Signs You Need to Scale: Building Self-Service for the Bottom Line
2026 is coming and revenue per headcount will be top of your execs' minds. You're asked to increase your CSM ratios while taking on commercial responsibilities, as your customer base grows. So how do you take on these challenges? By investing in programs that will scale customer adoption and self-service, you'll drive necessary outcomes while respecting gross margin. In this session, Adam Avramescu will share experiences working with companies such as Optimizely, Checkr, Slack, and Personio through various stages of growth who saw the need to drive scalable self-service through educational programs, communities, digital customer success, and more. You'll learn how to position these solutions with your leadership, evaluate which programs to put in place, and avoid common mistakes at each stage. You'll walk out ready to find the right tools for your business and customers -- and hopefully save some pain along the way!
Hello, everybody.
Thanks.
Thanks all for joining.
So happy to see so many familiar faces here.
But super excited to welcome all of you here in Amsterdam again.
Also, welcome to those who are new.
I'm an Enterprise CSM for Gainside.
I work at the community product.
So today in our track here, where it's
all about empowering customers to help themselves.
This is, of course, my track that I'll be also hosting today.
And we're kicking ourselves with an amazing session.
I'm super excited about this session, actually,
because Pissonia is actually one of my customers.
And they're doing amazing things.
So check out their community.
Just shameless advertisement there as well.
The presentation will be shared with you.
The recordings will be shared.
So don't panic about zooming in quickly enough to take a picture.
We've got that covered.
There's a Q&A at the end of the session.
You can go to the Pulse app, go to the track, go to the session.
Go to the Q&A section.
Please ask questions.
At the end, we will have enough time
to cover all of these questions in more detail.
So hopefully we can also help you further even more.
I should stop speaking, and I should actually welcome Adam.
Adam Iromesco, who is the VP of Customer Education.
[APPLAUSE]
Hello, everyone.
I don't know why I just ran.
I'm now going to be out of breath for a second of this presentation.
It's great to see everyone here.
And I am equally thrilled in this self-service track,
because that tells me that there's a lot of interest
in figuring out how we can really scale the way
that we support and serve our customers.
So as much as possible, I'm going to try
to answer some questions around how we do that,
how I've done that in the past, because this
is a big part of what Julian mentioned.
I am the VP of Scale CX at Prosonio.
That's a new title.
Previously, I was VP of Customer Education and Engagement.
But by and large, the things that we've
been working on at Prosonio have remained
on a pretty constant trajectory.
So try to talk about some of those things.
Previously, I've also built and led Customer Education
and Optimizely Checker Slack.
So if you have questions about how we did some of those things
and some of those other companies,
I'm also happy to answer those.
Before I jump into the slides, because I
do want to make sure that this is relevant to everyone.
I've designed this presentation to be right.
Hey, you know what?
I think I need to make some investments in self-service.
Maybe there's some things we're doing already,
but I don't know what's next.
But I want to know who everyone is so that we can make sure
that this is actually relevant to you.
So maybe we can do some quick hand raise.
How many CS leaders do we have in the room?
OK, good.
So a lot of target audience.
And of those, the question that you have on your mind,
I think I want to invest more into self-service.
How do I do it?
Yeah.
OK, cool.
Who do we have here who maybe is already
a customer education leader or practitioner?
OK, a few of you.
Community practitioner?
OK, more of you.
Great.
Digital CS or CX?
Wow.
Cool room.
All right, this is going to be fun.
So with all that said, we've heard a lot of '80s and '90s
references already being thrown around here.
And if you thought that that saying was cool,
let's talk about the coolest term that we're going to hear
that's on trend right now, ARR per FTE.
That's revenue per employee.
Why is that a cool term this year?
Because every business, including ours,
is thinking about efficiency in the coming years.
How to continue to serve our customers in a way that still
respects gross margin.
And the fact is, there are many investments we could make.
I've already talked about the idea of us investing in self-service.
And that's true.
It is an investment.
But you're going to have to think about that.
In terms of other investments, you could make.
What about new AI tools?
What about investing in more headcount in certain areas?
What about building out your systems and data teams?
In the past, in the ZERP era, the zero interest rate
environment, we could make a lot of big bets
because we could afford to fund which ones stuck.
But now we don't have as much spaghetti
to throw at the wall.
So we've gone from the ZERP era to what I call the NERP era,
which is that we don't necessarily
have all the investments that we could make.
So our thinking has to change from literally be
experimental and try as many investments as we can,
and then a loop of investment to a different way of thinking.
And a very wise SAS leader put it to me this way.
They said, think about ROI.
We can't necessarily think about purely the return
on the investment itself.
We have to think about whether we can invest at all.
So part of what we're talking about here
is how you can continue to grow in a way that will give yourself
room to make investments that will pay.
So we have to think about what those lovers are that
can really make it work.
What investments would you make with the people that you have
if you have to continue to grow your revenue
without increasing your head count?
How are you going to make that work?
Are you going to increase the ratios or the quotas of the existing
team that you have so they can serve more customers,
handle more tickets?
Oh, I didn't ask who's a support leader in this room.
Support?
Would you invest in AI tools to drive increased productivity?
These are all things that we need to make investments in.
But I also want to call out that when we think about self-service,
there are already some proven approaches that we can rely on.
And before we completely bank on new tools that
are still developing themselves more,
there are things that SAS businesses, software businesses,
and frankly, most B2B businesses have been investing in
and have been shown to work.
So let's paint a vision.
What if, in terms of first value, you
could empower customers to get to first value with less hander
path to value?
In terms of adoption, can you help customers achieve their outcomes
by offering the right values just find what they need instead
of focusing on them having a delightful support
interaction?
And in terms of peer service, what
if you can tap customers into each other's brains
to build a community that helps them serve each other
in a way that your company might not even know, right?
Customers themselves know a lot of hacks,
workarounds, tips, tricks, use cases
that you might not have even built into your own internal
knowledge.
That's what we're building here.
That was like the McWorld, hey, it could happen.
Hey, it could happen.
OK.
So what I'm seeing is that many businesses
are making an investment in pulling several surfaces
together with one mandate to do just this.
And these pieces that you see up here historically
have often been in different parts of the organization.
Some have lived in customer success.
Some have lived in support organizations.
Some have lived in services.
No one.
OK, I'm not going to talk about PS.
All right.
Some in marketing.
Some in-- I think I said all of them.
Increasingly, companies are pulling these together
into one team or one organization.
And that organization is typically
called something like customer education, scale or scaled
CS or scaled CX.
Those are some of the names that we've used.
Sometimes it's all called one that
might all be called community in some places.
But the point is that these functions here that you see
help docs, easily accessible references
that customers can find pulling those together with Academy.
What are the linear training programs
that customers can have?
Pulled together with community, connecting customers
to each other, and with digital CS.
What are the ways that we use automated outreach
to our customers based on data to engage with key points
through their lifecycle?
Or based on-- already be thinking,
there are already some very obvious seeming overlaps
between these areas.
Because what a lot of these programs are doing
is they are producing content that
can help customers achieve certain outcomes.
But if that content exists in the world,
but customers aren't able to find it,
or they aren't able to find it at the right point in time
based on their needs, then why did we
produce all of that content?
So there's a lot of synergy, if I can use that word,
in bringing these programs together.
But don't take it for-- if you're
tempted to take a picture of these, you can,
but I think it's available--
don't take it for me, like the outcomes
of pulling these programs together
and of investing in programs like customer education
are quantified.
They have been studied.
They have been measured.
And we see that for businesses who
make investments in customer education,
they're seeing an increase in adoption of products.
They're seeing an increase in engagement, customer satisfaction.
They're seeing fewer support-- some rough figures
from personio, from the investments
that we've made over the years as well.
And it goes beyond that as well to some
of the lagging indicators that we see further out
into the business that you might not even think necessary.
So lifetime value, win rates, retention rates--
these are the things that we really
guess is not an unproven concept.
This is something that businesses have been doing.
It's an investment worth making if you're willing to make it.
So we'll talk about some signs that might indicate to you
whether you should make that investment, how to think--
so these aren't magic numbers, right?
You do have to invest in building these programs.
You're going to need, at some point, people who do this work
as specialists.
You're going to need someone who is a specialist
in customer education.
Maybe it's a customer education leader.
Maybe it's an instructional designer.
You're going to need someone who's an expert in community--
community leader, community manager, for instance.
Digital CF, who are digital CS program managers,
they're very familiar with the tools, the automations.
They're more comfortable with digging into the data
and building automations than the average CSM would be.
And you're going to need systems that underpin it.
You're going to need some sort of learning management system.
You're going to need a community platform.
You're going to need some sort of CS in app campaigns.
And you're going to need to market the program,
because again, it doesn't really matter so much what content
you create if you don't have a way for customers to actually
find that content at a moment of need.
So this is why ultimately I see a lot of people
fail right at the jump, is because they say, hey,
you know what, I kind of want to do these things.
But then, but don't really invest in the people or the systems
or the marketing that is going to ultimately make
these programs work.
So by that token as well, it means you're not necessarily
going to want to build everything that I'm
going to talk about at once.
We're going to need to figure out how we get from where we are
to where we want to be.
So how do you know if you're ready?
We're going to talk about signs that you know you're ready.
But sometimes you don't want me to stand up on the stage
and say, it depends.
Because a lot of this is about to be, and it depends.
But if you want some rules of thumb,
if you want something more certain, here it is.
Are you doing above 20 million ARR?
You probably at this point need to have
moved past doing ad hoc education and ad hoc service
and have started to have some definable repeatable program.
Are you at above 150 plus employees?
Probably at that point, you should have one person, at least,
doing customer education, by which, I mean,
broad-good digital CX as well.
But you should probably have at least one person at that point
doing this as their job.
Do you support both admins and end users?
Because when you have a very distributed user model,
where you and your team are not necessarily
talking to every end user who might be responsible for using
the product and making your product successful,
well, then you can't necessarily rely only
on the people at your organization who are talking one
to one to customers.
You need to invest in something scalable.
But yes, actually, it does depend.
So what are the signs that you're ready for self-service?
Let's look into some of them.
I'm going to give you six.
And we'll talk about some of the ways that we detect them.
I'll talk about some of the things
that I've done in the past, or reasons why businesses have
brought me in to try to help solve these problems.
And I think we're also going to have Q&A going soon.
So I really want to take a lot of--
so sign number one is that you see the demand increasing,
but the capacity is not increasing.
This is the ARR per FTE problem that we talked about earlier.
So you're going to be able to blow up
the size of your CSM or support team.
Your customer base is increasing above the rate
of your ability to grow your own headcount.
That is a really clear sign.
And to me, it means you should invest in a scale engine.
And I often talk about, if you want,
like a nice buzzword, some self-service programs
are a scale engine for the way that you serve your customers.
Because when you create content, when
you serve them through automations,
you can ultimately reach more customers
than you can just by having humans who even really
smart talented humans who are able to reach out to customers
because those humans only have so many hours in their day
to do that.
And if you are looking at this, the question
that to ask yourself is, how can I get crawling before I run?
So like I said, you're eventually
going to need specialists in place.
You're eventually getting systems in place.
What if you only have CSMs and support agents
and you have not made your first customer education
or community or digital hire?
Well, you can start with a hypothesis.
So look at what are the areas that
are driving very questions that are continuing to come in
that your support agents are answering over and over.
CSMs are probably training on certain topics over and over.
These are the areas that are generally
going to be the first area where you
can have a very clear hypothesis to say,
this is an area where we are driving a lot our own humans.
If I produce this type of content or this type of program,
and I'm going to talk about exactly what those programs are
in a moment, if I produce this type of content,
this type of program, and serve it to the customer
at this point, let's see whether we
can bring that corresponding type of support ticket down.
Let's see if we can reduce the amount of time CSMs spend
in training or retraining.
Let's see if we can bring that down.
As a research investment in a full program,
you're actually seeing-- you're validating in a more targeted
way.
Does a targeted customer education or self-service intervention
actually work?
And that's going to let you tell a more specific story
to your business, and it's going to give you a more specific
signal on whether it's time for you to even invest in this or not.
When I was at Optimizely, we tested
this by building a very short training series where we produced
three videos, just three videos.
And those videos weren't hosted by professional video hosts.
They were hosted by three of our technical account managers,
who were our equivalent of CSMs at the time,
because this was like the very early days of CS when not everyone
had CSM titles.
And we published those not to a learning management system,
but to our Help Center.
And then we did an email campaign to get customers who
were onboarding into those three trainings.
And then we said, by doing this, how can we reduce the amount
of time spent from all the other technical account
managers, from implementations, from CSMs?
And we were able to scale that out to customers who didn't
necessarily have a one-to-one technical account manager
assigned to them.
That's the shape of an experiment that you could run.
And to investments and systems, you
can also do it without making huge investment in content.
So Help Center articles, product walkthrough videos,
a point in time email campaign.
If you're not ready to do bigger, more automated,
ongoing things, those are good places to start,
because they have a low cost entry.
Because there are a lot of intuitive sounding things,
things that sound like really good ideas, that sometimes end up
not being such good ideas, or they come with trade-offs.
So to help you see around some corners,
we'll do some, why can't we just?
And these are going to be my old man yells at cloud moments.
So why can't we just have a supporter, agent, or CSM
create content on the side?
Well, you can do that at first.
You can.
But if you try to do that for too long,
some things are going to happen.
One is that make sure that if you are going to have someone
conducted and is protected to actually focus
on running that experiment, otherwise,
it's going to get subsumed by their other activities.
So make sure that they have the time to do it.
And then looking down the road, also make sure that even
if you're having someone ring-fence their time
to run an experiment, also you'll need to ask yourself,
is this also someone who I would expect
to be able to do a fancier, more sophisticated, full-time version
of this role in the future?
Because often what I'm talking to people
who have made investments in the types of programs
that I'm talking about, they say, hey, yeah,
we brought over our CSM or our sport agent who
had a great passion for training,
or these are the people who really liked
writing docs on the side, don't know
how to do this professionally.
So at that point, you may need to bring in as well someone
who is more experienced or a leader for that team.
Not always the case, sometimes-- OK, side number two.
Your contact rates are over 9,000.
Contact rates are out of control.
Many of us see a rising customer contact rate.
And by contact rate here, I mean the number of support tickets
that come into you--
so it's tickets per customer.
That's an obvious sign to invest in self-service,
because there is really no other way out of a rising contact
rate besides either hiring more support agents
to a number of touch points your customers have to contact you
at all, which is going to trigger dissatisfaction,
or investing in better ways for customers
to actually self-serve.
And especially, I think, is about functionality.
So if you're seeing a lot of bugs or a lot of incident tickets,
maybe that's not a sign that you should actually invest so much
in self-service, because bugs and incidents
are harder to solve with content.
Like, how do I execute this use case?
What does this feature do?
Probably a good sign that if customers
are able to self-serve those questions, often they will.
So it also doesn't just mean creating the content itself,
but also making sure that it is really
discoverable to customers at Help Center.
Is your Help Center indexed in Search,
meaning both like an internal search in your product,
that might look across different knowledge sources
to serve relevant content, but also,
this is going to be trying from all those rate every time
it updates, too.
One strategy that I've used in pretty much every program
that I've built is to make sure that the content in our Help
Center, which sometimes feels risky,
because you're like, oh, what if my competitors see it?
Or, oh, what if we're talking about bugs in our product?
Or what if we're talking about workarounds?
And generally, those risks have never
outweighed the value of making content highly
discoverable for customers.
Because again, customers will search for things.
And if customers can find them easily, they will self-serve.
And we see that.
At Optimizely, we were living in a world
where our customers were really struggling
to self-serve.
We released a Help Center community and academy
that we all brought together under one name.
We called it the Optiverse.
We've done something very similar at Personao.
We've brought those same types of programs together,
and we call it Personao Voyager.
It helps, in my opinion, to make it branded,
because it's easier to remember for customers, like, oh,
I just go to Voyager, and then I'll search,
and then I'll find what I'm looking for.
At Optimizely, after we released that,
we were looking at it month over month
in the three months after we released our Optiverse.
The contact rate had fallen to--
that's a really dramatic outcome,
because we basically had nothing,
and then we went to something really good.
But you don't necessarily need to make
that big of an investment to get that big of a drop from day one.
The long-term effects can also be pretty staggering.
At Personao, if you look at the days before we
invested in anything like this, if you
want to look back three, four years,
compared to where we are today, today we
are at less than half of the contact rate
that we were at back then with a massively increased
customer pool.
So typically, the visual that you want to do for this
is you want to be measuring the growth of your customer base
on one hand, right?
That's going to be going up into the right, ideally.
Ideally.
And then you're going to have your contact rate
on the other side, and that's going to be stabilizing
or going down.
In a Personao, we have been able to bring the customer contact
rate down over time.
For customers to be able to contact us,
because we've needed to get that more under control over time.
But a lot of that has been increased investments
in self-service.
And what we've noticed is even over the past and actually
contact us, in fact, they've had pretty much the same entry
points that they have had before.
Our contact rate has continued to decline.
We've even made-- done certain experiments
and made certain investments in making it easier
to be able to contact support when you want to contact support.
And contact rate still continues to decline relative
to our customer base growth.
And that, to me, talks about some of the compounding
and long-term--
To do this, you're going to need the right tools for the job.
So I think of these in a few different categories.
There's your actual sources of truth.
Like, where is the content actually going to be?
Where are the answers to the questions the customers are
asking?
That would be typically a help center and a community.
Help center or documentation-- that's usually
the first thing that most people do.
You can make it better over time by looking at what customers
are up voting and down voting and using that to triage
how you improve your articles.
You can look at what types of support tickets
customers are filing and use that to prioritize the content
that you create.
Typically, that's where you're going to start.
One too-master source of truth for self-service as well,
but it has some other benefits.
But then, again, you need to make them discoverable.
And there, I think, two things that I'm seeing a lot of companies
do, and we're doing a fair bit of this as well.
Chat and contextual help.
So if you have a chatbot, for instance,
make sure that the content that you're creating
either customer is asking.
And contextual help as well, even though we saw a bunch of really
cool-- I was super inspired this morning looking at the demo
of the autopilot, where the customer was asking these questions
and getting served community threads and help center
articles and academy courses.
But idea of where in your product customers
are going to struggle to do something.
You generally know what the friction points are.
And how do you know what the friction points are,
either because that's where the support tickets are coming in.
That's what CSMs are always training on.
Or that's where your product team might even
be doing keep mapping analytics if you're using an in-product
either the clicks are going or this is where customers are dropping off.
And if you have that data, you can actually use that
to prioritize, often working with your product team,
or by working with an in-app tool like GainSight PX.
We use one called Stonley.
There's a lot of tools that do this.
So I'm not going to advocate for one over the other.
But the point is, you can use them that customers can opt into
at the moment of need.
And what we see when we do this, and even when the product team does it
natively by putting a tool tip in themselves,
is that will instantly spike traffic to our help center,
if we've done it right.
So that's an indication, again, that customers are looking for help
in key places.
And often, those are the single most highly--
but then you can even get fancier, right?
You can actually target customers and trigger not just
service-based information to them, but also
inspire them about different ways to use the product.
And here is where you can add things like life cycle
and trigger-based campaigns.
Life cycle, meaning I'm at a certain point in my customer journey.
I'm three months from contract signed.
At this point, generally, we are reaching out and trying
to train our customers on this thing.
Well, we can also run campaigns, right, through email
or through in-app, that reach out to our customers
at that same time to try to peak their interest.
And often, we can release those campaigns to more people
than we're able to talk to manually.
Or we can do it by segment, where, for instance, our CSMs
can reach out to customers in our largest segment,
where they have a very strong relationship
with the point of contact.
But when we start getting into our very small accounts,
if you're a 20-person company, we're an HR tech company.
You don't have an HR person necessarily
if you're a 20-person company, right?
It's like you're like the CEO running HR off an email.
We have a higher chance of getting
you to pay attention to that than if we were to keep
trying to reach out to you in some other way.
Trigger-based can also be, do we see adoption signals?
Do we see risk signals?
Are there certain parts of the product
that you aren't using that you should be using,
based on whether you have done or haven't done those things
that we can reach out to you that way?
Number three, small customers fail to adopt and then churn.
So I was getting into this a moment ago.
Small accounts work differently from large accounts.
I don't feel like I shouldn't have to go to a conference
to say that.
I don't know why.
It was really simple.
OK.
Small-cut size, there are different feature sets
that customers need to use to be successful.
Right, small accounts typically have simpler use cases.
But small accounts also tend to get on an EBR
or to talk to a CSM.
So even if you are going to try to drive the same outcomes,
in terms of activation, adoption, retention,
the number of features or the number of action
that's probably a smaller number,
and the way that you communicate with those customers
has to be more scalable, not just because you're not
necessarily going to have people to reach out
to the customers all the time.
But because they're not going to have time to engage with you.
So sort of what I was saying a moment ago.
So to do that, I recommend choosing Help Articles.
Again, one of the most scalable things
that you can produce, right?
Because it's written content, written content is easy to produce.
It's easy to edit.
It's easier to localize than most other things.
But again, customers won't find them on their own.
Now, when you are using communities
or when you're using digital channels, by which I mean
email, in-app, we make that content more discoverable.
And in fact, in some cases, if you can do that based on their intent
or their level of maturity, then you're
going to be able to serve something even more relevant to them.
How do you know what their intent is?
How do you know what their level of maturity is?
Well, intent means being able to do more opt-in
types of campaigns.
So for example, that says, what are you
trying to use our product for today?
Are you trying to use it for x, y, z?
Z, we're in Europe.
So if they answer y, then we can curate a certain set of resources
to recommend to them.
Then we didn't--
like less harm, right?
We're not being intrusive.
We're not putting a big upsell prompt in front of them.
Level of maturity, you might have this already
coded into your CRM or your CSP based on other signals.
But if you don't have that, level of maturity
can also be proxied by the types of adoption
that you're seeing from them, right?
What features are they using?
Are they using features that can be assumed to be more
maturity-driving features?
You might also see that the ratio of end users to CSMs is high.
So again, when we're talking about where your humans spend
their valuable time, your team might not
be able to enable all of the end users.
So what are some examples of this?
If you're in B2C, you're going to have
a ton of end users relative to the people at your company.
If you are a two-sided marketplace where you have clients,
but you're about your platform, if you
are a horizontal product like Slack or Miro,
those are really good examples of horizontal products
where you have tons of end users who might
be using your product essentially as a blank slate,
and they're all going to be using it in their own ways.
So your CSM is not going to be able to reach out to all of its
end users and tell them how to use the product.
Here is where you can approach this in different ways, again,
from a self-service perspective.
For end users themselves, having accessible articles,
short videos, like the key here is digestible, digestible,
digestible, and product at the point of use,
typically going to help, also again making them accessible
via search is helpful.
But the admins as well, or your points of contact,
are going to need something more in-depth.
And here, it's helpful to start thinking about what, over time,
that you can offer them as part of the implementation process.
So for example, if you are creating a train-the-trainer
program or with the details about their account setup,
and they can maintain those over time, communities
are also generally places where we'll
see admins or points of contact who have more time
to think about your product, who are probably
doing deeper and more configurable and more customizable
things, or connecting with each other
to talk about those more generative use cases.
Those are the types of course on top of that.
I know we didn't have many professional services
people in the audience, but professional services also
really help here, right?
Like if the customer is really looking for more
and if they're willing to pay you for more.
So here I want to spend a moment talking about digital CX
and digital CS, because we talked about some
of those different touch points.
And I think especially--
this works really well for end users, as well as for your admins
just in different ways.
So we're really talking about meeting users where they are.
So in app, for instance, if your users are actually
already making good use of the app or good use of your product,
because not all of our products are apps,
then we can look at their usage patterns
and recommend, hey, here is something else
that you might like to do.
If we can-- part of our digital CX programs
can be building contextual help to help them where they are.
But what if they're not logging in?
What if they're not already using your app at all?
What if they're not using your product?
Well, their email, this is about meeting them where they are,
right?
And if where they are is not in your product,
then email can be.
And it's not just about engaging your admins
or your points of contact to keep you
reinforced the key actions that drive product usage
at the user level.
So many of you might have something
like an adoption health score, where
you look at key behaviors in your app.
And you might say, hey, we've worked with our ops team
and we've determined that usage of these features
within our overall adoption health score
are ones that still ultimately correlate to overall adoption
and overall retention.
We've done the Supersonia.
We know what some of those key adoption drivers are.
And so when we produce campaigns through email and through in-app,
we don't necessarily try to drive this super overall macro
usage of the product.
We look at some of those individual features
and we say, hey, what is the use case for a customer
to be able to use our documents feature?
How can we produce a campaign that might help customers
understand what the value for them
is engage you in a way that helps you
go from not using documents to using documents?
Well, then we can also start to extrapolate
that that is going to be a lever for overall adoption
and overall retention.
But it's about taking a big problem and making it smaller.
Why can't we just have the product be so intuitive
that it teaches itself?
Good question.
You can.
But number one, that's going to take a lot of product
and engineering work to do.
I think a lot of us, over at B, that we wouldn't
need to also add self-service.
Product teams are notoriously hesitant
about putting in too many tooltips, too much help,
too many interventions that take you outside of the product.
We shouldn't be using the types of interventions
that I've talked about today as a substitute for having
an intuitive product.
Product teams to make products more intuitive.
And plus, intuitive means different things to different customers.
Not to mention that within any product,
there might be multiple ways to use it
that you yourself haven't thought of,
especially for some of these horizontal products
that I was talking earlier.
One way to potentially talk to your product teams about this
is to say, we're not necessarily talking about self-service
only as a way to make up for the product being unintuitive.
By all means, we're going to give you
data about what our support teams are being asked, and we do.
We are going to tell you what customers that work with our CSMs
are requesting the most.
Through our community, we are doing hackathons and ideations
that are as improved in the product.
We already have a lot of sources to work with our product teams
and inform them what our customers are saying
and what our customers are asking for.
But we can also use our self-service programs
and our customer education programs
to inspire customers about the art of the possible
with our product.
And in our Academy, for instance, we're using it--
no, I'll come back to that in just a second.
Sign number five.
You're offering white glove service through your CSMs.
But white glove, that word, does not
mean what you think it means.
And what it means is that CSMs are often producing
their own versions of training.
They are doing a bunch of repetitive work.
They're sort of customizing it for the customer,
but that customization isn't necessarily
yielding consistent results.
Andation for every customer.
So you end up with these very inconsistent onboardings.
You're doing retrainings every time you get a new point of contact.
And so the question you can ask yourself
is, for a given account, if a new CSM were to come onboard
and they were to set up the onboarding or the training
for customers, would they do it the same way
that the previous CSM did?
If so, or if not, why?
Is it because there's actually something different that
has changed in the account?
Or is it because you're saying you're doing white glove,
but actually you're just making your CSMs do a bunch
of customization work that might not even be useful to the customer
at the end of the day?
So here is where I recommend academies.
And again, with academies, you're
going to need to make a little bit more investment than say just
producing help center articles or just doing a one-off email
campaign.
But these can yield pretty good long-term results,
similar to the ones that we showed at the beginning
of the presentation.
I think academies are great for sharing
the what, the why, and the how of products.
So if you're just producing core steps or the clicks
to take to accomplish certain tasks,
it's probably not the best use of an academy.
That's something that a help center can do fairly well,
or in-app prompts can do fairly well.
But what academies can do is they
can organize information into steps.
So a customer can go from 0 to 100
and follow the steps, especially during onboarding.
They can also provide hands-on practice
through simulations or things like that.
And they give customers the chance
to check their skills.
And to see, hey, am I actually on the right track
to the customer?
You're telling them not just what the product does,
but in what cases they would want to do,
which things with the product.
So here, I think, again, similar to how
we talk to admins versus end users,
academies are great for people who
have more complex needs.
You're users who have more to do in your product.
And at moments like onboarding, or when you have a new point
of contact come onboard, it's the moments typically
where your CSMs would be reaching out to do training.
But for other roles, you can consider
let produce self-service guides, some of the things
that we talked about earlier.
You may or may not want to actually put them in your academy,
depending on whether your customers are willing to navigate
to a salve is when we talked about chat box
and when we talked about search to index your academy courses
and your academy content in the chat bot and in the search
so that incidentally, if they have a question,
they'll link to go there.
Or the content is being pulled generatively
into the response.
Why can't we just post edited videos of customer calls
to the help center?
That's something I hear recommended sometimes
instead of doing an academy.
You can at first, but it's not necessarily
going to scale very well.
If it's the very first thing you're doing
and you don't have anything, then that might at least help
you validate as a painted door.
But over time, it's mostly going to mean
that you just have a lot of content.
It's going to be really hard to maintain
that content over time.
And you're probably not going to be
able to track very well what your customers are completing
or not completing and where they're getting stuck.
So eventually, you do want to make the investment in having
something like a learning management system or a customer
ways and track what users are or aren't doing.
And finally, number six, customers
are already sharing with each other.
So in many cases, you might have customers
who are actually talking to each other,
who are sharing tips already, and who are maybe even going out
on LinkedIn or in public place.
This is a great chance to seize upon this yourself
to invest in customer communities.
So communities here are where you go beyond self service.
They are a great place to answer questions that may not
be answered by your own definitive documentation,
like your help center things.
But at their best, they can also drive
what goes beyond the community of support
to be that they use the product with each other
and can inspire each other, but also driving
loyalty through what we might refer to as a community
of practice.
So here, we're talking about customers
sharing industry best practices with each other,
or customers engaging in advocacy programs,
where eventually, the brand means enough to them
that they are willing to say nice things to each other,
to the world, and do work that helps other customers
along the way.
You can pull all your customers into a Slack channel
together and call that a community,
but you're going to need to moderate it.
I know we're running out of time.
So as we come into the close here,
I do want to share the obligatory AI slide,
because it is the year 2024.
And here's one person's perspective.
We have experimented quite a bit with AI at personio,
and we're finding some really good use cases for it.
But I think it's important to differentiate
with what AI can do really well,
versus what it can't do really well yet.
AI can help you with a U draft.
There are great products out there
that help you edit or produce content quicker.
AI can help you localize.
There's a neural machine translation now
that makes AI-driven localization more reliable
than it has been before.
And as we saw in some of the demos earlier,
it can be great for discoverability.
So through search and chatbots, it can surface content
way better than if you're sitting there
trying to predict every search a customer might have themselves.
It also is really great for analysis.
So we saw AI summaries.
We saw AI interpretations of what customers are and aren't
doing.
It could take massive volumes of data
and give you analysis from that.
But what it can't really replace, at least today,
is the creation of content itself.
Because what does AI do?
Sometimes it hallucinates.
And so if you're just asking AI to completely produce
all of your content, then chances
are AI is not going to know what your product does
and the best ways to do it.
So what I think AI is not really going to replace right now
is your subject matter experts and at least some people
at your company who are doing content creation.
The other thing that I don't think
AI is going to replace right now is the higher order use
cases of your community that we were talking about.
So that community of product and that community of practice,
AI is not yet a substitute for customers connecting
with each other and forming human relationships.
And I do believe that those who invest in communities,
especially communities of practice,
that will pay off even in the age of AI.
I think those will become competitive modes over time.
So finally, you think you're ready?
Are you right?
Well, here are some of the signs that you'll
see as you start to make investments that tell you
you're on the right track.
You're going to see content traffic increase
to the self-service programs that you create.
You're going to start seeing that more common issues
are addressed with self-service instead of humans.
Your humans will be able to focus on more complex needs
over time instead of delivering the same trainings,
answering the same support questions.
Then you're going to be able to start
automating based on common points in the customer life
cycle with effective content.
You'll start to see customers seeking out each other,
not just doing things on their own.
And finally, as you start to get really far into maturity,
you will have something like a digital CS program bringing
customers into the content-based programs
that you create, into the engagement programs you create,
like Academy Community.
That will ultimately drive adoption.
It will drive NRR and will drive some of the--
I know we're at time.
I'm happy to answer any questions that you have.
But I will also say thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much.
Thank you for this great presentation.
Super inspiring.
Really liked it.
Many things that I see in my daily life as a CSM as well.
Let's go to some questions that have
been covered some ground because we are at a time.
Let's do it.
Get the slide over.
He's also head to the app to the track and upvote those questions
that you like.
How have you successfully communicated the value of self-service
solutions to leadership, particularly?
Some of it was the way--
I was giving you some of the arguments earlier
during the presentation.
When we talk about the value of self-service solutions,
one of them is the one that I talked about earlier, which
is that X chart that I talked about,
where if you're looking at a rising number of customers,
you have to extrapolate based on the current ratios
that we have for our CSMs, based on the number of cases
that a support agent can take on to be able to sustain
those support levels.
And what does that do to our gross margin?
So typically, that's how I'm talking about revenue headcount
and gross margin, right?
We need to grow the company and we
need to grow the customer base so we can collect more revenue.
Or we're going to have to make investments in something
that can help us do that with better respect to gross margin.
So let's talk about what types of programs
we can put in place that will help us serve an increasing
number of customers more on their own than by continuing
to invest linearly in headcount.
But first, community or academy?
It depends.
But I would say generally, like, an academy
is the easier one to put in place because it doesn't require
as much ongoing commitment, right?
Communities are people-focused.
They are powered by people.
And you need to put in the work to make sure
that that keeps going.
If you get a community wrong--
and if you get an academy wrong the first time.
So I would say communities are incredibly powerful long term,
but you have to be willing to get closer to getting them
right the first time.
Thank you.
How did your internal teams and customers
react to the initial rollout of these self-service tools?
Probably a mix in some ways.
It depends at what time.
But I think it's a mix of, on one hand, excitement about not
having to do some of these repetitive things over and over.
But also, one form of resistance that I often see
is that as you start rolling out more of these tools,
often I've had people come to me and say, oh,
but you know what?
I really like doing training because that's my opportunity.
It's true.
I mean, training is an opportunity to form a relationship
with a customer.
But you have to ask yourself, again,
if these are the constraints, if these are the costs
that it's going to take to use training as a way
to form a relationship with each customer,
are we willing to do that?
And furthermore, for you as a CSM with so much expertise
in the product, is that the best way for you
to demonstrate that expertise?
If we can have customers going through academy courses,
for instance, in for you would have
spent on training having a much deeper use case conversation
with your point of contact on things
that they can do over and above that basic training.
Seems like a better way to build a relationship.
But that takes time and that takes change management.
Right.
One last question.
What skills does someone need to have those programs?
It depends on which self-service program you're talking about.
But typically, professional development
will go along the lines of for customer education.
There are many customer education programs out there
that teach you instructional design,
but also specifically can teach you
the customer education flavor of instructional design
and program management.
For community, there are great community management programs
out there, both for community leaders and for community
managers themselves.
And for Digital CX, that's an emerging one.
Starting to season programs put in place,
but also-- I don't know if Maria is still in here.
Maria, oh, hi.
Oh, you're right in front.
There are communities such as the DCS Connect community,
where people who are in the more emerging field of Digital CS
come together and are sharing the really great things
that they're doing.
Also, there are podcasts on each of these three
that I can recommend to you afterwards.
I can also recommend FIVA-B.
We have Richard Milick, Neil, so definitely check out FIVA-B.
You just let it then.
Subscribe.
Thanks.
Thanks, Adam.
Thanks, everyone.
And happy to talk to you afterwards.
There's so much more to discover.
[APPLAUSE]
Enjoy.
