Navigating Certainty: Removing Chance from the Customer Journey
Achieving true customer success goes beyond satisfaction—it requires making their journey seamless, predictable, and entirely repeatable. In this session, discover targeted strategies to eliminate unpredictability, significantly enhancing customer retention, upselling opportunities, and overall satisfaction. Learn how to foster stronger relationships, build loyalty, and drive sustainable growth by consistently delivering exceptional customer experiences. Join us to transform your approach and ensure every customer feels confident and supported at every interaction.
Hello everybody, yes, it's working. Good morning. Welcome all here at this
first day at PULS at the first session.
Very glad that you're all here today. Today here at this track, customer
success track about working smarter, not harder.
I'm your track leader here. I'm Nadia. I'm Nadia in the club from Gainside CS
team.
And I'm going to introduce you today, your speaker.
Before we go to the actual session today, I want to remind you that you're
going to hear a lot today from this session.
And I know you're going to be and have some questions.
So please, if you can drop these questions into your session, go to the app
from PULS.
Go to this track, also this session. You can go to the Q&A pool.
And then you can drop your questions there. If you find there are some
interesting questions, please don't forget to upvote them so that we near the
end, we can ask the speaker about it.
So, yeah, let's start it. So for today, I'm very honored to introduce you to
Hadley or Dwyer, Director of Customer Operations.
And fun fact, he just flew in from the melodies. He's just coming back from his
honeymoon. So give it up for Hadley or Dwyer.
[Applause]
All right, good morning, everyone. Welcome to Amsterdam. Welcome to PULS. As
Nick would say, "Who's fired up?"
[Applause]
I love it, my team. I made them cheer it here at the end.
All right, firstly, thank you all for coming. It's always slightly daunting.
You say that you'll do a session and you hope someone arrives. It's a bit like
organizing a party.
So I wanted to welcome you all and over about the next 30 minutes or so, I'm
going to share with you some of my personal experiences, having built customer
journeys, and hope that you walk away with just a few nuggets you can take back
to your own organizations.
I'm going to be brutally honest and open and explain that not everything has
been perfect, and hopefully you can avoid some of the pitfalls and stumbling
that we've had.
Let's talk a little bit about me, and then I promise I'll get into the good
stuff. I'm from the UK, joined Muse back in 2018, so I've been here a little
while, worked in hospitality for 20 plus years and have the grey hairs to show
it.
I'm a keen runner. Marathans actually doing a 10K race on Sunday, and as our
host here said, I've literally just blown in from the Maldives, so don't feel
too sorry for me.
Incredibly jet lag was woken up at 4am this morning staring at that red dot on
your TV.
So that's a little bit about me, and enough about me, a little bit about who I
work for.
As I said, Muse, we have 5,000 customers. We're actually based here in
Amsterdam, so this is somewhat coming home for us.
We operate in 85 plus countries, just over 1,200 employees, and over 1,000
integrations on our marketplace.
We've raised over 340 million dollars and just completed our 10th acquisition.
Muse, in a sense, is a property management system. Hands up if you're staying
in a hotel.
Okay, great. So each hotel will likely have a property management system, and
fingers cross its operating on Muse.
It's the system that really is the beating heartbeat of every property.
It's described as when you change from property management system, it's like
conducting open heart surgery.
It really is everything that integrates and holds that property together. It
really underpins properties.
It's used by the front desk, it's used by reservations, food and beverage,
housekeeping, etc.
Our mission is really to develop transformational solutions for brands.
That also includes independent properties as well, while really doubling down
and focusing on creating remarkable guest experiences.
The founder, Richard, founded the company back in 2012 in the Czech Republic,
and it was really clear that he was about to embark on his own journey of
putting a property management system in a hotel that he was working with,
and was about to go down the age-old route of on-prem. On-prem is solution,
seems like the best in class,
but he actually decided to take that budget and invest it in to what Muse is
now.
He felt that he could do better. He could do more. He could create a cloud-
based solution that removed the barrier between the guest and essentially the
hotel staff,
automating many of those mundane and repeatable tasks and allowing the staff to
create a remarkable guest experience.
Spend more time explaining about what to do around the city as opposed to input
ting details, passport numbers, credit card information, etc.
This is basically what the growth trajectory has looked like.
As I said, I joined the company back in 2018, and since then it's been up, I
mean, apart from the pandemic, you could say.
We opened a London office back in 2016, and I joined shortly after. We've been
through Series A, Series B, etc.
And of course, we were also impacted by that unfortunate pandemic.
Back in 2022, we started our journey with Gainsight, so it's been just over a
two-year anniversary,
and I hope to be able to show some of the amazing things that we've done during
our partnership with Gainsight.
And then one of the most amazing things happened this year, we actually managed
to achieve our unicorn status earlier in 2024.
Now, let's get to the crux of it while you're all sitting here and hopefully
taking away a few things.
How do we remove chance from the customer journey? And I've got a dice here to
represent it.
Quite often it is like rolling a dice or playing roulette and hoping that we
create this remarkable customer experience.
So it's the main reason you're all here, and it's something that we all face.
It's a challenge regardless of industry, whether you're in hospitality like me,
any other provider,
you're essentially trying to create that remarkable customer experience.
And we want to create something that is repeatable and predictable, and I hope
that you can walk away with something here.
And I'm going to run you through the five main considerations.
So the key themes to help remove that chance from the customer journey is
ensuring that you're creating a consistent experience.
Also identifying what are the key milestones that a customer is going to go
through during that journey.
Using data, we've heard a lot about how AI is going to help us crunch that data
so we're not trawling through spreadsheets or BI tools, etc.
So using that data-driven insight to give you an idea of where to start
proactive communication, avoiding leaving our customers in the lurch.
I'm sure we've all been through a customer experience when you're like, what's
coming next?
Whereas I prefer to know that up front.
And lastly, the bit that really underpins it, the need for continuous
improvement, it's no good having a one and done.
It's all about iteration, iteration.
So let's kick off with the first topic, which is consistent experience.
Put a few two animations, too many animations in here.
The problem that we're trying to solve is inconsistent experience can lead to
easily lead to customer dissatisfaction, ultimately churn confusion.
So a possible solution is creating some uniformed experience across the
multiple touch points,
and inevitably the multiple members of your team and organization that's going
to speak or interact with that customer,
whether it's across onboarding client engagement or support,
creating that consistency helps to build trust, and the customer ultimately
knows what to expect.
So this is where I go into a little analogy and just stick with me.
So what you see here is a marina. What I see here is what represents our
customers or our customer base.
And what do you ultimately quickly notice that every single one is slightly
different,
whether it's powered by fuel, whether it's powered by wind, how big it is.
This represents the complexity of the customers that we deal with.
Again, regardless of which industry you're in.
Each one has slightly different needs, but ultimately they all need to go on a
similar, very similar journey.
And when I think about that journey, I actually found this quote,
and I think it's really important not just to focus on the end destination.
Of course, we're in the business of driving desired outcomes and business
outcomes,
but you also need to focus on the journey.
How many people have been on a journey, whether it's by plane, by car?
You kind of get there and you think, wait, how did I get here?
You go in this autopilot. You don't stop to actually take in all the great
things about that journey.
So Ernest Hemingway sums it up here.
It's not just about the end, it's about the journey towards the end that really
matters.
So let's focus what matters in our nautical theme.
Arguably the most important instrument on a boat, which I should have asked,
is anyone a boat owner here?
No, that's good, because there's only two good days with a boat, the day you
buy it,
and apparently the day you sell it.
So let's go on this nautical journey together.
So navigation is super important.
You would be foolish to go out in the open sea without some kind of navigation.
Traditionally, a compass, more notably now with your mobile phone.
It's like a sat-nav for boats.
But without these instruments, we can quickly go wrong.
And things can go wrong pretty quickly.
The same can be said for our customers.
If we're not giving them an idea of where they're trying to navigate to,
the possible risks that they may face and be open and honest about our lessons
learned.
At the end of the day, we're the experts.
They're coming to us as a vendor and as a partner, so we should be providing
them with expertise
in terms of navigation.
So what should we consider when we're planning our route?
Again, thinking of our nautical theme that can relate directly to our customers
the depth, where we need to possibly change direction.
The time of day and the bottom one, particularly for the UK, is the weather is
terrible.
But before setting out these are all considerations that we should have.
Likewise, when building a customer journey, we need to think about the
considerations from a customer perspective.
Because customers left to their own devices will quickly create their own
course of navigation.
And I'm sure some of you can relate with some of these.
The customer thinks that they know best and ultimately ends up in quite often
completely the wrong destination.
Can anyone relate with the last one?
Yeah, exactly.
So they tend to find and plot their own way.
It's not repeatable, it's definitely not predictable.
So where to start?
It's important to start with a map.
We spent a long time at Muse, really mapping out the customer journey.
It's not the funniest thing to do, I'll admit, but it was worth its weight in
gold.
It's one of those tabs that I continuously have open on one of my many screens.
And continually reference and communicate and share with the wider business to
really understand the different touch points.
And the different points on the customer's journey.
So let's start with the first thing.
If we think about customer's interest, think about what the customer is going
to see.
What communications are they going to receive?
What does it look like to be in the customer's shoes?
What will they receive?
Emails, resources, expectations, expected calls.
Next thing we did was create a second swim lane, which is, okay, what are the
actions that we're going to do based upon those things?
Which system and software, what's the trigger that's going to enable that
customer communication or touch point?
The who and the where in terms of software.
And the last one is then build the process.
So start with the customer and really what kind of remarkable experience we
want to create for them, and then build the process around them.
So we started to look at, okay, we want to create a playbook of tasks to create
repeatability, standardization.
And this can all be iterated on over time.
And that's the important thing.
So we've got to continue our iteration, but you have to start somewhere.
So we really started with this map.
Our map looks something like this.
This is a representation of about one fifth.
We use the particular software at Nero, which is great for collaborating,
especially in the remote kind of business we find ourselves in today.
And each throughout this entire map, whether it's in sales process, whether it
's in onboarding or post onboarding, the swim lanes remain throughout.
So we've created our map.
The next thing we need to do is understand or identify those milestones, right?
We want to be creating repeatability and predictability.
So where do we expect the customer to go?
The problem we're trying to solve is, you know, we're trying to solve the
problem.
We're trying to solve the problem.
We're trying to solve the problem.
We're trying to expect the customer to go.
The problem we're trying to solve is, as Ernest Hemingway said, focusing only
on the end neglects all the critical and crucial moments during that customer's
journey.
So if we're purely focusing on the end, we're missing all the good stuff in the
middle.
So a solution is actually just map out those milestones.
And it might sound incredibly simple, because it pretty much is.
Whether you start pen and paper or even Nero.
Work out where those pivotal interactions are and shape that journey.
Acknowledge the achievements along the way that helps build trust and reinforce
positive experience for the customer.
Going back to our Nord school analogy, there's something called waypoints when
you start to look at a map on a boat.
And that tells you where there should be a critical change of path.
And that could be for a number of different reasons.
It could be for depth.
It could be underwater obstacles.
And all these can relate to the customer journey.
Where do you traditionally see customers get stuck?
We then take those waypoints and essentially translate them into something that
is more digestible for a customer.
So providing them with something like this up front lets them know exactly
where they're going.
Right?
What are the waypoints?
What are those milestones on the customer's journey?
So what we did is we did a mixture of human and digital and tech touch.
Each one of these milestones are captured during the welcome call.
And we expect those to be inputted into the R360 and gain site.
And from there, we start to trigger some proactive communication.
Explaining to the customer what's in it for them?
What should they prepare ahead of time in order to pass through that milestone
or that gate?
Sorry.
We did similar thing for the post onboarding journey.
Here we combined even more human and digital touch.
Everything underneath the line is completely digital.
It's driven through journey orchestrator.
And what we really wanted to enforce is 100 days of change management.
It doesn't matter which system software telephone provider.
It's normally not a seamless or painless process.
So why not help get ahead of those questions?
Help your colleagues and folks in support and try and get ahead of those
potential support tickets
by providing proactive information about the main topics, about the change
management.
Data driven insight, super important.
Again, we've heard a lot about AI and how that's going to help us avoid having
to trawl through
the ITools, look spreadsheets, notes, et cetera.
So relying on guesswork leaves a lot of room for chance and it does quite the
opposite of what we're trying to do here today.
So leverage the data and analytics that you have available.
Whether it is in a spreadsheet, it's a place to start.
It doesn't mean that you need the latest BI tool, right?
You have to start somewhere and use that data.
Understand the customer behaviors, their pain points, their preferences, where
are the patterns?
Where do you see support tickets coming in often?
And how do you get ahead of that in your customer journey?
So proactively addressing those things before they actually become issues.
Again, going back to our nautical theme, the bridge of a modern ship is packed
with technology.
And I'm sure we all work in organizations today where we have a plethora of
different system softwares
and access to data.
Use it, right?
The idea is that we help, you know, everything that you see there on the image
helps the crew and the captain make those informed decisions.
So why should we not be doing the same?
Like many businesses, you know, we should be leveraging the technology, don't
guess.
Remember, we're trying to navigate the customer so they can be in the driving
seat.
They can be the captain and driving their business to ultimate success.
Because if you do, you're likely going to end up on the rocks.
It's going to be costly and possibly even end to result in churn.
So navigating blindly could end up something like this.
A question that I normally receive is, okay, but where do I start?
One thing that we started with was support.
Support is most probably the team and part of any organization that is speaking
most regularly with customers.
So why wouldn't you naturally start there?
So we started to identify the trends, the source of the tickets.
Did they come from certain types of properties, language, territory?
Was it within a certain period of post on boarding?
We started to then work out, okay, how do we get ahead of those?
I personally think that's a great place to start.
We then started to look at engagement.
We started slow. We started to feed out information, whether it be through
journey orchestrator,
but to look at the open rates and engagement, is it landing?
Are we sending it to the right person or persona?
Do we need to think about translation, local language?
And then think about customer behavior.
Things like how is the customer interacting with your platform?
Where are customers getting stuck?
We're very fortunate to benefit from both Gainsite CS and PX
so we can quickly see whether customers are taking desired action
based upon the type of communication that we're sending to them.
Which brings me on nicely to our next topic, which is the art of proactive
communication and engagement.
Reactive approach just means that you're likely to miss out on opportunities.
You're constantly firefighting.
I know I've been there, it's not a fun place to be in.
You really want to try and get ahead of it.
Explain to the customer what they can expect, the what's in it for them, and
why they should show up.
So the solution is really to anticipate the needs ahead of time.
Reach out before the problem rises or before it becomes a challenge.
Provide personalized support.
You know, you can do it at scale.
I'm not asking necessarily a one-to-one.
We have the technology to do a one-to-many.
Make sure that the content is relevant to where the customer is in their
journey.
We have fallen foul of trying to throw all of the information at the customer
up front and it just doesn't stick.
I'm sure we've all received long, long emails that look more like an essay.
You give up after the first paragraph and ultimately you expect a customer to
digest it all.
So break it down and make sure it's timely and proactive.
Proactivity reduces the uncertainty.
Again, if you communicate without context, it can be daunting.
If you were to receive this, you know, or see this on the water, for example,
it leaves it open to interpretation.
Likewise for this, the water can be a dangerous place if you don't know what
you're doing.
So why not ensure that every step of the way the customer is informed as to
what's coming next?
Ultimately, we want to avoid leaving our customers wondering what's next.
Now, this can easily lead to disengagement.
It can lead to confusion, frustration, poor experience and ultimately the risk
of churn.
So here's some examples of how we have utilized some engaging content.
So we have deployed this via Journey Orks strater, mainly time-based events in
a customer's journey.
The content is engaging. It's branding. It's something that you want to read.
We've all received those plain text emails and we're like, "Well, they could
try harder."
It's driving self-serve. It's driving customers to the community.
It's driving customers to our knowledge base.
It's utilizing bullet points instead of word walls.
This is basic stuff, I'm sure I'm not teaching anyone anything new here,
but tell the customer where they are in the journey.
Are they 20% through? Are they 50% through?
You can embed gifts if you really want a customer to take action.
It's really driving the cost to serve down and increasing the self-serve motion
These examples, as I said, we've now moved to even more complex examples using
J.O. and behavioral-based triggers.
Whether it's inactivity in digital onboarding, for example, we can monitor the
active sessions and get customers re-engaged.
If there is a significant decrease in product usage, we're not expecting
someone to be there watching
the dashboards. We can proactively reach out to the customer and see if there
is an issue that we can address.
Switching off or declining in key areas of the system or software,
or ultimately our main contacts, as I joined the community, for example, in the
first 60 or 90 days after GoLive.
As I mentioned earlier, in the onboarding journey, we capture those key
milestone dates up front.
It allows us to understand if a customer is on or off track.
And what that then ultimately allows us to do is send pre-read materials before
the customer actually gets to that part of their journey.
It's timely. It's relevant as to where the customer is.
It explains in signposts to them what's coming up, what can they expect, who
should they bring to the call.
I'm sure we've all been on a call where this can't happen today because so-and-
so is on holiday or on their honeymoon.
But it explains what's in it for them. It ensures that it makes the best use of
everyone's time
and clearly signposts why they should be there and focuses on the what's in it
for them.
Continuous improvement, super, super important.
Stagnation leads to complacency.
And if you honestly think that you're building your customer journey as one and
done, you're wrong.
We're constantly iterating.
I can't even remember what version of our customer journey we're on today.
But we're constantly evaluating how it's behaving, how our customers behaving,
how is it being received.
Is it leading to an increase in NPS, a decrease in support tickets, et cetera.
These are all indicators that either the customer journey is working or perhaps
we need to go back and review something.
So iteration and optimization, absolutely critical.
Regularly assessing the processes, gathering feedback from the front line, from
our CSMs, from our onboarding team,
and ultimately from the customer.
Don't be scared to reach out to the customer and ask what their experience was
like.
They will most probably give you the unfiltered version.
And that is absolutely critical in creating remarkable customer experiences and
removing chance for the next customer that happens to go through that journey.
Now, I'm sure gamesite will like me for using this one because I know that this
is something that they preach and we practice the same.
The crawl, walk, run methodology.
We're absolutely not at the running stage yet.
Even two years into our journey and I don't mind admitting that.
We're still walking.
We're still learning.
We've got multi-production, gamesite, and we're working out how do we integrate
the data and information from each and really utilize that and provide that
insight to our CSMs, to our onboarding team and to our executive team.
So whether you're crawl walking or running, it's all about forward momentum.
It's all about understanding from the user perspective, what else can we do?
What else can we do from a customer experience perspective?
We have created a few little things at Muse which has helped us with this
continuous evolution and iteration of our customer journey.
Creating an internal and gamesite product council, helping create advocates
within your business.
Understand who those champions are.
Who are those that are going to give you that feedback about things that are
and perhaps aren't working?
You want to avoid that inertia.
You want to avoid dissatisfaction and disengagement from the platform.
End-user shadowing, perhaps going into the office and sitting next to an end-
user and see how they're interacting with the platform every day.
Where are they logging their notes?
Where are they logging their entries?
How are they maintaining customer contact hygiene, etc.?
Perhaps there's some inefficiency or perhaps as we do, we release on two weekly
cycles.
Perhaps they just haven't realized that there is new functionality that we've
now rolled out.
Post onboarding CSAT is absolutely critical.
Post onboarding CSAT and MPS, all critical feedback and understanding what
perhaps you could do better next time.
CSOP's office hours and dedicated Slack channels is something that we openly
welcome.
We want the good and the bad feedback to understand what's working and what's
not for our end users.
And then lastly is something that we've introduced more recently and that's
shared roadmaps across CS teams.
So I'm obviously from the customer operations team and I work with our support
organization, our CSM leaders and also our onboarding team.
I basically buy into their strategy and likewise to ensure that we are creating
synergy between our roadmaps and our commitment for the coming quarters.
Continuous improvement will help to avoid this situation and hopefully keep us
on this type of trajectory.
That's easy for me to say.
I'm moving forward in a faster powerboat type manner.
And all I've spoken about, I bet you're thinking, "Okay, great.
What about the results? Show me what it's really mean.
What's it meant for your business?
What's the return on investment?
What are the executive team saying about the things that we've rolled out?"
These are a few high-level numbers.
So in the past 12 months we have, believe it or not, over 12,000 automated
emails, which has saved over 1,000 hours of manual time writing emails,
which you have the risk of lack of standardization. There is a chance that
everyone's going to say something slightly different.
So we've saved a huge amount of time for our CS teams.
We have a 52% open rate, which I understand from the marketing team. It's
pretty phenomenal.
And that's ensuring that our content is relevant.
We're sending it to the right persona or the right person that is responsible
for that area of the business.
We send our communication in five different languages, which has its own
headaches, but it seems to work to our customers.
We have a 15% click-through rate.
We've generated over 470 upsell CTA's, which are delivered directly into the
cockpit for those CSMs.
So essentially it's the warmest lead that they could possibly get to follow up
on.
We've seen a really nice decrease in the number of support tickets in that
first 90 days after Go Live,
which is ultimately that critical stage where a customer is going to receive or
have some kind of confusion, I'm sure.
It's at the point where they exit onboarding, that hand-holding perhaps is no
longer there, and we've seen a steady decline of 16%.
We've seen a huge increase in the community adoption and engagement, because
every single touch point and information we send to a customer,
we remind them that there is an option for self-serve.
You don't necessarily need to speak to a human.
And we heard earlier today the importance of peer-to-peer communication.
And then lastly, but not least, we launched digital onboarding, which some of
my colleagues are going to be talking about tomorrow.
So a shameless plug for their session.
But they will explain about how we've utilized digital onboarding and community
to significantly decrease the number of hours to onboard customers through
digital.
It's amazing that the number of hours that we've saved, not only for our team,
but also for our customers through that digital motion.
So I'm getting towards the end here, and I just wanted to take you through four
different takeaways.
And I think some critical points before we all exit.
Start simple.
Really don't try and boil the ocean.
Sometimes you have to go slower to go faster.
And my job as director of operations is quite often getting people to go a
little slower.
A muse, we tend to want to try and do a lot at once.
And I love the fast pace, but sometimes you need to re-priorise.
Work out, start simple, and then build.
Don't necessarily go straight to automation.
Try things manually.
There's no problem with trying things manually to validate the automation.
Clear navigation and proper planning is key.
Start with that map.
It's the key to smooth sailing.
It's the key to a smooth customer journey.
So think about really planning out those key milestones, those key touch points
Don't blindly navigate.
Utilise the data available, whether it's in shadowing sessions, whether it's in
onboarding
surveys, whether it's in customer behaviour.
And then use that to help iterate.
And the last one, avoid running a ground and getting stuck in the mud by
constantly evaluating
the effectiveness.
To stand still and get stuck, it's just not an option.
Customers are going to constantly evaluate.
They're going to constantly evolve.
As you move to a multi-product solution or offering, you're again going to need
to re-evaluate
your customer journey.
So my closing slide in summary is that by helping remove chance from that
customer journey,
it's creating and fostering a stronger relationship ultimately with our
customers.
Enhancing that loyalty, creating sustainable growth, you can embark on this
journey together
and it can help create more confidence and support for that customer at every
step of
the way.
And I think it's time for Q&A.
[Applause]
Thank you very much for this interesting session, Hadley.
Very, very well done.
I hope Slido can also give a little yes.
Thank you.
All right, I forgot to also add like, hey, you can also vote or ask your
questions enormously,
but I'm glad to see that also some of you were comfortable having their names
out there.
Let's start with the first questions.
In creating an uniform experience across customer touch points, where do you
find companies often
fall short and how can they overcome these challenges to build and maintain
customer trust?
Great question.
I think people negate to think about, or people often ask, well, where do I
start?
Well, for me, you start with the hello.
You start with the introduction to the customer.
That sets the tone for everything else.
I think people quickly jump to, oh, we're going to do this and we're going to
do that and you can expect this.
But if you nail the hello, the introduction, the welcome, the handoff, call it
whatever you will in the organization,
that really sets the tone for everything else.
I see company now time and time again just skip that.
Jump straight into the meaty stuff, straight into the work.
This is how we're going to do it, but actually don't set the scene properly.
Don't explain expectations.
I'm forward in explaining where there is potential hurdles or perhaps some
things you might want to prepare in advance.
I think that is a critical step that many organizations miss.
It's actually setting the tone with the customer.
Whether that's in a welcome call, a kickoff, a pre-signature, really setting
the tone and managing the expectation of the customer is where I see a lot of
companies just fall over.
And for me, it's the most obvious place to start.
Yep, it totally got you there.
A lot of things we automate and this is making a little bit more personal to it
Right, also Tommy, Tommy Peters, oh sorry, no, another enormous.
Do all of your customers have named customer success managers?
And if some are minutes fire, tech touch or digital touch, is there still
appetite for human content?
And how do you manage that?
Great question.
And I think there's a large focus on digital CS and no more so in Muse.
And we're actually at the moment every customer does have a name, CSM.
But we're moving much more to a digital motion.
Trying to segment our customers to really understand their needs.
That's not necessarily looking at how deep their pockets are or what their ARR
is.
It's understanding what their customer outcomes are.
What are the objectives?
Why did Muse win?
And then we assign a CSM based on that type of engagement model.
We are really excited to hopefully get our hands on spaces.
That is going to enable us to really get going on the digital motion.
So the answer is today, yes, each account or a customer does have a dedicated
CSM.
But we're definitely pivoting more to a mixture of digital and human touch.
Great, thank you.
Alright, let's go to the next one.
Do you create a map for each customer and how much time does a CSM invest into
it?
Great question.
No, we don't have a map for each customer.
And I think the important thing is when I mention about starting simple,
you have to try and create a journey or a map that works for the majority of
your customer base.
Then you can tweak it and add to it perhaps for an enterprise segment
or perhaps water it down slightly for SMV or digital segment.
So right now we have essentially built the spine as I like to call it.
And now you create the deviation from that because trying to maintain a
customer journey
for each and every customer that is customized in my opinion is nigh on
impossible
without a small army of Gainsite admins, which unfortunately I don't have.
So what we have tried to do is create three distinct journeys that kind of
intertwine.
As I mentioned, a lot of customers will go through a similar gate to a
milestone,
whether it's an introduction, whether it's a go live.
So there is commonality between them all.
And then understanding where that deviates based upon the different segments
or the engagement model or levels is important.
But I would suggest avoiding creating a customized map or journey for every
single customer.
As soon as you start doing that, you open the floodgates for every customer to
have a customized journey.
Yeah, and it's not scalable.
Exactly.
So, yeah.
Tommy, finally your question is here.
What step did Muse take to evolve from reactive customer interactions into a
pro-active touch voice?
Another great question. Thanks Tommy.
I think we've all been guilty of firefighting and trying to think that we're
being proactive
at anything but, and I think our pivotal or turning moment was when we started
to look at the support data.
That really allowed us to move from just pure reactive to more pro-active.
We were delivering content and information to the customer before they even
know that they needed it.
Because we had seen from the trends and from the data, this is where customers
tend to struggle.
Or at which point they tend to open a support ticket.
So, I think that was a pivotal moment for us, is really digging in and doubling
down on the support data
to understand where your customers are struggling.
And what type of questions they're asking is their trends.
Can you create community groups or content that would help further support
those questions from customers?
So, I think that was a pivotal moment for us is both introducing the community
but also digging down into the data of our support tickets.
Yeah, that's a really good one. We also did it at Gaines, right?
Yes, how do you manage the end user journey next to the overall customer
journey?
I'm not sure I understand the question.
I'm also, maybe if you're comfortable to explain it just a little bit more this
question.
I hear, yeah. They're in the back of the end.
I know exactly what you mean.
Can you repeat it for me?
Yeah, so I think what Jeff was asking is, how do you map different personas or
different users that use your platform or software?
How do you create a journey for them?
And I will admit it's something that we're embarking on right now is
understanding the roles and responsibilities and the who is who in the
organization is critical.
We're actually utilizing something that Gainesite did recently.
For anyone that's a Gainesite, you may have seen an in-app engagement that asks
you to confirm your role and your responsibility.
Well, we've done exactly the same. We've asked our end users, can you confirm
the department and the role that you do within that department?
That then allows us to create a much more specific and strategic communication
strategy for them.
So that's something that we're working on right now.
And again, we started Simple. We understood within each organization who our
primary CS contact is.
And that's who the majority of our communication is going to.
But we're now taking it to the next level.
So for example, anything payment related will go to a finance contact.
Anything about food and beverage will go to someone within that part of the
business.
So I think it's critically important from an early stage as soon as you
possibly can, it's understanding who does what in each one of your customers'
organizations.
That will allow you to become much more strategic and avoid a real spray and
pray type communication strategy.
I think it's critical, but a great question, Jeff.
Thanks. Thanks also for coming up with here.
Another round from Tommy, you're a popular.
What is your approach on working with customers who show a lower level of
ownership?
And how do you engage them in the design customer journey?
I think within any organization, you're always going to get a few customers
that are somewhat disengaged and feel like you're the partner, you're the
vendor, you should do the work.
And I think it's, again, it's about managing that tone, ideally through the
customer journey, through the sales cycle, for example, and explaining that you
're entering into a partnership.
This is not a 90/10. We're not here to do all the work for you.
And if you do fall into that trap, the likelihood is that they will expect you
to do everything thereafter.
They will not become proficient in the system or platform either, and will
likely lead to an increased number of support tickets.
We started to create some strategies, particularly around digital and digital
engagement,
whereas if you've got a customer's contacts, email address, or phone, it's
quite easy to call them.
But where it's more of a digitally-ledged motion, a customer can disengage
without someone necessarily chasing them.
So what we started to use is Journey Orkstraitor in collaboration with PX, and
we look at the last active session.
And if we see that that last active session was outside of a certain threshold,
we start to send them reminders as to try and prompt them to re-engage.
And only after X amount of emails that are sent, if we still don't see that
they're engaged, then we ask a CSM or an onboarding manager to reach out.
But we try to use the automation and the system and software, and the human
touch as kind of a last element for digital.
Yeah, very good one. And also what we've seen in Journey keynote, where we can
ask someone who has the latest contacts with that partner or with the
relationship.
That's really good.
Althomath, great. The 50% open rate is crazy good, and my marketing team would
die to hand the number, or even something close to that.
What are some of the things that you and your team did to get to these numbers?
I think really break down the information into bite size.
I said earlier on that we were guilty, as I'm sure many others have been, of
throwing a lot of information to the customer up front and expecting it to
stick.
But to actually break it down into bite-size information and ensuring that it's
relevant to where they are in the customer journey, which is what I think is
ultimately the special source and what has led to the high open source.
And I think that's a very important thing to say open and engagement rates.
Ensuring that it's relevant to not only the role, the persona, the
responsibility of that individual, but to where they are in their customer
journey.
I think that's, and I also said, make it engaging.
Make it something that a customer actually wants to read.
What you'd naturally expect to see is, as you continue through this journey of
automated emails, you would expect the customers to tail off.
The customers continue to engage throughout that 100 days and beyond.
So what that says to me is that the content is relevant, it's timely, and it's
landing with the right person.
We quite often see sometimes the email has been opened in excess of 27 times.
That either says that someone really loves our emails or they've likely
disseminated it to others in their organization.
That gives me an idea or at least an indication that it's relevant.
So my tip here would be, break it down into bite-size information.
Make it relevant to where the customer is.
Ensure that it's written in a language that they know and understand.
I think it's quite easy and often overlooked that not everyone is doing this
for the tenth time.
Not everyone knows all the acronyms that you use in your business.
So try and really water it down, make it easy to digest and understand and
explain at every step what's in it for the customer.
Don't lose that focus on customer's interest.
Don't just focus on what's in it for your business, but really focus on why
should the customer turn up what's in it for them.
Yeah, great.
One less question and then we really need to close it all.
How do you factor in responsive clients who only service once an issue arise
and disregard prompts?
How do you factor on responsive clients?
I don't know the answer to that one.
I think through, like I said, with digital, we're trying to automate or utilize
journey orchestrator to try and re-engage those customers.
But yeah, perhaps we can follow up on that one.
Perhaps we can share some ideas as to how to get those responsive clients back
engaged with us.
Yeah, maybe I can share one thing that we do with here at Gaze said.
We often ask, for example, Cali or Eastern or someone on high level also to
make a connection there with their C suite and say,
"Hey, how are you doing?"
Just small talk and also get a little bit there more of a deeper connection and
try to find some common.
Thank you, Sarah and Bill, the machine.
I'm really hoping that software is like solutions like Staircase AI will get
ahead of this and will hopefully indicate to us early enough that we see a
customer starting to tail off or disengaging.
Yeah.
All right. Thank you.
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