The Customer Success Pro Podcast

How to Build Digital Success Plans That Actually Drive Adoption with Alana Stoltzfus

• Anika Zubair

Share episode

Grab your copy of the 2025 Customer Experience Benchmarks Report: everafter.ai/benchmark

In this episode of the Customer Success Pro podcast, host Anika Zubair speaks with Alana Stoltzfus, a leader in digital customer success at Okta. They discuss the evolution of customer success, the importance of digital growth, and how Okta's Success Hub enhances customer experience through personalized recommendations. Alana shares insights on the tools and systems that power their digital success plans, the challenges faced in data management, and the lessons learned from building a scalable customer success program. The conversation emphasizes the need for continuous improvement and the importance of delivering value to customers.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction 
02:52 Alana Stoltzfuss: Journey into Digital Customer Success
05:46 The Evolution of Digital Customer Success at Okta
08:43 Understanding Digital Growth and Customer Segmentation
11:50 The Success Hub: Enhancing Customer Experience
15:04 Personalization and Business Goals in Customer Success
17:59 The Role of Digital Customer Success in Business Growth
27:58 Tailored Customer Experiences for Gold and Silver Clients
30:06 Personalized Communication and Value Realization
32:29 Differentiated Messaging for Admins and Executives
34:38 The Importance of Personalization in Customer Success
36:36 Tools and Systems Powering Digital Success
42:41 Lessons Learned and Future Directions in Customer Success

Connect with Anika Zubair:
Website: https://thecustomersuccesspro.com/
LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/anikazubair/
RevUP Academy: https://thecustomersuccesspro.com/revup

Connect with Alana Stoltzfus:

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alanastoltzfus/

Alana leads the Automation & Scaled Insights team at Okta, where she drives efforts to increase customer adoption, retention, and growth at scale as part of the Digital Success motion. Through the delivery of data and insights to customers and customer-facing teams, as well as AI-powered experiences, she has enabled Okta to serve all customers from SMBs (via self-service) to its largest enterprise customers, not just to scale but also to more effectively drive better customer outcomes through deeply personalized experiences. Prior to Okta, Alana worked in roles across customer success, voice of customer, and digital success, most recently at LinkedIn and Atlassian. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband and 2 sons.

Grab our FREE resources here:
 https://thecustomersuccesspro.com/resources

Want to be our next podcast guest? Apply here:
https://www.thecustomersuccesspro.com/podcast-guest

Book Anika as a speaker at your next team event: https://www.thecustomersuccesspro.com/team-event

Speaker 2 (00:00.238)
This podcast is brought to you by EverAfter AI. Post-sales leaders are under more pressure than ever to deliver personalized scalable experiences while driving revenue impact. That's why EverAfter surveyed over 120 leaders to create the 2025 Customer Success Benchmark Report. It's a deep dive into how top companies are approaching onboarding, renewals, expansions, and of course, AI adoption. The report is packed with insights, best practices, and trends that

are shaping the future of customer success. And the best part, you can download it for free. EverAfter is the AI native customer facing interface trusted by companies like Okta, Salesforce, and Zoom Info to deliver seamless customer experiences across the entire post sales journey. Go to everafter.ai forward slash benchmark to grab your copy and see how your team stacks up. Again, go to EverAfter.

dot AI forward slash benchmark to grab your free copy today and to get those CS best practices. Hello everyone. I'm your host, Anika Zuber and welcome to the Customer Success Pro podcast, your go-to space for real talk, expert advice and actual insights in the world of customer success. I'm a CS executive leader, award winning strategist, CS coach and customer success fan.

I help CSMs and CS leaders build the skills and the confidence to become revenue driving pros and scale world-class CS teams. So whether you're brand new to CS or a seasoned leader, this podcast is here to support your growth. Because customer success isn't a destination, it's a journey. And I'm here to be your guide and navigate every step of your journey. So join me every Wednesday where you'll get fresh CS tips, tricks, and strategies

you can actually use. Some weeks I'll share my own insights and best practices from working in CS over the last 13 years. And once a month, I'll bring on expert guests to dive into the most relevant and pressing topics in customer success today. So if you're ready to level up, hit subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you tune in. And let's make your CS journey a little bit easier together.

Speaker 2 (02:28.622)
Today's guest is Alana Stoltzfuss. She brings decades of experience leading customer-centric teams at industry-defining companies like Okta, Atlassian, LinkedIn, and Fluid. She's built a career solving complex business problems, often without a clear roadmap and creating scalable solutions that drive real impact. At Okta, Alana leads a world-class team of digital customer success managers focused on delivering customer success at scale through personalized

data-driven experiences. She also founded the Automation and Scaled Insights team to empower post-sales teams and amplify value across the customer journey. Her work directly fuels adoption, retention, and measurable business outcomes. And today, she's here to share her insights on the topic that's been changing the way we think about customer value delivery, which is digital success plans.

What are they? Why do they matter? And how do we implement them effectively at scale? Let's chat to Alana to find out how. Welcome Alana to the podcast. I'm so very excited to have you today and dive into everything that you've built at Okta around digital customer success. But before we actually get into our topic today, can you please introduce yourself to my listeners? Let us know who you are, kind of what you do at Okta and

Maybe why it all started there as well, because I think you've been there for a number of years now. So if you can give our listeners your introduction, that would be great.

Well, first of all, I'm so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me today. A little bit about myself. I'm Alana Stoltzhus. I lead our Automation and Skilled Insights team at Okta, which is part of our digital success organization. I've been at Okta a little bit over five years now, and I've played probably every role within our digital success team, which started very small but mighty. I was our first individual contributor five years ago, and I

Speaker 1 (04:28.44)
started building our very first email program to target customers at scale. And we have grown to a multi-channel experience across email and app guides, and now within our automation platform, which I lead, including automated insights, self-service, et cetera. So really proud of what we built over the past five years and excited to share a little bit more about what we built here today. Yeah.

love that. And I love that you've really niched into the digital side of customer success. You've come from tons of great companies, which we'll get into in a little bit, but at Okta, you've really like niched into digital customer success or scaled customer success for those people who have different naming conventions for it all. But what inspired you to move from, I guess, quote unquote, traditional customer success into the digital side of things?

Yeah, so in a previous life before Okta, I was a customer success manager myself, and I was working at LinkedIn within a small sort of startup within the company. It was called LinkedIn Elevate. It's no longer in existence, but it was this little SaaS product within the company that we had a very small but mighty customer success team, very little processes in place since we were brand new.

but you're within this enterprise realm of LinkedIn. So you have these resources, but not necessarily processes, and it hadn't been applied to the business that I worked in. And as we started to build out more and more customers, I started to get more and more customers on my plate. And I realized that there's a better way to do things. I was giving the same exact training over and over again as I started to onboard people in different regions.

Or people would ask me for resources that were the same resources. So I would be sending emails that were the same, the same exact narratives, just to different contexts or someone lost their resource and they just needed to access it again. And I kind of felt like there's gotta be a better way to be doing this. And so little by little, I just started kind of taking up this like sort of like 20 % work of my role. One is to build out.

Speaker 1 (06:43.738)
a self-service support center for our customers. So I helped onboard a support team that was taken from another part of the business. We started to think through like, how can we have recurring webinars to help our customers onboard that were scalable, that everybody can join, that were recurring every single week. We started to think through like email comms at scale so we could help our customers onboard. And we had two different audiences. We had our customer like the admin, and then we also had their employees because it was a B2B2C.

product and that's just a scale that you can't possibly talk to every single employee of your customer all the time. So I realized after a while of doing this, like this is actually the part of my job I enjoy the most. Yeah. And that's, think before this was maybe seven or eight years ago. And I think the concept of like digital customer success didn't really exist as a term. So I didn't really say like, I want to get into digital customer success. was just, I enjoy the scalable aspect of delivering value.

So that was kind of where I decided I wanted to do it full-time. And because it was such a tiny part of LinkedIn, I couldn't find a full-time role at LinkedIn. So that's where I started to do this more full-time at Atlassian, which was my journey before Okta.

Yeah, I love that. my gosh, so many great logos and I want to ask a follow up question. But mainly, I love what you just said that you realized there were so many repeatable processes that we do in customer success. And I always sometimes feel that we like to reinvent the wheel in CS. I don't know why we're so guilty of it, but we're like, oh, sending the same email like 500 times a year, but you're almost rewriting it every single time or.

Again, grabbing this resource or sharing this video or telling a customer to use the product in this way. It's so crazy how we do some of the same work, but we don't think about building, like you said, scalable processes around it. So I love that that made your brain think there has to be a better way and I have to be able to kind of do more with what I have. And I love that that inspired your entire journey because like you said, you started LinkedIn.

Speaker 2 (08:50.146)
You were at Atlassian for some time and then now you're at Okta. And I personally want to know like, what's kind of next? You've been at all of these amazing SaaS businesses. You've gone from customer success to niching specifically in such a specific part of customer success. I always love knowing from my guests, like what's kind of your next ambition or your CS dream or career dream? What are you looking to accomplish?

Yeah. So it's funny, like I'll do this sort of career conversation with my own team sometimes. And even for myself, it's so hard to say like, I want to be this in three years. I want to be this for five years. I think my own career success has been attributed to diving into things that you never would have expected yourself to do. So I don't have this like idea of I have to be like a chief customer officer or something someday. Honestly, like I think every role that I've had, especially over the past seven or so years has been a role that

probably didn't exist a couple years prior to that. So honestly, I want to be in something that doesn't exist.

few years. Oh, cool. That's such a great answer. Because as you think, as you just said, I even remember when I first moved to a CSM role, which was in 2014. And I'm just like, everyone was calling it CSM, but I was an account manager before. And I was like, what does the word even mean? Like, what is this? And I remember hearing Chief Customer Officer for the first time. And I was like, what is that career trajectory even look like? I still remember when I got my first CS leadership role, I had no idea what

would be after head of customer success. I was like, there's no clear path. And I think sometimes in CS, it is all a gamble, but it's a fun gamble. Like you just said, you want to do something that doesn't exist. And if we were to talk 10, 15 years ago, our roles today would not exist then. So I love that. That's such a great answer. I wouldn't like steal that for using it sometimes. Amazing. But I know that you said digital CS means something different at every company and it's super true, right?

Speaker 1 (10:41.879)
and they go.

Speaker 2 (10:49.612)
Some people call it scale, some people call it digital. What does it look like at Okta? Tell me a little bit more about your team, kind of what you guys are responsible for. How does Okta build out, quote unquote, digital customer success?

Yeah, so actually technically within Okta we call it digital growth is the name of our team. Uh-huh, uh-huh. And sometimes it can be confusing because there's marketing teams that are called digital growth and we are not arters. But ultimately we want our customers to be so successful that they go beyond what they thought they were going to do with Okta. And that might mean growth. we...

Ooh, look, even a new term.

Speaker 1 (11:28.77)
We work across all of our post sales roles. So that includes customer success, renewals, technical account management, support, and a portion of our customer AEs. So AEs that are purely post sales focused. So all of those roles have an interest in delivering customer value at scale. Now what their outcome of that interest is might differ, like CSMs might be motivated by adoption measures.

renewals might be motivated by renewal rates or reduced churn. But ultimately, they're all trying to deliver better customer value. And we try to enable those experiences for our customer-facing teams, but also for our customers in a self-service manner. So for digital at Okta, we have a number of different functions within our team that we all have different responsibilities across the organization. So my team focuses on building the

foundation, so to say, of digital. What's our data platform? What are our experiences that we offer to deliver success at scale? What are the insights that we want to deliver to our customers to demonstrate value? And then what are the tools and processes that can enable all of that to get out to our customers? Well, the other arm of our digital team is responsible for communications. Like, how do you make sure our customers know about these resources that they have available to them, whether it's through email channels, in-app channels, et cetera?

work very closely together to ensure that our customers see the value, whether it's through those digital channels or whether it's through our customer-facing teams.

love that. I love that you guys are so cross-functional. you just said, growth can be a lot of things within a business. It can be new business growth. It can be marketing growth, but it is, there is also customer growth. And it's interesting that you guys call it digital growth. What a new way of classifying success of a customer at scale. I love that. And then I know when we talked before, you guys have an interesting way that you actually break down and work with your quote unquote digital growth customers. Did I say that right? Digital growth.

Speaker 2 (13:34.412)
Like I think you guys have a really unique way of how you've segmented that part of your customer base. Can you tell me a little bit more about why you chose that segmentation? What does it mean basically? Can you just explain a little bit more how you segment?

Yeah, of course. So depending on the success entitlement that our customers purchase, which is often guided by how much they spend with us, they might be looking to have our most basic package, which is usually for smaller spend customers. And they have access to many of the digital resources that we offer, and we want to make sure that they're successful. So we'll give them onboarding communications on how to be successful.

They'll have a somewhat basic version of our customer success hub, which I'll share a little bit more about in a moment. And they'll be able to access self-service resources like free training through our learning center. ultimately, they are smaller companies, so they likely can onboard a bit easier by themselves. And they usually have a little bit less support along the way.

We also have what we call our Silver Success Entitlement, which is a entitlement that actually does not entitle them to a customer success manager when they have an elevated version of their self-service resources. So I think they'll get an interactive success plan within their customer success hub that is highly personalized based on their product usage data, based on their business goals.

We'll also offer them additional personalized video to help them onboard. And then there will be, for example, if we see certain signals that that customer might need a little help along the way, we do have a pooled CSM team that will reach out to those customers if they need help based on those proactive signals that we're getting. And then our highest tier would be our gold tier, which means that those customers have access to a customer success manager.

Speaker 1 (15:37.07)
And we often augment that experience. So digital is for all. Some people think about digital as a segment, but for us, digital serves all customers. They just serve them in a different way. So for example, our self-service success plans, which we call our identity maturity checklist, will be interactive with their CSM. So the customer can check things off their box and they can ask their CSM for questions.

We're also testing out this new functionality that will have this AI driven summary that will send a Slack message to the CSM on how they should take action with that customer. And then we also deliver insights reports that are automated for our customer success managers so that they can more scalably drive effective conversations with their customers. they are resolving that problem that I had when I was a CSM, which is make these processes repeatable so I don't have to be taking screenshots and

assembling manual side decks all day. yeah, kind of complementing that scalable process with the human touch to serve that gold segment.

Yeah, which is your success up, which we'll get to in a minute. But you said so many little pieces there that I just want to like double click on for a second. First, you mentioned that you have paid services, right? No matter what type of customer you're serving by the sounds of it, basic silver, gold, it is a paid for service rather than just something that's serving your low ARR customers. Did I get that right? You are charging for digital customer success depending on again, what level that you've just indicated.

Yeah, Basic is included for all, but for Silver and Gold customers, they can get that level up experience. So everybody's going to get access, no matter what, if they're an Okta customer, they will get access to our digital onboarding communications, adoption recommendations that are personalized based on what they have or have not done in the product. They'll have in-app guidance no matter what, but they're going to get a way more interactive experience if they've purchased a Silver Success entitlement and a more hands-on experience if it's Gold.

Speaker 2 (17:37.262)
love that you're charging for digital led, because again, a lot of people think digital led is almost like your low ARR customers or your self-service or just the ones that you want to make sure get some engagement, they're just not your high paying logos and people kind of forget about them. But I love that you're still structuring a payment model, basic silver, gold, what makes sense based on what their model is. But I also love that you said that there's a pool model as well, right? So there's not just

an engaged one-to-one CSM model, is pooled. Does that go for both silver and gold then, or is it depending again on what package they're in?

It depends on their spend and it depends on package, but yeah, across different segments, there will be access to a pool team. If they are higher spend, they might be able to request access to that team. If they're lower spend, it would be more of they're not entitled to a pool team, but we are looking out to see if they're getting stuck in their journey. And if they're getting stuck, we'll reach out to them because we want to make sure that they're successful.

I love that. And this is all agreed upon before, right? Like this is like something a part of like sales and onboarding that they are like, okay, we want this level of success or do you guys also recommend what package or what kind of support they should be aiming for depending on again, their spend and what type of package they're on.

Yeah, so during the sales cycle, they will be highly recommended a certain success package and success plan. And I do want to clarify that this digital aspect is like a cherry on top for a bunch of other areas that they get access to. Like they're going to get access to faster SLAs with support. They're going to have better access throughout the day to support more training, hands-on training that they would be entitled to.

Speaker 1 (19:29.518)
And so all of this is packaged during the sales cycle. So this is another aspect that AEs can be armed with to say, you're also gonna get access to these amazing other self-service resources if you are purchasing these packages and they are highly recommended based on certain spend levels.

Okay, I love that. Again, I love that this is so tied in and it's not something that's just like the forgotten stepchild, which I think sometimes when teams are building digital success, it's always like, no, we have to serve our lowest tier or lowest paying customers. Let's just make it digital CS. But it feels very intentional. It also feels like you guys are, like you said, it's a value add on top. It's not something that...

everyone's gonna get, it's not something that's gonna make sense for everyone, but there's so much more that they're getting on top of the base layer of success that they're expecting to get with Okta, which is really cool. But I wanna dive into the Success Hub, because I know that's the heart of your digital team and how you guys kind of monitor and really show value to your customers. So for my listeners, explain what is the Success Hub? What role does it play? Kind of what does it all mean?

Yeah, so we created our success hub a few years ago to reach a specific pain point that we were seeing with our customers. We were getting feedback from customers that they didn't feel like they were nearly getting as much value out of Okta as they thought they could. And they didn't know where to start. Like they would say, I don't know what I don't know. So we had this really robust help center that had a ton of articles that were self-service. But there's a lot of capabilities of Okta. And if you were to go into our help center,

you need to know the question to ask in order to find that answer. So we wanted to serve that need for our customers to understand what they needed based on their data and to give them resources based on that data. So the way we started off our Success Hub is we had three different parts of the customer journey that we were serving. would have a

Speaker 1 (21:30.486)
experience for customers during onboarding, and that would be indicated based on the actions they've taken in the product. So we could see they haven't deployed yet, and also based on when they started their contract. We had a phase for this adoption phase, so to say. So they're post-onboarding, but they're not coming up for renewal anytime soon. We're trying to help them get the most value. And that's focused on how do you start to unlock the capabilities that you may not have known about Okta.

And then another phase for you're coming up for renewal, here's what to expect and who to contact, what you are entitled to, et cetera. So it was a good experience. It was personalized based on data. But the thing that was missing is that there are so many things that Okta can do for customers depending on what they care about and they might have different goals.

Yeah, definitely. All customers do. When you buy software, it's never, even if you do have one goal, I'm sure it evolves, it changes, and I'm sure there's a million and one ways to use Okta, and sometimes one person wants to do it one way and another person wants to do it another. So personalization is probably extremely important, probably pretty tricky too at scale.

Yeah, yeah, mean, you don't exactly know what they're prioritizing at a given moment. There's assumptions you can make based on their industry and based on their persona, but you don't really know what they're trying to do. So we decided we needed to figure out a way to understand their business goal. And we did have a little bit of a disconnected journey between pre-sales and post-sales. Like during the pre-sales conversation, the AE would probably talk about this, but they'd like put it into a sales force note somewhere.

goes to die. And then we never knew what the customer actually wanted to achieve. So we started by collecting business goals. Now in ideal state, future state, we would connect that to the pre-sales journey and not have to ask them again. But sometimes also you have a different person during onboarding than who was the buyer during the pre-bills aspect. So we want to make sure that those goals are still the same. So we created these nine buckets of business goals that were based on

Speaker 1 (23:45.068)
like 1,500 success plans from CSMs. So it's using customer data, not what we assumed those goals to be. And then we implemented that in our success hub. I think the main value to this is we're not just collecting data for the sake of collecting data. When they provide that business goal to them, they are unlocking personalized recommendations. So by submitting that business goal, we'll give them a personalized checklist.

of steps to success. These are the actions that you need to take based on that business goal. And let's say they complete all those actions in that business goal, then we ask them, what's your next goal? Now what do you want to achieve?

ever evolving. It's not like, okay, suddenly we're done with this one goal and now every all our dreams are achieved. There's always more, right? And it's like, you give them what they need when they need it rather than overwhelming them with like 17 outcomes that they could maybe get with Okta. I really love that. What what kind of made you think of the logic of that? Was it were you seeing customers kind of being overwhelmed with the success hub or why pick one or two outcomes rather than giving them all of it to pick to go from?

Yeah, we were hearing from customers that they were overwhelmed with options. We heard it either through their CSM or we hear it through surveys. For example, our sentiment survey would tell us that customers see all these recommendations, but they don't know what to do. Our customers would click through to our resources, but then get paralyzed and not take action.

And I think the other aspect is like sometimes we would give very targeted recommendations and we'd say go take this action, which was very clear. You should go take this action, but it wasn't contextual. So they didn't understand why it mattered. So we knew it had to be a small amount of recommendations. We've done that before by having a targeted recommendation, but the thing that was missing was putting it in context of the business goal. And when you put it in context to the business goal, you help them understand, this is why I should be doing this. And sometimes

Speaker 1 (25:46.19)
it feels like another checkbox, like, yeah, this seems like a good idea and I'll get to it when I get to it. But we have all these other business priorities. what we wanted to make sure is that we stressed that this was so critical to them achieving that goal that they had in the previous collection that they needed to reprioritize internally and make time for that action.

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:09.138)
I love that. I love that. That's so powerful. think, first of all, you're focusing on their business goals. A lot of times we get so stuck in our own product and our own ways of working and our own teams that we think our product and service is the best thing since sliced bread. But really, we are here to deliver their business outcomes. And I love that the Success Hub connects what Okta is doing day in, day out to their outcomes because it makes it that much more

exciting for them to actually achieve goals because they are seen in real time that, okay, if I work on this in Okta, this is gonna help realize this business goal that we have for Q4, for example, which I absolutely love. I also love that the Success Hub really encapsulates the entire customer journey by the sounds of it. It's got onboarding, it's got ongoing success, renewals. You mentioned it all, which is really, really cool. I'm curious, do all customers actually get this? Because we talked about the basic silver gold.

Are they all getting this? Do you have to be in certain tier? How does this work with the Six Plus Hub?

So our basic customers will get access to the Success Hub, but it does not have this aspect of the personalized checklist. So they'll still get resources. They'll have like a basic personalized video that will walk them through their tasks. They'll understand who their contacts are, that what they own and SKUs. That was also a big piece of the Success Hub is customers who are self-service would say like, I don't even know what I bought, because like somebody else bought it.

I don't even know what SKUs I'm entitled to. I don't know who my AE is. I don't know who I should work with on the renewal. And all this gets aggregated in the Success Hub. So we still want to make sure that they have access to that information so that they can better self-service. But that next level interactive experience of providing your business goal and getting recommendations, that's available for our silver and gold customers. And then our gold customers on top of that have access to interact with their CSM.

Speaker 1 (28:04.83)
within that experience. So they can ask questions to our CSM, their CSM can provide recommendations. They get a little bit more deeper access into some insights on their usage embedded the book in the experience. So there's a little bit of a differentiation. But that's just how the experiences is made today. We're not saying on paper, like only gold customers get access to these insights in their success hub. But for now, we want to make sure our gold customers get top tier.

Top tier experiences, not to say that we won't extend that in the future to other entitlements.

Makes sense. And you mentioned that the Basic doesn't get the personalized checklist, but do they still get the tailored recommendations based on what they selected when it came to their goals and outcomes of using Okta, or is that only reserved for Silver and Gold?

that's only reserved for silver and gold. There's a slight element to collecting their goal in our product. We have like an in-app guide that selects their goal and gives them some in-app guidance based on that goal. But beyond that, it's a slimmed down experience for our basic customers.

Okay, makes sense, but I really want to understand like what then does a silver and gold customer, like how do they get their tailored recommendations? Like obviously I'm guessing there's tons of ways to use Okta and tons of goals that you can achieve with Okta in your own company, but do you survey them? Do you watch their interactions with the software? How do you actually tailor recommendations based on customer selected goals and what they're looking to achieve?

Speaker 1 (29:33.666)
You mean when they select it, how does that differ their experience?

Yeah, how does that change in this? Yeah, so how do you guys like decide what next for them, I guess?

Yes. So after we select that goal, we are actually saving that goal in Gainsight. Gainsight is our system that we use for customer success. So it's not just like lost within that experience. It's within a system of record that we can use across all of the entirety of our digital journey. So now that we know that business goal, we one, we tailor the success hub experience, of course, but then we also can tailor our customer communication. So think as we send an adoption email,

That email is tailored based on that goal that they selected. We also send out quarterly value snapshot reports to our customers to say, here's the value that you're getting out of Okta, and we're starting to tailor that value snapshot based on the business goal they selected. So one example of a business goal with Okta would be like, I'm proactively trying to mitigate identity threats. If a customer is proactively trying to mitigate identity threats, they're really going to care about moving to phishing resistant authentication. They don't want to get attacked, right?

Yeah, so we'll really focus on how they have adopted phishing resistant authentication with Okta as the metrics of the value metrics that we would deliver in a value snapshot report, which think of it as like a self-service snapshot QBR. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:54.894)
Is that in is that in Success Hub as well as emailed or how does that work? Cause that seems like a lot of value. That seems like very high punchy value realization for the customer. And I'm guessing the champion might know that, but I'm also thinking if you're serving a digital customer success organization, how are you making sure the executives see value and realize value? they in the Success Hub? Are you emailing them? How are you making sure that value realization is getting to the right people?

Yeah, so the reports themselves sit in the Success Hub. are a very security-first company, so we actually do email metrics in an email, but the email will direct our customers to authenticate into our Success Hub.

using your own security system. I love

So our success hub is available for both our executive sponsors and for our admins. And we actually have different experiences in that success hub depending on if you're an admin or an executive sponsor. So both will have access to these value snapshots. But the way that we might message their actions might be different depending on the two. So for example, an admin might have actions of you should adopt FastPass, which is if anybody uses Okta out there.

You might use FastPass, which uses your biometrics to authenticate into your device. And so we'll talk about you should go adopt FastPass. That's a great phishing resistant authentication method. Here's a link to go directly into the product, which will then include an in-app guide, because we know they came from that experience, that will walk them through how to adopt that. Now, the executive sponsor, we know that they're not in the product. They're not hands on a keyboard, but they're going to influence the priority to implement that particular task.

Speaker 1 (32:35.838)
So instead of giving them a CTA to go into the product, we'll give them access to white papers of research that we've either done or partners that we've worked with to demonstrate why this is a big threat to their industry and they really need to be thinking about this in order to beat out leaders and mitigate security incidents within their company. So very different messaging, but ultimately they're both getting access to value snapshots.

And that was also partially why we felt like this is something that's necessary to not house in the product itself and have a separate experience that's really focused on the health of an account where an executive sponsor would be accessing that experience.

Pause in the podcast episode to ask you a quick question. Have you ever stared at a blank business review deck thinking, how do I make this executive worthy? You know the product's working, but you're not sure how to tell the story in a way that resonates with the C-suite. And worse, your customer goes quiet after the meeting. No expansion, no real feedback, just silence.

Imagine instead running a business review that feels like a revenue conversation where CFOs lean in, the VP is nodding along, and your champion says, that's exactly what we needed. That's what we cover inside of my signature team workshop on executive business reviews. And in this live coaching session, I teach your team how to move from feature walkthroughs to commercial storytelling to help customer success pros

Frame value, gain executive buy-in, and turn every business review into a growth conversation. If you want to bring this workshop to your team, head over to thecustomersuccesspro.com forward slash team hyphen event. That's thecustomersuccesspro.com forward slash team hyphen event. And you can book your session today. Okay, let's get back into the episode.

Speaker 2 (34:44.504)
You guys are personalizing so much. Like when anyone says digital or scaled customer success, they're thinking like, okay, let's email Blaster. Let's just send as many comms to everyone, as many metrics, all this stuff. But not only are you personalizing based on, again, like you said, their goals or their tailored recommendations based on their selected goals that they went with you already. But on top of that, you're then taking it a level deeper by making sure

if it's an executive sponsor or a champion or maybe someone who's just a technical support person, they're getting different experiences and understanding the system differently as well, which I think overall in a customer experience sense, that's just making someone so much more interested in actually, what did Okta send me? And actually look into it and say, I wanna see more of this because it's more towards their actual job role or what they're actually interested in, which is something we tend to forget a lot of, especially when we're building scale and we're thinking,

Okay, I need to send this to 10 people today. Let me just copy and paste and send to 10 people. But it sounds like instead of doing that, you are being very, very intentional with the data you have and the people you are sending that data to.

Yeah, and that's the goal. We'll be transparent. We are not perfect. There is so much more that we want tours to do. And we've tailored for a couple use cases. We have not tailored for all of our use cases. We have not built out all the experiences. So anyone out there who's trying to build these experiences and is thinking like, Okta's perfect, no. We all are learning and building along the way. And we are always on the journey to getting better.

I don't think customer success is ever, there's not a start and a finish. I always say it's a journey and we're always kind of evolving and going around and figuring it out. And then when we've got it all figured out, we figure it out again. Let me start all over. So I totally agree. But you already mentioned that there's so many moving parts to this success hub. And you mentioned you guys are using your own systems and tools for it, but also Gainsight.

Speaker 2 (36:42.338)
I'm wondering what other tools and systems are powering Digital Success Plan and the Success Hub? How are you making this all work? Because it sounds a bit complicated, but I'm guessing you guys have spent, like you said, months and years building all of this up. But how did you kind of pick the tools to power what you guys are doing in Digital Success?

Yeah, so it's been a progression. It wasn't just like one bit launched to the state that we are in today. But where we started is to build upon our existing help center foundation because the success hub is embedded within our help center. So our help center is built on Salesforce Experience Cloud. And really what we first started with was just like another page within Salesforce Experience Cloud. that was a personalized experience, but it was limited to Salesforce data. And as I'm sure many

Organizations can attest to, Salesforce can be powerful, but also it takes a lot of work from our business technology team.

Jill and Sharad Salesforce.

And we wanted to move a little faster. So our love our BT team, but they have so many priorities going on. So we were thinking about like, how can we make sure that we are able to get the customer experience that we're looking for built within our existing technical foundation, but having the ability to customize and bring in other data sources and being able to build a few more things ourselves. So we're using a tool called Ever After.

Speaker 1 (38:10.894)
to provide that personalized experience that is embedded on top of our Success Hub. So a customer would never know that these are actually two different platforms behind it. The overall frame of it all is the Success Hub, the, or sorry, is Salesforce Experience Cloud, but the interactive component is powered by Ever After. So we're able to unlock a whole lot more with Ever After. One is the interactive experience, the types of

I would say widgets, so to say, for lack of better term, that we can offer our customers like usage data, access to different resources, et cetera. But I think the main thing is that it hooks into a lot of our other data sources. So we use Databricks as an example for most of our product usage data. And that doesn't require adding another field into Salesforce. So we can show trends over time in terms of a customer's usage.

We can embed benchmarks on how they're performing in comparison to their tiers. have peers. We have an automated identity maturity score where we're talking about the maturity journey within the identity industry. so we can feed in all that data now because we have that integration with Databricks into our success hub. And we also can include other data sources like sharing that Gainsight field and

Gah!

I'm missing a, I know there's another data source out there, but we have a number of different areas that we can connect to based on that Success Hub. And then to answer your question about how all the other systems that we use come together, when I talk about those value snapshots that we present within the Success Hub, we use a tool called Matic to mass produce those snapshots, because we're producing thousands and thousands every month.

Speaker 1 (39:56.386)
Yeah, and that's also the tool that our CSMs use. So for example, we can have that business goal that that customer selected in our success hub. Yeah, that then powers the QBR narrative that a CSM would.

And it makes it easier by the sounds of it. That snapshot is pretty easy to produce, I'm guessing, based on the data that you already have from Databricks and all your other tools. And then it's a matter of, like you said, grabbing the snapshot, making sure it's personalized to whomever is receiving it, which is really, really great. But I love that your tools are so well integrated as well, because from a customer's experience perspective, no one wants to go and click on this link that takes you to your digital success plan and then this link that takes you to the

help center and then this link like your customer just doesn't want that. It sounds like you really embedded it within Salesforce, but used additional tools like ever after likematic like Gainsight to make sure that the experience is seamless. But to a customer, it doesn't seem like that, which is so important. I'm glad you guys were to get there because I think sometimes it can feel like such a broken experience from a customer perspective. It's like, go here, wait, wait, go here and now go here and then they're lost and they have no idea.

where to do all of that, but that's really cool that you were able to build it as a layer within whatever you're already building rather than having to like yank it out and go somewhere else, which is really awesome to hear.

we're looking at tools or vendors, we're always making sure that it integrates in our existing systems. Like you get these pitches for vendors sometimes they're like, I've created this tool and like, they just have to go into this other system and access that system. And like our customers aren't gonna do that. Our internal teams aren't gonna do that. So there has to be that interconnectivity. We're always flexible and changing as to like what makes the most sense for our business and for our customers. So that's not to say like we're like locked into.

Speaker 1 (41:44.896)
everything that we're doing, but there has to be flexibility with the tools that we use today.

I completely agree. was just nodding my head thinking of like when vendors approach and say, well, we have native integrations to this, this, and this. And then when I'm like, well, I use this. And they're like, but we can just guide you to our API documentation and you can build it yourself. like, then why are you even pictured me? But sometimes like to elevate it up easily integrate because every customer experience should be that. You shouldn't feel like you're fragmented in any way. And it's not going to seamlessly integrate. It's not going to work.

I totally agree with you there. But listen, we can keep chatting, but I do want to ask you one major question. It sounds like the entire program has been a great journey so far. And like we said, it's not over. There's still lots to continue to work on. But as you look back on everything that you've built within the digital and growth team at Okta, what are some of the like either lessons or challenges that you've encountered from building all of this? And if someone was starting

from scratch, kind of what would you give them as advice?

Yeah, so I think data has always been a challenge for us in order to provide this hyper personalized experience. You need access to good data and we've slowly but surely expanded our data set. I can't say it's where we want it to be. I think we want access to more product usage data so we can tell better value narratives. We can give better recommendations to our customers, but it's much better than I think where we started and it's just been a very long journey. The way that we

Speaker 1 (43:22.274)
had built our original foundation for digital was we were very reliant on a custom object in Salesforce for all of our product usage data. And as I mentioned earlier, can take a road not right.

Yes. And if you have this no data, how do you build anything on that? Yes. So like everybody had Salesforce integrations five years ago. So we're like, okay, has to be in Salesforce because that's where all the integrations are. Um, and so it helped us have a, have a somewhat personalized journey. But I think as we're evolving, especially in the world of AI, right? Like we have to be more sophisticated in terms of our recommendations. Um, and so we're

we're starting this migration to move a lot of our digital programs over to Databricks in terms of like where they're powered from a data point of view. It's a long journey to do that migration. I think if we could start over, I would say, yeah, let's just start in some sort of data warehouse, Databricks, Snowflake, whatever it might be. But we didn't have the capabilities of doing that five years ago. So now we're kind of doing some rework. So there's that. But then I would say like the other learning that I actually think that this

worked well for us and it's why we were able to grow in a way that we have been is that we started small. We didn't try to like say we want to build like this big world class digital program in the next six months. It's it's you're not going to be able to accomplish it if you have something bigger than you can bite off. So we started small and we iterated and we grew. We piloted before we went on full scale launches for every little initiative that we've done. So I think that that's been

a good success for us that I would advise anyone who's starting on this journey to undertake.

Speaker 2 (45:06.638)
I love that. Even being at a large organization, which to some, is quite large. I know you've been through the evolution of Okta, but you guys failed fast. You really tried things and you're like, okay, this work, it didn't, let's figure something else out and let's keep growing and keep moving. Which I think sometimes we forget to do when we're at larger organizations. Sometimes we think the red tape is gonna stop us or maybe this other team needs buy-in or whatever it is. And that ends up stalling.

a project rather than let's just kind of figure out little bits and it doesn't have to be perfect. But as long as we're making some progress towards our bigger goal, that's enough for us to get started. So I guess if anyone is listening, just get started. You never know where it's gonna go. You might have Okta's beautiful digital success hub one day, but you just have to start really. But Alana, I wanna jump us into my quick fire questions round where I challenge each one of my guests to try to answer

each of these next questions in a sentence or less. Are you ready to take on the challenge? I suppose. Okay, amazing. The first question is, if you could predict the future, what do you think customer success will focus on next year?

Thanks

Speaker 1 (46:18.766)
If I could predict the future, I think we all know that everyone's going to be focusing on AI still next year. I think that's a pretty easy prediction. How successful it will be is a, is an interesting question, but I just cheated when I think I gave a second sentence.

Okay, it's okay. Every guest I have struggles. I actually I enjoy it a little bit and I think everyone enjoys watching everyone struggle but Amazing. The next question is which app or software do you use every day or every week on your phone or on your laptop and why and it can be non CS2 it doesn't matter

Nonsense. Probably the one I use all the time is Spotify. Music is my motivation to get things done. If I'm ready to start to do something, I'm listening to music. My kids, every day I pick them up, the first request is put on music. That's like that. is the driver to getting things done and to keeping the kiddos entertained.

Amazing. I love that. That's a great answer. And Spotify is so well used. I think it's a very loved app by everyone. Amazing. Next question is, if you could change one thing about customer success, what would it be?

Focus on how to deliver value for customers, the foundation for driving success instead of fighting fires.

Speaker 2 (47:41.602)
Yes, let's focus on value and not feature functionality or what's broken. Amazing. Okay, last question. And this kind of relates back to your AI topic, but what is something cool or new that you've done with AI recently? Like with chat GBT or Claude or Gemini? It could be work related or it could be fun, family related. I always like knowing how everyone's using AI these days.

Yeah, I'll give a work related one because it's pretty fun. We're starting to create these account research plans for our CSMs, both for internally, but also what they can present to their customers by combining their customers' product usage data with public information about the customer, about the industry, and providing recommendations, which is just something like that would have taken days and days days and for just one customer. So think like,

I'm a new CSM, I've never talked to this customer before. They're a publicly traded company. So I can figure out like what are the goals that are listed in their 10K report and how does that map to their current adoption within the product and what are steps that they need to take in the product as a result of those goals that they set out that relates to our industry and relates to their industry and threats that are happening in their industry over the last couple quarters that they need to be aware of based on news articles.

That's just like, named five or six data points in that, but we're co-incorporating maybe 20, 25 that all culminates in like a SWOT analysis for the CSM and what they need to do in terms of their action.

That's so powerful. I mean, I was just smiling and nodding along because you're so right. Like a few years ago, the amount of research or time that level of research would have taken would be weeks. And it would be like a data science team to go and dig all of that information out, search the right parameters, make sure you have it, and then make it into a concise, like readable format that makes sense for a CSM. But you're so right. AI can do so much for us when it comes to deep research.

Speaker 2 (49:46.626)
of what's happening within our customers' businesses and then relating that back to the outcomes that they can achieve while using our product and service. So I love that use of AI. That's a great example. Thanks for sharing. Amazing, Alana. Thank you so, so much for coming on the show. There was so much that I took away from this, but if my listeners have any follow-up questions or want to connect or want to chat through anything that you discussed here today, what's the best way to get ahold of you?

Yeah, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. That's probably the best way to contact me and I'd love to chat with anyone who's interested.

and learning more. Amazing. Thanks so much, Alana. I appreciate this conversation.

Thanks so much for having me.

Thanks for tuning in to the Customer Success Pro Podcast. I hope you picked up something valuable to take back to your team. If you enjoyed this episode, it would mean the world to me if you took just 10 seconds to leave a review on Apple or Spotify. It helps more CS pros like yourself discover the show. And creating new episodes takes a lot of work, so leaving a nice review keeps me motivated to keep creating. And don't forget to hit subscribe on Apple, Spotify,

Speaker 2 (50:55.82)
YouTube or wherever you listen to podcast episodes. I drop a new episode every Wednesday packed with practical tips. And if you've got a topic you'd love for me to cover or want to be a guest on my show, send me a message. All the details are in the show notes. I'd love to hear from you. And hey, if this episode helped you share it with a fellow CSM or CS leader. Remember sharing is caring. Cheers to your CS journey and I'll catch you next week for our next episode.


Head Shot

Anika Zubair

Host