Stop Digital Channel Chaos: Orchestrating In-App, Email, Community & Education

Hi everyone. Wow. I'm hopefully I'm not too loud. I'm a loud human being anyways, but then you mic me and I'm even louder.

I'm Michelle Costia and I lead digital customer success here at Gainsight. I've actually only been here for about three months. Prior to that, I led education for the last six years and community at Shopify. So that's who I am and hi everyone.

I'm Lila Crutel and I've been with Gainsight for actually over 11 years. So through lots of evolutions and I've worked with the education and community and documentation teams. So a bunch of the different pieces of our digital customer success organization. And we are thrilled to have Michelle on board and her role in digital CS.

Like definitely factors into our conversation about how we're starting to better manage the chaos. Yeah, exactly. So we'll get started and we kind of debated what to actually call this session. We thought about how we stopped four teams from accidentally emailing the same customer three times in a day.

But that actually seemed a little long yet accurate for what we're going to talk about. And then we thought, well, maybe we'll call it. Here's what we tried. But that kind of felt weak.

So we ended up on stop channel chaos because that's largely what we're trying to do right now. It's we're in the middle of stopping it. But we're far along enough that I think we can kind of share some of the secrets that we have found along the way. So if you have ever looked at your customer touch points and thought we're sending too much, it's not connected.

And I'm actually not sure if it's working. Then this is the session for you. We've lived this problem. In fact, we're still living this problem.

We're in the midst of trying to solve it. And everything we share today is real. We've tried to be really practical with what we want to share with you, give you like really concrete tips about what we did, what we broke, what we're still learning along the way. Is it moving?

There we go. But I want to set the stage first and then Lila is going to take you through some of the practical steps that we did. There's a lot of things that have changed for digital teams today. There are three things that made this job way harder.

I love to do things in threes. So one is we have way more channels. Email is not the only way that we can communicate to our customers anymore. It's not the only game in town.

We have in-app, community, education, social media, and so many other channels we don't actually use, but they influence the overall digital experience our customers are going through. Second, we have way more complex audiences. They play different roles. They're all at different maturity levels.

They come from different verticals and industries. Some of them aren't even human. In fact, we need to make sure that our content and our properties are built for our robot overlords. And then finally, our customers have really high expectations.

Every customer has seen what good personalized experience looks like through things like social media, through e-commerce sites. They see what they get from advertising, those boots that you looked at once and now follow you through the internet. They see that every day. TikTok has figured out what you like and within 45 minutes and personalizes that journey.

I loved the Blue Jays baseball and during the World Series, I swear to you, that is all I saw. If you sit and binge watch Bridgerton, they will show you the next show that you need to watch. You had something happen to you while you were here. Yep.

Within 12, 16 hours of landing in Vegas, my Facebook feed was showing me things they thought that would appeal to me like an hour long scalp massage, which I got to say they nailed it. So our customers don't understand when after six months of being with you and being on your products and that you're still showing the onboarding user journey just doesn't make sense because they expect more. So these three things, one of them would be challenging for digital success teams, but three of these together are incredibly challenged. And it's not only the complexity of the channels and customers.

I'm betting that a lot of you have experienced some of these things over the last year. Anyone had a reorg? Yeah, probably some layoffs. Those things are happening to everyone.

Reorgs as key stakeholder is let go and all of a sudden that work ends up on your lap. A new tool migration you didn't even know was coming now changes everything and breaks all the logic that you already built and now you have to spend more time redoing it. Leadership changes the strategy mid quarter. Anyone?

See some nods. Your company acquires a new product and suddenly you have a whole new customer base, a new audience that you have to think about and no digital playbook. Have you experienced that? Yes, a few times.

And also, AI. AI has changed it 10 times over the last year what you're able to do what's possible and then once you get used to that, it changes it again. So by the time you've built the program, you have to go and shift and change again and AI is also speeding up our teams, our product teams, they're creating and they're shipping more faster. And so we as digital success leaders have to keep up as well.

So ultimately, this slide, it doesn't end. There's more problems. There's probably more things, 10 other things that all of you can say, oh, this happened to me. This changed my trajectory.

This got in my way and that meant I was reactive rather than really planning how I was going to do my digital strategy. So ultimately get used to it. The only constant is change. Anybody heard that one?

Yeah. The teams doing digital success and leading through these channels well have figured out how to build programs that survive this turbulence and not just programs that work when everything is calm. Before we go any further, I'm going to ask you to do something. Look at these six quotes.

I'm going to give you a few seconds. Count how many you've said or approximately said, maybe not the exact same thing in the last quarter. If you said three or more, you're in the right room. You said all six.

I want to see you back here presenting next year. Show us what you've done. So what's interesting about this slide is these aren't random complaints from six different problems. They're all from the same problem.

They're all coming from the ownership. They're all coming from the ownership conversations that keep on happening and somewhere out there. A customer is definitely getting three messages from you on the same day or the reporting dashboard doesn't exist. And they're all coming from one thing and the symptom is chaos.

Here's what it's also important to understand. It's not a content problem. You all have lots of content. It's not a channel problem.

As we said, many different channels. We have tons of content in AppGuides, digital program journeys, courses, community threads. They're all live and active. And all the channels exist, but they're not working together.

So it's an orchestration problem. No shared good system for deciding what to go, what goes to whom and when. And when there's no shared system, a customer just receives whatever we built last week. That's a coincidence.

That's not a system that puts in place something that is going to work and build a really good experience for your customers. So today we're going to show you how we're solving it. We're going to walk you through exactly what we did. The audit, the channel, the roles, the collision roles that we're thinking about in the framework.

Not theory, what we actually did and what we'll do differently. Channel chaos looks like four teams doing their totally their own thing. This is what it looks like when they don't. One hub, four coordinated channels, personalized through role, lifecycle stage, product usage.

That's the inputs that make this system sort of intelligent. And then the outcomes, faster adoption, personalized journeys, content that's actually current and stronger customer success. That's what happens when the system all work is one. But underneath it all, and this is key.

This is super not sexy. This is not glamorous. But what's underneath it all is that we have to start with clear ownership, agile standups, governance, project management, those old races, pull them out. They're useful here.

A system that one to deliver away from what you've got in chaos. We didn't start with a clean system. We started with a lot of chaos. Lila is going to walk you through some of that.

And keep in mind, we're still today working on this. So, yeah. So we flipped a coin and Michelle got to tell you know the part about like what's wrong, what's broken and where the challenges are. And I get to come in and tell you how to fix them all.

So welcome. And here we go. Let's see. There we go.

So we knew where we wanted to go that previous slide. You know what good looks like for our teams. And in our case, we had the teams, community docs, education and in app and email as well. And with Michelle, we finally had a common leader and alignment for all of those teams, which was really critical I think to like setting us on the right path.

And so now it was time to get down to the business of figuring out how to get there, how to get to that, you know, what good looks like. So I'll go into each of these in a bit more detail as we go through the slides. But just at a high level, this is what our approach looked like. So we performed a channel and content audit.

So each team, you know, community, education, help center docs, etc. You know, looking at their specific assets. Then we need to agree on which of the channels should be responsible for what messages. Again, I'll tell you more about that in a moment.

And one of the very critical steps, of course, was also naming the shared customer outcome that we're all striving to achieve. What's that common goal? We designed the customer journey map for our particular project and customer segment. This was definitely a meaty task that I'll share a bit about with you shortly.

And then ultimately, once you're ready to launch, start learning and iterating, seeing what's working, what's not, and go from there. So I'll jump into more of the details here. You know, so we didn't just jump right in to building new resources. We actually took a step back again and reviewed our existing assets across every channel evaluating how they were performing.

So if we're talking about courses, how many people have even enrolled in this course in the last 90 days, the last year, when was the last time that it was updated? Perhaps when was its original creation date? So those are some of the criteria, just as an example, that we were looking at to identify what was stale. And the good news, and I think that when you guys potentially do your own content audits, you'll find that you have a lot of information.

There was a lot of relevant content for us, like our documentation, our training. There was a lot there to build off of. We just needed to update some of it or modify it to some degree for the particular project and segment that we were focused on. During that audit process, we also reached out to our support and onboarding teams to understand what are the customer challenges, the frequently asked questions, where do they get stuck?

Where's the friction? So that we can make sure that we're also building in resources and assets that help solve their problems proactively. There were also some new features that were part of our project and kind of new tier of service, if you will. And so we did see that there were some new supporting assets as well that needed to be created.

So with all these insights gathered from our inventory evaluation and the gap analysis, we were then able to prioritize the work to be done. So that was really like our first step. So with our pink sweater uniforms, we came to a customer journey mapping offsite. That's Samantha Murray, who's also here and will be on the keynote tomorrow and Michelle.

And we had that channel and content audit completed. But before we could actually say exactly what should happen and with what delivery method, first we had to define and agree on which channels should be used for which jobs or which messages. So that's what the little sketches on the right side there taken from the poster paper. And equally important was defining what each channel is not for.

So kind of stating the obvious, but like email, for example, is not for teaching. Right. Our in app is not where you're going to offer your long form education. So that not for list prevents overlap between those channels.

And if you're using AI, which I imagine a lot of you are to perhaps draft some of the content or the assets. This is one of those things that is just as important as telling it like what to do or how to write and what's the right tone. You also want to say what not to do. Right.

Sometimes those what not to do is are even more important if you're leveraging AI. So with this in place, when we did go back to our respective desks, we inevitably had questions or, you know, a little bit of confusion came up here and there about like which channel or which team should own or host a particular asset that we were creating or updating. But these channel definitions that we had agreed on, they helped give us the clarity and make sure that we're all on the same page for this project. So that was a quick exercise really, but like critical to the process.

What you're looking at here is also from our customer journey mapping exercise and originally Jared block. One of my colleagues was going to be co presenting but he had a conflict this week. So this is our, you know, a match to Jared. But it's the first 90 days at a very high level, obviously for the purposes of the visual here of our our customer journey and mapped out across every channel and and on the left you can see we're like physically mapping out the journey with Post-its and poster paper because we had the luxury of being together in person.

But if you were doing this virtually a tool like Miro, for example, would be perfect for it. This was really fun. Yes, I'm a big fan of sticky notes. Yeah, you there's something very nice and tactile right about actually getting to move things around physically.

But before we could even do this exercise with the customer journey, we also needed to deeply understand our persona that we were building for in our case. The personas name had been named Alex and they were a customer education practitioner. And so we needed to know and keep in like pretty much in the forefront of our minds during this journey mapping like what's Alex's experience? What's important to Alex and what environment is Alex working in and so on.

So we actually had a pre read document created before the off site that like helped set the stage and kind of get us all thinking about who is Alex? What's important to Alex? What does Alex need so that along the way as we designed the journey and week one and week two and so on. We were asking ourselves continuously.

What does Alex need and what does success look like for Alex like at the end of the week week one week two etc. So then we mapped each each touch point with a defined trigger a primary channel to deliver that message and then in some cases a fallback or a nudge that if the customer didn't take an action there would be a little bit of a change. So we had to do some additional support reminder etc to kind of push them along in the journey and we built this for a real product launch with no prior digital playbook and also no dedicated CSM for this particular customer segment. And then the other thing that was important to us was that the framework was sound and that the user's strength was actually useful because if the journey could hold up without a human safety net in place then we knew that the framework was sound.

And so we had to do some more work before we mapped the touch points so not focusing on like what should we send but rather again like what does success look like for Alex this week and next week and at the end of the month and the at the 60 day point and so on. So everything on this map, the journey map should trace back to, you know, what does success look like for Alex. This is where I really miss Jared and feel free to jump in because he like knows the sort of the orchestration part a little better and these the collision rules and so on but there are four rules basically summarized here that helped govern the system and prevent collision. The first one is is priority order because not all messages are equal onboarding beats re-engagement a milestone moment beats a generic nudge so the context should really determine the priority.

So we also had frequency caps. So we try to set like hard limits on how often we touch a customer and and the channels that we used so for example, you know, maybe you you say no more than one email every three days or no more than two in app guides maximum per user session and never email and in app on the same topic the same day. So we have all sorts of, you know, frequency caps that we're keeping in mind and similarly suppression logic. So if a customer completes a meaningful step in the product then stop the nudges right and perhaps some kind of congratulations goes out if appropriate.

So here is channel handoffs. So meaning the channels talk to each other. If an in app guide is dismissed by the user twice then we send a reminder email. But if they click the email then suppress the in app version or the reminder so everything's running off of one shared model.

So the user channel is working from the same playbook and the rule that overrides all of this if a message doesn't help the customer take their next meaningful step in the product then it doesn't send. The framework it doesn't end at launch like that's the point. We are actively in learning mode. We're looking at signals to understand what's working and watching where customers are dropping off and then adjusting and iterating.

So for example, these are just some some sample metrics perhaps about like customer feedback that you're getting email open rate and skill that skills badges and courses completed and things like that. Right. So just as an example we saw early on that learning path completions were below our targets what we had hoped to see. And so we decided to add a final quiz and a skills badge to earn at the end of that learning path as a kind of motivating piece.

A lot of people whether if you're in education you may be well aware like they are definitely motivated to get those badges or certificates and you know add them to their social media profiles and things like that. So adding that piece it definitely helped drive enrollment and completion. So what we've seen is that teams that stay ahead of the channel chaos are not necessarily the ones that get the perfect system built at the outset. It's really the ones that are have a cadence and a process for revisiting and iterating based on their learnings that are going to be the most successful.

Okay, so here's the measurement shift that makes everything else work on the left side here are channel metrics that are maybe typical or familiar like individual metrics that the teams might own like email open rates or course enrollments or completions and in-app guide engagement and you know community engagement. With these alone you can have a great quarter on paper but the customer is not actually succeeding and maybe they're even quietly churning right so the key to digital success is again agree agreeing on those shared outcomes and reporting them together. So that's what we have sort of visualized on the right side there. It's the only way to know if the system is actually working and where you may need to iterate.

So for our team and the project that we've been working on that meant keeping the big picture in mind and that was specifically did the customer go live on our product within the expected timeframe did they reach that critical milestone that we're looking for them to complete by the first 90 days. Michelle stole my line earlier about like this is not particularly like sexy or glamorous but you know the work that we're talking about would not have been possible without some basic operational infrastructure including races so nobody's waiting for a decision to be made. Bi-weekly standups with reps from every you know function a project lead who owned the whole picture and of course some shared slack channels to help with communication and staying on the same page and also a cloud project for all of the spreadsheets the context and resources that were helping us manage the project knowledge and tasks. So the project leader we put all of that into a cloud project that we could each leverage to ask questions about our project of ask questions about our persona Alex potentially and for the project lead to be able to track our overall progress each week and say you know okay we're on track to you know 85% completion of all the tasks that we've identified for example.

So necessary infrastructure for for project success. And then speaking of AI which I think is maybe even mentioned a few times today. I want to share a bit more about how it helped our teams scale so yeah initially we were building a slide and it was like oh here's what education was able to do with AI and here's what community was able to do and here's what the docs and you know so on and so on and it was like you know there's a there's a better way to do this. Across all of the digital teams it AI didn't just help us work faster it fundamentally expanded what the teams or teammates were really capable of doing so this is again across all of our teams.

We saw things like accelerated content development and program delivery so moving from ideas to drafts and to assets much faster than before we had been using AI. Secondly helped us create scalable team enablement so instead of knowledge about the project or the product living with individuals. We started building and sharing reusable skills again like Claude skills prompts and frameworks that each of the team members could leverage. And third AI improved journey orchestration we could model sequencing and coordinate channels more intentionally and think more systematically about the customer experience across touch points.

And then fourth here it gave us faster insights and optimization loops we able to connect the engagement signals and identify gaps and continuously learn what was working and what wasn't. And then lastly it empowered really I want to say that teammates themselves and the example I had in mind here was like a technical writer who's responsible for setting up a new category of documentation for this particular customer segment. But the way we wanted to permission it who should see it who should not be able to see it like the platform the product did not support that. And with the through the use of AI he was actually able to code a new page that would act as a category that would only be visible to in the ways that we wanted.

You know again just really supplementing his skills and allowing him to do something that otherwise in the past would have required maybe you know borrowing a web developer or something like that if you can get that resource. So non-technical team members were able to solve problems and prototype ideas and contribute in ways that previously they may not have been able to or we would have had to go to other teams to ask for help. So this was really a lot more than just about like isolated efficiency gains but more about helping us across the digital teams build a scalable repeatable digital operating model. All right so every problem that Michelle named you know so well at the start of this presentation and that resonated I think with a lot of you the siloed analytics stale content channels with no connection or communication between them.

Each one of those has a step in our framework that directly addresses it. So here they are again you know in a summary slide. You want to audit your existing assets you probably have more than you realize that are applicable and design that customer journey map get together virtually or in person. It's a great exercise to really wrap your arms around the persona the customer that you're trying to serve and talk about which channels are best suited for which messages and assets.

Build in that collision prevention so you're not sending overlapping or duplicative messages and align on a shared outcome metric for the customer. So these are the steps that will provide you with a shared system or framework and language and ultimately the discipline to hold the line. So at the start Michelle said that the job has gotten harder and that's still true but we've seen that the teams who get orchestration right don't just manage the chaos. They build something that their customers actually feel was designed and intended for them and I think that's work worth doing.

Thank you all for listening and I know there's some questions and so we'll you can continue adding them into I think the slido app if you want and we'll take them. Yeah thank you everyone. I didn't mention this in the beginning but if you don't know you can open up the pulse app and it's very easy. We're in room 105 which is the first option and they just click that room and you'll be able to submit Q&A.

So we will start at the top and we have about 10 minutes so we should hopefully get to a couple of these. You talked about how you decide which channel gets which message but what does the documentation actually look like today who owns it on the DCS team. Yeah so after our session where we walked through that and kind of drew it on the on a piece of paper we took that and we put that into AI and we worked through a bunch of questions with all the various teams and we created actually like a very like a decent digital channel document which sort of said each channel what goes here what does not go here. We made sure that all of the folks in the digital success team agreed on this.

We actually had hoped to be able to share that with you guys today in case it was helpful for you but we do not have it but we'll try to follow up in some way of getting that out to everyone so that perhaps you can use it as well. It was a little gain site focus so we wanted to generic fight for you guys to use but that's essentially what we build it wasn't anything really crazy just get everybody on the same page with community so there's a little product focus communities ability to send emails what considerations were made between sending direct emails versus creating posts and resources that notify subscribe users while also keeping info accessible later. We take that one to. Sure we can we can tag team and go ahead.

I think you know this is all part of that document was what would go on the community versus what would be an email versus what would be in both. But we definitely had lots of things that went out on email and that also existed within community and then we were also creating content that would on a regular basis be posted sort of like as the cohort was going through their journey will get posted into the community that was more of a user generated opportunity for conversations so we really did want to use community in the less about like throwing information at you but also like more of a two way conversation. Yeah and definitely like of course we can link in emails to community posts and so I know one example that comes to mind is we also had some discussion about a guidebook that we were creating for the Alex's among our customers and where it should live and you know was it a training resource or community or whatever. And ultimately we decided to put it on community because we wanted to encourage people to share later like what worked for them and you know be able to have that conversation and there was no need for it to just be like a document that someone reads on the academy but it's also going into our like welcome you know to the new customer email.

This one was uploaded a few times but in our company most of these functions and channels are owned by different business groups what's your one up advice for creating org alignment and change management to make this work. We had this challenge for a really long time at gain site too and I I don't have the answer maybe Michelle does but I can definitely just say like I empathize and plus one on the importance if you can of bringing them together organizationally because it's really really challenging to have those shared action. And alignment and focus that without it. Yeah we're incredibly lucky that this team is is kind of all put together we have a shared outcomes and shared you know team but I have worked in organizations my past organization I owned partnering and merchant education and enablement but I didn't own community and I didn't own email and I didn't own all of those things.

But you make it work it's partly it's it's building relationships it's building shared understanding of what those responsibilities are and what those other teams are actually trying to do. And sort of like coming together in a way that is it's just inherently human. I think that's the best way that I could describe it is kind of figuring out like who's doing what and what what comes first what is the most priority but you do have to like eventually you all ladder up to somebody. So it's making sure that you know if everyone has the same goals ultimately that you're making those decisions on those higher up goals and not necessarily the ones of your particular team.

So it's sometimes it is the relationships and then wiping away some of the things that you may be told ownership to and not being precious. Looks like we did that second one on documentation and messaging. So I'll jump to the next one. What is your strategy or vision for applying a genetic AI shocker to this multi channel approach.

Michelle. Early days but I think. Absolutely this is a pure example of where a genetic AI can absolutely play a role. I am three months into my journey here at Gainsight and I know that we will be absolutely thinking about how this changes things.

But ultimately right now like we need to get a foundation. Right. Like how we work as a team is brand new. So like this team has been four different teams and so we need to figure out how we work together before we can bring in the robots but we will be absolutely this is a great example of where it can be.

But for now we used AI within as you saw Lila posted we're using it with content development we're using with insights we're using with a lot of that. But this team needed to come together to figure out how we program manage how do we project manage how does this work as a collective unit between community education digital journeys and all that before we can really introduce another layer. But come back for our talk next year. Probably have time for maybe two more.

So if you want to get in there put in something quick thumbs up another question that resonates with you. Do that now. So how do you define which specific contacts get to be a part of the digital journey and to make sure the email goes to the right person. Everyone has that problem right.

Yeah. Yeah. This particular project we were really lucky. This is a blank slate.

So we did not have that particular challenge but it is definitely like you have to have a good deal with the people that you're working with. You have to have good data hygiene. You have to have good data context within there. You need to know what those roles are.

You need that all to be connected back into the work that you're doing so you are sending the right emails to the right person who needs it. We were again very lucky in that this was a little bit of a blank slate and a very very simple product and simple persona. Because of the blank slate piece like we've been able to work with the product team or work with the like rev ops team and say we need this piece of data when the opportunity closes you know to in order to trigger these other the next steps. Right.

And yeah. And so ensuring that we get the contact you know the right the person and so on. Right from the very beginning like even to the like process of like the sales process ensuring that they've got the enablement to know what they're actually putting in to Salesforce that then helps us to trigger what the information that they're going to get. Last one we have time for what suggestions do you have for analysis paralysis continually planning the scope of this chaos can be so fast it feels like you never have your arms around it.

Yeah, I mean one thought was like we had this in here at one point I think and it got you know kind of revised out but like pick a place to start like so we're not trying to figure out all of our customers journeys for all of the personas and all the products right now simultaneously. We you know picked one to do like a pilot with basically and you know figure out our process and our framework and iterate on it and then we're going to apply it to another you know customer and or persona and product so that would be my recommendation like maybe pick one and perhaps it's one where you already have strong assets or content in place that doesn't feel maybe as overwhelming to get started with a big fan of small experiments so if you can find that small piece that you can start with show that it works and then you'll be able to take it to the to the next one and so forth and then you might find that the building blocks from the one actually expedite the next one. I mean again we were pretty lucky and that we were starting with a blank slate and that was why it was so easy to sort of say like this is our experiment for now. And if we can get a V to me put our last slide on I've up there I forgot.

We have our like linkedin QR codes in case anyone wants to connect and talk more. I would love to hear from you and continue the conversation and we'll also be out there. Yes. Anyone wants to chat.

Thank you both so much. Thank you everyone for joining. Thank you.