#TDSU Episode 216:

⏱️ Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:50 - From Google to global brand speaker

00:02:37 - Rethinking customer journeys with AI

00:04:23 - The brand curiosity theory in action

00:05:42 - Why AI isn't always the smartest fix

00:07:07 - When deleting your homepage works

00:08:01 - Start with the end goal, not the tech

00:09:56 - Breaking paralysis with baby steps

00:10:17 - Startup lessons and chasing impact

00:11:36 - Youngest Platinum CSM at Google

📺 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 Chirag Nijjer:

Chirag's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chiragspeaks/

Any experiences or opinions shared on this recording are solely those of the speakers and do not reflect that of any affiliate organization or employer.

[Chirag] (0:00 - 0:22)

What I started thinking is if we just map out user jerks, and especially as we're moving more towards this idea of AI machine learning, now eventually, you know, the way the tech seems to be is eventually we'll get to a point where maybe AI is able to operate just like a human being. But right now, I'm finding that it's a lot more effective to understand what are the tiny little steps or things that we're doing that we want to essentially, in a way, automate out.

[Dillon] (0:29 - 0:42)

Are you ready for this? What's up, lifers, and welcome to The Daily Standup Live with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man, Chirag.

[Chirag] (0:42 - 0:43)

Yes, you got it absolutely right.

[Dillon] (0:45 - 0:45)

Can you say hi?

[Chirag] (0:45 - 0:46)

Hi.

[Dillon] (0:46 - 0:58)

And I'm your host. My name is Dillon Young. It's just the two of us because we are recording live here at the Customer Success Collective Summit in New York City.

I'm so glad to have you sitting in that seat. Can you please introduce yourself for the audience?

[Chirag] (0:58 - 1:49)

Absolutely. So my name is Chirag, and I say my nine to five, I'm over at Google, where I've had the distinction of having been the youngest ever platinum customer success lead, which means I've had the chance. I mean, words, right? But I've had the chance to work with some of the most strategic, largest global advertisers in the world from Louis Vuitton, Wayfair, eBay, and many more.

And then my five to nine, as I call it, or my alter ego is I'm a brand marketing speaker. I get to travel the world giving talks at conferences, colleges, and corporations. I find that not surprising at all.

I love that, man. I'm glad it's coming across. And I get to talk about something called the Brand Clarity Framework.

Three-step process. Simplify your brand, find the right stories, and use audience engagement to keep them moving. I'll tell you one thing too.

If you've ever seen the History Channel, the docu-series Mega Brands That Built America, I'm an onscreen expert on there. If you don't recognize it, chances are your parents do because apparently that's my target audience, right?

[Dillon] (1:50 - 1:54)

Dude, there's so much happening right now. There's so much information. All right.

[Chirag] (1:54 - 1:55)

So we'll be back for like five more episodes.

[Dillon] (1:55 - 2:36)

Yeah, exactly. So this is a four-hour episode. I love it.

So from Google to brand marketing to the History Channel. I never before said in one breath. I'm taking it.

Which is how fast you talk. You speak really well, but you're overwhelming me with professionalism and polish right now. Anyway, Chirag, you know what we do here?

We ask one simple question of every single guest, and that is what is on your mind usually for customer success? You could expand it out if you want to talk about the History Channel and your experience there. No, no.

What is on your mind when it comes to customer success?

[Chirag] (2:37 - 2:59)

Yeah. Share that with us. Absolutely.

So I've been playing around with something I'm starting to call the brand curiosity theory, right? And the entire idea is that we tended to view marketing and branding as sort of the stages, right? Back in the day, things like Ada Marketing Funnel.

For those of you that are familiar, four stages, awareness, intention, desire, action. I become aware of the fact that you exist, interested in what you're offering, desiring that product, and finally take the action of buying it, for example.

[Dillon] (2:59 - 3:06)

And let me clarify, you're implying that it ends there. Or that's how they used to treat it.

[Chirag] (3:06 - 4:22)

That's how they used it. Yeah. So I think that was the fundamental.

It's so based. I think it's incredibly important for people who are starting off in brand marketing to really understand that point, right? Is that, hey, there's this base model.

But like any other base model, I mean, let's think scientific method, right? You have a base model, you can add a million steps to it, right? And what we're starting to see is either an oversimplification of that or way too over complication of that, right?

Where we go like a million other stages after that, and then you loop around consideration, all that kind of stuff. And instead, what I started thinking is if we just map out user jerks, and especially as we're moving more towards this idea of AI machine learning, essentially, now eventually, the way the tech seems to be, and this is my personal opinion, not representative of any employer, is eventually we'll get to a point where maybe AI is able to operate just like a human being is. And that might be Tom, Susie, or Charlie on your team, right?

But right now, I'm finding that it's a lot more effective to understand what are the tiny little steps or the little processes or things that we're doing that we want to essentially, in a way, automate out. Yeah, farm out. Format.

Exactly. And AI is a little bit smarter than automation because it's not just following instructions you've given it, it's also trying to build on top of that and add its own insight or more data into the play, right? But in order to do this, what I find that especially customer success leads are able to do is map out your user journey.

[Dillon] (4:22 - 4:23)

You have to be able to.

[Chirag] (4:23 - 5:42)

Absolutely. So a good example I always give people, I was working with someone who has a consumer packaged goods company, and she was going, hey, Trog, I have multiple social media platforms, I have a huge audience, they're coming onto my site, but they're not leading to sales, what do I do? And the downside there is she was viewing her marketing or her entire customer journey, that customer success site, as one big journey, or one big step, sorry.

Once we start breaking it down into journeys, the first video, the profile, the post, the following you, going on your page, going on the homepage, product page, checkout, these are all like 10, 12 steps. If we map each step out, we're looking at the data and we go, hey, we were losing like 90% of people on the homepage itself. And at that point, the question became, what are the questions that our audience is asking us?

So the core of this theory that I'm working on right now is that marketing at its base or essence is answering the questions that our audience has. And effective marketing is answering those questions in a way that we are guiding them to the next step. So when someone asks you, hey, who are you?

You can sometimes answer, hi, I'm Dillon. Or you can say, hi, I'm Dillon. I'm doing interviews in that section of the room.

What that does is it takes the responsibility off of me to ask you the next question and to go further into my user journey, because now you've given me an avenue. I go, oh, Dillon, what type of questions?

[Dillon] (5:42 - 6:21)

I want you to finish this thought process, but I imagine there is a point where you tie this back to customer success, or maybe this is how you started thinking about this originally, because I want to zoom out for a second. And actually, everything you've described so far sounds a lot like how marketing looks at lead conversion. That's even the example you used.

And it's very data-driven, and it's very much mathematical, formulaic, whatever you want to say. But you could extrapolate that out to the customer journey as well, and trying to gain a certain type of action out of your customer along the way. So keep going.

[Chirag] (6:21 - 6:57)

The base idea, and I appreciate you just stopping me in my rambling, right? That's how excited I'm getting into this, is that we overcomplicate, especially with AI and everything coming in, especially in the customer success journey, is we jump into being like, how do we plug AI into everything? What I'm finding is, if we break everything down into these tiny steps, so if we go back to the rudimentary, fundamental analysis of marketing of any journey, find the parts that are incredibly data-heavy.

In our case, it was like the homepage who was losing a large number of people on the homepage. When we saw that, we go, okay, can we remove, can we mix the home, can we remix it in some way to try to see what questions we can answer for the audience?

[Dillon] (6:57 - 6:58)

Yeah.

[Chirag] (6:58 - 7:07)

Can we plug in AI? Can we make it faster? Can we make it smarter?

Only to realize that the trick that worked for us, getting rid of the homepage. Everyone that came from social media, we took them directly to the product page.

[Dillon] (7:07 - 7:22)

And AI wouldn't understand that because if you prompt it over and over again, how do I make this homepage better? It can never reach the point of saying, just delete it entirely. Bang, bang.

Did I just do your job for you?

[Chirag] (7:22 - 8:01)

No, you've helped me. I feel like a kid in a candy shop going through this because it's like, we're so quick to rush to adopt technology and these technologies are incredibly powerful. But the base thing we're asking you to do, and that's why if you're someone who's like, I'm not technical and I'm in customer success and I want to eventually work with our technical teams, instead of simply just giving them the reins and going, hey, run with it, because they will come up with solutions that'll ignore sometimes the most obvious solutions.

Yes. Delete the homepage, map out the journey you are taking and what your consumers are taking or your customers or your users are taking, map it down onto papers and test each assumption as a human first, then move on to automation and AI.

[Dillon] (8:01 - 8:34)

Well, I'd say that's a piece of it. But what I talk about a lot, and we've talked about on the podcast many times, is thinking about the end goal first. And that could be the ultimate end goal.

It could be the end goal of a particular segment of your journey, a milestone, so to speak. And then survey the tools you have at hand and decide what works best to get you there. As opposed to, I think what you're describing is people say, it must be AI.

That must be the solution because it is the...

[Chirag] (8:34 - 8:37)

It must be machine learning. It solves anything, right?

[Dillon] (8:38 - 9:14)

It can do anything. But oftentimes, even if that were true, which it isn't necessarily, the lift to solve for it, that outcome may just be too great. It just may not be worth it to build an entire persona within the AI so it knows the way you think and it has this entire battery of prompts that it can work off of every single time for what is maybe 4% of a customer's journey either in time or value.

Yes. Yes. Why would you waste that time?

Absolutely. And hey, if you're a large company that has resources, gung-ho.

[Chirag] (9:15 - 9:15)

Sure.

[Dillon] (9:15 - 9:22)

And maybe that's where you find the incremental increase. But usually, I mean, that might be Google. That might be Google.

[Chirag] (9:22 - 9:24)

I will refrain from representing companies.

[Dillon] (9:25 - 9:27)

But in the smaller companies, that is not the case.

[Chirag] (9:27 - 9:54)

Absolutely. And so when people are saying, hey, how do we improve this? How do we get better in this next decade of what we're seeing?

It's go back to the fundamentals. Everything that's up here, the client context, the process, you map it out. And instead of trying to solve the entire equation, where do you really need to solve for things?

Or where can a human be the best option at the moment? And again, you never know. All this stuff will get better and better over time.

So if you don't jump into this technology now, you can always jump in in the future.

[Dillon] (9:56 - 10:04)

That's the other thing is people get paralyzed. They think I got to build this whole thing right the first time. Exactly.

And you're gassing me up.

[Chirag] (10:04 - 10:17)

I love this. No, you're indelible. You are amazing in this.

Like you're hitting it right on the dot. Right. And I mean, look, I rambled for two minutes and you got it right into the crux.

Where were you before Google? Yeah. So right.

That was right out of college.

[Dillon] (10:17 - 10:18)

Right out of college. Right out of college.

[Chirag] (10:18 - 10:21)

I was very fortunate. I was working on a startup at the time. Right.

[Dillon] (10:22 - 10:22)

Okay. Okay.

[Chirag] (10:22 - 10:23)

Well, that's what I'm interested in.

[Dillon] (10:23 - 10:29)

Do you have startup experience? So during the college years? Yeah.

The experience is night and day.

[Chirag] (10:29 - 10:36)

Oh, 100%. Experience in the fact that we did it, right? We did it for about six months and I realized I hate managing people.

Right.

[Dillon] (10:36 - 10:37)

Oh, yeah.

[Chirag] (10:37 - 10:38)

At least in that setup.

[VO] (10:38 - 10:38)

Right.

[Chirag] (10:38 - 10:46)

I think it's different. Especially in a startup setup, right? Where you spend more time, I find as a lead, managing people and their expectations as opposed to solving the problem.

[VO] (10:46 - 10:46)

Yep.

[Chirag] (10:47 - 10:59)

So funny thing at the time, my family, Indian immigrants, entrepreneurs, their entire lives, very much a go against the idea of doing my own thing. They were like, get a nine to five job benefits, all that kind of stuff. But they were entrepreneurs.

But that's exactly why they were.

[Dillon] (11:00 - 11:02)

It's a life of suffering. Don't do it to yourself.

[Chirag] (11:03 - 11:29)

Exactly. Right. And so like, no, you got to go buy for a company.

And so I'd applied to Google just going, hey, there's no way I'm ever going to get it. Imposter syndrome at the time. They're working on this startup idea.

The idea was, let's raise as much funds as we can. End of the year, that's what we'll say. Oh, Google said no.

But the startup, yo, look at how much we've done. I was fortunate enough, Google came around, said yes, and come in for the internship, did that. And then sort of never looked back.

And then I've been at Google for about five years now. It's been an absolutely bonker. Wait, so you're what?

[Dillon] (11:30 - 11:36)

27, 28? Quick nuts. Let's go.

And so when did you become a platinum CSM?

[Chirag] (11:36 - 11:44)

Oh, funny. Actually, I think I can talk about this, right? This is personal experience, right?

Not representative of the company, my own personal journey here, right? You always have to be clear here.

[Dillon] (11:44 - 11:46)

I love CYA, CYA. Go ahead.

[Chirag] (11:46 - 12:31)

But actually, the funny thing is I had a chance to work on a project that was sort of for a team, the project that eventually turned into this team that I ended up being on the customer success team, right? And at the time when they made that new sort of role, it was a few levels above me, right? I took the sort of job listing that was out there at the time, ended up going to each market and saying, look, I can do this.

I've done this. Here are the markers that show that I've done each one of these. And I made a case to the director at the time I was putting this together.

My worst case thing was like, if she says no, at least I'll be the one person in the room to be like, that guy was young. He showed up, right? Yeah.

And when I'm old enough, they'll let me on some team. Yeah. It was fortunate where she took a chance on me.

She goes, wait a second, you've proven that you know this. You could do the job listing. You can do it.

So let's try it out. Tried it out for six months, fell in love with it. And I was on that team for about three and a half years and enjoyed it.

[Dillon] (12:31 - 12:35)

Wow. Wait, okay. So you were like 24 when you became a Platinum CSM.

[VO] (12:35 - 12:37)

That wasn't six months ago.

[Dillon] (12:39 - 13:06)

Big dog. Oh, no, I appreciate it. That is our time.

Yeah. Thank you so much for bringing the energy, for boosting my confidence, but also fantastic story. I think it's exactly the way people, we need to be breaking things down a lot more into their individual pieces, as opposed to trying to, oh, I need NRR to go up.

Nice. And having no clue about how to actually reach that. Fantastic topic.

Thank you so much.

[VO] (13:06 - 13:07)

Pleasure. Come back soon.

[Dillon] (13:08 - 13:09)

Excited to.

[VO] (13:14 - 13:50)

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