CXChronicles Podcast 168 with Abby Hammer, Chief Customer Officer at ChurnZero

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #168 we welcomed Abby Hammer, Chief Customer Officer at ChurnZero.

ChurnZero is Customer Success software for growing SaaS and subscription businesses. Their platform is designed to integrate with CRM systems and tightly into an application or service.

In doing so, ChurnZero (1) helps businesses understand how their customers use their product, (2) assesses their health and their likelihood to renew, and (3) gives the business the means to automate and personalize the customer experience through timely and relevant touch-points, including in-app content.

ChurnZero customers find instant ROI as their customer success managers are immediately more productive and better informed and their customers are getting better just-in-time service from the automated playbooks.

In this episode Abby and Adrian chat through how she has tackled The Four CX Pillars: Team,  Tools, Process & Feedback throughout her career + shares some of the tips & tricks that have worked for the team at ChurnZero as they've grown their customer portfolio & revenue.

**Episode #168 Highlight Reel:**

1.  Why customer success and customer support are two halves of one pie
2.  Marrying your customer success & product teams to develop new super powers 
3.  Why customer success operations is paramount for your growing business
4.  Building customer feedback loops & acting upon it to improve your product or service
5.  Why investing in your CX & customer success provides invaluable perspective 

Huge thanks to Abby for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring her team's work and efforts in pushing the customer experience and customer success optimization space into the future.

Click here to learn more about Abby Hammer

Click here to learn more about ChurnZero

If you enjoy The CXChronicles Podcast, please stop by your favorite podcast player and leave us a review. This is the easiest way that we can find new listeners, guests and future customer focused business leaders to tune into our weekly podcast. 

And be sure to grab a copy of our book "The Four CX Pillars To Grow Your Business Now" on Amazon +  check out the CXChronicles Youtube channel with all of our video episodes & customer focused business leader content!

Reach out to CXC at INFO@cxchronicles.com for more information about how we can help your business make customer happiness a habit!

Transcript

#168 -- Abby Hammer, Chief Customer Officer at ChurnZero

Speaker 1 (00:00:02) - All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the cxchronicles podcast. Super excited for today's guest, Abby Henry from churn zero. Welcome to cxchronicles podcast. 

Speaker 2 (00:00:12) - Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here today, 

Speaker 1 (00:00:15) - So I'm, I'm excited to have you too, Abby, this is going to be a fun one. Why don't you, why don't you start off the show? Like we start off all these episodes, give the CX nation a couple of minute elevator pitch for who you are and how you got into the position and the role that you're in today. Um, building and leading an awesome company like churn zero. 

Speaker 2 (00:00:31) - Yeah, absolutely. So I am the chief customer officer and head of products at churn zero, which is an unusual combo. Admittedly, I'm one that is hopefully worked well for us in the last few years, as we've grown a solution that is designed to help customer success managers more proactively and more efficiently manage their book of business. Uh, so we really cover all manner of customer engagements from trying to build relationships, to increasing product adoption, to churn risk and reduction health understandings. We really covered the gamut. Um, and we even get into some more modern ways of communicating with your customers like in-app content and collaborative spaces with your customers, which I think is super exciting as we think about the myriad of ways in which, um, communication with customers can grow and expand. Uh, I've been at churn zeros since the beginning. I'm employee number one here. So I've, uh, I've seen us grow in a lot of really exciting ways. Um, and I've seen us go through a lot of, uh, evolutions of our own customer success, understandings and practices of which I am always happy to share with others. 

Speaker 1 (00:01:35) - I love it. Well, number one, I'm always pumped to have, um, uh, a fellow CX and CS nerd with me, but number two, you know, you've been, you're, you're playing number one at a company that I think most of our listeners today are probably intimately aware of who turns your with what type of, uh, products and solutions you've built, what type of customers you serve. And the more importantly, you know, the, the beauty of the, the listenership on this show is like, we're the guys and gals that are been tasked with thinking about portfolio management, thinking about frontline customer comp communications, thinking about all of the other fun, modern ways of thinking about how like CX and CS is modern selling. This is dollars revenue to say, you can grow a company faster. This is how you can create an army of promoters. And this is how you can literally help your customers grow their business, grow their revenue. And if you're, if you're playing in that type of game, everybody knows what type of value and what type of, um, runway, a company like that has. So, so definitely, definitely excited to jump into it with you today. Um, Abby, I'd love to start off with the first six per team. Give us a sense for what the churn zero squad looks like today. Give us a sense for sort of how you built out the different players in the pitch. 

Speaker 2 (00:02:40) - Yeah, absolutely. Uh, so currently the, uh, customer success team at transmitter is made up of a couple of different sub-teams. So we do have our customer success managers. We also have our implementation specialists who are heavily involved with our customers at the very beginning of our relationship, doing technical implementations and technical. We have our support team. I always say, you know, success and support are two halves of one pie. You can't have one without the other. You can't be proactive if you don't have a great reactive arm. And then as we've grown in the needs of our customers have gotten more varied and more complex. We've introduced our professional services teams, a group, we call our success consultants. We now have some roles on the team around, um, solutions engineers to handle, you know, uh, more complex projects that might come up with our customers. 

Speaker 2 (00:03:29) - And we think of all of those teams, when we talk about customer success, uh, at churn zero, we think about all of those teams that are interfacing directly with our customers all the time, plus our enablement team. And that enablement team is focused on customer enablement. So things like our academies, our community, they're also focused on our internal enablement. So how we grow a team of CS geeks and get them really excited about they do know our product really well. Know our customers really all know our industry really well, cause that's a big expectation we get from, uh, the groups that choose to become part of the term zero family. They want great solutions, but they also want great service and guidance. So we really think of all of those teams coming together as the customer success team. Um, only thing I'd say is that at our current, at our current juncture, uh, CSMs, that turns your do own the commercial relationship as well. They own the renewal. We own the majority of expansion, which is a bit unusual, you know, a little bit of, a little bit of a dividing topic in our, in our industry. Um, but one that sort of plays into our perspective of if we do relationship building well, if we do product adoption, well, if we do value realization, well, renewal expansion, those sorts of things, it's just crossing the T's dotting, the I's, um, as opposed to needing to be this, um, this sort of momentous part of the relationship. 

Speaker 1 (00:04:51) - I love it. And you know what, it's funny, like I think our friends on the, on the south side of the aisle, they've been telling us this for decades, right at the end of the day, customers stick around because of relationship.

Speaker 1 (00:05:01) - Customer stick around because of dependability customer stick around, because if they have a guy or gal that they're going to, and every time they have a question or a need, or there's a challenge or struggle, they're getting fixes, they're going to quick answers it. They're going to go buy from that person again in the future. And that's again, that's why I think we're seeing this incredible evolution in the way that a lot of executive teams are thinking and investing in customer experience and customer success, because the reality is, um, it's almost like there's been a, uh, this huge light shine upon the fact that if you can keep your retention rates extremely high and your churn rates extremely low growing the business really is not, it's not that difficult. Don't mean that there's a ton of bumps along the way, constant ups and downs every day of day of the week. 

Speaker 1 (00:05:44) - Every one of us knows that, but the reality is, is like, it's, it's also just fun to build a business, to build a team that has that baked into its DNA. So I love that. Um, I do have a follow-up question for you on the team side. So I mentioned earlier too, the product part, and you know that I'm going to hit on this because I think most ex executives would salivate over your situation where you have connectivity to product. So being able to help oversee lead and just constantly be pushing and motivating customer success and customer experience, but then being able to just bring back the wins and bring back the learnings and findings straight to your other team on the product side. Can you spend a minute or two just talking about what that's kind of what that's looked like for you, and I'd love to kind of hear some of the benefits that you've, you've been able to experience having that type of a setup. 

Speaker 2 (00:06:28) - Yeah. You know, I will say there's a lot of, I believe in an organization where customer success sits to the middle, because that's another way of saying the customer sits at the middle of customer. Success is ultimately responsible for it. And customer success should have a lot of great partnerships in New York with just about every team, uh, you know, from sales to marketing, to finance, all of that. If you're going to ask me somewhat biasly of course, where they should, where, who their BFF should be, it should be product. Because the fact of the matter is, is that when we come up to a renewal people renew on services and on the solution, if they don't like your solution, even if they love you, they're not going to spend tens of thousands of dollars to be your friend. That's not how anything works. Um, and if they, if they love the solution, but to your point, they can't consistently rely on you for the things that live around your solution and support them around your solution. 

Speaker 2 (00:07:18) - They're also going to go looking somewhere else. So it's, it's really, it's really two pieces of the equation that have to come together. And I think in most organizations, even once I've been a part of it, uh, previous, uh, in previous lives, I think the biggest disconnect between product and CS is how they think and how they have to think in order to be good at their jobs, a customer success manager, that's traditionally going to be someone really high IQ, really relationship focused, you know, really, really focused on, on helping people realize something that they're seeking for product on the other hand has to come from this more objective space. They cannot live and die by every single thing that happens to every single customer. They'll never make it. So I think a lot of the disconnect between those teams is how they share their insights, how they share their perspective, how they communicate with one another. 

Speaker 2 (00:08:11) - I think if you ask those two teams, what they want to accomplish, they're going to say the same stuff. Yep. And where we fall apart in partnership really comes down to how we go about, uh, discussing how we use each other to accomplish those things. And at a very high level, that's, that's a role I serve between my two teams is translator almost, you know, uh, bringing part people on the product side, closer to CS, bring the CS people closer to product, helping them understand where they may be talking past one another, or really saying the same thing in a different way. And I think that's potentially a little easier to do through one human, but I also think it's wildly wildly possible through to, um, aligned leaders. Uh, and they probably wouldn't have the sort of angel and devil conversations that I have all the time when I'm Trying to make some different decisions based on whether I have my product, my success leader hat on. Yeah. But I think, I think nurturing that relationship is incredibly important because CS has a lot of meaningful insights for product product has a lot of good perspective for CS and good problem solving for CS. So I'm hoping that's an, a continued evolvement that we see in a lot of businesses is how those two groups work together. 

Speaker 1 (00:09:24) - I think Abby, you just know that that's probably one of the biggest takeaways. Um, in general, every, every CX and CS leader should be thinking about how product can become one of their very best friends. The other thing too, is there's something really interesting about you mentioned this, but when you talk about like the socialization or sharing tribal knowledge or cross-pollinating different, SMEEs across a business, any business, any industry, by the way, um, nothing is better than when you get a C extra CS or, and a product person sitting around a set of customer inquiries or a set of customer requests. And even just being able to walk a CSM through. Okay. Super.

Speaker 1 (00:09:59) - And we'll fix. We can bang this out in the next sprint. This is easy. Okay. This next question, this is really hard. Like you need to let your customer, if they want this, like Google struggles with that apple struggle. And then, but my point is, is like, just even having that like regular communication, that internal discussion number one is just good UX and it's good employee experience because then you've got a team of people that are sharing each other, sharing ideas, collaborating, whatever, too. It's amazing how many companies don't leverage the ability of putting some of that golden information into their CSM or into their customer focused teams mouths, because that's the strategic partnership that we're talking about. Like when you go back to that next customer phone call, you go back to that next, that next email. And there's, it's loaded with substance. It's loaded with knowledge, it's loaded with things that we can do, or maybe can't do, or even better yet. Hey, this is already on the roadmap. We it's going to be done by XYZ date. We've already heard it from a number of customers we're halfway through. Like that is also phenomenal modern customer experience being involved in that conversation showing what's being done or what's being out there. And, and frankly, just helping to make sure that people understand sort of what's on the horizon from a product, from a customer experience perspective. So I love, I love that. So I think it's awesome. And it must be fun by the way for you. 

Speaker 2 (00:11:07) - It is, you know, it's really, um, it's really rewarding. I feel, I feel a little guilty sometimes because I do get to have this such an amazing experience on both on both sides of the house. Um, you know, and I think, I think whether it, most people are not going to have my scenario, but you could easily get to something like my scenario through shared understandings, shared KPIs, ways that you communicate on things. Um, you know, I encourage every product team that if you're not talking to customers constantly do it, start it now. Like you need to experience what the CS team experiences you need to have. You need to have a touch of that, of that, uh, of that awareness. As you think about things, think about ways you can bring customer success, bring support, bring professional services into the process of developing a solution. 

Speaker 2 (00:11:53) - Some of the best sort of litmus testing you're going to get as you develop a solution is to turn it towards your own, your own team and say, like poke some holes in it before we're done coding here. Um, and on the CS side, I tell people, you gotta lead with the data. If you want to influence a PM, don't bring a story. Don't bring in anecdote, don't bring, don't bring your energy and your nerves, bring your numbers. That's what's going to move that's, what's going to move the needle for product. And that's, what's also going to move the needle for the business. 

Speaker 1 (00:12:23) - I love it. I love it. Um, Abby love to jump into the second CX pillar of tools, and I think this fits nicely with what you just said, because every company out there is obviously number one, they've probably already got a plethora of different SAS solutions running their business. Some of them, they probably love some of them, not so much. Um, but those tools and those different solutions that we're all building our companies with that gives us some of the numbers that you just finished talking about. Can you spend a few minutes talking about, um, as you and the team have really kind of grown in scale sculptures zero, what are some of the tools that have been, you know, uh, just a, a super important part of that journey, and then definitely spend a minute two talking about how your two hotrods zero is helping your customers and it's helping, um, all of the, all of the users out there in the world that are using zero, have a better insight and have a better grasp of what's going on inside of their own business. 

Speaker 2 (00:13:10) - Yeah, absolutely. So we'll start with us. Um, we use turn zero veterans zero. We drink our own champagne and we, we have from the beginning. Uh, so we, we are in a bit of a unique scenario where most CS teams pick up or ideally pick up a CS platform or purposeful platform for them a little bit further, along in their maturity. We happen to have had it from day one, which has given us a lot of, a lot of structure, um, that a lot of teams are sort of building after the fact, which is fine, totally normal. Um, it's also given us a shared space to work with product in terms of the numbers that we produce about customers, where they can go to understand the customer and to learn more about, uh, you know, what interests them and what motivates them. Um, so for us churn zero is our main hub and what it represents. 

Speaker 2 (00:13:57) - And I'll try to, I'm not here to sell turn zero. So I'll try to do this more. Agnostically is a CS platform, represents a centralized hub for the CS team. And this is something that many other parts of the organization have. CS is still grappling for those same rights. In some ways like no CMO is out there explaining to their CEO why they need a marketing automation system. It's just like, of course you have a marketing automation system, no VP of sales or CRO is out there explaining why you need certain sales, automation, tools, or sales reporting tools. Of course you do. It's mission critical to the business. And as we see our space, and as we see leader, CEO's CRS their understanding of customer success shifting away from being a happiness team, to being a revenue team, the same, thing's got to be true for CS teams is that they need a space that is purpose-built for their workflows every single day for their, for the numbers they need to report on for the tools that they need to manage their customers and manage their customers. 

Speaker 2 (00:14:57) - And what those tools are, can vary a little bit, depending on whether you are high velocity or a high touch CSM team, or maybe a mix of both. So that's really what turns here is bringing to all of our customers who use us is that centralization of data. So you can make informed decisions with that centralized data. You have a holistic picture of the customer, and even just in a one-on-one communication, there's no more showing up and being like, well, how are things going? What do you want to talk about today? Which is my biggest pet peeve don't ever show up to a meeting and do that. Like you should have a reason for your existence there. Uh, so really sort of driving your customer conversations and then helping us, helping teams be more proactive. You know, it'd be great if we could each look at every single customer that we work with every single day and understand the nuances of what's going on with them, it's not practical. So how do we have solutions that help us, uh, you know, at, at scale, understand where someone is, where they may need help and then react to that in a, in meaningful, timely, relevant way. Uh, and that's, that's what turns here is doing for the customers that use us. 

Speaker 1 (00:16:03) - Let's I mean, number one, it's awesome. Number two, I think, um, this year, when you talk about just like, what types of resources, what types of tooling, what type of technology does each member of any executive, um, you know, leadership role need you're right. Salespeople will always have their CRM and, uh, maybe you have operative individuals that always have their ERP, or maybe you've got financial people that always have their FP and a, uh, to us, but we're finally in the spot where there's just, I think across the board or for most companies, they thank God. There's, there's this understanding. And there's this agreement around the fact that like the people that are managing the portfolio and the people that are managing the customers that have already been brought down and have already been closed, there are already paying customers leading to our revenue every single day, allowing all of us to be here, thinking about them as a customer, um, to have some of those additional insights, but more importantly, to be able to create meaningful digestible calls to action on the insights. 

Speaker 1 (00:16:59) - That's a game changer. And I think that number one, this is why you see so much just number one, so much investment, getting fueled and ducked into our space right now. But this is also when you have companies like trans zero that are killing it. And they're making a ton of happy customers because this is this stuff's hard to build it manually or to try to draw just from a CRM or just from an issue resolution management system, or just from a, a Telephonics itself. It's not that easy. Like there is a, there's a, there's a tremendous amount of aggregation assessment compartmentalization. Then you gotta do the whole game of how do you get a bunch of smart people to know what to do with that information? And it's, it's pretty, it's a, it's a pretty awesome solution, but more important than you guys picked a hell of a space to really be able to help so many growing businesses, um, you know, think about what's important as they, as they scale into the future. What about the second part? And I'd love to know as you guys were building the business, building the team, building the portfolio, or some of the other tools that, that really kind of help that process and help that growth process and help keep the train on the tracks. 

Speaker 2 (00:17:55) - Uh, so we certainly have a CRM here at, uh, at turn zero as well. We, we happen to use Salesforce, um, you know, and one of the big things that turns zero does is communicate with a CRM, whether it's Salesforce or others, because most businesses are going to need a sort of central source of truth, uh, in order to, um, you know, in order to organize what they're doing as an entire business. Uh, you know, so, so that was the other issue for us here as a CS team, that was the other main tool use. Now our support team uses other tools, um, you know, to, to do ticket management and that sort of thing, but we've really challenged ourselves here at turn zero to exclusively drink. Our own champagne, I should say is because when we find spaces, uh, as we found spaces, as we've grown where we said, oh, gee, I really wish turns zero would do X. That means we've got customers out there thinking that exact same thing. And that means that our product roadmap comes from a really natural place because you've got a team behind it. That is it. That is you trying to use it to its fullest advantage. And so they're the first ones that are going to come up with great ideas about how we could, how we could continue to grow. 

Speaker 1 (00:19:03) - Yep. I love it. Um, I mean, I'd love to pick your brain on the third CX pillar of process. So I've talked to my team, we've talked about tools. What are some of the things that you've learned along this journey in terms of how the churns your team has been able to number one, just document and capture and constantly Chronicle the different things that are going on internally and externally with their business. And how have you guys, um, as you've grown the business thought about keeping or curating, or, or even just controlling and monitoring the evolution of your playbooks or your SOP or some of the processes that guide the day-to-day business. 

Speaker 2 (00:19:34) - Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, as all great things in life with process, uh, moderation is your friend. Uh, I have seen people go to not as bad, but you can also go in the other direction. And I think all CS teams go through a period where they go too far in the other direction, they start from nowhere, then they get, uh, they get excited about the possibilities and they over-engineer, we've gone through that same period as well. So.

Speaker 2 (00:20:00) - You can do I believe as you're growing in something, we try to do really routine here routinely here at churn zero is to have very purposeful moments where we step back and analyze and you can't analyze the whole thing. If we analyzed every single process we have from start to finish that, you know, we do nothing else. So sort of rotating through what we do. Like, Hey, let's focus on implementation right now. Where can we refine there? Let's focus on our renewal processes, focus on our product, adoption angles, and continually refine because of the fact of the matter is, is that it cannot be a set it and forget it as your team changes as your customers change, as your product changes, you have to adapt to that. What looked like success for a turn zero customer three years ago would be a horrifically unhealthy customer now. 

Speaker 2 (00:20:45) - So like, and if I never changed my, you know, if I never looked at my health again and sort of just left it and said, well, it was good three years ago, it might still be good. Now I'd be making poor decisions, uh, as, as a leader. So another way to say this is that I think probably sooner than most groups think of, I believe customer success operations has to become a thing, a defined role, not a thing that a leader does on the side when they have time. And when there aren't 16 other fires that they're trying to put out, but an actual defined role that they do. And again, I'll go back to marketing and sales here. Marketing has ops no one questions that sales has ops unknowns questions it, and it's because you need a particular mindset, a particular skillset to do it well. 

Speaker 2 (00:21:28) - And as your team grows as your customer base, diversifies, as you try to do more, you can, you need someone who's solely focused on that and making sure you have good feedback loops, um, the data analysis on what's working versus not. Uh, so that's usually one of the biggest pieces of advice I give to other CS leaders is find ops before you, before you are very convinced. You need it. If you wait until you're like a whole, we need it. Now you're digging out of a hole. So try to avoid dipping into that hole in the first place. Um, and you can save yourself and your CSMs, a lot of trouble, a lot of trouble. 

Speaker 1 (00:22:05) - I, I love, I love that, that, that piece of wisdom, Abby, and I think you're absolutely right where, so a couple of things let's start with just, um, the different, the different lenses of going, being too draconian with your process or your playbook curation or doing nothing at all. Like finding that middle spot is absolutely like your number one, starting point goal. Like you got to have something it could literally, I tell, I tell our clients at CCL time, we can literally be a few pages, even though it could be somebody has spent three or four or eight years of their lives thinking about this every day. So can you leave me a, like a, like a, like a complete, you know, foreign piece type of books, eyes, playbook, but even if it's just a three to five page on things that you have to know about the team or things that you have to know, the tools, the processes, the feedback, I think same thing, customer lens versus employee lens, having simple things that you need to understand about our customer or our ideal customer profile or tendencies with customer, same thing on the employee side, if you can, here's common problems that our developers have common problems that our support teams like that type of stuff is super, super helpful for people just having compass views. 

Speaker 1 (00:23:09) - They at least kind of directionally have an idea of where they need to go. Um, the other piece though, that you mentioned that I absolutely love, and it's funny, cause I've been, I've been very much pounding this drum the last several months myself, but I I'm getting to the point in my own CX and CS nerd journey where it developing inserting and investing in CX and CS ops is early as possible is probably the easiest way that you can optimize all of the foresee exposures at the exact same time. Because the minute that you get sound recording visibility to your point earlier in the call, making sure that you're constantly following and reporting on the numbers, cause all the other feelings and the human elements, they are important because it's part of the art. It's definitely part of the art, but if you're building your story or building your painting or building your piece of artwork based on math and numbers, nobody's going to disagree with what that plot looks like. 

Speaker 1 (00:23:55) - And it's just a much easier way of getting things done faster. The last part is this it's incredible to me, how many incredible companies, companies that are killing it, companies that are doing over a hundred million dollars of annual revenue, who they miss the fact that there are other gains that come from that CX, that CS operations, for example, agent utilization, um, customer segmentation, um, some of the other intricate parts that go into a playbook or go into your processes. You get the answers from the CX and the CS operations managers that can actually show us and prove and validate these insights. And you're right. It's like, this is what, this is one area of for our listeners. If you haven't already invested in this area for your team, don't think about the next three or four or five CSMs. Think about maybe two, two CSMs. And once the X ops matters and start there and see if you even need to go to the fourth or the fifth, because it's, it's almost like a missile control or missile defense add onto your team. You get this whole level of intelligence that makes your team.

Speaker 2 (00:24:50) - Absolutely. And I tell people also, if you're so efficiency and accuracy of those CSMs is the number one reason to get CS ops, because we're all trying to do as much as we can with what we have for the benefit of our customers. So CS ops is all about capitalizing on that, but the other time I tell people, Hey, you might want to start thinking about CS ops is when they feel like what they do as a customer team, doesn't have a place in New York. People don't understand it. They don't recognize it, or even worse than not benefiting from it. You know, there's a lot of lip service going around about being customer centric. And I think sometimes in customer success, we're like, well, we're not part of the problem. Cause we deal with customers all the time. You are, if you are not the constant source of customer insights to every other part of the organization and CS ops can, it usually is the main owner of that. So it's great to be super well-organized and super efficient. I believe modern CS will be defined by the fact that CS will be the most operations driven part of the organization, the most efficient part of the organization, but it also serves a really great purpose in making sure that your company can be customer centric, because you are constantly proactively democratizing those insights about your customers to product, to marketing, to sales, to finance, whatever it is. Um, so those are the sorts of two signals that it, it might be time to start thinking about ops. 

Speaker 1 (00:26:18) - I love that. And literally perfect segue into the fourth and final pillar of feedback because you're right. I think selfishly, this is probably one of the best parts of any CX or CSR job, every right. We get to put our hands in every part of the business, but like the best CX and CS leaders in the, and some of the companies are absolutely crushing it and creating this incredible, you know, world-class customer experience for success, uh, roadmaps, playbooks, they just did the last part. You said they democratize that fee. They democratize the hell out of that feedback. Everybody from the top of the business to the bottom of the business knows about what that drum beat or what that pulse from the customers. Obviously we've all seen just so much new work about the voice of customer reporting, voice of customer dashboard. Who's the customer taskforce force interests. Everyone's got different terms for this stuff, but like, this is why it's so, so critical. I'd love for you to spend a few minutes talking about some of the details for how you guys do leverage your, um, your customer feedback. And I'd love to hear some ideas for how you guys leverage some of the employee feedback insurance of your, to be able to make this thing a crank every single day. 

Speaker 2 (00:27:19) - Yeah. So I'll, I'll speak first from a product perspective, since that's the other half of the hat that I wear. Um, so we have a system, it turns zero for anybody to submit product feedback. It could be a prospect, it could be a customer, it could be an employee. We don't care where the feedback comes from. We, we, we want it. So we so that, because then that gives the product team a very, um, rich environment to work in, instead of guessing what people want or trying to decide like would a or B have a bigger impact to the business. Now you can tie things to actual numbers to deals won or lost renewals, you know, lost or won or even expanded. It starts to allow the product side of the business to make very business driven decisions. When you have a good method of collecting that feedback and then using it, um, you know, businesses are always going to make some decisions about where they go with their product roadmap, where you're, you're, you're trusting more than following things you already see, you know, you're leaping into the abyss here a little bit, but in general, if you want a roadmap that feels customer centric, customer driven, that is likely to make your employees happy, uh, you know, really, really coming from that feedback is huge. 

Speaker 2 (00:28:27) - Um, I also think it's interesting because I think that when I talk about product and, uh, CS being BFFs, I think it's because they have a lot of the shared, shared responsibilities on voice of the customer on product adoption. You know, so instead of seeing those as battlegrounds of who's gonna win and get to own that it should become, you know, uh, compromising opportunities where we can feed off of one another. Um, in terms of other teams finance, if you are, if you are an actual revenue team, finance is going to be really interested in, should be really interested in just about everything you say, because the most important thing they can have is, um, perspective is it is an idea of what is, what is coming. Uh, you know, if they're ever going to be bumps in the road, those bumps are less horrific. If you knew they were coming, versus if you were riding along in the car and everything's doing fine. And then, you know, you sort of go over your speed hump here. So real insight into the health of the business and how that relates to dollars is a huge thing for finance. Um, so if you haven't already spent time with your CFO, figuring out what numbers he needs from you.

Speaker 2 (00:29:32) - Definitely, definitely do that for sales and marketing, it's a little bit more straightforward, but super, super powerful. You know, when you have voice of the customer programs, you can then use those to find your advocates, build a, you know, good referral programs, uh, build good reference programs that really help on the marketing. And on the sales side, it's also great opportunity. I think sometimes CS feels like the victim in the situation around customer fit, like home sales gave us another like, like, you know, it's like, and I mean like, look, it's going to happen sometimes. But if you, again, if we talk about bringing together finance and marketing and sales and CS is CSS, all right, here are the customers. Here's the profile customers that we were new and we expand here's the profile customers that we lose. You are suddenly gonna have a lot more say in what fit looks like and how it develops than what you have previously. Um, so, you know, it's, it's a good opportunity to positively influence on the classic, um, tension points between sales and marketing and sales and CS. 

Speaker 1 (00:30:37) - I couldn't agree more in Abby. What you just highlighted. This is another prime example for how eats just in today's world CX and CS is a team sport. It is not just on us as the customer experience or customer success individuals. This is all encompassing. I think this is one of the reasons why you do see so much content and you do see so many, um, you know, incredible customer focused business leaders talking about the idea of a holistic customer journey, because when you think about, or just even for our listeners, imagine a customer journey, or think about the last customer journey map that you looked at every, you just nailed it. It's like for, for, from the very point of awareness to how somebody even becomes aware that a brand or a product or a service is out there, your CML starts there. Then you got to pull them into the pipeline. 

Speaker 1 (00:31:19) - Right now you got consideration. Maybe you're thinking about converting. Your you're doing the sales process. Now your CRO or your, your head of sales is in there. Now you can get them across the line and they're ready to rock and roll. They're ready to onboard. And now this is, what's interesting about your world, Abby, this is telling you, right, this is one of the coolest takeaways from today's show. This is typically where the CS side, right? And the CX side starts to take over. But if you're a software company, or if you're a technology company, this is where product adoption, stickiness retention. And I would argue, I've been using this fourth term of mastery sets it, cause like, if you want to really rip out your LTV and max it out, you need to help your users become masters of the tool. They master the tool. 

Speaker 1 (00:31:58) - It's, it's a daily thing. They're using it every day. They're using it. They're fully utilizing it. They're going to enrich all of the reporting and the dashboards that they could pull out of the back end because it's being used properly. That's like incredible. And then this stuff goes all the way through product analytics, finance. So like the point is, is like, whether it's, um, if your company already doesn't have some type of group again, you know, at CSU with our clients, we call them our voice of customer taskforce, but knighting individuals from each one of these camps and immediately bringing them to around the table to think about how you can expand the way that you're doing your voice of customer or your customer feedback, digest, curation, whatever you guys are calling everyone. Company's got a different way that they want to kind of brand it. 

Speaker 1 (00:32:38) - And that's, what's cool about this is there it's pliable. Like you can come up and some companies, they do an awesome job of turning that right around, right around to their customer base Abby. And they do like the here's what we heard from you customers. And here's what we worked on for the last 90 days. And people love that stuff. It's inclusive. It feels like you, like customers feel like they've got their blueprints all over or their thumbprints all over it. And then employees feel like they got their thumbprints all over it. And that's like where you're, you're really kind of starting to balance that CX and IDX to make like a super, super awesome situation. So all super foresight there. Um, I have to ask you, um, has there been in your journey, has there been one or two things that you would suggest to our listeners when it comes to feedback? Like what are, what are like the one or two things that have worked the best for you? Whether it's surveys, one-on-one conversations, but has there been like one or two things that you already know have worked the best for you as a customer focus business leader? 

Speaker 2 (00:33:29) - Uh, I'm going to Dodge the question slightly and say that I do think it's situational depending on what you're trying to, uh, get feedback on. So for example, you know, very common after a support ticket to send SEASET, I think there's a perfectly good way to collect feedback. It's very, you know, transactional, the feedback is focused. It's quick and easy to give, and you can get real information out of that survey. What percentage felt good about it? What percentage didn't and then if you're willing to comb comments, you can find themes in those comments. So there are scenarios in which surveys work really well in general, if you need to know something more than can be answered in one or two questions, I feel like the more you can lean towards listening tours and interviews.

Speaker 2 (00:34:13) - The the better. And I think sometimes we think like, oh, you know, well, product's a small team or there's, you know, there's this many customers in the product teams only this big or same with CS. I think you can sort of leverage all of your resources if everybody knows what we're asking for. And the goal is really to go and listen, not to change minds, not to convince or anything like that, but rather to absorb and to bring back information. I think a lot, a huge group of people can go and help with that. Um, you'll want to try to approach those things in a way that makes the results more than just, um, totally qualitative, where now you have to read through thousands and thousands and thousands of words to get understanding. So it is definitely a balance, but I think in general, the more we can talk to people directly, the more exposure we get to the language that they use, the nuances of tone and direction and where a thought travels because you are getting to the human behind it, as opposed to just the, you know, the check mark on a survey, I think surveys serve a really important purpose, but a really, uh, controlled purpose in my experience. 

Speaker 1 (00:35:17) - I love it. That's fantastic advice. And I couldn't agree more. I think it's like, I think we're going to see a big change to that too. I think there's going to be a lot of customer focus executives that start thinking about the, the, the, the leveraging, the customer, listening to our customer score carding, obviously. So many CSM groups have got fantastic at the way that they do their monthly reviews or quarterly business reviews. So we've already done a ton of awesome things in terms of evolving this whole space, that direction. But the last thing is this, when you bring it down to its simplest form too, it's like conversation, it's listening, it's learning. And that's, that's what builds relationships over time, right? It's that it's that those are the activities at the simplest sense and make another human feel really good about working with a product or a solution. 

Speaker 2 (00:35:55) - I agree with you, but I actually want to bring in something else that you said here on mastery. So I think this is sort of the, to me relationships, and I say this as a person who's been in CS for a long time. Now relationships are a double-edged sword. If your relationship is based too much on the individual, it's a weak foundation on which to build your house. So if I had a customer's like, we love Abby. We love no one else, but Abby, and that's the only person we ever want to talk to. If I win the lottery and I moved to The Bahamas. Now what happens to that relationship? Or I get a new POC. I mean, how many of us have struggled with a customer who got a new leader constantly? So when we think about relationship, I think we need to think about how we build relationship through understanding challenges, understanding goals, understanding intent, and have that be the foundation of interactions, but have it not be necessarily associate with just a single human cause I think single humans, particularly the environment we're in right now with the job market and everything like that, single humans are, are shaky ground on which we stand. 

Speaker 2 (00:36:58) - So I think that's what CS needs to get our mind around is how do we build relationships that are very human, but also don't require a specific human, if that makes any sense. And that's sort of, it's a problem I'm like trying to noodle through in own head. But I think that is going to be the crux of how we figure out modern CS is keeping the human element without requiring necessarily the specific individuals that are there. 

Speaker 1 (00:37:23) - So that is super interesting. A whole whole, we could have a whole other show on this topic right here, Abby, but the one thing that you immediately make me think about is like part of listeners leveraging your feedback and thinking about how you can build the future of your customer success planning or your customer success approach with each account. That's how you get to where Abby saying, then it's not about the superhero CSM, although we all, we all love to 

Speaker 1 (00:37:49) - But you're right. It gets back to process. It gets back to consistency, gets back to the platform or the tool doing the things you're keeping the guard rails for the customer. And that's again, that's where the value comes from. That's where all of the consistency comes from. So I'd love it, Abby, this is been absolutely fantastic. Before we wrap up today's show, I want to make sure number one, any other things you want to call it about things that are going on with you and the team of truancy or anything you want to call about, call out about some things you're working on and then number two, where can people find out more about you and more about the team? 

Speaker 2 (00:38:15) - Yeah, so, uh, I guess from the turn zero front, I'll say we are incredibly lucky to be growing really fast. So if you're a CS nerd and you want to hang out with a lot of CS nerds, we have lots of different customer positions that are open. We're always looking for talented folks to join the team. Um, so if you're interested, definitely visit our careers page, uh, and take a look there as for me, you can find me on LinkedIn, um, you know, um, underneath our turn zero page, I'm always happy to talk about this stuff. I tell people I get get too geeked out, too excited. So give me opportunities to get geeked out with you and I'll be, I'll be really excited. So 

Speaker 1 (00:38:51) - That's why this has been an absolute pleasure for me because it is super fun to have, uh, these types of conversations with someone that's equally excited. Plus you guys are killing it out here, so keep it the potassium work. And, uh, we look forward to seeing what you, what you're the team of trends you were doing in the near future. 

Speaker 2 (00:39:04) - Awesome. Well, thank you so much for having you as a great combo. 

Speaker 1 (00:39:07) - Absolutely. Thank you so much heavy.