#TDSU Episode 188:

⏱️ Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:02:27 - The challenge of scalable customer success

00:03:48 - Does everyone really want a personal touch?

00:05:35 - Choosing what NOT to do in customer success

00:07:19 - Segmenting customers for better service

00:09:03 - Generational differences in customer needs

00:10:03 - The power of checklists in CS operations

00:12:29 - Why standardized processes matter

📺 Lifetime Value: Your Destination for GTM content

Website: https://www.lifetimevaluemedia.com

🤝 Connect with the hosts:

Dillon's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dillonryoung

JP's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanpierrefrost/

Rob's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-zambito/

👋 Connect with Emily Deas:

Emily's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-deas/

[Emily] (0:00 - 0:27)

Everybody wants to feel like the most important client. Everybody wants to feel like it's personalized to them. Everybody wants to have that feeling of, I'm not just talking to AI.

I'm not just going to get some bot that's handling things for me. I want a person who's giving me their full attention. And how do you balance that with delivering this service and everything that you want to and yet being able to make it where you don't just have like 5 billion people on staff to be able to give that to the clients?

[Dillon] (0:36 - 0:54)

What's up lifers and welcome to The Daily Standup with lifetime value where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man Rob with us. Rob, you want to say hi?

Cheers. And we've got JP with us. Isn't cheers a goodbye?

No, I guess it's a hello too.

[Rob] (0:54 - 0:55)

It's a Boston reference.

[Dillon] (0:56 - 1:00)

And we've got JP with us. JP, can you say hi, please?

[JP] (1:01 - 1:07)

Hey, Atlanta, where the players play. Yes, area codes.

[Dillon] (1:08 - 1:16)

I do like that song. It's a great song. And we have Emily with us.

Emily, can you say hi, please?

[Emily] (1:17 - 1:18)

Hi, everyone. Nice to meet y'all.

[Dillon] (1:19 - 1:25)

Thank you for making it normal. Not these weird deep cut references to cities.

[Rob] (1:25 - 1:27)

Cheers is deep cut? Come on.

[Dillon] (1:28 - 1:37)

Well, and I am your host. My name is Dillon Young. Emily, thank you so much for being here.

Can you please introduce yourself?

[Emily] (1:39 - 2:11)

Sure thing. Thanks for having me. So I'm Emily Dees.

And I am just now leaving my position as director of national accounts at Delegate CX to move into role as director of customer success at Ptolemy. And I'm very excited for this new opportunity and to take the years I've had as customer success specialist and to a customer success manager and to moving up and to managing the biggest accounts and really just focusing on those high growth startups and all of the challenges that come there.

[Dillon] (2:12 - 2:13)

Very cool. Well, congratulations.

[Emily] (2:14 - 2:15)

Thank you.

[Dillon] (2:15 - 2:26)

Emily, you know what we do here? We ask one single question of every single guest, and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success? And so what is that for you?

[Emily] (2:27 - 3:23)

You know, especially after this onboarding process and being able to see how different things are from where I'm going to where I've been, I've really been thinking about process documentation and scalability. That's, I think, something that runs into a lot of issues with customer success, because obviously you're wanting to deliver a very custom experience. You know, the idea of customer success is that you are being heavily involved with these clients, that you're building these relationships.

It's a very manual, energy driven relationship and task, and that can really kind of be counterintuitive to scalability. So that is really what I've been thinking about recently is how do you bridge the gap in between delivering that custom white glove experience to talk to your accounts while also building something that is repeatable and scalable so that way your business can grow as much as you need it to and everybody can benefit from what your team has to offer.

[Dillon] (3:24 - 3:48)

Is there a word you're not saying here which seems to always accompany this thought process? And I'm not saying it one way or the other, whether it should or not, but personalization. It seems like that's why everybody wants to do the manual stuff is because it just feels so personal.

Is that where you think that the center of the universe is, is how to achieve that at a scalable level?

[Emily] (3:48 - 4:18)

Yeah. Everybody wants to feel like the most important client. Everybody wants to feel like it's personalized to them.

Everybody wants to have that feeling of, I'm not just talking to AI. I'm not just going to get some bot that's handling things for me. I want a person who's giving me their full attention.

And how do you balance that with delivering this service and everything that you want to and yet being able to make it where you don't just have like 5 billion people on staff to be able to give that to the clients?

[Dillon] (4:19 - 5:35)

I want to call out one important thing that I learned a while ago. And that was because I, Emily, if you know anything about the show, I am the resident challenger of notions. And the idea that everybody wants like hand holding is this really interesting phenomenon that like I had to learn was not necessarily true.

There's this really well known idea now that millennials actually find greater satisfaction by solving their problems by themselves, by not having to engage somebody. And when I did a lot of training for software, that's a thing that I had to institute into the way I trained. I had to understand the personality types and actually like the generational aspects of the folks I was training.

I was also training like largely like boomers on my software, which they do want to feel like the most important person. And they do want to be able to call you at nine o'clock at night if they don't understand how your software works. So it definitely does cut both ways.

But I just wanted to call that out because I thought that was an interesting thing that you mentioned and a thing that I learned a long time ago. JP, why don't you jump in?

[JP] (5:35 - 6:43)

Yeah. Yeah. Emily, great topic.

As someone who's worked in a lot of scale teams, I think something that I sort of wrestle with in my mind is what are we not going to do? There's always a bunch of things that we want to do. We want to be able to do, like you said, we want to be able to service the customer.

And I think even if it's not about them like feeling the most important, we want them to have a satisfying experience at the end of the day, whatever type of customer they are. To me, it's what are we not going to do? What are the priorities going to be?

Because sometimes it seems like the challenge is you're saying, OK, we want to do all this. And then it's like we want people to create limbs and time and different things that they don't really have, especially when there may be multiple things that they're going between. Switching between these things takes a lot of our processing powers, people.

So I know that we can- Or like, let's just be honest, you don't have that capacity.

[Dillon] (6:43 - 6:55)

You don't have that capacity to add additional experiences to your repertoire. This is JP trying to be nice because he's talking to somebody in a leadership position. But, yo, JP, just say it out loud.

[JP] (6:55 - 7:19)

Stop giving me work to do. So, OK, yeah. This guy.

So what is it that you think is most important? If there's three things that you're like, OK, we're going to make sure these three things get done, what are they? So- I'm a curious.

I'm a curious, not a challenger. I'm the curiosity guy. He's the challenger guy.

So I'm just curious. Absolutely.

[Emily] (7:19 - 9:02)

And I have a couple of thoughts on this, especially with the challenge that was brought up. I think you actually highlight a really important point of generational differences. A lot of times currently in customer success, you want to be dealing with the decision maker.

Right now, we're not having as many millennials in that decision maker seat. I think that we're going to see this shift in time as the millennials kind of rise up in their positions at companies. And of course, it depends on what your business is focused on selling to.

But in my experience so far, millennials haven't gotten to that decision maker place yet. And it'll be fantastic when they do. And we can focus more on the process driven side of things.

And that curiosity of what you focus on. I think the best thing in my experience is when you can kind of specialize your customer success managers. So rather than just having not exactly any type of organization system for what client goes to which person, start to figure it out by like, all right, these are the clients who are going to want that white glove service.

And these are our biggest accounts are going to be our biggest revenue. And they're going to be our highest demands and have a customer success manager who's dedicated to that. That's their focus.

And that is what their bandwidth is going to be devoted to. And then to be able to look at accounts that you're going to be trying to push into things that are a little bit more automated things where they can find resources themselves, be able to push them towards a knowledge base and be able to find that information on their own. And then also, if you do that, you can start setting up education sessions and things and you can kind of start connecting some of these clients.

And theoretically, if you're organizing them by customer success manager for being similar, they're probably also coming to similar issues and trying to have the same problems fixed for them. And so that's going to be a lot of really good cross collaboration within that team.

[Rob] (9:03 - 9:23)

Rob, your thoughts. Good points, Emily. Has anyone ever read, especially the points about generational differences?

I think that's always a careful conversation to have because it's like, we want to be mindful of these differences and without being judgmental based on these differences. I think I was born in the wrong generation, by the way, because I talked to...

[JP] (9:23 - 9:25)

No, you born in the right one. You born in the right one.

[Rob] (9:26 - 9:36)

I talked to someone yesterday, he's 22. And he avoids talking to his customers, going on site with his customers. And I'm like, you can't keep me off the phone with my customers.

[Dillon] (9:36 - 9:39)

But you said he's 22? 22.

[Rob] (9:40 - 10:00)

But that's a different generation. That's what I'm saying. But it's a spectrum.

So I think I belong in the boomer generation, if we're going off generations. I'm very distant from the Gen Zers. I didn't claim we're in the same generation.

Gotta listen. You're kids these days. Oh, then you mansplained me.

[JP] (10:00 - 10:01)

Oh, it's a spectrum.

[Rob] (10:03 - 10:15)

Let me just reel it back to the original point around... Process documentation and scalability. Have any of you guys read the book, The Checklist Manifesto?

Heard of this?

[JP] (10:15 - 10:20)

I've heard of it. It kind of got trashed in the reviews, but it's okay. It's fine.

[Rob] (10:20 - 11:46)

It just basically says, run things off a checklist, you'll be better off. But it brings up good points. The good points are that...

Those are good cliff notes. Yeah. But it brings up some good points that there's an increasing amount of knowledge work in the world.

That knowledge work is more subject to errors, as opposed to if you were putting something together on an assembly line and subjectivity as well. And that if you follow a checklist, you'll have a better experience as an employee, you'll provide better client experiences. Basically, the author says, more or less, if a checklist is good enough to take a plane into the air and land a plane, then a checklist is probably good enough for your job.

Now, not knowledge work entirely, but you get the idea. I think about this all the time because my magnum opus in my work is putting together a template gallery of all these different processes and playbooks and checklists that any CS team can use. Not a shameless self-plug, but I do always want input on it.

And it's to the point where my friends make fun of me for it. When I got married, you should have seen me. Even when my sister got married, my sister was like, she was like, you think maybe you could help me out like day of the wedding?

I was like, I was there with checklist in hand, ready to go telling the caterers what to do. I'm all about documented process. That's my favorite thing in the world.

So Emily, you got a lot of good stuff coming with the new opportunity. I'm excited for it.

[Emily] (11:46 - 11:53)

I'm really excited for it too. And people can laugh at a checklist, but the thing is, the more processes we have...

[JP] (11:53 - 11:54)

That's not what I'm laughing at.

[Emily] (11:54 - 11:55)

That is...

[JP] (11:56 - 11:57)

We're laughing at him.

[Emily] (11:58 - 12:28)

You got to have processes and documentation and things. Because if it's all just living with one person and everybody's just kind of like owning and running it, that just leaves a lot of room for not only user error, but we're human. That's a lot of information to hold onto and live in our head.

And that's why you need a team. And then your team's not able to help you out because you're having to communicate everything to them first. So those processes not only help streamline things, but they help to have more cross collaboration and support.

[Dillon] (12:29 - 13:00)

Not only that, but without standardized processes, in my experience, it is near impossible to properly measure the performance of your different CSMs or properly measure the performance of your processes. If you just verbally transfer knowledge and then expect them to duplicate that for every customer experience, you do not have the right as a manager to measure them against that. I don't think that's fair.

[Emily] (13:01 - 13:04)

I agree. And if you can't measure it, you can't improve it.

[Dillon] (13:04 - 13:18)

Exactly. Exactly. Emily, this is fantastic.

Love it. You should come back and talk to us in another three months and tell us more about how this onboarding process has gone, all the fantastic things you've done at Ptolemy. But for now, we do have to say goodbye.

[Emily] (13:19 - 13:23)

Well, thanks so much for hosting me today. I'd love to reconnect with you all in the future.

[VO] (13:28 - 13:59)

You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at lifetimevaluemedia.com.

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