CXChronicles Podcast 169 with Kristi Faltorusso, Chief Customer Officer at ClientSuccess

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #169 we welcomed Kristi Faltorusso, Chief Customer Officer at ClientSuccess.

ClientSuccess is revolutionizing the way SaaS companies manage, retain, and grow their existing customer base. They help SaaS companies proactively manage customer relationships, measure customer health, minimize churn and maximize revenue.

ClientSuccess is a simple yet sophisticated solution that both the front-line CSMs and any Executive team will love. For the CSMs, they bring together the tools, best practices, insights and analytics that they will need to proactively manage their customers & future portfolios.

For the Executives, they deliver the deep analytics, metric and reports to provide a comprehensive view of the customer health of their SaaS business.

In this episode Kristi 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 ClientSuccess as they've grown their customer portfolio & revenue.

**Episode #169 Highlight Reel:**

1.  Why customer success is becoming a leader within modern sales & revenue generation 
2.  Ideas for setting up your optimal, well-balanced customer success team  as you scale
3.  Setting expectations early & often with the customers & teams using your product   
4.  Leveraging customer journey maps as your company's blue-print for growth & success
5.   Socializing your customer feedback & democratizing your data to drive innovation

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

Click here to learn more about Kristi Faltorusso

Click here to learn more about ClientSuccess

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

#169 -- Kristi Faltorusso, Chief Customer Officer at ClientSuccess 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:00:02) - All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CXChronicles podcast. Super excited. We have an awesome guest today. Kristi Faltorusso, so welcome to CXC. 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:00:11) - Hi. So excited to be here. Thanks for having me. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:00:15) - Kristi is got, so number one, we're excited to have you and the number two, Kristi got an awesome story. She's been on this incredible journey. And I think like I was super pumped to have you on Kristi because, um, you've just done such an awesome job of helping to kind of expand the CX and the CS community. You're constantly, it's hard to keep track of where the hell you are because you're always in a different town, a different city, a different place, always with these different companies and awesome customer focused business leaders. So I'm super pumped to have you come on today, share the story and just give us a bunch of different ideas for how you've sort of planted your own journey and how you've really kind of, uh, struck the chord that you struck with client success and with this huge community that you built. So I'm pumped. So why don't you start off, um, spend a couple of minutes kind of sharing that, sharing the high level. Give us a sense for how you got into this whole space and how you got into the position that you're in today. Um, leading up client success. 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:01:04) - Awesome. Yeah, I actually, I love my journey and not just because it's my journey, but because I think it's, it's an interesting one because it helps at the stage that anyone can make their way into customer success at a software company. Um, I, my break, my career down into two acts act. One is all in digital marketing. I spent 10 years of my professional career in marketing, uh, specifically online acquisition, right? So helping companies, whether it's agency in, in agencies or in-house, um, drive more traffic to their websites, right through SEO PPC, right. We're going to either do e-commerce or they're selling ad space. So spent a decade doing that. And during that time, I actually used a product called bright edge to help with our search engine optimization, which was a SAS product. Uh, they were a Silicon valley based company. And after using them at two different companies and establishing a great relationship with the CEO, I said open the New York office and I'll come work for you. 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:01:54) - And eventually they did. And so I did. And so I was able to spend act two of my career breaking into customer success, you know, in, in early 2012 and spending the past 10 years building scaling and transforming customer success organizations at hyper-growth SAS companies. Um, and then most recently had the privilege of joining client success, um, and coming on board to basically do customer success for customer success professionals, which is like literally finding the thing I love most in the world. And then tricking somebody into paying me is what I feel like I've done it now. And I'm super excited about that. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:02:27) - That's super cool. I think that, so first of all, I love, um, it's just, I, I know I say this a lot, but it's, it's awesome here. How many different walks, different customer focus business leaders have to getting to where they are today? You mentioned digital, um, digital marketing. I selfishly that is like such an incredible place for a CX or, or a CSR to be able to kind of cut their teeth because I mean, look most, most modern day companies, when you start to think about like this holistic customer journey, when you think about the very first, um, way that a potential customer, a new customer finds out a business or a product, the first place you must have had a lot of, uh, you, you, you got a lot of, um, early, early experience in terms of just that, that beginning of the journey or that upper funnel part of the game that had to have been huge in terms of kind of thinking about how you eventually, as you get down the journey or you get down the funnel and you're thinking about retention, and you're thinking about satisfaction, you're thinking about product adoption, usability. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:03:21) - Must've been a really good way to kind of start like starting early on that, that early part of the journey. And must've really kind of set you off on a, on an interesting course for thinking about how CX and CS is. It is a huge part of selling Kristi. It's a huge part of selling. I think people like you and I are probably some of the loudest people around like this is modern south. Like if you can get really, really good at bringing people in the door and then keeping them for the long haul, that's the game, that's an easy way to crush your sales goals. That's a super easy way to grow your business. And that's a super easy way to be able to grow your team and expand and scale into the future. So I liked how you started that off. Why don't you talk a little bit about client success and give us a sense for the team that you're building today over a client success. 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:03:59) - Awesome. Yeah. So for folks that aren't familiar with what client success is, and it's a customer success management solution. So we manage from new to renew. So basically your entire customer life cycle journey, um, helping make sure that you've got visibility into customer health and engagement and all the things that kind of make your partnership with your customers really strong, hopefully driving towards retention and advocacy. Um, so I joined about a year ago with the remit of coming in and transforming that post initial sales organization. Right. So you think about the customer within any organization, right? You've got customer acquisition and then customer growth.

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:04:34) - Uh, right. And so customer acquisition might be like marketing and sales, uh, customer growth teams. This is me managing customer success, support services. And so I came in with that as kind of my task at hand Christie, come in, come on board, let's assess what we're doing for our customers today and find a way to optimize that. And so I spent the past year really redefining who we needed to be, to provide a better, stronger value for our customers. We did tons of interviews and met with a lot of folks. And ultimately what happened was we changed everything. Um, I rebuilt the entire team and listen, we had wonderful people on the team, but what we learned is that we needed different skills, right? And different experiences for the folks that we're going to be partnering with our customers. They were super vocal about, Hey, listen, your product is really easy. 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:05:19) - We don't need somebody to kind of walk me through point and click. I need somebody who has been there and done that who understands strategy behind customer success, best practices, and can help really serve as almost like a consultant. So that was a value that my customers needed to see from us as a team. That's what we did. We brought folks on board who had led teams. I had brought folks on that actually had to worked out even other customer success management solutions companies. Um, you know, we just really upload, we, we, I don't say up level because that would say that the other team didn't have the same. Uh, we changed the profile. We've also rebuilt our entire support organization and our services function as well in terms of what we were doing with our customers. And while it's still a complete work in progress, we made huge strides and our customers are loving the people. 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:06:04) - We also rebuilt all the processes. So everything from what do we do the minute a customer comes on board through the entire life cycle management. Every single process has been redefined rejiggered in a way that really puts the customer at the heart of everything. We no longer focus on things that would otherwise be internal metrics or internal focus activities. It's not about us ever. So we redesigned it so that the customer is really taken into consideration in everything that we do. We've made it super flexible. So it feels custom all the time, but can still scale for us in terms of how we execute. And so far the feedback from our customers has been wonderful. So we're not done by any means, but we've made huge progress in, in 12 months. And so I'm excited about continuing that journey. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:06:48) - Well, so number one, I mean in only 12 months to get that laundry list of things, even just touched, let alone turn around optimized. Up-leveled just pushed onto that next stage. That's incredible. That's a ton of heavy lifting. That's a ton of construction. That's a ton of deep thinking. That's a, probably a tremendous amount of collaboration with the team of client success, just to get some of that stuff done. Cause that's hard. Let's call what it is. That's hard. It's also even, even in a, even in a fast moving high paced business, it's constantly focused on growth. It's hard, it's hard to get changed. It's hard to also be able to keep the train on the tracks while you're making all these different adjustments. So that's awesome for you guys and that's awesome for the team. Um, one quick thing I want to pick on that you just, that you just talked about, which was when, when you think about like the evolution of these teams or Christy, when you think about the, or just the, the ongoing optimization, which immediately made me think about that, I want our listeners to absolutely kind of be thinking about on a regular basis is you made me immediately think about as business grows as a company scales, as a customer portfolio grows, changes and evolves. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:07:50) - The reality is, is there's going to be wildly different needs and there's going to be wildly different complexities that the team has to be able to manage, has to be able to adapt with. It has to be able to evolve with. And I like the we're starting here with team because like the team often also has a huge impact on what the other pillars are going to look like. So depending on what your team looks like and how your team is set up and what types of guys and gals you have on that team, to be able to do this stuff, it's going to oftentimes dictate how well the tool section is going to be set up how well the processes are going to be set up how well you're going to actually be able to not only collect feedback, but act upon feedback. So I love that, that, that you kind of call that out. I think it's something that our, our listeners need to think about because realistically, this is hard and every company is going to have a different type of appetite and a different type of cadence for when you need to think about when it's time to Uplevel or when it's time to graduate to the next, uh, the next day. But I think it's really, really important that you call that out. And it's something that as CXOs in CS, there's we gotta be thinking about on a regular basis as, as we're working at these growing companies. 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:08:45) - Yeah. It's just a tough realization to come to, right? Because sometimes that means you have to make people changes and, you know, listen, if you've got hardworking employees, last thing you want to do is have to make a change that results in them, maybe not sticking around, but at the end of the day, we are dry. We are managing a business, right. And I do have to give our customers what they need. And so those conversations, they're tough, the outcomes are difficult, but all, and even for our customers, right, that change is hard. Those transitions are seamless, right? Although we'd like them to be. Um, but ultimately I think if everyone is very clear on the vision, everyone can work to getting there and really understands it. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:09:18) - I love that vision compass, just this general idea of direction, setting, being one of the most paramount activities that any executive leadership team.

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:09:27) - Just the team with their customer base too. If your customer base has a sense for who you are, why you exist, where you're going, what direction you're running in, they can make a quick decision as to whether they're getting behind that bus or whether or not they're going to find another one. 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:09:39) - I mean, that's a great point, right? This journey isn't for everyone, you don't have to stay here. You don't have to follow along. This is might not be for you. Um, so I always tell everybody like, listen, if you want to come along great, here's what it's going to take. And if you don't, that's okay. We're going to remain friends. Yeah, 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:09:52) - Yeah. A hundred percent. Um, Christie, before we move forward, I want to give, give the listeners a sense for what is that bread and butter ICP for client success? What type of customers are you guys serving? What type of customers are you working with? And give us a sense for who the profile is for all the awesome guys and gals a year that you're spending time with them thinking about CX and CS optimization with. 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:10:09) - Yeah. So usually these are early to mid stage organizations where I'll define it based on their customer success teams, teams are usually anywhere from three, uh, customer success professionals all the way up to like a hundred. So it really, I would say probably not much larger than that. It probably caps off around there, but so you've got really small organizations who are just starting to build some infrastructure and some light processes around customer success, all the way to some organizations that have really, you know, structured teams who are very clear on how their business operates. But the unique thing about what we target is that we're really focused on teams where they have a high engagement model, right. We don't focus on like that. The leverage ratio is here is usually there's no, no more than a one to 50 ratio. So one customer success professional to 50 customers it's not or lower because that's what our solution really supports and drives. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:11:01) - Okay. Awesome. That's super, super helpful. Um, Christie, so this is fantastic. Thank you for setting the stage. Let's, I'd love to move into the second CX pillar of tools. So number one, with that being said, having probably a very diverse portfolio, you probably see a ton of different tools and you'd probably see a ton of different technology solutions. You probably see some companies that are doing a phenomenal job of utilizing and maintaining. You probably see some companies that are doing a subpar job of utilizing maintaining. Can you spend a couple of minutes talking about some of the things that you've seen along your own journey in terms of what has set companies that do a phenomenal job of tools management, uh, tech stack optimization technology utilization spend a few minutes talking about kind of what you and the team of client success has sort of learned around tools and how you've been able to help customers think about how they can improve the way that they're actually using their tools on a day-to-day basis when they're taking care of their customers. 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:11:51) - So the first thing I will say and start with is teams that have a very clear vision and a strategy around how they intend to use the solution are usually going to be more successful, right? So we're a customer management solution. Our customers are coming to us hopefully to operationalize their practice for teams that come to us with no customer journey, no understanding of what their health scores are gonna look like. No playbooks, no process. It is a lot more difficult for us to get them to a place where they're going to hit that flywheel and be really successful. But the customers who come to us and we're like, Hey, listen, we've been doing this a little manually or a little with our CRM, but we've got it on paper, right? We're really tight on what we need our teams to do, how we're going to do it, what this looks like, those teams come in and they just, they take off. 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:12:37) - Um, and those were the ones that we really want to partner. I mean, obviously we want to partner with everybody, but the ones who have it defined, they're going to get it right. A hundred percent of the time. Now what we always say also is like, be clear on the what's, but be flexible on the how right. And it doesn't have to be true for all technology, right? Like be clear on where it is you're trying to accomplish, but come to us and be flexible on how we're going to get there because not every tool is going to be built the way that you need it. And so people that are, that have that clear mindset, right? Like we know exactly what we want to achieve, help us figure out how we get there. Those are the partnerships where our customers can really get value from every single thing. Our solution does, the ones who are a little bit more rigid around their thought process around that, where they feel like they've defined their what and their, how, and aren't flexible. Those are the ones that often will run into roadblocks, right. Where they're not going to be pleased with a alternative way of getting things done. And they'll almost be their worst enemy. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:13:32) - Yep. That makes sense. That makes sense. Um, what, uh, what have you seen in terms of, it's funny, the last couple episodes we've kind of gotten into this more and more, but what are you seeing in terms of like some of the different ways your customers are some of the different ways that some of the teams that you're working with when it comes to like tool, kit management, tool utilization, are you seeing a lot of companies with these, like these, the, these fat tool stacks where basically you have too many tools, there's confusion around which tools you want, your, your, your primary CX and CS activities and day-to-day operations getting stored into. Um, and then I guess the utilization part, are you seeing a lot of companies that they're spending all this money on these tools, they're theoretically spending a lot of opportunity costs of having a bunch of super smart people looking at maybe 17 different things instead of two or three primary tools. Are you seeing the same type of thing on your end? And if so, what types of things are you guys doing to kind of work with those customers and think about how they can mitigate mitigate context. Switching really kind of hone in on which two or three or four tools are going to be the primary bread and butter solutions. Can you talk, spend a minute or two talking about what you're sort of seeing on your side with some of some of that whole world? 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:14:41) - Yeah, absolutely. So I will say our smaller customers definitely have less technology, right? Just probably because of funding and budgets. So the team is really, it's, they're powering, you know, there may be using ACRM and us and maybe like a few other point solutions in their stack, right? So it's super easy for us to work with them and help them get what they need. Right. Which is ultimately that data democratization and getting them to really utilize all the information in a well streamed way. What happens is you get these, it's not even the larger companies. It's like these, the mid-size customers who have some money and everyone starts feeling like we need all these tools to solve all these problems. But what happens is you've got leaders who are building their own tech stacks, right. But not realizing that this is one universal journey, right? 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:15:25) - And so if your tools, if you're not thinking about how they all work together, how the data should flow from system to system, this is where you end up with these data silos, right? And this is where that breakdown happens. And your teams are having to go to five different places. And it's often because there's this like territorial sense of like, these are my tools, these are my team. This is my process. As opposed to having maybe a technologist in your organization who is leading the charge and saying, you know what, we're going to be very thoughtful about how we approach technology in our business and understand what our entire tech stack looks like across the organization. So that when somebody needs something, before they go and buy it, do we have a solution that already solves for that here? How is the data going to flow from here to here? Right? Like I think people that buy technology, if you're not a technologist or somebody who's really bought software a lot in their professional career, you're not thinking through some of those things and you're buying something because it solves a problem that's immediately in front of you. And because you're not being super thoughtful about it, that's where that breakdown happens. So I do feel like you get to a certain size and there's this, all this tech debt that you have because you bought all these solutions. So you're not using any of them. No, 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:16:31) - I completely agree. And I think you just now, the other part of it, Christie, which is people, and it's almost like the minute that a company gets to the point where they've got the funds or they got the Worchester, they got the financial capabilities of going out and getting a bunch of smart people who, frankly, they've done it before. They've got technology experience. They've built out these, these types of portfolios and processes and playbooks to get you there. But you just now that, where if you don't already have some centralized strategy or some type of stretch centralized roadmap, or I'd love your point of like, no, no, no, just have the, whatever the CTO or the chief innovation officer who, the chief product officer, whoever that is kind of managing the data, hygiene, the data governance, the data structuring connectivity between these toolkits. Like that's the starting point guys 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:17:12) - Ever buy a tool that doesn't speak with all the other tools that you have, if it's core to your operating model. Like I just, I, I can't wrap my head around, like, how did, how did your organization allow for this? Right. We spend half our customers. I mean, listen, we all know it's, it's garbage in garbage out. And the biggest challenge we have is the data hygiene that lives in something like their CRM, right? This is supposed to be your centralized data warehouse, right. For all information. And it's, it's a mess. Right. And I tell them, I'm like, I can't guarantee that what you're gonna, what you're trying to get to, you're going to be able to, because garbage in, garbage out. And so we, we struggle with these things, but to your point of not only the tech stack and kind of the, the governance around all that, but the data hygiene as well is so critical and not enough attention is paid to that. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:17:59) - I totally agree. I last point you mentioned the customer journey mapping too, and I've kind of been on this, this horse for awhile now, but like folks with, as soon as they roll their eyes, when people like Christie and Adrian say, Hey, customer journey, mapping support. And this is another piece. Like if, if you, if for our listeners, if you're not thinking about another critical importance in terms of why customer journey mapping can also help to create a blueprint for your organization or minimally blueprint for your executive leadership team, Christy, this is another one that with some of our customers at CAC, when you start mapping out all of the solutions across a specific customer journey, and then you start looking for that either, either the overlapping or the interlay or the missing pieces, the missing connectivity, the missing visibility, the missing socialization. Again, it's one of the easiest places that you can help. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:18:41) - I think any company in the world start to kind of at least see some opportunities and some threats around when you're starting to identify, identify where systems are communicating or where silos are created and visibility's lost. How are you, how are you actually building a world-class voice of customer report or dashboard or visibility set for the whole business to be able to go and consume what's going on with what's customer, what's going on with the drum beat of the pulse of the customer. So that's another way that like, it's like another reason why this stuff is so important to put it all together and to bake it, make it into something that's going to be awesome. Um, 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:19:13) - Crazy on that though, that I feel like a lot of people fail to see is the impact of your internal tech stack on your customer's experience. 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:19:20) - How, how are those systems not speaking together, doing things that they're supposed to be doing, that's fine, but not with the right data and not with the right flows that impacts your customers. Right. I always think about like the, the sequencing of something like invoicing, right? Like why, why are you sending the invoice right before you even kicked off with your customer? You've proven no value. Why can't you wait like six days? You know, it's silly things like that, but just because the technology triggers because contract signed invoice out and that you're not, you're not thinking about how the technology is actually flowing with the customer life cycle in a way that.

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:20:02) - Um, Christie, I'd love to dive into the, the, the third seeks pillar process. And you, you, you started to kind of hit on some of this, but what have been some of the ways that you and the team of client success and more partly just, just, just Christie in her own journey. What have been some of the ways that you've leveraged, um, your ability to curate living playbooks with your, with your team, um, control, monitor them, right. Keep a tab on it. Cause I think the thing that I'm learning that the more time I've spent in just like the growth, fake growth phase, uh, business side of trying to help companies grow and I'll, I'll come to scale. These playbooks change on a weekly basis. It's, it's arguably daily, but it's minimally on a weekly basis. There's new foundational items, there's new directional sets, there's new pivots or, or pitches that happened with the business that a new customer comes on. And now all of a sudden you're chasing a different type of a target, but can you spend a few minutes talking about some of the things that have worked really well for you when it comes to playbooks or when it comes to standard operating procedures or just baking process into the day-to-day of a, of an awesome CX and CS organization? 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:20:57) - So the first thing I always do is obviously it's with the customer they're kind of in their shoes, right? What is the experience that they need to realize in order for us to execute against their goals? So everything that we design is with them at the forefront, right? We don't think about our internal processes. I'm not designing it for me or for my team. Everything is designed for them to help us orchestrate that now to your point about flexibility, the big thing there, um, you know, you've gotta be nimble enough to account for change and be able to manage that. And the big thing about changes that communication, right, the strategy obviously is core, but how you manage that change within your organization is going to impact a success. And so for us, I mean, listen, we're, we're grateful. I work at client success. I get to use our own solution, right? 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:21:38) - We drink our own champagne. So for me, all of my processes live in client success is our platform. And so as things evolve, right, we're able to see the data and impact correlation back to our processes, right in the solution and modify on the fly. Now I will say we do have some standard process around how those things get modified and, and what we do in terms of change, right? Not every CSM can go and make a change to things, things I I'm the governing body over our process and infrastructure. So the team will provide feedback, right? And that's what I want them to do. There's a frontline team working with our customers every day through our life cycle and all the processes that go with that when we're hearing or seeing the need to modify those things, we meet internally, we discuss these things. 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:22:21) - We, we discuss with those changes look like, and then we execute accordingly. I will say, I used to be a little more rigid and saying like, Nope, we're gonna, we only make change on these days. Right. We make change six months in six months. And like not in between. And what I've found is that me being that rigid because I am such a process person and like need structure, um, that was doing a disservice to our customers, right? Forget like how that was impacting my team. But that inflexibility was really hurting our customers because if we needed to modify, we needed to modify right away. So having the ability to clearly define measure the impact of all your processes, keep them in place for you to have that kind of system of record, where everyone's working off of the same process and model, and then also being able to modify as needed, but having, having a governing body. So it's not the wild west. Um, that's how we've been able to do it. Like I said, everything I design and all the programs that we create from as early as even the pre-sales process through our entire life cycle, which obviously goes beyond, uh, renewal and advocacy is really, you know, something that we, we own internally from the customer standpoint. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:23:21) - Oh, I love that. I think, you know, I don't know if it's just a product of the type of folks that gravitate towards the customer experience and customer success based or what, but I've found over my last 15 year journey, working at a number of these different high-growth startups folks in our camp tend to tend to have a, an innate ability to Chronicle document curate, capture, socialize, and then improve that content better than I think anybody in the business. And maybe that's me selfishly saying that because we are like that we are the hub. I mean, we, we have, uh, arms and feet and legs in every single part of the business, right? We're in marketing, in sales, in support, we're in product, we're in analytics. We're managing up to executive leadership team. We're managing down to the ranks of the portfolio. But I think that now more than ever, I'd feel like I'm having more and more conversations where people understand the criticality of having that, that playbook or having that set of procedures or having that process. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:24:17) - I think COVID and remote and the push of remote workforce management is probably a huge piece of it. I'd also argue the other thing that I'm learning as I talk with more awesome customer focused business leaders. You know, if you're, if you are in charge of you have the privilege of being in charge of, uh, uh, of a customer success or customer experience, you need a big budget. You have a bunch of awesome, smart people working on your team. You are in a position where you should be essentially helping the company or helping your business, write that story, write that history, share that story, socialize the history. And then lastly, I think, I know I say this a lot, but like some of the best companies that I'm seeing, they do a phenomenal job of building their internal FAQ knowledge base in general confluence knowledge. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:24:56) - And then they can mirror it back out to the customer. So maybe not everything, maybe not a hundred percent of it. Cause there's some stuff that you got to keep in the back of the kitchen. That's the magic sauce stuff, but there's some stuff that you can repurpose this content where if you already know that 80% of the time, primary inbound FAQ's are going to be asking these three things, you, some of that, that, that playbook or that SOP content to fire it back to your customers and make them feel involved. And I love what you said about the team inclusion. I think that's mandatory. I also think that some of the it's been interesting. I've been talking with more folks at sometimes some of their strategic customers are like the really close they're friendly customers, whatever you want to call them.

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:25:28) - Sometimes they take a look at this stuff too, to see how to your point, how are you building with language to serve your customers? How does it help your customers? So I love these ideas. 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:25:36) - That's right. If it's all about them, how can you design it with maybe out to them? Um, so we've got, we definitely have a couple of friendly folks where it's like, listen, they're CS professionals also. So I think I'm at a competitive advantage because I'm speaking the language of my people here, but I'll put some things in front of them. Like, does this resonate with you? Do you feel like if my team was running these motions with you, would that land well, how can we modify it? How can we optimize it? And a lot of our customers are, are always eager and excited to share feedback good, bad or otherwise, and we're happy to hear it. Um, and like I said, I almost feel like we are under a microscope though, because, because we are their peers and we're most of the experts that we're watching, every single thing that we do, every email that goes out, every deck template, every meeting that we run, every agenda we put in there. And so there's a lot of scrutiny around our team and how we work in support of customer success, but the feedback, but like I said, has been phenomenal, but working in collaboration with our customers is definitely like the icing on the cake. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:26:31) - Love it. That's huge, Chris, that's awesome too, by the way, it's gotta be a fun place and a fun environment to be a part of every day. Um, you just mentioned feedback. Let's dive into the fourth and the final CX pillar of feedback. And I was excited to chat with you about this because number one, you just, you also just set the stage. Well, for this, you deal with a bunch of customer success and customer experience folks. So like these are the, these are the, these are the folks that like, whether we can help it or not, we're constantly thinking about how can you ask better questions, solicit information. We're probably some of the best people in most organizations thinking about how you're going to act on it, because none of that other stuff matters. If you're not going to take it and go do something with it. But I'd love to hear you spend a couple minutes talking about the way that you and the team of client success, leverage your customer feedback. And I'd love to hear how you guys think about your team fab team feedback and the employee feedback that, that, that, that, that you're using as you grow the business. 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:27:17) - Yeah. So w we try to be very thoughtful about how, and when we're collecting feedback from our customers, now we have a high engagement model just like most, most of our customers, which means we're staffed in a way that allows us to engage with our customers on a very regular basis. Some of our customers we're speaking to weekly, some bi-weekly, but we have a regular recurring cadence that allows us to engage. Now, we orchestrate a series of different surveys and things that allow us to kind of automatically go out there and gather information. And we'll talk about what we do with that. But our team is soliciting information and feedback from our customers all the time. Um, and so we've got that frontline force. That's collecting it and we're processing all the information again, like I said, we, we put it into our system, that information and client success even gets pushed out into slack. 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:27:59) - So everything that we're we're hearing from our customer base is actually being shared and socialized across the entire company. Um, they're going back to like the importance of data democratization. We make sure that feedback is heard and we use that to drive our strategy. So even in the surveys that we, again, very, we're very formal and in terms of the timing of when they go out and how they go out and what they ask, we make sure that first all of our feedback, we make sure that we acknowledge it for our customers, right? We're, we're expressing gratitude and appreciation for them sharing those thoughts and ideas. We make sure that we're, double-clicking into all of it. So even something like an NPS survey, Dave, our CEO and I, we reach out to every single person who's given us a score, not just comments, but a score. 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:28:38) - If you taken the time to even click a button and give us a rating, we reach out to you and ask to get a conversation going, because you want to learn more. We want to unpack that. Um, and we learned a ton that way, but more importantly, going back to closing the loop, every piece of feedback that we collect, we make sure that we put a plan in place to address it. Now, not everything we can do, especially if it's related to the product, I can't go build every single purple button you want, but I can take that and identify themes, right? If enough of our customers are asking for the same things, you're looking for same similar modifications, that's, that's critical, right? And so in mass, that drives our strategy. So we put together plans with our product team in terms of how we're going to evolve and innovate in, in correlation with our vision, right. 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:29:20) - We don't want to derail our product strategy, but then we share and socialize that with our customers. So we take the feedback, we express gratitude, we have those conversations, we put a plan together, and then we close the loop with them again, by putting it back out to them and saying, here's what we heard. Here's what we're going to do. And that I feel like, and that, and then we do it, right. I think we're doing it as the most important part, but managing that as our process, whether it's feedback from a survey or feedback from a conversation or something that we we've heard through the grapevine, all of those things matter to us, but we want to just make sure that again, we, we bring it through that entire life cycle of listening, acting in, uh, closing that loop. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:29:57) - I love it. I want every one of our listeners to literally pause this, go back, listen to exactly because she 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:30:04) - Just 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:30:04) - Gave them, you gave them the, the picture perfect playbook for how you need to be thinking about that. I think there's just one thought I want to add onto it, which is like, you, you now that Chrissy, but like these reviews, these feedback, these survey responses, these inbound slacks, these texts responses, that type of number one to your point, the time that the customer just took to give you something that they didn't even need to give you, they're already paying you for the product or the service. That stuff needs to be viewed as, as gold. It's like those reviews 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:30:33) - Like 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:30:34) - Gold. It's like, you're, you're, you're getting a bonus from the customer, but there's another piece I, I, along my own journey, you're absolutely right where the acting out it's the most critical part of it, but I've been blown away. I've had customers get back to me that are just shocked. That what, what you and the team are doing with just even following up and say, Hey customer, thank you so much for just taking the time to answer that NPS or, or, you know, responding to that survey.

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:30:56) - Even that there's something in the relationship or there's something in the caring about the customer. There's something about like the, the taking the time to actually give us additional feedback so we can get better if you get to the point where you actually act on it. And not only that, you start to, you start to get really good as a company, or maybe even as a sales and a marketing engine of saying, Hey customers, last quarter, here's the thing. Here's the top five things you talked about with us. Here's the four things that we were able to accomplish. That fifth one will be done next quarter. Comp customers love that stuff. That's how they become a fanatics. That's how they become like completely addicted to the fact that this company cares so much about their portfolio or their customer base, that they're constantly working on it. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:31:30) - And I think that's something that frankly, for a lot of our listeners that are building their own startups, building their own growth focused companies, it's not that hard. Somebody in your company just needs to start owning it and doing it tomorrow. And frankly, it's, it's where you get more growth. That's where you get more customers. It's the way you start to build your own army of promoters, where people are going to go out there in the world and just talk about how fantastic your businesses and how fast fantastic your team is. So what about the employees? I don't want to pick your brain, any employees, what have been some of the ways that it worked really well for you as you manage a bunch of different teams, you see a bunch of different CX and CS teams. You and I are both believers in the fact that those guys and gals arguably have most of the answers under the sun, around the things that need to happen in an organization. How have you, how have you helped, um, some of your own teams or how have you helped some of your customers with leveraging, uh, how they can improve getting better at using their employee feedback and their cost and their, their actions to feedback, to grow the business and to, to help with scaling? 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:32:20) - So the interesting thing is our team here at client success, right? My customer success organization, they are our customer, right? Like, so this is like having your, your product advisory board live in your business. Right? So we get, we cheat. Um, we make sure that all of their feedback is heard early and often. So they have direct access. We meet regularly with our product team because we're in the solution every day. Right? We're, we're navigating things. We're experiencing that long. He like, oh yeah, that shouldn't do that. Um, so our product team is very keen in having those conversations and leaning in and uncovering that even myself as a leader, right. I use our solution all the time. I'm in my leadership meetings reporting out and I'm like, Hey, I pulled this report and this thing didn't do what I actually needed to do, or Hey guys, we're going to be so cool if it actually did these like five other things. 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:33:06) - So feedback is really important. And I think for us, we, it's very easy for us to just throw out all these ideas because we're going to have all of them all the time. Um, what we do is just try to make sure that we're documenting everything. We review it. We kind of stack it against what we're trying to do as a business and making sure it doesn't, again, derail our strategy and our focus. Um, and then making sure that our team more importantly, that they feel heard and validated, especially when things do come to fruition in the product. So we treat them just like our customers, right? Our team is our customer. And so we want them to feel that same validation that what they need in our solution is important. It makes sense. Here's what we're doing. And then making sure that they're getting what they need when, when we can deliver it. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:33:47) - I love it. I mean, look, you just Christie you're spot on where if you are a startup founder or, or a growth executive, and you're wondering how you can fill that product, that product feedback bucket up again, go, go right to where Chris had. You said your, your, your internal users are arguably going to have most of the answers anyway, or minimally. They already know the, the, they know the top, um, concentration points. They know the 20% of things that are coming in 80% of the time. That's probably where you need to prioritize from a strategic product roadmap. And just from a general high level view of what you're gonna, what you're going to do next for your customers or for your solution. Last thing is this. I think like if you're, if you're a business owner, that's trying to think about how you can expand your SAS solutions, product adoption in general retention and usability. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:34:33) - Exactly what Kristi said, get, get these users who are touching it every single day on your team, talking to your customers. There's almost like an amplification effect that happens right there, Christie, where not only are they dealing with the customers, but they're using it themselves. There's like a, there's almost like a, a level up that happens with that type of feedback. I would almost, I would weigh that a little bit heavier if you will. So like definitely start doing that in your business tomorrow. Cause it's an easy way to get started. So Christie, this has been absolutely fantastic before we, before we wrap up, where can people find out more about you and all the awesome stuff that you're doing because you've been just killing it on, not just the thought leadership game, but like you're one of the, I think one of the absolute best pioneers of the customer success, customer experience community, you do such a phenomenal job of getting it. I'm not even kidding getting around the whole damn country meeting with other CXOs and CSS, but where can people find out more about you and where can people get in touch with you if they want to learn more about client success, 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:35:22) - Absolutely. Somebody sending you to three places first, I will send you to client success.com. There you can go, not only learn a little more about our solution and how it might be able to help you in your business, but also get access to all the thought leadership content that we produce out there, whether it's our bootcamps, our blog posts or content eBooks ton, a ton of information, our templates. So please head over there. You'll be able to get a wealth of information, bring yourselves up to speed and maybe accelerate your pace of innovation in terms of your processes. Um, also you can check me out on LinkedIn, um, try to be a super active there. So if you want to have a conversation, you can reach out to me directly or 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:35:55) - Try 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:35:55) - To be, try to be. Um, and then lastly, I will just obviously do a quick plug for my website, keeping CS simple, um, which is my domain where you're going to see an aggregation of all of my content. So all my podcasts, videos, bootcamps, um, books, I love podcasts. I love like cxchronicles and a whole bunch of just information and resources to help you on your journey. So those are my three. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:36:18) - I love it. Well, Christie, look, it's been an absolute pleasure. We can't wait to see what you and the team of client success do next. And I am absolutely excited to keep our conversation moving forward into the future. Thank you so much for joining us today. 

Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess  (00:36:27) - Awesome. Thanks for having me.