🎙️ ready for a fresh perspective on customer success in the world of b2b saas? join us for a transformative conversation packed with practical insights! 🚀

🔑 key ideas:

• discover the pivotal role of customer success in your business.

• learn actionable strategies to exceed customer expectations.

• meet our experienced guest with a decade in saas customer success leadership.

🌟 our esteemed guest has led customer success, support, and professional services teams at saas startups for almost a decade. her wisdom, drawn from managing enterprise accounts and building customer success initiatives from scratch, is a game-changer! 💼

👾 ever faced a startup nightmare with tech debt, communication breakdowns, and poc challenges? we dive into this scenario, highlighting the absolute necessity of a dedicated customer success team. 🤯

🧩 lessons we uncover:

• the importance of robust customer success in maintaining relationships and delivering value, even in tough times.

• strategies for success, including interdepartmental collaboration and fostering a culture of cooperation. 🤝

🚀 but wait, there's more! we challenge the notion that customer success is just a department. 🏢

💡 instead, we believe it's a company-wide philosophy. discover how sales, marketing, and product engineering teams each play a unique role in ensuring customer success. learn how they deliver exceptional value to customers! 🌐

🎧 ready for a paradigm shift in customer success? tune in and join our enlightening discussion! 🎉

transcript

josh: 0:07

today on the diSaaSter recovery podcast, we're digging into customer success, both as a critical team in your company and a guiding philosophy for success. we'll explore what customer success really means, the effort involved to go above and beyond and scaling those efforts as the business and as the base grow. and finally, we'll hear a tragic tale of diSaaSter in which the failure to embrace customer success as a core company philosophy, along with a healthy dose of tech debt and team debt, led to the complete opposite of customer success. but what would you even call that customer failure? i mean, it's not the customer's fault. it's more like a customer letdown. now our guest has nearly a decade of experience leading customer success, customer support and professional services teams and departments at sass startups. she's had a strong focus on building scalable programs for companies who have never had these critical organizations, so she knows how to start them from scratch and take them global. the business to business, b2b. sass startups that she's consistently worked at have catered to enterprise organizations and we all know enterprise accounts require a white glove approach to customer success. now she's a member of the executive team and her current company and is eager to share some of the lessons and stories she's collected along the way. but before we get into that, a quick note. the stories shared on the diSaaSter recovery podcast are based on anonymous, individual experiences at real companies. the goal in sharing these stories and perspectives is to help fellow sassholes learn from each other, get a much needed sanity check and build empathy along the way. at no point in time are we mentioning a specific company or person. so if a story feels like an attack on you or an attack on your company, we really encourage you to reflect on why you have that guilty conscience and with that, on to the show. welcome to the diSaaSter recovery podcast. it's really great to have you here and i feel like i'm kind of interrupting because both you and i have the same type of chores planned for this labor day weekend home improvement activities. tell us a little bit about what you've got going on.

guest: 3:15

yeah, thanks, tess. so we've already been to lowe's once today. i'm sure we'll take another trip, but we're redoing an office and we actually brought the kids with us, which is great and bad at the same time. but my husband and i really can't make any decisions without our seven-year-old supertful, so she had to come.

josh: 3:40

i've certainly learned firsthand some of those lessons that you just brought up. already i have not been able to do a home improvement project and only have one trip to lowe's. so if you're able to pull that off, you're going to have to let me know all of the secrets, because i'll get into it. then i'll realize i don't have a tool or i just put a hole in the wall and now i need to undo that damage. and i've certainly learned firsthand the importance of getting your kids to buy into whatever is happening, because it makes your life just a little bit easier.

guest: 4:14

yeah, i'm hoping for only two trips this time and minimal kid involvement on the paint. maybe a bit of a diSaaSter.

josh: 4:24

yeah, we're all about the diSaaSters here today, so today we're talking about customer success. i want to start off our conversation with a question, kind of like all the questions i ask people starting off is how do you define customer success?

guest: 4:41

yeah, so i really think of customer success, about ensuring our customers are getting value out of your solution. it's pretty simple, right? you just want to make sure that customers are getting the value. everything else around that principle whether it's ensuring renewals, expansions, advocacy that all flows from getting the value out of your solution. so if customers are receiving value, then they'll want to partner with you in a lot of different ways, which translates to a lot of success for your business.

josh: 5:16

now, when you say value, what exactly is value? are we talking about roi and focusing on specific metrics? are we talking about feelings and perceptions? what do you think on value?

guest: 5:31

yeah, it's got to be a mix of both, because you can't just have numbers, because people at the core they buy on emotions. they don't buy on. oh yeah, i know that i saved $5,000 because i bought this. it's a lot of emotion, so they might feel like they're actually saving more money than really the math would work out to, and a lot of this stuff, especially when you're going in as a startup. there's no baseline. you can't just go in and be like, oh well, you've been measuring this for 10 years and now here's your roi. they haven't even been capable of measuring it. so it's a lot of feelings, games and making sure that they're feeling like they're getting value out of the solution, and oftentimes your champion has put pretty much their reputation and job on the line to bring in a new solution like yours and so making sure that you're watching out for them and for their job. that's another big job from a customer success standpoint.

josh: 6:39

i like how you broke that down. i agree with that idea of appealing both to the emotional side of the equation as well as the rational side, because you can talk numbers all day well, you saved 10,000. it's like cool, well, i don't feel like i've done anything. but when you really tap into the like, oh my god, my life is so much easier and we just so happen to save the company 10, 20, 100,000, $1 million. that makes for a really strong relationship, direct relationship with the value that's being offered. it also, i think, brings in the idea that there's layers to the value, which is something that i've certainly struggled with optimizing for on the product marketing and the solutions consulting side, because it can be a very complex thing. it can almost be a deal by deal, customer by customer, person by person type of experience. i like how you brought up the idea that, especially with saas startups, we're talking about technology that hasn't exist in its current shape or its current form, or it's a different take on an already known technology, but there's something new to it. and because that newness is there, there's uncertainty with okay, but what problem is it really solving? what's the impact of me actually doing something about it? i do my job every single day. i deal with this day in and day out. i don't know that i really need it. so i like how you brought up the fact that in order to get people to value, you have to make sure that they understand how to get to that value right. and it takes people to shepherd them there. and then you called out that the fact that the person bringing in this new product, they're taking a risk, they're putting their career on the line to say i believe in this thing, let's bring it in because we believe it's going to have this impact. and then it's up to the customer success team, it's really up to the whole company to come together and deliver on that.

guest: 8:46

yeah, i agree, and that's, you know, one of the you actually get on. one of the main things that i feel like is one of the pieces that people often like get wrong is that customer success is not a department, it's really the entire company, and so the whole organization needs to be customer success and customer oriented. so you know, that's a big piece of making sure that you are successful in the market is that everybody is customer success. yeah, i've seen customers stay because of the relationships that they make with their customer success managers, and that's kind of a really big part of customer success as a whole. so, making sure, internally and externally, everybody's successful around the customers.

josh: 9:45

you know, i've certainly seen firsthand that perspective manifest of customer success being a specific department. really, customer success is the philosophy, right, like that's the goal. you might have people who are specifically assigned to like work every single day, day in and day out, with the customer, but to your point that's, you know, just isolating customer success to that group is doing not just a customer or a disservice but the company as a whole a disservice. what are some other thoughts that you have about what people get wrong about customer success?

guest: 10:24

yeah. so a lot of what i hear, especially in early stage startups that are just kind of starting to get into customer success and realizing that they need somebody to watch the customers is they think it's customer support. those are actually two very different things. well, there's elements of support in customer success. all you're doing is being reactive to your customers and answering them when they pick up the phone and call you. you're not maximizing that value for your customers or really for you internally, because one of the most valuable things you can get is listening to what your customers are saying about your organization, about your product, and that's how you build that foundation for your product to be able to scale and grow, because in the end, you can have the best product in the world, but if nobody wants it, yeah, you got nothing.

josh: 11:22

yeah, i've certainly seen that first thing and it talked to plenty of people. we've got this great idea. it's this technology that's going to do x, y and z, and people are like i don't really want that. yeah, that's not really a priority to me. i like how you put it if you are being reactive, you are not maximizing the value. and i like how you further delved into that by really establishing this idea that you get value, the company gets value when you listen to the customers. and i would take that further. it's not just listen, it's respond. and i don't mean respond by saying okay, we heard you. i mean like delivering upon whatever you've heard. and that doesn't mean saying yes to every single thing that comes your way. but it is still. i hear you. i see that you're going through this struggle. here's what we can do to help. sometimes we can't do anything to help. i'll listen to you. you can call me if you want to talk about it, that type of thing. so that's thinking about it from a reactive standpoint. let's think about it from a proactive standpoint. what does it look like for customer success to be proactive?

guest: 12:36

yeah. so i think about being proactive in customer success in a number of ways. so one is engagement. you have to be engaged with your customers. make sure that you have, of course, segmented, because we are humans and we can't get to everybody, but in a segmented way we need to make sure that we're at least reaching out, be like how are you doing? we're here, let me know if you have any issues. just that small touch point can help. if there's, for example, there's, you know, when we do releases at my current company and i know a customer has asked for a particular feature, even though they're getting the release notes already, i'll reach out to them personally and say i know you requested this. here it is and here's a little bit more information. let me know if you have any questions about implementing it. so that took me what five minutes to do and it created value for my customer and for our relationship as we move forward. so that's one is making sure your customers are engaged. two, i'm a huge proponent of data. like, if you don't understand your active users, you don't understand how your customers are using the platform, then how are you going to have high quality engagements with them? so you need to make sure that you understand the data, know what your customers have purchased, know what they're doing within your product, know who's the top user out of your full customer base and, like, really start to learn that, and then that helps you to be more proactive. the third thing, which has actually been something that i've learned recently, is, and can help from a cross-functional department standpoint as well is work with the product team to set up alerts based on that data. so, let's say, something goes wrong, i'm going to get an alert and then i can use that technology to proactively start a conversation with the customer. so, for example, they have some sort of sync failure or something like that. i can reach out to the customer and say, hey, we saw this happen. how you doing you ok? well, i think, do you have anything that we can help you with? and that in itself creates so much good will with the customer and makes them happy that i've even doing things like that. i've even experienced having customers apologize for telling me about bugs because they love the interaction and the product so much. it's a new experience, i have to say.

josh: 15:27

that's interesting that you say that. it sounds like there's a bit of a diSaaSter looming in the background of this conversation that we'll get into. i like how you broke that down, that idea of being proactive, focusing on engagement, data and products. as a quick little summary, engagement the way that i interpreted what you shared was really just that. what's that extra effort that you can apply to lead to that perception of this team is going above and beyond for me. they're making my experience exceptional. we all know that the people we seek to sell to who we want to use our products, who are using it day in and day out, they're not just using one tool. they're using a lot of different tools and to varying degrees. these tools provide a experience that people may or may not love, and so i've certainly seen firsthand that when you put that extra effort in, it's noticed because it's not provided by everyone. so it's a very easy way to stand out. all products talk about their differentiator being their customer's success team, but few actually commit to it and do the follow-through, because it takes a lot of work, time, intention, et cetera. you called out data using the data to understand how are our customers using the product, what exactly are they doing? who are the top people using the product? let's build a relationship with them, let's champion them, let's put a spotlight on them and help them further their career, because when you build that and invest into those people, they typically want to take you with them. it establishes that loyalty. i also think that there's probably a potential to explore proactively how they could be using the product. in that particular example, especially the more comfortable and familiar you are with other customers who look like that particular customer, who have similar products that they're working on or workflows that they're working with. then now you can really enter that trusted advisor state with the data to back it up to say you may potentially see a benefit like this customer, this other customer that we work with, and i really think you should try it. so i think it was great that you called out data there and then product establishing those internal relationships so that when a problem inevitably happens because this is saas that we're talking about there's going to be bugs. it's inevitable. how can you mitigate the impact that it has, not just on the user themselves but the relationship between the company and the other company? so i think that those were all great topics. to call out one question that lingered in my mind, that sounds like it takes a lot of effort. whenever a lot of effort is required and a lot of intention is required, then that conversation of scale really comes up. how do you scale that type of effort?

guest: 18:31

yeah, so one of the things that i think everybody's looking into right now is really trying to figure out how to use ai within customer success. so we've been looking into that as well and trying to see how we can scale efforts that way, because some of the high touch things that i've always had in my career being on the enterprise side are difficult at scale. so if you're working with mid-market, some of the ai tools that they're coming out with this year are really compelling and interesting. so that's one way that you can work on scale. most of my career has been in high touch, so we're really looking out for making sure that all of our stuff is kind of a custom standard. so we'll start out with a very standard base and we'll use that across my entire team and they will create something that's gonna work for the like 70, 80% right. so it works in the ideal. it doesn't work for anyone's particular customer, but it works at that 80% level. then we add the small customization on top, so that way it helps us to really provide that nice custom looking experience, but on our side, we're not spending as much time like recreating content at each interaction with the customer.

josh: 20:12

that makes sense. there's a lot of excitement with ai and it's not because it's replacing people. it really what you're describing is reducing some of the administrative burden that all individual contributors and even management in fact, everyone has to deal with is some sort of administrative burden, even if that's mining the data and coming to some sort of insight. like anytime spent trying to figure out something is a time that could have been spent doing something that actually helps, and so if you're able to reduce that, that certainly makes an impact in reducing some of the demand on a team. i like how you broke it down from really a pareto explanation. what's going to get us to that 80% that's gonna deliver the most value, most consistently to our customers? let's make that our standard process, our standard way of executing these types of engagements, and then it's just that 20% you have to focus on. that might vary or change from customer to customer. not all customers may need it. not all customers may get it, cause some companies decide to charge extra for that really custom approach. there's nothing wrong with making a buck off of helping others make a buck. that's the capitalist in me and all of us. but i think that was a great idea, a great explanation of how you can scale. now, one of the questions that's always on my mind is people have a lot of perspectives on these different topics that we explore on the show. what's a strongly held opinion in customer success that you completely disagree with?

guest: 21:57

yeah. so i think i touched a little bit on it earlier, but i want to double down on it because one of the things i really don't like is that we think customer success is its own department. and you know what we do need as customer success department, it's really a joint effort across every department within the company and everybody needs to be involved and engaged in creating value for the customers. and really the best organizations that i've seen really think about the customer and everything that they do and it really creates that culture of partnership with customers, not like, oh, they're the customer, we're gonna do the thing, but it's really like i will give something to you, you give something to me. so it's about partnering with their customers and not just thinking of them as transactional. so that's how we create long-term relationships with our customers. and then customer success as a department, i really see them as the glue that helps kind of work with the other departments and the customer. so we go in there and we're really the voice of the customer internally and a good head of customer success should be working really closely with these other departments, like product engineering or like sales and marketing, because for product, you know, cs can help product managers build up those relationships. they can give the impact to engineering so that they know the why behind what they're building. and on the sales cycle side, i've really found that as i get more involved with the sales cycle, i bring authenticity to those interactions because what i can share that sales can't share is very specific customer stories. oh, i have customers doing x, y, z within the product and that makes them think of your solution as real, implemented and like able for them to implement too. it doesn't seem like some sort of hypothetical, it feels real to them. on the sales side and then, of course, for the marketing side, it's a very close partnership with customer success. i love customer marketing, even though it's not very prevalent, i know, across multiple organizations. but they help you build revenue within your customer base and expansions. and then they also help your customers to implement because they need help, especially on the enterprise side. talking about your solution internally, because they're gonna be your best champions, is if you can help them out in that way.

josh: 25:00

i think this is a topic that can't be spoken about enough the idea that customer success is not a department, it's really an operating strategy and that's something that manifests across all departments in the company, or at least it should. and by that what i mean is everything is focused on making the customer successful. sales is focused on making prospective customers successful because they're evangelizing this product, the solution to a problem that they're having, and the goal is not necessarily this is an ideal world. the goal is not necessarily to sell the product, it's to solve the problem that they're having in such a way that brings such value and joy that you build loyalty with people who then wanna spread the gospel of the solution that you're having. i like how you talked about cs as really representatives, like internal representatives for the customer, almost like elected officials, except you don't always have a choice about who you're working with. of course, the customer can certainly protest and say they wanna work with someone else, which is a terrible sign if you've ever experienced that. if you have someone on your team and a customer says i never wanna talk to that person again, get me someone else. definitely listen to your customers in that sort of thing, but treating customer success as actual representatives, as advocates for the customer internally, so driving those productive conversations up the chain and to the necessary departments who, again, should all be focused on customer success. i love that you brought up customer success as a resource for selling, of bringing some concrete examples of what people like the people that you're speaking with have done and the impact that they've had. to make it more real, because that really helps people understand that they're not making the wrong choice. i'm reading this book right now. it's called the jolt effect. it's by the team that did the challenger sale as well as the challenger customer, and one of the things they talk about is that for a long time people thought people bought on the fear of missing out, but what they really buy on is, well, what they avoid buying is this fear of messing up, and so it's a big decision. they don't wanna mess up, so the more that you can show them, people like them in their situation went through these same problems and till they actually installed this type of software or used this tool, and then they had this effect. so that can't be understated. and then all of that ties very well into marketing, because marketing needs that. marketing's entire goal is how do we reach these people that we seek to serve and show them that we understand them and we've heard them and we have something for them and do it in an authentic way? and so really just emphasizing that idea of putting customers first and making it every department's job to make the customer success, or make the customer successful, is critical to your own company's success. i think it's a great thing that you called out yeah, i liked the fear of messing up.

guest: 28:25

i haven't heard that one before, but i feel it when you're talking to the customer and they're kind of like, well, we're in this together. now i just heard that last week our ships are tied together so they're trusting you with their careers and their reputation. so it's very personal and we have to be good shepherds on customer success and within the entire company of that reputation.

josh: 28:58

yeah, yeah, i completely agree. it's an interesting book. i love it because i have heard in sales you really gotta focus like these other guys are doing it, and if you don't do it you're gonna be less behind and to some degree that's true. there has to be an element of that in the story. but really the thing that gets people to listen, you know like other people are doing it, okay, but really making it concrete of like look these other people, they're kind of scared to make the decision too, but they did it. they did it because they saw that we were able to deliver blank, blank and blank. the sales side of me is coming out right now and then. but again it goes back to that point of people wanna see other people that they identify with, who essentially represent themselves in some way, shape or form. they wanna see what they've been able to do, because that provides that safety, that assurance that this is possible. people like me are able to do it. i can do it too. so can't be understated enough. well, we've talked about a lot of concepts, but i really wanna get into story time. so i know you've got a diSaaSter story ready for us. take us through your story.

guest: 30:12

i do at that, josh. you know i had to pick a good one for you and i think this is a good one. so you know my career has been in startups in the saas world and always b2b enterprise. so with enterprise always comes a lot of different things. but in this particular company it was an early stage saas company had a lot of tech debt. i think that even after a couple of years there was still founder code in the product. not good, you don't want that. don't let your founder code stay in your product for too long. we had a lot of hacks that were kind of like features in the product which nobody cleaned up. there were workarounds because they just they made that classic startup mistake of just opening the apis like, oh well, we use these to, you know, talk to it from our backend and open them up, and so then there's a bunch of that sitting on top of the product to try to make use cases fit and for really being a small company, there were lots of communication issues across departments and the culture of collaboration was really lacking and it was not being cultivated by the leadership and there was often infighting with the executive team. that then, of course, trickled down because it's a small company. so rumor mill is strong at small companies and as a leadership team you have to be really careful about the ways that your interactions with your colleagues then get perceived outside of the executive team and then also within this company was we had spent some years doing pocs right, so it was like poc land. everything's great in poc land right. because nobody's actually using the product, they're not putting it through its paces. so we're like, oh, this is gonna be fine. we got a couple of things because it's enterprise, we've got some features that they wanna set out and so we were looking to actually deploy some of those features within the product. now that were more enterprise grade features which, if anybody has been around enterprise software, those can be pretty heavy feature sets themselves. so all this to say is that we're really starting to move. we're kind of at the infancy of our implementation and the system really isn't that pressured test, not on full scale implementations.

josh: 33:11

so it sounded like this clearly something was working, or at least perceived to be working, because people were able to use it in pocs, which, for those who don't know, that's a proof of concept. that's a common thing either. well, typically in the sales side, of making sure that the product works for them and their needs, and they're proving out the concept of even solving whatever problem they're trying to solve with this type of technology and there's probably a whole episode we can do on pocs. but so it sounded like from the beginning. the product itself. you called it out, it had tech debt, it had founder code, so this is something that's not on the most stable foundation. it's a real stretch of the minimal, viable product type philosophy that you hear a lot with. quote unquote lean starter.

guest: 33:59

you have the v.

josh: 34:01

yeah, it's got to be viable. yeah, or yeah, we've. oh man, i could talk all day about what is actually minimally viable. but you also called out a different type of debt. there's sounds like there was a bit of a collaboration communication debt in the company as well, and that i'm sure is gonna come into play later. but i just wanna emphasize that idea of tech debt, collab debt, and not having, like you said, not having that pressure test of a fully, truly implemented solution because of the limited usage of the poc, which some people can take as a sign that they are success and their product meets a market need, which is not necessarily true, anyway. so okay, that's where we're starting. where do we go from here?

guest: 34:50

yeah. so as far as my role goes at that time i was in charge of the customer success team. i sat under the vp of sales and customer success and then i was really responsible and my team was responsible for the onboarding of customers and then also maintaining that relationship and driving value for our customers. so we're fully customer facing and we're like doing our job well right. we're doing very high-touch customer success. we're converting those prc's. we're doing the weekly calls. we have personal relationships with the customers. you know i knew their kids names, actually still in friends with quite a few of those customers. i have their personal cell phone numbers we're texting right up for about what wine we're gonna drink that night. you know, like this is well set up on the relationship side and and our book of business kind of looked like five people globally globally, not just in the us supporting over 16 million dollars worth of enterprise revenue, so not even fully tax revenue. it's like you could expand each of them several more times five people at your company.

josh: 36:10

we're supporting all that, oh, my goodness. back to that conversation about scale. you must have learned real quick some, some tips and tricks, maybe even your own, oh, cs debt on scaling with five people, my goodness. yeah, well, that's you know. you're painting quite the quite the picture here. so what happened?

guest: 36:37

yeah. so, like i said, like we were doing our job well on the cs side and on the sales side. so the sales team was you're really starting to get successful, we're getting those poc is done, we're starting to convert them. and then you know, on our side we're we're really driving usage. so we were moving that year from like two, three, four sites implemented up to your hundreds implemented with like thousands of monthly active users and that's a lot of users on the platform and we had done that growth like really well that year. but, like i said, we were kind of missing some of the enterprise features and so we're asking the product to you and put those in. there's a lot of pressure starting to build because the foundation wasn't there, there's lots of bugs happening and it puts a lot of pressure on the product to have that much usage. and really all this came to a head when we were going for our big enterprise product release. so at the time we save up all our features for one big bang release. and we did this at the end of the year of all times because, right, it sounds great. so we decide to deploy that all at the end of the year. but there was a really a big problem with this deploy and you know it wasn't i don't know what significant lack of qa, something. something happened and they deployed it and seems like they didn't even look at it. they even opened up the product. and so the next day, like we go in, like we always do go in the product, open it up, the whole thing's broken and like the customers start calling us right.

josh: 38:44

you say broken, broken how.

guest: 38:48

so you'd go in, but you could log in. so i will say that you can log in, but credit where credit's do.

josh: 38:55

you could still log it.

guest: 38:58

it's not actually you, the thing which any customer will tell you. you're like, yeah, features are great, but if i can't use the thing then it's useless to me and those are just table stakes. it has to work, absolutely to work.

josh: 39:16

absolutely so. customers started calling you.

guest: 39:19

yeah, yeah, that was a fun day. they started calling us and of course you know they ever our cell phone numbers. so we're getting texts, we're getting calls, we're getting, we're getting support tickets. so it was between us and support. we're like trying to triage all this incoming because and this software was actually very critical to their operations. and when operations don't work, that means a lot of money, right, if? if you shut down operations, that company is not making money and then you're in big trouble. so as a software company, you need to understand that type of impact. yeah, you could log in and maybe you could do one thing, but if you can't do their use case anymore, it's essentially completely broken. so we start getting those phone calls and, yeah, i told you about the lack of collaboration internally we start to escalate to engineering, but but there's hardly any response from the engineering side because they, yeah, they're like well, i mean, it technically works. i'm like, but it doesn't work because it's not doing the things that the customer needs it to do. and here's all the things that are broken. it technically works.

josh: 40:58

but it doesn't work.

guest: 41:01

that's, yeah, almost like, well, i mean, they can log in and they could, you know, use it for for this like really easy use case.

josh: 41:11

i'm like, yeah, but that's not how they actually use yeah, yeah, well, to your point, when you become so embedded that you're an essential part of the operation, the operation that's there to make the company money, which is you know, a significant portion of where you're providing the value, and then that stops, and so now you're actively preventing them from producing it. now you're detracting from value and those people like you talked about before, they're putting the reputations on the line, working for you, vouching for you. that becomes an emotional toll of we're not producing because of this tool. you wanted us to bring this tool in. this is kind of a perfect storm that you're describing here, and then, on top of that for people to be like well, technically it's not completely broken, so let's just let's get all the facts out. okay, they can log in and they can do this cool thing that we just deployed.

guest: 42:10

yeah, it's real cool when they come back and they go well, i need facts, you're like, not emotional responses, because at this point you know my team's getting yelled at. i'm getting yelled at and they're like, well, you're all emotional because you're getting yelled at. i'm like, well, let's read into that a little bit about, maybe, why i'm getting yelled at. but you know, of course, it's like, let's take the emotion out of it and use, figure out like, what level of priority. it's like no, no, no, no, no, no, no, go, go, look.

josh: 42:47

yeah, it sounds like you're almost describing a defensiveness from the other department in this scenario. that's interesting. so you're, you're escalating. you're still getting calls. what happens next?

guest: 43:00

well, eventually one of our customers, you know, in we are escalating internally to up the food chain, and then i'm also customers are emailing our ceo. so of course, once the ceo gets involved, then it's like okay, hey, hey, attention to what customer success is saying, which was great, and i was very appreciative that we started doing that. so what we ended up doing is we had it. we did start ticketing sips stone for a while and we just used spreadsheets. we went back to old school, because then everybody could see it, everybody knew what was going on, and this actually helped for a bit to get internal tracking on it, because not everybody has access to every system and it's confusing if you're not used to it. so, yeah, we're back to the old handy-dandy spreadsheet.

josh: 44:04

yeah, a little bit of a little bit more work involves, but the impact of everybody being able to see it, that's such a great call out because obviously a ticketing system is essential for providing support and following up and tracking and all of that stuff. but not everyone has access any additional user. it's an additional license to to you. you're really kind of getting into a story within a story here of like the opportunities for some of these support systems for providing the visibility that's needed to make the decisions to satisfy the customers. but we all go down that rabbit hole.

guest: 44:37

maybe someday somebody come up with a startup for that one.

josh: 44:40

yeah, exactly, it started right here, so don't take that idea. all you listeners out here, so you've got the spreadsheet, you're. you're longing all the issues in there. what happens next?

guest: 44:53

yeah, so and this is this was actually a helpful tool for us, because then we could log the issues, we knew which customers were affected by what and we could, we could come in and help prioritize what was the most egregious bugs. unfortunately, bug fixes were very slow and on that particular release we hadn't put in any any any way to roll it back, which is what we probably would have done had we even thought about how we were going to release this out to customers. so, tip of the day if you're doing enterprise, make sure, if you're doing a major, major release, have mitigation tactics already built up.

josh: 45:51

have a backup plan.

guest: 45:53

some backup plan because things go wrong, despite sometimes your best efforts.

josh: 46:01

so you identified all these problems and it still took time to fix it. was it because these problems were so complex, or did this come back to some of the urgency issues you were talking about?

guest: 46:15

i mean to their credit, some of them were complicated and to resolve, i don't know, not very technical, so i just have to take it what they say. but it felt like as we were getting towards the end where there wasn't that recency, they seemed to just put them back into the normal cycle when it would have been good to just get through the list because even though they were lower down they were still affecting one or two customers. you remember we had large customers at the time. they're large enterprise customers, so affecting one customer affects quite a bit of revenue within the customer base. so that was not great and the fact that things take so long makes customers more angry. they may have been like sometimes they're nice about it at the beginning, but then if you take two weeks, three weeks to resolve a major problem for them, then that's really going to sour that relationship with that customer.

josh: 47:32

yeah, and you can know that the team is working very hard to get it resolved, but at some point you got to see some results. it's like if you were to go to a i don't know a fancy steakhouse we'll say fancy because expensive and enterprise software typically tends to be a premium price attached to it and it's like you go in there, you order a steak makes sense, you're at a steakhouse, that's the product that you expect them to have quickly out and it turns out well, for whatever reason, there's a major redesign of the kitchen and the flow is off, and so now all the orders are taking some time and there's a lot of orders and it's backed up. so we're working hard, we're trying to get you your steak. you're right there and you're like okay, i get it. as a human, i understand that we're not perfect, we make mistakes, all of that, but i am starving here and i am paying all this money to eat this steak. that's kind of what we're talking about, so kind of. you know, if you ever find yourself on the other side of like well, i don't know why, it's not a big deal what would you do if you ordered a steak and you never got it?

guest: 48:36

anyway, i'd be pretty angry. nobody likes it when i'm being angry. that's what would happen.

josh: 48:43

that's what would happen. well, so what happened next?

guest: 48:48

yeah. so as relationships start to sour with customers, you know they're still yelling at the team, we're having to apologize over and over and over again, which is, you know, something you get good at at customer success, but it's not something you want to do long term right. we're starting to also affect our internal relationships too, because when things aren't going well with the customers and you know things are seeming to happen from other departments, then those relationships start to get impacted too. and you know i mentioned earlier how i think customer success needs to be kind of that blue internally, as things aren't actually sticking together, then we have a really big problem in it being able to be responsive to our customers and in the end it really affects your reputation as a company and especially in enterprise. everybody talks, everybody talks to each other before they move from one enterprise to the next, and your reputation is so important, especially in the enterprise space, because there's only so many fortune 100 customers right 100, to be exact and so that really hurts you as a business and it is hard to recover from that. so that is really what started to happen. is that our reputation to our customers and even our personal reputation right, because they're trusting their customer success manager to go get things done for them, and so that hurts personally too.

josh: 50:47

yeah, that's tough. it's a tough situation because on one hand, you have to represent the company and you have to try to maintain a positive light about it, but at the same time, you've built these personal relationships with people, because that's what people do and we're all people and we shouldn't be so corporate from a company perspective. anyway, that's another episode, but it's a difficult situation to empathize, to understand, to even want to be like. i know it sucks. i'm ashamed of what happened. it's hard. it affects company's reputation, it affects the individual. we had one guest on the show who talked about with the company that he worked with just having this feeling of not living up to his own standards because he had to sacrifice so many different things he had to compromise on things that he didn't want to compromise so that he could represent the company.

guest: 51:47

and i think a lot of companies get that wrong. right, because you hear all the time you think you're not replaceable, or you hear those things all the time from you're in movies, you're through social media, all that type of thing. of course everybody's replaceable, but a leader should be thinking about their people as individuals that make up a company, because what else is a company except a bunch of people getting together in a group, being like i think we should go do this right and attempting to go in the same direction and to ignore that or say like, oh well, i'll just replace everybody here. that's a bad place, not a good leader.

josh: 52:43

not a good leader there. yeah, i completely agree with that. so, reputations being impacted is there any end in sight? is there any? is it just going to slowly die at this point?

guest: 52:56

you know, of course we launch it at the end of the year, so eventually things got resolved. the vacation schedules made it even worse because you're waiting for, like everybody goes to thanksgiving and so then the issue lingers another week right because nobody's there actually working, and so that kind of made it drag out for a very long time. so we didn't eventually get things solved. we did a lot of apologies and stuff and you know, in the end there were a lot of unhappy customers and you know i can't directly attribute that one product release to a turn like a specific turn, but it's definitely one of the things that we've heard in exit interviews that you know the product is unstable, things like that so it becomes another take in the box against you and when there become other alternatives on the market, customers move. no matter how much implementation you've done, no matter how many personal relationships you've built up, if the thing doesn't work, they will leave.

josh: 54:14

as they should, as i'm. if you don't get your steak, get out.

guest: 54:19

yeah, i would leave and i would go to mcdonald's.

josh: 54:23

you know i'm not liking as much of the steak, but but you will solve the problem that you were having, which was hunger. right, because this is the thing is like we'll get rid of you. we'll just go back to what we were doing. we might replace you with something, but we're probably just going to do what we were doing, because at least this didn't happen to us.

guest: 54:44

yeah, at least it didn't stop production. so you know that's. sometimes they end up with a lesser two evils.

josh: 54:53

yeah, this is a bit of a bubble, that kind of burst that was really founded on the tech debt, the communication, collaboration teamwork debt that you described at the beginning of the story, and it culminated into this. you know, maybe you know it wasn't because you mentioned a very specific product release, but i'm guessing, and i'm inferring based off some of the other comments that you made, is that this was a bit of a pattern.

guest: 55:20

yeah, and unfortunately this wasn't the last one, right? so you know we went about implementing some controls and working on getting better at releasing, but in the end you know it just, it happened over and over and over again where we would break something pretty major. we didn't have to go back. i mean, i remember one particular customer that i think i apologize personally to at least on like four or five times. we're almost put ourselves on a performance improvement plan.

josh: 56:01

wow.

guest: 56:02

so that really hurt the company, right? you know you can't have that many releases and major issues with your customers and then expect them to stay and also expect everybody else to say so yeah, suffice it to say i eventually left the company as well, but when i left it was better, but it wasn't completely solved. so i hope you have enjoyed this episode of this show. i will see you again soon. alright bye.

josh: 56:34

yeah, you gotta do, you. if you see there's only so much change an individual can impact and i know i certainly like to think of myself in this ideal way of like well, i fight for it and win people to my side. but my god, is that exhausting. and at the end of the day, i really believe in this concept of putting people first, and that means putting people above the company. and you're a person, so you have to put yourself first and know when you know you're seeing the same patterns. you know it takes a toll on you to respond to this type of stress and deal with it and be held personally responsible over something that you cannot control in any way whatsoever. no, you have to put yourself first and leave, because the company will not hesitate to put itself first and ask you to leave for any reason. right, for any reason. well, it was quite the experience. what were some of your takeaways from that?

guest: 57:37

yeah. so you know i try to turn everything into a learning opportunity and you know, even if it's learning what not to do, and some of the things that i think have really shaped the way that i view customer success and successful businesses, it comes from that experience. so, you know, one of the first things i learned was really to make sure that engineers and anybody in the company knows what and why customers use the product like what are they using it for? it helps them build that empathy that will make them rally around a particular issue. it gives them a sense of pride in what they've built, because they are building great things right and we want to celebrate that with our friends on the engineering team. so one of the things that i've personally done in my next career has been to make sure to bring back those customer stories into the engineering and product organization. we were trying to do it before, but okay, get on some deaf ears.

josh: 58:54

back to that communication collaboration that you were talking about.

guest: 59:00

another thing that i really think helps make especially major releases you don't want to do it on every small release, but a major release where you're really changing the product is make sure you involve customer success. customer success can be great advocates for you in the release process and they can also help to test things with real use cases. right, we can give good testing scenarios. we can look at the product prior. it's one of the things that i've done now is we help by going into staging and just doing all that testing, making sure that it meets the use case that it was supposed to meet from the product requirements. so just involve your customer success team earlier to especially on large releases.

josh: 59:55

yeah, i think that's a great one. i like the first one that you called out really is building empathy within every organization, but particularly the engineering team, making sure to cultivate that understanding of the importance of the product being used this way, because i've seen firsthand i worked with a company where at one point we flew an engineer out to the customer site to really figure out what is this bug and why is it happening, why is it only happening here? and there was a lot of dismissiveness before that.

guest: 1:00:30

but once the engineer was there, seeing the product in use and seeing the frustration and seeing the hope, it really changed the perspectives there and that bug if you even invest in that for one engineer, then they can bring that back to their team and then speak kind of more in the engineer language to everybody else and share that experience.

josh: 1:01:00

absolutely. it spreads empathy spreads, that's for sure. and then you mentioned customer success, really as a layer of quality assurance, which i think makes total sense. you're not gonna find anyone aside from the customer who understands what the customer is using the product for and why, and how they're gonna think about it, how they're gonna react to this change or that change or whatever. so it's such a critical layer in the qa process that after you go through your qa review, like the cs team, should be involved in and really examining and pressure testing, at least pre-pressure testing, whatever that capability is.

guest: 1:01:43

right, at least we opened it up nature.

josh: 1:01:46

that's right. yep, you can log into it so.

guest: 1:01:52

yeah, i think, overall, though, one of the major learning out of this if you really tried to figure out what the actual pain point was is the leadership needs to foster a culture of collaboration. and then that really was the core of the problem, right. it wasn't about, oh, they should have done releases better, or oh, we should have involved cs earlier. it's when things happen. you have to already have that established collaboration within the company so that everybody moves and they move in the same direction, right, which is leading you towards your customer's success. it's not such a thing that you can just hope for either. it really has to come with a lot of intention and work from the leadership team. i know on a leadership team that we spend a lot of time thinking about this. we spend a lot of time working on this, because it doesn't just happen. you can't just sit back and wait for the rest of the team to collaborate. you have to first make sure that you're modeling that with the rest of your executive leadership team, and then each department then needs to talk about collaboration and the ways that you can collaborate and encourage collaboration and everything that it is that you do.

josh: 1:03:40

to your point. if the people responsible for making the customer successful, which is again the entire company, if they can't work together, they're gonna struggle to deliver on. that goal of making the customer successful can't be understated enough. i think really, each department, each internal employee, needs to think of the other department, the departments that they're not in, as their customer internally, because it's not just the external customers. you've got people relying on you to help them bring value and feel good and all that. that's part of the teamwork. so really, customer success is just as critical inside the company as it is outside the company.

guest: 1:04:29

yeah, i agree with you, josh. that's a good statement.

josh: 1:04:35

i hope to have a few of those in my life. well, this has been a great conversation, certainly enjoyed exploring your perspective on different aspects of customer success. i feel like i've had some realizations myself, some lessons learned, just through talking with you, and hearing your story sounds like quite the diSaaSter. i'm glad you were able to get out. i hope you have found yourself in a situation that is less chaotic than what you described.

guest: 1:05:06

different chaos, a different chaos.

josh: 1:05:08

different chaos, but it's a good one.

guest: 1:05:09

no, this is very chaotic.

josh: 1:05:11

no, it's chaos. good, good, that's the goal, right, and hopefully everyone listening who can relate to some of these things feel seen, feels heard to some degree, because we're out there.

guest: 1:05:23

sure others haven't been there. i'm sure they have.

josh: 1:05:28

i am too well, look, i really appreciate your time. thanks so much for joining us.

guest: 1:05:33

yeah, thank you, josh.

josh: 1:05:36

i don't know about you, but i thought that was a fantastic examination of customer success. i had a ton of learnings from our guests and i'm going to recap them here. of course, if you had learnings, i certainly want to hear from you and hear your thoughts. one of my first takeaways is this idea of value the product offers the potential of value. customer success helps customers realize the value. and value isn't just dollar signs, it's not just numbers, it's also a feeling. so we cannot overlook perceived value, which is way more subjective, when discussing return on investment metrics dollars earned back, dollars saved, dollars made, et cetera. now, another thought that really resonated with me was the idea that customer success is proactive, not reactive. it drives engagement with both the product and the company, and some of the best ways to be proactive is outreach, extra effort, data and internal collaboration across departments. that actually leads me to my next takeaway customer success is really a company philosophy, not just a specific team. it is every department's responsibility to bring value to the customer. the ways in which each team's contributions do that may differ, but the goal is the same. sales, as an example, brings value to customers by helping to diagnose the root cause of pain felt by prospective customers, showing them how they can solve it and setting them up to do something about it. marketing engages with well, the market, and it's doing that to make sure that the company is in tune with the needs and wants of the people. the company seeks to serve product and engineering while they're building the tool, the critical component that customers use to achieve value. everyone works together for customer success. if you don't have that, you could be setting yourself up with diSaaSter. speaking of how about that story? could you relate? this certainly sounds familiar to me. not all launches go as planned i mean, does anything really? but how you come together to respond is critical and in some cases it could be make or break for both customer and employee churn. now, if you felt that pain before, you'll enjoy some of the content and resources we've published to our site. so go to wwwdiSaaSterrecoverycom to dive deeper into topics like these and before you go, take a second and subscribe to the show. let us know how much these stories resonate with you by leaving us a rating and a review in apple podcast or spotify or any podcast player of your choice. also, share these lessons with a coworker or even a boss who's going through it with you. who knows, maybe your story of diSaaSter could be next.