Customer Success Playbook Episode 6 - James Scott - Trends in Customer Success

Get ready for a jam-packed episode with hosts Kevin Metzger and Roman Trebon as they dive into the transformation trends in customer success with expert James Scott! James brings the energy as he unpacks how digital CS is becoming essential for efficient scaling. 

The insights come rapid-fire as James explores slam dunk starting points like onboarding, leveraging data and AI to unlock new potential, and rallying the entire company around CS as "everyone's job". Learn how tying metrics across teams can drive real outcomes. 

We discuss the "Help Me" exercise that exposes gaps between what companies think they deliver and what customers really experience. James doubles down on why CS is getting hyper personalized thanks to improving data. 

Don't miss this episode of the customer success podcast.

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Transcript

Kevin M.

James, welcome to the show. So we're going to jump right into this and start with the first question and starting out how is the rise of Digital-led practices changing the way customer success teams operate today. 

James S.

Yeah, it's a great question. Thanks, Kevin and Roman for having me on the on the podcast today. I'm excited to talk about this topic because it's something that that I think it I I personally been working at and I at for a number of years, right? Because it's hard and and I think we're all on that journey and we're all at kind of different points in our own personal journey with digital CS. But I think the key thing to remember here is that digital CS isn't new right. 

I know it's very, very topical right now and there's a lot of companies and people talking about it and I'm glad we are because we haven't been talking about it enough, in my opinion, over the last few years. And we're talking about it now really out of necessity and I'll talk more about that in a second. But, but digital Interactions with customers and Prospects as a concept rate. It's been around for many, many years. So we're we're talking about some stuff now that I think we should have been talking about years ago and I think actually some people have to their credit. There's been a lot of good workers already happened in in the area of digital CS particularly with 

companies that have a more product led go to market motion right? Where there aren't necessarily teams of csns that are interacting with customers. But instead it's a sort of a product where you sign up online and then you know interact with it through a trial and etc. And you don't typically have much one-to-one interaction with with members of the team. In that sort of model, you need digital, right? It's the only cost effective way to to interact with customers. It's the only, it's the only way that really works. 

So, I think the product leg growth companies, have be more sort of digital ear doctors if you like. And now companies that have more of a sales lead, motion are having to, also think about what digital looks like in their world. So, so I don't think it's a new thing. I think it's but it, but it's come as a necessity because of the economy, right? So, it's something that I think a lot of CS leaders have been talking about for a long time. Hey, we need, we need to do more digital. We we can scale our teams more efficiently if we have a digital 

strategy, but now, because of the me, and you know, what's happening in the economy is obviously been very hard for many, many people, and I want to just recognize that And I want to just I think though, also for the, for the 

Roman T.

Yeah. 

James S.

CS profession, for the discipline of customer success, it has actually been quite helpful in that it's focused CEOs. CFOs, you know, boards investors etc, on. Hey, did we get customer success? But we don't really like the way that it's being done. Right now, it's in East that there needs to be a better way. To do customer success. It needs to be a more efficient way. 

It needs to be more impactful, it can't just be about Adding more humans to a customer success team and having more one-to-one conversations. So in that way, I think, I think the, the economic macro economic environment has been helpful, but in terms of a digital led type of campaign, if you if you just look it off our friends and colleagues over in marketing, they've been doing this for decades. Like how they've been thinking about, 

Kevin M.

Right. 

James S.

how do you take an individual, not a company, an individual and move them through a journey? Using Digital Touch Points. to drive some sort of outcome, whether it be sunny or trial or buying a product, whatever, and they've learned how to use data to to Tailor that journey and personalize it based on what they know about that. Individual. And also the actions that, that individual takes. Right, did they open that email or did they not when they opened it? 

Which link did they click on? Oh, they clicked on that link. That tells us a bit about what they're interested in. So now let's send them down a slightly different path, for the next stage of the campaign, right? So so they've been doing that for a number of for many years. I mean, it's sort of decade now to Digital CS is really. 

The customer side of that, we need to. Now, think about how we do that when somebody has already signed up to be a customer of our products. And what's, what I think is also really interesting is we've got another channel available to us that the marketing team in the acquisition 

Kevin M.

Well. 

James S.

phase doesn't have, and that is the in product. Experience, right? 

Roman T.

from, you know, 

Kevin M.

Yeah. 

James S.

We are literally able to talk to the customer, right where they are using the product and typically, like only a click or two away from the action that we want them to take. action that we want So we've we've got a really exciting new channel, which I think. Personally I get yeah I think this is a massive opportunity for customer success as a discipline and I think we're just really at the beginning of that journey. 

Roman T.

Yeah. And no I think you've hit the nail on the head James and I think especially as you said is you as as these organizations begin to scale, right? It can't just be throwing bodies at at customer success. You have to be learn how to be more efficient, you know? And I know digitals like a big word, right digital Camino a lot of things and so I'm curious as where you see digital emerging in customer success, you know there's certain Areas where you see organizations maybe gravit to gravitating towards it sooner than later. Is it? You know? And again, is it maybe like automating the onboarding process or the in-app support or using that data-driven insights to become more. Proactive like, Are there certain areas where you see organizations starting to focus more on digital? 

James S.

Yeah, I think you hear the nail on the head with the onboarding piece, that, that is, I think, what's was nice about onboarding. It's, it's a finite stage of the customer journey, right? It's got to start and an end. However, you define the end. It's got, it has got some point where they, they move out of onboarding. 

And so it's kind of like And so it's kind of like It's an easy place to kind of start and I think it's the right place to start obviously because of the impact it can have. Now onboarding in many companies is quite a hands-on like human-led. you know, set of interactions with customers so that but that doesn't mean that digital can't play a part to Supplement and and empower, those individuals to be more efficient to be more impactful to me more relevant with the advice that they're giving to customers. 

And I think the core of all of this is data, right? 

Roman T.

Yeah. 

James S.

It's absolutely. I've probably nobody listening to this podcast things. Oh, thought of that before all. It's all about the data. I remember joining. Oh five, six years ago joining a company and and you know right away data was the thing. 

Identified was the biggest blocker for us doing the having the impact we wanted to have as a customer success organization, It was clear that data was the weak point in our strategy. And people kind of conceptually get it, but it's really hard to solve that problem for a lot of companies. Which is, which is, you know, can be frustrating as a leader. When you you haven't, you have a vision you have a sort of set of milestones in your mind for how you're going to get there. But you're just hampered by the fact that the data is, is either low 

Kevin M.

The information. 

James S.

resolution or it's it's stuck in a silo somewhere and you can't get it into the tool that you need it in to to use it. So I think, I think, I think that is a, the data pieces is probably the big challenge that that a lot of companies are. Having to solve right now enabled in order to unlock their digital CS strategies. So I think onboarding answer your question, onboarding is a great to 

Roman T.

Yeah. 

James S.

start. I think once you've got the data you can use it in support interactions and things like that you can use it to trigger playbooks and more proactive customers success engagement particularly around like low. 

Low user engagement with the product or maybe. To, to some of the more sort of proactive pieces of the customer journey where you're you're planning for a renewals or business reviews and things like that. 

There's a There's I don't, if you heard this that this one, the student, one of many great Steve jobs quotes but he he talks about the this paper that was published in. 1973, I think it was Scientific American where the author studied the amount of Energy. It took. To move an animal's, a different types of animals, different types of kind of, mechanical transportation devices, humans etc, to move, one kilogram of their mass one kilometer, and he compared all these, you know, he did this amazing piece of research and it found out that the condor the bird the Door is actually number one like that can just it's the most efficient, it can collide for very low energy. 

Kevin M.

What experience with? 

James S.

Humans we came in about like, a third of the way down the list. We weren't we weren't great, but we were okay. In terms of walking But this author also had the insight to test humans on a bicycle. And human on a bicycle actually was the most efficient of everything even more than the condor top of the list. And I think, I think as humans we have this 

Ability to kind of use tools to make ourselves more. 

Roman T.

Yeah. 

James S.

Impactful. Right. Powerful? Or more to do more. With our time. And I think in customer success, we're kind of going through a bit of an evolution like that right now, where we're realizing that it's not just about what we can do day to day. It's also about how do we leverage data, how do we leverage AI? To enable us to do more for our customers to be more efficient, and 

to allow us to lean into the stuff that we're really good at which is building the human connections, looking for looking at the edge cases. All the stuff, quite frankly, I think is customer success professionals. Get is exciting to us and I'm really things like data should just be there. I should just be there to support us and empower us. 

Kevin M.

Yeah. 

James S.

But a lot of the time a lot of companies I think customer success practitioners are struggling with bad data and having to do a lot of repetitive, you know, discovery and 

Roman T.

Yeah. 

James S.

to understand their customers and it just it just slows down. Our ability to make impact on our, on the customers that we serve. So I think we're an exciting time. 

Kevin M.

Yeah. 

James S.

I think this is a great, it's great time for CS, there's gonna be a lot of change. 

Kevin M.

Yeah, and and it's it's excuse me, it's exciting because the with AI with what's coming in, it's going to help a lot with the data classification and then leveraging, the data as we go forward along those lines. What are some of the more like innovative products or tools that you see being used right now? And where do you say it? Going with the AI component coming in. 

James S.

Yeah, I I is very, very exciting. I think, you know, we're in this sort of early adoption phase right, where we think we do an amazing things, but when we look back and maybe a couple of years from now would be like, we didn't even have a clue. Hey, we're just scratching the 

Roman T.

Yeah. 

James S.

surface. So I I I've been really actually impressed with how quickly existing tools have integrated AI into their offerings in really meaningful ways. 

There's lots of examples of that one that stands out in the CS world is, is zendesk. Yeah, that's zendesk has been a support tool that has been used for many many years for ticketing and kind of that reactive support piece right and i I remember actually, when I, when I was working leading a CST, I went to 

Spend a day shadowing one of the support specialists and I said It just carry on workers. You normally, Would we got in a conference room? And I just watched her. Yeah, good old days. And I Answer tickets by email of our phone etc. And share this workflow. That really surprised me. I was thinking, like, she would know the product inside out, she would have all these great support documents that have been written by the support team to refer to. 

But actually what she did, when you get a ticket came in, she would take key information out of that ticket and search in Zen desk, for other tickets like it. And then take the answers from those tickets and and use that answer the question I say, Oh, okay, that was really surprising to me. I don't know why it's quite logical, you know, with high in hindsight, but hindsight, What was endless could I, you know, that's how she worked and what the zendesk have done with their AI, basically they you can just turn it on and it will look back through all your ticket history. Like however, many years of ticket history, you've got in Zen desk, Like however, many years of ticket history, you've got 

All the answers that are specific to your product, right? This isn't generalized information. This is your world. It's your product. All the tickets related to users using your product. It will also scour your, your knowledge base that you've already built. And it'll start answering questions either directly to customers through, you know, chatbots and things or, or giving your support team superpowers by helping them. 

Kevin M.

Yeah. 

James S.

Find those answers and avoid those steps of going searching, right? So I think that's just that's just immediate value, that AI AI is enabled for an existing product. And then is that there's new products, of course, there's one called Update AI, which I'm a big fan of where it's a customer success, kind of focused meeting notes summary tool and there's lots of tools out there that will kind of take you zoom meeting or whatever and summarize it. But this is customer success specific. So it is a really good job of 

Of framing it from a customer success lens looks for product feedback, things like that. It looks for risks related to the customer etc and just delivers at you, right? After the meeting. In a nice email summary that you can, and it even has a version that you can email straight to the customer if you want. Like just really, really well for 

Kevin M.

but, 

James S.

through and immediately can provide value to to a CSM who's awarding a book of business. 

Roman T.

Yeah. 

James S.

Yeah. 

Roman T.

And I think James you've it you've hit the nail here, right? Like I think we're right where we are right now. It's exciting. It's a hot topic with AI but we're on the early early stages. In terms of you know, mass usage for it, right? I kind of think, like, you know, we're probably at the beginning of a record player. And, and now we have Spotify and Amazon music, and we've come so far from the old record. And I can't even imagine what AI will be able to do in, you know, two years And and I think we're right at the at five years, right? 

James S.

Right. 

Roman T.

the early stages and you made one, I 

James S.

Yeah. 

Roman T.

do a lot of work in contact centers and, you know, one thing that they're using that for right away is the knowledge base. You hit it, right? I can set of me doing all this work. I try to find the answer it automatically services it and then also on the Up, right? Like I don't have to do all the kind of post admin note-taking. Let let AI do a lot of that. For me, let me focus on helping the customer and helping organizations, right? 

So, so James, you're, you're, you 

James S.

Yeah. 

Roman T.

know, you're with growth molecules, you're the head of the Atlanta customer success community. You're, you know, you're talking to tons of different companies and people in the space, you know, we've talked about AI, you know, digital, what, what else are you hearing and seeing from companies and organizations in terms of trends in customer success? 

James S.

Yes, it's a great question and kind of going back to what I talked about right at the beginning of this of this podcast. customer successes has now become everybody's job. I was gonna say problem. 

It's not, it was job. And I mean by that, I mean it's no 

Kevin M.

Yeah. 

Roman T.

Yeah. Yeah. 

James S.

longer a department. That sits on its own, trying to do the best it can with you know, with whatever resources. It has trying to, you know, serve the customer and and save Churn and, you know, beers proactive as possible like but but kind of doing it on its own. Now, the conversations that I've been having over the last six to 12 months have been increasingly with CEOs, Um, of companies rather than VPs of customer success, which is, which is a good thing, right? Because customer success is a company. 

Mission. 

Roman T.

You know. 

James S.

And and particularly with everything we've just been talking around about around digital CS. Yeah, we talked about data, we talked about serving content to customers, we talked about the in-app experience, right? So there you're touching engineering touching marketing, you touching product, 

You can't do digital CS. Without other teams. Help. And any kind just be, hey, you know, can you do me one favor a quarter? It needs to be a strategy. It needs. 

It needs to be a company level strategy and I and and what I'm Hearing more about is companies tying together. Metrics. Or time binding these teams together with metrics. 

that that they're all trying to contribute towards So rather than marketing just you're being focused more on acquisition or product being focused on certain pieces around usability or speed to market, whatever it might be. They're actually picking metrics that every team has a piece of that. And, and I'm not just talking about, I think obviously nrr churn MPs, whatever, these sort of larger lagging metrics are ultimately the most important. But it's it's very hard tactically. To make decisions on that from week to week quarter to quarter. Like, Do I do this or Do I do that? Why should I help you with? 

Why should I drop working on this feature to help with this thing? feature to help you know, NRL Yes, I understand, it's 

Kevin M.

Yeah. 

James S.

important, but I can't really draw The line that connects this specific decision with Nrr is to to many layers removed So what what some of the, what I'm stuck seeing, which I really love is more customer, focused metrics. That the the teams are being measured against, I'll give you an example of how that works. if you go and speak to, and I've had many of these conversations, you'll speak to kind of product team and the marketing team you speak to different teams and ask them, how, how well are they serving their customers like 

Are the features doing helping the customers have impacted, you'll get, you know, generally very positive kind of wrote outlook because everyone feels like that they're doing the right things. But not many companies have really measured that from the customer perspective. 

Roman T.

Mmm. 

James S.

it's a really interesting, very simple exercise, that that you can go through where you can get all your teams together or key stakeholders from different teams, And do this exercise called, we call it the Help Me Exercise. So articulate in the form of a statement. This starts with Help me all the different jobs that you help customers with. Like Help me produce a report to show the efficiency of this project, help me to reduce the time. I spend setting up a campaign, every week, whatever is right for your product and design a brainstorming 

Roman T.

Yeah. 

James S.

and very quickly, you come up with a lot of these sort of help me statements. Then, you can take those statements and obviously do a little bit of sort of curating, and and culling to get sort of a corset. Then you can ask the, you can actually ask in the company. You can survey employees, or, or leadership. And ask How well do you think we are helping customers with each of these things and ask them to rate it on a scale of like one to five one to seven. And that gives you kind of like the internal perspective, right? The company. 

But then take those same questions and ask your customers though. So survey them. Ask them How well do you think this product is helping you do this thing? And there's another layer on top of this, which is how relevant that particular Help Me statement is to each user, because every user needs 

Roman T.

Yeah. 

James S.

help with different things, right? Which is a, which is a new answer that's important to remember. But I see see how the the customers rate you and I think it can. I think starting to then focus teams on metrics like that, like, How do our customers score us against these key jobs of work that we have identified that with, you know, we as a company trying to help customers with How well are we doing? All right. Then a quarter from now we're going to send out that same survey to a You know, another segment of our customer base and if this new feature that we're releasing that we think is great is really 

great. Those numbers should improve on the or this particular help me statement should should get better next quarter and that's a combination of building the right things, it's combination of The building It. Well, from a product perspective, It's about how you talk about it in marketing, it's about customer success teams and how they make customers aware and help them adopt it etc. So, if you all come together, you can really move metrics like that. And I think that's that's an interesting trend. A lot, some it's early days, but I think it's a really positive step in the right direction, at an organizational level. 

Roman T.

Yeah. 

Kevin M.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's, that's great. We've done something similar to that and find that I specially When you start comparing what you think you're doing versus what the customer thinks you're doing. Sometimes you'll see a big difference 

James S.

Yeah. 

Kevin M.

in it. Helps you move in the right direction. 

James S.

Yeah, yeah, and I think persona I think as we get better with data, we'll start to get more granular in how we think about data. It won't just be company level, it won't it'll start to get to persona level data and outcomes that are 

Kevin M.

Yeah. 

James S.

persona level, like the outcomes desired outcomes for the company versus the CEO versus the yeah, individual end user of the product. They're also they're all different 

Kevin M.

Yeah. 

James S.

and yeah. 

Roman T.

Yeah. 

James S.

We got a big kind of data challenge. We got to build that capability as an industry. Get better at data but it unlocks so 

Kevin M.

Yeah. 

James S.

much, exciting potential when we do. 

Roman T.

For sure. 

Kevin M.

Alright would James. Thank you so much for your time today. We've got a couple of rapid fire questions that we're going to go through. 

James S.

Okay. 

Kevin M.

oh, 

Roman T.

You're on the hot. 

Kevin M.

so, 

Roman T.

T James. You ready for this? 

James S.

Oh boy. So don't make them too. Like, no, no, sort of American cultural references that I'm going to struggle with those. 

Kevin M.

Alright. What's one hobby you have outside of work? That helps you online. 

James S.

Ah, I'm a I just this year in this year got certified as a soccer referee. 

Kevin M.

Nice. 

James S.

Yeah. 

Roman T.

What kind of what level games you 

Kevin M.

sorry, not 

Roman T.

refin James? 

James S.

So it's grassroots. So it's under 18s and then, adult amateurs. Yeah. 

Roman T.

Oh, that's awesome. 

James S.

I mean, yeah, it's fun. It's really fun. I've been around soccer. My whole life, my children play. And I finally decided that I've shouted enough referees. I probably should before we should step up and try to do the job is hard. 

Roman T.

Talk about that you were just talking about that exercise about internal, you know, experiences. And then the customer I'm sure is a 

James S.

Yeah. 

Roman T.

ref you're now facing it from a different lens as well. 

James S.

Right. Exactly, exactly. 

Kevin M.

All right. Early bird or night Owl. 

James S.

I'm a night owl. Yeah. 

Kevin M.

No. And favorite sport to watch or play. 

James S.

Salka football soccer. 

Kevin M.

Soccer. 

Roman T.

You got a favorite team? 

James S.

So I I grew up in Oxford in England. So Oxford. United was like team, acorn watches kid, they're not very good. They're kind of middle middle division. So, Liverpool is kind of my Premier League team. That's my, my dad's team and and then Atlante United. I have I have season tickets here, so I'm going to see them as much as I 

Kevin M.

Nice. 

James S.

can. 

Roman T.

Yeah, I enjoy the messy show coming 

James S.

Yeah. 

Roman T.

soon. Hopefully to mercy, you 

James S.

I know. Well, hopefully that yeah, yeah. 

Kevin M.

Oh yeah. 

James S.

Hopefully 

Kevin M.

And one place you want to travel where you haven't been already. 

James S.

I would. It's kind of what there's number number of places on this list. I'm just say, Mexico, which is kind of embarrassing, that amount of time I've been in in America. But I have not yet been to Mexico and I love the food. So I, I need to, I need to make that a higher priority than it has me. 

Kevin M.

Yeah. That's a great vacation spot. 

Roman T.

Yeah. 

James S.

Yeah. 

Kevin M.

And our last last one. What's your favorite book? 

James S.

There's my, my favorite book. I read a lot of business books, like Stories of Founders and businesses, they've built, and there's one called Good Company by Arthur Bank. And obviously, he's the sort of founder of the Falcons and the Atlanta United, or the owner and he just talks a lot about how as a company you show up in the world and how You can have a really positive impact on the community around you whether it's your local community or your virtual community, just by the way you think about doing business and that really resonates with me. It's you know, obviously I do a lot of work here in the community in Atlanta and 

And I think, if all of us kind of just put a little bit of time aside every every month to to give back or give service, then then we can make, you know, a really big impact. So I like the way he does that from us sort of a corporate lens. 

Roman T.

Yeah. 

James S.

Yeah. 

Kevin M.

Thanks James, that was great and appreciate it.