GSD Podcast : Jay Nathan is passionate about Customer Success and Community

In this podcast, Jay Nathan, EVP of Higher Logic, talks about how to use Community as a way of scaling customer success.

He also talks about :

- How Community increases NRR

- The community ROI story to the CFO

- Creating an Ecosystem customers feel great about

- Building Self service with Community

- Monitoring your communities will give you an effective product in behavior insights better than anything else

Watch the video below or check out on your favorite podcast episode:

Transcript :  All right, I'm here with the man, Jay. Nathan, how you doing? What's up Jeff? How you doing, man? I'm doing great. So if people don't know Jay and I have known each other for a couple years now. I, and I think it was through gain, grow, retain. I think that's how we, we connected. So, oh. No, it wasn't. You know who it was?

What's that? It was. The first time I heard your name was from somebody was swearing, obviously. Well, yeah. Somebody was cussing and saying your name, . It was oh my gosh. I'm looking at his face from, he left Medallia just recently now. Oh, Scott Roth. Scott Roth. Yeah. That, that's how I was first introduced to you.

He intro, I think he introduced us. Oh, he might have. Yeah. Yeah. Scott's a great dude. We worked together at Endeca together and there's a podcast that you can go listen to with Scott. Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah. Great. So so Jay's obviously very learned man and many things, customer success with a, with a huge background that you heard about.

But today's topic, you know, we always wanna talk about something that, that the guest is passionate about, and Jay is passionate about scaling customer success with c. Right. So that's what we're gonna talk about. And I'll tell you this, I will admit I am like dumb, like d u m dumb about communities.

Yeah. , that's my, my south for you, right? I'm dumb d u m about community. And, and then I went through and I listened to your podcast with Bribe and Brian Ober for, you know, cuz Jay's got his own podcast with G G R and Jeff and Christie. I'll. I was a little bit of a dog watching tv. Wasn't in that well, too

That's that's good feedback. We probably need to, need to figure out how to simplify it a little bit. I just feel like I was supposed to walk into like bio 1 0 1 and I walked into like a doctorate 5 0 2 level. Oh, wow. Well, Brian, yeah, Brian's a really smart dude and he's been doing community for a long time.

This is nothing against you guys. I, I just, I, I. I'm glad I learned something new is, what is the word? ? What, what you could gather from it. No, I, I think it's a good point. I think, you know, there's some people who have, have been in the community world for a very long time. Yeah. And it's probably like customer success.

People who have been in customer success for 15 years and they're talking to somebody in engineering or product management or sales, and they're like, so what do you do again? But and so I, I've had to come up this learning curve a little bit as well. It actually isn't that complex, so maybe we can simplify it as we chat a little bit.

Yeah, But I g I think maybe the, I'm sorry, did I cut you off on the, like the whole Not at all. And, Okay. And I mistakenly had not turned off Slack notifications, so the worst sound in the world just popped up. So I didn't hear it. I didn't hear it. Oh, good. Okay. Yeah, , and that's authentic anyway.

That's good. So, but I, so maybe, maybe we'll start this way. Did, do you believe Jeff. If you look back at the 15 years since customer success has come of age, do you feel like it's been built the right way? Oh, I, I think, you know, my opinion on that one, , I, I, I feel like it was done with great intentions, but it was not built in the right way.

Yeah. I, I, I sort of agree with that. I agree a lot with that. Yeah. If you sort of rewind the tape, the tape cuz we're older. Yeah. The 15 years ago, customer success was really born because. We had data that we didn't used to have on our customers. Cuz if you recall, everything's on premise. There's no telemetry.

There you go. That's it. Right? No, no, no data. Couldn't see what our customers were doing. Couldn't see if they were using it. All we knew is we were charging a hell of a lot for professional services and they were paying for the software upfront. Yeah. Not. Quarterly, three, three years. And then every three years a BMW would roll up at the client's site with a renewal contract.

That's right. And a and like a whole team full of people. Right. I was on those teams. I know how it went. . Yeah, absolutely. As I said, just make sure that you got the big m and m cookies and you're good. Yeah, yeah. There you go. So, I think what, what started as a very noble thing, which is, hey, we've got a bunch of data that we now actually can see what all of our customers are doing.

We should set up an operation to monitor that data, figure out who's making it and who's not. However that looks for your product, whatever that looks like for your product, and intervene proactively. That's what customer success was in the early days.

Yeah,

no, that's what I remember. Yeah, absolutely. Right.

I mean, fast forward 15 years and now we've. It's the primary relationship manager. It's got account management, it's got revenue ties, it's got customer experience, responsibility. Like I hear people all the time say like they're responsible for the end-to-end customer experience well. That's sort of a problem, right?

Yeah. Cause if you, if you make your entire customer experience dependent on a person, it's going to fail. Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. At some point it's gonna fail. So I, I think we, you know, as I look at the, take a, take a step back from this whole industry, which I've been very invested in, as you know, and you have two.

I think we have some, we, we have an opportunity to sort of lean it up and tighten it up. Really, really clean up what customer success has become. And I think the foundation of that is it's really. Starting with your product, a great product that, so that's the most scalable customer success that you can provide, right?

Yep. Great product that does what it's supposed to do. That's simple to onboard, keeps customer effort very, very low. Yep. Second to that is self-service resources. I have been rereading a book called The Effortless Experience. Oh, nice one. Yeah. You know this book I've got here my desk to prove it's reading it.

I've even dogeared pages in it, Jeff, like in written notes in the margin. Oh, so you actually read the books too? Well, I don't usually, but I had this one on my shelf and I knew I had to get back into it cuz I read a couple of h b articles by Matt Dixon and his team. Yeah. And, but the, the most interesting statistic in this book is that 81% of your, 81% of your customers who contact support are trying to solve a problem for themselves.

They actually don't want to talk to you. They just want to go in and figure it out. They wanna solve their problem. And furthermore, th there's really fascinating data in this book. Furthermore, you are four times more likely to leave a customer in a disloyal state if they do contact your support team than if they don't let that sink in.

Okay? That means in, in, in the converse side of. is that with a good customer service experience, you're only like one time hundred, like one time more likely to have a customer advocate for you based on that service experience. There's, there's huge, the, the, let me net it out. Yeah. Without the metrics, there's huge downside to people having to, to actually talk to a vendor and there's only limited upside, which means wow, this whole surprise.

Kind of high empathy kind of model we've tried to create for customer experience. It's not building loyalty and it's not building it's not building, it's not accretive to the business in any meaningful way. Interesting. Generally speaking? Generally speaking. Yep. So what that tells me is that as a product company, what I need to be doing as a customer success leader is first building self-service at scale.

Education. Yeah. Collaboration networking with peers who sit in the same seat as I do. Right. As my, the rest of my customers do. Yeah. So they can learn from one another and people who are literally experiencing the same set of problems. If I'm a C S M, I'm not experiencing the same set of problems you are as a user of my product because your role is whatever it is, right.

Maybe you're in hr. No. Listen, I, I, I'm totally on board with this cuz back around. I don't date myself here, but like 2007 or so I was at Endeca which was a develop, like it is a developer product, you know, it powered all e-commerce like in the United States for a while. And, and there was, we put out the Inca Developer's network, which was basically a discussion board Yep.

For developers. And people were like, like half the company was like, absolutely not. Everybody's gonna go in and bitch about us. And everything as you can. I know you're shaking it cause you know where this went. It was wildly successful. And people were like, thank God. Finally, I just want to interact with people who do what I do.

And like, what's the query parameter for the this, and how did you solve this problem? And then actually from, I did get from that podcast, if your marketing team goes through there, they're, that's where they can get all of their data points on what they should be talking about. Okay. You already know more about community than you were letting on Jeff.

Like that. That's it. Right? It's, it's, and it's not necessarily only about reducing your workload. It's about creating an ecosystem that customers feel good about. . Yeah. Right. And, and well, yeah. Okay. So we can get into the gang grow, retain community later, but, One of the things that Jeff and I have always tried to do in that community, the other Jeff, not you, Jeff

That's okay. But you think this way too, I'm sure is. Yeah. Yeah. We call it being the dj, not the talent. Right. You bring the talent together in the community to help one another, to help the people who, who don't have the talent yet. Absolutely. Guess who gets the credit for that? The brand that gig Giardo in this case.

The the community, the the vendor. Yeah, exactly. The vendor. The vendor. That's right. The vendor who, who creates the environment for that collaboration and that learning and that. Help and knowledge transfer to take place. So it's really not a complex, community's really not complex, but I, I think it's a fundamental part to scaling customer success.

And it's different for every company. Right. I, I was on the phone with one of our customers earlier. They're, they're a customer of ours, but they have like, 500 really large customers, they serve high-end enterprise. Yeah. And so they're like, you know what? We are always going to have a high-touch customer success model.

That is our business model. Yeah. They're profitable, they've learned how to make that work, but they're not gonna go have a no-touch segment in their business. Right. Yeah. Now, but the community still works for them. Which is cool, right, because it's additive for them. But what I would do as a, as a new customer success leader, especially in 2023 with what we're facing, every company is looking at how to tighten up, you know, sort of, you know, batten down the hatches for the next 12 months to see what happens.

I would be thinking about building a scalable approach first, meaning I've got a solid knowledge base and that knowledge base has more than just product stuff in it. Right. It's probably got best practices, you know, sample code if you're a development thing, but sample whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know who's a really good example of this?

Zendesk, zenes. Oh, absolutely. You've been very good at like self-start, self-serve stuff. Yep. I'd have a, a community platform and I'd have a programming schedule where I'm running. Webinars for customers, webinars, sessions different programs where I'm providing the type of information that people need so that if I'm a customer success manager, I'll tell you a story here in a second.

Sure. I have programs that I can plug people into so that I'm not responsible for the entire customer experience, cuz we know that doesn't scale and there's quality problems. It fails at some. Right. Yeah. I was on the phone, I did a, a QBR R with one of my team members a couple weeks ago. And as, and this is us, like we're a community company, right?

We should be the best in the world at this, and we're still working on it. Yeah. But you know, one of the things that, that I was taking notes as I do, you know, on these things, like feedback I wanted to give and that kind of thing. One of the things that I noticed was even our C S M, she was doing a great job on this call, but she was like, oh, well I'll have a follow up call with you on this and I'll have a follow up call with you on that.

And, but by the end of the call, like we had scheduled three or four more calls and I was like, oh man. Like what percentage of those follow up actions could be community style one to many type of things? Like what if we said, oh, we've already got a webinar that, that happens on a monthly basis to go think about your community.

Engagement strategy, right? You should go do that because you'll hear from other people when you're on that call that are doing exactly what you're doing, and we'll have somebody there who's gonna give you the best and latest tips and tricks that we have. Would you differentiate that from your standard office hours?

Yeah, I would, it's just a different program, right? One, one of the, the we did a podcast a few weeks ago with Pendo and their scale customer success team, and they're doing this, that, that is their mandate. And, and Erica Akroyd actually chatted here yesterday. Awesome person doing great work. But what they did is they started with a pooled model for customer success.

Okay. And pooled means it's a little bit like, People might say it's not support, but it feels a lot like support. If you have a group of people and you've given your customers an email address to go contact that pool of people, and then that pool people picks up each email as they come in and handles the request.

That's called customer support . Yeah. That's Robin S Absolutely. Yeah. , absolutely. But they flipped the model. They took all the data from that. From that inbound stream of requests and they said, okay, there's a lot of requests coming in for new user onboarding, right? Yeah. A new user, a new administrator joins our customer's company.

Maybe instead of doing five of these calls a week per c s m, do the math on that. Five, five times no. Like Friday at 11 is a new user onboarding , how many hours does that save? Literally thousands a year. Yeah. At this point. That's what I'm talking about. So that, that's a, that is a very specific program, a new user onboarding program.

Yeah. That, that way ev And by the way, it doesn't just apply to the long tail of customers, it applies to enterprise customers. Cuz when an enterprise C S M is on the phone with a customer and they hear of a new user, you think they're gonna sign up to go do a load? Oh no. I, it's, I'm so glad you said that.

We did an engagement last year with a customer that was all white glove high. You know, fortune 10, you know, 50, you know, types of customer base. And then they started going into smb and, and that was one of the things that we said was like, well, this just just doesn't apply to smb. Like, why would you go and have this.

New user training, data upload. Like why would you, why would you, why would you, if you're gonna record this once, why not? Like have a whole, if you have a curriculum around that, why not give that to your white glove people as well too, right? Like, you can do it in a way where people are still gonna get the, the love and care that they deserve.

But yeah, and it comes back to this too, right? Because. If a customer's gonna put the effort into getting on a call with you, you wanna be able to guarantee the quality of that call. And if you have 30 CSMs or 30 anybodys running around doing the same thing, then you have a quality control management issue.

Yeah, right. But if I have one person running a new user onboarding program, Twice a month. Yep. I can't control the quality of that pretty easily if they're, if they need feedback, you give 'em feedback, they tweak it the next time. That's right. And then you don't have like, oh, well Bobby does it this way, but Joanne does it that way.

And then conflicting information. We all get standardized down and everything. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And that solves the other issue it sounds like, of what you always see as like, oh, okay, we've got 15 CSMs. This. We're going two x next year in sales. So that means 30 CSMs, right? . Yeah. That's not scaling, by the way.

That's not scaling. Scaling is not just adding more people Right. Linearly with the number it scaling literally means you have to do more with the same amount of resources or do more with fewer resources relative to the inputs. So work smarter not harder. Absolutely. Yeah. That's right. So, so I. You know, when I think about scale customer success, I think about that kind of concept.

Community isn't the only answer to that, right? Because we're not talking about just online community here, but I did a post about this yesterday. It if one of the things that I've found in my time as chief customer officer at Higher Logic, As I've talked to customers and I've talked to customer success people because I do that often.

I ask the customer success people or I ask the community people that are our customers, I say, how, how engaged is your customer success team in your community? And they're like, oh man. Almost to every single time, man, I wish we could get them more engaged. And I'm thinking, what a huge missed opportunity for customer success teams to not be leaning on a customer community as part of.

Engagement and scale strategy. It's not the only answer, but it's a huge, it could be a, a, a huge resource to help take burden off of those people, connect them with their peer, all the, all the business that you've already described. I, I see this with you know, I'm sure you're part of some of these groups, and I'm not gonna name them, but like it's an executive sort of group where we we're all in a community together.

And there's like the CSM that I'm associated with, cuz it's based on my region, is like, she's amazing. Like, Hey, I've got a person that's looking for a X. Do you know any knowledge? Who's, who's worked with a tech company that's done Y and also z And so like, and using that community to help her customers are out, right?

Because at the end of the day, she's responsible for getting us to renew at this high ticket number and we wanna make sure that we see the value out of it. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And. Just think about the burden of training that goes down. It's not just new user onboarding, it's everything else that has to go on.

Cuz CSMs typically, especially when you're scaling rapidly a software company, they're not coming from the industry. There's just not enough. Oh, subject matter. We need the subject matter expertise in our field. Yeah. It's just, yeah. Yeah. You, you could, the rest of the organization winds up saying, sir Sims know nothing about our data intelligence platform analytic strategy.

You know? It's like . Yes, exactly. So you literally, there's always this dichotomy and customer success. Do you hire people that are from the industry and they have subject matter expertise like you just said? Sorry, I'm talking really fast and you told me you're, you're not talking fast. No, no, no. We. Don't worry.

No, it's just you hear from the south, so you think talking my speed is fast. Okay. That's true. That's a good point. That's a very good point. We all know I'm the fast talking Boston guy with the Yeah, that's right. Half Italian hands waving around and everything. Well, I do the hand wavy thing too. I'm really good at that.

We have that in common for sure. But. Yeah. So it's subject matter expertise, or do you hire for somebody with a customer success experience? Well, increasingly you just have to hire for somebody that's got some CS experience and then you have to teach them everything about the subject matter. So yeah, it's impossible.

I, I feel that way as well. So you can always get them trained up on your, your special snowflake software, like Yeah. Training people to engage with customers and provide. Is a skill, right? Yeah. Yeah. And even, even the industry, you can train people on, I mean, how many indu, that's sort of a consulting skill.

And you've been in consulting, I've been in consulting, so it's, it's easier I think for us with some experience in that realm to go say, okay, I gotta learn something new here. But you can quickly get to that. And if you. Create an enablement program for your team, then you can actually do that part really, really quickly.

Absolutely. So, absolutely. Hey, so you might have answered this then. Well actually, let's, let's, let's, so I was curious what the ROI story to a CFO F is, but it says it's, I I feel like we talked about it in that whole two x the team aspect of things here. It's the, yeah. That, that's the, that's the ROI story that we are trying to help.

Customers and our prospects build. Yeah. You asked another question too as we were prepping about the support community concept. Yeah. Really, if you think about customer communities, if you look back 10, 15, 20 years, they really started out as customer support communities and, and what the goal was there.

Like you mentioned your developer community. Yep. What was it in Deca? In Deca? Yeah. That's where I worked with Scott. Yeah, I did. I did one very similar at Blackboard and part, part of the goal there was to. Have all these answers sort of built up in an online Absolutely. Unity. You get the SEO value, you're classic.

And it's also in a support term deflection, right? Well, you've, that's it deflected you over to here, which has taken the human capital cost. Sorry, I don't mean to talk like we're all widgets, but like, but that's exactly what you've done here. It's like, oh, we f now you use ai. Like, oh, we've got your answer right here in this knowledge base article right here.

That, that's right. And. It's, it's not a matter of, it's, it gets back to that scale thing, right? Yeah. Because, and it gets back to the effortless experience. Most customers don't wanna call you. I'm gonna wing to that book . It, it's, do you have a referral fee I can put in there? Like, well, yeah. I give it to Matt Dixon.

He's the, he's the brainchild behind it. But the, the, the yeah, it. Creating, well, that, that was the origin of, of community and B2B SaaS is really like, let's challenge all the demand that we're getting in our support channel, which, It, it's got its benefits, if you think about it from the perspective of the 81% metric that I threw out, right?

Yeah. It's not just about the company. It's actually a win-win for the, for the customer as well. But the way I think about our, so that ROI is pretty concrete, right? It's pretty easy to say. Like, we can challenge, we believe we can challenge this much of the volume that comes in today. We can give another channel.

Self-serve customers can find their answers before they have to call us. That means we have to staff fewer people in our contact center or our support center. It's easy, right? Yeah. So I started trying to think about how do you take the same concept and apply it to customer success, and it's almost the same kind of thing.

Customers aren't necessarily looking, they are , they're looking for training, they're looking for best practices. They're looking for, how does my peer do x Y Oh, huge. Yeah. Like. I remember implementing Endeca for Lowe's and they're like, Hey, what did you guys do over at, at a Home Depot? Right. Like, exactly.

It's like, right. You know, wanna make sure they're in P in Pier and then maybe leapfrog as well too, so, yeah, that's right. Yeah. What are the benchmarks? Like, what does good look like for this metric of that metric? So, and, and then what are some of the answers to the problems that sit around the product but not.

Our product issues, right? Like this gets in, that feels like a community thing to me, where it's like we just built the product, like, and then people start having these other things that they're trying to use it for that that, that feels like a great community thing here. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and Like half the problems in software adoption actually don't stem from the software themselves.

They send, they stem from something else. Environmental around the software. Maybe it's the way the people are organized, maybe it's the other technology that's in the stack that you have to go integrate with. Yeah. So it's it's community begins to give you the opportunity to connect people to talk about all those problems that aren't your product.

But again, you bring 'em together, you get the credit for that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But so, All that aside roi. Yeah, right. See me talking with my hands, I'd do it. It's ok. . Maybe it's cause I'm talking to you. There's chameleon dude. I am a, I am. You gotta do that. It's called mirroring. Yeah. So No, I'm not doing it on purpose.

I promise. , the, the model is similar. Like, again, it goes back to the how many calls do my, does my C S M team need to have with our customers and follow up to our qbr? Yeah. What are all those things? So if you can say, all right, our customer success team is doing all these activities today. If we can make these.

Three or four things that are the biggest volume drivers for that team, reduce them. Then it's not a matter of getting rid of CSMs, it's a matter of hiring fewer CSMs in the future. Absolutely. More with less. So every time I hear this type of a story, I remember I was at unknown software, unnamed software company.

and we had to put in more recs for support people, right? And so we created this initiative of like, let's add up all these support requests and see if Dev can go build some of these things because, and, and, and it was, it was change password, which is a very common thing, right? Like, and basically we would've had to spend another $80,000, and this is 2010 economics, but another 80,000.

On two support reps because of the increase in volume that we expected with sales. And the number of change password requests that would come in. So it's like, why don't we, why don't you guys just take a sprint? We fix that. Yeah. We fixed that . Will it cost $80,000 maybe , that's fine. Yeah. Or maybe not.

Hopefully not, but absolutely. Oh, no, that was definitely, that's one side of the ROI equation for customer success. The other side is what is the intangible benefit of having an ecosystem that your customer. See you at the center of, they're more loyal to your brand because you're giving them access to this ecosystem of people that look like them, that can help them solve their problems.

Again, it's back to the DJ now, the talent. Yep. You, you, so can, can you get your head around the idea that you could improve retention by a quarter of a point next year by having this kind of environment? That's pretty believable for me as a, yeah, as a chief customer officer. That's part of the ROI story we tell to our customers as well.

No, that's great. Cause it it all for me, it, it feels like there's an ROI story and then there's this like, you just gotta do it. Right? Like and that's, that's how I felt about your other, your answer there, which is like, yeah, it's just the right thing to do. You know what I mean? So I, I was, I was on the phone with one of my customers, literally right before I talked to you, you know, she said to me, what's that customer community is table stakes for a SaaS company.

So there you go. Yeah. There, there's your other roi. Your competitors are doing it. No, that's awesome. Are you not gonna. Right, right. They just need one. And then you start moving to that industry. That, that's great. So I think we covered, like, now I feel a lot better about it, Jay, like I feel like I could, I could, I could explain this a little bit more now.

This is, it's not rocket science. You know, the, when you think about gang grow, retain, you're close enough to G G R. Yeah. Being a part of it it's all about content. It's all about putting people who have great ideas and who have done great work, putting them in the spotlight, letting. Tell their story.

Yeah, it's, it's sort of a marketing kind of thing as well, right? Like Yeah, but what, what's better as a, as a software vendor, when somebody asks a question and another customer goes in and answers it, you're like, oh my God. Like there you best case scenario right there. It's like, get 'em on the stage at our next user conference.

Right? That's exactly right. And that's the kind of thing that you can look for. So you're actually touching on something else, which is I believe one of the most important. Elements of customer success and maybe one of the most important, is it advocacy? It's advocacy, yes. Right? Yes. Yes. Like what do you think?

Because I mean, I see a lot of marketing teams struggle to, to work with their CSMs to say, Hey, go recruit me somebody. Oh, that's done X, Y, and Z. Like, I'm not gonna lie. And this isn't a pitch for my company, infinite renewals.com . But

I

always tell people my. Is not to increase your retention number.

My goal goes beyond that so that your customers are what I just said on stage at a user event, talking about how much they loved. That's what you should shoot for, not for the renewal contract, but for these people singing their praises. Getting on the phone and calling when people are doing a reference check and all the G2 stuff and everything.

Like that's, that's what you're shooting for. Yeah, and it's, it's them talking about your brand and places that you can't see either. I dunno if you follow Chris Walker on, oh, maybe I should. Oh yeah, you should. Def they, they, Chris has this concept, his, his company's called Refined Labs and they've built Oh yeah, absolutely.

You know that actually he's in Boston. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that whole, they connected that with Meg, their coo. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Oh yeah. Awesome. Yeah, she's awesome too. The the whole concept there is this thing they call dark social, which is that the fact that buying has changed drastically since the whole HubSpot inbound model, love HubSpot.

But the, the model is different today and. Word of mouth is more important than it's ever been because people are having conversations in private communities and like one-offs. Yeah. You know, we, Jeff and I are part of a, a very elite circle of people , so we that one. Yeah. But I will say for that very elite , so funny.

Wish I could talk about what we were talking, we have like a chat group. That's it. Like, it's like a, it started as who's going to this bar during. Right. That's how the whole thing started. Yeah. And it's persisted for six months and

now

it's like what's good? So it is literally, if you ask a question in there and it gets answered, like I am taking that as like the word of God, like that is, Yeah, but that's where, that's dark social, right?

That that's Oh, yeah. Places that your marketing team cannot see where people are talking about you positively or negatively. A lot of people one of the common questions we get in the sales cycle about community is, especially from customers that don't have one yet Yeah. Is what happens when customers start badmouthing you in your community.

Or people say things that are undesirable about your product. Wouldn't you rather be able to see that and have some be able to go in and respond to it? Right. To respond because yeah, if you, if you go and read more about the psychology of, of customer experience and service, you'll also find that it's not actually the bad things that happen in the process of using a product or working with the company.

It's how the company responds to those bad things. That's, that really defines the experience for the customer. And actually, if you do have a problem and you. Chances are you're in a better spot at the end of the day. Oh, absolutely. Oh, you, you see these on either like a G2 or even like Yelp or whatever, just to make it a little bit more in the, in the everyday life where, you know, I went to this restaurant and XYZ happened and blah, blah blah.

And then they get reached out to and they're like, we're so sorry. Here's 10% off, 20% off the next time. You know? And then suddenly like, people feel better about it, but then you addressed it and it's. Hanging out there and just like for people to read and just figure like, oh, I guess they just let it fly then, so Absolutely.

Yeah. They, they didn't even know about it, so they couldn't respond, so, absolutely. But yeah, so anyway, there, there's, there's many facets of it, which I think, you know, the people that are in community deeply, I think it, it gets hard to explain it all because there are so, Benefits as you start to unpack it.

Yeah, but to your question about ROI support, deflection is key. I call it customer success deflection or customer success. Scalability is to me, number two. And then from there, there's all these other benefits that sort of, yeah, no, that's absolutely true. That's, that's fantastic. I, I appreciate it. I mean, we could talk for hours, you're probably going on for, for quite some time, but I, I think you sort of resolved all of my, my community questions and, and settled it down to, to, to what I was thinking about.

So let's, let's do this. Let's chat about, you are a voracious reader, right? Yes. Oh no. You're an audiobook guy. Yeah, I am. Yeah. So I, I read by listening to books. That's what I do. Yeah. Yeah. But so what is your non-business thing that you're listening to right now? . So, you know, I told you before, like the thing that I'm listening to that's not business is this guy named, oh, Tom, Tom Bukovac.

Yeah. Who's, who's a, who's a, he's a session guitarist. And for people who don't know what that is, like this is, Professional. Musician who basically is a recording artist. You listen to like Taylor Swift and you hear amazing guitar riffs in the background. It's probably him like Yeah, yeah. Literally probably this guy.

Yeah. He starts YouTube channel during the pandemic and it's just, it's got me, got me Mesmerized. And then I brought it up to you when we were having our pre-call and you were like, oh yeah, I know that guy. And I was like, oh, the, the, the, the handle on his channel is based on like an effect pedal from like 20 years ago.

It's like echo. I was wondering what that was. Yeah. Oh, it's an old delay pedal that he loved someone when he named his channel, which never thinking he was gonna make videos about, but Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But, but you know, it's so, he gives a little guitar lesson, but he talks a lot about the business that he's in.

He talks a lot. I mean, he lives in na, he's a Nashville recording artist, which is a whole universe unto itself. I knew nothing about how any of that worked. And, you know, both of us been playing guitar all our lives. Yep. How we connected a lot of it. And and I, he brings you into the studio. He shows you to just tracking like, Nope, screw up.

Go and do it again. Like, like yeah. Just walks you to here's my effects. Yeah. So that's, that's, yeah. That's awesome stuff. It's, it's the, the thing that I love about it most, Jeff, is that it. It's like on display picture of what mastery of a subject looks like. Yeah. This guy, he's just, he's so deep into his craft that like he can't even see beyond it and so deep into it that he doesn't even think he's that good either.

You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Like he's like other guys you know better, but yeah, exactly. It's inspirational, right From just from. Perspective to see somebody so deep into their craft, you're like, okay, like what's my thing? How do I get so deep into something? And know the nuance of it so well, and yet can explain it so simply to people.

Like that's what I aspire to, so. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. That, that's my thing right now. Is there a, is there a business thing besides the effort? Is it Effortless Mastery? Is that the, the, the book that you're into now or uh, well actually Effortless Experience that I've referred to like three times.

Oh yeah, yeah. That one. I am reading that cause I'm actually writing my newsletter. Okay. And it's, and it's coming out, it comes out every Sunday morning. But yeah, we'll put the link in the I'm sure everybody listening to this is a subscriber already, but We'll, hello podcast. Yeah, that would be awesome.

I'll tell you here, I'm looking at my Audible account here on my phone right now. I've got influence by Robert Cini. I use a story in that. Have you listened to it yet? I use a story in that all the time. That's the story. When I talk about charging for implementation, I talk about the story when that lady had these like diamond, these crappy jewelry at like a Grand Canyon gift shop, and she told somebody like, oh, just price 'em down to get rid of them.

And so she accidentally, I think, put an extra zero. So suddenly people thought a $10 thing or 90, 99 thing was like 900, whatever it was, they paid it, right? The, the, the perception of value. Was suddenly like, oh my God, it's worth something. I should buy it, versus, oh, it's just crap. Who wants. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I, I gotta turned onto this by accident, by somebody in on LinkedIn who made a comment on a post that was blown away, so, oh, it's a great book. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That, that's one I started listening to How Brands Grow Again, by Byron Sharp. Yeah. And then okay, here's a really practical business thing that I'm reading.

It's called Delegation and Supervision, by a guy named Brian Tracy. And I was just, you know, I was, over the holidays, I was thinking, There's some things I need to brush up on in terms of my ability to delegate and scale myself. Yeah. As a leader. That, that sounded pretty good. Delegation. Delegation and supervision.

A little bit old school, but some really solid concepts in there. So I don't know. No, absolutely. I'll put, I'll put the links in the show notes. Those are fantastic. So Jay, I know we'll talk again. So let's do this for everyone. Where can people find you? We're gonna put your LinkedIn profile. Okay.

You're getting a newsletter. Yeah, the newsletters@customersuccess.io. Okay. And you can, I mean, I've got, what I did there, Jeff, is I pulled like 500 LinkedIn posts off there and I organized them and tagged them and categorized 'em. Oh, nice. So, you know, if anybody's like, seriously tired and can't go to sleep some night, you can maybe go check that out,

But I do write on there. I, every, every I, no, I get it. I think it's Sunday, right? I think every, every Sunday morning. Yeah. I, I did take. Christmas Day and New Year's Eve. I didn't write, I didn't publish anything, but I'll, I'll get back to it starting this week. So that's great. So we'll, we'll put those links up there.

Why don't you uh, we'll say goodbye, but you'll put stop on the recording and then we'll just wrap up with some, okay. Last stuff, so, yep, sounds good. Hold on. Lemme figure out how to stop this. My dad.