start and to learn and tofigure out what's working and
what's not working.
While you work on, you know thedata cleanliness you don't have
(20:21):
to you don't have to have itall figured out on day one.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Exactly, I would shine that light across the
leaders and let them know it'sokay, you don't have to be
perfect with day one.
You can work, grow as you build.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Yep and yeah, stuff's going to go wrong.
But you know that's how youlearn Exactly.
Are there like digital emotionsthat you have seen or
experienced yourself or builtyourself that you think are kind
of top notch or really cool orstand out in certain ways, like,
(20:56):
are there other things thatyou've encountered in your
career or in recent times whereyou've been like, oh, that's a
really cool thing?
You know, I wish more peopledid that.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
Yeah, I mean, I think a few things.
So I think number one is themost important thing to build
with digital motion is thatearly on relationship.
It's when A you have to ensurethere's a clean handoff or a
clean and very much understoodapproach of when the customer
becomes a customer, when thesale happens and we're passing
them over to CS.
What does that mean?
(21:26):
What does that look like?
How is it scaled?
And then, what sort ofcommunication?
Or how are we handling thatfrom a digital perspective,
right Is it?
Do we send an email introducingeveryone?
Do we have kind of a three-stepwhere we introduce you here,
then we set up a time here andthen we do a follow-up here?
And it's very much, I would sayit's very important to be
thoughtful on how that is done,because that is your first 30
(21:50):
days or so post-sale and you'rereally building that rapport,
you're really kind of buildingthat trusted relationship.
So, even if it's a scaled modelor a digital or one-to-many
model, it's still the idea ofyou coming across as, hey, I'm
here for you, I'm here to help,I'm here to be your customer
success person.
And again, whether it's a 100emails you're sending out to
(22:13):
different customers, but it'skind of the same consistent
template and same process.
That should be really ironedout, I think, from the first one
as one of the first motionsthat you create.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Yeah, totally, I dig it.
There was a.
I'm trying to think who thecompany was.
Oh, it was Ford.
I just bring it up because theother day I experienced a pretty
cool kind of situation withFord where I had to take a car
in for some service or whatnotand this dealership had their
(22:44):
stuff, like their digital stuff,just figured out, fully figured
out.
And you don't think about thatwith car dealerships necessarily
, like you think of this likeclunky, disjointed situation.
So I don't, I want to get moreinformation as to what was
behind all of that.
But long story short, I won'tgo into the super details, but
(23:05):
the email communication and thetext communication and the phone
communication were allintertwined in a way where there
was contextual relevance beingpassed between all of the
separate conversations and I'mguessing there's some like cool
transcription stuff happeningthere.
(23:25):
I don't really know, there'sdefinitely probably some
artificial intelligence there,but basically, when I was
exchanging actual messages withmy service advisor, he had kind
of full awareness of everythingelse that was happening with me
in terms of the communicationsand the status of the car and
the status of my loaner thatthey gave me and all this stuff.
(23:47):
I was like Jesus, like whycan't we all do that?
Speaker 2 (23:51):
Yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
But I love seeing that stuff in the wild because
those are the things that giveyou all the ideas and spark
things, and I think B2C hasalways been real good at that.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
Yeah, I think you're right.
I recently had a birthday partyfor my now five-year-old and
about a month ago we were tryingto figure out where to have it
and so we started kind ofnarrowing down places.
We found this play place,locally owned, you know, a
little while from here.
So I inquired.
They were really quick to getback.
They sent very specificfollow-ups.
(24:28):
They sent very specific pricinginformation.
It was very easy to kind of getwhat I needed from them and it
made very easy to kind of getwhat I needed from them and it
made it easy to make thatdecision of okay, here's what I
feel like it's going to be like.
If we have it here, it'll be aseasy as for us as possible,
because when you're kind oftrying to organize this kind of
stuff, you just make sure it's alocation is easy enough for
everyone to get to.
You can get in, get your stufftogether, you know, have
(24:48):
everything ready for you andthen you can get out.
And we learned again as parentsof growing children that having
it somewhere else and havingthat kind of all done for you is
definitely the way to go.
There's a much easierexperience, so being able to
kind of communicate with themdirectly, then sending us emails
and kind of setting up apersonal site for us and and
(25:08):
waiting it's an evite to getinvites out and then following
up with how many are coming, andjust all that communication was
very much done digitally, and Iknow they have like dozens of
birthday parties a weekend, so Iknow this isn't something that
they do manually, right.
So I had to think, man, theymust have some really good
back-end process here to do thisright way and to make me as a
customer feel like I'm importantto them, right.
(25:31):
So I'd say that's a nice shoutout, an example of a company
that is doing it right.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
That is such a churn and burn business.
My wife and I used to run acooking school for kids and our
bread and butter on the weekendwas like kids' birthday parties.
And, oh my God, this was.
I mean, I'm dating myself, butthis is, you know, 15-ish years
ago.
So we were still on paper, man,it was like a paper notebook.
(25:57):
All the details are writtendown there and coordination and
all that kind of stuff.
It took so much time to do thatand uh, I'm guessing there's
probably a vertical sasssoftware out there for, like you
know, birthday events, places,and if there isn't, then we need
to jump on that.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
Oh yeah, and especially like not only being
organizing yourself but going toother people's where you're
like wow sometimes it's greatand sometimes it's like this is
a mess and I don't really knowwhat's going on.
So there's definitely adifference.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Yeah, exactly, that's cool, well, awesome, as we kind
of wind down, you know, onething I always love to do is ask
people what they're payingattention to and what's in your
content diet in terms of booksand podcasts and whatever Like.
What do you pay attention to tokeep yourself up to date?
I know LinkedIn Learning isprobably in that list, I don't
(26:49):
know.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Yeah, absolutely yeah , I've been trying to consume
more content.
You know I've had a little moretime to do that lately.
So, as you kind of hinted at, Ijumped at some certification
opportunities from, actuallyfrom pindo.
They have a series called mine,the product, and well, it's a
little bit of a shift from cs.
It still kind of can be appliedand I could see a direct
(27:11):
application to cs because it wasabout AI for product management
and understanding product dataand how kind of to capture that.
And Pindo is such an interestingtool because of what it is and
what it does and how much itcollects.
And one of the challenges Ithink that I've noticed in a
role where you're dealing withthat is how much data you're
getting, how much noise there isand how hard it is to kind of
(27:32):
dig through that and findrelevancies.
So those minor product coursesfor me were really valuable and
really something I found to betruly helpful.
So that's one area that I foundto be great Obviously, giving
up with all the CS toolsGainsight, hubspot, all those
guys and what they're doing andthat shift especially on like
the AI side and all Nick's postsabout what he learned about AI.
(27:54):
It's like so fascinating tokind of learn how much is
changing even week to week withhim.
So that's been great.
I have a plug for a podcast,rebels of Sass, with Dan O'Brien
.
Yeah, she's great, and yeah,just really cool to hear some of
the stories on differentperspectives, different changes
and kind of the way people areapproaching these issues.
So I love that.
(28:15):
I'm going to shout out my CXExchange folks, so Jan Young and
her newsletter and some of thefolks that are involved with
that.
So that's great.
I'm involved with CX Exchangeas well, happy to be a part of
that group, and that's a greatcommunity.
Also, plug Success Panda, whichis another great resource for
folks looking to either get itat CS or get some mentorship.
(28:36):
I'll be appearing on a panel,uh, in a couple of weeks on
digital customer success forthem, uh, but it's just a great
resource for anyone that islooking to develop in CS.
So lots of great resourcesthere as well.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Yeah, that's awesome.
Those are all real good plugs.
And then also, I mean therewere already some shout outs in
there, you know, but are thereany other shout outs that you'd
want to give to folks doing coolstuff in digital?
Speaker 2 (29:01):
Yeah, I'll say Kat, who was on last week.
I love her weekly post, she'sgreat and of course, all the
other folks that are presentingat the MatTik Digital CS Summit.
So that's going to be great andreally I'm sure a lot of them
have been on here before, but ifnot, then I'm sure you'd love
to have them on but really a lotof great thought leaders in
that space.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
Yeah, awesome, that sounds good.
Well, look, we're doing theMatic thing in a few weeks.
Sounds like you're doing somestuff with Success Panda too,
which is great Always goodresources.
Where else can people find you,engage with you and to learn
more about you?
Speaker 2 (29:34):
Yeah, so my LinkedIn is very active.
I'm on there posting prettyfrequently.
I've got a sub stack that Iwrite pretty exclusively about
CS ops, digital CS.
I post articles in there prettymuch weekly about kind of that
journey, also kind of somereflections on my MBA and how
that kind of correlates to CS.
I've got my LLC set up, myconsulting, so you can certainly
(29:55):
find my website there and kindof learn what sort of services
I'm offering.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
What's your website?
Let's plug it.
What's your website?
Speaker 2 (30:02):
It's just SuccessfulLayoffSolutionsLLCcom.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Cool.
Justin, thank you so much forthe time and all the knowledge
and the insights Superappreciated.
And yeah, see you in a fewweeks, but again appreciate you
coming on.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Thank you, Alex.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Thanks for having me.
Thank you for joining me forthis 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 word
map and get more informationabout the show and some of the
(30:41):
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
(31:03):
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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