The Four Pillars of Digital Customer Success | Episode 065

In this solo episode, I take you through the 4 Pillars of Digital Customer Success, a model I have come up with over the past years to help establish a strong foundation for a digital CS program. I also cover a few news tidbits related to CS.

Join me as I walk you through the four pillars:

• Customer Journey
• Data
• Automation
• Content

Chapters:
01:05 - News and Reviews
07:18 - Four Pillars of Digital CS
10:05 - Pillar 1: Customer Journey
16:05 - Pillar 2: Data & Data Cleanliness
20:41 - Pillar 3: Automation
24:28 - Pillar 4: Content
29:34 - Recap

A few resources mentioned in this episode:

• Article: The Digital CS Sweet Spot: https://digitalcustomersuccess.com/dcs-sweet-spot/
• The Digital CS Tech Stack: https://digitalcustomersuccess.com/tech-stack/

And don't forget to check out Sara Roberts and Christine Raby's course, LinkedIn Mastermind: http://www.bayviewtalent.com/masterclass

This episode of the DCX Podcast is brought to you by Thinkific Plus, a Customer Education platform designed to accelerate customer onboarding, streamline the customer experience and avoid employee burnout.

For more information and to watch a demo, visit https://www.thinkific.com/plus/

Chapters

• 0:31 Four Pillars of Digital Customer Success
• 9:14 Essential Elements of Digital Customer Success
• 26:59 Optimizing Content for Digital Customer Success

Transcript

Alex Turkovic: 0:31

Hey, it's episode 65 of the Digital CX Podcast. You know what that means. Every fifth episode we do a solo show. Today is all about four pillars of digital customer success. Stay tuned.

Alex Turkovic: 0:42

Once again, welcome to the Digital Customer Experience Podcast with me, alex Turkovich. So glad you could join us here today and every week as we explore how digital can help enhance the customer and employee experience. My goal is to share what my guests and I have learned over the years so that you can get the insights that you need to evolve your own digital programs. If you'd like more info, need to get in touch or sign up for the weekly companion newsletter that has additional articles and resources in it. Go to digitalcustomersuccesscom. For now, let's get started and welcome back to the show. It's episode 65. And, as you know, we do a solo show every five episodes or so, and I've got some content lined up for you all around the four one, two, three, four pillars of digital customer success that I can't wait to get into with you.

Alex Turkovic: 1:34

Before we get going, though, a couple of news items that I felt were worth mentioning at the start of the show. The first is this is probably a couple weeks ago now OpenAI released a new model called GPT-4.0 Mini, and unless you're tracking this stuff, I mean, it can be really hard to just keep track of all the different models coming out all the time. It feels like there's a new one every couple of weeks and there kind of is. And what's interesting about GPT-4.0 Mini is that it's a lighter version of GPT-4.0 that came out not long ago. That has really changed the game and for the end user, honestly, you're not going to see a massive difference unless you're, like you know, a super user or whatnot between 4.0 and 4.0 mini. I think the implications of 4.0 mini are much, much more on the developer side of things, and I think that's where the big impact is, because, first and foremost, it's smaller and these new models are starting to be embedded in things like mobile devices, and the environmental impact of that is pretty massive, because right now you know if you're using chat, gpt or cloud or whatever it is, um, you're hitting server farms and you know there's a lot of energy that goes into maintaining those server farms and doing the processing and doing all that kind of stuff, and so the advantage of having these mini models, um, actually a native part of your mobile device, which is really the way things are going is that that processing power is going to be, you know, not part of a massive server farm, but really on your mobile device, and so the implications are just big, both from an environmental impact standpoint but also from a cost standpoint. In all the kind of side-to-side head-to-head test, 4.0 Mini has performed really, really well, even against 4.0 and against 3.5 Turbo or whatever it was meaning. It's a very capable model, but to developers it costs a fraction of what 4.0 does, and so, again, the impact to development and integration into apps is pretty massive. So does this change your life right now? Absolutely not, but what it does mean is that we're starting to see a very, very quick incline in the affordability and the general availability of these models. The proliferation of chat, gpt and generative AI in general is just going to continue to pick up steam as the cost of these things decreases and the power of them increases. So you know, I could say something like it'll be interesting to see what happens next year, but really we don't have to wait long for, you know, developments to happen around generative AI is just happening so quickly, and so part of what I'm trying to do is just stay up to speed with this stuff and mention some relevant things on the show every once in a while. So I hope that helps.

Alex Turkovic: 4:58

The other thing that I wanted to chat about really quickly is we have a couple of podcast veterans who have teamed up to create a really phenomenal course specifically around LinkedIn as a resume, linkedin as a resume replacement. So if you're a longtime listener to the show, you know I've had both Sarah Roberts and Christine Rabi on the show. Both of them are phenomenal and really career-oriented, career-minded individuals and they love helping people to navigate their own career changes and challenges and job searches and those kinds of things. So if you follow both of those fantastic, amazing women, you'll know that you're in for a treat when it comes to the course that they're putting in place, which again is all about zhuzhing up your LinkedIn profile to be an effective resume replacement and to start to really get more of those inbound leads and inbound kind of requests. So I would highly recommend you check out the course. I'll put the link down in the description and the show notes for you to look at, you know, but they're doing phenomenal things with this course. I've had a sneak peek into it and it's really really good. So if you're a job seeker, if you're on the market, if you're casually looking, if you just want to make sure your LinkedIn profile's on point, I would highly recommend engaging them with that course.

Alex Turkovic: 6:33

Lastly, we've had a couple of new reviews, but every once in a while I like to read the reviews for the show out loud, just to give a shout out to the reviewer, but then also to you know. If you haven't left a review, would love for you to do the same thing. This one's from Russian Learner exclamation mark. It says an engaging listen to help you learn and grow. I've been listening to the show for a year and every episode has offered me something new to learn as a CSM. All of the guests are great and share useful wisdom. I also like the solo episodes. There you go.

Alex Turkovic: 7:09

The show is great to stay up to date on practical digital ideas. Thanks, alex. Thank you, russian learner. Whoever you are. The show is great to stay up to date on practical digital ideas. Thanks Alex. Thank you, russian Learner, whoever you are. Very much appreciate it. Hit me up in DMs and I'll send you some swag. How about that? But yeah, if you haven't already, would love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And also, you know, if you're a YouTube listener, feel free to engage there as well. It helps the algorithm, it helps me grow, helps me attract sponsorships, all that good stuff. So thanks very much. So what say you? Let's get on with the rest of the show.

Alex Turkovic: 7:44

Today, what I thought I would do is spend a little bit of time on what I'm calling the four pillars of digital customer success. Those of you who've been following the show for a little while know that I have this concept called the digital CS sweet spot, which is essentially the intersection of a few different pillars of digital CS and the center of those picture Venn diagram. I'll put it up on the screen if you're watching on YouTube the center of which is of that Venn diagram is the sweet spot, in other words, the combination of those four pillars. And so today I wanted to talk about those four pillars, because actually it used to be three pillars, but I've added an additional pillar, so we might as well talk about it right now. If you want to kind of follow along or read something separately, I do have an article up on the website about the digital customer success sweet spot, and it goes through all four pillars there as well. I'll leave a link down below in the description in the show notes, so that you can go there. The quick way to get there, though, is digitalcustomersuccesscom forward slash dcs-suite-spot. That'll get you there. So the digital CS Suite spot is something that I've had around for a little while now, and it is essentially that center point of a Venn diagram of foundational pillars that you need to have in place in order to be able to build an effective digital customer success program on top of Now.

Alex Turkovic: 9:14

You've heard me preach over and over again on this show about the variability involved in digital customer success. I talk at length about. You have all these variables in terms of the product and the CSP and the tools that you're using and the other departments that you're working with, and all those kinds of things, and that's not really what we're going to be talking about today. The four pillars that basically make up this Venn diagram are relative constants in every program, and the four pillars are this customer journey, data I like to call it healthy ish data uh, digital automation and then content. So, and we'll dig into all four of those pillars here in a second, but essentially those are the things, the foundational elements, that you need to have in place in order to start building your digital program on top of now. Notice, I didn't say these are the four things. You have to have absolutely perfect and fully defined and fully outlined and in place. That's not really the case at all, but in order to get going on some digital motions, you've got to have some semblance of this stuff.

Alex Turkovic: 10:28

So, without further ado, let's start digging in, and the first pillar that we're going to talk about is customer journey. The first pillar that we're going to talk about is customer journey. It's kind of become a little bit of a dirty word maybe not as dirty as QBR in CS circles, but the customer journey is oftentimes, I think, overcomplicated a little bit and there's any number of exercises that you can go through customer journey mapping exercises that really, in detail, map out you know what are those key moments along the customer lifecycle where something has to happen. Key example is onboarding, or you know the renewal flow and those kinds of things and those kinds of things. The way I like to think about it and the way that it's outlined in this article, if you go read it is essentially in three different categories of customer journey elements. The first one of those is related to your own company's calendar. So if you have, for instance, user summits, or if you have an annual user conference, if you have a webinar schedule and those kinds of things that your company puts on on a regular basis, you know those are elements that you will want to promote with your customer base and those are elements that are ripe for digital automation and putting you know digital automation to work, really promoting those elements and promoting attendance at those events and those kinds of things. Something else that may fall into this would be product releases. You know a lot of companies release quarterly, monthly, some daily. I don't know how that's sustainable, but you know, based on what that release schedule is, you're likely going to want to automate some release notes, information that goes out to admins and those kinds of things, right? So that first kind of subcategory under customer journey are your own company calendar events that happen.

Alex Turkovic: 12:33

From there I'm looking at customer lifecycle events. So these are the things that we traditionally think about when we think about customer journey. Those lifecycle events are elements that happen as you progress through being a customer of your company. Again, we mentioned onboarding, so that's kind of like a time-based event from the time you sell the contract until the time to first value for know. From the time you sell the contract until the time you to first value, for instance, or the time you you finish getting the technical onboarding done, that is, you know, a time-based event. Pre-renewal flow is another time-based kind of period where you have a renewal date and you work backwards from that and really try to figure out what your you know what your engagement cycle is going to be based on the timing of those things. So that's all part of a really healthy customer journey is really outlining what those time-based things are.

Alex Turkovic: 13:27

But I would also then categorize triggered events as these customer lifecycle events. The classic example is, if you have a health score and their health score tanks and goes to red, you might want to trigger an outreach campaign or some kind of outreach automation. Or you may want to trigger your scale team to reach out and those kinds of things. So trigger-based events based on product usage, login drop-offs, telemetry changes, an uptick in support cases and all those kinds of things. These are things along the customer lifecycle where you are going to want to engage and which are also ripe for digital programs to automate around.

Alex Turkovic: 14:14

And then the last category under customer journey that I would specify in your customer journey documentation are those user engagements or user specific engagements. So an example of this would be you have an existing customer with existing users and admins that have all been onboarded, but now that customer hires a new person to come in, there needs to be some onboarding that happens for that new user. Is that automated? Is that with a human? Is that you know? It doesn't really matter what the form of that onboarding is, but you need to know about it and it has to be documented as part of that customer journey so that you can engage as part of that customer journey, so that you can engage Some other kind of user-specific engagement elements that I would want to look at is how active your users are in your community, for instance, how active your users are in your educational content or your docs portal and those kinds of things. If you can glean what the activity level in those platforms are and how you can engage based on that activity, that's also really, really powerful and, again, ripe for follow-up engagement.

Alex Turkovic: 15:30

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, on whatever platform they're listening to it on. As you know, algorithms love, likes, follows, subscribes, comments, all of that kind of stuff. So if you get value out of the content, you listen regularly and you want to help others to discover the content as well, please go ahead and follow the show, leave a comment, leave a review. Anything that you want to do there really helps us to grow organically as a show. And while you're at it, go sign up for the companion newsletter that goes out every week at digitalcustomersuccesscom.

Alex Turkovic: 16:09

Now back to the show. So that's Customer Journey. Again, three subcategories it's your own company calendar, it is those lifecycle events like onboarding and renewal and triggered events, and then it's user-specific engagement what a specific user is doing either in platform or in the periphery of tools that you have around you. So pillar two we're going to talk about data and data cleanliness. Pillar two we're going to talk about data and data cleanliness, and again I like to joke with this particular pillar in that we're talking about healthy-ish data and having healthy-ish data.

Alex Turkovic: 16:51

Any digital program that you put in place, you're going to need some data to feed it. You need to know what users to engage, or even what companies to engage and what to engage them with. What do you want to trigger those things off of? There's a basic parameter of data that you need to do certain things, and if you're anything like me or any of the companies that I've helped, or really anyone on the planet, you're going to have some gaps in your data. It's just a nature of the beast. I have never come across a customer data set that is so squeaky clean that you could reliably automate just about everything off of.

Alex Turkovic: 19:32

Of course, there's better and there's worse, but there are things that you can proactively do in digital CS or in CS ops or rev ops or what what may be to help start to clean some of that data up so that at least you can build some of the motions that you want to go build. And what I would highly recommend you do is to start to identify, you know, what are the digital motions that are of highest priority that you want to go put in place and to do a little bit of regression testing on those to see, okay, do you have the necessary data to be able to do this automation or to be able to trigger this engagement or to be able to do this thing. If the answer is yes, great though you might want to double check it. If the answer is no, then you start going through the steps of putting in a plan to get the data to where it needs to be so that you can start running those motions. This can take any form of different types of activity on your part. One of the things that I frankly love doing is running data hygiene exercises with teams and kind of making an event out of it. You know, if you want to throw a party like a data hygiene party and literally spend an hour or two with various teams running through some data hygiene exercises to clean up contacts and to clean up this and to do this and to just kind of go through some of the parameters that you want to highlight as part of an automation, that can be a really effective and, quite frankly, fun way of doing it with your team. But that's not always feasible, nor do you want to do that every month or even quarter, right, and so that's where I lean on data people. That's where operations data analysts really are worth their weight in gold, so that they can go look and analyze a piece of data or some tables and figure out where the gaps are, figure out where that data might live if it does exist. Figure out an interesting way to collect that data if you don't have it there's, there's all kinds of things that you can do, perhaps in platform or in other ways, to bridge that gap in data that you don't have. So it's a bit of creativity, which data and creativity don't always go hand in hand in my mind, but you know it's the truth. There's always some interesting ways of going about collecting the data that you might be missing. But you know. Again, I would highly encourage you to come to the table with you know, some ideas about what it is you want to go automate, to go figure out okay, do you have the data or not? And if not, what are some ways that you can then collect that data and get to a point where you can start running those automations. You may not be running them, you know, across your entire customer base at first. You know you may. You may have a bit of that data and you know, use it as a beta test for those automations and a limited test while you do collect that other bit of data. So we've talked about customer journey. We've talked about healthy-ish data.

Alex Turkovic: 23:12

Pillar three is all about automation, and really what I mean by automation is do you have the means and the capabilities to automate a flow? This does not necessarily mean that you need a CSP. It doesn't mean that you have to go out and buy a CSP. It also doesn't mean that if you don't have a CSP, that you can't automate. If you don't have a CSP that you can't automate, there are any number of ways that you can automate between systems, you know, without the need for a massive amount of spend. Case in point Zapier tends to be a really great entry into the ability to automate, because A it connects with a ton of different systems and so you can automate with the pre-existing things that you have in place, but it's also quite inexpensive to get started with.

Alex Turkovic: 24:08

But when we talk about automation, the one thing I do want to caution you on is automating something before you've tried it manually. I always, always, always try to automate those things that are already being done manually that I can remove from someone's plate, for two reasons. One, it makes that person's life a lot easier. The second reason is because that person will have already learned the lessons that are needed in order for you to build that automation right the first time. For you to build that automation right the first time, because chances are, if you're just building an automation for the sake of building the automation without it having been done before, you're gonna learn some lessons in how not to do it and you're gonna reautomate probably multiple times over. So I always highly encourage people to look for automation in the places where things are being done on a repetitive basis.

Alex Turkovic: 25:06

Support is prime territory for automation, but so is you know CS, frankly, sending you know emails over and over again and these kinds of things. You know. Triggering off of things is prime suspect for automation. Using your telemetry, for instance, time-based triggers are massive. So if you really want to get your renewals playbook in check, automating off of your renewals timeline is huge. Ideally you might be able to automate off of you know persona specific kind of users. So if you're you know you might have an automation flow for an end user versus an admin, versus an executive, nps and CSAT and those kinds of things. What do you want to have happen after that survey is returned? Because hopefully you are doing something after a customer survey is returned?

Alex Turkovic: 26:09

Now on the website there is the DCS tech stack. You can go check it out. It's in the resources section. There is a laundry list of different tools that are available on the market to help with things like automation and telemetry and health scores and all those kinds of things. So go have a look through there. Chances are you've got either Salesforce or HubSpot installed. Guess what you can automate in that and guess what those all integrate into Zapier. Those all integrate into Zapier. Makecom is also a really good competitor to Zapier that I highly encourage you to check out and also has a free plan. So there's all kinds of things out there where you can get into automation relatively inexpensively, especially if you're a smaller team. You're going to want to look at all of those options.

Alex Turkovic: 26:59

Okay, the last pillar pillar four that we're going to talk about today, is content. This is actually a new pillar. I added this one because you know I think I looked at it previously as kind of a foregone conclusion because if you're going to automate stuff, you need to have some content to send out along with those things. You know. But it occurred to me that you know everybody is in a different boat when it comes to content, and so it is worth spending some cycles defining what content you have versus what you don't have and figuring out how to plug those content gaps, because we all have them right. You want to create an automation around some trigger, but you don't have a bit of content that goes along with that automation to then inform the customer about. You know why that's being triggered or whatnot.

Alex Turkovic: 27:50

One of the things that I learned very early on in my career which the early part of my career was in learning and development internal learning and development, and then that slowly expanded into customer facing L&D. But one of the early lessons that I learned is that content really is king. Like you know, a good bit of content that leads a learner through from start to end on a specific thing is massively important and can't be glossed over. And this holds true for, you know, two minute videos or a one minute quick walkthrough of something you know there has to be an element of I don't want to say quality, because you can just do a quick and dirty, but the consumer of that content shouldn't feel like, or shouldn't really have a sense for, the scrappiness of the content or how good the content is. They should be focused on the intent of the content, which is to learn this thing, if that makes sense. In other words, your user shouldn't know about the production quality behind the content. They should just be able to consume the content and learn the thing, rather than being distracted by, like, really horrid audio where they can't understand something or, you know, glitchy video. Or also, gosh, how many millions did they spend on this video shoot? Like that shouldn't be part of the thing.

Alex Turkovic: 29:16

So the way I've broken this out in the article is by talking about ways to go about you know, really solving for the content curation and creation element by either doing it in-house, curating it from other departments, or kind of a hybrid approach, which is actually my favorite. But in-house would be look, we're hiring somebody on the team and all they're going to be doing is shooting two-minute videos on how to use the product, or creating technical documentation for admins or basically content creators or technical writers. That gets expensive very, very fast. It also gets us into the territory of duplication of effort very quickly. You know, if another department is doing something very similar, all of a sudden you might have two similar bits of content in two different departments being used for roughly the same thing. That's not ideal, and so you pivot hard to the other side and you talk about curating content from other places, which can be effective if other departments have invested heavily in video creation and technical writing and those kinds of things.

Alex Turkovic: 30:34

You know your knowledge-based team, or your support team, or the marketing team, or the product team all of those teams potentially have some content creators on staff, and so it's worthwhile looking to see what that content looks like, what gaps are filled by that content, and if it is sufficient enough to also solve your content gap needs. Chances are, though, you're going to live a little bit between the two worlds, where, yeah, there is some content out there that you could repurpose as part of your flows, but maybe it looks very different. Maybe the content from product looks very different from support, and you want to kind of mash the two together. You want to curate the two, but there are still some gaps, and so you might want somebody on the team who not only curates content from other places, knows about that, that stuff, but then also adds a layer to it or creates a container for that content to where it feels like a smooth transition from one piece to the next as part of your digital flows. So I want you to take stock of these things and really try to analyze for yourself, in your department or on your team, or in what you want to go build. Do you have the content in-house, do you not? Do others have it? And what kind of approach either in-house, curated or a hybrid approach are you going to take in terms of building that content library that you need to power your digital motions? So that's it.

Alex Turkovic: 32:03

Those are the four pillars. So we've talked about the customer journey and how you know there's various elements that feed into digital from that customer journey. We've talked about data and how to bridge data cleanliness gaps, if you have them. We talked about different ways to automate and we talked about the content to feed into those automations. So you can quickly see that these are things that are a staple part of pretty much any healthy digital program, and so if you're in the process of building your healthy digital program and so, if you are, you know, if you're in the process of building your own digital program I would highly encourage you to take a second to really take stock of these four pillars and to make sure that you have some of the necessary elements in place already and, if not, invest some time and some cycles into you know, maturing these four pillars so that you can build without being, you know, held back by the lack of one thing or another. Because it's very frustrating once you get this kind of roadmap of digital motions that you want to put in place and you can't because you're limited in terms of your automation capabilities or you don't have the right content to do it, or the data isn't in place and those kinds of things. Nine times out of 10, the data is going to be the biggest struggle and I think we all know that and we all get that. But take a moment, even if you're in the advanced stages of your program, even if you've built all this stuff out and it's working and all that kind of stuff, it's always a good idea to take a step back, take stock of what you have in-house and what it is that you might want to go spend a quarter on really shoring up your data problem, for instance. So I hope this has been helpful.

Alex Turkovic: 33:55

These solo episodes are meant for me to share some of the things that are on my mind and particularly share some of the things that I get asked about quite a bit, because I've been talking a lot about this stuff recently with various people and so I figured it'd be good to just share it a little bit more broadly. If you want a little bit more information, you know, go read that article. I will link it down below because it is hopefully a good resource to have in your back pocket and to reference every once in a while. So that's going to be it for this solo episode. Next week we have a really cool episode coming up with Jess Osborne. I've got a ton of great interviews lined up for the next cycle and, quite frankly, I think I have episodes lined up through the rest of the fall. Some of those, most all of those are going to knock your socks off.

Alex Turkovic: 34:47

So I thank you for your continued listenership. I appreciate all of the feedback and all the messages that I get on a regular basis. It really means a lot. Would love any feedback that you have. Would love your feedback on the four pillars and the DCS sweet spot. Would love to hear if you disagree or if you have different ways of looking at it. Any kind of engagement like that is more than welcome. And again, I appreciate your listenership. We'll talk to you next week. Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Digital CX Podcast. If you like what we're doing, consider leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice. If you're watching on YouTube, leave a comment down below. It really helps us to grow and provide value to a broader audience and get more information about the show and some of the other things that we're doing at digitalcustomersuccesscom. I'm Alex Tergovich. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you next week.