How Alex Turkovic Built a Digital Customer Success Team

How can businesses build and optimize customer success practices in the digital age? Alex Turkovic, Director of Global Customer Success at Flexera (formerly known as Snow Software), answers all of your questions about digital customer success in this episode! Delve into innovative strategies, tactical automation, and impactful insights as Alex shares his expertise in steering customer success programs to new heights.

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- Unveil how Alex spearheaded a comprehensive digital Customer Success program at Flexera, revolutionizing customer interactions.
- Discover success stories as Alex details automation implementation, bridging high-touch and low-touch segments for a seamless customer journey.
- Gain valuable insights on forecasting accuracy, churn mitigation, and enhanced customer satisfaction through data-driven strategies employed by Alex Turkovic.

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Meet Alex Turkovic, a leader with over 15 years of expertise in customer success leadership, professional services, and customer education. As the previous Director of Customer Lifecycle at Snow Software, Alex merges digital and scaled customer success strategies with educational initiatives to optimize customer lifecycle engagement and drive impactful outcomes.

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📑 Read: How To Get Your CS Tech Stack in Order

🎥 Watch: How Did Digital CS Skyrocket Talroo’s Growth?

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Transcript

00:00 Thank you for joining me again for you another episode of CSM Practice podcast where we bring in brilliant people from the trenches to just share with us what's going on, but every now and then I got to tell you, I end up bringing somebody that's special today.
00:21 It's going to be one of those people, Alex Turkovich. What make you so special in my eyes is that not only your great practitioner of digital CS, you made it your mission to create a full podcast dedicated to those specific strategies that help companies apply digital CS in a productive manner.
00:43 You have people on your show consistently. So first of all, big shout out for taking the time, the initiative and the resources to putting this together for our amazing community.
00:55 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, It's been a passion project. We've been probably seven months, eight months into the digital CS podcast, and we have had some incredible guests on such as you, you read.
01:07 If anybody wants to find that podcast, they can go to digitalCustomersuccess.com. An additional to being a host in a podcast show that I think is absolutely fantastic and super relevant for 2024, by the way, I speak to a lot of customers success executives and scaling customer success is definitely top
01:28 of mind. And I think the digital CS is still in a maturing phase. So listening to those episodes is going to be absolutely critical.
01:36 Is that this conversation is going to talk about not only things that you have done in your own lane, but rather what have you been listening to and hearing from those various people that were interviewing with you and bring it onto our channel to just give us a taste of what's going on, what have you
01:53 seen works with doesn't what are the effective strategies that everybody should have top of mind. So just wanted to mention that you're the director of customer life cycle and digital CS at a company called Snow Software at the moment.
02:08 And how long have you been working there? Two and a half years, three years. It was interesting because I was brought on to start the digital CS program, which I think is lovely whenever you encounter an organization that she wants to invest specifically into establishing those kinds of things.
02:27 So it was brought on to start the digital program. And it's been a thing ever since as most digital programs are.
02:33 Because the nature of digital has changed since I joined the company. So it's been a fun process. And obviously happy to share some of the stuff we're doing there.
02:41 Yeah, maybe tell us a little bit about the company you work for. What kind of customers do you have? Are they big, small?
02:49 there's like hundreds of them, thousands of them, just to give us a sense of the world you're coming from. Three-ish thousands of customers.
02:59 Like most organizations, we have our customers segmented where our largest customers have a dedicated customer success manager that works with them on the regular basis.
03:11 And initially when I was brought on, it was like, hey, look, there's all these other 2300 or so customers that need some help because we don't talk to them from deal close or post-implementation to renewal time, which is a horrible experience.
03:25 The initial goal was, hey, let's create some experiences for these customers. Let's monitor these customers and reach out, but it quickly morphed into more of a holistic strategy, where part of what we try to do in our digital programs, not just the customer facing stuff, but we also try to automate 
03:41 around the CSM as well and make sure that the CSM has some automations behind them to help bolster themselves. So about 3K customers, you said you had segmentation where you had 20, 30 percent high touch and the rest when you came, this was your long-tailed cohort of customers right here.
04:08 There was a high touch engagement here and no engagement here when you joined. The zero, like, support was it. Just support it.
04:15 Yeah. So this was support, reactive. And this was high touch. You mentioned you had regional CSMs. How many CSMs do you have at that time?
04:24 Was 12, 13, 14, something like that. All to 14 CSMs, of which do you also have like a CSop steam or anybody that could do digital CS at that time?
04:37 At the time, no, since then we have somebody in an optional, but at the time it was literally just CSMs and CS leadership.
04:45 Yeah. All right, but 2014 CSMs, that's a pretty nice size. What was your CS text act look like? Game site.
04:53 It was nice because I actually stepped into a situation where there was already a CS tool being used and implemented and running.
05:00 So that was good. So you come in. There's this situation. Can you share a little bit, what were like some of the main issues two and a half years ago when you didn't have digital CS, or some of the key challenges that you were seeing in.
05:18 You thought, oh, if we don't fix that, things aren't going to go well going forward. There was just zero monitoring or touch point or opportunity for those customers that didn't have a CSM to get some help along the journey, or be contacted throughout their journey, unless it was renewal time.
05:36 And that's just not a great experience. We didn't actively monitor the customer base to see who was doing what, and who was floundering, where among those customers, we saw successes.
05:50 There was no measurement around a C-SAT. There was definitely no NPS happening. So we were just flying blind, basically, that was probably the primary challenge.
06:00 just don't know until it comes to renewal time, what's going on and what's going to happen. It makes forecasting super hard.
06:06 All of these are things that were not happening and the impact on that was hard to forecast. What was the impact on you as an executive?
06:16 No ability to forecast reliably, I would say. Was there any other impact on you or the team? So yeah, the impact was just renewal risk.
06:25 left and right out of the blue, we would get cancellations that just kind of appeared out of the blue without us having time to react to them without us being able to build an intervention plan and reduce some of those risks.
06:38 In efficiencies around churn risk. Okay, so we can intervention, surprise cancellations, inability to forecast, what do you think would happen to the company if you were to continue and not do anything?
06:51 The other thing is too like it's hard to stand where your opportunities for expansion are among those accounts as well if you don't know what's going on within those accounts.
07:00 So without intervention for me anyway boils down to two things. One is yes it makes everything you do harder and it makes keeping those customers unnecessarily hard but then also it's an industry thing.
07:11 I mean we're relatively niche product and there are a few vendors that kind of compete for the same customer and so it becomes a point brand awareness when you say, hey, look, I signed this deal.
07:23 I was dropped off the edge of the cliff. I'm looking at other vendors that can support me a little bit better.
07:27 So weaker position in the market. It wasn't doing you any favors. And then sound almost like customer satisfaction. Wasn't something you control it.
07:37 Hopefully it happens well, but you didn't feel like the team had full control over, you know, making sure that the customer is happy.
07:44 Depending on who was catering to it and what was the overall situation? We're sure. Looking back, what has dramatically changed?
07:54 Always the biggest impact on you, and on the team, since you introduced these frameworks into your customer success practice. One of the biggest impacts is that CS, today, isn't as much of kind of like this dumping ground for stuff that needs to happen post-sale.
08:16 And it's much more of a resource that can be used for intelligence gathering around the customer and be used cross collaboratively to make important strategic decisions based on the data that we have and the insights that we provide to the business.
08:33 The digital program and the surveys that we've done but also some of the things that we've built out around just capturing customer summaries and things like that have been important for the rest of the business to understand what's going on with accounts and to target certain campaigns towards a specific
08:50 niche of customers, for example, or just to gauge the overall health of accounts. It had launched a SaaS platform last year, and it was all of the data that we had in gamesite collected around those customers that drove those monthly executive readouts to where we could help steer the business and help
09:08 steer product decisions and help steer certain conversations based on what our customers were saying. Did anything happen to your ability to deflect churn?
09:17 I know you mentioned two and a half years ago, lots of surprise churn. And effectively of handling those churn incidents because by the time you got to them, it was almost like too late and there wasn't real clear who's on first, how are things now?
09:31 Yeah, and churn attribution issues aside, it is allowed us to more accurately predict those things. We've done a lot of regression testing on our health scoring to understand.
09:42 Like, among the turn customers, did we accurately predict that with our scoring or did we not? And if we didn't, let's go back and tweak these things a little bit.
09:50 And so we've gotten to the point where regrettable turn is a lot easier to address and hence lower than turn that just have whatever reason.
10:00 But yeah, we've definitely had an impact on it. It's allowed us to answer questions around turn that before we were just kind of scratching our heads on.
10:08 Yeah, absolutely. Did you get any impact on customer satisfaction or the relationship you have with customers? Or even though, I mean, sometimes it's not so much the NPS or the C-Sets score as much as all of a sudden, you're seeing different reviews online, different conversations with clients.
10:24 It's about the dialogue. Like we've seen just an increased dialogue with our customers, which is cool. I mean, NPS scores, sure, they've gone up a little bit, like we increased it from a negative score to like a nice double digit positive score, which is super cool, but I don't care about the MPS scores
10:41 about the dialogue. Last thing you mentioned was challenging the team with untapped opportunities for upsell. You wouldn't even know if there was an opportunity not know if you feel like there's a little bit more control now.
10:53 Yeah, for sure, because of that dialogue. Even in the low touch segment, if we're going in with a conversation, there have been plenty of examples where one of the digital team members has a conversation with a customer about XYZ issue and through those conversations and those consultative engagements
11:11 able to ascertain that actually what they need is this over here or they need to go to our SaaS platform or they need this additional module here that will actually solve the problem.
11:22 We wouldn't have had those conversations with those customers, had the program not been in place, had we not caught whatever issue they were encountering, they probably would have just gone they were new cycle and turned out.
11:33 So definite positive impact and I think same on the named CSM accounts where there's just more information and more data for those CSMs to have those kinds of consultative conversations.
11:44 Maybe name three initiatives that you implemented that you feel like fixed the situation. One, we just started listening. We just started listening to our customers and that was through various ways, either directly by what they were survey responses.
12:00 We did implement an NPS program that a lot of people kind of hate on NPS a little bit. Granted I don't pay much attention to the score itself.
12:09 The goal is obviously in the comments and the things that your customers are saying and making sure that they create that feedback loop so that you can do a full circle engagement on that customer depending on their feedback.
12:21 We did spend a lot of time building a lot of automation around that but then also interjecting the human touch where every a single customer who responded would get a response from us like an actual person, reaching out and doing the follow-up necessary to kind of close the loop on some of those things
12:38 . And think that was incredibly important for us to do because it started to remove the veil on some of the things that we were doing that we didn't know were causing kind of consternation within the customer base.
12:50 So now you have better insights of what needs to be fixed from a strategy standpoint that puts you in a good position because now you could place the right bets instead of just guesswork.
13:02 Do you think that this reach out also created a different relationship with these customers? A higher loyalty percentage, if you will?
13:11 Yeah, absolutely. We've seen that in some of the results because one thing we see is like there are repeat responses to these surveys, but customers aren't just like we made sure that they don't feel like they're just responding and avoid that they're actually being responded to and that kind of built
13:27 a little bit of loyalty in, hey, I'm providing you with some feedback, you're actually listening, so I'm going to keep providing you that feedback and it's going to feel more like a partnership.
13:36 The cross-departmental benefits have been great as well because all of a sudden we're providing this value will feedback directly from the customer into these other departments to kind of foster some tangible changes that would actually have a high impact on the customer.
13:50 So that was initiative number one, you implement I'm going to write a customer survey because I'm sure you had more than just the NPS question and we just released as we're recording this video another podcast episode with Manchu and he actually went through like a whole session on how we elevated their
14:10 NPS initiatives what kind of questions they asked, how they sliced and diced the data like deep discussion around that take a listen to Alex and he actually gotten so much out of it.
14:23 So key messages is like don't poop on the NPS just yet and the better I think to think about it is is it just part of an overall customer survey that you should probably do.
14:34 And there's better ways of doing it. So I'd like to kind of like reframe it as a annual customer survey or our customer survey.
14:40 What was the other initiative that you did? We said that there were like maybe three key initiatives that you can suggest.
14:46 We relatively quickly hired an implemented a digital CS team. So like a team of scaled folks regionally placed. And that was an interesting experiment in just kind of starting to understand what kind of role profile and what kind of people you should be after when you're hiring like a scale team.
15:06 But essentially the crux of it is this team is responsible for a monitoring the client base for both good and bad.
15:15 And then engaging customers or engaging internally when we see signs of trouble or when we see some good stuff happening and engagement on an as needed basis, but then also being available to our customers via shared impacts kind of pool model.
15:30 There's both kind of the outbound engagement and also the inbound engagement that has helped give our customers an additional internal voice to go to when certain things happen.
15:40 And around that is just a lot of triggering, a lot of dash boarding to make it as easy as possible to monitor 23, 2400 accounts.
15:49 I want to double click on something with the relations to the team, you said they were placed regionally. Yes. Talk to me about that.
15:55 Is that something you learned from someone that was on your podcast or something you came up with on your own, and if so, why?
16:03 The initial impetus was we wanted to try to foster kind of like this 24 by five availability model for these folks, so that if somebody reached out, there could be somebody embedded regionally in the same time zone or roughly the same time zone that could react relatively quickly.
16:21 That has definitely helped, especially where we've had to engage in more strategic kind of longer conversations where we haven't had to battle time zones.
16:31 So it's literally just like a logistics decision. And I think it paid off. I mean, I think there's a lot of people who would say, look, you can put a scale team anywhere and just have it being one place.
16:41 And I would say that that gets you away from the personalization a little bit. How many people did you hire for this pooled model?
16:48 Not a ton of people. We have three that are engaged across 20 months. So it's not a ton of people, but we haven't seen the volumes B2 crazy that we needed to pull in a bunch of people.
16:59 I have gotten the question in the past of how do you think about hiring for a digital or a scaled team?
17:07 Because a lot of folks use the CSM methodology, which is to say, hey, look, we want about X number of clients per CSM.
17:14 I think it's healthier to look at it in the same way that a professional services team might look to hire a scale team where you're looking at capacity planning.
17:23 You see what activities are needing to be done roughly with how much time they take and what the volume is going to be and then work backwards into how much head count that you're going to need to support that.
17:33 So that's how you do a hiring considerations and budget ask when you establish a pooled or just in time model, excellent, what kind of skills do you hire for?
17:43 Or would you hire for in the future? Anyone who can think strategically, but then also go into a level of detail at the same time is key.
17:53 And so I think pulling from marketing like BDR type roles is an interesting kind of career progression into a scaled CS team.
18:02 Support people have an eye for detail and nice mix technical knowledge and customer skills that make for a decent kind of scaled team member.
18:12 But I think it also depends highly on what your ask is of that team. Is it purely to be customer facing or are they also going to be involved in building some of your digital motions and your automations in which case you're probably going to be looking for somebody that's maybe a little bit more dev-minded
18:27 or technically minded or programmatic as well. So you know that people I've talked to on digital CSers, no one flavor of these things.
18:35 It all just depends on how you end up structuring it or who the people are that you already have. Absolutely, I think what's unique in your situation is that not only did they build stuff in game side, but they also were leveraged to have interaction with customers as CSM in a pooled or just in time 
18:51 model. Okay, so we talked about solving for lack of ability to forecast and challenges and renewal risks and surprise cancellations.
19:01 and weak intervention, even not being able to understand where the up-sill opportunities are. And in so far, we talked about implementing customer surveys and how that helped increase customer satisfaction.
19:14 Then you talked about you hired the Digital CSM team. What other initiatives have you done that actually impacted these challenges you were talking about before?
19:24 I will say that over the last year, we've been very hyper-focused on building out a customer life cycle journey and mapping various automations to that journey in a way that helps us to not only do that kind of cohort level reporting where we actually know how many customers are in each segment, but 
19:45 also allows us to build automations around the pre-renewal process, for instance, or what does the onboarding experience look like? It's allowed us to map out, okay, what part of this needs to be automated versus what part of this needs to be human to understand those things a little bit more.
20:01 I would say over the last two years it's been this iterative kind of agile process of hey we're going to implement this motion to solve for this little part of the customer journey.
20:12 We're going to implement this to help us CSM with this particular aspect of some kind of data blindness that they had before.
20:20 And so it's been this small kind of pyramid effect of building all these things into a program that today we're still chasing perfection.
20:28 I would say it's very much iterative, but a lot of the things that we've done specifically around automations and how we present data and how we make the customer's history and profile kind of come alive.
20:39 And some of the data that we represent has helped to emotional team members to just go look and say, okay, this is what's going on with the client.
20:48 This is what I need to do. It's helped those cross collaboration conversations between CS and some renewals and all that kind of stuff to flow a lot more smoother as well.
20:58 So it's kind of a wish you wish you answer, but it's the crux of all the technology and data that we've put in place to help support the team members, I would say.
21:05 I'd like you to share examples of what you've heard on your digital CS podcast. What do customer success executives do to introduce automation?
21:17 And where does it work in high touch? You could give me two or three examples of specific processes or emails.
21:24 Have worked well in terms of automation for high touch. And then if you could do the same for the lower segment or just share, what have you done in lower segment that has been tremendously helpful?
21:35 I think that would bring it down from the 20,000 foot level to actual tactical advice for things that you've seen or heard work consistently.
21:44 I mean, for high touch, one of the focus areas has been to make it easy for a CSM to manage their customers life cycle a little bit more and to understand kind of take the guesswork out of what activities need to happen when and so one of the things that we've done is out of kind of our activity to solidify
22:06 customer journey, we've identified key points along the where a CSM needs to take action, whether it's prepping for, we call it the T-180 process, so that 180 days prior to renewals or prepping for that process.
22:19 It's all built into gain site with CTA so that a CSM will know exactly at which point they are with their customer, depending on when somebody's thought, obviously with customers that you have a lot of meetings with and high rapport with, you're going to know pretty much right away kind of what your 
22:36 or statuses with that customer. But some of the ones that you don't talk too very often, it's helpful to have kind of those indicators and those trigger points in place to understand where you are and what the next steps are with those accounts.
22:49 So a lot of it has been around that. I think some of the automations that we've put in place related to our health scoring have been ones that kind of bridge the divide for anyone.
23:00 So whether it's high touch or your kind of digital model We're certain things happen within your telemetry or certain things happen within your support metrics where we generate those trigger points to make sure that our CSMs react appropriately.
23:15 And one of the things that we've tried to do is match those things across departmentals. So the things that our support organization would classify as high risk, for instance.
23:25 We also classify as high risk. Can you give me an example? One of the things that we measure very closely is the ratio we call PRBs or problem tickets or engineering escalations to normal tickets.
23:37 So if we have a high ratio of engineering escalations on a specific account to their normal tickets, that will raise alarm bells and red flags across the entire organization.
23:48 Because obviously there's product defects that we need to go address. We have also done some alerting around our content delivery vehicle, so our academy, which is learning management system as well as our community and looking at some of the usage data to understand when people are logging in or not
24:09 logging into those and what specific types of content that they are engaging in so that that in turn informs some of the communication that goes out.
24:20 So if specific user completes a piece of learning material, for instance, we'll know, Okay, they're interested in this type of activity.
24:29 So we're going to suggest some courses that are kind of next in line that would be good for them to go through.
24:34 It's this kind of helping themselves serve while achieving their goals and starting to guess what their goals are without actually talking to the user that's been pretty impactful.
24:43 So you had some scheduled CTAs. Okay, these are the things we want to do throughout the year and they get an alert or a call to action to remind them what should be done even if they're in a pooled model.
24:54 And on the other hand, you're forming out the data you have available for your clients, such as escalations, usage trends, or training data to give the client a training data.
25:06 You gave them the next step here. Here's something else you might be interested in. Based on what we guess the use case here that you're trying to pursue, what you're trying to do in the system.
25:15 And then for use in the data, they're trying to use something new. And then they stop and you offer training.
25:20 and for it's escalations, you just get ahead of that risk way earlier. And I had just assumed that this is for the lower cohort too, that could be tremendous, all these examples.
25:32 I know we kind of put it under the high touch hat, but even for high touch, if you have a lot of end users, it's hard to keep track of.
25:39 I got to tell you, most of the things that we build aren't segmented between high touch and low touch are meant for the entire customer base.
25:46 There are differences, obviously, so when we go to send an email for instance, if it's a low touch customer, we'll go ahead and send the email from the system, but if it's a high touch, we'll route that email through the CSM so that they can modify it and add their own bit of context there as well.
26:01 So we do differentiate, but fundamentally speaking, we try to approach the entire customer base the same way. One kind of shout out and highlight that I want to give is to Dan and his who's all over the place with digital.
26:14 He does some interesting things around data analysis where he's built these user persona profiles. And so based on what somebody is doing in the academy or what they're doing in community or where you can start to basically assign some suggested personas to specific people that we've never talked to,
26:33 which I think is super, super brilliant. You know, if people wanted to learn more about digital CS, obviously go to the podcast.
26:39 Is there other resources or people you recommend that they would follow? Who would you recommend them? Obviously, I would love for people to come check out the podcast if you're not already.
26:50 A couple of other things I would point to is there is cool growing Slack community, specifically about digital CS. It's called DCS Connect.
26:58 Started by our friend Marie Loney in 23 and it's growing all the time. There's new members joining all the time.
27:05 Some great conversations being had in there around digital. Well, thanks. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.
27:11 You're an awesome It's been absolutely delightful to have this conversation with you, and I want to appreciate you for also hosting me in your own podcast and doing all this work for everyone and just being such an upstanding guy.
27:24 Well, thanks for having me. It's nice being on the other side of the microphone. Everyone, if you like this conversation, give it a big thumbs up, subscribe to our channel, go check out Alex Turcovitch podcast as well.
27:37 And I will see you on the next video.