The One Thing Holding CS Back: How to Work Smarter, Not Harder feat. Alex Turkovic

CS teams are stuck in a cycle of busy work, but what if the real problem isn’t the workload - it’s how they work? Alyssa Nolte and Alex Turkovic break down the one shift that can transform Customer Success: taking control of your workflow. They dive into the power of templatization, leveraging AI for efficiency, and why the best CS pros don’t wait for tools...they build their own. If you’re tired of playing defense in CS, this episode is for you.

Key Takeaways:

1. Optimize for Future You – Investing extra effort today in templates, documentation, and repeatable processes saves exponentially more time in the long run.
2. AI is Your Augmented Intelligence – AI won’t replace CS, but those who learn how to use it effectively will outperform those who don’t.
3. Own Your Workflow – The best tools won’t save you if they don’t fit how you work. Build systems that work for you, not just what your company provides.

Key Moments:

00:00 Introduction and Welcome
00:27 Introducing Alex and the Topic of Customer Success
01:36 The One Thing for Customer Success
03:41 Practical Tips for Efficiency
09:06 Using AI to Enhance Productivity
12:11 The Role of AI in Customer Success
14:27 Best Practices for Implementing AI
22:00 Tools and Hacks for Success
22:40 Connecting with Alex
23:24 Conclusion and Call to Action

It's time to say "goodbye" to the Sunday Scaries.

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Transcript

Alyssa Nolte: 0:00

Hey everyone, welcome back to Taking Back Monday. I am so excited that you decided to say goodbye to the Sunday Scaries and hello to a future of more meaningful work. And this is actually a really exciting podcast for me because it's different than any conversation I've had before. Today we're not going to talk necessarily about Hi, thinking leadership concepts. We're not gonna talk about the touchy feely stuff. We're actually going to roll up our sleeves and have a real conversation about what it takes to take back Monday. And I'm so excited to introduce you to my friend, Alex, Alex, welcome to the show.

Alex Turkovic: 0:30

Howdy pleasure to be here. I'm so glad to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Alyssa Nolte: 0:36

So I was trying to figure out, you know, who I was going to reach out to, to come on the show and be part of this first real practical tactical roll up your sleeves conversation. And you were the number one person at the top of my list,

Alex Turkovic: 0:46

Oh, dang.

Alyssa Nolte: 0:47

I know lots of pressure. So, you know, like do what you need to do, roll up your sleeves, take a, take a shot of water, whatever it takes. Um, but I would love to have a conversation with you about customer success specifically, you know, with your podcast and with all of the speaking and relationships that you have, what do you think is the one thing that's keeping from customer success professionals from having their Mondays back and taking back their Mondays?

Alex Turkovic: 1:11

Yeah. Uh, that's an amazing question. I'm so glad that I made that list. I was kind of like, who, um, who else turned her down before she got to me?

Alyssa Nolte: 1:24

You were actually my first outreach. So I was really pleasantly surprised that you said yes.

Alex Turkovic: 1:29

But yeah, I'm rolling up my sleeves as we speak, and I'm not taking a shot of water, but I am drinking Earl Grey, so there's that. Um, you know, I think the, the thing, there's this book that I often reference by Kell, Keller, is it Keller of Keller Williams? Or Williams? It's Keller of Keller Williams. It's called The One Thing. And you don't really need to read the book to get the overall concept of it, but it's like, you know, the whole concept is what is the one thing you can do like today, this week, this month, to make everything else that you do down the road easier. And that is a concept that I, I like to use myself. That's a concept that I like to preach with the folks on my team and whoever I'm surrounded with, because there are those things that you do on a repetitive basis, where if you. Put in like 10, 20 percent extra effort to like templatize it or turn it into something that you can reuse and reutilize and, and remove that burden from you in the future, the next time you have to go do it, I think that is one of the things that we just, we're bad at as human beings in general. Um, You know, so when it comes to the core question though, of like, how can individual contributors take back their Monday, it's really in the prep work and the templatization and, and the, the tooling that you personally surround yourself with, I don't think it's so much a question of, Hey, you know, what. What tooling has the company provided for me? But like, what tooling have you provided for yourself in the way that you work? Because ultimately, you know, your leadership can, can provide some CSPs and some, you know, all these great tools that we all hear about all the time. But a lot of times I find that the way that one person works isn't necessarily compatible with that system versus the way another person works, you know, that compatibility is there. So. You know, it's, it's about taking ownership of that a little bit yourself.

Alyssa Nolte: 3:42

So you just unlocked like a memory. I I've read that book and like the whole concept of that we've, we've glorified busy and we've created a place where you get rewarded for looking busy, but not actually being productive and putting these systems in place, like, yeah, it kind of sucks to only do one thing. And I said to someone recently that. I feel like the last several months of my life have just been working on a single PowerPoint. It's made a lot of, like I've refined it a ton, I've done a ton of evolution, but when you're pitching to VCs like I am right now for TrueView, I'm literally just refining the same PowerPoint over and over again. I feel so uninspired by that because I'm just so sick of working on one thing, but it's an important one thing.

Alex Turkovic: 4:24

Yeah. Yeah, it is. And, and whatever that looks like for you, you know, I mean, um, you know, another example is I, you know, I'm going through and doing some like billing audits of our accounts right now. And. You know, it became, it's, it's like, after you do it like three or four times, you're like, okay, this is the general process. So I'm going to write this down. I'm going to make a hell of a checklist out of it and, and, and go to town. Um, you know, but it's, it's those little steps of like, you know, documentation and, you know, um, Templatizing and, and, and, and turning something into a lasting resource that I think is huge. And you can take that into any number of different facets, whether it be your customer facing documentation. Like if you're, if you're chatting with a customer about it, um, about something, you've got it recorded. I mean, you know, use some AI and turn it into a knowledge base article for crying out loud. Like those kinds of things are, it's interesting because you. In the moment, you're like, ah, you know, it's not going to make a huge difference. But if you do something like that, at least once or twice a day, the cumulative effect is, is, is pretty massive.

Alyssa Nolte: 5:44

It's, it's really funny. I have a non work example of this. So, I have a five year old and a nine year old and without fail, we do not get up very well in the morning. We do not move very quickly. And a couple of years ago, I started requiring my kids on Sunday night to put together their outfits for the entire week. Like we have pants, we have socks, we have underwear, we have shirts. And we, we, we've thought about like the weather. We've looked at the weather and every single week it is a little bit of a fight because you know, they're, they're fighting against their upcoming Monday. Um, bye. It saves us so much time and stress in the mornings and it saves me so much time and stress not having to run around and be like, Oh crap, I'm so far behind on laundry. I don't have anything ready for them. So yeah, we work slow on Sunday. It takes, you know, 30 ish whatever minutes if we're behind on laundry. But it saves us so much time and anxiety the other five days of the week That it's worth it to me to have that fight on sundays about getting your clothes laid out

Alex Turkovic: 6:42

Yeah, totally. I do very similar things like, uh, you know, the night before I'll like fill the kettle with the water and, uh, you know, so it's ready to go in the morning. All, you know, Kind of do as much prep work as possible so that then the morning isn't, isn't a fight and, and I approach my week that way to, um, you know, just something that works for me is I keep, uh, just, uh, as we all do running to do list and my, my to do lists have migrated from. Uh, three by five index cards, which just used to litter my workspace to, you know, general note taking app. But, um, what I'll, what I'll typically do is keep like a weekly list and. Kind of knock stuff off of my weekly list. And then when I get to the end of the week, I will then kind of look at it because there's some dopamine involved in like seeing, okay, knock this stuff off. That's great. And then, um, you know, I'll take probably 20 minutes and I recommend this for everyone. Just, you know, take 20 minutes and turn the things that you didn't get to into the start of next week's to do list. And it may seem, you know, maybe a little bit, um, Kind of demoralizing, but if you do that on Friday after you've done, like take 10, 15 minutes and prep for the week that's coming up, uh, it, it allows you on Monday morning to go instead of like figure out what the hell it is you got to do for the rest of the day, you know,

Alyssa Nolte: 8:19

And and honestly sometimes remember what the heck you did last week. Like what did I even do last week? I don't even know like so if you've done that prep work you've you've set yourself up to start strong on monday morning

Alex Turkovic: 8:29

because if you're a CSM, I mean, you're talking to tons of different accounts and it's easy to get that stuff, you know, the, the, the threads crossed and all that kind of stuff. And so really while you're in that mode, if you take that time to just really put a pin in stuff, A, it sets you up really well for Monday, B, it sets you up well for the weekend. So you're not have to think about the stuff that you might've missed.

Alyssa Nolte: 8:55

Right, right. It's almost like putting Giving yourself permission to put something on the shelf, right? I'm not going to think about it because i've already handled it and I don't need to worry about it until Whatever time I start on monday

Alex Turkovic: 9:05

Yeah, totally, totally. And I, you know, I love the individual use of artificial intelligence to do that kind of stuff. I mean, the biggest, the biggest thing that I've found, okay, this is interesting. So last week I spoke at the customer success collective event in Austin. And, um, I had done a talk there the year before, and I asked the same question, both kind of. Last year and this year and the, the response was quite different, which, which was great. The question was, um, how many of you in the room actively use chat GPT, for example, on a daily basis to help you with your stuff. And last year, when I asked the question, it was probably 20 or 30%. Like people just weren't using these tools. Just to help them on a daily basis. This year, it was probably like 80 or 90 percent were raising their hands. I don't know whether, whether it was like out of guilt because the, they felt like that was the thing to do, but, um, It was nice because it, to me, it shows that people are actually finally starting to, I say, finally, it hasn't been around that long, but people are starting to really adopt the daily use of, of things like chat GPT and perplexity, because, you know, honestly, like some of the stuff we're talking about, um, you can, you can make literal minutes. Up for like, I said that wrong. You can turn an hour's worth of work into, into literally minutes. especially around this task list thing we're talking about, because if you're feeding it, you know, your call transcripts and things like that, you can grab those tasks out of there, like super, super quick and give yourself quick reminders of what it is you need to do, put that in your to do list. And that that'll set you up for success.

Alyssa Nolte: 11:01

I'm an early adopter by nature. So I've been using chatty chat GPT for what feels like a lifetime. Like when you're like, finally, I'm like, yeah, I know. I've been, you know, before it was a paid thing and you've had a pro plan. Right. Um, I just actually recently came across perplexity. I did not know that that's a really cool tool as well. Cause then, you know, it's not like hallucinating facts or, or anything. You have like actual sources, which is great. Um, And, and for me, it's really what a lot of what you're saying, I have to set up these systems to let my brain focus on the, you know, 80 percent of the tasks that an AI can handle for me, so that I'm freed up for the 20 percent that literally only I can do. I've been having a conversation with a lot of people in this industry about There's AI, artificial intelligence, but we need to treat AI like augmented intelligence. It's making me better. It's not replacing me. I'm not, you know, being replaced by an AI. I'm being augmented by an AI. It makes me X number of hundreds percent better at what I'm doing because I'm not wasting all of my energy on small things, minutia, stuff that doesn't really matter.

Alex Turkovic: 12:11

For those of you out there who are like in solidly in the camp of just a matter of time until artificial intelligence replaces me, um, granted, you know, there are certain, I think there are certain roles where it's like probably more of a reality than like, Uh, whatever we won't, we won't go down that rabbit hole, but it, but if you're in CS specifically, let's, let's say your customer facing, you're, you're in the business of creating lasting relationships with customers, the news flash is that customers are always going to want to talk to a human, right? Like there's no, I don't really think there is a replacing the human behind Relationship building aspect of what CS does, because ultimately that's what humans do. That's what we thrive on. And customers are always going to want to chat with a human. Does that mean that we can't, you know, use some of this technology to, you know, help, you know, them answer questions with, You know, large language models and that kind of stuff. That's totally fair game. But at the end of the day, if you're talking about dollars and cents and renewals and value outcomes and those kinds of things, they're always going to want to chat with a human. The trick is, um, you know, using the artificial intelligence tools that we now have and are rapidly coming to market to make that happen. Those conversations better, right. To, to make sure that the conversations that you're having are informed or powerful, full of insights and those kinds of things. And that's, that's the trick of it. Um, getting there is still, I think a little bit tough. Uh, and I know you're part of that solution, like solving for some of those insights, especially, um, with what you're doing at TrueView, but. I think ultimately, like it's still just like this wild marketplace of AI tools that are all over the place and it's super confusing. And so when we start to see a consolidation of that technology, that's, that's where really the rubber is going to hit the road.

Alyssa Nolte: 14:19

there's a there's a lot in what you've said there. And one of the things I want to key in on is. You know, using AI and it has its place, right? So one of the things I'm seeing in the market is people are rolling out and deploying AI chatbots without any kind of understanding of how it's impacting their brand. Like I just watched how many Superbowl commercials and those were carefully tested and carefully planned and carefully selected on, you know, Matthew McConaughey is in this commercial and he was chosen for a reason and it was tested and it was vetted and it was thought about. And yet we're rolling out these chatbots that. No one's really thought through and yet they are your brand ambassador. And I want that chat bot to answer those questions that, you know, like we all get those emails of how do I log into my account? Like, I don't need to be responding to those. I don't need to be just a support agent. I need to create value and build relationships, but we have to do it in a way that doesn't actually tarnish our customer's understanding and relationship with us. Cause just because it's easier for you, or maybe even easier for your customer. If it's not a great extension of your brand and what you want to be known for, then you are actually doing more damage than, than helping your customer achieve their outcomes faster.

Alex Turkovic: 15:29

Totally, I agree that, which is why my number one recommendation for people specifically, they're implementing chatbots is like, use it internally first, like as a tool for your support agents or whoever, so that they can like, you know, not only use it as a, as a, as a performance tool, but then also like gauge how good it is. Cause if you put a stinker out there, it's just going to hurt you.

Alyssa Nolte: 15:56

It's so funny that you say that because, um, I'm building a, like a knowledge base for TrueView right now with a chatbot, right? Cause that's the cool thing that everyone's doing. And again, early adopter. So I want to do like all of the new tech things and I had my husband test it out and I didn't give him any of like, he's not in my industry. He doesn't really know anything about what we've got going on. And I gave him no guidance. I just said, Hey, interact with this thing. Tell me what you think. And he asked it a bunch of questions and I had set guardrails of like, if you don't know the answer, say you don't know the answer. Right. And he kept asking questions that in hindsight were super reasonable and obvious. And I should have thought of those questions too, but it kept saying, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. And I'm like, well, this is, thank God I didn't deploy this because that would have been exactly embarrassing. His questions were good, but I was too emotionally close to our product and our solution that I couldn't see the more obvious questions. Cause of course, to me, they're obvious. You would never ask these, but to him, they weren't.

Alex Turkovic: 16:48

I think the cool chat bots out there, the, you know, there's, there's several, um, there, there are several vendors who have really capitalized on that element of it and, and are on the backend, then making suggestions for the content that you're missing and those kinds of things, which is super, super cool. Um, and I think, you know, really when it comes to this stuff. You're really only limited in terms of your own imagination. Um, okay, like, like a couple examples, um, of things that I've done recently that, that are, Just kind of cool and very helpful. Um, one is, and it takes a little bit of, you know, duct tape and paper clips to do some of this stuff. But like I, uh, I created a, a Google news feed, um, for our industry. We're a vertical SAS provider for the security guard industry. And so I created a Google news feed, RSS feed for, you know, security guard, kind of, You know, latest news and trends and whatnot. And, um, with Zapier I'm feeding it into our Slack, into a specific Slack channel that just gives digests of like, Hey, this is what's happening, you know, uh, in the industry and that's, that's super cool because you give your sellers or your CSMs kind of an insight into what's happening in the industry. And with specific, especially larger accounts, I think there's a lot of value in doing similar things as well to help you have those informed conversations. So when you're prepping for a QBR or whatever, you can go just sift through real quick and see, okay, are there news updates? And then you can take it a step further and have, you know, artificial intelligence summarize all those things for you so that you don't have to go weed through articles and things like that. So it's all about that. I guess going back to the one thing, it's all about that kind of, um, uh, you know, uh, uh, cumulative effect of those things that you start to put together and you start to surround yourself with to make sure that you're having super informed conversations and you can start to be consultative and not just reactive.

Alyssa Nolte: 18:59

And, and we're seeing that a lot, I mean, the people I feel like who are winning the customer experience space are being much more strategic about the conversations that they're having. They're not wasting their time on, on things that don't necessarily matter. They're focused on proactivity and, and being in the right place at the right time. But that's not as, as easy as we're really making it sound right. Like you have to, there's, there's a lot of work put into building those systems to your point earlier. spending an extra 20 30 minutes building something so you can save yourself five minutes a day every day forever.

Alex Turkovic: 19:32

You as a CSM, you know, if you're an individual contributor, if you're a CSM right now, you will be doing yourself a disservice if you're not investing some of your weekly time into artificial intelligence, learning how to work with it, learning Zapier to integrate it into different things like, like, And flexing that creative muscle of what could you do? Because a, you're creating your own tooling that can help you. You don't have to wait for an ops team to put something together for you. Um, but B you're, you're developing this kind of more strategic skill set and this more kind of. Uh, way of thinking about not just your accounts, but just in general, how everything comes together, uh, which really sets you up well for, you know, leadership or operations, um, positions in the future. So I don't know, that's, that's my two cents

Alyssa Nolte: 20:27

I love it. Um, so you're obviously very well connected in the customer success space. When you think about the people that you know, or the people that you, you follow, the thought leaders you listen to, who else should we be talking to? Who can help us take back Monday?

Alex Turkovic: 20:41

Steno, man, I love that guy. He is doing some incredible things on his own podcast. So I'm not just like singling out podcast hosts here, but he is, he is, um, you know, he's, he's a voice for the CSM, uh, uh, and a great guy as well. So he, he's really, really good. Um, You know, I, I do love the things that, uh, Rachel proven, you know, puts out routinely, Jan young puts out a bunch of stuff routinely that is really oriented. Yes. On the leadership front, but then also on the individual and kind of, um, you know, career growth front as well. Um, yeah, those are, those are the ones that kind of come to mind. Um, I've got, uh, you know, a couple of team members who are, uh, really Good at like task management and stuff. One, one specifically is I'll call her out as Christina Drake. She, she lives in Vitaly's task management system and her tasks are super clean. But as like an example of somebody who's like really in it to where they can go enjoy their weekend and then come in on Monday with a fresh set of eyes and hit the go button. It's really cool.

Alyssa Nolte: 21:57

I love it. Okay, put on your, uh, inner influencer hat. What is one tool, trick, secret, hack, whatever that we need to know in order to be successful?

Alex Turkovic: 22:07

Um, I mean the sleeper we kind of already touched on, but perplexity, man, if you use perplexity to do your account research and to also do some spying on your executive stakeholders, that's like huge. You can get a wealth of information on who your accounts are, uh, by using perplexity, those of you who aren't aware, just. Start using perplexity instead of Google. And you'll thank me later. Totally.

Alyssa Nolte: 22:33

over. I don't even go to Google search anymore. It doesn't, it doesn't give me any value or it gives me wrong answers only. So. Okay. Last but not least, Alex, if they are really connecting with you, if people want to find you, where can they connect with you online?

Alex Turkovic: 22:47

Best thing is obviously on LinkedIn, but also digital customer success. com. That's where you'll find, uh, the podcast, some articles. There's a digital. Um, CX maturity assessment that you can go take for yourself. Um, which is cool. It'll rate how your organization is doing on the, uh, digital success maturity model that I built. Um, but that's basically it. LinkedIn digital customer success. com.

Alyssa Nolte: 23:19

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking back Monday with me. This was great.

Alex Turkovic: 23:22

Thank you for having me. That's awesome. Thanks for joining us on Taking Back Monday, where we say goodbye to the Sunday scaries and hello to meaningful and fulfilling work. If you enjoyed today's episode, let's connect on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear your thoughts. And if you found value here, share the podcast with your network. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review. It helps us inspire more leaders to join the movement. Until next time, let's take back Monday.