#TDSU Episode 208:

⏱️ Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:02:14 - The glowing office mystery solved

00:03:05 - Victim mentality in customer success

00:05:56 - Owning your outcomes, not making excuses

00:07:14 - Fighting for budget like everyone else

00:09:01 - The echo chamber of complaints

00:11:30 - Accountability starts with you

📺 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 Kel Kurekgi:

Kel's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kel-kurekgi/

[Kel] (0:00 - 0:20)

Workshops and stuff, and I came out and I was like, everyone is moaning. They are just whinging and moaning. Why don't we get a seat at the table?

Why doesn't anyone pay attention to us? And I came away thinking, like, you all sound like babies. Like, who's inviting the baby to the boardroom?

Right? No one.

[Dillon] (0:28 - 0:46)

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?

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

[JP] (0:46 - 0:48)

I used to love orange soda.

[Dillon] (0:50 - 0:54)

And we have Kel with us. Kel, can you say hi?

[Kel] (0:54 - 0:56)

I put the screw in the tuner.

[Dillon] (0:57 - 0:58)

Oh, my goodness.

[Kel] (0:59 - 1:00)

Yeah, I got you. I got you.

[Dillon] (1:01 - 1:16)

And I don't know what's going on. I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Kel, thank you so much for being here. And you were weirder than I would have expected. So you're going to have to explain this a little bit.

Can you please introduce yourself?

[Kel] (1:16 - 1:51)

I am to please. Glad to. So I'm Kel, Director of Customer Support at Zapier.

I've been working in customer experience for like 17, 18 years now across various either corporate environments or startups or scale-ups. And I kind of forge a niche in that scale-up environment, right, where a company is coming out of startup mode, trying to grow and trying to do more and better. And they kind of get caught in that almost adolescence of a company, right, where they kind of still want to hold on to stuff that makes them special at startup.

But they know they need to grow and they're kind of struggling to kind of get through that. So that's kind of where I step in and help companies out from there.

[Dillon] (1:52 - 2:14)

Kel, I hate to diverge here for a moment, but first of all, you're located. Are you in the UK? I am.

Yeah, that's where this this weird accent comes from. Yeah, very weird. No, it's charming.

I love it. Thank you. But can I ask really quickly, anybody who's not on video, Kel, you're in some sort of glowing room.

You've got some sort of like backlight behind you. What is going on here? Can you please explain this?

[Kel] (2:14 - 2:46)

This is a recent office that we that we built in the backyard of my of my house. And in my head, I had all these grand visions of a beautiful space and I was going to decorate it and make it amazing. And in the end, I was like, just paint it white.

I don't care. It's done. And because the UK is always grey, right, like it's either I have like a big fluorescent light that just bounce off my bald head or I put some lamps around that makes it look less horrendous.

[Dillon] (2:46 - 2:55)

So, you know, thanks. Thanks for bringing that up. I appreciate it.

It looks so cozy. And with the sweater, you are just so quintessentially British right now.

[Kel] (2:55 - 3:03)

I love it. It's how we do. Yeah.

And until I go back to London, that's where it kind of gets a little bit more aggressive. But, you know, on one of these, it's all good. We're fine.

[Dillon] (3:05 - 3:17)

Kel, you know what we do here? We ask every single guest one simple question, and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success? Or we can talk customer support, the customer experience.

So why don't you tell us what that is for you?

[Kel] (3:17 - 5:20)

Yeah, I think this topic spans across a lot of different parts of customer touch points. Right. Apart from sales, sales is the one place where it doesn't.

And the notion is like people in support and sometimes success, they get in their own way and they victimize themselves. My main thing at the moment that I'm really pushing on this year is you're not the victim. You're doing this yourself.

Love it. I love it. Do you want to expound on that or should we open the floor immediately?

I'll expand. So how this came about last year, I was kind of doing a few podcast webinars and stuff like that. And a lot of my message was all about empowerment, right?

Empower people because, you know, people in customer support experience success. Now they want to sit at the table and like, hey, this is how you can do it. And I kept on going to different workshops and listening to different podcasts and stuff.

And some of them are great. Right. We heard some fantastic speakers.

I listened to your recent episode with Sarah Caminiti, fantastic speaker. There's people like Martin Teasdale. If you haven't had him on, you have to get him on.

There's some people who are really good at delivering messages. And I kept on going to like workshops and stuff. And I came out and I was like, everyone is moaning.

They are just whinging and moaning. Why don't we get a seat at the table? Why doesn't anyone pay attention to us?

And I came away thinking like, you all sound like babies. But who's inviting the baby to the boardroom? Right.

No one. So this year I'm changing my attitude a little bit in terms of it is not up to other people to offer you a seat to have your voice heard. You have to be able to stand up and demonstrate the value that links up to what your company really needs, wants and values to be able to earn the seat at the table and stay there.

Because if you're just sort of saying, hey, look how good our CSA is. Nobody get sorry, I was going to use language. Nobody really.

Nobody gives a right. Nobody cares. That's the situation.

However, if you make it make sense and you make it and you speak their language, that's when those will really start opening up for you. And that's my biggest thing. That's what I wanted to get off my chest.

All right.

[Dillon] (5:20 - 5:56)

Two things. First of all, probably top three British phrases is whinging. I love it.

I just love the way it sounds. It's totally foreign to Americans. It's fantastic.

Number two, JP, you've been on mute this whole time. You've been gesticulating and yelling. And so anybody who's not on video, you got to go back and watch that.

JP was jacked up while Kel was was was going off. But I'm actually first going to go to Rob and let Rob talk about this from the perspective of somebody who sees a lot of different operations. And do you find the same thing that Kel is talking about?

[Rob] (5:56 - 7:14)

Look, I'm going to disclaim this by saying I bring certain biases to the table, certain opportunities, whatever, like we all do. And I recognize there are different dynamics, different organizational dynamics that inform whether somebody gets a seat at the table. But I will say, Kel, you spoke to my heart, because before we got on this recording, I saw another one of these posts that was saying retention is not a customer success problem.

Retention is a product problem. And I'm like, please, everybody, stop. Stop saying this.

Like we that's like saying sales. That's like sales saying, you know, it's the product's fault. I can't sell.

It's like, yes, that might be true. But like you got to own your number and you have to own your outcomes. And the further we remove ourselves from retention.

Well, guess what? We're moving into this like fluffy la la land where we don't earn that seat at the table. And if the past, you know, several years in customer success has taught us anything, it's exactly your point.

It's like we have to define our domain of ownership and we have to serve it on a silver platter to our executive teams. And we can't be babies about that. Yeah.

And I know that's a hard thing to stomach. And I know it's not easy. And I know there's barriers that we like lack the systems, the budgets, the data.

We might be faced with a ton of internal organizational pressures and biases against us and that kind of thing. But to your point, we can't not try. Right.

Mate, you know what?

[Kel] (7:14 - 8:25)

Everyone lacks the budget. Everyone has to fight for that budget. And it's the equivalent of me blaming the dentist.

My teeth looking bad. Mate, brush your teeth. You know, do the basics every single day.

Nail it. You need to be nailing this stuff. And then when you're able to demonstrate, hey, you know, this is the value we're going to get from investing in these things.

And this is what it means to if the company is all about getting on, bringing on new customers, what is what you're going to do help going to bring on new customers? If the company is all about, you know what, our churn rate is too high. Hey, don't worry about it.

I've got the answer here. These are some tools that are going to help us reduce the churn rate by X. The fact is, historically, we haven't learned as a kind of organization, as a sector, as an organization, how to do that.

So we've just relied on what's the American term for whinging, whining, moaning? I don't know. We've done that.

And I say that I'm generalizing here as well. Right. Some people are excellent at it.

But people need to understand the way forward is not to think that the victim is to take real ownership and accountability for what you're able to do. And if you're in an environment where it's just a shut door, don't care, stay in your lane, you've got to decide if that's the right environment for you.

[Dillon] (8:26 - 9:00)

You made such an interesting point that I want to make sure we reiterate, which is everybody's fighting for budget. I want everybody to do this really brief thought exercise around if you didn't have if every time you asked for money, your company said, yeah, sure, here's some more. Your company would not be in business for much longer because that would get around real fast.

People would deplete those coffers even faster and then you'd be done. So the whole point is you've got to fight for that budget. They want you to feel a little bit of pain before they're going to give you any more quarter.

JP, I want you to take us out of here.

[JP] (9:01 - 11:28)

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for bringing this this up, Kel. I think, you know, I've always been sort of about character has always been a big thing for me.

So, you know, whether you're CS, whether you're in sales support, whatever, I think like character is something that's going to shine through no matter what role you take. And when I was listening to you, I I thought about, you know, Rob seeing, you know, people having these conversations about basically passing the buck. Right.

It's like this sort of lack of accountability, the whining, the moaning. And, you know, first of all, I want to say like, yes, it's tough. Right.

I'm not saying CS doesn't have challenges and that it isn't tough, but to your point, like everyone's got their challenges. Right. Everything's tough.

It's not to say that those things don't exist, but how do we proceed? You know, how do we move forward at some point? Just the echo chamber of whining just becomes super stale.

I know. I know for me, like I'm tired of it. I'm sort of trying to think like I think outside the box of CS even more because I think it's because the narratives around CS, when I put those those bumpers on the lane, so to speak, they seem to sort of go in that direction.

And I just feel as if like I don't really want to complain anymore. And I'm really sort of tired of hearing people just complaining all the time. And I think that like this accountability is something to really think about.

It's also like tough when I guess my controversial statement is that I don't think social media engenders a culture of being accountable. And so people like to run with narratives and put them online and they just want engagement. All those things, they function on the hyperbole, the engagement.

Those are all things that are, you know, people want to jump in. It's it's very easy to bite at. It's not my fault.

It's like sometimes when people say they feel seen. I'm not talking about you, Rob, because you just said that. But sometimes people say I feel seen.

Sometimes that doesn't mean just like being recognized. Sometimes it means like, oh, right, I don't have accountability. So you have to be careful with like the way people have these mentalities around what they approach.

And I think that no matter what field you're in, whether it's C.S., support, blah, blah, blah, like really thinking about, yes, how can I have more of less of a victim mindset, more of an accountability mindset and really move things in a direction? Because, yeah, you can't just expect people to just give things to you, especially because just because you're complaining about it.

[Dillon] (11:30 - 11:40)

Love it. I love it. Kel, that is our time.

Would love for you to come back and maybe let's talk about tactics to engender accountability within your teams. But for now, you have to say goodbye.

[Kel] (11:40 - 11:42)

Thank you so much for having me. Take care.

[VO] (11:47 - 12:18)

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.

Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value and find us on the socials at Lifetime Value Media. Until next time.

Do you have a story to tell, an opinion to share?

Join us on The Daily Standup.