Rethinking Digital Customer Success: Delivering Customer Value at Scale

Hi, everyone. Before we start, I want you guys to think about your own customer base for a second. Not your top 20 customers, not the strategic accounts that get executive attention. I mean the thousands of customers that are sitting in the middle.

The ones that maybe are getting an automated email, a webinar, a campaign. The customers that we say we are engaging at scale. But ask yourself, are they actually experiencing value or are they experiencing activity? Over the past few years, we've built up digital CS.

We got really good at scaling communication without actually scaling customer success. And that is what the session is about today. Not how to send more emails, not how to cover more accounts, but how to actually deliver customer value at scale. That is where the real loss treasure is.

All right. I am super excited to be sharing the stage with Julie Fox today. So a quick background. Julie and I met on LinkedIn, but we had our first in-person at last year's Pulse.

And that shows the value of building and networking those genuine relationships from peer to peer in customer success. I am Melba Miles, and I'm the head of success at Miro. There I lead our scale success program across all of our regions globally. And I'm responsible for our digital strategy across all of our CS segments.

Julie leads the digital and scale success motion at Highland. She's got years of experience working through and building up programs to support a large subset of customers. So between the two of us, we have built a lot. We have evolved.

We've also broken a lot. So today we want to make sure that we leave you with some tangible takeaways. We want to share our lessons learned. So hopefully you don't have to learn the same ones and that you have some things that you can take home and apply.

All right. I'll go over our agenda, but really there's three takeaways that we'd like for you to have in our agenda. One is we want to shift your mindset on how you think about digital success. Second, we want to give you an idea of what a scalable, modern model could look like.

And third, we're going to tie that to measurable outcomes. So stay tuned. Again, it's meant to be practical. We look forward to seeing your questions in the end.

So I'm going to hand it back over to Julie. Thank you. So let's talk about one of the most damaging phrases in customer success, low touch. At first glance, it may sound harmless, but over time it has quietly reshaped how companies think about a huge portion of their customer base.

Low touch slowly kind of became associated with lower value, lower investment, and lower expectations. And many digital CS programs evolved exactly that way. With reactive engagement and fragmented experiences, a lot of noise without intentional journey design. At the same time, pressure has been growing and growing, pressure from rising customer expectations.

They want immediate answers. They want faster outcomes. They're less tolerant of something that feels automated versus personalized. Then add in the growing pressures on CS teams in general.

How often are we told that we need to do more with less? We're being asked to scale faster, support more customers, improve retention, and improve business impact. It's a lot. And low touch isn't the answer here.

The answer is building a smarter operating model for scale. For a long time, digital CS was treated like a secondary model. Reactive, fragmented, something for smaller or unmanaged accounts. But the modern model looks very different.

It's intentional. It's an orchestrated system that's designed to guide customers towards value. It's built around connected journeys, proactive engagement, and signal-driven decision-making. And it's no longer viewed as less than high touch.

Gone are the days where you have a CSM that starts their career as an associate or a junior CSM. And as they grow in their career, the only path for them is to eventually reach a higher touch model where they become an enterprise CSM. We're now seeing completely different paths where people that are in digital are staying in digital. They're growing in their career and building a career there.

And I even think about a few years ago when I was coming to Pulses, and digital CS was kind of the new kid on the block. I don't know if you guys have noticed, but digital and scaled CS has arrived. It is the topic this year, and it's not going anywhere because people are seeing that digital CS has become the foundation for how organizations consistently deliver value across the entire customer journey. That's the real shift.

Digital has become the operating system with human engagement as the strategic layer. The goal is no longer how do we do more with less. The goal is now how do we help more customers achieve value consistently and at scale. When we do that, journeys become more intentional, teams become more focused, and customers feel guided instead of managed.

We have the opportunity to fundamentally change the trajectory of customer success here, to create experiences that are more proactive, more human, more impactful at scale than ever before. Okay, magic time. So this is where the treasure and the magic happens. You're going to hang with me for just a little bit.

So the goal here is not to cover every customer equally. It's really to allocate the right level of engagement at the right time so when it matters the most. It's really important that we settle in those mechanics a bit because we really are moving away from the ownership-based model more to that orchestrated-based model. Okay, so reality, if you treat everybody the same, there's no way that quality can hold, right?

You can't expect that. So the way I think about this is really through three layers. The first layer is your foundational layer, and that is your digital by default. Think of that as you're always on digital.

So honestly, this is not optional anymore. We've got to have this. This layer should be covering 100% of your book through every single part of their lifecycle. Think about this layer as the layer where you can do your lifecycle journeys, your in-app, any of your educational-type things.

This is where those self-service resources are also served to those customers, providing that continuous guidance. All right. Also, the next thing that you think about when you do this layer right, you get two outcomes. The first outcome is your customers are still getting that meaningful engagement when it matters, and the second is your human teams are freed up to focus where precision and deeper interaction count.

So here, think about this. You're not trying to avoid the customer. You're not avoiding human contact. But what's happening is your customers are increasingly expecting you to give them value.

They want to access value in ways that are fast, that are flexible and available when they need them. So this is how you do that. So you've got the foundation layer covered. Now let's go on to layer two.

This layer I call the leverage layer. This layer is that one-to-many concept. We've started hearing the buzz about it around the industry, but you really have to do it right. This has to be that structured one-to-many.

So what this does is you're scaling your human interaction in a much more intentional and efficient way. Instead of repeating the same conversation hundreds of times, like you guys know, we can repeat an onboarding conversation over and over and over again, right? So instead of repeating that conversation that many times you design an experience where the customers are together. So the customers are engaging together, they're learning together, and they're achieving value together.

So that's indispensable to me. That's something that you continue to grow. This can look like the onboarding workshops that I spoke about. This can look like adoption sessions.

I also have one that I call Art of the Possible where we're talking about release notifications and things of that nature. You can do this in several ways. You can do it by verticals, industries. You can do it by cohorts.

You can do it by personas, where they are in their life cycle. So there's several different ways that you can structure this one-to-many. But remember the structure part on it. What's important is it still feels really human in a world that's very much AI-driven.

It's very, very human. And again, your customers are learning from one another. Customers are interacting with experts. They're asking questions.

And so they're hearing real use cases as well. It's not you or a sales rep or someone else trying to sell them on something. It's the best ad you could possibly have for your business. Operationally, this becomes incredibly powerful.

If you think about it from the perspective of this is one that has the highest impact, but the lowest incremental costs. You can easily see by the number of customers that you have coming to this meeting and the number of CSMs that you have attending or facilitating that meeting, the number of hours that you've saved. All right. And then there's layer three.

I call this the precision layer. This is where human engagement becomes really, really intentional. It's signal-driven rather than just blindly assigned across a book of business. And this layer, we're looking for moments that actually warrant a human to interact.

So I call this like you're earning the human engagement. It's not just a calendar option. We've hit this amount of time in the calendar. We want you to do a quote-unquote check-in.

Right? So this is where we're actually getting there in the right moments at the right times. Now, your signals can be several different things. You can have risk signals that you're monitoring, and you can have expansion signals that you're monitoring, and you also may have a time where the customers just raised their hand and said, "I need help." So this is where you have that precision layer.

All right. The important mind shift here is that we're going from CSM engagement being earned through signals and customer need. All right? In summary, what you're going to get here is all three layers are working together.

So when you're presenting this to your company, the internal parties at your company, you're showing that this is an interconnectivity. This is a journey. This is an experience that we're taking the customer on. So now that you know what those layers are, the next thing is like, "How do I actually operationalize this?

How do we make this work?" Customers don't experience us as individual meetings, individual emails. It's the full journey that we spoke about. So you do need to design the journey that you want the customer to experience, and that needs to run through every lifecycle of the customer experience. All right.

Well, before we go any further, we want to make this a little bit interactive. I know there's a lot of people in this room, but... We're going to do it. We're going to do it anyways.

If you currently lead or manage customer success in some way, go ahead and stand up. I apologize. We had to make sure you were awake. It was like your exercise for the day.

All right. I've got one. Stay standing if your team supports more customers today than you did last year and you are expected to maintain retention and grow the customers. I saw no one sit.

Okay. Now, stay standing if your CSMs are constantly balancing the proactive strategic work with the reactive customer requests. Okay. No one sat again.

Day standing if you feel pressure to scale without proportionally scaling headcount. It sounds like you're writing our job descriptions. Okay. This is the last one, and then you can sit.

All right. Stay standing if you feel your current customer success model is fully scalable for where your business is headed for the next few years. All right. So that was the last one, and I imagine that's why you're here in the room and that's why you're here at GainSight.

Okay. So thank you all very much. The trick away here is that we learned that most customer success organizations, they don't have the pleasure of going in and building their success model from scratch. Right?

It's inherited. It's inherited from your sales structure. It's inherited from operationals and early stage decisions that the company was designed. It's inherited from headcount realities.

It's inherited from what worked when the business was smaller. And so we know that that's not going to scale you forward. So your coverage model can't stay static. It has to evolve alongside your customer base, and also it has to evolve alongside what they're actually expecting us to do in our roles.

Right? We have to be able to meet the need of the business. So more magic. I keep looking this way.

I think I'm going to see my screen. All right. So more magic here. We're going to talk about programmatic design.

I like to talk in three if you haven't picked that up already. And so we walk you through the layers, and you've seen, you know, how teams in this room are actively feeling the strain of having to scale. And the question then becomes, okay, I've got all this good stuff, but now what's next? How do I operationalize this part?

So honestly, this is where a lot of scale teams seem to break down, or this is where they fall apart. And so organizations, they often try to scale through humans before they start building the programmatic design. And we want to talk about scaling through humans and coverage ratios. We want to talk about that programmatic design first.

So the reality is your coverage model is only as strong as this design that you put underneath it. So before you start debating, do I have a 50, 50 customers to one season ratio, 500 or so, or something in between, you need to ask yourself, what journeys are automated? What engagement is programmatic? What signals trigger human interaction?

And what experience should the customer have consistently over and over whether or not they speak with the CSM? So that's when we think about this to three core program types. First are the lifecycle programs. These are your foundational journeys.

Some of the things we've already spoken about, like onboarding. So some of those journeys you can, no matter how unique or special, you say your customers are. Each one is. There are certain things that you can take away from that and start building it in a repeatable model.

So think about it from that standpoint. Think about the renewal lifecycle. Think about all of the stages that the customers go through. The second is your thematic programs.

These are the broader plays around customer needs and business priorities. So maybe every week, week and a half, my CRO has a brand new idea for go to market play. Oh, this is recorded. My bad.

So they have. There's always a fun go to market play that comes up. And I'm yay and so excited to go through. So my answer to that is always like a three fold answer.

It's one, I'm going to do something digitally. I'm like, what is marketing doing? How can I join in with them and I could be the call to action to marketing? The second is what workshops do we already have on the calendar where we could embed this in?

Right. And then third, which of these customers do we need to get in front of and make sure they get something customized? So I'm always hearing every type of rollout this way. So that's what I think about when I think about thematic programs.

That's a perfect example of when you need to roll that out or you have any new release features or anything along those lines. The third are intervention programs. We all have it. Again, when I get that lovely call from my CRO, did you see that customer churn?

I did. But do you know they only spend pennies compared to the other one you told me about? And so I'm having to balance that. So I have to have thematic programs and those also include retention or I call it risk mitigation to ensure that those programs are going after those customers as well.

All right. At the end of the day, if it's not programmatic, it is not scalable. That's bottom line. That's true.

That's it. So if they bring you in and say we need you to scale success and they don't want to bite with the things that you're presenting them with, you have to just tell them. If it's not programmatic, it is not going to be scalable. And so once you have these programs in place, they're intentionally designed, you can then start making smarter decisions about how to deploy your humans around them.

Okay. Don't even squint. That is not the expectation you're going to get this asset to take with you. We're not going to go line by line.

We just felt it only right if we told you about all these lovely things that we also talked to you about, some of the programs that Julie and I have seen. So on the far left, you're going to see the traditional assigned CSM role. This is the model that organizations start with. Every customer is having a named CSM.

There's strong relationship and strong ownership there. This is the one that I think they were most comfortable with innately as human beings. But as customer accounts grow, you can't scale this, right? It becomes really, really difficult and then it turns into a reactive motion instead.

In the middle, you see the pool model. This shifts us away from that fixed ownership and leans heavy into that digital communication, digital programs, life cycle driven engagement. And this model, it may scale extremely well with a long tail, but if you don't do it right, your customers are going to feel disconnected. They feel anonymous.

It's just another email, basically. All right. And then on the far right, it's the hybrid model. We're seeing a lot more organizations tend towards this model.

This combines lighter ownership plus signal driven engagement. So instead of trying to provide the same depth to every customer equally, teams are focusing that human interaction where it matters most. So the important takeaway on this is there's no right, there's no wrong way to do this. It's best if this model really depends on like your customer complexity, your operational capabilities, your segment strategy, et cetera.

So biggest takeaway is this really should be designed, not inherited. Right? When you do this, I want you to know that it can change. It can evolve.

You don't have to stay with the same thing just because it was there last year, just like your KPIs evolve every year, right? So those are things that you don't want to get stuck in. I rolled this out. I put in all this work.

You have to take the risk. You have to pilot. I know I was talking to somebody at lunch. I used to do pilots for six months at a time.

Then it was three months at a time. Now on the role of AI, some of my pilots are every 30 days. I'm trying to see if I can drive those proper outcomes to see if this is the right thing for us to continue. So I say all that to say you're looking at different coverage models.

The question becomes, how do you decide which one is right for you? These are five things that you should take into consideration when you're thinking about which model is right for my organization. The key takeaway on this one is if you scale the wrong thing and you scale it fast, all you're doing is scaling your problems. So take the time to build that programmatic design underneath it.

All righty. I'm going to speed up here. Lastly, program strength is really important. And so I want to give you something else to take away, design principles.

These are important for you to think about. Number one, as you think about design, don't design effort. Route your effort. Number two, when you think about this, don't default to human engagement.

Earn that human engagement. I know that's a hard one for people to understand, but when you start showing results to that, then they fall back. They're like, oh, my gosh, that's working really well. Sometimes it's really hard to say no.

The third one is don't say static. Evolve with your business. And the fourth, end of the day, customers don't really care about your org chart. They don't care.

All they care about is are they realizing value, are they making progress, are they achieving the outcomes. And so that takes us to outcomes. Because this will not be successful. We won't be in place if we're not driving the outcomes that the business is looking for.

Julie? Thank you. So we've talked a lot about designing the right model, layering engagement intentionally, and deploying human interactions where it creates the most impact. But none of those work without measurement.

Because once you move into more scaled and signal driven approaches, you can't rely only on what customers explicitly tell you. You have to start learning from what they're actually doing. How are they using their product? How are they engaging with your help center, with your community?

Are they using your academy and things like that? This is one of the biggest shifts that we're seeing right now. Behavior is becoming the new voice of the customer. So product usage starts to tell you whether your customers are realizing value.

Engagement signals, like I mentioned, start to tell you whether they're progressing through that journey. And support and community activity helps to surface any friction that they're having. And ideally, you're able to use that to design and anticipate what their needs are versus them having to come to you and ask the questions. You're able to remove the friction.

Behavioral patterns are often what can reveal the most risk or expansion opportunities long before a survey or a renewal conversation even comes up. So measurements become much less about looking backwards, the lagging indicators, and more about identifying the leading indicators that tell you when you need to intervene, and you're able to do that a lot earlier and more intentionally. This is where digital CS has become incredibly powerful. Because once you can recognize the behavioral patterns at scale, you stop reacting to customers after the problems happen, and you're guiding them proactively towards value.

Once you start measuring behavioral signals, the next question becomes, what are we actually trying to measure here? What are we trying to measure the customers towards? What does value actually mean? We hear that word thrown around all the time.

One of the biggest traps in customer success is confusing activity with value. A customer attending trainings, logging in frequently, or opening emails does not automatically mean that they're successful. Those things matter, but they're inputs, not outcomes. Real value is about customer progress.

It's about whether customers are moving faster towards something meaningful. It's about adopting workflows that create measurable business impact, not just logins, and clearly understanding what the product is helping them to achieve. That's why we think about value across a few different dimensions. First, time to value.

How quickly can customers experience and achieve meaningful momentum and outcomes after they purchase? And that doesn't just have to be the first purchase. That can be any expansion, any growth throughout the journey. Second is deeper product adoption.

Are customers expanding into the workflows and capabilities that actually drive business impact? Again, looking at the depth versus just looking at the monthly active users. Third is clear customer outcomes. Can the customer confidently articulate the value that they are receiving?

Can they answer the question, what did this product actually help us to achieve? All of that drives the outcome most organizations care deeply about, predictable retention. It's about customers consistently realizing value, life cycle. That is the mindset shift that we continue to see across scaled customer success.

Value is not measured by customer activity. It's measured by customer progress. And we're also starting to see CS teams being measured by these things. So it's less about the activity that the customer's success team is having, how many emails are they sending, how many touches, how many meetings, and more about the actual metrics that drive the business.

So if we take a step back from all the tactics, tools, automation, this is really the model that we see working across modern CS orgs, not just at Highlander Miro, but across companies that are trying to scale customer value more intentionally. It starts with life cycle design. Intentional journeys built around customer milestones, outcomes, moments that matter. Then comes signals and intelligence.

Because behavioral data gives us visibility into the customer momentum, things like friction that can signal risk, opportunity, long before a renewal conversation would ever come. It allows teams to act proactively instead of reactively. And finally, the human engagement piece here. This is where I think many organizations are making one of the biggest mindset shifts.

Human interaction does not become less important in digital CS. It actually becomes more intentional. Focused on the moments where people help create the greatest impact. So now instead of just having the monthly or quarterly cadence, you can actually use the signals and the data to say, "These are the customers that need my attention.

These are the customers that I need to spend more time on." It allows you to go much deeper with them. When these three things work together, intentional journeys, intelligent signals, and meaningful human engagement, organizations create experiences that feel both scalable as well as deeply customer-centric. When this is done well, customers achieve value faster, times the value. Teams identify risk earlier.

That's going to impact your net revenue retention. Experiences feel more connected. This plays into the whole customer experience. And human engagement becomes more meaningful because it's focused again where it creates the greatest impact.

That's what great digital CS actually creates. It creates more confidence. Confidence from customers that they're moving in the right direction and they're spending their time and their resources in appropriate ways. Confidence from teams that they're focusing their time where it matters most.

And confidence from the business that CS is driving real impact at scale. Truly, I think this is that we're still very early in this whole journey and what this space can become. We have the opportunity to fundamentally change the trajectory of customer success, to move beyond reactive support models and create experiences that are more proactive, more human, and more impactful at scale than ever before. The organizations that are getting this right, they are not just going to improve the NRR or efficiency, but they're actually redefining what great customer experiences actually look like.

All right. We did it. All right. Lots of questions coming in.

Great job, you guys. Magical, if I may say so. I really like the way you broke that down just at the foundational levels and then shifting into the detail of how to break down the different models and into outcomes. So great job.

I know I'm going to get requests for slides after this. Thank you. They're coming. They'll be on the Pulse library.

All right. We'll go ahead and shift into Q&A here. So go ahead and feel free to log your questions in Slido, but we've got some queued up. So our first one here.

How do you drive customers into one to many engagements like your onboarding workshops? I've done this at a couple of companies, and it can be challenging to get a lot of attendance at these workshops, right? So you've definitely got to be creative. I know that, like, around the holiday time, it was about what subject line we put in the emails that we sent for the invites.

I've used videos before, ones that I've had going ongoing. We would highlight customers that were repeat and kind of highlight them on LinkedIn and highlight them in the invitation. We also did giveaways as well. But another thing is if you're just now starting this at an organization, think of your other cross-functional parties, like your sales team.

Hey, you've got this going on. You just sold this customer, your implementation team. Make sure they know to come to this onboarding workshop. These are the three things they're going to get from this.

If they're anything like me, I ignore a lot of emails. You better tell me quick and fast what exactly is I'm going to get from taking time to speak with you. It's not personal. It's not intentional.

But if you can show them some type of hook or some type of catch, that draws it up and you advertise it in multiple different ways. You're definitely a fan of the three. You're a fan of the three. I'm picking up on my fans.

Oh, yeah. I didn't realize that. Darn it. All right.

So next up here, from your experience, what are the internal teams to collaborate with that are crucial for Scaled CS model success and why? So in Scaled CS, you really are interacting with a number of teams. That's one of my favorite parts about this work that we do. We get to interact with ops.

We interact a lot with product teams and marketing. I think being able to be more part of the overall go to market function and be able to not only craft the story and the messaging around what we're bringing to market, but also like what's going to happen after we launch this thing? How are we implementing it? How are we onboarding?

How are we making sure that we are achieving value throughout the experience and collecting the data, whether that's through surveys, whether that's through the behavioral intent signals, whatever it is. But that collaboration goes both ways. So being able to not only work with those teams, but also give back feedback to them to make sure that we are sharing the patterns that we're finding. I think that's one of my favorite things about Scaled CS is that because of the volume, we have the luxury of being able to see patterns a lot faster than other areas of the business.

So I think it's really an important part of this is that we bring that back to them to say, hey, here are the signals that we're seeing. Here's the patterns. Here's the issues with the friction. How can we design this in a way to reduce that friction?

I work very, very closely with sales teams. I work with the other CS functions. I think making sure that you're delivering consistency across the customer experience. So whether a customer is in a very high touch model or whether they are in a digital first model, regardless, they all need to achieve value and make sure that they're achieving their outcomes.

So making sure that there is consistency across those customer experiences is really important. Can I add to that? Of course. The other thing is if you have a scale program that's already in motion, it's really good to partner with your renewals team if you have a renewals team.

Because the renewals team will tell you what's happening in real time and what's causing you to lose retention. And then you can go back and reflect and see if you need to tinker with some of the signals that you're using to monitor behavior. I think I could literally name every department. I'm like sitting here going through the list of like interacting with education team, the community team.

It's with finance. I mean, there's so many teams that you're interacting with. And so I think the piece here is also not getting lost in that. Being able to develop and understand what your strategy is, what your purpose is, and then the teams that are most important for you to be working closely with.

Love that. All righty. You described a three-layer model, digital by default, one-to-many engagements, and signal-driven human intervention. For teams just starting to shift away from a purely reactive calendar-based motion, which of these three layers do you recommend building?

Why? Digital. Digital by default. So even if you build this program and you have a low, like, open rate, say it's 30% or something like that, it's still better.

You still save some time. You still have something foundational to where even if your CSM is talking to them, they can relate back to that digital communication. But the digital, always on, because you're saying, "Hey, welcome to our organization. Here's how you can reach us." Something as simple as that.

They didn't have it before. So by far, and then I can go on and on on that. What digital do you want to add? No, I agree completely.

I think digital allows you to create that consistent experience. It allows you to see the patterns so that then as you are developing what your other models look like, you know how to best deploy resources and staff accordingly. Awesome. Okay.

In a hybrid model, describe what might move an account from not having a name CSM into light ownership by a CSM and how often does that get reassessed? Daily? No. I've been at companies where in one year we redone the model three times in one year before.

Oh my gosh. And that was a lot. I think, again, we talked on the screen that you have to think about your product maturity, your company maturity, all of the things. And also what you're being dealt with.

What are some of the expectations that you are expected to achieve? And then that should lead to some of this as well. I think it really depends. I think that depending on how much you have built and what the more automated and digital experience looks like also factors into how much you need on the human side.

And so I think that's really where maybe early on it is a little bit more hybrid where you have a maybe a focus group of customers where it's like, okay, based on timing of renewal or risk signals, things like that. These are the accounts that we want you to focus on in addition to the pooled model as more and more is built out those focused accounts. It's probably going to get smaller and smaller because ideally you have more customers that are automatically getting what they need when they need it. Yeah, probably it ties back to like kind of the idea of piloting, testing things out.

Yeah, the idea is you graduate them to that level. So depending on where you are at a company, you may put an ARR cut on it. You may look at it by where they are in the life cycle. They've been with us for a while.

They have the same admins for a while. We feel good with that. It really takes a lot of dependencies on your organization. So again, there's no right or wrong.

All right. How much time did it take for you to be where you are today with digital customer success? So what a question. So in my experience, I've worked at a couple different companies where I was more of like a general leader and digital kept being kind of my passion project that as I was building and leading teams that were very high touch strategic teams.

I was realizing that it wasn't working very well, that there was a lot that we were trying to do. And as I'm listening to calls and things like that, I'm seeing a lot of inconsistencies. So a lot of it I started just building behind the scenes because there was such a need. And then that became a career path that I chose where it was truly like I'm obsessed with this.

I want to get to a point where this is all that I am focused on and I'm able to have an enormous impact with it within an organization. The cool thing about digital and scaled CS is that it is still evolving. We are still in the infant phase here. There's still so much that we're learning and there's truly like we're standing here on stage next year.

You could be standing on stage, not joking. This is moving at such a rapid pace that nobody has it figured out. And if you haven't figured out right now, you're still going to be learning tomorrow. There's so much.

You've got 30 days. But I think it's just it evolves so quickly. And so it is a high paced, fast environment. I love that.

I know it's not for everybody, but it's also really good for growth because it gives you the opportunity to try things, see if it's working. If it's not working, throw it out, try something different. But it also gives you the opportunity to learn from others in the industry to ideally learn from their lessons so that you don't have to learn everything through your own journey. I hope you keep your eye on this team.

I want to say before you give them a state-of-the-art look, could you write this? That would be great to happen. At that point, hopefully if you don't share some family on our team. You're right.

And when you try to teach your family clients, it's only for some along track time to make sure that it's sticking out. fast. my current company for about a year and a half, and you know, I'm a disruptor. But I came in, and so for the first quarter, it was just like sitting, observing, taking in all that knowledge.

The way to be the most positive disruptor is as you sit in and take that knowledge, you're still being empathetic, but you tie it to the data, and you make some bets. And you know, I like to make three bets. So I make my bets, and I say, this is what we're going to do. Do you agree with me?

And you're going to all those stakeholders that align with you, so you're going to the CRO, you're going to the CCO, you're going to whomever that is with that company to make sure you're locked step, because you're going to have to keep repeating this to them over and over and over again when they ask you to do something that's completely outside of that filter that you've just created. That's the lightest way I can answer it. Meet me after, and we can talk about it. (audience laughing) Okay, you made the point that most CS organizations, oh, I lost it, let's see.

You argued, sorry, you argued the traditional CSM metrics like MPS and NRR are lagging indicators that surface risk too late. What leading indicators such as product telemetry, community engagement, or education activity provided the earliest and most reliable signals that a customer was heading off track? In my experience, I think the best signals are that behavioral intent data, being able to actually understand what customers are doing. Part of that, you have to work really closely with product in order to really design and say, hey, what's the intention here?

How often should people be using this? How deep should they be going? Things like that. To be able to give you some sort of benchmarking around the wiggle or what good looks like.

So I think, again, it depends here, but I think it's really a combination of all of this. Ideally, you're looking at all of it. You're looking at the product telemetry to understand what customers are doing or not doing. I think support data and help center data is also a goldmine of information because you literally have customers that are typing into the little bar, asking the questions that they need answered.

And now we can handle that in a reactive way through support, through ticket queues, and things like that. We can also use that information to pull from that and say, I'm going to design experiences that solve these questions or answer these questions along the way so that people don't have to go to support, they don't have to go to the help center. So I think using all of that information to really kind of craft the experience, remove as much friction as you can, can help you a lot. And then I think from the NRR standpoint, how it's actually leading to retention and growth, expansion, all of these things.

I think, again, it's a combination of how all of these things are compounding together. Just because people are showing up to a webinar, just because people are clicking on links in an email doesn't mean that they're going to renew. And so ideally you're building a system that is also in some way measuring at scale how you're achieving value. So you're doing some sort of surveying, something where you're able to capture and understand the outcomes that a customer cares about, whether you collected that at the time of the sale.

Ideally you're collecting it not only then, but you're also talking about it during onboarding and implementation. You're also surveying throughout the experience that you know exactly what your customer cares about and then you can measure based on that to actually be able to tell the story around ROI. That takes time, it's probably not the fastest win, but it is something that does a really, really good job of giving you indicators of, yes, these customers are highly engaged and getting value out of our solution. Okay, winding down here, maybe one or two more.

So how do you identify and monitor that customers are actually attaining outcomes that translate to value in a digital CSM model with one to many scenarios? Did you approve these loaded questions? (audience laughs) So this has a lot of answers to it, I would say. One is if you're doing the one to many workshops, of course you have surveys and things of that after, but you can also look at the overall metrics of your book of business.

Are these customers staying with us? Yes, that means you kind of assume that your programming is working, they're getting value. Are these customers organically growing with us? Yes, that means you're assuming that they're getting the organic value.

But additionally, are your signals that are triggering your CSMs to engage? Do you have concrete examples that show that? So I just did a QBR last Friday and I was able to share examples in each one of those pillars to say, "Hey, this signal triggered, here's $345,000 we added because of these signals." Just giving them some examples. So I was able to do that in each one of them to show that value.

We could show this is the value we drove for the customer off cycle, and this is the millions of dollars that we drove for the customer before they actually are at renewal time. So we're showing all of those things. Those are two important metrics for me, but I'm just like, "We not only brought you this many millions of dollars, but we did this off cycle and we did this at renewals." This customer was a part of our programming and they responded A, B, C. There's also some in-app ways that I look at this on doing surveys and things of that nature, not just your standard MPS survey, but surveys that ask questions to my CSMs can make one solid statement, because you are using this product in this way to get this outcome.

You are saving this amount of dollars, whether that's getting you to market faster or in labor dollars. I'm gonna add to that. And the only thing I'll add, just because you mentioned the in-product or in-app stuff, one of my favorite things is not just using it as a way to survey customers, but also creating true guides where now you're getting the information back of how far are they getting through this. If you have a six-click guide and you can see that customers are spending time and making their way through it, versus stopping at the first click.

That helps get you ideas of, is this resonating? Are they actually taking it through this workflow versus just they saw something and they immediately x'd out of it. And so again, not just looking at what are the pop-ups that we can do, but how can we actually integrate this into their workflow to actually help them and provide support to them, guidance to them of, hey, here's the courses that we recommend, or here's a article here or a case study or things like that, that's actually connecting them to the right information. Okay, why don't we close it out there?

That was fantastic. Thank you so much for all those insights. (audience applauding) Yes, could you please complete the survey that's in the app as well? That would be greatly appreciated.

Please. And-- She's competitive. (laughing) Give us feedback, please. And we'll see you at the next session.

Thanks, everybody.