00:00 Hey everyone, hope your day's going amazingly well. You're right, he's up here for CSM practice. Thanks for joining me for another episode where we always have brilliant guests that come in and generously share from their experience and their expertise.
00:17 And today I decided to invite Daniel Kule, who works at Click. And he was one of the finalists for the customer success excellence awards in 2023 for the US in the last five years that he's been with click.
00:33 He increased the NPS score by 125%. Yes, you also said to increase by more than 30% as well. Also, he moved so many customers from human touch to actually relying on digital assets, so that there's more digital engagement and self-serve is much more amplified to the tune of moving it from 400,000 transactions
00:57 online in 2018 to over 40 million digital touch points in 2023. You also launched and scaled not only the customer support but the CSM team increased adoption as well as their new rate.
01:13 Daniel, thank you so much for taking the time to share that journey with us. I think it's such an incredible story.
01:20 Thank you, Eric, as you know, because I'm a success, your team sports, so I'm here today. I'm happy with the progress we've made so far.
01:26 I mean, you can share a little bit about your team. How large is it? But kind of clients do they work with and kind of like, what's the culture like?
01:34 So team is about 300 people across free G.O. They packed the new OS. We are a company and they go there from different places.
01:42 That's one use case and then two, we make this that are available to people. So they can use it and make better decisions and that's where we call the Data Literacy.
01:51 From a pure market standpoint, I mean we are healthcare, in a financial, in a retail consumer, and many organizations, especially finance, HR, and mostly businesses are using data integration and data magnetic tools.
02:07 For those who don't know, click is a business intelligence solution company, so obviously analyze data, you empower companies to make data driven decisions and as such I think the customer success team is a bit more challenged because after work with companies all over the world from all sorts of businesses
02:26 and within each company that is actually a client for click you also work with multiple teams on multiple potential outcomes I think that makes it super complex and yet Here you are, you and your team, obviously, increasing NPS score, decreasing cost of serves significantly with these self-servant initiatives
02:48 , what would the state like when you just join Click? I think it was in 2018. And what were some of the initiatives you decided to put in place?
02:57 Click made a decision, but customer success was important to them. I mean, our investor and the investment in people first, we build a sequence of events, my boss always wanted to keep simple.
03:09 So we started with a clock 1 PM, 3 PM, 6 PM, 9 PM, 12 PM, which is 1 PM on boarding, 3 PM, you get in production.
03:17 6 PM, you verify that your customer is engaged and then 9 PM, you're in the renewal and we align the entire organization, you're in support for services and so on with this clock and that was very compelling for us.
03:31 And we do get it or people with this and as You can see there is no thing that art will understand, I understand it and as I did the video, I look at this box and I say my on top right, top left, and I know what I have to do.
03:44 Two is to align with all responsibilities as a CSO organization. At the end of the, we want all our customers to join you and we want them to upset.
03:54 So what is that you're doing in your organization to avoid these customers to basically not adopting your product and I know they're product proven.
04:04 So we had this customer for life program and basically my boss or was he's making everyone responsible for customers not engaged with us.
04:14 I mean, that means that maybe we did something wrong, that's an adoption or maybe our CSM or digital engagement, whatever it may be, it can be real, but someone didn't do something that they say they should be doing.
04:27 That was a good tool that we use is what do you have to say with this customer, who is living, click for whatever reason.
04:35 And that's a customer for life program. And it's across everyone into our customer success organization. Amazing. So you launched a customer for life program.
04:46 You established this clockwork type of journey so that it's very easy for customers and your team to understand where they are in the life cycle and what's the next step that needs to happen and with whom.
05:00 I create clarity, I suppose, and a little bit of order around the engagement itself. And we already talked about the impact, quite significant.
05:10 Click as a 30-year-old company. Here comes Daniel and Team and says, no, no, no, we need to do things differently to get any nasirs.
05:20 Was it hard to convince people that not actually now we do need to double down on self-serve and ensure that customers reach their outcomes whatever size they're in?
05:30 So to go back to see our organization, when you talk about customer for life, just to give an example of getting people accountable for results, for some of our product line, we had an increase of our annual rate of more than 15 points.
05:43 It was like in and 12 months. It's giving you an idea that the first thing that was done is making people accountable for a result, but that's one number one.
05:52 I think the number two is probably change management, your ability to drive people into a mindset of the day one every day and that my contribution to result was maybe good enough yesterday.
06:06 Maybe we'll not be good enough for today and probably not good enough for tomorrow. So we say the of pace of change and the first place of change has probably be the main recipe for success for increased vis-vast five years.
06:21 You know, a lot of times we think about successful initiatives. I think you hit on the head like what is the makeup that thinks it's not so much about what are you going to initiate but making sure you take a pause and think about a how am I going to drive accountability because many of the CS solutions
06:40 and initiatives that we establish in companies cannot be successful in a bubble. You actually do have to drive accountability, not just by our own team adopting it, but also have other team players in the company adopting and changing into it.
06:57 Second component is obviously change management. Maybe it could double down on what does it mean accountability? When you do self-serve, you absolutely need to have the support teams on as well as maybe even product team?
07:10 How did you tackle that? Does that mean that you change for example, teams performance KPIs for the product team or other teams as well?
07:18 Absolutely, I think my boss is always saying, well, why people are watching sports? It's because it's easy to understand who is winning.
07:25 So it's kind of very simple to say, but when you bring that into organization, it's about us clear, right, to know who is winning in your organization, probably not, right?
07:36 So having simple rules about side-to-side your measures, success of every organization, not with 20 metric, but probably between one and three, has been as well another change.
07:47 And making people accountable for the result, why do you want to be in three months, six months, 12 months? It's also something that definitely change, click and that's why I talk about every day, the day one is every day, the new KPI to achieve and the results to achieve.
08:02 And that's why how we are driving, I mean, our excellence, I think into our organization. But one of the biggest change we've made is definitely with digital and our transition from let's say human based to kind of a digital approach has been one big step.
08:18 Investing in digital has the right success. It's a big bet for a large company. I mean, just from the tools that you need to integrate data from various tools, various technologies onto one, It's a multi-year project, it's a big bet.
08:32 What made you so convinced that this is actually going to work? Maybe you did have some fears when you just got started.
08:38 A couple of things, one, you said it. I mean, I think an alignment between your boss, your boss, boss. And that's what you want to do is align with what compression wants to do.
08:49 It's definitely something that was a key factor of success. Being able to have a quick wins and to have quick wins, you need to have a coalition who is with you, are you measure success with our management, with R&D, with IT, and marketing, our key stakeholders, is a line in this organization, with one
09:07 API, or maybe two. And that's, I think, is a recipe for us to success, is being able to measure and go one quick win after the over, not in 10 months, and not in six months, but probably next month, next week.
09:21 So that's what we are asking people to do. Dania, so when you think about the initiatives in your approach for digitizing the engagement with customers, how would you frame that?
09:31 Three steps where things that may be so product was not able to do, that the product should be able to do, so that's basically an agreement, so comment goes, that we set up with product management mainly on our end year, but things that need it to be improved as well as a partnership that we build as
09:49 well with our partner ecosystem, but things that we believe should get done by a partner because it's more valuable for them with our own customers.
09:58 And that's one piece of things that we've done. Or focus for us as being mainly about sharing or knowledge and making this knowledge easy to reach one is tooling like AI, so tooling like chat birds, a lot of new things have been done there.
10:13 So we capture both for the knowledge and then the technology to make this information available to users. Last slide is privacy, security, and then a generative AI, we were making a lot of investment there instead of an article that you have to consume or something you will have to avoid.
10:31 So tool is giving you one answer to your question, and it's extremely powerful, but it creates some security problems and privacy problems that we have to overcome.
10:39 Now, you talk about, you know, a lot of these initiatives resulted in an increase of adoption. So from low adoption to high adoption, and then you said, well, then we transitioned into effective adoption.
10:54 You could kind of like share with me and everybody that's listening. What is the difference between high adoption and effective adoption?
11:02 Always that's so important to you to have it as part of your strategy for recent years. Difference between customer adoption and then use your adoption.
11:13 What the team has been producing on is the adoption to be effective that you have to go to a very granular level to actually understand what your customers are doing.
11:24 So telemetry or obviously key when you're incess, what you have, you have to keep in mind is that you have to start week or months, they're spending a time in your platform and then you get into something much more granular, which are what kind of function they are using, what function they are using
11:47 that make your product stick here. That's a level of granularity that you have to go full so that you better understand if people are able to achieve their use case.
11:57 So, level after and we use here, say, framework for it is really if people are getting a value from very investment, meaning that you can measure to better they're getting from the product is valuable to them or not.
12:13 So it's hard to measure, if you measure it not in a perfect way, it's okay, because at least you have a direction and then we are not at a level of measuring if a customer is reaching the outcome, that's a drain.
12:25 And that's where we are expect to go, but it's stickiness first and making sure that if you're getting a valuable and useful, that's a step we are taking this last six months.
12:37 Yeah, I kind of want to go over what is a customer journey looks like with this new initiative that you have established?
12:46 Thank you, or generous enough to share with me. Your approach for the customer for life program at a high level.
12:53 And this sort of like, dovetails to your clock approach. How is that life cycle impacted as you're going through this transition to doubling down on self-serve and digital engagement?
13:07 The fact that you can have this process is very well defined for each step of your adoption to me are extremely critical because when you can start thinking about automation.
13:21 So you start using your process, you learn about how to get same can have an impact on particularly on PM3PM and you learn from it, you document it.
13:30 Then when you have it on a framework or workflow, it's actually easier to understand what product could actually help you automate and we are transitioning these automation more and more into something digital, so we can use people with value and use this low-level task with automation.
13:50 That's a great approach. I'm a head of customer success And I want to introduce more digitalization and scalability. Step number one, take your entire customer life cycle, pinpoint what are the manual processes that your customers are going through or your team is going through.
14:08 And then for each tackle the ones that you want to address first, maybe because they're the heaviest or more critical, what we call moment of truth.
14:17 And see, can you automate them? Can you make them easier with tools, identify the tools, and then go for it?
14:23 Once you're done with that, you can choose the next cohort of manual processes and things that you can optimize with automation or with technology.
14:32 It's fair to say that you heavily leveraged your existing investments in Salesforce to automate a lot of the manual processes that your team was having to do.
14:44 Yes, if all your processes are actually documented, you understand what value you're getting for these processes and automation, and people have been certified of these processes, so nobody can say, and didn't know, right?
14:57 Then you can start into automate the question, is how many tools you should be using, you can use, you know, total more, you can use insight on many of the products and Salesforce, right?
15:07 And different organizations could be on from product. So a question is should we use one product, maybe not perfect, but everybody is on it, it's a different organization, it's a different product.
15:17 So it's vision we have at click is that we should as much as possible use one product, which means that everybody has an understanding of what's going on by going to the same product and the source of truth is in one place and we choose Salesforce point.
15:32 Even if you don't have all your capabilities that may be total good and site on overs have for specific organization, but overall it's a great tool for everyone.
15:42 You know, one of the naysayers for actually doing it in Salesforce, like Salesforce is it's extremely capable platform, I would say.
15:49 But some of the pushback that I hear when some of my customer success teams or clients that are trying to do this is that IIT is busy right now with other initiatives and they won't get around to it for at least two years.
16:02 And so every change that you want to make because there's so many people in the company that are leveraging it or they might have competing priorities, my team's going to push back.
16:11 Whereas if you do have a CS solution, your team owns it and then you could do whatever you want, however you want, whatever priorities you want.
16:18 What you just described is exactly what is happening. So view we have is to keep things simple. The number two, when you talk to IT and not saying at IT have also been with just for CSO, right?
16:30 But if you have your process very well defined, and IT really understands why you need a B&C to be in Salesforce, which is to it.
16:38 Because for them, they understand for your workflow or construction, that what value they will deliver by spending a week on your change.
16:47 I think very often, IT's reluctant to do something, because they don't really understand what value they will create to your organization or customers.
16:56 If they do, they are much, if they need to do such a change. You're brilliant and digitizing customer success, but you also mentioned how much work went into elevating support, especially for the lower cohort.
17:09 We know for a fact that this exists says it that if support is quite accessible and the support experiences quite phenomenal, then we're going to see an increase in NPS and we're going to see an increase in adoption and an increase in renewals.
17:22 And again, this would be true for end users. Your companies that have a lot of users, where the CSM can't work with all of the stakeholders in the account.
17:31 You have to rely on digital engagement. So maybe you can kind of share how you took the digital support to the next level and how you're thinking about that.
17:40 Telling my team that's actually having an interaction with a customer and super language we say, okay, I say, okay, this is a failure.
17:48 It means that's everything else failed. Your adoption fail, maybe your training fail and your interaction and we project services fails of somewhere and somehow it fails.
17:58 So we talk this approach and say, okay, the need of interaction is a result, 80% of the time of a failure somewhere.
18:04 We did start with every question that the user will ask need to have one answer, not 20 answers. That means that if you are multiple assets in your company, multiple website, community documentation, search and so on, you need to only find all of these search into one.
18:22 So that people get, when they ask a question, you have a company answer, right? Number two, you need to push availability of your people and make them as close as possible to your customers.
18:36 I'm telling my team that's basically when we fail to give the some sort of customer for a chatbot or the search, we have to be available to them in a quickly right.
18:49 And most of the time is that the boat will tell us I mean I cannot answer this customer's question please help and for live chat and not for a very difficult painful system with case management.
19:01 We are even pushing more AI tools. Most of the time they're actually getting an answer and they don't need anybody to talk to us.
19:10 So as of today we have million and million and million digital interaction and we have fewer if you I think that's goals for a lot of companies, reduces the cost of survey, even well below industry levels and makes the company more profitable and increases in PS4's.
19:29 So many benefits. It actually also helps align the team onto one single answer for a question. So the experience is becoming quite consistent.
19:40 Let's say I'm listening to this podcast and I was like, Daniel, I'm all in. I want this. Where would you recommend them to start?
19:46 You need to have a well defined vision of where you want to go and you need to split this vision into number of steps so that you can deliver an outcome and this outcome is as I call it a quick win and this quick win has to happen in months and even weeks after you start it and most of all is giving
20:06 trust to your team or we have a vision but now I understand my contribution and I can make a contribution And I can see, you know, the results of my contribution, that motivates you to team, that motivates your bosses, and that motivates your company and that motivates your customers.
20:22 If you do it again, people are starting really to believe. Sometimes your coalition, I studied with digital with five people, out of 300, but it's not many.
20:30 And when you go to six and when you go to seven, and after two years, you have 300. So you don't boil the ocean, you start very simple, start having wine, it's internal external.
20:40 Quick wins, who's totally on board with this that can help you make this vision happen and then I think in the prep thought you kind of talk to me about Train my view is that sometimes you want to do things that are misaligned sometimes with what's a company want to do and it's up to do so what I'm doing
21:00 is that I look in the company like trying initiative and I look at one, but it's kind of going in the same direction as me.
21:07 So if you want to go to Miami and various of trying going to New York, I go to New York and when I only have New York to Miami, I see if I can go to Atlanta, it's another step that I can make.
21:17 If I can jump into this initiative and just add my stuff to them, so that it doesn't show even too much, but it's adding a little bit more flavor to what they're doing.
21:27 They welcome me, I go into, you they're doing when I jump to another train and I go to Miami like this.
21:37 I use this way of doing business very often. When I have to quit my own train to go from somewhere to somewhere where there is no other train, I know it's going to take a lot of time, I know that I need buying from everyone, Steven and so on and I will fight for it, but I do it when I don't have any
21:53 other choice. Are there any like books that you found yourself reading as you're implementing these initiatives that inspired you that gave you great ideas that you would like to recommend others that are listening to this podcast.
22:07 JP Cotter and this eighth step of a change management, it's a very simple book easy to read and you feel like everybody can do change management, so I will advise people to do it.
22:17 Book from a don't have web air as well on the onboarding, it's same same thing. When I read the book, I'm like, I can do it, I think it's simple.
22:25 I saw a lot of these books where I do not hook at science, we are not saving people's life, We're not selling rocket tools, but it's a lot of steps that are easy to do.
22:35 But it's all together that makes a complete city. And so when you have books like that, where I can explain to you a simple way how to do stuff, you learn from it, you learn a lot of stuff.
22:46 And then you can do big things. But it's a lot of very easy, small steps that need to be taken.
22:51 We're thinking about customer success. How would you define it? If you think about the last five years, How will you define customer success?
23:00 To me is in sport, but you have to make it simple, because I think we make it way too complex.
23:07 I think at the end of the day, you need to have few KPIs, but you're all in a very body behind.
23:14 And then you have to be able to measure easily if you're succeeding or you're failing and if you can learn from it.
23:20 To me, that's a simple way and we use OK or at click, which is a very simple methodology as well to keep score.
23:28 So that we know if we are going in the right direction or by both nodes, or we are not going in the right direction and then we fix it.
23:34 My view on it is adoption is everything. KPI is everything, keep things simple, not try to over-complicate it things. And I think if you follow markets, what people say, what they're doing and how to do things at the end of the day, you can be a five space leader in customer success.
23:53 Daniel Kule, you're amazing to me, you're a winner. Best big love to your team for doing all this hard work and getting to these incredible results in a very tough environment Birdie-year-old company so many types of customers and use cases.
24:08 This is not easy. So well done And thank you so much for coming on our podcast to share your journey your thoughts around it your frameworks and what works And what doesn't even give us tips.
24:21 Thank you for having me. It was a good pleasure Alright, if we wanted you like this podcast episode, give it a like, don't forget to subscribe to our channel and hit that notification button so that you don't miss on any new episodes.
24:37 Then you have a beautiful days, everyone have a beautiful year, amazing careers, and I'll see you at the next podcast episode.