The Digital CX Podcast: Driving digital customer success and outcomes in the age of A.I.

Customer Engagement with AI and Self-Service Strategies with Kari Ardalan of Qualtrics | Episode 049

• Alex Turkovic, Kari Ardalan • Episode 49

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Kari Ardalan of Qualtrics is a staple in the CS community and has been leading scaled motions for YEARS - which is sometime that not a lot of people can say. She also sits on Gainsight's Digital Advisory Board - so yeah, she's qualified to talk about this stuff. :-)

In this fantastic conversation, we talk about:

  • Building digital first with humans coming in off of the back of those motions
  • The evolution of ‘scaled’ from just email and outbound events to a push to come inbound
  • Building one place portal where customers can go for everything and where CSMs can interact with their customers
  • How Digital is structured at Qualtrics across various departments
  • Internal cross-collaboration on digital motions
  • What to look out for in a digital leader - specifically cross-collaboration and a varied background
  • Focusing on Support deflection metrics and areas to automate
  • Other interesting metrics in use at Qualtrics: % CTAs launched, penetration rate of closed success CTAs (conversation), Monthly Active Users, Monthly Active Customers, Flow Completion, % of Renewals Not Assisted by Humans 
  • Balancing being tactical and strategic as a leader
  • Using special interests among the team to drive career growth and creativity - including Hackathons
  • Cool examples of digital motions including customer-facing scorecards, micro-learning, AI and self-serve portals.
  • AI bot & recommendation engine implementation at Qualtrics 
  • Letting data tell you who the customer personas are
  • The dependency on operations work streams to get things done

Enjoy! I sure did...

Kari's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kariardalan/

Link to Kari's post about the qualities of a Digital CS Leader: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kariardalan_digitalsuccess-leadership-recruitment-activity-7175101395631570944-qujn?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

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The Digital Customer Success Podcast is hosted by Alex Turkovic

Speaker 1:

You're seeing less outbound because it's noisy and annoying, and more of like, hey, a push to come inbound to do a lot of these self-service motions. So you're seeing an emergence of these, like self-serve portals or these self-service experiences, which, to me, are super, super cool, as well as when you can integrate the AI and the bots.

Speaker 2:

And once again, welcome to the Digital Customer Success Podcast with me, alex Trukovich. So glad you could join us here today and every week as I seek out and interview leaders and practitioners who are innovating and building great scaled CS programs. My goal is to share what I've learned and to bring you along with me for the ride so that you get the insights that you need to build and evolve your own digital CS program. If you'd like more info, want to get in touch or sign up for the latest updates, go to digitalcustomersuccesscom. For now, let's get started. Greetings and welcome to the Digital Customer Success Podcast. It is episode 49. So great to have you back. As usual, 49, close to 50. Yeah, it's one less than 50. Jeez, just real quick.

Speaker 2:

Before we get started, a reminder I do send out a weekly newsletter along with the episode. That includes not only the show notes and info about the upcoming episode, but I also write quite a bit about digital in there. Most recently, I wrote about how digital customer success people have the mindset of MacGyver, which totally dates me. But I don't know. We do a whole lot with. You know what we have around us the duct tape and the bobby pins and you know, in the case of digital, it's the tools that we have around us and we're we're scrappy like that. So so go check that out. Subscribe at digitalcustomersuccesscom.

Speaker 2:

Today I'm joined by Carrie Ardalan of Qualtrics. Um, she is a staple in not only CS but digital CS because she's been doing scaled for a long time, um, and has her finger firmly on the pulse of this whole digital revolution, scaled revolution in customer success and is doing it extremely successfully at Qualtrics. She's pretty much, I think, the number one reference that Gainsight always throws out when they're asked you know who's doing digital? Real well, pretty much everybody I've talked to Gainsight says, hey, go check out Qualtrics. Anyway, in this episode we dig into obviously you know things about her background and you know what she's doing at Qualtrics. One of the hot takes that she had is the fact that digital and scaled is transitioning a little bit more from an outbound type environment to being much more inbound and really focused on self-serve. So that was great.

Speaker 2:

You know we talk about balancing strategic and tactical, so a lot of great content in this episode with Kerry Ardalan of Qualtrics. I hope you enjoy it, because I sure did. It's been a little while since we first started talking about this and I'm glad we made it happen and I'm glad you joined. Um, you know, I mean one thing that uh is the obligatory podcast thing is to just kind of say, hey, who are you, what do you do, and all that kind of stuff. Um, and it'd be great to kind of get a little bit of background. The one thing I will say is you're one of those few people in the world that has been doing CS since it was called account management.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, honestly. Even before it was a thing to be honest, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Right yeah. So what's that journey been like for you Even before? It was a thing to be honest, Right yeah.

Speaker 1:

So what's that journey been like for you? Yeah, so it's been interesting. I started gosh decades ago in sales, right out of college, but I worked for a reseller for Adobe and so it was kind of a mixture of sales and CS, but it was like your typical 50 cold calls a day, managing a lot of customers at scale. And then I moved over to a market research firm and again, this was before CS was a thing, this was more member services, and that was my first foray into now what's called scaled success. So we had, like gosh I think I want to say 200, 300 accounts. It was in region, so we did meet them in person, but we were KPI on engagements and that was like the first time that I was like interesting, what if I met with 30 customers in one and I started to like blow my engagements out of the water? And my retention rates were really high. So it was it. It's really cool that I started that so early in my career.

Speaker 2:

Does that mean, you got paid really high too?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I did really well there.

Speaker 2:

You blew it out of the water.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, but I moved to Enterprise CS, which that was like your typical path, especially being in Washington DC. I did a lot of public sector and regulated industry accounts and started moving up into management. There I managed the whole East coast and at that time scale came back into my life because Vox at the time said hey, we can't keep throwing headcount at these things, and so I I raised my hand to build out their scaled success team and so it was kind of like my earlier career coming back, which was awesome. And then I now work at Qualtrics managing really a lot of post-sale services. So I have community, we run a self-serve portal, I run events, we have lifecycle design team and then I also have a frontline scale success team.

Speaker 2:

Dang, you got your hands full.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's a lot, but it's good, because I get to kind of control everything, which is nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

And you've probably built a lovely team around you that you know can specialize.

Speaker 1:

obviously, Honestly, I wouldn't even be able to do anything without them.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, for sure Love it. That's cool, awesome. Well, I mean, what better person to ask the standard question that I ask all my guests, which is to say like, what is your elevator pitch of digital CS? Because you could argue, you've been doing this stuff for a long time.

Speaker 1:

A long time, yeah. So to me, digital customer success is more of like a strategy right Designed to deliver exceptional digital experiences, but at scale, and managing customers at scale. One of my most recent LinkedIn posts was 77% of businesses have a demand for digital. 57% of users actually prefer digital experiences over human ones. I am one of those people, same. And then, on top of that, 69% will ditch you if it's a poor experience, and so for me, it's really around driving scalable adoption retentionbound comms that we've always seen like email, and then there's been this transformation into inbound self-service which has allowed for, like generative AI coming in, app guidance, communities, one to many programs, all those great things to help interact and serve your customers effortlessly.

Speaker 1:

Excuse me, yeah, and so for me, the impact, of course, is like streamlining processes, reducing costs, increasing efficiencies, like we all like to tout about, but also really meeting those evolving expectations of our customers today?

Speaker 2:

For sure I had. I think I might've brought this up on a previous episode. I don't know if I have yet or not. So if you're listening, and this is a repeat, deal with it. I had a really amazing digital experience not long ago. That just blew my mind and what you said kind of reminded me of it, but it was in B2C, so it was the shoot shoot. Why am I forgetting the name? Uh, they make storm doors larson, maybe, larson storm doors.

Speaker 2:

I needed to replace a thing on my storm door and you can't like go on the internet or on amazon and buy this thing. And so I, you know, I engaged the chat bot on their website and it was like, okay, you know, the chat bot said, okay, go to your storm door and take a picture of this barcode on your door. I was like, okay, this. And then it's like, okay, what part do you need? And I typed in roughly what I needed and I was like, okay, you need exactly this part. You bought your storm door within the last five years, or something like that, and somehow it I've never registered the thing somehow it knew that I bought it at lowes within the last few years and it says because of that, your thing is still in warranty, so we're going to ship it to you for free.

Speaker 2:

What's your mailing address? And this was all a bot doing this. And I was like, okay. So I was, I was kind of blown away because, working in digital, I'm like I love a good digital experience. But then yeah, um, what I really loved about it is they've then taken this digital experience and combined the human element on the back end, because the next day I got a phone call from a real, live person who was like hey, you know, we've. I just want to let you know that part's been shipped today. How's your door been Like, is there anything else that you need? And I'm just like I was absolutely blown away because I think that's to me. I've kind of seen what a lot of people strive for in digital motions. That doesn't really exist today but I think should kind of be the norm and will hopefully be the norm going forward.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I agree. That's essentially why they at Qualtrics they set up my team like that everything to be digital first, and then you should have those proactive elements through a human. I actually talked to someone from Randstat yesterday and then you should have those proactive elements through a human.

Speaker 1:

I actually talked to someone from Randstat yesterday and they're building that in their bots as well. It's like, while you're waiting for a human to join you, it walks you through all the thing, all the documentation you need to provide, and so when they join, they're like oh hi, carrie, how are you? We see this as your problem. They have the answer. So I do see that like 10xing very quickly over the next few years.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, exactly, it's fascinating and I guess this leads to kind of one of my first questions that I had for you, which is really just to understand a little bit based on your experience. Based on your experience, what was scale like when you first were in?

Speaker 1:

scale versus what it is now and what it's going to be. Yeah, so when we first started, it was like your traditional pooled account management, right, and a lot of it was email based. It was like how many customers can we email in a day? And it was that strategy of like one-to-one, one-to-few, one-to-many, and it was always seen as lesser than which kind of bothered me too. It's like, oh, scale does nothing, and you still hear that sometimes, but it's like no, we actually do a lot, right, and you have to explain the model. So it's interesting.

Speaker 1:

There's still sometimes a lack of understanding of what that model is, but it has changed so much since then and I've kind of been riding that wave ever since I started gosh, like several years ago. But now it all this data telemetry to send a personalized email and now it is much more inbound. So, because of all the email changes that have been happening with, like Google and Yahoo, you're seeing less outbound because it's noisy and annoying, and more of like, hey, a push to come inbound to do a lot of these self-service motions. So you're seeing an emergence of these like self-serve, a lot of these self-service motions. So you're seeing an emergence of these self-serve portals or these self-service experiences, which to me are super, super cool, as well as when you can integrate the AI and the bots. So a lot of these companies are starting to think about how do I create a LinkedIn or Facebook that's like my all one-stop shop for every service you might need, so that customers can help themselves.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that one place where you can, you can, you can go versus. Oh, here's the LMS, and here's the community and here's the. You know the docs and here's the.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and where it's going is we're starting to think about not only are we building out that self-serve portal, but then where is the human element in that right? So we've started with doing all of our intake there, and it automates routing to Gainsight or Salesforce, depending on the account number that needs to take the action.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

But we've been talking to companies is could we have a CSM interacting with the customer while they're in that self-serve portal? And I'll say we haven't nailed it yet, but that's something we would love to see in the future as well.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I would imagine part of the conversation there is that that has the potential to be super creepy. You know, hey, I'm watching you. Yeah, this isn't the doc you want.

Speaker 1:

you want this document yeah that's true, but hopefully it's like the experience you just had with your story more right and we're reaching out at the appropriate time, like if there was exactly in that interaction uh-huh yeah, for sure, that's super.

Speaker 2:

I love it. There was a question that I had in my brain on the heels of that that I've completely forgotten and I didn't even write it down. So that's how organized I am, but anyway, I'm sure we'll get to it. So I think you talked a little bit about the structure of the team and your remit. Does that encompass the entire digital strategy at Qualtrics? Are there other elements You're?

Speaker 1:

obviously very digital first, but what does the lifecycle of digital look like? Yeah, so there are separate teams, like marketing obviously owns the online sales motion and the digital engagements. From a marketing and sales perspective, we try and align as much as possible. So if they enter in as a digital customer, how do we continue that experience all the way through renewal? That's been challenging, right, because we're on different systems, different teams, different processes, but working to align that much, much more than we have in the past. Yeah, um, uh. And then obviously in product, uh, the product team owns the PLG motion, but we meet a lot to say okay, from a customer success view, these are the resources we think are important to increase maturity. And then we partner with product on what are like, like what's the data telemetry or the trigger points we need to look out for as far as those in-problem experiences. So those are why the two I don't own, but we heavily partner in those areas you have to.

Speaker 2:

One of the things that um, I uh ran across the other day. Actually, you posted on linkedin about the qualities you look for in a leader, like in digital um and and the list. I'll link the post in the in the show notes because it's fascinating, because the list is spot on and it's like, but it's extensive, it's like, it's like but it's extensive, it's like holy cow, like where do you find these people now?

Speaker 2:

Like you know, seriously. But I think one of the points you just made reminded me of that, because so much of what we do in digital is that collaborative kind of handshake internally with other organizations, because you've got the sales handoff situation, then you've got support happening in the background as well, and then you've got your renewals team and then you've got product inputs and ops teams and all that kind of stuff, and so you know, I guess my point is that you know that collaborative element is so tricky but so vital to a digital program.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and it's probably the most important characteristic, and that in a diverse background. I think, too, like you can't just have someone come from marketing or just from customer success, like I. I think one thing I prioritized throughout my career was, uh, definitely differentiation, right, like experiencing all different areas, and so I've been in ops, I've been enterprise, I've been scale, I've been in sales, I've been in support. So knowing all those different things has really helped me in my career better understand the business needs of those partners.

Speaker 2:

Totally. Somebody asked me recently you know kind of what what my view on support is in relation to digital and my answer was like I love going and just bunking with support because that's where you learn what's what the heartbeat is, what the pulse is of the customer, like what the problems are, what's working, what's not working. I just I love sitting in the support org and just listening. It's so cool.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, agreed, and that's one thing. We did take ownership of support deflection metrics and that brought us a lot closer because they're able now to focus on their frontline teams engaging with customers, where we take on like what is the content we need in the support portal and how does the bot going to work, et cetera, and so it's kind of eased their concerns there. Where that's my wheelhouse right is automating manual processes and letting customers self-serve, so not having that be siloed has been helpful as well.

Speaker 2:

You reminded me of what my question was in your support kind of ticket deflection thing, because that's such a cool metric to measure, kind of like you know what's happening, kind of between renewals, so to speak. You know, it's like you know how. How are you in, how are you, how effective are you at engaging customers to where, over time, you see that reduction in in in support contact which is which is cool, but are there other kind of metrics that you're you're tracking aside from, like you know, NRR, GRR, all the usual suspects and things like that?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so because we also activate frontline teams, we've got like percent of CTAs launched, penetration, rate of closed success CTAs. So like, how many customers are we converting with our human teams, our scale frontline and then from a digital perspective, because I own that self-service portal.

Speaker 1:

We do measure monthly active customer and monthly active user and then these goal completion paths. So if they came in there to onboard, what did they click on? Did they get through the onboarding materials and have they hit exit criteria for onboarding without talking to the human? So those types of things as far as the self-serve portal. And then we do own a ticket deflection metric and then we also own a percent of renewals non-assisted by humans as well. Oh cool.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, non-assisted by humans. I like it, I know, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:

You're seeing a lot of people these days not want to even talk to humans during that renewal experience, and so again, especially if they come in through online sales, we want to make sure they can renew online as well.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, don't, don't make them talk to a human if they don't want to. So kind of back on the on.

Speaker 2:

I guess the leadership front, one of the things that you and I talked about as part of our earlier discussions was that kind of balance point between being strategic and tactical, because you sound like you're a lot like me, like you like to be in the weeds and you like to understand what's going on and you liked you know kind of the knowledge of the backend, but too much of that and you're getting sunken down into the quicksand and and it's hard to kind of pull back and and and and be strategic and be forward thinking and what it is you need to do with the team. What's your, what's your approach to that? Just in general.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I would say I wasn't very good at it at the beginning. Like, I am like a roll your sleeves up, I'll do it type of person, but it comes to the detriment of my team because I'm not empowering them to do it. So I've kind of zoomed out a bit more right and doing more of bringing my team along on the journey of like what is the strategic aspect that we're trying to achieve, and then break that down into the tactical execution areas and delegate that um, and then, if it's missing the mark, sometimes I'll give them an example of like what I'm expecting like, and that's through a template or a program guide, something like that, and then, but then they're able to go and do the rest of it themselves and that allows or likes emails, you know, or likes copywriting, or something like that.

Speaker 2:

And even though it's not necessarily part of their day gig, like go do a project, do something, you know. I love that because it's like um, I mean a as a, as a leader. It kind of shows that, hey, you're actually listening, you're actually engaging with your employees, but it works to the, the, the, the overall benefit of the team when you have people doing stuff that they like doing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, qualtrics is very good at that. We have very cross-functional OKRs and then we even run a regular hackathon where people can come up with different ideas for teams and we implement them.

Speaker 2:

So love that. Love hackathons that's cool, Awesome. Are there? Are there, like digital motions, getting more into the tactical speaking of tactical speaking of tactical are there digital motions that you are particularly fond of, proud of, or that you've seen in the wild Maybe that you haven't created, but that you've seen in the wild that are really cool and left an imprint?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean so I've been involved in several projects. I'll name a few. So I've been involved in several projects, I'll name a few.

Speaker 1:

But when I joined Qualtrics, this idea of that self-serve portal, unlocked a whole new door for me, I will say, in just the way to deliver different experiences and then I think again, powering that through AI has been massive as well and just how you're able to deliver personalized experiences and at scale, and I'm not programming a million email journeys anymore. So that, to me, was an unlock. Other companies and teams that I've been admiring Autodesk has an incredible e-commerce motion that we've been studying and trying to build out ourselves. You just interviewed Dolores Cooper the other day with a short form video learning. Zendesk was the first time I saw that kind of TikTok style of enablement and the engagement they get on. That is incredible.

Speaker 2:

It's insane, and it's so like scrappy and wonderful, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:

And then the CSMs do it, so they feel the impact as well and it's it's sometimes beat some of marketing's content, so that was good to learn. When I was there, workday was one I was a part of. It's more of a self-service of adoption value drivers. So what they were trying to build out where customers could choose some sort of value driver they were looking to achieve and it spit out all the features that they needed to adapt to do that if they weren't using them. I wasn't there to see the end of that and how that worked, but that's something I've always been very interested in and how to replicate.

Speaker 2:

I love that.

Speaker 1:

And then the last one is Salesforce has a customer facing health score calledals, which I like as well because it's very transparent. It allows the customer to kind of manage their own health and what's important to them. So that's another area we've been looking at as well.

Speaker 2:

Back on the AI front. What are you doing today from an AI perspective?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we started with the bot, so we launched intake through the hub, but now eventually all intake will go through that bot, right, and we are scanning support documentation, customer success documentation, thought leadership, the whole gamut.

Speaker 1:

We have a ton of content, and so the idea is they would self-serve as much as they can, but if they cannot, it will route them to their sales rep, their customer success manager or support, and so we're working more on that automated routing on the backend, but again pushing them to self-serve first. And then the next area is this idea of a recommendation engine. So when you're in our portal it will surface up like this training might be important to you, this event, this product release, etc. And again, like I said, trying to build out that like Facebook or LinkedIn feed where customers can come in and see all the relevant things to them. Other things are more internal right, like understanding customer health and their adoption of certain features. I actually talked to a gal from LinkedIn today and they're doing a ton around clustering customers and they're utilizing AI to see what different clusters and features they're using, and it's helped them enhance their email personalization a ton. So I always thought that was interesting to do.

Speaker 2:

It's kind of like the advanced version of what you were talking about, where you know a customer identifies like what their goal is. Like you can I mean theoretically, you can use AI to really analyze customer usage across all their users and figure out okay this is what they're trying to do, so let's surface this kind of stuff.

Speaker 1:

What are the different cohorts of customers and or personas, and letting the data tell us who those people are, and so that's been interesting as well.

Speaker 2:

AI has is starting to help us move away from rules based automation and and especially like from a health scoring perspective and those kinds of things. Like we all live in rules-based worlds. We've gotten very good at writing these rules based on the data that we have and all that kind of stuff, and you know, I see more and more kind of platforms that are switching towards rules. You know just really intelligent ways of doing stuff without having to get into the weeds of the rules and just using plain English to do that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1:

Yeah exactly. Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 2:

I don't know where I was going with that, but yeah.

Speaker 1:

I like it.

Speaker 2:

For me anyway, I don't know if this is your experience, but when, when, when I've been, you know, working on these digital motions and implementing things and trying to get, you know, trying to get programs off the line, for me my experience has been like look, we're going to do V1. It's going to be scrappy, it's going to be ugly, there's going to be some manual stuff that we have to do as part of it, but we're going to learn a ton and then we're going to automate based off of that. But we're going to learn a ton and then we're going to automate based off of that and we're going to iterate based off of that. We're going to make some mistakes and we're going to learn from that. And I'm curious if I think we've all gone through that period, you know, in implementing stuff, where we've made these blunders and we've said, oh, that doesn't work, so let's pivot. Are there any kind of classic things that you've experienced along those lines where you've pivoted hard based on initial assumptions being wrong or something?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and you always enter the design phase right and you're like this is how it should work and it's so simple. And then you go to the op side of the house and it's like, oh, we can't segment customers like that, or we don't know if a customer is a multi-year or an auto renewal, and so you then have to like regroup and say how are we going to deliver this experience, or do we ditch it until the company is at a certain level of maturity to then go be able to digitize that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

So we have a lot of things like built on the back end ready to go. We're just waiting, because operations prioritization is probably the hardest thing to deal with and so getting those resources to help.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely. There have been times where I've inserted myself into various ops projects just because they are.

Speaker 1:

You know, it's like a massive dependency on doing this one thing, where it's just like, hey, you know, know, let me help you, drive your kpis and drive this thing over the line, you know yeah and I think there's a lot of instances where we have to go do that yeah, I tend to be very nosy in their work because a lot of times, even if they're launching a new process right especially if it's customer facing a lot of the times they're like well, we'll get that information via email and I'm like, but's so manual, like we could put it in the self-serve portal. So, um, they don't always love me when I interrupt and intervene in some of those processes, but we're good at partnering on the end result.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, it means you're doing your job, you know, rather than just idly standing by. You know, rather than just idly standing by. Yeah, yeah, so funny, I mean, you know it. Um, one of the things that I think I've been battling with um is the fact that look, salesforce or HubSpot or whatever, um, any CRM is going to be extremely focused on the sales motion, and rightfully so. You know it's. It's kind of you know, all the tools that are built around it are very sales focused and things like that. And then it gets to the post sale and you have this data set that is very focused on, you know, the sales process and whatnot.

Speaker 2:

But when but then you realize post-sale you need all this other stuff that you could collect pre-sale, and so I you know, my own experience is I'm constantly like chasing these things. Well, why didn't we collect this contact name pre-sale? Or you know, why didn't we capture, you know, these goals and outcomes pre-sale, and can we have those flow over and like those kinds of things? Does that ring true with you too? Like, do you battle that stuff all the time?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, absolutely. And the good news is we have a lot of cross-functional leadership meetings, and so that's the time where we surface like, hey, if we're not getting this data, then I have to go do all these manual things to get it, and it's impacting on customer experience, and so sales has been a good partner on like an opportunity can't close until certain fields are filled out. But you always have to balance that too with, like the administrative, how people don't want people in sales doing administrative things right, and so there's always a healthy balance there of what should they be entering versus not.

Speaker 2:

Totally, and a lot of times when you force somebody to enter something to close a deal, they're going to just enter something.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, right, yeah, there's a lot of bad data out there, so that's been a challenge, I will say, a lot of times too, where someone goes in with the intent to purchase something that changes so much through the implementation and then when they actually start using it. So I do think even having additional intervention points to get that data is important as well.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think a lot of folks are starting to use in-product for those kinds of things which is super powerful of folks are starting to use in-product for those kinds of things which is super powerful.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, gainsight's a good one, like the first time you log in, you say your role and your use case and those types of things, and so and it re-asks.

Speaker 2:

Actually, I was talking to Aaron Hatton, who's kind of behind that program a little bit, and he was like yeah, I think we collected initial round, but then we realized we need to ask this again because people change roles and change yeah. So it's interesting because it's you know, once you start, once you collect the data, the clock starts ticking on that data.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We have a my Profile in our customer hub and we're looking at do we get like a CDP on the back backend to start to store some of that data? But we've talked about exactly that Like how often do you nudge them to fix that? Do you get something like a zoom business info to help keep that data up to date as well and automate it? And so it depends how, I guess how much funding you have to do all those things, but it's definitely something to pay attention to.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, that's cool. Any other kind of cool things that you're working on that you want to highlight or, like you know your cool things your team is working on kind of fun stuff that the that the audience might appreciate.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean a lot of it. I. We do so much across the whole gamut. It's always astonishing to me how much we release per quarter. I will say the bot right now is the most exciting. Like, our unauthenticated is deflecting at like 70% at this point, and that was massive change management. Our customers at first were like, where did my support buttons go? Why do I have to talk to a bot? But we're starting to see a greater adoption of that and them being like oh, this is such a better experience because I'm able to get my answers, and rather quickly. But yeah, I would say that's the top one. And then again e-commerce. We are moving to a new market texture and figuring out how do we do that via self-serve as well has been a challenge, because we want to make sure that is an optimal experience for our customers too, and something that we're not forcing but that they see the value in. But how do you do that without human intervention has been a challenge, has been a challenge.

Speaker 2:

So the the uptake on the bot is fascinating to me because to me, the fact that users are starting to get used to it means that it it's actually doing what it's supposed to you know Um and so I'm curious what, what, what was your testing campaign around that Like like yeah. Did you roll it out?

Speaker 1:

We launched it internally, first on a gain site, so we embedded the bot on Gainsight, so my frontline team were the first testers of it, and so you know customers ask questions on calls. They were able to search it and then their email responses after meetings, and so that was the first launch. And then we launched it to our unauthenticated customers, so anyone on the support portal but perhaps not logged in can ask most basic questions. And then we just most recently launched the authenticated version and we did it for the digital tier first, and then we're starting to slowly bring that up into different segments.

Speaker 2:

That's cool. Are the internal teams still using it?

Speaker 1:

They are. And then we've considered you know, do we pump in ticket data in there and do automated responses based on that? We have to test out the accuracy and obviously work through some legal requirements before we do stuff like that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, that's cool. Well, look, I've really appreciated all the insight and like tactical kind of practical knowledge that you've brought to the convo. So that's super helpful and I can't wait to share it with everybody. What's, as we kind of round down like, what do you, what's in your content diet? What do you pay attention to to keep yourself up to speed?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, absolutely One your podcast. Of course, people come on LinkedIn. I I watch that feed a lot. If if folks are sharing interesting things, I connect with them and we meet one-on-one. I had one this morning which was great, and then I'm on Gainsight's digital advisory board and a lot of different customers from Gainsight share their digital motions. And then ValueEyes is another partner of Gainsight. They have a really good digital maturity model and some thought leadership around digital as well.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, for sure. I've seen that maturity model. It's nicely detailed, for sure.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's very detailed.

Speaker 2:

It's very detailed, it's a little repetitive, I will say, but it's, it's nice.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, I've been helping them on how it's just that digital maturity framework is so hard because you can start from really anywhere, right Like you don't have to start with email, and so that to me, has been hard to translate.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's true, I've been working on kind of a similar thing, like a version of it, and I think the thing that I keep going back to is just the fact that, to your point, the variability that exists in anyone's digital program is just, I mean, it's infinite right. Infinite right, so you can't plunk a model that worked one place down into another place, and so it's like okay because of that, like how do you measure digital maturity? That isn't like okay, here's an email campaign or here's in-app or here's whatever. It's like it's a little. Yeah, it's trickier yeah, I agree.

Speaker 1:

I mean, I've done it at three companies and it's looked very different at all three, so I'm in full agreement.

Speaker 2:

For sure, for sure. Do you want to give a shout out or kudos to anyone that's doing cool stuff in digital?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, of course I mean. Well, dolores already gave one on LinkedIn, but she's an up and comer in digital. Austin Kwan is another one. He's over at LinkedIn. He used to be my manager over at.

Speaker 2:

Box, but we share what works.

Speaker 1:

He does B2B as well as B2C, so it's interesting to hear from him how he approaches those two motions. Kelly Bray at MongoDB she and I used to work together at Box, but she's kind of risen up through the scale and digital world as well. And then Rimpel Patel she's the chief customer officer at Eightfold, but we used to work together at Workday and she taught me the most around customer experience and digital. So that's awesome. Those are my mentors definitely go to for any help.

Speaker 2:

That's a strong set of mentors right there, yeah, where? So? Where can people find you, engage with you and interact with you, and all that good stuff?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, definitely on LinkedIn, People reach out all the time and ask to connect. Um, I'm very open to that. Um, I always love to hear what other folks are doing. Uh, and offer my advice in any way I can.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you, you're, you're more than forthright with that stuff. Um, on LinkedIn, both publicly and, I'm sure you know, privately people hit you up in dms all the time, I'm sure. So, yeah, cool, thanks again for sharing your wealth and your experience with us. It's, it's uh, it's been awesome chatting with you and I can't share it out, thank you thank you for joining me for this episode of the digital customer success podcast.

Speaker 2:

if you like what we're doing, consider leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice. It really helps us to grow and to provide value to a broader audience. You can view the Digital Customer Success definition word map and get more details about the show at digitalcustomersuccesscom. My name is Alex Terkovich. Thanks again for joining and we'll see you next time.

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