GSD Podcast - Deep dive into CS Ops with David Epperly
In this podcast, Jeff does a deep dive into the world of CS Ops with David Epperly of Red Canary. David put together a great post about the basics of CS Ops (click here to read).
Topics discussed were:
- Key metrics to track for CS Ops to prevent churn
- Do you need CS-specific tools like Gainsight or Churn Zero to use data for understanding churn risk?
- Using qualitative factors to understand churn risk
- What level do you start relying on data science and more complex tools?
- David describes his current CS Ops Tech stack
- How does somebody break into CS ops?
Transcript:
Jeff 01:14
Hey there, it's Jeff, just a quick note, I know my vocals are a little distorted at the beginning of this podcast. Good news is I rarely talk during this. My mic levels is jacked up for some bizarre reason. And But David spreads goal and as I said, he's really taken over the podcast here in a great way. So you might hear all distortion when I first start talking, but bear with the first minute or two. And then what David do all the rest was a great cast. And we really went into some really deep topics about CSS ops and when to do it and how to start and what stacks people are using and CSM sentiment versus using strict data and just some some great approaches. So give it a whirl and fix that mic for next time. And I'll talk to you all right, and I think we are good to go. So then Sydney are talking with David Epperly catching up. This is a note we had met during a game grow retains to be attained, that's a good thing for them to have, you know, no affiliation, except for I've done a couple of postings, and it's just a great networking thing. And also just great for people to log into and ask questions and things like that. So it doesn't matter where you are in your sort of journey there. But you know, as I mentioned in the previous podcast, I felt like I crawled under a rock or crawled out from the rock that I was under last couple months. And I just saw like CS officers just growing up and it's everywhere. Where were my kids who are getting ready to go to college, I'm like, Well, maybe you need to start learning about this stuff. And actually, we chat about that. But I am pushing them into the data. Like you don't have to be a data scientist, but you should be able to understand data and everything like that. So So I talked about this with the data a little bit in the last podcast, if you heard that we were talking about what we used to do back in the day before, this was like a term and all that stuff. And I thought the good sort of bookend on that would be talking to David who's just a ninja on this. And just a lovely saying, I'm also gonna post a LinkedIn post, which I think he just does an excellent job talking about, you know, all this stuff from the ground level and things like that. So David, welcome. Well, let's, let's chat about where you are, and kind of how you got there.
David Epperly 03:49
Yeah. Hey, Jeff, thanks for having me. Currently, I am the manager of customer success operations. At red Canary. We our security operations shop. So it's good to be working in operations for an operations I've been, I've been here with the team for Coming up on eight years now. It's very hard to believe,
Jeff 04:09
eight years in the SaaS company, oh my God, that's
David Epperly 04:11
the nilens days, eight years, you know, they took good care of me. It's still it's still interesting and fun. And and I've done a lot of different things as very early employee. And as you know, all too well, when you're when you're an early employee, you do lots of things and so it's right. Keeps the work life interesting.
Jeff 04:32
So vacuuming the floor. Is it one of those times like?
David Epperly 04:37
Yeah, you name it, we've done it, like, roll up your shirt sleeves and get it done kind of work, like removing hailstones from a patio out in Denver, in an office party to everything you've done at all. But that's probably one of the reasons I've stuck around like, I think that in CS and especially in CS ops, curiosity in being you know, explorative, by by nature is one of those things that helps you out. And I think I'm sort of naturally inclined to do those sorts of things. And at Red Canary, they've really allowed me to do a lot of different stuff over time, which is, which has kept me really busy. But I'm very excited to continue to explore CS and CSS operations specifically now. It's just there's so much to do and so much to learn. Yes, point. domesticating, busy for variable.
Jeff 05:31
Did you start off originally in the CSS and then moved into CSS officer? Did you come in from like an operations perspective? And then moved into into CES? Actually, neither?
David Epperly 05:42
Yeah, it's a crazy. Well, it's crazy. But it is a story. A friend of mine once described career trajectories in two different ways. One was one was the paint by numbers career and one was to connect the dots career. Yeah. And I've never had a paint by numbers career, because they're always
Jeff 05:59
all over the place. Absolutely.
David Epperly 06:01
I've always been a big kid who when you ask him, when you ask him, what he wants to be eating grows up, I start to get anxious and nervous, because I don't I don't have any idea. There's no, you know, there's too many things to explore and do. So I actually came to red Canary after, after a previous full career in the federal government working for the Department of Defense as an analyst. Yeah, almost 14 years there, and I took the job, my wife and I were at a point in an hour. And you know, with our family that we we both needed to change. And we found a great outlet back close to our parents in central Virginia to sort of do some of that work. But red canary was starting up at the time. And they were a security company that needed some people power. Yeah, and one of their, one of their big, early on ideas was that if they could, if they could take someone who didn't have a security background, and really, you know, good in analysis or not, but then really focused them on the most important things within an environment, teach them what bad stuff looks like, they could then take that and scale it and, and do something really cool with it. And so I was the first guinea pig along those lines. And since, you know, since then, that that whole model is more all for like a really good and important ways. But that's what I did for like, nearly two years, or a little bit longer, even. And that was I sat side by side with one of the best security guys on the planet. And I had no idea at the time, you know, like
Jeff 07:30
base. So sometimes God when my mom was DoD at MIT Lincoln Labs, and so I'm familiar with that lifestyle and travel restrictions. And man was getting asked questions.
David Epperly 07:43
Proudly, yeah, it's frustrating not being able to talk about your work. Anybody that you want to talk about it with?
Jeff 07:51
Washington, integrin. Great, right. So yeah, yeah,
David Epperly 07:54
exactly. Yeah. So yeah, I did that for a couple of years. And as the company grew, that role model morphed into a customer facing role, we started doing work that people would kind of classify as technical account management. So talking to customers, making sure they understood what our value prop was, how the product worked, how our services work, and then getting into a good spot. And I found that I really enjoyed that. And it sort of like, led me down another path of, you know, what my career might morph into this strange, you know, company that was at the time very early, did that for a while and, and as we grew, we had a first head of sales come in to company. And we were just sort of cresting the 100 customer mark, maybe 150, customer mark at that time, and the paperwork around renewals, expansions, upsells, all that stuff started to get cumbersome to the technical account managers like if you know, those folks, they're just not want to do that.
Jeff 08:57
Right. Just Just Just so people, just for timeframe, what years are we talking about? Is this like to 2012 2015? You could probably
David Epperly 09:08
pull up LinkedIn now. So it's, the company was founded in 14. If you just look at the LinkedIn profile, I can tell you exactly. So around 1617, I started working on account management full time. And it was still a customer facing role. The way we did it, I had these great relationships that I built with customers, as a tam. And it was just a it was an easy transition for me to start talking about, like more of the business side of things with those customers over time. And it started as like a you know, documents kind of heavy roll but then it morphed into something else. It was more about like where do you want to go with red Canary and what what do you want to do with our services and how does that help you get to the next level we're taking, taking the the TAM work that we had done and then combining that with more of the business and in the high level visit ability kind of stuff, which, as everybody probably listened to this understands this point, you know, that's what a customer success person does. So I started following all these people on LinkedIn talking about customer success. And one day, I just went to one of our founding and I said, Hey, we're doing customer success, we should just call it customer success. I think his word, his exact words were congratulations. Now you're our first CSM. So that's how I became a CSM. And we scaled as most CS teams do over the first couple of years. We, you know, roll up our sleeves and got busy, we did a lot of trial and error kind of work. We didn't have any specific tools or anything to get us started or busy. We just dug in, and we worked. We worked hard. We were we had over, you know, 100 accounts apiece at that time. And we were hustling very, very hard. And we just started adding body after body. And through that we built the team became the director, we started putting structure around it process at some point, we said, You know what? Let's get out of spreadsheets. Let's get a real tool, we brought in a tool, implemented that. And the team started to look like a real team over over time. But fast forward a couple years because I know this is running long, but no notice, well, good. Yeah. But we got to a point where as as one of the original folks on that team, looking around, I started to notice things like we got a lot of technical debt, with respect to how we want to run our business on it on the customer success side. And we've got a lot of process debt as well. So CSMs, early on, especially are doing what they do, and they're creating processes, they go finding best fit and what works for them. Nothing was sort of pulling the thread together across the board and telling that story. And it really hurt us at the sea level within privately. We weren't well understood we, we couldn't use the same language and represent the work that we were contributing to the overall book of business based on the same numbers that the sales team were using, because that's well understood if you weren't doing that for 100 years. And at the same time, we had this this small Earth department that was making big waves internally, and doing some really cool stuff working in an agile way and bringing really new thought and leadership to eternal red Canary. And that was our Reb ops team. And speaking with our VP of Reb, ops, Hey, there's this thing called Customer Success operations that sort of fits in with the sales operations and marketing operations that you have under your wing. And it seems like that would be a really interesting place to explore. And she was like, Yeah, let's, let's figure this out. And let's do it. So I've made that transition over. I've been here for a little over a year now. And you know, I think earlier this week, Nick Mehta, Gainsight just said, CSR ops and 2022, everybody's got to have it. So I felt like
Jeff 12:59
oh, man. That's what spurred my initial CSS research. Because I guess Nick's just really loving it these days, because he posted in like, December, November, like when I get asked by startup founders, what's what propres hire should be, it's going to be CSR switch. Let me tell you, if I tell you, my customers that they're going to show me the door, but like, it's nice. It's nice when you can do that. But it's super important. I'm not throwing shade at it at all. But it's sometimes you have to go in and build a little bit of process and how's your the traditional thing I see is startups to get some money, they start building a product, they get some more money, they start marketing it and selling it. And then they're like, Oh, crap, what do we do now we need to service this. And then they get initially just throw some CSMs in and they're doing everything post sale. And then it needs to sell and settle and gel but I always call this like the Pangea moment where the supercontinents break up, and they start going off into their things like CSR ops and implementation and things like that. So, you know, there is a sort of place around in between series A and Series B, I think it's great to happen. So absolutely, not. Absolutely. You can get in early, and that's great. More companies are getting bigger, and be round. So it's easier to do now for smaller companies. So I agree. So yeah, and
David Epperly 14:19
I don't I don't think that there's any one solution for any company out there. You know, when McAuliffe says the same thing, like operations, you know, his book recently came out the seven pillars, which is which is foundational, as far as I'm concerned.
Jeff 14:34
From the list I saw on the other one that you posted, which is like a textbook. So that's, that's, that's, that's on my Amazon wishlist. Well, no, it's just my cart right now. So yeah, absolutely. Put those links in the podcast notes. Absolutely.
David Epperly 14:47
That's the thing. Like there's so many great references out there like just you could spend all your time gathering references and sort of reading about it, but like, I don't know that there's any magical like, formula for or when and how, yeah, but what I, what I feel like is that coming from a CS background and to CS ops within the same company, as the first CSR hire is probably going to make your life a lot easier than it would be to sort of parachute in as an ops specialist and try to do work within an environment that don't necessarily get all the way. But you know, every company is different, right?
Jeff 15:29
Absolutely. So let's get into some questions. And you know, I had some questions after in your blog post, and then, you know, I posted into some CSM or CS specific slacks, what a alliteration, they're sort of probably didn't trip over that today. And so you had this concept of, you know, telemetry of the sort of overall concept of customer risk forecasting, which I see that as being a new job title, and 2022, or 2023. But you have this concept of telemetry, and these qualitative customer factors that can help understand churn and risk everything, which is probably like a big part of your job right now. Can you sort of expand into that and maybe maybe with the eye of day different than what the CSM is doing for the all the relationship stuff, like where these kinds of factors come in?
David Epperly 16:19
Yeah, I think it Okay, so a little bit of background. So where the term telemetry comes from, back back, when I was a DOD guy working for working in Intel, one, one of the things that I did was look at rocket telemetry and sort of figure out what, you know, what we knew about rocket based on the technical feed, coming from that specific rocket. So the pitch, the your thrust, what the color of the plume was cetera, right? That was my first interaction with the word telemetry. And that was my understanding of it for a long time. And it varied slightly like you can satellites have telemetry, anything that moves, right, you can pick up telemetry on and you can do it at distance, we moved into, I moved personally into the cybersecurity realm. And all of a sudden, it started to be endpoint telemetry. So all of the actions that take our people are taking on their desktops, laptops, mobile machines, etc. produce evidence of those actions. And it's, as you might imagine, a huge data problem, because every single thing that you do records, and it builds up over time, and you can imagine an organization having, you know, 1000 people, millions of actions on a daily basis, we're talking gigabytes, terabytes of telemetry that you could sort of sort through, right. And so that was really the red Canary problem to solve. How do you collect all of that? How do you take that and discern what's bad inside, and then only tell your customers about the certain things they need to know about, so that they can go and act on that rather than giving them every little thing, this might be bad, this might be bad, this might be bad. So that was my life for a few years. And, and as I moved over into it to customer success, it dawned on me that that CSMs are doing this inside their head on a daily basis. And they're utilizing what they know about their product and what success looks like in their product and for their customers to figure quantitatively, how are qualitatively rather how people are faring along their customer journey. But even more so these days, they're starting to look at quantitative data, as well. Like, what is Jeff doing on our website? When he visits? What is he What is he doing in our app? How long is he staying? Is he is he utilizing the right pieces of that that we think will make him successful based on what we know about Jeff, right. And so the idea about customers will imagery from the post was that you could take both the qualitative and quantitative and you could put them together and have your data set. And then CSR ops, then writes the detection logic that goes through all of that data and says, If you see a combination of x, y, and z, that is likely to present you with the risk come renewal time, or at least probably somebody that you should talk to you because they may not be getting everything that they could out of our products and services. Right. And so in my in my head like that is a very clear analogy to how we work in cybersecurity. And so I thought that was an interesting sort of way to look at it. And that's where telemetry from customer telemetry from my perspective, kind of came from, but I think you asked specifically about the qualitative stuff and
Jeff 19:43
I'm really interested. So I have a bunch of customers where you're doing exactly what you're talking about where they they balance out their customer risk score based on these factors and there's a there's a heavier weighting on the CSM and sentiment. So just We've seen how that all sort of boils together, which is, you know, CSM being like, a good feeling about this, and then like going into the data, like proactive versus reactive and all these types of approaches.
David Epperly 20:13
Yeah, so So let's talk about that. Let's unpack that a little bit. So I think there's a big difference between like a health score, and an indicator and a warning that something is wrong. The health score, like you said, has combination of factors. It's almost a meta detector at some level, if you want to say that right. And I do still feel like there's a good place for customer success manager sentiment within that health score of all the instrumentation that you can add me sitting on this call staring you eye to eye, looking at your facial expressions, because we're via zoom, like, it's even better for face to face, but like, I just pick up on those subtle cues that are going to tell me that this is either going well or it's not, and then start to back out from there, what I think is going to happen is the more people at that customer level that you can have that sort of relationship with the better and more accurate that that's that piece of your health score will be. Now I also think that in order to make it very good over time, I think it's a big part of your health score, but to sort of increase its validity over time, it gets better when CSMs experience having to make a call with respect to a prediction in terms of a renewal or forecast. And the closer they get to doing that in the way that our sales teams have done it for years and years and years, the better that they are at doing that. And so I've seen this firsthand, we used to not have any way to predict a renewal or an expansion or an upsell other than kind of like a like your thumbs to get into the air and see which way the winds blowing that day. And we've gone through the whole motion of yes or no versus quantifying the percentage with which you think that you have confidence in that. And then talking about that week over week and making sure that it's accurate and updated. And that discipline around that forecast is incredibly important, from my perspective to getting that piece of CSM sentiment accurate within the health score.
Jeff 22:22
You feel that is that is something that's always there. It's just like, like a stock tracker. And it's just always collecting data and giving you the response, or is it something that a CSM should be looking at on a monthly, quarterly weekly basis or something like that?
David Epperly 22:41
Yeah, I think that the machine can tell you what's always happening. Yeah. And I think that you as a as an individual need to consider your book of business and where it is in its in its like, you know, renewal path, its journey and what you're doing in order to like, update that frequently. And you know, it's only natural that you will raise risk, you will say that there's a problem. And then there will be much attention given to you. And your thoughts about that problem over the next, you know, weeks or months until it resolves or goes away.
Jeff 23:15
So the big thing I see in sort of the difference in size of companies is being able to instrument your product that you're having your customers use, so that you can get this data. How important is this? You know, is it can you do anything besides CSM sentiment until your product is instrumented like this? So you've got a usage. And then we can talk about products after that and you know, puts let's just talk about straight up data collection for now. And then maybe lots of V lookups. And, you know, tools like Tableau and stuff like that.
David Epperly 23:50
No, I think I think you can ease your way into it. I'm sure like when we started, we started with the Google Form and a spreadsheet. And that's the way most companies probably want to start, you always want to prove out from my perspective, what you're trying to get out of that tool before you enter even enter into conversations about should we buy it or not. And that's honestly the best way to do it, but But you have ces sentiment, and you can record that over time. And you can correlate that very easily in a spreadsheet to time and date. And if you overlay that on customer journey, you can start to see patterns about you know, the ebbs and flows of that CSM sentiment and maybe start to derive insights in terms of what your customer journey is feeling like over time to customers from their perspective, you can also just ask them, that's also super important, especially when you're early on. But But things like who attended who attended your sync meetings? How like, what, what their role is, what they're trying to get out of it. All that stuff sort of bridges the gap between qualitative and quantitative, and it's just a heavier lift early on from the CSMs perspective, to enter in those sorts of things than it is to be You'd much later Later, you want you want qualitative, you want the machine to take care of all the quantitative stuff and just the CSM, the gravy on top with qualitative but like, I guess frequency of meeting how many people how deep you are within that relationship, guys legs and pellet at appsflyer appsflyer have done amazing work documenting how to build a quantitative relationship model. He's doing it and he's doing it out of Salesforce. So we're not talking like CSM specific software here. There's there's lots of different ways you could do it. And he started in spreadsheets as well. So I think that there does answer your question, there's absolutely a lot of things that you can do without having a specific tool that's built to collect that information and having your whole app instrumented front to back by the, you know, on the other side of the coin, anybody who is good on the data cycle tell you, you can absolutely have your have your application instrumented completely, and not know what the heck to do with all of that data. And it's almost more paralyzing to have that situation. So so that's one, you know, one and the checkbox for caution, before you jump into that sort of
Jeff 26:15
thing. Yeah, just the thing that we, you know, wasn't on our things to talk about. But like, I could see this being extremely powerful for like your long term sales where people are demoing the product off and you know, you're having to go through like a super long sales cycle. And so you're kind of putting this tool set until like, sales engineers and things like that. And sometimes people will bring in CSM and into the, into the pre sales process as well. But I think of these, you know, six month long, extended trials and things like that, where you're able to really say like, you know, these people aren't logging in, or they're not using these modules. They're not doing extra not doing wireless, make sure we get some education out to them and things like that. So your travels? I'm sure you work in some Slack channels that I'm not in so
David Epperly 27:04
yeah, I think, like I said before, I think that this is the time of experimentation across the board, whether ces or specifically to see our SOPs, I think people are doing all kinds of crazy things. And some of them will, will shake out and be amazing over time, and others will just be trials that we put aside. For us. I know our CSCs, our our pre sales engineers are much more focused on things like overall value delivered and and making that high level connection. And what we found, at least on our side, is that in the pre sales motion, a lot of times the buyers are different than the actual users. And so and so if you do go that route, I think the caution would be around understanding that well, and knowing that what presents itself post sale is not necessarily what you can rely on presets to get the job done.
Jeff 27:54
Yeah, I think it's probably better for maybe some of your more complex products that take a long time to sell. So if you're like, Okay, we'll give it a whirl for six months. And it's you know, versus though like types of things where you're dropping JavaScript in and just go, it would go into town or something like
David Epperly 28:08
that 100%, if you're in an environment for six months, you need to have some really, really detailed user perspective. And if they're not giving it to you on a frequent basis, you better instrument it so that they're, you know, basically their fingers, see the talkin within your application as well,
Jeff 28:25
you're talking to a buyer, this way out of what we've done, we're gonna die. If you're talking to a buyer, and they're like, Great, I'm gonna give this to my team, and they're gonna go use it, they're gonna tell me if this was good. If they say they liked it, I'm gonna go purchase it, right? And then But then you're like, I hope they start using right, but like, are they I can see where then those factors can come into signal back to the buyer, and you're like, your team's not using this. And you know, then, like, if they do, we'd be able to save 30% Or you know, those types of things. So let's we can stop talking about pre sales. But
David Epperly 28:55
one last thing. I want to hear two questions, I'd like to test sort of title back though, I do think there's a really interesting perspective for for the SaaS in general, who is trying to shorten sales cycles and trying to get people in the door quicker than, you know, traditionally they have, if you can deploy in minutes, and red canary is one of those solutions that you can do that right. What you do is because most of the emphasis naturally within a company, and I say this, like, I don't love this, and I'm and I'm working to change this, but But honestly, like between you and I and everybody who ever listens to this, like most of the like attention from the leadership level is going to be focused on the pre sales sort of stage. If a sales engineer needs something to sell to a major customer, it's going to happen it's going to jump to the top of it very quickly. But what happens is if you shorten that sales cycle and make it so easy to push those things, push people into customers, the emphasis on some of those things gets lost. They then become customers who are good and your feedback through a voc program. And, and maybe they're not prioritized to the level that they should be unless you're really paying attention. And so that's another like, super important role for CES and CSR to play is to bring that commentary back into the forefront of the conversations internally and say, Hey, there's a huge demand segment for this. And we may have missed it, because because maybe you aren't killing it on the sales cycle side,
Jeff 30:24
or no, and I love your perspective on that. Because the common problem I see is somebody signs up, let's say your average ARR is 50k. Just to make things easier, right? Every customer you average it out, it's 50k. Suddenly, the 200k AR customer signs up, and everything they asked for suddenly gets escalated to the top. But I worked with somebody who did this great exercise of taking this one feature that when you added up all the customers that were asking for it, way above 200k, but it was that 200k customer that like got the big spotlight that was able to kind of dictate everything and stuff like that. So 100% hear what you're saying on that on those notes. Like, oh, it's just, you know, see, forget it, we'll put you on this backlog, which will never happen and stuff like that. Yeah, absolutely.
David Epperly 31:09
Every, every new company needs to learn that hard lesson of changing how they do business for one specific customer and then having that one specific customer lead them, right. And they're like, Well, what do we do now?
Jeff 31:21
If you're, you know, going back to baseball, like if you try and win every game by hitting the grand slam on the bottom, and it's gonna catch up. Have a user question we have. So, you know, shock to you. It's wasn't passed to you beforehand? What are the key metrics tracked by CSR? Is it only related to churn? Or does it also include metric around time to activation usage? Etc? Great question.
David Epperly 31:51
And if the answer is yes, I guess I would say, you know, the standard answer is it depends. But it really you can, you can sort of get better than that by saying, this year, as long as you know, last year, and this year, with CSS and CSS ops, everybody's turning their attention to net revenue retention, or annualized revenue of some sort, and tying everything that we do as a CS team, or as an ops team back to that, that revenue. So to answer the question, like, that's how we need to high level measure everything and have that constantly, like first and foremost in your mind, like, how is it going to affect that, like, customers with great long term relationships that understand the value prop, always renew, they always expand, it's a big incentive to have them on your team when you're talking about NRR. And you can directly correlate the work that you do in things like EB Rs, and, and sync meetings and all those things back to NRR. And, and so the it from my perspective, you need to look at that stuff, all and pull the thread all the way through back to that and so the metric at a CS level or a CSS ops level might be some sort of like, number of EDR to customer ratio, take an EDR as an example, and then correlating that to likelihood of renewal any kind of risk that comes up time to resolution and then ultimately, their renewal and upsell upsell expansion and how that ties into NRR. But I think if it all ties back to that, to that overall company goal, I think that you're in good stead so it could it could vary like anything you know, for for a B to C kind of business it might be tied in app or something like that, which which would also course that correspond back to those high level boys as well. So that's great. Yeah, to answer it.
Jeff 33:43
I actually had a follow on question along to that. Because the the day to day interaction is are you working with individuals si SS CSMs on their poker business? Or are you just kind of working in the background and make sure like the processes are available and like the dashboards are available to people so they can just always go in and check out what's going on? Are you like, you know, classic movie scene running in with a you know, laptop like oh my god like this? Look at this data right here. You gotta go do something yet,
David Epperly 34:16
so it's much much more the ladder or No, I guess it was the former. People had been saying for quite some time that CSR is basically becoming a CSM to the CSM comes with a view. So as a CSM, if I don't, if I don't work with individual CSM on a daily basis, I'm not doing my job, okay, like I have a I have a very close relationship with the VP of CS. We work on the strategic things, then to implement and make sure that it's working and also to make sure that our solutions and our processes are tone deaf and adding more overhead to the CSM than they should be in order to get the job done. I have to be constantly taking feedback from the CSM and it goes even further than that, like ideally myself and my team sit in on actual customer calls. And we look at actual customer issues and go through actual renewals with, with CS stems to really deeply understand how they work. And the cool thing. Yeah, the cool thing about Ops is that it's not just that you get to then pivot. And because we're in Reb ops, within customers, within Customer Success operations at Red Canary revenue operations is their blinkin organization, which sits in the middle between sales and product, and everything else, that we get to then turn around and say, Okay, we have these customers, but we also have these other larger customers within the organization. And how do we take the voice of CSM and sprinkle that data throughout the better or the bigger organization and influence how we make decisions as an organization about these really important things that we're about to do? So it's, it's incredibly like, broad, if you think about it in that
Jeff 35:58
perspective, oh, no, that's fantastic. It's funny, because you would not know this, like, I have a post in chat with a company and I called it that CSMs are the the Jan Brady's of the organization, but like you're arming the jam. So they can actually say like, I'm not just saying this, like, it's really true. We're, this is a fascinating stuff. And I try not to sprinkle too much my stuff in here, because we're gonna run out of time. But I did have an additional question, it comes out of your, I get to, but that one comes right out of your blog posts, you talked about, you know, there may be some time, point in time, excuse me, where, where suddenly you're gonna pass that data into, like, you know, data scientists and you know, have them really start putting the screws to the data and coming up with some some stuff. Where do you where do you see that? Like, when does an organization get to that point where they're like, We got to bring in even bigger guns, because you guys are the big guns, but let's say even bigger guns?
David Epperly 37:01
Yeah, I think you have to be as greedy as you possibly can about, about your role and about how you handle it. And, and, and not really make that call until you absolutely need it in some aspects. In many places, you're going to have a data scientist, or some sort of data expert that you can maybe lean on and ask questions off of and until it becomes acute. On the CS side, you have questions that you can't answer, given the data that you have, then you can get by for a very long time, DIY and leaning on other people,
Jeff 37:38
or what some data scientists build a product that that you then just go do. Is this sort of how I've been praying works out. So yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And,
David Epperly 37:47
again, it's the old academic thing there is that you can get into trouble using the tools that you don't exactly know how they work all the way. So caution there. But it's but for some organizations, it's just going to be a matter of logistics, like I, if I have 200,000 customers, and a b2c kind of like environment, I just can't use the tools that I have on hand to process that. And I'm probably, if I'm doing like what I should be doing, don't have time to go and learn those tools and implement them and be responsible for care and feeding of them and data integrity, and all of that stuff. So I'm gonna need someone to help me with that. So it's probably going to come earlier for those companies that have, you know, web analytics kind of frameworks and doing things with like many millions, maybe customers and that sort of thing.
Jeff 38:43
I 1,000%, agree, I actually have data to back that up because I was at a company called Virgin pulse, which had a web products. And then also everybody was wearing like a Fitbit type of tracker. You can imagine all the data that's coming in, in we there was no tool you needed to pass all this usage data after was de identified, of course, into into data scientists, and so they can come up with these insights. Okay, so last question. And I understand if you need to be generic and talk about the type of product and so saying like, these are the actual vendors that you're using, but like what's your current stack right now? Like, what are the tools or types of tools that you're using? I will also as I've probably said, in like 15 podcasts already, like VLOOKUP is the biggest BI tool in the world. But
David Epperly 39:28
no doubt, we definitely use Google Sheets to a great extent, but less than less more so these days, and it's because we have a much more robust stack coming to the to the fight, if you will, with respect to all of this customer telemetry. So So for us, our foundation is and always will be Salesforce in order to be our system of record for everything that customers do our CRM, and we also have our own, I will throw in our application or our customer portals that that generate all of this Right, I mean a good majority of this customer telemetry. Because we're security operation, we don't, we don't want those things to come together ever. And so we set a very specific customer success software in between those two things. I'll just say it's true zero was a customer of theirs for a coming up on five years now. And we gather telemetry from our application within that tool. And then when appropriate, we will make the connection back to Salesforce. And so it sort of regulates between the two of those things. We also have Zendesk handling all of our customer support activity that's piped into turn zero as well. So for more telemetry, more indicators of, of good, bad and ugly, and then we have product board that provides feedback for for direct from customers, but also from CSMs. And everybody else in the company who's that's a product that's customer
Jeff 40:55
facing talking about that on the GDR, and I was blown away by how cool the product that sounded like absolutely, yeah,
David Epperly 41:02
yeah, absolutely. And so we sort of tie all that together. And that's it really seek Katrin zero handles surveys. So we don't have a specific survey tool to handle our journeys and our, our place. They also do all of our risk scoring and our health scoring. I mean, they don't do it, that tool does it based on our prescription. It's it's incredibly flexible and powerful. And it does things like export to Google sheets in a live way. That allows us to NVP dashboard, dashboards and products that we would for the rest of the company with customer specific data involved in this as well.
Jeff 41:37
Fantastic. Well, lots of great insights. I really appreciate it and I'm sure we'll grab you back in a year or so and see what's been up there. I have been sort of ending some of these were saying like what was your big activity for COVID which is like now kind of back so like he's baking bread I see a banjo in the background what's what's what's the
David Epperly 41:57
it's just for looks like most bands on the planet like that one just sits there and collects dust.
Jeff 42:02
I had a guitar behind me for a while I had to move ping pong tables here, but now makes it a lot cooler than as guitar players because Bandula cool.
David Epperly 42:13
Yeah, I think it might be the first time I've ever heard. So let's see the banjo was cooler than the guitar but I'll take it right. Oh, yeah. For us,
Jeff 42:21
make it look super cool. Like I got
David Epperly 42:22
one of those collecting dust too. For me specifically, I'm a girl dad times threes are three little girls, my wife and I are randomly busy with s3. We, you know been stuck inside and COVID for so long. We really try to get out of the house over this last break and just explore and do some things that to push our boundaries a little bit and we were mostly successful.
Jeff 42:49
So that's awesome. Well, listen, David, hold on. Stop the recording. We'll just catch up on couple logistics and we got the thanks so much for joining. I'm sure it would be super helpful for everybody that's listening in. We'll have almost hit stopper right about now.