Juggling Hats: A Practical Guide for Real-Life CSM Chaos

Welcome everyone. Can you all hear me okay? Cool. I tend to be really loud sometimes.

That's kind of the perks of being bilingual, I always say. We're excited you decided to join us today. I'm sure it was some really stiff competition with the puppies in the expo hall. I know our managers here in the front row and it was probably like pulling her away from the pup was probably really challenging.

So we're coming to you with a perspective of two frontline CSMs, both of us. Juggling the variety of hats that we wear while navigating the chaos internally and externally. Our goal today is to explore four key hats that we wear as customer success managers and share what we're doing within our organization to support them and grow each of those different hats. We recognize that we wear a lot more than four, but just for our sanity, we're going to focus on those four today.

We're going to talk through some of the initiatives that we've been working on throughout the past couple of years, and then we'll wrap up with some Q&A. Before we dive in, we wanted to share a little bit more about each of us, the company that we work for and our tech stack that we have at our disposal. So my name is Sarah Welsh, as Katie mentioned, and I am coming to you from Baltimore, Maryland, which is the state where we have made our state flag, our entire personality, and I'm okay with that because it is pretty cool. I currently work at Paycore, as I mentioned, but I started out actually in support working a call and a case queue.

So I know that life very well, and then moved into an enterprise CSM role at a very scrappy startup, and then moved over to another enterprise CSM role in a similar environment. Then now, again, back at Paycore in a more corporate environment, we as a software are what we call a human capital management software. So we are payroll benefits, think the whole tech stack that your HR team would utilize, and we for that reason are what we like to call a key operational software. So our customers depend on us to pay their people.

So our reliability and stability is incredibly important. You can imagine all the challenges that brings up. We want to make sure that you all get paid on time and that you get your benefits. So I'm Brenda, I'm coming to you from Austin, Texas where we love our breakfast tacos and love a good patio.

I'm seeing a sign back there. Oh, you know Austin, cool. I am a principal customer success manager at Paycore. I manage 13 accounts, including some of our top 50 customers.

That ends up being about 5.5 million in ARR. Throughout my career, I've always been a customer facing. I started off in nonprofit education, pivoted to a scrappy startup doing implementation, support, and success. And now at Paycore through an acquisition about three years ago.

And at Paycore, we're lucky that we have tools and team members to help us do our day to day jobs. We recognize you guys all have come from a different place. We have two full time gain site admins, a growing customer enablement team, and tools such as gain site, sales force, gong, and reach desk, and other ones along the way. All right, take a minute, soak it in.

I'm sure this image kind of resonates with everybody in this room. Whether it was a meeting that you've had a whole day, month, hopefully not an entire career feeling like this. But point being that we are no stranger to this kind of environment. And where do you start?

Do you put out the fire or do you get that ostrich out of your office? So for all of the things that are thrown at us as CSMs, we have to wear different hats, try them on, switch between those hats as we try to tackle tasks one by one. I saw this LinkedIn post about a couple of months ago about the different responsibilities that are probably not in our job description on all the things that we're tasked to do as CSMs. It was really terrifying and also really validating.

And the amount of reactions this post had was overwhelming. I can find you the link and send it to you cuz there was like, I think 130 comments. And I don't share this to scare us, but to really ground us in how much we really do as CSMs and the expertise that we bring to the table in our roles. I always joke with my friends that we should have a PowerPoint party about what we do in our jobs, cuz I honestly don't know what my friends do.

We just all show up to work. And I always joke that I either feel like Oprah. I either feel like I'm an HR therapist or sometimes it can feel like I'm a punching bag with my clients. So as I mentioned, we are going to focus on 4 key hats today because as we all know, we are kind of a little bit of each different department within our companies.

So we are going to start out with Relationship Builder and work our way all the way down to being a trusted advisor. All right, we all know the routine. Pull out your phones. You probably have that QR code for the Slido.

This light is in my way and it's so bright. We would like to know which hat do you wish you could spend more time wearing? I would challenge you to maybe avoid seeing firefighter and maybe think of like, do you wanna be a better negotiator? Someone who's bringing value to the conversation.

Are you trying to be a better trusted advisor? Again, wanna challenge you to not use firefighter. Creative hat titles encouraged. It's not available.

There we go. We got a refreshed? Okay. Therapist, I love it.

Peacekeeper, I like that. That's a good one. Haby sitter. Support ticket escalator, yes, that is- Yes, we can resonate with that one.

Key function. Okay, babysitters good growing in size. Babysitter and therapist. All right, I'll give you guys ten more seconds.

Manual data infirm, yes. Okay. Product manager, okay. All right, so we're all great babysitters, this is my takeaway.

All right, I'm gonna move us along. Thanks for participating. There we go. All right, so thank you for all of your creative hats that we wear, and all of those kind of resonate with us, I know, and I'm sure with all of you as well.

We're gonna kick things off with Relationship Builder. So, see here our lovely stepbrothers friends. So, maybe not besties, becoming besties with your customers, although that's kind of the goal, and it happens sometimes. But really, the idea is to build rapport and do it in a really genuine way.

So, as CSM, or, when I joined Paycore, I came into a situation where I was taking over a large part of my book of business from another CSM that was moving on to a different role within the company. So, there was some hurdles when you inherit new accounts, no matter where they're coming from. So, think about kind of the things you're seeing on the screen. When we have a net new logo and there's a miscommunication between sales and the customer, or we have an experience risk based on their implementation process or working with support, and so on and so forth.

So, I had to really take a step back and do some of reframing, we'll say, with these customers as to what a CSM at Paycore and what that relationship looked like with a customer. There was a company that I used to work for, and we always asked in our EBRs that standard question on a scale of one to ten, how would you rate us, or how would you rate this relationship? And I was getting five, six, seven, eight, whatever that number kind of in that range. And I always kind of made this joke of, well, I'm glad you didn't give me a ten, because that gives me something to work towards, gives me some wiggle room somewhere to go.

And eventually I had kind of an epiphany that that's where the magic happens, when I would get to come back to the next EBR, or maybe not the next one, maybe a couple EBRs would have to go by before we really moved that number up. But that was really satisfying, and then looking back at what we did to move that number up the scale. So those middle moments are really where relationships are built and how you handle them, and that becomes a strong framework for all of the other hats that we're gonna talk about, and even ones we aren't. So that is kind of our framework of being, we're always gonna have to be reactive, and those hurdles can come up at any point during your relationship with a customer.

But I get really excited when I get to move into kind of the take charge relationship builder role, and a way that we've done that at Paycor over the last year or so is by implementing success plans. And success plans were something that Paycor had worked on previously. It's something that I've worked on at previous companies. But we've done a few things this time around that I think have really made it stick and made it really successful.

So first thing that we did is provide training for the CSMs, and not just training in a tactical way of how to open and how to work your success plans, but how to approach the conversation with customers, and how to approach the conversation depending on where they are in their customer journey, the type of customer they are, so on and so forth. We also, that bled into weekly office hours with cross functional partners. Our gain site admins, as Brenda mentioned, we have two, so we would have at least one of those folks on there. Our customer education and ops, so we really brought everybody together and everyone was involved in kind of the entire process.

We standardized the goals, so we were able to kind of narrow down what our customers are trying to do within to five buckets. And I think that made it really digestible when we're presenting this idea to them, and something that I have been doing is having them rank those five buckets to give us a starting point, and it really kind of opens up the conversation and gets them talking. And often, I'm finding that we're only focusing on one, two, maybe three of those to start, because even five is a lot to tackle at one point. We also implemented auto creation of new success plans, as well as for net new logos, but also for the next fiscal year as well.

But where I really think that we had a ton of success was with our leadership buy-in, from our manager level to our executive leadership, as well as I mentioned, our cross-functional partners. We had a KPI that we were tracking towards to create two new success plans every month, so this is something that we're building momentum on. And now, most of us are at the point where we have success plans for our entire book of business within our enterprise unit, which is really exciting. I think I saw this morning that we're at 87%, and we have three days left in our fiscal year for folks to- [LAUGH] So, a picture is worth a thousand words, right?

And Katie mentioned putting out fires, and we don't always have the right tools to put out fires, right? So, what do we do when we're trying to stay calm and extinguish these fires, but we just don't maybe have all the tools in our toolkit? So, this kind of framework that I have been utilizing for a while to manage the communication and manage the process of customer issues that arise, so first thing is owning it. And when I say own it, I don't mean completely fall on the sword.

Take accountability where accountability is due, but make sure that you're also asking the customer to meet you where you need them to meet you if there's something that they could do different within their behavior or encouraging whatever's coming from a product team or other cross-functional partners to make them successful. And throughout the process, managing both the internal as well as external communication, internal I'd argue is almost as, if not more important than that external communication and being able to kind of translate between your internal teams to the customer. And I think something that really hits home for me is leading with the perception. You are a representative of your company, and as I mentioned, we're all a little bit of every department within our company.

So, when you're showing up and a customer's saying, reporting's broken, and you say, I know, our reporting stinks, or whatever, you are kind of perpetuating that negative narrative. So really sticking behind your product, being transparent and upfront with customers, but also making sure that you are keeping your internal teams also, they may interact with them later. So we don't wanna throw anybody under the bus. And then your post-mortem analysis, just staying really clear and concise and consistent with all of your messaging throughout.

And then on the next slide, we do have a meeting kind of talk track and template, and then follow up email that follows the same kind of language and format so that you can keep that concise and consistent. Awesome, so you've managed to hopefully put out some fires or probably surrounded by them. I find myself that I become paralyzed sometimes or overwhelmed with the amount of ways of how do I document all this risk? Who do I talk to internally?

At Paycore, we have a lot of departments. So we're tasked with understanding a little bit of our integrations team. I'm not your girly that knows about API integrations, but I'm gonna go find the right people. So something that we do is how do we tackle that internally?

How do we get the visibility and support that you need to get action? So I'm going to be angling my sections more on how do you manage and document risk in your book of business to get the visibility and support. Cuz identifying documenting and communicating risk is vital for visibility and support. When I'm asking for cross-functional engagement, maybe leadership action or engagement, or maybe I don't know where I need to start.

I have been working over the past, I would say, a year and a half in changing my framework of how I communicate what I need help with. So I use this framework on like, hey, what is the action help that I need upfront? And then I layer in the, hey, here's why it's important. Here's what's at risk if we don't get action on this and a little bit of the context.

I know as CSMs, we're really good storytellers and we're tasked with being really good narratives. So I've been on calls where people tell the whole story with no clear, like, okay, what do you need help with? What's the end goal? Because we're so absorbed in the issue, but others are not.

So I've been really mindful of, hey, what do I need help with? What's gonna be that immediate action that I need? And how do I translate that and adapt it based on my audience? So whether I'm adapting it to my senior leadership, maybe to some other cross-functional leaders, I'm trying to really adapt it based on that.

And also the medium, so if I'm chattering in a Salesforce case, I still find myself occasionally, I will start sharing, the customer called me and shared this and it's like, nope, Brenda, pause. What do you actually need this person to do right now? And then put in the context that the customer called you. So that the person that's probably reviewing a call log of like 200 cases knows what is the immediate action that they need to handle right now.

And then they can read the context. And what really motivated me to change my form of communication, while finding the balance of still being someone that's collaborative, is we have a weekly code red call where we bring in all of our escalations that are not getting movement. And so imagine there's 20 plus CSMs on this call, this code red list could be like 20 plus escalations. And we used to have a CSM that were treated like an open mic night, and would just go on and on and on.

And it got to a point that at one point, one of our senior vice presidents cut her off and said, what is it that you need help with? She proceeded to still talk about the narrative and clearly wasn't understanding the question that our SVP was like asking. So we cut her off again and said, no, what is it that you need us to take action on right now to help you? And it was in that moment that I told myself I never wanna be called out like that in a call this big with my senior leadership.

So that's what really motivated me to think about, I need to adapt my communication based on my audience. I need to keep in mind, am I asking for something via email, via a call, via a chatter? I'm not saying we're perfect, we still have people who show up on this code red call still operating on the narratives, something we're trying to work on internally. I see my manager laughing because she's part of this call and we're working to try to change our folks to be more clear and concise communicators.

And here's an example that actually our manager created for us when via an email template of like, hey, here when you're making a business case for something that you need help with, maybe you need to bring in product for a client call, maybe you wanna bring in, plan an on-site meeting with executives. I know it's kinda blurry, hopefully you get access to the deck later. This is kind of a framework that we use when we're making a business case that we need help with to move the needle with our customers. So we talk about with like, hey, what's the ask, what's the background, what's the benefits?

And again, we just continue to adapt it based on our audience. The second way that I'm stretching my risk manager hat is by creating visibility cross-functionally. I mentioned earlier that we have a lot of departments at Pay Corps and sometimes I don't know who I need to talk to about what. And then I get bounced around and I'm like, along the way I'm frustrated, but I try to power through.

So in my first year at Pay Corps, I wasn't really good at like saying, hey, this is an issue or hey, I don't know who to talk to. Because I just wanted to be under the radar and just pretend like I could figure it out by myself. And what I noticed is actually I was doing the opposite. I was creating this illusion that I was resolving this on my own.

There were no issues. And it wasn't allowing leadership to see the knowledge gaps, the tension with other cross-functional teams, and opportunities for process improvement. And when leadership can't see that, they can't identify trends or themes that they could help action on. So that was kind of like a big, oh, I need to be more vocal.

It'd be the signal carrier that's, hey, this is bubbling up. This might be something to keep in mind for the future. So that's something I've been actively working on is my two frame minds with my manager is, hey, this is bubbling up. I don't need you to action on this, but I just want to make you aware.

Versus, hey, I need you to help me with this department. I'm not getting any response back. And because I have things documented, I'm able to give her the trail of information to go pester the right folks. And then some additional tips is I use AI to synthesize my information adapted based on audience.

So I usually word vomit. I either use the microphone in the system or I type out everything. And then I'm like, okay, write this as I'm writing it to my senior director and always put my request and action up front. So I always put that in my prompt is make my request and action up front and then add in the context.

I always also being mindful of how my leadership is writing and how they're speaking so I can anticipate better questions. That's helped me a lot with our senior director of like, okay, in my manager, I'm like, what are, like, how are they writing? What are the things they're asking about? How can I anticipate that and already have that in my communication?

And it also allows the opportunity for us to join a task force. Pay Corps is really great at encouraging us to be part of a task force, especially if you're someone that's vocal and kind of being that signal carrier of like, hey, I'm noticing this. I would like to be potentially helping resolve this or like maybe we can help write a playbook. And an example that kind of shows all of these examples in like a small way is about a month ago I heard my manager talk about like, I might be working on some deactivation resources.

I emailed her with the subject line, unsolicited advice. I'm really glad you didn't market a spam. And I gave her my pain points of like, hey, here are the things that I as a CSM really struggle with our deactivation resources. And then earlier this month, ironically, we had a power on this topic where they talked about deactivation resources.

I pinged the leader on the presentation and I was like, hey, I have thoughts. And I forwarded her my email, gave her some more information. And pretty much I was like, okay, I put it out there. It may or may not get movement, it may get deprioritized.

But instead of being a critic, like they said in the keynote speaker, I at least was like, hey, I'm open to being someone that wants to test this out and like improve the process. All right, so thinking about how we're documenting a lot of the things that we're talking about within GainSight. So of course we're utilizing risk CTAs within GainSight. I have had the honor of onboarding two new team members this year.

And there was a lot of questions around, should I create a CTA for this? Should I create a CTA for that? And I came up with a little bit of an adage that they affectionately refer to now. So CTA to CYA, call to action to cover your accounts.

So it's just a really great reminder of put it in there, put it in the system. And then if something comes of it later, you already have it documented. And it's also a great way for our leadership or other cross-functional partners that have access to GainSight or CGAINSight reports even if they're not in GainSight all of the time. To know, hey, I'm not talking to customers, but these are the themes.

These are the things that are happening. And our product team actually utilizes those. We have experience risk CTAs and product risk CTAs both. So that's one way that we're utilizing GainSight.

Of course we're doing timeline updates. I use the AI summary on the customer's homepage a lot. I talked about success planning and maintaining and creating objectives there. And then we are also right now manually updating expected leave date and likelihood of leaving.

And both of these markers our leadership is using to forecast and budget. So historically, that was not something that we were super strong at and we were having a lot of unexpected churn. So utilizing those two fields, having team risk meetings and those meetings lead up into leadership risk meetings. But those two fields specifically have led to us hitting our marks this entire fiscal year related to churn.

Can I ask a question about that? Sure. So do you use risk CTAs and churn CTAs? Because we have a pretty different idea of what risk is potential when churn is they've actually decided to meet.

So we have product risk CTAs, we have experience risk CTAs, we have shopping CTAs. So that would be that more we have either confirmed or very high suspicions that they are shopping. And then we would put them once they've entered their loss records, we have a process for that. Once they enter their loss records, then they would be moved into exiting and then lost.

And then we do a loss summary at the very end, has a template already and we go and fill it out and again that rolls up to leadership. So again, we're really mindful of what are you putting in that narrative? What are you putting in that story? So yeah, everything's through CTAs and we just have different ones like RFP shopping and all of that.

[INAUDIBLE] Yes, I'll talk about it a little bit, but we operate so right now our customers could be implementing with competitor and we wouldn't know because they only have to give us a 30, 60 day notice. And we're actively working on trying to solve for that, for that it really like, crap, they're leaving us. So we're working on converting customers over to multi-year contracts, which I'll talk more in a little bit. Great questions though.

Good. We actually kind of credit our risk updates. It's kind of what our template looks like, for example. Every two weeks, we in our dashware, we have risk updates that we have to do that are auto populated by our team based on their health scorecard.

So customers in Red Health, we have to do an update every 14 days. So that's another way that we're helping prevention is every 14 days for our Red Health customers, we have to go in, fill out this template. That basically is, hey, what's the type of risk? What's the likelihood of leaving?

What's the summary? Who are you engaging within the organization? And what are your next steps? And for our customers in Yellow Health, we do this once a month.

And this recently changed, we used to have to do this for all our customers. So there were some days I'd roll up and I only have 13 accounts. And so I would have to do sometimes 13 risk updates at one time. And I was like, my goodness, this customer's fine, everything's good.

It's just, we had to change our health scorecard recently. All right, CTA, so again, we talked about this a little bit, but this is just a visual example of what some of those type drop downs are. So these correlate largely to one of the first slides we looked at on Relationship Builder. And then you can see, so these are our experience risk.

And then we have product risk and RFP shopping risk. So just kinda outlines what we just talked about. And then we do, sorry. [LAUGH] We do have the code red call that Brenda mentioned earlier.

So when we put in escalations to our customer support tickets, we will take those escalations to that code red call. We have cross-functional leadership on there. And then we have what we call our critical response team, which are the team that manage all of our escalations. And we have their leadership come on the call and all collaborate.

And that is, we like to say, a very expensive meeting to have, but it's also a very effective meeting to have. And we get a lot of movement on some issues that we've been stuck on. Just gotta have that clear request up front. [LAUGH] Awesome.

[INAUDIBLE] [LAUGH] Yeah, just to reiterate that really quickly in case you can't hear in the back. So each of those risk types comes with a playbook. And then it's very plug and play. So you can take all of the tasks in there and just kind of run with it and try to mitigate risk utilizing all of those tools.

I'm gonna round us out with kind of the ultimate goals that we wanna be seen as a trusted advisor with our customer. I know that can be rocky, especially if you're in a dumpster fire. And like Sarah's case, she inherited a bunch of accounts that were like, just not in a good place. I inherited accounts that I was her fourth CSM in less than a year.

So they're kind of like, all right, who are you? How long are we gonna have you for? So really the dream is like your customer's asking you for advice. Your peers trusting your judgment and really building those internal relationships and that when you consistently follow through, collaborate, and treat others with respect, your colleagues may be more willing to help you out.

And so when I joined Paycor, again, I came through an acquisition. I was dealing with my post acquisition feelings. So in my first month, someone told me you really need to be mindful of how you communicate across the company because that's what's gonna shape the perception and your brand. And then I was like, okay, I still think about that obviously.

And so I carry that with me and how I chatter at people via support cases, via email, and really trying to understand like how can I approach things in a more collaborative tone. And it usually can be something so small as putting in an email, like how can I better partner with you or how can I better assist you? I went through this about two weeks ago with a team that I'm doing this new process I've never done before. And I don't have any shame being like, hey, I've never done this process.

Can you help me understand what this looks like and where I can help you? And then recognizing cross collaborative efforts was another thing she really instilled in me was like, you need to recognize who you're working with. And that can look as simple as, hey, maybe you have a recognition platform where you recognize a colleague. Or it could be something simple as just chattering the manager.

I did this last week. I messaged a manager and I was like, hey, I'm really enjoying working with x person, I've never worked with them before. Just wanted to share that they're really organized. That was just a simple way to recognize a cross collaborative efforts.

And then I mentioned earlier being that consistent signal carrier. You don't wanna be the CSN that's just known as a person that's always escalating and just has chaos around them. So how can you be that person that's like, hey, how can I bubble things up in a more calm way? I have my business case.

I have the strong relationships internally. Which kinda goes into the last one of really understanding how others operate cross functionally and how they're being measured. Sarah and I every fiscal year go through a sales realignment where we get new sellers on our accounts. And we try to assume really good intentions with our sellers as we all try to do.

And they sometimes jump the gun and reaching out to our customers without letting us know. And it took, I think both of us separately asking them, hey, what are you measured on? And they were like, we get measured on making sure we have a first time contact with the customer and I was like, I didn't know that. We've been out here competing to try to reach out to the same customer.

So it's like, let's just understand what your goal is and I can just have you join one of my meetings to intro you. So again, you're owning the relationship but you're bringing in a cross functional partner. So the more you build your relationships internally, the more your customers are gonna benefit. I have a customer that constantly tells me, hey, can you work your magic on this?

Do you know X person in this department? And I think again, knowing that you have those skill sets, I think will go a really long way and your customers will benefit from that. That was a question somebody asked, I hope I answered your question. All right, so I'm gonna show you or talk about a case study of what I call my year long labor of love.

That really captures all of these hats and how it can take a really long time. I took over a customer that the CSM had left the company and had left them in what I would politely just say a dumpster fire. They were not following the proper escalation process. This customer of mine is also one of our largest customers.

I think they were like our 15th largest customer. They had clocks that were not operating, they were 24 seven business operations. You can imagine what the repercussions of that were. I dreaded going on those calls with the CHRO where it was like, all right, I have no updates for them cuz it's still the same issues.

Or we're still having issues, here's some new stuff that popped up. And Sarah mentioned earlier, you can only go up from there. I didn't feel that way in that moment. I was like, what did I just rest it into?

What am I doing? So what I did is I used some of those frameworks of, hey, who can I engage cross-functionally? Product managers, our senior leadership. We went on-site with our executives.

I increased the support cadence just to show like, hey, I may not have updates for you, but I'm still a resource that wants to meet with you. I can find the right people. We put them through a product risk task force, which is something I'll talk about here in a little bit. In that moment with the product risk task force, opened up some creative solutions where someone casually was like, hey, you should bring a solutions consultant for this customer to see if we can migrate them to our time product.

And I made the assumption of like, that's not gonna be allowed, that's only for field sales. I went to my manager, made the like, hey, just thinking about this. She took it up the chain and it got approved. I'm happy to report this customer is going live on this new product in less than three weeks, a little stressed about it.

[APPLAUSE] They also signed a 36 month contract with us, which if you had asked me a year ago, I would have said this is never happening. So we're really grateful there. All right, so let's talk about our current impact. So as I mentioned, my book of business when I joined Paycor was I was dealing with a lot of unresponsive clients, unstable relationships due to many different reasons, but essentially CSM that was not acting as much of a strategic partner as I would have liked the relationships to be at.

So some of the things that we've done, we've already talked about how we managed a lot of that risk. But something else that I did was kind of took it upon myself to get out of my virtual bubble and go see customers in person. I recognize that maybe not everyone has the opportunity to do that or customers are dispersed and it's hard to get them all in one place too. But if you have the opportunity, I've seen firsthand what a difference it can make to be sitting in the same room with your customers.

And out of the 12 on-site meetings that I've had over the last roughly ten months, six of those accounts when I walked into the room were in our RFP shopping category that I mentioned earlier. And five of them now have been removed from that category due to conversations we had that day and things that we have done since then to correct the things that we were, the reasons they were shopping. Brenda mentioned we've been piloting contracts as well and five of those customers were kind of eligible or in a good place for contract. And three out of those five were open to and interested and hopefully we're getting some signatures here in the next 30 days or so on some of those.

And then one that was unexpected to me was being in the office just by happenstance. I had four new executive level connections that I was able to make. I connected with executives at other customers but these were unexpected. Just walking through the office and I got to meet the new co-presidents of one of the customers that I was on site with.

So just it really opens up a lot of opportunities if you have the ability. And if you don't, something as small as just sending a card in the mail or whatever you have at your disposal to really show your customers that you care about them. Cool. And the other two risks I'll talk about is our subscription based risks.

Like I mentioned earlier, our clients right now either have to give us a 30 or 60 day notice and we're actively working on trying to change that. Because as you can imagine, that creates some financial instability and risk for us. So over the past probably like less than a year, we're coming up on a year of piloting, converting customers over to contracts. And giving them some benefits, maybe some professional service credits, some pricing incentives with discounts, just like what's gonna hook them in to stay with us long term.

And so I aimed big and I went for my bigger customers with the one that I mentioned earlier and I was like, let's see what happens. Just the worst they say is no. And I will say within our immediate team, we have already secured 18 customers over to contracts, which ends up being about 6.6 million in ARR that is secured for us over the next few years. I believe as a department, we're closer to 30.

I know as of this week, we have like three active contracts with legal. So it's just like a constant growing number for us. And then I talked about product risk. That's a big one.

I know you probably all have product risk, we all do. And something that we piloted this year was a product risk task force that's led by another department through our technical account managers. And we nominate the customer into the program. We had to have all of our CTAs documented of like here are all the product risks.

And then we do a discovery call. And I will say that program has been really impactful, because again the customer that I had the case study ran through that program. And as of now, 24 customers have gone through that task force. The end goal with that task force is to try to like retain them.

Like how can we get ahead of it and like maybe put them in front of product managers, product leaders. And those 24 customers ended up being about 9.3 million ARR. And I was reading the report that the person leading this effort had an anecdote that stuck out with me of she identified top 20 product risks through her year long journey. And as of now, 50% of those product risks are planned.

So like she's been leading the effort in like making sure we document these risks and taking them up the chain to product. All right, we're gonna have Moira Rose bring us on home. So trust is built in those tough moments. And then building your own internal brain intentionally in those relationships.

Owning and directing those really uncomfortable conversations is key. And I've been talking about like making sure you do that bottom line upfront communication, being really clear with what is it that you need help with. And it all boils down to strong relationships paired with strong visibility. And that really opens the door for creative solutions in CS.

All right, y'all, we are open for questions. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] Appreciate your patience. This was our first time presenting at Polls, second time attendees.

You did amazing. Great job. We have time for maybe like two questions or so probably. Sure.

Let's see. You shared that the time back gained by leveraging AI allows you to reinvest this time for scale CS and sales. How do you invest this time for CS? Which one is it?

It just changed. The second one. The second one, is that related to success plans? Just want to make sure I understand.

I'm trying to understand the question. If you ask the question, I'm happy if you can ask more context so we can try to frame it. We are also both enterprise CSMs, and this is a specifically scale question. So it's a great question, but we may not have all the answers when it relates to scale.

I know that a lot of the things that we talked about today, we've implemented at the enterprise level, and now they're trickling down to scale. And agents are a huge part of that. And I was telling Katie earlier, we still are working towards getting folks to even adopt our own internal AI tools. So that's something we are actively working on is just trying to get people over the hump of how can you use this to benefit.

Even just dipping in small, use it for communication. We have a channel with what's called our Ask a Tam channel. And we're adding an AI tool in there where we instead of asking humans, we're asking this agent about our product. And it's been really popular.

Pretty sure our manager uses it every day for everything at this point. [LAUGH] There were some great questions. We won't be able to get to most of them unfortunately. But I did want to ask one quick question.

Where did it go? I feel like both of those kind of go together. What are your communication plan for transitioning CSMs when there's turnover? Yeah, we have a template pretty much.

I have my own template where I basically reach out and I'm like, hey, here's who I am. So I already have a template ready to go. I know our leadership, for example, when we were going through that peak season of high turnover and it was really large customers. Our leadership was actually the one who reached out to the customers and notified them of the, hey, we're having a change, here's your new person.

And then we have the playbook. As soon as it happens, we trigger off our email. And then we immediately send our calendar to like, hey, let's book a time to meet. So just immediately, let's make that connection.

And we are asked to do that. I think this week we are transitioning some accounts and our playbooks have already been executed. People have to go in and start making outreach to their customers this week. Yeah, the transition CTAs have to be worked before we are able to transition the account.

All right, so with time's sake, we will wrap this up. But another round of applause. Great job. [APPLAUSE]