Running an efficient and effective digital customer support operation is crucial for businesses today. In this blog post, we will explore valuable insights shared by Angeline Gavino and Jeff Kushmerek, two industry experts with extensive experience in digital customer support. Their discussion covered key strategies, tools, and best practices that can help businesses streamline their customer support processes in the digital realm.

1. Understanding the Importance of Digital Customer Support:

Digital customer support has become increasingly vital in the modern business landscape. With the rise of online interactions, businesses need to adapt and provide seamless support across various digital channels.

2. Leveraging Technology for Efficient Support:

To enhance digital customer support, businesses must leverage technology. Gavino and Kushmerek emphasized the importance of using customer relationship management (CRM) systems, ticketing platforms, and chatbots to streamline support processes, automate routine tasks, and provide personalized experiences.

3. Omnichannel Approach:

An omnichannel approach involves providing consistent support across multiple channels, such as email, chat, social media, and phone. Gavino and Kushmerek emphasized the need for seamless integration between these channels, ensuring a unified experience for customers and enabling smooth transitions between channels.

4. Building a Knowledge Base:

Establishing a comprehensive knowledge base is crucial for efficient customer support. By creating a repository of frequently asked questions, troubleshooting guides, and tutorials, businesses empower customers to find solutions independently, reducing the burden on support agents and improving response times.

5. Proactive Support:

Gavino and Kushmerek highlighted the importance of proactive support, which involves anticipating customer needs and addressing potential issues before they arise. This can be achieved through monitoring customer interactions, analyzing data, and implementing proactive measures like personalized recommendations and proactive outreach.

6. Empowering Support Agents:

Digital customer support requires well-trained and empowered support agents. Providing agents with the necessary training, tools, and resources equips them to deliver exceptional support experiences. Gavino and Kushmerek emphasized the significance of ongoing agent training and fostering a supportive team culture.

7. Data-Driven Decision Making:

Leveraging customer data is crucial for optimizing digital customer support. By analyzing customer interactions, businesses can identify patterns, anticipate trends, and make data-driven decisions to enhance their support processes. Gavino and Kushmerek emphasized the role of analytics tools in gaining actionable insights.

8. Collaboration and Feedback Loops:

Effective collaboration among support teams and other departments is essential for delivering outstanding customer support. Establishing feedback loops, conducting regular team meetings, and fostering cross-functional collaboration can lead to continuous improvement and a better overall customer experience.

Further Exploration:

To dive deeper into the world of digital customer support, it's recommended to explore additional resources such as industry publications, online forums, and case studies. Some topics worth exploring include emerging customer support technologies, AI-powered chatbots, social media customer support, and customer support in the era of remote work. Staying updated with industry trends and continuously refining digital customer support strategies will ensure businesses remain competitive in today's rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Transcript:

Jeff  00:00

Think we're good to go. So I just so. So anyway, I wanted to first tell people how we sort of got introduced because I just reached the right out to you, because of all the writing. And I didn't know if that was like, hey, this week I'm going to write about digital touch. But as we were talking about beforehand, we don't want to have these with our clients. But we really were focused on taking people that were high touch in you know, do less with more. But also like, like, you've got 85, CSM is for not that much, you know, Arr, like, we really need to break down the work that your teams are doing and things like that. And those were the scenarios that we're typically facing. But what I really liked is a, you're validating a lot of what our assumptions were on how to roll out a good program, but just seem to just have like, just this amazing way of freezing. And this is what you need. And this is how you do it and in everything. So that's how we reached out and got in contact with each other and is so is this a passion of yours, or it just happens to be like you feel like a problem that's out there that you think more people need to know about?

Angeline Grace Gavino  01:39

Oh, it's definitely the latter. Well, a bit of both. But it really started with trying to solve a problem, really. And then I really got into it. I mean, digital CSS has been around for quite a while. But like you said, there's very little thought leadership writing or, you know, just resources out there, that validates a lot of as I said, assumptions, and really the only way to validate is through experience. And what I've written was really based on my personal experience implementing digital CES and my current organization. And one of the things I also did when I was starting is I wanted to validate whatever it is that I'm you know, I'm I I'm experiencing, and I've actually did connect with a few of other people in the space, one of which was Dan, was your your recent? Guest. Yeah, but you know, like, there's very little of us, there's a lot of talk about digital CEUs, because, like you said, especially like late last year, where everybody's like, the outlook for 2023 was all doom and gloom, gloom, right. And then everybody's talking about doing more with less resources, Customer Success teams having lesser budgets, so you need to be able to understand how to handle everything at scale. And so I felt like this is really, I think a lot of the experience that I've had would resonate with a lot of people who's either just don't know where to start building it, because there's not enough resources out there. Or maybe looking at outdated resources, because like I said, it's been around for a while. It's been called scaled CSS, low touch, yes, all of these other terminologies. But yeah, like nothing has been formalized, or codified for us to really at least follow and we know in theory is, you know, nothing is set in stone, it's always changing. And really, that's where all of this came from just trying to solve a problem. Validating through my experiences, validating through other experiences, and hopefully being able to share all of that to the rest.

Jeff  03:45

Oh, absolutely. We do appreciate it. I think you hit on something that I think really, I think summarizes a lot of what I'm seeing out there where before, it was sort of again, just my opinion, or my view is that you had people with a sort of a plg, you know, put your credit card in, you know, don't talk to a salesperson and you sign a sign up, you know, congratulations, here's your Slack account, or XY and Z. And that was very well known, there would be emails that go out and they would do all these things. And then you had the world of sales, lead growth, or now you still do, and now people are saying like, Well wait, the do less with more, but also efficiencies, kind of blending those two models together. You know, Dan's on Monday, and we talked about it in in they do they, I think they went in the other direction. They started off with the digital touch. And then they said, Okay, now that we're going to blend in this other model, from there. So, I want to take the approach because I know a lot of people that asked me Are, are at a point where they need some efficiencies, right? They're not in the plg model, where they may be thinking about it. And in theirs they're saying to themselves was okay do less with more? How do we how do we get into more of a either low touch or no touch model, which I do agree with that. And I just one more anecdote from some work that we've done, we found that, um, if she saw this, when we had high touch customers, and we went through and we analyzed all the activities that they did, so then we could make a low touch thing, or no touch, it's still really helped out the high touch people, right? Like, you know, for example, not everybody needs personalized training for how to reset your password and set up your account and do all these things. And so, I'm not sure if you've bumped into that as well as well either.

Angeline Grace Gavino  05:40

No, but I mean, going also, what you said at the beginning, right? plg sales sled, there's a lot of X sled bros, right? Customer led rows, just just a lot of this different school of thought, I do believe that whatever your your go to market motion is, digital ces will always play a role. Because typically, when you're starting your digital ces strategy, it really starts with self serve service resources, like the content, what are you going to put out there? And what is the purpose of the content really, to empower your users to be able to do things by themselves either, you know, get started on your platform, continue to adopt the platform, expand the usage of your platform, or services or your your product, right. And so it really starts with that. And typically an plg motion, right? That's, that's how you want it like you want, first of all the product to be able to sell by itself. But then also in tandem with that typically, customer success and the plg lead motion is responsible for just orchestrating like that adoption somehow. And digital ces helps with that. And I can see that because within my current organization, we're actually a dual mode of go to market motion is plg. But also we do have sales lead motion. And so I see right now, how across the board, what we're doing digital ces works a lot works well. And like you said, right, it starts with content, what kind of email because really, I see how your progress, you're getting started, you create the content, and like you said, self service resources, training videos, but you know, not everybody needs that. So the next step is personalization. Like, okay, maybe there is a subset of, let's say, digital success, lead motions, that's the same across the board, you do it things like customer lifecycle emails, you know, onboarding campaigns, we see this every time we sign up with any new product, right? Like, it's just, you know, it helps customers or it helps company lead customers to the resources that they need. And so that's there will always be part of the journey, and maybe in the middle of their adoption journey, a few more resources that will nudge them in the right direction, to make sure that they're realizing value. But then at some point, you have to personalize because like you said, you can send the same message to everyone, because at some point, they're going to be like, I want to start receiving messages from you guys. It's not relevant to me. And that's where you start with personalization. And he's gonna

Jeff  08:20

jump in for a second before we move on to Yeah, sure. I'll forget. This is a common question that gets asked those emails, right. writes those. Right. Okay. That's a good point. So like, I see content marketing, sometimes. Yes, and sometimes be in marketing. And so I'd love to hear your personal point of view on that.

Angeline Grace Gavino  08:50

You know, what, I've, I've worked with a lot of startups are we very early stage, we're trying to figure this out. This is actually my 123 Fourth startup in the last, you know, less than a decade. But But basically, it actually depends, you know, there again, I'm maybe this sounds cliche, there's no one size fits all,

Jeff  09:12

in general, but in general,

Angeline Grace Gavino  09:14

I like I am the school of thought and make sense to have it and the customer marketing space, just the customer marketing role itself. However, like you said, customer marketing like today, is actually sitting for us in between the marketing team and the customer success team, only because we're early stage of customer marketing, and customer success, I believe, needs to have a hand in guiding the strategy there because they know the customer is the best typically. And I find that in startups, you know, marketing is geared towards top of funnel right like, you know, creating the later with their marketing MQLs and stuff like that for you. Know the sales lead strategy or even plg motion, right? And, and actually, what I find is that the customer marketing matures later or even get started later on, and only somebody needs to get this started because typically in marketing, the marketing hats are like the marketing lead usually would wear the hat of, you know, like I said, top of funnel getting more absolutely

Jeff  10:24

in enjoy. I love your answer so much. Just to show you how narcissistic I am because this is exactly what I said. It's like it's the exact same thing with those marketing people like, and by the way, I was at a much larger company where we had it sit right in the middle, just like you said, because there's like the the dotted lines, because they need to be on point with the branding and the tone and the voice. But the marketing people are are geared. I like like they're in b2b mode. And I view customer marketing and b2c mode, right? So like, classic thing, when I was at Virgin, we'd sell to like yum brands, and they're trying to get that message out, you know, like, Hey, you should buy this, because this is what your employer, your employees will see all these benefits. And you as the employer will get these benefits and things like that. The users don't care about any of that, right? They want to know, why should they sign up and use this program that their employer is paying for and everything. So you need to create a separate marketing campaign for why it's important for them to use the product, which, which is kind of exactly I think what we're saying here for just the generalized content marketing. So you need sort of the voices of both of him, I never found by the way, those relationships adversarial. I know a lot of people don't like dotted lines, but it's kind of like they're getting the direction on what they need to do from CES. And they're getting sort of that branding, imagery, voice tone of voice aspects of elements from from the marketing department. Okay,

Angeline Grace Gavino  11:59

again, echoing what you said, it's great to have some of my experiences as well validated because like I said, there's nothing in the market like in the industry telling me this is how it needs to be done. And so to know that, you know, this is the viewpoint that you're seeing as well. Exactly, that's what's happening right now I am as the one leading the customer success function. My organization is in charge of the strategy for customer Mark marketing, however, like execution things, say drafting the messaging in alignment with the branding, execution, because we're using HubSpot, for example, for our marketing campaigns, we're also using that for customer marketing, no need to reinvent the wheel. So it's it's marketing's job. And so it's a tandem job to make sure that you know, there's consistent messaging across the boards,

Jeff  12:46

got it writing a question for later, because I don't want to go off the reservation. But we'll talk about the email triggering later. I do think it's important to go over some of the essentials. And I know a big one for you is segmentation. And so I'd love for you to tell everybody, like I believe this is the firt. Like my strong thing is like you need to get your segmentation in order before you try to do any. There's two things I need to think need to happen. Especially if you're going to convert like, hey, we need to go down this road. I think people need to know this is going to take a little while. It's a big project, right? I found I usually tell people like it's a six month project to get it right. I don't know if that's been your experience or whatnot. But like, you know, if you're taking people that they have jobs, and now you're gonna save, and we need to carve out some time to go do this. That's that's sort of what I prep people for. And so when they start asking me about it, I'm like, yeah, just to let you know, that's not a what's get this done this month sort of activity?

Angeline Grace Gavino  13:48

For sure. For sure. And we're at it. Yeah, maybe almost a year now. And it's still, you know, obviously we got we got it running, we got it from the ground up running. But there's still a lot of work that needs to be done. Like you said, it also started that way with us. Obviously, I want to I floated the idea of having digital ces because you know, we're scaling up and to scale, you can just say hi more CS does work. Yeah, it just doesn't, it doesn't work for sure. And so it's like there there is there definitely is a way for us to continue to provide the level of the same level of service personalization without having to hire more people. And so that's really how it got started. And same thing like you said, existing CSS I have to carve up some other time to help me with this project to get it up and running. And at this point, there is kind of a it's still a hybrid like my team is still a hybrid. They are not fully digital CES, but they're running a lot of the initiatives and so they kind of like half half they're still doing a handling their some of their accounts portfolio. I'm in the SMB segments. And could talk a little bit about that. Because I know typically, when they say digital CSS for the SMB segment, the only reason why I use my SM, my SMB CSMs, to help get started with digital CS, because they're already used to scale. So they have their hat on, how do I engage with my customers, this number of customers at scale?

Jeff  15:24

When we're talking about hundreds, we're talking the hundreds, right to be clear, like they usually have oh, yeah, customers, yeah, several

Angeline Grace Gavino  15:29

hundreds of customers. And so I knew that they have the right mindset for it, compared to our high tech CSM, who is very much used to a very, very high glove personal, personalized touch, because they have smaller group, a subset of customers. And so that's really where it started from my SMB CSM.

Jeff  15:50

Another question on this, and again, no right or wrong way to do this. But I've been pretty vocal recently about saying, This is not that cheap resource that you pull, and everybody's like, let's get first year CSMs and put them on digital. And I'm like, they would not know what to do. They need to know how to review data and how to balance their time over 400 accounts. And I don't know if you've got Cs opts into the picture or whether you know, but there's the the triggers all being set up and like, Hey, you, we've run three campaigns, and they need some, some touch now and you need to reach out to them. What's how is this worked out for you?

Angeline Grace Gavino  16:28

Okay, so reality is, in reality, right, like you said, expectation versus reality, obviously, it does make sense that if you want this running, like, right off the bat, you need someone with the experience to do it. And I did have that experience. And I help initiate that. Now. However, the execute the ones is really due at the execution helping me with just driving a lot of the tasks and content and all of that. I had to take what I have, and like I said, and I chose not my criteria wasn't about there the junior wants in the team. My criteria was Do they have the right mindset? And it's like, what I was waiting the SMB? Yes. And do have that mindset of how do you engage at scale? And that's really the the main reason why I decided that, okay, typically, as you send organizations to SMB CSMs, are the more junior ones. I also have, okay, this is going to be a different topic altogether. I'm not, I'm in a different school of thought, where I believe that, you know, SMB, mid market, and enterprise CSM are like the same level to me, there's just a different career progression, like I said, I did. But then again, you're right, this is not an A cheap resource. Because to get started, it has to somebody has to have that experience, which I did, I implemented that already is something similar in an early stage startup as well, I got the resources, they need to help me with the execution. But that's not it. We, there's there's other teams, I have to pull in other teams into this equation. And I think that's where you really see that how it makes sense, if you only had one resource, who knew all of this and and then I didn't need to go work with our rev ops team, we don't have a specific CSS revenue operations. We have a data team, a separate team has to do it. And we have the product team who's in charge of a lot of our in app engagement. So I have to pull resources from all of these teams to kind of carve this out. But like I said, if there was one superhuman who could do all of this, like super huge digital CSS, then it would have made things so much better. But But yeah, I guess it depends on where you are in the organization, if you have the budget to really get this going.

Jeff  18:55

Yeah, I have this, it's, I, these questions pop into my mind on those digital CSMs, which is, and this is crazy, but this is you know, the stuff that runs through my head. It's sort of like, okay, I'm a CSM. I've got 400 customers and everything's running in the background. What are they doing during the day? If they're, if all your customers are in Google, I do have that thing pop up. I have to answer those questions for my clients sometimes, like, well, if everything's running great, and you're at like, 95% satisfaction, rating and usage is up and everything like what are they doing? I'm like, That's great.

Angeline Grace Gavino  19:29

You know, I think people make the mistake of once you get the program up and running, it just runs by itself. Always needs recalibration. Well, this is where I am at right now as I mentioned, they're still hybrid because we're still trying to figure out the the effort that is needed the resources that's needed to really keep it going and really maintaining it and constantly iterating on it, right. So my my digital CSMs right now is also have their own kind of accounts, but then there Going through the journey. And like I said, digital ces for us services, all that customers, not just SMB, digital, all digital ces motions also touches the enterprise, the mid market.

Jeff  20:12

I love that that is so refreshing to hear. Because I get wound up in a to where am I know, it's two different flows. But I think what I'm hearing from you, it kind of that answers the question I had previously, which is, everybody's going through this motion, you just might have a different level of service from your CSM. Like, you know, the classic triangle at the top is enterprise on the bottom is total mid market, you know, I'm envisioning there's this, you know, you're splitting up the accounts, and maybe the digital CSMs have some people you know, a lot from the bottom of the triangle, some of the middle, and then maybe one or two, but sometimes people just say, Hey, we're gonna give, that might be an enterprise CSM, and they're gonna get some named accounts or something like that. But you're still reaching out and engaging with oh, sorry, go ahead, but you're still reaching out and engaging with them and things like that.

Angeline Grace Gavino  21:03

Exactly. So how it is within my organization just like everyone else, there's you know, subset of customers that has a high touch to enterprise CSM, whatever you call it, with named named accounts, my essence, my SMB segment, or SMB segment, also have our digital CSMs kind of owning the whole portfolio is what is driving the digital CSI motion and program. And so what did they do?

Jeff  21:33

I know they're busy, I know, they're risky.

Angeline Grace Gavino  21:36

But the thing is, not every day, you have to like, oh, let's tinker with this email, or you know, like, let's check this and that like, it's not an everyday thing. Like I said, you do get it running, but you still continuously monitor. However, there will be, for example, there might be some engagements that requires in your digital ces motion where your customer could respond to it. Obviously, when a customer response, like any of the engagements, automated engagements that we push out, it goes to the actual CSM. And so it could be an enterprise CSM that will get that message and they will just, you know, reply and take that forward. Or it could be from their own book is that the SMB segment as well have their own books that you know, they share. And every, every time a customer respond needs additional help, really just needs human intervention, like there's just so much you can do with like automation content, right. And so there is still that human element. So how we set it up today is that when there needs to be an any intervention they jump in for for the accounts within their portfolio.

Jeff  22:41

Got it. Got it. This is great. So I think that really helps cover the segmentation question. Let's talk about and we don't have to mention specific products. But let's talk about what you think are the bare bones tech stack that's needed to be able to drive this? Right. Right, because so let's put like a use case towards this to make things correct or like or just for people to understand like, Okay, so let's talk about this use case, somebody great, because like you said, there's jobs to be done that might not be titled, but somebody has recognized that this customer, regardless of segment is not using their product, right. So you know, you've got a playbook just Worsley's called, you got a set of actions that need to have to happen to be set off and triggered, maybe that's an email, maybe that's a reach out to the organization. So knowing that, and you know, because we're not gonna get into the whole onboarding, and that's, that's pretty easy to go through. I like to think about these in these like ces types of actions, like, you know how to do the classic, you gotta renewably you got to win back, you have a low engagement and things like that. So if you're an owner of CES, you know, leader out there pondering this and wondering what they need to put in. Because I see a lot of startups seed Series A, and they're going down this route. What do you think of there? Like you, you definitely need these tools in place in order to run through those use cases.

Angeline Grace Gavino  24:18

Right. Okay. So so obviously, like early stage startups, let's talk also a little bit through that, like, kind of just understanding maturity, right? Yeah. In the beginning, you're probably going to have a certain number of customers is not enough. Maybe you have already some a CSM in place. And that CSM is enough for that one person to handle the whole portfolio that counts, right? But when you start to see that, you know, clients are scaling up your sales team is you know, winning more deals or whatever your emotion is, right? There's just more customers coming into the pipeline, you start thinking about just self service resources, as I mentioned earlier, really start with how do you To empower this, you know, big set of customers to be able to just do whatever they need to do on your on your platform. So typically you start with like, content like a knowledge base. And again, sometimes the support team is involved in this more often than not, right. And the thing is, where I am today, I lead both success and support. So I have, you know, oversight over which which makes things easier as well. And so a knowledge base, you start making more interactive content, like training videos, and then you start thinking about, like I said, lifecycle emails, we don't even you probably, at this point, don't even know who is not using your product, unless you already have a very, very robust system in place. But like I said, we're starting off, right. So I would say, some external, it could be a page on your website, that points to an FAQ, starting with a knowledge base, right?

Jeff  26:04

I don't, by the way, I was on a webinar with Christine felt Acero. And she was like, Oh, I just built this Google site. And it was exactly what you just said, like, rolled it out, like this isn't, you know, I don't have the resources at the time. So I just rolled out a LMS on, you know,

Angeline Grace Gavino  26:21

exactly, I put all of these somewhere that's easily accessible. For all I know, it could be a Google Drive, but you know, it must be somewhere where it's very easy for you to share it to your customers, right. So start simple, like, it could be that, or some other people would use some type of wiki or just set it up. You don't even probably want to invest in an LMS. That early right in time. Typically, I do feel like support a support ticketing system already is happening. Typically, that's what the opposite of customer success is, right? They start with you do everything and then.

Jeff  26:59

And then they realize people aren't renewing, because they're doing support tickets all day long.

Angeline Grace Gavino  27:03

Exactly. So. So once you have that, put your FAQ in the support portal, I'll just make sense. So whatever it is that you're using for your support, ticketing, just utilize whatever you have. And then as you start to look at the next phase that I would usually think you'll need is just a customer lifecycle, email drip. And so you start thinking about probably a marketing email tool, right? Things like HubSpot, or

Jeff  27:31

because not too many of the CSPs have the email marketing tool in their system, like, you know, yeah, or

Angeline Grace Gavino  27:38

I'm saying that use that because typically, your marketing team already has this is one of the things that they would usually, you know, invest in first, for all of their motions, right? So use whatever your marketing team is doing for sending out emails, yes, what I would

Jeff  27:53

do point they used to the templates and setting up the triggers and the campaigns and the sequences and things like that, right,

Angeline Grace Gavino  27:58

whatever that is that they're using, you can use it repurpose it for, for your your email engagement, basically. And then you start getting into data, you want to have visibility on data. What is your product team using to track data? So again, you can see that I'm trying to figure out what are the existing tools that you can leverage before you invest something that's specific to CES. And the reason why I'm very deliberate with that right now, because I've learned my lesson investing in a tool because I was, you know, I, in a much more advanced startup, we had all of these scsp, all this platform. And then I went into an early stage, I invested on it. And it was a big mistake. So I started to become very deliberate with when do you invest at the beginning. And so look at what the other teams are using. So when I find, for example, an organization, they're using user flow first, because we have like in app engagements, yep. Just just use that instead of maybe finding another tool that to invest, ah, that's doing the same thing. Because once you have disjointed tools, the next problem or nightmare gonna have is that there's the data is not you know, there's no one place to pull all of the data that's feeding from this, right. If you're, you already have a marketing team on the suing this tool, but then you're going to invest in a separate marketing email tool, for example. And so that's one or what if you have a data team that I guess it really depends on your maturity? Right? Is there is there any way for you to get like the product telemetry data in the back end, right. And so I find that in startups, they will usually build this in house with like, have their own internal data warehouse, and I'm saying this is important as a tool set because you need data at some point for the personalization part right. Now, I know I'm running into the same problem. I was just saying that there's a lot of different tools that you need to work needs to work together. To be honest, I, if anybody can tell me advice, no, there's I haven't seen any one tool that can perform every single thing that you need to do, like I said, very efficiently. So I've seen one.

Jeff  30:14

And I'm about to start using it, I hate sounding like an advertisement for for for something. But turn zero, I've heard has the email templates, you can take the usage data in. And by the way, if anybody is listening to this, and other platforms do this, please let me know. But, you know, sometimes we work with a customer, they already have this, you know, the stuff in place. And they also have like a snippet of code that they can just basically start getting all the user data from about your prayer, it has to be an application that uses that type of technology as well. But they're essentially saying, drop this five lines of code in to get the usage data. And in that they also have, you know, the health score, which is going to trigger off email campaigns and things like that. What, you know how it goes?

Angeline Grace Gavino  31:08

No, no, let me sorry, thank you for writing because I have implemented churn zero, and one of the startups that I've had, and I think I just have not fully explored the potential of it. But I know I remember they have like the email system in place.

Jeff  31:24

Some of this is newer to like, in the last year or so. Yeah, um, so that's probably why

Angeline Grace Gavino  31:29

but good to know, good to know. Because obviously, at some point in time, you want to pull all of these in together, either. And that's the thing, it's up to you. I guess it's to pivot with, especially with digital CSS within obviously, the realm of CSS, do you really want all of the data to be present in different tools that you have to borrow from, like all the other teams? Right? Well, that's

Jeff  31:50

a great point. That's a that's a great point. Because I feel also when I talked about turn to maybe for a little people are down the down the road a little bit more. And, and in, they've also sort of standardized as the CRM as the source of record for a lot of things. So when I've seen people use a turn zero or a gain site more, everything's going through Salesforce first and and then it's getting in, then you're integrating your CSP with Salesforce at that point, or this. It's mostly I am with HubSpot, Verizon, but or any of the other ones. But I feel like people start moving down this we're essentially talking about a capability maturity model for CES. And now we're at that sort of, you know, late teenager elements where

Angeline Grace Gavino  32:43

that bill, late teenager phase, but no, I agree. I guess I what I wanted to just make sure it's very clear, right, like, depending on the stage of your mature company maturity as well. You may want to like in the beginning, early stage, you're still setting everything up. I really, I would say, technology is the last thing I like to in the process, right? Maybe probably the even the people component right before we even hire the technology part. But obviously, we know how technology will make things much more efficient. It's ya

Jeff  33:20

know, it's a it's a great point, though, because some people just think dropping tools is going to make everything work. But you really need to do that, that upfront work to it's not easy, I've sketched it out, we've got like, you know, spreadsheets with like 15 tabs on them. And it's a lot of things to think about when you think about a whole complete ces program, living even for a light touch mode as well, too. There's just a lot to go through. Yeah.

Angeline Grace Gavino  33:48

Especially when you're just still trying to introduce digital ces into the organization because not every mostly people in the CES space would understand what digital ces explain this to somebody outside Director of Product Marketing. What is it was very tough to like, what is digital CES? How is it different from CES. And so when you're just still trying to get started and trying to prove the the impact of the program, it's really hard at the beginning to get the buy in right and to get obviously,

Jeff  34:23

you gotta go to the CFO, you gotta go to the CFO and show the impact on employee count.

Angeline Grace Gavino  34:29

So I have to be very deliberate and like I said, That's the mistake I did as well like I one mistake was I wanted to do all of this self service sources I invested in a CSP and I realized how time consuming it is to even get get it started and then like three months down the line, we haven't fully utilize it and because you need one person, just like how Salesforce needs a Salesforce admin, a CSP will need its own admin to get everything you know, integrated and all of that but it's really

Jeff  35:01

Yeah, and that's a good point. Because I will say, for that large company that I was talking about that I worked for before, we didn't have a CSP at the time that we like, they were putting Gainsight in when when we left, when I left, excuse me, but we did a lot of this for many years by looking at usage data, reaching out to the market customer marketing. Yeah, it can be done. I think it's, it's, it's also it's a good point to realize that everything we're talking about with tools, and everything just makes it more efficient. But it's just essential to know the roots of what needs to be done with the segments, the activities that need to happen, the playbooks that need to be going on and things like that, before you start getting into like this tool, and that tool and things like that. So

Angeline Grace Gavino  35:51

I mean, the reality is, in order to get automation going, there needs to be a tool, I'm saying that, do you want to just first separate whatever is available? And before you really invest in a whole different tool? I think you know, this.

Jeff  36:07

I am curious, are you using other types of tools? And this is a tool as a tool in the toolbox, not technology tools, things like office hours and webinars?

Angeline Grace Gavino  36:21

Yeah, definitely. Especially I, like you said like to engage a big chunk of customers, try to look at how your high touch approach is, right? And figure out how you can do that at scale. That's really how my mind, that's kind of how we started it, right? Because especially like I said, when you don't have any playbook out there that really outlines what you need to do, you have to think, like, just practically. So we know that high touch customers needs onboarding. So usually you have a kickoff call and you know, go through like the onboarding phase. How do you do that at scale, trading the customers. So typically, we would leverage webinars to, you know, a one to many like training, or series of trainings to go guide them through the motions, there's still a person guiding them, right. Instead of obviously, there is also self service tools, but we do know, depending on the complexity of your product, you may want someone to still be interacting with your customers to walk them through. And our product is a kind of like in the more calm, kind of mid complex size when especially because it needs to be integrated with other existing tools. Yep. So you want a human element to it. And like I said, That's why digital CS needs to coexist in tandem with you know, a lot of your human approach or human touch. So, webinars for examples, we haven't I think office hours is something that we're gonna try to explore as well.

Jeff  37:50

I've done it and I'm just going to say like, the companies loved it. Absolutely loved it. Right. I have this concepts that may sound a little crazy. But if done correctly, I think it could, you know, it's not for everybody, right? First of all, I also think it can really increase sales, I combined a bunch of these concepts, that if you boil them blending a bunch of different concepts together, right? So I remembered the sales team like, Hey, Jeff, we're trying to get our end of the month numbers in so can you was when I ran implementation. So like, can you run? Can you write me an email saying we only have two slots left available for our April cohort, we only have so many slots available to onboard customers. And then you run it like one of these classes, like, hey, this week, we're going over integrations. And we have these like monthly cohorts. And then on Friday, we're gonna have office hours, we're gonna go over any questions you might have with integrations and things like that. And so you've got this sales a seller, and like, Oh, you gotta get in by, you know, march 31. Because April 1 is when the first coat you know, the first meeting kicks off, and then you're just running it in this, okay, go watch this video. You know, you know, go do X, go do y. And then any questions on week one activities, going here, not again, does not work for everybody. Some people just need to go log in and do what they need to do and an hour and get in there ready to go. But when you know, for that blended sort of enterprise, but not too complex, not maybe having to do like data cleansing and all that fun stuff. I don't know if that worked out really well. But you have to find the right kind of slot for that.

Angeline Grace Gavino  39:36

That's true. There's really no but that does make sense. Like you said, there's really a subset of just people in general who wants who doesn't like to read, like, you know, doesn't like to read the instructions and they need somebody to tell them what to do. And I think, you know, like instructional like, instructor led, kind of for whatever like like hosted sessions like this just also brings that home An element. And like I said, it's always different when there's that human touch and intervention. When it comes to the

Jeff  40:07

other side. There's a lot of people out there like, I don't wanna talk to anybody.

Angeline Grace Gavino  40:11

So here are self serve resources, do it yourself. So yeah, you're you're servicing, like I said, like, a variety of segments, and not talking just about enterprise mid market SMB, like segments with how people people want how they consume data or

Jeff  40:28

not. No, I can't remember where I learned this. But I heard a great quote about when doing segmentation. It's not necessarily, it's what you just said, it's not necessarily the triangle reverse Sword by arr. Right? It's how people want to receive your it's like a relationship, like, you know, these people are very, you know, of the level one,

Angeline Grace Gavino  40:49

they don't want to go on QBRs for example, we know that don't contact me, I don't care about attending this QBR I have. Yeah. And so

Jeff  40:57

let me know I'm doing right, like,

Angeline Grace Gavino  40:59

kinda like that, right. There's, there's your customer. And it's very hard. I can imagine. And I'm not saying I've done this already. I just know how it works with even our enterprise high touch customers is very hard to engage with, like, somebody who invested this much money, they don't want to attend this meetings, they don't want to get in touch with us. It does happen, right? Because they're very self sufficient. Like we're used to implementing all of these kinds of tools, we know where you could just give us all the resources that sounds so you have to meet your customers where it matters, where it makes sense for them. We know like, like you said, like, they don't want to be engaged. Maybe ask them how, what is the mode of engagement, then you want? How often do you engage? I mean, we're digressing a little bit outside of digital CES and just the whole,

Jeff  41:41

but it all gets wrapped into there. Because there is a question around that around. How do you make sure that renewals are smooth? And then that walks back to you can't run 400 QBRs? As a, you know, so do you have like a digital QBR? Sort of,

Angeline Grace Gavino  41:57

oh, I this is something that we're exploring as well, you know, because our digital CSS is not as mature yet. We are in a sense that we haven't touched the whole customer lifecycle, we're very good that the book ends typically that's like the renewal waters and know the beginning like the onboarding, and then the renewals because they want to renew again, and where we struggle a little bit. And that's also how I see the maturity. The maturity progression of Digital's Yes, you start with both ends. Yeah. When you start like in the middle, how do you continuously engage with them?

Jeff  42:30

The valley is essentially one of my customers, basically, they that was the problem. They're like, great, the book ends, but so many valleys, can we just cut the bottoms of these valleys out? Right?

Angeline Grace Gavino  42:41

Exactly out and, and yeah, like you said, digital QB Rs. I've been hearing a lot of this. And I'm trying to figure out what is the most efficient way to do this, obviously, data needs to be involved on on an automation of some sort. But there's something that we're also investigating. Like I said, Yeah, like renewable conversations. And more specially in the longtail like the SMB. They typically like, we just reduce, especially because they have the credit card on file or something like that. But again, keep in mind, although digital CSS meant to be automated, like you know, like I said, almost no touch, because that's really how it is when you're automating engagement, there always needs to be a human element. And what we're trying to do is, we don't have to do that human touch point, every single time you let digital see us do it. But when it matters, when you feel like a customer is stuck in the middle of whatever, that's when you signal to your CSM that, hey, it's time to jump into this account, whatever their segment is. And so what I'm saying like whether that it will be a renewal conversation, and even though it's an SMB, we would still jump into a conversation to help them Yeah,

Jeff  43:56

I feel that this will there'll be some great AI that and I'm not trying to be funny with AI but I think there'll be something that can come out and walk through all the indicators of value right like you know, you wanted you know 30,000 users to sign up you're at 35,000 years is like check the box like you wanted your usage to be here you you know you're not gonna get into the the sort of secondary like how do you feel and have you gotten the value out of it but I feel like you can really streamline send out like a 510 minute video of like, this is how you're doing and then follow up or personally or or have your your CSM has come in and maybe record like a quick intro or summary or something like that. And I feel like I don't know if it was like a fever dream, but I feel like I talked to somebody that had been working on this or seen this product. I have to go back through but like, it's definitely going down that road. There will be somebody to kind of put this together so

Angeline Grace Gavino  44:55

I wouldn't be surprised, right? I feel like that's something that can Yeah, with the technology. Either we had today AI chat GPT. That's yeah, definitely possible pretty soon. I'm excited for that, actually. Because that's one thing I haven't been able to prep. And we're still trying to figure out how do you continuously engage with customers. So even with our high touch customers who don't care about jumping into Qb, ours, yeah, we need to still show them the value somehow. And that's what we're trying to figure out as well. Yeah,

Jeff  45:24

you're taking that data from the, the ops people, right with the usage, coming up with some type of summary. And then being able to message that out into an easily consumable fashion.

Angeline Grace Gavino  45:36

Like I've seen your new one. Now, you're, like I've seen if I ever find this, I may have seen some similar tool. Maybe, like, send it to you. I remember, but I feel like I ran into something. And I remember I might have sent it to my one of my digital fields, because hey, take a look at this as you can do. Yeah, that's I feel

Jeff  45:54

like this. That's like, making this up. I feel like I've heard it in conversation or, yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. That's good. I just want to the time and this has been amazing. We've gone over all there's a lot. Yeah. So let's let's so thank you so much. We're gonna put all your your LinkedIn stuff and everything like that. So people know where to find you and everything. So now um, people may not know this, you're you're you're in Thailand. Like what's the season? Because usually in the in the States, I'm like, Okay, it's like, springtime in Boston. What are you doing next? Like, what's your big fun thing? Are for the springtime coming up?

Angeline Grace Gavino  46:34

Well, we don't have springtime is really only two seasons. It's actually starting at the start of the rainy season over here. And so yeah, I typically uh, during the rainy it doesn't rain all throughout. It's actually not that bad. It just rains specific time of the day. And you know, so yeah, I typically there's nothing much you can do. I guess you wait until most and also because we have very limited, like public holidays here. So nothing much actually, I knowing that the rainy season is coming. Just last week, I went to the beach and try to you know, take advantage because there's a lot of

Jeff  47:18

how long how long does it last in Vietnam for for the for the rainy season?

Angeline Grace Gavino  47:22

Probably half a year. Oh, wow. It's kinda like that kind of the left hand side is not that bad, bro. I'm originally from I'm originally from the Philippines, and it rains all throughout. And there's typhoons and like Hurricane equivalent in the US. So it's not as bad as that. So you could still go randomly take an out of town trip anytime because it doesn't rain throughout the day, especially in the southern part of Vietnam. So

Jeff  47:49

yeah. Well enjoy the rainy season. Because you're used to it. So it's, you know, people get depressed around here when it rains for more than two weeks. So, so

Angeline Grace Gavino  48:00

yeah, you're used to it. Yeah.

Jeff  48:03

So thanks so much. Well, just hold on one second. I'll stop the recording and then we can follow up here. So there we go.