The Customer Success Playbook
Welcome to “The Customer Success Playbook,” a fresh podcast initiative spearheaded by Kevin Metzger and Roman Trebon. Immerse yourself with us in the dynamic realm of customer success, where we unravel the latest insights, inspirations, and wisdom from recognized leaders in the Customer Success domain.
Our journey began with a simple yet profound belief: that meaningful conversations can significantly impact our professional trajectory. With this ethos, we’ve embarked on a mission to bring to you the voices of seasoned and revered professionals in the field. Our episodes have seen the likes of Sue Nabeth Moore, Greg Daines, Jeff Heclker, James Scott, David Ellin, and David Jackson, who have generously shared their expertise on a variety of pertinent topics.
We’ve delved into the intricacies of Profit and Loss Statements in Customer Success with Dave Jacksson, explored the potential of Customer Success Platforms with Dave Ellin, and unravelled the role of AI in Customer Success with all guests. With Sue, we navigated the waters of Organizational Alignment, while Greg brought to light strategies for Reducing Churn. Not to be missed is James insightful discourse on the Current Trends in Customer Success and Jeff’s thoughts on Service Delivery in CS.
Each episode is crafted with the intention to ignite curiosity and foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement among customer success professionals. Our discussions transcend the conventional, probing into the proactive approach, and the evolving landscape of customer success.
Whether you’re a seasoned veteran or a newcomer to the industry, our goal is to propel your customer success prowess to greater heights. The rich tapestry of topics we cover ensures there’s something for everyone, from the fundamentals to the advanced strategies that shape the modern customer success playbook.
Our upcoming episodes promise a wealth of knowledge with topics like CS Math, Training, AI, Getting hired in CS, and CS Tool reviews, ensuring our listeners stay ahead of the curve in this fast-evolving field. The roadmap ahead is laden with engaging dialogues with yet more industry mavens, aimed at equipping you with the acumen to excel in your customer success journey.
At “The Customer Success Playbook,” our zeal for aiding others and disseminating our expertise to the community fuels our endeavor. Embark on this enlightening voyage with us, and escalate your customer success game to unparalleled levels.
Join us on this quest for knowledge, engage with a community of like-minded professionals, and elevate your customer success game to the next level. Your journey towards mastering customer success begins here, at “The Customer Success Playbook.” Keep On Playing!!
The Customer Success Playbook
Customer Success Playbook PostGame - Ed Powers - Harnessing the Power of Data and AI in Customer Success
Unlock the power of data in your business with insights from our recent guest, the remarkable Ed Powers. Feast your ears on a riveting conversation that explores the essence of data-driven decision-making in Customer Success. Ed Powers, an esteemed expert who delivers enlightening courses on Udemy and Success Hacker, shares his expertise on customer health scores and how companies are harnessing the power of data to predict customer outcomes. Join us as we explore the journey from subjective health scores to AI-powered, data-driven decision-making.
Dive into the world of AI and its role in processing massive amounts of data to predict outcomes. Ed Powers provides a tantalizing preview of his upcoming courses discussing generative AI. We also bring to light the importance of unearthing data that aligns with your company's goals, which often requires reaching out to customers for discussions. Listen to our stimulating discourse on customer satisfaction and churn. With Ed's insightful ideas, you're sure to leave pondering a few burning questions that just might be the foundation for our future episodes.
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You can also find the CS Playbook Podcast:
YouTube - @CustomerSuccessPlaybookPodcast
Twitter - @CS_Playbook
You can find Kevin at:
Metzgerbusiness.com - Kevin's person web site
Kevin Metzger on Linked In.
You can find Roman at:
Roman Trebon on Linked In.
Welcome to the Customer Success Playbook Post Game Show, where Kevin and I talk about our recent episode, discuss the insights that our guests shared with us and then give our perspective on the conversation Kev. We just had Ed Powers on. Ed was a terrific guest. He talked to us about data-driven decision-making in Customer Success. I'll jump right in Kev, because I really enjoyed this conversation.
Speaker 1:The one thing he talked about is customer health scores. He said there's four ways companies are doing these today. They're starting with the red, green, yellow, subjective health scores. Just how do you feel the customer is doing that, being the bottom of the scale, all the way up to input all of these variables and let the data decide what's predictive of a customer outcome. Don't go in, like he said, some of the factors that you think will be important won't be and some of them that you don't think are important will be as well, but let the data drive. That's on the other spectrum. I thought that was really insightful. Again, he even said at the end a lot of organizations still are on that early spectrum, which it's that subjective feel. How do you think they're doing? Approach?
Speaker 2:Yeah, from my experience, I think a lot of times things start all very, very on the subject of them. We got to get a red green yellow. What's doing it? Then somebody says, well, what are the factors we're using to determine red green yellow? Then it's that iteration You've iterated from.
Speaker 2:He described those four levels. You've got iteration one, where it's pure gut. Iteration two it's this is the reason why. Then iteration three well, we've got three or four reasons why we say the customer is red or green. Maybe some of those are measurement based, maybe some of those are gut based, but you're piling the data on.
Speaker 2:Then iteration four is machine learning based. We're looking at all the data we can gather and trying to use that information to determine what the reasons are for churn or what the red, yellow, green level is ultimately. I think obviously there's a couple of factors as to why companies use each of those iterations, starting with maturity, but also going to the points of costs and things like that. I think what we're going to see is there'll be a lot more data driven decisions coming down the road here as a result of the lowering of costs and access to the types of artificial intelligence, machine learning, availability to companies to be able to look at the data, which is really a cool movement forward.
Speaker 2:One of the other interesting things to me that I thought was when we started talking about data and we started talking about questions and you know, you was even saying you've got to uncover the data that's important to you as a company, right, and that requires going out and talking to customers. And then we brought in the discussion of AI to that right and how AI is good at picking up all different types of data. If you're having a customer discussion, that's beyond the information that you may surface love with me talking about, and I think that's another area that's really interesting, as you're trying to understand why people are doing things. Trying to uncover that data, I think, is one of the hardest things for us to do as human beings and having the assistance going forward is going to be interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was already, you know. And again, if you haven't checked out Ed's courses, go to Udemy, go to Success Hacker. I mean, go find his courses right and, like I mentioned early in the podcast, like the tools he's instructing his class on are really like high-level mass golf and regression linear models and I think to your point. We asked him about AI and you could see that, you know, I think you know it's going to have a big impact, right, because a lot of what we're talking about is taking all these variables to help drive, you know, predict outcomes. Now you can do that on a mass scale, huge scale. You have AI that's doing it and Ed's already incorporating that in his course. He's already put talking about, you know, he's redoing his course and he's going to start talking about generative AI, which I think is super important.
Speaker 1:You know, the one question I didn't ask Ed in and, looking back, maybe you know I wish I would have asked is you know we had Greg Daines on in September, right, and Greg talked about if you ever listen to the show, go back and listen to it. Greg's an awesome guest. He, you know he talked about 23 churn reasons in 2023. But he talked about, you know, customer sat and NPS have no correlation on churn, right? I wish I would have asked Ed you know kind of his thoughts on that. I know he's probably looked at churn a bunch and looked at a lot of those models. I was, you know, kind of looking back after the fact. I'm like, oh man, I wish I would have asked Ed that. And so anyway it's funny.
Speaker 2:I had the same thought, same thought, that was it. And during the conversation it did pop in my head and at the end of the conversation I said I had more questions and it popped right out of my head. But yeah, that's a question. As a matter of fact, I think we should try and go back and ask him about it. Maybe let's see if we can get an article out of that or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that would be good. The other question is and it kind of it's a question maybe for Greg is, and this question that I've been thinking about is you know he says no correlation. You know C-Sat doesn't correlate to churn. I'm curious how much customer results correlates to customer sat, though? Right, Because he does talk about customer results being super important. I am curious, if you just look at those two variables customer, if I get customer results, does my customer sat go up? Right, and we didn't ask even Greg about that. So again, there's there's a lot to unwind here and double click on and really get into this, because I think, greg and Ed, you know they bring up some really valid points and really good questions that need further exploring.
Speaker 2:Yeah, maybe a future episode to get them on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, well, maybe we're generating some future content here. So, all right, kev. Well, you know, one question I have for you, so we'll go behind the scenes here. So, ed, you know this episode with Ed's going to be coming out in early October. Right, we are recording this right before the start of college football season. I want to get you on the record how many wins for your Clemson Tigers this year, Because now it's on the record, kev, so we can go back and we can look at that Well, regular season, or we talk about 12 regular season games.
Speaker 1:What do you? What's how many wins we get?
Speaker 2:I'm hoping you know the hope Realistically I'm going to go 11 of one, Okay 11 of one season.
Speaker 1:Alright, I way. If they lose the Duke on Labor Day, Cap don't don't. I'm definitely cutting this video and posting it out there for our audience to see.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting. I'm opening with Duke. I think it's gonna be uh and then yeah, we got four. It's. It's an easier opening in the.
Speaker 1:Florida State's got the full day.
Speaker 1:It's started. Uh, you know full slate of games this weekend and, and so that'll be great. So, okay, we got a lot of exciting things beyond just football starting. Uh, we got the Cosmer Success Playbook website. Uh, check it out. That should be live Our Cosmer Success Playbook Linkedin page, right, so make sure you go on the Linkedin page, check us out. Um, again, we're gonna be putting a newsletter out. So, again, if you go to the website, you can enter your emails. You get on our distribution list. You can check us out. We send out, send out, send out. You want to check out, like our conversation with Ed Craig Daines, etc. Can I miss anything? Anything else? We, we got going on. We want to share with the audience. Well, you didn't give your predictions for pit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm, I am a pit fan, I'm going, I'm going eight and four, eight and four, right, so right, uh, ho-ham, uh kind of middle of the road.
Speaker 1:I hope I'm and I hope I'm wrong. Yeah, I'm hoping, I'm hoping to love it, one like you, but I, I, I, you know I'm not gonna be able to get that in, so anyway, uh, thanks everyone for listening. Make sure you like, subscribe, comment, rate us, check out, connect with Kevin and I. We love connecting and learning from other customer success professionals, right so, at Roman Tremont on LinkedIn, at Kevin Metzger Again, we have a customer success playbook LinkedIn page as well. Uh, and thanks everyone for listening. We really appreciate it. Keep.
