Run CS Ops like a Pro: The 5 Things Every CS Operation Needs to Have

0:00 (logo whooshing) - Adrian, I'm so excited to have you here today. I feel like this is a true full circle moment where you were my first CSM I've ever worked with, and it was my first job out of college, and you introduced me to the world of customer success, which I actually spent a lot of time in before doing RevOps. I think it's just such an amazing business function, and you being my first impression of that really left an impression of what CS could and should be. And I really appreciate that you're here today to talk to us about customer success ops and how you got started in that. So I think something that would be really good

0:42 to kick off with is how did you make the move from CSM into CS ops? What attracted you to that part of the business, and how did you get it kicked off? - Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And well, first, I appreciate that, 'cause I think it must've been, what, maybe around 2012, 2013 or so that we met, and frankly I was also first time in a CS role and trying to figure things out, and so-- - Well, you could've fooled me, you seem like a pro, so. (laughing) - Which, I'm glad, because I think when it comes to the approach that I've always tried to take is first and foremost listening to you and customers that I had an opportunity to work with.

1:24 And I think part of what I feel has allowed me to kind of make that transition over time into a more of an ops role really came down to that first initial experience, experiences that I had with folks like you, because the reality, I think, of CS ops and just CS in general is we're gonna help solve meaningful challenges that our customers are facing, right? So they have signed on with our products for a variety of different reasons and find them. We work with a lot of recruiters and sorcerers, and so they're looking for ways to hire more effectively and land key people and key roles as quickly as possible. And so understanding the goals of our customer,

2:03 working backwards from there, I'm like, well, what are the things that are needed for us to be able to support them? And it can't always be one-on-one training sessions, right? It can't always be, let's hop on a meeting. There has to be a way of scaling, right? And so I think back to my transition and just really when I think about what it took from me to be able to move from kind of one area of being a CSM over into ops, I think it first really came down to just understanding the kind of the way that I was investing my time, trying to figure out the things that are just like not working in the way that I would want.

2:42 So maybe I'm just hopping on too many calls. Maybe the emails I'm using are vastly different than one of my colleagues that were also working with me at the time at Mindflash. But just like any sort of inconsistencies, any sort of challenges that I was facing, I got curious, like, why is it? Why are we not using the same Salesforce reports? Why aren't we kind of all working together cohesively? And so over time, I just like naturally started asking more questions and learned ways of being able to try to navigate kind of the relationships I was building with my direct manager, with the leadership team and also trying to understand

3:23 from them, like what are the expectations they have of me? What are the things that I'm supposed to be solving for from a business point of view, in addition to solving all the challenges that our customers are facing and trying to solve with our product? And so I think that's really where like some of the initial transition into ops started for me was getting that really clear understanding, kind of building that North Star with my leadership team on what are those expectations they have of us? What's the impact that they want me and the rest of the team to be able to drive? And then really like working backwards from there

3:56 in terms of, you know, just identifying, like, are we actually spending the time necessary to meet those goals, meet those expectations that we have from leadership? And part of that work really is in looking at something like Salesforce, making sure that I'm also logging my own time appropriately and then being able to figure out how much time each individual person on the team was spending time and where, and kind of compiling all of that eventually came up with like a few key areas where there were just like immediate gaps that were like obvious, like we just weren't able to do as much strategic time because maybe we were doing a lot of support tickets

4:37 or not basically engaging in like those kind of key strategic conversations that are ultimately gonna drive those renewals that we're looking to be able to meet with customers. And so, so I think that was part of like my journey as far as like going into it. It's just like figuring out what are the pieces that could be better? Why aren't we doing the things that we could be doing and recognizing where our time is really kind of being spent today as a team. And that was like really where I felt like at the moment, I didn't know what was trying to do CS ops work, right? Like I was just trying to figure out how I can be better in my role,

5:17 how I can make the team members that I work with and eventually manage better wasn't just trying to understand like why are we kind of so inconsistent or inefficient in certain key areas, figure out what those areas are and then come up with solutions that will ultimately drive some of those outcomes that we're looking for for both our customers and the business. And so I think that's where really the value of CS ops comes in. It's taking that kind of low value, highly repetitive tasks away from the individual teams that are working with supporting customers and just like ultimately focusing them in on where the real impact is

5:56 and that's in driving customer outcomes. - Yeah, did it feel like it came down to a single moment when you wanted to make that transition? I think back to, I felt like it was a Spidey bite moment in my career when I was a VP of CS and we had a CRO transition and when the new CRO came in, he was walking around asking, hey, who's the head of ops around here? And I was like, oh, we don't have that. And he said, well, who manages all the tools and who does the forecasting and who does, I said, well, I do that just because the majority of our revenue is kind of in customer success and we have the biggest team, so I just take on the tools

6:40 and I train everyone how to do it. And he was like, you're the head of ops and from now on, you're gonna be the head of ops. And it felt like it came down to kind of a single moment where I transitioned into that role. Did you feel like you had that moment where it just became obvious that you should focus on more of the ops side rather than direct customer relationship side? - Yeah, probably there were similar moments, I think, in my experience where I think part of the challenge that I was seeing was that the lack of accountability and ownership of who is responsible for defining what good means from a customer health score perspective,

7:28 from adoption, from are we actually meeting with the customers that we should be meeting with as often as we can, all of that kind of the definitions of like the activities and the engagements that the CS team should be doing. No one really kind of had that central ownership. And so for me, it was more around like, well, I don't know what actually good means. So let me just figure out like what does adoption in general look like, sharing that with my leadership team. And then over time, I think it started becoming clear where like, you have a lot of experience in CS, you have an ability to just like dive in there, dig into the data and try to like come up

8:09 with hypotheses around like what, why are customers churning when there's high adoption. And high adoption doesn't always in itself mean that the customer is gonna be healthy unless we have some other factors that we're looking into and like, how are they doing in support? Are we actually engaging with them on a monthly, weekly, quarterly basis? And so I think for me, it was asking those questions, sharing those reports that I was building, like, hey, have you seen that our customers are like not adopting the platform in the way that we thought immediately after training. And then they're like, yeah, it doesn't look like it's what we would expect.

8:43 Adrian, could you like dig into that a little bit more, maybe work with the CSMs that manage those particular customers. And so then I kind of started shifting away from like, how do I solve the challenges that you were facing, right? Or any specific customer is more like in aggregate, like what are the processes that we have in place that aren't leading to those outcomes that we wanted as a business. And so it wasn't like one individual, right? It was more just like those, the combination of the different activities that no one was really focusing on because it wasn't in that new business deal, it wasn't an expansion and in renewals,

9:18 like all those were for sure things that our revenue leaders were looking at all the time, but not the underlying causes of all of those activities, like why are we actually getting them? We're not getting them. And so that was just like fascinating to me. Like, well, yeah, I don't know, let me figure it out. That was always my approach. - Right, right. No, and I think having that level of curiosity and then having a hypothesis driven approach of saying, hey, what judgment based on my experience can I leverage to understand why companies are churning, why they're growing, why they're contracting? And I think people who think that way

9:56 just have a really strong knack for ops. - Yeah, and sometimes those lessons I feel will come in, come in the hard way. Part of the reason why I wanted to better understand churn did come in with, it was the highlight of my day and also one of the lowlights of my career when I was promoted to a senior CSM, where I was just so happy. I was thinking it was hot stuff, I just got promoted. I'm working really well with my leaders, with my customers and my adoption numbers were looking amazing. And in one particular customer I managed like our number one customer, I believe was like just like from a revenue perspective, like at least 2x more

10:41 than any other customer like next to it. And so like it was the best type report of this book of business that I could have wanted at that point. But their dashboards were showing green, like green on this area of how many courses they were created, green on this area of how many things were being assigned, just green across the board. So I shifted my attention to other customers where they weren't green, they were yellow and red. But come renewal time, they churned. And of course they churned at the moment when I had my promotion. So I was like, oh, that crushed me. That crushed me so hard because like I thought I was doing all the right things.

11:19 I thought the systems were telling me, right, that we were supporting this customer in the best way possible. But in that moment eventually and over time as I've started to learn is like, not just tracking things for the sake of tracking them, like kind of these vanity metrics of like all of us, I think in some ways do it, right? Like number of logins that are amazing. Well, yes, they've logged in, but are they tapping into your product in the way that will actually be the differentiators that you're able to provide for them? Like are we actually driving meaningful outcomes for them? And so that was part of like where I think that me

11:55 kind of digging into data, like that's where I think it started is like I never wanted to feel that way again in terms of like having lost that big customer. And if I did lose a customer, not have it be a complete and total surprise for myself and leadership, right? So that's where some of that forecasting, right? Renewal forecasting comes in now that I love and part of 'cause I want to make sure I avoid that for everyone on the team, I don't want anyone to feel that way that I did, you know, back in those days. - No, absolutely. Sometimes it takes that type of moment though to get that lesson and then also kickstart that passion for what you're doing.

12:32 I get, you know, some of the best things that we have built are built off of really big failures, almost the bigger the failure, the bigger the innovation comes on the other side. So I think that makes a lot of sense. One thing I know you have a lot of wisdom to share on how to build a CS ops organization. I know you stumbled into it, but then join organizations to go in and create that function from the beginning. For people listening, the audience listeners, what are the five things that people need to be focused on when they're building a CS ops org from scratch? - Yeah, and actually as I think of that, maybe there's a bonus sixth in the beginning

13:21 that's like, breathe, there's gonna be a lot of overwhelming things, a lot of challenges and it's gonna be very, very tempting to just immediately try to action and get working on things, you know, solving challenges right away. - Yeah, there's almost a never ending to-do list for anyone in an ops role. So I think you just have to be comfortable knowing, hey, we're never gonna reach the bottom of this to-do list. We're not reaching inbox zero. So how can we just triage and work on the things that make the most impact? - Yeah, 'cause inbox zero, that's how I live on my personal and professional life for my email inbox.

14:00 But when it comes to the projects and just everything that we are trying to solve in ops is around again, ultimately enabling the team or teams rather, 'cause like today I'm responsible for our customer success managers, the account managers that the renewals support team and just like a variety of others related to implementations. And so each one dedicated for different focuses across the customer lifecycle. And so that's where really kind of step one needs to come in is understand kind of lay of the land, like who's client facing? What are the roles that they're supposed to play within the business?

14:39 What value are we looking for each individual component of that kind of post sales or responsible for driving? And so take the time, learn. 'Cause you're not gonna have those first couple of weeks ever again, right? 'Cause then your backlog is gonna be suddenly filled or constantly filled rather with a lot of projects. And so it's just make sure you understand not only how they function, but also you're coming in oftentimes in a CS ops role with a lot of background experience, either having been a support rep, a CSM, or just some part of CS that kind of eventually got you into ops. So use that knowledge.

15:15 Know the things that are best practices industry standards for running a technical implementation, running onboarding and renewals, and just all the different touch points. But understand them, see whether there's opportunities for improvements based on your experience, see whether there's areas of opportunity based on feedback that you're getting from people that you're talking to too. Like my first couple of weeks was just around the world meeting everybody. Like, "Hey, what's working well for you? What are the things that you're finding are just the pain for you right now? Like what's taking your time? What could you use with that additional time

15:47 where you're able to gain it back, right?" So learning, that's definitely step one. Just make sure you're really understanding kind of all the key areas of the customer journey. And then once you're there, then really it's just starting to back into figuring out where those low hanging fruits are. What are the things that aren't being set up now that are critical? So like in my case, I find out very quickly, I realized that sales was using one type of forecasting for renewals, CS was using another, finance was using another. None of us were aligned in terms of like all of the different reports and analytics, even frankly on like when you would consider

16:27 credit being given for when the renewal was closed. Was it closed date? Was it renewal date? And just like, that was the first thing. Like if we don't have proper forecasting on renewals, we don't know how many accounts a CSM will maintain quarter over quarter, year over year. So that's gonna impact you down the line, you know, for capacity planning, right? And so like that was the first thing I wanted to plan for. But then also like just understanding like, well, these are all the different friction points at the different parts of the life cycle, but also like churn will happen, that's unavoidable. Do we get a good sense of like, what caused that?

17:00 What are the things that could have been preventable from that? And then I noticed that one of the things that was happening is we were reaching out like something's within a month of the renewal date, which is just a huge note, right? Like you wanna make sure that you're well in advanced communicating with the customer about the renewals. And so these two findings alone, you know, started with the renewals reports, starting doing the churn analysis, trying to figure out what are the areas of feedback that we've gotten from customers from internal reps on like causes or potential causes for churn. And then creating six, three, one month alerts for renewals

17:36 that automatically just generate from Salesforce, pinging the right people, making sure, hey, have you started these conversations? Have you asked these questions? Are they adopting the platform in these ways, right? And just starting to build that, that I guess operational rigor a little bit with folks that weren't used to it. They were just kind of like, I might talk to a customer here, yes or no, like, or I don't know if I should talk to them about the renewal yet. That's just setting those standards, setting those expectations from the beginning. So like that was part of what I worked on after having gotten an understanding of like

18:07 what the existing processes, what things should be worked on. And then leveraging tech. I think mentioned Salesforce already as far as one of the things that I started using right away. I think a CRM in general doesn't have to be Salesforce, but something that's your source of truth for everything. Financials, adoption, customer notes that you're sharing, that you're inputting so that everyone in the team is aligned, but you need something like that to be able to make it possible to tell a cohesive story. I think in my experience, I have used a lot of different tools as well. Like Vitaly is one of my favorite customer success platforms, for example.

18:47 I use that a lot for taking existing playbooks, managing the customer experience through automated email sequences, customer health scoring. - Can I ask, Adrian? Just because I know the tech component of this is so important. And I appreciate that you started with aligning the process 'cause I think the process informs the tech that you bring in and how you set it up. But Vitaly, I think there's a lot of CSPs that are in the market. I know churn zero and Gainsight are kind of like the big ones in the room, but what attracted you to Vitaly? What do you like about what they do versus their competitors? - Yeah, absolutely. And I was a Gainsight admin also

19:35 at my first go-round at Mindflash, and I know I use Vitaly at WorkRamp and evaluated the churn zeros at Citango's and just like Planhats, so many out there for sure. I think my perspective of CSPs are, it really just depends on kind of where you're at as a business and your ultimate goals and needs for what you're trying to accomplish. So for us, we knew right off the bat that something as robust as a Gainsight just wouldn't be in the cards for us. One for kind of the size of the company that we were at, just like the budget wasn't gonna be there for us to be able to get some meaningful outcomes from it.

20:15 But then also, I think part of it is really just around understanding what are those core kind of integration points that you're looking for, and the ease of use really is what it pulled down to for me. Like when I compared a lot of the different CSPs I mean to a team, they all probably provide email sequencing. They all do the customer health scoring. So they have the same core functionality. It's really, I think around some of the intangibles around like is it actually easy for me to use? Is it something that I can create a team being able to leverage? 'Cause I can work with complicated systems from an opposite perspective.

20:53 Like probably the more complicated, the finer it is for me, frankly. Like I really love the challenge of being able to do something more technical, but I don't want my team that's leveraging a tool like this to have to go through hours worth of training to figure out how to use it, right? And so I think that's where ultimately vitally for me struck that nice balance between being robust and providing enough of a workflow automation capabilities that we needed, but without like making it just like completely complicated to leverage. So definitely one of the reasons I'm... - Do you have a good heuristic to use when you should be leveraging a CSP

21:39 and not doing this in Salesforce or HubSpot and your typical sales sequencing tools? When does it feel like it's the right time to bring in something like that? Or what functionality are you looking for that you feel like are really underserved by CRMs and typical sequencing tools? - Yeah, absolutely. So, and it's actually even something I'm actively considering here, I find them 'cause we don't have actually a CSP in place today. And so some even just thinking about the appropriate time and really I think what it boils down to are a few key components. The first really is around having established processes, not everything under the sun necessarily,

22:25 but just do you have the right approaches already dialed down from how often are you reaching out to customers for renewals, how often you're running QBRs, the type of meetings that you're hosting with customers, the difference is just like, you can't figure it out with a CSP. Like a CSP will really only be valuable for you if you've already have kind of like your wheels turning a little bit and you already have like the processes button down a little bit because if not, it doesn't matter whether you have the best health scores mechanism in the world. But do you know what to do with like an at risk customer versus a moderately risk customer

23:05 versus like someone is highly adopted. Do you already have an approach of how you would handle those? And if you don't, then a CSP is really not gonna help you. I mean, there's some like templates and things that you can leverage, but it'll be generic, right? It won't be something that's custom for your business. And so I think that would be one of the first things like making sure that we have good, clear processes established for different parts of the customer lifecycle. And then the other is just, I don't think any of us really will have the 100% most accurate cleanest data around our customer usage and just like revenue

23:38 and just there will always be some challenges, but are you even able to track product usage? Do you have something like a snowflake or business intelligence tool that you can tap into where you're able to feed something like a bite of your CSP because that's where a lot of the power comes into is around the triggers and the alerts, like high adoption, low adoption or whatever the case might be. But if you're not tracking this data now, then you're almost blending with like a glorified email tool in a way 'cause like it's just gonna allow them to create emails and send it out, maybe sequence it, but blindly,

24:14 unless you have some data that can kind of feed into it. And so I would say that if you have good processes, if you have the data there in place, then probably the third really is around like, are we not meeting those expectations that leadership has of you? And if not, where are we failing? Is it in the manual kind of like lift that it takes right now the team for them to scour through trying to find the data or they just don't have the time to reach out to these customers that have suddenly become red because they're working on so many other things. And so like, if you're finding yourself not being as proactive as you need

24:52 and you have all these other pieces, then at least at that time, I think is proper for you to be able to start looking and evaluating for a CSP platform. - No, that makes sense. I think a lot of, I know we're in the situation often when we're advising customers like, should we bring in a CSP? Should we not bring in a CSP? And it always feels like there seems to be a tipping point of complexity. And then also yes, do you have the right processes aligned? And are you tracking the product utilization data that can be tracked by the CSP? I think those things are really important. - Yeah, and then also like something that is an unseen oftentimes, not consequence,

25:34 but just like a reality of going with a CSP or just any tool is like, there's an enablement that needs to happen of the CSMs for this new tool. And then some sense of accountability of driving the adoption. So like, if you build all the systems in place, are the CSMs actually using it on a daily basis? And it's a lot of effort, especially the leader of the team you are, like that's just gonna take a lot of time for you to like build net new habits because people will have their Gmail templates or their outreach templates already set up. And now suddenly we're asking them to move over to a CSP. And so that takes a lot of time too.

26:11 And a lot of planning that goes beyond just like the technical setup, right? Of a customer success. - Totally. So I think this is great. Set up and align the processes, bring in the right tech infrastructure. Once you've done those two, what's the next thing if you're building a CSOps org you need to focus on? - Yeah, so, and a lot of the tools will also help with regards to kind of the next area that I am passionate around. It's alluded to a little bit like, what's our North Star? And really it's our KPIs and our metrics and making sure that we're starting to build like a strong foundation on not just tracking the metrics

26:52 again for like the sake of tracking them, but just what are the outcomes, the behaviors that we're looking to push forward as a result of us being able to track sort of things. Like, so from a revenue perspective, if we're able to track not just like what our local retention rate is, what are kind of like our gross revenue retention, just like on their own, they may not mean anything. But if you're looking at like GRR based on account segments, so from enterprise to mid-market to SMB, are we growing any particular segment or not growing any particular segment more than we would have expected? So maybe we saw a dip, for example,

27:35 in the number of customers that we expected that were in an SMB market, not expanding in the levels that we want. Because we're tracking it, we're able to then act on it, right? So like we're able to say, okay, these particular deals fell through, let's dig into the details and figure out why. Was it adoption related? Was it just like, what was the cost basically, right? But if we're not tracking these sort of things, if we're not measuring them, then you really can manage the expectations of the team accordingly. And one of the tools that I was actually found up outside of like revenue tracking would be something Survey Sparrow that I use for our NPS

28:13 or our CSAT surveys that we sent for post implementation for user onboarding, just like getting a sense from them on like, how do they feel about the product with NPS? And how do they feel about the customer experience? And a combination of all of these metrics that we track feeds into like that idea of a customer health score. So it's not one isolated thing that we need to track. It's support, satisfaction, adoption, just so many key areas of the customer bicycle that tools like Survey Sparrow, things that you will be reporting on within Salesforce on its own won't tell the complete story of whether or not the customer is doing well.

28:55 It's an aggregate, it's building that all together and combining it. And so that's part of like what I've been working on these days is building a customer health index that combines all of these different individual components, metrics that we've been tracking. And so that's part of the next step is just figuring out what are those metrics that again, leadership is looking for, how are we tracking revenue, and then ultimately building in that muscle memory for the team to know that, yes, we wanna know how particular customers are feeling and how their overall sentiment is. That's a really key component. It's really important for customer health scoring,

29:28 but we need to move beyond that and be more data driven as a company by implementing some of these other parts of the analytics infrastructure. - Yeah, no one, I know that infrastructure can look a little different depending on the company, what metrics are important for them. I think the table stakes ones, net retention rate, gross retention rate, measuring first time to value, having some form of health scoring methodology I think are key, but that's gonna look a little different depending on the product and everything that they have in their organization. So once you have the analytics infrastructure in place, you're tracking the KPIs

30:10 that are important for your organization, what do you do with that data and how do you leverage it to drive impact? - Yeah, yeah, I think part of it has to do with, yeah, the different types of data sets that we're collecting and then also going back into just the kind of assessment and analysis of are the team members that we're supporting doing the thing, doing the actions that we expect them to. And so for example, like when I think about some of the newer metrics that I'm working on these days around support and interactions that customers have around that front, being able to track things like first response time, times of resolution,

30:58 in addition to CSAT, informs a few different things. And so like for us, what I was noticing is our time to resolution was climbing up and up and digging into the data. What I was noticing is that CSMs were actually much more heavily involved with doing support tickets here than kind of in my previous roles and previous experiences that I've had. And I was wondering why. So then I dug into it a little bit more and looked into the Zendesk ticket data that was available. And then after kind of doing some analysis around how many private comments and public comments CSMs were posting in Zendesk, looked at the data and figured out that on average,

31:40 I was seeing like, even up to like 20% of their time every week was being spent in Zendesk tickets. So one that blew my mind, I was like, I was feeling so bad for them 'cause like, I get it. They wanna help, they wanna support their customers, they want them to be successful, but kind of back to where we started, right? Around like, we want them to be strategic, right? We want them to be ultimately be drivers of outcomes and value realization from our customers. That's where then being able to track that sort of information led to me, actually part of like one of the newer roles I have is starting out a more frontline support customer function.

32:21 And so now I'm gonna be able to have a dedicated head that takes away all that time away from the CSM team so that we can have them focused on working with customers. But that would be like one action, right? It's just like, I didn't start with that opinion, right? Like that I needed an additional head. It was more like working backwards from the things. We're not as fast with solving the tickets. We're not as efficient as we would like to be with the CSMs, right? Because they're spending so much time in Zendesk. And so then ultimately that to that outcome, being able to build out a team from there. And then also it's important to like

32:56 reducing their workload there, but keeping an eye out for what are the things that they are working on, what types of meetings they're having and just like using things like Gong and Salesforce, how many emails are sending just so I can get a full sense of like, what does it actually take to manage the current books of businesses that they have? Moving away from like, it has to be $2 million ARR per CSM. Like that's a good baseline I think to start with, but it really depends on like how high touch or low touch you are as a business for your customers. And in our case, we're very, very high touch. So it's actually much lower in terms of like

33:34 what I would expect the CSM to be able to handle while not sacrificing the quality. And so those are just some of the things that I think the data looking at it and just kind of digging into it helps with driving business changes. - No, and I think having the data context in that scenario, you know, driving that decision of what type of head count to bring in, how many CSMs you need to bring on, how big each of your organizations needs to be, leveraging that and forecasting the org you need to build. It's very tough to do unless you lay the infrastructure to get the data that you need to make that call. - Yeah. - So once you've done that,

34:14 one thing I've always thought is important, even if you're in an ops role, often you have so much to do behind the scenes. I still think it's important to be in front of the customers in some way, especially in CSOps. Because at the end of the day, you're here to operationalize how to deliver an amazing customer experience and empower your teams to do that. And I think it can be tough to do if you get a little too removed from being in front of the customers. What do you do to stay connected to the customer base and feel like you know what their needs are and you know what your team needs to do to deliver that world-class experience? - Yeah, yeah.

34:54 'Cause a lot of what I would say I've been able to lean on in my time in ops has been because I was a CSM and implementation manager. A lot of the work that I did personally there really feels a lot of what I try to work on and the experiences I try to deliver. But I've been far removed from working with customers directly for many years at this point working in ops and leadership capacity. But I do agree, it's important to know that we're keeping the experiences of our customers and the top of the mind of everything that we do. And from my side, probably the best ways that I've found to do that is one, through some of the tooling.

35:37 So like survey server, like I mentioned before, so many kind of rich points of information that I've been able to gather from like RPS and CSAT surveys.

35:50 As an example, one of the things that we try to do from a scaling perspective is to kind of reduce the number of one-on-one training sessions that the team were doing in favor of putting them into a learning management system. Right now we're using WorkRAMP for that. And part of the feedback that we were starting to get was that the prior platform that we were using, that the content felt too static, too stale. And at that point, I didn't have access to our system. When I went in there and looked at what content we had, it was a page after page of just like video, next slide, video, next slide, video, next slide, right? And so yeah, made sense.

36:30 But I wouldn't have known to look there unless I was like keeping an eye out for what's the sentiment of our customers around one aspect of the experience that they had with us. And so through that, was able to work with one of my colleagues on the kind of evaluation and transition over into a new system that transformed kind of the learning experience accordingly so that it's more interactive. We have more quiz questions and videos and click through tutorials and just the overall, you know, meaningful change in the direction of the customers, kind of the feedback that they were sharing with us. And so I think that if you're not surveying

37:07 and like looking at those actively, it's a goldmine. Like definitely one of the areas that I lean on for sure. - I also think now something that was really tough to do before, you can get a lot of verbatim feedback and now AI can categorize that feedback for you. So I think sometimes we would try to collect the feedback in certain like buckets and, hey, we have to organize the feedback first before we go get it. And now you can just ask really good open-ended questions like, hey, what's your favorite part about working with our product? Or what's something you think we can improve and just let them ramble and go. And then AI can figure out the best way

37:43 to categorize that for you. I think that was one of the most difficult things to do before. And now we just have so many amazing tools that we didn't have access to before. - Yeah, yeah, 'cause while I've done my fair share of like rolling out different types of surveys, like I'm not an expert necessarily, or I like, I'm not a survey, don't have a PhD in survey making right or anything, but it is one of those areas where I think AI has made it a lot easier to be able to ask the right questions and then be all taken to kind of an anonymized data set, putting it into something like a chat GPT and just saying, hey, what are the common trends

38:19 that we're hearing from our customers? And then what are some clear next steps and action items that we can take as a result of these learnings? Boom, you have more work on your plate, but definitely something that blows my mind these days, how like just say I was streamlining the mundane repetitive tasks into what us humans can take and actually make meaningful changes from there. - Absolutely. No, and I think this is great. I mean, just to recap, aligning the processes, bringing in the right tech, laying the data infrastructure, using that data to drive decisions, and then always being connected to the customer base,

39:02 whether that's if you spend a little bit of time in person with them, a little bit of time on calls, but now we have so many powerful tools to get that data through surveying techniques. Just staying plugged in is so important to make sure you're making decisions that ultimately, like I always think about going back to the why, why are we doing this? Okay, why do we have a CSOps organization? We need to empower the people who are in front of the customers to do the job to their best ability, and in order to know what that means, you have to know what the customers want and what the customers need. - Yeah, and it's also even like I think of an ops role,

39:42 like every individual I support, CSMs, account managers, I am their CSM in a way too. Like I wanna understand what are the challenges that they're facing and then be able to kind of take all of those learnings and be able to create ways for us to unblock them. And I think that that's also a cool part of the role too. It's just like part of what I love about working with customers as a CSM is still here. It's quote unquote behind the scenes in the sense that you're no longer client facing, but your goals are still essentially the same. Like, why are they trying to do the things that they are? And how do we get them from point A to point B

40:21 as fast and efficiently as possible? And it's never the same answer. And I think that's part of what I love too. It's just like, there's a lot of sometimes chaos kind of in situations you come in with ops and just like making sense of that just doesn't get all, it's one of the things I love for sure. - Absolutely, no, you can't, you know, I spent a lot of time working in restaurants during like college, high school and that level of hospitality, like it never leaves you. So when you spend some time in CS, like you're always a CSM.

40:52 One thing I think our listeners, people we work with, what's some advice you'd give to someone sitting in a CSM role who wants to move into ops? What's the best way for them to get exposure, build skill sets that are relevant? What would you tell them to do?

41:10 - Yeah, you know, it's interesting too, that even as we're having this conversation, part of like what I've done, like I wasn't necessarily even aware that I was stepping into CS ops with a lot of the work that I was doing. It was always what I drove to do in every interaction was solve problems. And if you're someone that just like thrives and enjoys figuring things out, what's the root cause of things and how do we make things better? You know, going against that mantra of like, if it isn't broken, don't fix it. No, like if it isn't broken, can it be better, right? Like, is there ways of like making things faster, more efficient?

41:56 And I think that's where kind of having that mindset is one of those things that's gonna set you up for success in this type of role, because it's a constant curiosity, constant questioning of things and just like understanding the why behind everything and never assuming. And so I think for me, when I think about the qualities that would make someone successful and also even just like have that ability to kind of enter this world of CS ops is really that first point, just like starting by solving problems. And it's not gonna be, oftentimes I would say, problems that you're being told, hey, Adrian solve it. No, it's gonna be things that you discover

42:38 or uncover on your own as you're kind of getting curious around the way that things work. And so I would really recommend anyone that's sitting in thinking about an ops role, is just kind of listen out for things that just sound like trends, like, oh, I have to hop under this other call. What kind of call? Why are you hopping on that call? Could it be an email? Have we thought about doing it? Just like constantly asking the why, questioning things, not from like, why are you doing that perspective, right? It's more just like, hey, I'm genuinely curious. - No, not accusatory, just curious. - Yeah, yeah, just like, you do you,

43:15 but like, hey, like, have you thought about approaching this other way, right? And so then that kind of transitions you kind of in this way of like moving away from like, just like immediately doing the things just because, but trying to figure out the best ways to do things. And so that's gonna eventually get you to a point where I'm like, you won't know the answer until you start digging into some data. And so like, that would be the other area that I think would be another quality that I think would make you successful here is that being comfortable with the unknown, like, you're not gonna know right off the bat how to use Salesforce unless you go

43:50 through the formal training. I actually never went through the training myself personally. I just probably like the nerd of me, but like I love looking at flow error logs that come through, came through from Salesforce and just like, line by line, clicking through it and just trying to like, like a puzzle figure out like, where is it misaligned? Where is it broken? And then being able to take that learning and kind of annoying pester my colleague and sales ops at that point. Like, hey, I think it's broken this way. It might be fixed if we do this by maybe adding a filter to remove this attribute from this flow. Is that right?

44:30 Do you think that's actually what's gonna solve it? And that also is like part of like what will make you successful here is like being that collaborator with your fellow ops members is like not just saying, hey, this is broken. Can you fix it? But it's like, hey, I think it might be broken. Here's where specifically I feel based on my research it might be, do you think this will help? Do you think this will solve it, right? And then that's gonna start building trust with you towards that person and that individual so that eventually as it did for me, like I started getting more access and more controls over things because I was demonstrating

45:04 that I had that level of curiosity and an ability over time, right, to be able to like do the things that I needed in Salesforce to run the reports, change the filters and just like get comfortable with automations and flows. And so I think that that would be another area and one that I still to this day love to do like collaborating with others, never assuming and just like always making sure that things that I'm working on I'm making aware of with other people around like what processes I need to kind of improve. What are the things that I'm trying to understand and I'm just like asking someone else, hey,

45:38 I know you're an expert in that particular area, would love for you to be able to like walk me through this based on what I'm saying, right? So I think that that's kind of like essentially how I've transitioned at least is just more taking that kind of curious mindset, leaning into the unknown, trying to figure out data as best you can, getting more control and access over time as you're building these relationships with folks. And then eventually before you have the formal role, be loud about your accomplishments, be loud about the impact that you're driving for the business. So if you're able to build a really awesome kind of like

46:16 report with different role level formula, sub level formulas that give someone the ability to know, oh shoot, I should actually reach out to that customer. We reached out over time, we landed a renewal, but maybe that conversation would have never started if it weren't for you giving them those insights, giving them that data. And so it's hard for me 'cause I guess it's funny, like I know a lot of what we were talking about today is like my experience, my thing, I don't like talking about myself, but I also know that, hey, we need to push and advocate for ourselves as well as we're doing things. And so like the more I was able to just like demonstrate

46:49 the impact that I was making, eventually, Hayden, hey, we have this opportunity for us to be able to do a complete separate headcount for our CS ops, would you be interested? Yeah, sign me up and here it was. - Yeah, no, the mild and meek tend to not make much of an impact, so it's not for self-promoting, it's just to make sure that people know what is driving results for the business. Tell me, I think you've had such an amazing career in CS and CS ops, tell us what you're doing now at Findom and if there's anything that you think would be good for our listeners to know about the organization too. - Yeah, yeah, for sure.

47:29 So these days, they have a pretty unique role where I'm still in CS ops, but I'm also overseeing our learning and development strategy for both internal employee training as well as customer education. A lot of that comes in from my time at Mind Flash and WorkRamp, both different learning management systems and so I wasn't able to be here and not use my like 10 plus years of experience there, which, hey, like I'm glad I'm able to, you know, kind of still like leverage that type of expertise, but, and then support is another area that I've been focused on. So really when it comes to just like all things, CS is what I'm passionate about

48:11 and things that I love to talk about as often as I can. And I find that it's been really awesome to be able to leverage those capabilities because from a technology perspective, especially these days, anything with AI is really awesome to be a part of and just like see that revolution live in a company that's thriving on this type of level of automation, but find them itself as a talent acquisition solution. And so companies will come to us whenever they're looking for really an ability to kind of take what sometimes is really inefficient in a hiring process, especially anyone that's been a hiring manager, think of the hundreds and maybe even thousands

48:49 of resumes that you've received for any one role, right? And so how do you find the needle on the haystack? Well, find them as here to be able to help, find the right candidates using our kind of proprietary 3D data, so not just the resume, but if they're an engineer pulling in anything they've posted in GitHub, being able to leverage LinkedIn and just like all these different resources comprising kind of like different unique profiles of individuals based on your hiring criteria, trying to match them together with AI. And so I think that's where from a technology perspective, I know personally, I've had to hire for many different roles

49:28 and I was the person that would spend many, many, many afternoons try to read and review all the resumes and give it enough thought and proper care for each one. So for me, I would have loved something like this, but yeah. So if anyone's out there that is also kind of going through and trying to make sense of like, just like how to find the right person, find them is definitely a solution and be happy to connect with anyone that's interested in learning more. - No, I appreciate you sharing that. It's definitely a problem I've personally experienced. It is really difficult to make sure you bring on the right people.

49:59 One, make sure it's a good fit for the company, but make sure the company is a good fit for them too. It's always tough. Well, Adrian, this has been really amazing. I really appreciate you going through. I think CSOps, it's a newer function. And I think there's still a lot of people defining exactly what's underneath the management, but I think you laid out a really good roadmap. If you're building a CS organization, where to start, how to take it to the next level. I think your story too, of how you got transitioned into CSOps is really, really interesting and knowing, hey, what are those underlying transferable skills that you have

50:38 or interests that you have that lend itself to being on the ops side? But how do you always keep that customer success idea in your heart too, and make sure that you're approaching it that way? I think is really good and really interesting for anyone who's trying to get into that type of role. So Adrian, really appreciate you being here. I think I've learned a ton. I think you shared a lot of insights that our listeners will really enjoy. And I hope to have you back in the future and can't wait to follow your career and see what you do. - Oh yeah, well firstly, I appreciate the opportunity to connect with you again.

51:11 And I love the ability to be able to share what I've learned and we talked about it a couple of times. There's a lot of unknowns, a lot of chaotic things that may happen in the world of CSOps, but it's something that just thrive on being able to resolve and so being able to just chat with you about it and share with the listeners here has been great. So thank you so much. - Thank you, Adrian.