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Josh Schachter:
Whoo. Yeah. Isn’t it? It’s so catchy.

Jon Johnson:
Hey. We played the right music this time.

Seth Terbeek:
Congratulations.

Josh Schachter:
What’d you play last time?

Jon Johnson:
I don’t even know what I played, but it was it was great. Like, we were on such a roll last week without you, Josh. I’m so happy that you’re back. But I hit the the music, and we started vibing. And about 13 seconds into it, Christy’s like, this isn’t the right music. So I’m glad, Minoli fixed that in the edit. Because it was just something just something hanging out in Riverside, and I played it, and it it worked.

Josh Schachter:
It was probably Taylor Swift or

Jon Johnson:
something like that. Taylor Swift. Can we talk about Taylor Swift?

Josh Schachter:
No. We cannot because this is a CS and BS product product. Pervasive. She she probably doesn’t know shit about customer success. I’ll tell you that.

Jon Johnson:
I bet she knows something about customer experience, though.

Josh Schachter:
She does. And you know who else knows something about customer experience?

Jon Johnson:
Is it Seth Turbic?

Seth Terbeek:
Got it.

Josh Schachter:
It is Seth Turbic. Yep. Yep. Vice president of customer support. Wait a second. Customer experience? No. Vice president of customer transformation at Delta First. Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
Nailed it.

Josh Schachter:
Just took the 3rd yeah. I’ll get there. Vice president of customer transformation and the very first vice president of customer transformation that I’ve ever met In the world. You may ever meet. In the world.

Jon Johnson:
In the world. But he’s gonna have We’re saying it here first. The one and only Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But but but he is he came to this podcast specifically

Jon Johnson:
To talk about Taylor too.

Josh Schachter:
To recruit To yes. To recruit more vice presidents of customer transformation at their respective b to b SaaS organization.

Jon Johnson:
Well, this is this is timely because I think, you know, I in the last four and a half minutes, I have decided what my future title should be. And it very much is vice president of customer transformation. So I do feel like this is an adequate audience for this conversation.

Josh Schachter:
Perfect. Perfect. Also, John, your gain is so loud. Damn it. You’re just like Let me turn

Jon Johnson:
that down.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. I know I know you got that pro series on and everything.

Jon Johnson:
But, you know,

Josh Schachter:
yeah. Well, that’s that’s that’s the that’s not for the show. Seth Yeah. Thanks so much for joining the podcast.

Seth Terbeek:
Very excited to be here, guys. This is gonna be a lot of fun. I’m sure.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. Already is.

Jon Johnson:
I I we’ve got a lot to talk about. I’m really excited about this conversation. I wanted to make sure that we did have a moment of BS that was referential in CS. We don’t have to talk about Taylor Swift. You can follow me on TikTok if you wanna wanna hear my true opinions about this record that just came out. Okay. Seth, I have a question for you, and this is this is gonna feed into the the the greater conversation. Do you we’re just gonna jump right into it.

Jon Johnson:
How do you feel about CSMs and support and services asking for customers’ cell phone numbers and communicating via cell phone in today’s business world?

Seth Terbeek:
I am okay with it. In terms of, like, just general engagement, not asking for it is one thing. But, you know, if customer says, hey. I wanna reach out to you via cell phone or whatever, I think that’s good. I think it is up to the CSM. They have to be really good at setting boundaries because the that could be a really slippery slope if you don’t have someone with a strong ability to set boundaries and say, no. This is when I could talk to you about this, and this is when I can’t.

Jon Johnson:
So so you are against texting memes to high value customers in the middle of QBRs?

Seth Terbeek:
That would be a problem, I think.

Jon Johnson:
That would be okay. I’m I’m gonna have to rethink this. I may have I may have made

Josh Schachter:
a mistake. What’s yeah. Tell us more, John. Where is this coming from?

Jon Johnson:
We, yeah. So, I mean, there’s there’s the humor side of it as well. I’m I’m a big fan of I mean, a lot of what we do within customer success is building trust and building relationships. And, eventually, those those business relationships do tend to bleed into more of the personal side of things. I’m good friends with a number of my current and past customers that I work with. Recently, we’re going through kind of a revamp of our sales cycle. Right? So everything’s about how quickly we’re closing. Close rates are are incredibly important.

Jon Johnson:
Renewal renewal dates need to stay in quarter, all that kind of good business stuff. And we’re getting a lot of push to say, hey. You should get your customer’s cell phone number and just call them if you can’t get the deal closed. Right? If it’s if you’re, like, waiting on something, just go ahead and call that CCO. Right? And and I’m having a lot of these internal I I think there’s, like, a a discomfort, I would say, like, in my gut of, like, I’ve sent you, like, 19 emails, and you haven’t responded. And I now I’m gonna call you. And I do feel like that tips into almost harassment. Like, yeah, it’s it’s business.

Jon Johnson:
Like, there’s a reason you haven’t gotten back to me. Maybe because the deal isn’t gonna close or who knows. Right? But, like, I feel like there are some boundaries, like you said, Seth, that you kinda step into, from that. Well, first

Josh Schachter:
of all, nobody’s calling. Nobody’s picking up a phone call. So you’re talking about texting or not texting. Right?

Jon Johnson:
Let let I think that’s the thing is that people say, get their phone numbers. You could call them. And in my head, I’m like, dude, you’re not call you’re texting people. Like, it’s just one more notification.

Seth Terbeek:
You could just see how quickly they’ve put you on silence. That would be a really good idea.

Jon Johnson:
Do they have their read receipts on? Because does that count as a contact in Tatango if, they marked it as read? Yeah. That’s good. Alright. That’s it. Josh, do you have opinions? How do you feel about cell phones and customers and

Josh Schachter:
No. I just wanna know what customer transformation is.

Seth Terbeek:
That’s it. That’s all you care about today.

Jon Johnson:
Okay. Very good.

Josh Schachter:
Tell us tell us tell us a little bit. And so you’re a doctor first. Tell us a little bit, first doctor. Tell us a little bit about doctor first. You’ve been there, you know, only for 17 years. So you’re you’re one of these guys that, you know, like, one of these these generations that just likes to switch

Jon Johnson:
every chance. Right? See that. 16 years and 11 months.

Josh Schachter:
Yep. Yeah. Well, the pension doesn’t kick in until 18 years. So, I’m still working on that. Oh, yeah. So, like like yeah. What was it? What was Doctor First? Like, 17 years ago, you’ve worked your way up and around. Super up.

Seth Terbeek:
Yes.

Josh Schachter:
Well, not really because it was vice president of operations. Yeah. I think that he actually No. But he got has gone down.

Jon Johnson:
He did specialist. He did team lead. He did manager. He did director. He did senior director. He did VP of ops. VP of

Seth Terbeek:
Then he was

Josh Schachter:
vice but isn’t VP of ops? Like, that’s all operations in the tech company.

Seth Terbeek:
That was, you know, 50 plus employees when I was running that that whole team, which and so at the time, the company was 250 employees. So it was, that was a big job. And so then I switched gears and, went into customer success and then vice president of customer transformation. But, yeah, prior to that so Doctor. First is all about Wait.

Josh Schachter:
So I just want it. Well, this is gonna be a first. This is podcast first, Seth.

Seth Terbeek:
I like it.

Josh Schachter:
So, yeah, let’s go. Let’s talk about instead of somebody’s growth at a company, let’s talk about their

Seth Terbeek:
their company.

Jon Johnson:
You have 50 reports to share

Josh Schachter:
reports to what? To report? Yeah. Let’s talk

Seth Terbeek:
about Now

Jon Johnson:
you can just come sit in the closet by yourself.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. Now now this is the real b s part. This is a first and only. No, Seth. I joke. If I didn’t have, the utmost respect for you, I wouldn’t I wouldn’t bring that up. But, yeah, tell us, like, a little bit about how you, like, went from one to the other and into customer transformation.

Seth Terbeek:
Yeah. So how I came from VP of ops to where I am today, what you’re looking for? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Seth Terbeek:
So how I came for VP of ops was actually I needed to head back home to live with, near family when we had our first child. And so after that, they said, hey. You can work remotely for us, but you gotta have a change in your job. And so change jobs and said, okay. Where else can I help out in the company? And they said, well, you know, we need some help in our customer success team for our B2B reseller in the EMR market. Mhmm. Okay. And so went to help them, you know, build that out, continue to grow and scale that team.

Seth Terbeek:
That was about, 7 CSMs. There were some ops roles still in that that we were working on, and, they didn’t kinda did that for 6 years or so. And, that was a big transition time for the company. We retired a legacy version of the flagship software we had and rolled everyone over to a brand new one. So that took, you know, about 24 months for us to complete that process. 300 customers, you know, businesses moving over. It’s a lot. And then started to look for other opportunities, kind of externally and internally, and, you know, realized that there was a real need for this customer transformation focus, really helping the business do our you know, provide our services more effectively and have a better customer experience, really.

Seth Terbeek:
So we started out with capturing customer feedback with mapping journeys internally as a company and then helping to really help bring that forward into the business so people would understand what we were hearing and how we could do things better with our processes, and then how that, you know, other teams as a part of that would need to improve what they were doing as well.

Josh Schachter:
Love it. John?

Jon Johnson:
No. I’m like, this is good. When you when you came into customer success, I wanna hear a little bit about the genesis behind this. So, you you know, kind of let’s let’s go back down to the seeds of this this department. Was this a role that was created for you or that you created out of something, or was this kind of like your company came to this idea of, you know, the customer success is very much cusp individually customer focused, you know, taken from awareness to loyalty? And then the idea that our businesses have become actually pretty difficult to work with. Right? There’s just a ton of friction from sales to renewals to products to training. All of these things are just really fucking complicated. And then having somebody to say, okay.

Jon Johnson:
Well, take me out of this individual account shit, and let me get into the actual experience that the brand that our brands are having with us as a brand. Walk me through kinda, like, the genesis of of how you came to want to do that and how your company, validated investing in that because it’s hard when you separate those individuals from revenue as we all know.

Seth Terbeek:
Yeah. So, really, it came down to I was, you know, I was in my VP of CS role, and I was trying to figure out how can I start to build community, find others who are in the same role? So went through various avenues of doing that, found some roundtable discussions that I was a part of, Slack groups, things like that. And then I started to kinda look through, alright, what is CS? What is customer experience? And trying to figure out, is customer experience just a part of CS, or is it something that stands on its own? So I did research around that, and I came to land on customer experience is a thing. Like, it gives a function all alone. And so what we came up with is really just that, right? It’s it’s about removing cross functional friction in the organization so that there’s a positive sentiment of working with the business. To your point, John, there’s so many areas, there’s so much friction internally, and there’s a lot of work needed to actually make those things better. So took that and then basically made a pitch internally. It was my idea to kind of say, alright.

Seth Terbeek:
How can we make a department out of this? What what our goals be and things like that? So we ended up focusing on NPS improvement. I made the case that NPS, would increase, you know, renewal dollars and there would be growth with these businesses. That’s a pretty loose correlation, a coupling. You know? So but I made that case because I didn’t really have a whole lot of revenue that I could tie things to. But we did that. And then from there, pitch that to my boss at the time who was the GM of a division. He bought into it, said, okay. Let’s do that, and then spent the whole year proving that out.

Seth Terbeek:
And, from there, once we had those proof points behind us, we’ve got, you know, increase in NPS, we’ve got customer journeys that are improving, and we’ve got real world results. We’ve got this feedback from customers of how much they want to share with us as we had roundtable discussions with them. I was able to make the case, hey. You know, our president at the time of the company, here’s why we need to do this. Here’s the improvement in the value we’re going to bring to the organization. I then signed up for some big goals to say, we’re gonna find you a $1,000,000 in efficiency gains for the business through the work that we’re doing, talking to customers, journey mapping, things like that.

Josh Schachter:
I’m sorry, Seth. This is customer experience, right, not customer transformation?

Seth Terbeek:
This was customer so, yeah, like, the transition is is interesting. Right? So I was like, I was doing the customer success role and at the same time building out this new department. So kind of splitting my time between them and then got the approval for the full department.

Josh Schachter:
Of experience?

Seth Terbeek:
Yes. Experience and transformation. Yeah. Like, so it was

Josh Schachter:
It’s synonymous.

Seth Terbeek:
Synonymous. Yes.

Josh Schachter:
Oh, okay. Cool. Well, then your LinkedIn profile should say vice president of customer transformation slash experience. There you go.

Seth Terbeek:
I should

Josh Schachter:
say that.

Seth Terbeek:
Fit on

Jon Johnson:
a business card, though? I feel like

Seth Terbeek:
I don’t I feel like But do you use

Josh Schachter:
a business card, John? Who uses a business card?

Jon Johnson:
Listen.

Josh Schachter:
It fits on a QR code. It’s good. So I I like it. And the first thing that I wanna know is, did your hypothesis or your, you know, justification for this team, Did that, pan out in the sense of you increased the NPS? Were you able to correlate that back to renewals and and expansion?

Seth Terbeek:
So I was able to say we saw we didn’t see a drop in customers, so we didn’t see customers leaving our platform. Right? So in terms of, you know, revenue growth, I didn’t necessarily see that straight out play out. But we did Yeah. So basically what we did was we pivoted from okay. We’re focusing on NPS to we’re now focusing on how can we make the business run more efficiently. And that’s really where we started to to double down on. We’re going to evaluate the cross functional processes we have, and we’re going to say, you know, as we find improvements, there’s gonna be dollars or time that we can add back to folks with what they’re doing. So now these folks who are doing all this extra work have more capacity to do the job that they’re doing now.

Josh Schachter:
This is cross functional within your internal operation. This was the software. But right. But for but not the customer side, not their efficiency. This isn’t your internal.

Seth Terbeek:
There were there were we were looking at processes with the lens of what does the customer have to do. So journey mapping. But that that whole process, what it does is it really takes any ego out of, hey. I’m in support and product’s not doing that. Or, you know, I’m in CS and the support team isn’t doing this. And so everybody can really focus on what is the customer doing, what’s better for them, and it helps to generate ideas about how to make it better without a bunch of ego or finger pointing going on. And it’s it’s really, an impressive process to see unfold, you know, as folks have those conversations.

Josh Schachter:
Can I ask a self serving research question? Yeah. Literally, like like, off the back of of a product, prioritization session with my team, which is why I was a minute late to this podcast, right, like, literally right off the back of that. So as you know, Seth, UpdateAI, we’re all about creating, really kind of cross functional knowledge about your customers and and with the insights coming from their conversations primarily through customer success managers. And so you’re you’re all about kind of cross functional efficiency as well. In what ways do you does your team currently share information cross functionally amongst let’s say, like, with focusing on the leadership. How is knowledge getting transferred from whoever’s talking to the customer, whether it’s CS or or support or whatnot, to product to make product decisions, marketing to to understand testimonials and c s q l’s and, you know, executives to know what’s going on and have a pulse. I’m I’m I’m I’m asking this sincerely because we’re conducting research on this for how we can create the most effective workflows.

Seth Terbeek:
So right now, it’s funny you asked that, because we just did a journey map around the process where a lot of that, was discussed. But right now, a lot of that is done either, you know, through email or Zendesk. Right? People are, you know, sharing this information back and forth, talking about tickets, a lot of verbal stuff. There’s a lot of pinging back and forth as well. So I’m gonna, you know, follow-up with product, ask what’s the status of this ticket, or what’s the status of this bug? You know, where are we at with those things? We’re in the process of rolling out Plan Hat as a a way to centralize that to help everyone be able to say, okay. Here’s what’s going on with these issues with this customer, what their priorities, and so forth. But but but last week, we just had one of our journey map follow-up sessions where we talk about here’s all the things that we said we wanna improve. Now let’s put a plan in place to make that happen, and what’s the status? So we kinda work with these teams to say, this you said this was important.

Seth Terbeek:
You gave this date. Are we making progress against that plan? And we had a the most productive conversation we’ve ever had about, hey. How do we make this process better? We’ve got an issue that support can’t fix. We’ve got product that needs to get involved so that they can bring their resources or dev resources to help figure it out. How do we make sure that we, have a successful, you know, closed loop experience for the support team to make sure they can communicate well with customers? And now we’re talking through how do we prioritize bugs and, enhancements so that we get the holistic picture. And product can really focus their time in an area and make sure they use it well rather than trying to respond to 15 different requests across all these different CSM teams to figure out what’s the most priority, bug and enhancement.

Josh Schachter:
That that’s referring to, to bugs. What about insights in general? Whether it’s feature requests or, again, like, going back to to to advocacy to share with marketing. What about all the other types of of information that you’re

Seth Terbeek:
getting there? So enhancement requests are gonna fall in that same bucket for us. But advocacy Okay. Right now, it’s it’s marketing coming to us and saying, hey. We’ve got an event coming up or we’ve got a need for a press release. So, CSM, can you give us some customers that are in a good spot? And we can go figure out what’s what, you know, story we can create or what stories exist that we can actually create something with. So it’s still a very manual process right now.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. So one of the things that I’m I’m kind of gleaming from a lot of conversations in customer success right now is, you know

Josh Schachter:
You’re gleaming or you’re gleaming?

Jon Johnson:
I am also a little bit gleaming. I I did I I have some nice moisturizer on, so this would be a good one. Right now, I feel like a lot of people feel there is a almost a crisis in customer success of of, like, what is the value of a CSM, and is it value creation? Is it value ownership? Is it value management? Like, what are these things? Right? And and the way that you’re talking about these things and, actually, you quote, Jack Springman from The Final Ramp, which is an incredible book. And I I wanted to kinda pin I wanted to kind of read his quote and then kinda ask you a few questions, to kinda line up where I’m kind of seeing the overarching themes of this kind of new department for you. It says value creation has 3 elements. There’s analysis, design, and execution. Analysis locates value, design unlocks value, and execution delivers value.

Josh Schachter:
And in

Jon Johnson:
my experience, most CSMs sit on the execution side. We just kind of are strategist, and we get something in our heads and we go and we fix it or we do it or we deliver something. Right? And it’s it’s very much, like, on the front lines. But as data and big data really has become more available to CSMs, the the need for analysis and design statements or segments have become more important. And I feel like what I’m seeing is a lot of CSMs and support and CX is getting kind of is vacillating between those three things. It’s like we gotta go back into analysis, go look at the data, and then figure out a play, and then we kinda, like, forget how to get in the trenches and execute. And then it that pendulum kinda swings back and forth. And what you’re describing and what you’re kind of talking through and what you show you know, showed at the customer success collective in, New York is this idea that maybe we need to specialize these things, where, as you deploy these strategies, as you look at the analysis to figure out where the pain points are and where your CSMs are running into friction and that your customers are running into frictions through that.

Jon Johnson:
Right? I wanna hear how like, what is the deployment strategy for this? How do you and your team, tackle what needs to be transformed? Is it, like a ticketing system? Is it kinda like a product request where it’s like, man, this sales cycle is bullshit. Like, I need you to deploy. Like, go get your, you know, seal team 6 and jump in here to fix it. Right? And then you just kind of have your your playbooks that you work through to optimize and process and and update, and then you roll it out. Right? I’d love I I know I’m saying a lot of words, but I I like, I’m really, really interested in this because I do feel like this is one of the next permutations of a career path for senior level CSMs that have a great experience in customer facing roles, but also have dealt with a lot of bullshit processes and know how to fix those processes. And then how do they then pitch that and and work with their team on that so it’s not just whack a mole with fires popping up like it normally would be with a product fix or whatever.

Seth Terbeek:
So I def a 100% agree that the the splitting of these two roles is really incredibly important because if a CSM is going to be effective managing their accounts, they need to focus on those accounts, not all the friction that they’re experiencing around them, you know, so that they’re really able to deliver the best experience there. And I it’s one thing I wanna share is that I I really consider, the person on my team, Carolyn Duffield, a cofounder with me in this whole process because she has been instrumental in helping us really take these activities. You know, all this feedback we had to turn it into really in a, you know, action oriented approach that we’ve got with these teams to bring everything forward. And so one of the things that we did first was This is your senior director

Jon Johnson:
of That’s right. Transformation. Right?

Seth Terbeek:
Just to Exactly.

Jon Johnson:
Cool. Get the the bylines in there correctly.

Josh Schachter:
So Surprise, Seth. She’s on the line. Listen. She’s on the line. Come on. Ladies and gentlemen

Seth Terbeek:
Oh, that’s awesome.

Jon Johnson:
My god. We can just start doing that, Josh. That’d be

Seth Terbeek:
amazing. Yes. It would. So we started with just pulling a bunch of customers together and say or and and pinging them and say, hey. We wanna have a discussion with you and about 6, 7 other people around a topic. And what it was was a pain point. It was, hey. We We wanna talk to you about your support experience with us, or we wanna talk to you about your onboarding experience with us, or, you know, your billing experience.

Seth Terbeek:
When there’s a problem, people love talking about it. So it’s a great way to get feedback. They help help you understand where are the problems that they’re most concerned about. Because anybody in the business, whether that’s my business or somebody else’s, is going to know what is painful for them or what they’ve heard. But when you get a group of customers together to actually start talking about it, you really start to hear things repeated. So if somebody brings something up and it hit it strikes a chord, other people are going to jump onto that and say, yeah. I have that problem too. And that really helps you then to to focus in your efforts to get to the right areas that have the most impact for the customer experience.

Seth Terbeek:
So that was where we started. And then we took that feedback, and then said, okay. This is what we heard. Let’s do some journey mapping around that. And then from there, we started to take that after we had some really, you know, good experiences. We took that to some other teams and said, hey. You know, we think this could be a valuable to you. We wanna offer our services to you as a team to help you make your processes better.

Seth Terbeek:
Again, people were like, hey. We have some problems. We would love your help on that. And so they said, great. Let’s go through that and do our implementation process and see what that looks like and make that better. As we started to get, you know, traction internally, now we have people coming to us and saying, hey. You guys do customer journeys. Right? Could you do a customer journey for this? Because this problem really this this area is really difficult.

Seth Terbeek:
And so now it’s a matter of us sort of taking that feedback and try to prioritize, alright, where are the right areas to focus on? Because just because we heard something about it, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing. And so we’ve gotta start figuring out, alright, what is the actual impact that we think it could be? And so that started to help us, you know, get a pipeline of things that we can go look at and plan out for future quarters.

Jon Johnson:
Got it. I love that. In one of the points of your topic at the festival, you talked about finding the right CX balance. And, you know, we can we can tag some of the content that you shared in the show notes. But one of the things that you are talking a lot about is you I mean, we say value a lot. But I want you to go and I’m gonna lead the witness here because you do talk about it. You talked about customer value and how they see value in this. But I’d love to understand kind of your thought process around prioritizing these things, around, you know, growing the customer experience, from I think what’s the type what’s the term that you used earlier? Not opportunity cost, but, I’m losing my words here.

Jon Johnson:
But walk me through, like, what’s an okay process and what’s not. Right? Like Right. There’s pain point. And then, like, sometimes, just like any product manager has ever heard, it’s like, I’ve heard a 1000000 people ask for this thing. I’m never gonna fucking do it because and and I know why. You don’t know why. Walk me through that a little bit.

Seth Terbeek:
So what we found is early on, some of the processes we started trying to improve, they were painful for our teams. They were kind of painful for our customers. And so, I mean, they were really painful, like ones that were, like, the most difficult. But what we found is that, okay, we did some improvement on this, and it didn’t actually reduce any work effort. So while it made the experience better, there wasn’t a balance of it’s gotta be meaningful to the company as well. Yeah. And that is really you know, if you look hopefully, you guys could show that picture, that chart from KPMG. But it does a great job of saying there’s there’s value lost when you have a bad experience, but you’re also losing value when you have an experience that it sees the customer expectations too much.

Seth Terbeek:
Because it doesn’t, you know, return any value to you from what you’ve got in the, you know, the the value that you’re the effort you’re putting in to the value that you’re gaining from the improvement in the experience. And so it’s that sweet spot right in the middle where you’ve got the ability to, you know, improve how things operate in your company, but then also it improves the experience for the customer. So the prioritization process is, alright, what is the return on investment we’re going to have from making this process better? Are we going to save hours? Are we going to reduce tickets? You know, are we going to have, you know, less, you know, interpersonal friction internally at the company? And then also, okay, how do we then make this more, beneficial for the customer, reduce steps, give them better information, help them navigate it more effectively. You know, all those things would be improving to the, customer experience.

Josh Schachter:
Got it. And for you guys, I think it’s, I mean, you had a concrete goal of of of saving a little over $1,000,000 Yep. Right, in in cost? So is that really what I mean, that’s what it came down to?

Seth Terbeek:
Yeah. That’s how we start that’s how we really justified what we’re doing to say, we’re going to make the business operate more efficiently, which benefits everybody. Right? All these teams that have more than they can do right now, they can, you know, start to perhaps manage that workload with the team size they have now instead of need to, you know, onboard additional, employees to help cover what they’re doing today.

Josh Schachter:
So you’ve got a slide here, and we can show that as well, that your goals for for last year, for 2023, were increase NPS by 12 points. And you talked about that, that making the correlation then to to expansion and revenue growth, demonstrating CX impact on operational efficiency and probably, well, no, actually. And then the third one would be deliver customer optimization adding 1 point 3,000,000 to revenue.

Jon Johnson:
Yep.

Josh Schachter:
What are your goals for this year? What are those 3?

Seth Terbeek:
Yeah. So this year, you know, we’re in the $1,000,000. That is, the kind of the goal that we’ve got. We also needed to roll out Planhat. So that is a a big lift for the company right now. There was a lot of work to, you know, ensure that our data was ready to be imported into, the the Planhat system and then make sure that we’ve got processes around that as well. So there’s a lot of efficiency gains with Planhat itself because you could see it has the ability to consolidate a bunch of these activities that we’re now doing in in disparate systems, help the teams have a single place to go. And then really, you know, because of plan hats and limited licenses, anybody in the company now will be able to access everything about the customer in one place.

Seth Terbeek:
You could see it contextualized so that they’re then able to really understand what’s going on with the customer. Support has, you know, a frustrated customer on the line. They can go here and see what’s going on and and then interpret and apply the appropriate plays based on what they know about the customer, you know, in a way that really gives them that insights that they wouldn’t have otherwise at this point. And then another one is, you know, really just helping the company continue to map those customer journeys. Having that information available so people could see how the process works from the customer perspective, is really going to be critical to make sure that, you know, as we onboard new people or people get moved to different roles, they know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and what the end result is.

Josh Schachter:
It’s good. So the Planhead implementation is a big one. That’s a big rock that you’re that you’ve been tackling. I’d love to know how it’s going. But but but beyond that, I you mentioned having different stakeholders, not just from CX, but from other groups as well come and be able to access, you know, symmetry of information. That’s a lot of change management. Talking about, like, head of transformation, there’s a lot of change. How and I saw on the other slide, you know, training was one of the the chevrons there.

Josh Schachter:
But have you thought yet? Have you gotten there yet? Have you thought about how you’re going to you know, you can the whole you lead a horse to water, but you can’t make a drink or, you know, how to how to have people fish for themselves? Have you thought about that change management?

Seth Terbeek:
Yes. We have, actually.

Jon Johnson:
Any other euphemism that you wanna

Seth Terbeek:
use? Exactly.

Josh Schachter:
I got more.

Seth Terbeek:
So we have, you’ve gotten to a point where we’re really trying to be, like, recipe makers, like, helping people understand here’s the best way to approach leveraging Clan Hat so that you could start to streamline some of your work that your team is doing now. And so we’re kind of asking questions, open ended questions of, hey. How are you being measured, you know, with what you’re doing today? And then bringing that into the system so that we can help them design it and make it fit with what they’re doing now. So that’s a big piece. And we are focused on the customer facing teams first so that we’ve got that those teams working well within the system, then bringing on product or marketing or support so they can have that. So it’s gonna be a multiyear journey for us as we go through this. But we’ve had, let’s see, 3 different customer success teams to bring on. Actually, 4.

Seth Terbeek:
Sorry. So there’s, the 4th one that we bring on. So it’s been a lot of work over the last 6 months just to get those 4 teams up and running because they all do things very differently. They all serve different markets, different customers, and have different products. So it’s been a lot of work to make sure that we can have a cohesive platform for them along that. And then one last thing I’d say is, you know, we’ve got some further NPS growth goals that we had as well. So, you know, the, one of the teams was wanted to have another 12 point jump. So we’re continuing to, you know, drive further improvements in NPS.

Seth Terbeek:
And, you know, NPS, it could be a bit polarizing right now, but NPS, to me is it’s a barometer. It helps you understand gauge at a high level, and and then you’ve gotta use that to know where to dig deeper.

Jon Johnson:
That’s amazing. I love that. One last question about Plan Hat. And I think this is probably the most important question. How many bags of coffee did they send you prior to you signing their contract?

Seth Terbeek:
So apparently, we bought it before a coffee thing was going on, but I got a couple when we were in New York City, so that was good. I’m definitely enjoying that.

Jon Johnson:
I I the I have probably 3 bags in my freezer right now, and they just keep, they just keep sending them to me, man.

Seth Terbeek:
They’re pretty great. I didn’t know that was their thing. Coffee any day over any other I

Jon Johnson:
absolutely. Like, that’s, that is, like, the best, like, the best. And shout out to Grant Jones, who has been keeping me stocked with Plan Hat coffee that think is pretty wonderful stuff. So, Josh, I’ll I’ll make sure to get you some, next time I, I I I have too.

Josh Schachter:
Good. Actually. I don’t I don’t drink coffee, but I went to the Plan Hat, their Malibu open, co working thing in the fall, and it was great. And they gave us all bags of coffee. I didn’t realize that was that was a thing. But you know the story behind that. Right? Which I like. I like that it come there’s a marriage.

Josh Schachter:
No.

Jon Johnson:
I just know that I

Josh Schachter:
have a bunch of them. Okay. So we can we can chat GBTA for the the proper word while we’re on this. But there’s a, a ritual, a ceremony in, they’re all they’re all Danish. Right? And I think it’s in Denmark, but it may be just Scandinavian in general, where I don’t it’s Sweden. No. It’s Swedish, where they have a, like, a coffee hour in the middle of the day, like a coffee break where you all sit around and you just kind of talk and chat and, but in a constructive, like, structured way. And so that was their whole thing is that they’re a Swedish company.

Josh Schachter:
And so this was them bringing that that,

Jon Johnson:
It is the Swedish art past. Fika. Fika is a ritual that’s important in Swedish culture, giving yourself a moment to have a break and socialize.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. Now I know from insiders, they don’t actually do that. But, you know, it sounds really nice. And I like that word fika. It’s a very, like, strong it’s a good branding word too.

Jon Johnson:
It is.

Josh Schachter:
And you know, John, I gave out pancake mixes, make pouches of of pancake mix, at our last, CCO club event.

Jon Johnson:
A good handout.

Josh Schachter:
That was that

Jon Johnson:
was I’m a big fan of creative swag. So

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Well, for anybody going to Pulse, just wait.

Jon Johnson:
What are you doing? Oh, we got I got some questions that I wanna we’ll get there in a second because if there are some things that I wanna I wanna ask you, Josh, about, but let’s make sure that we’ve talked to our our guests.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
Okay. Man, this is so cool. And I have I have so many like, my brain is is is swimming around. It’s like all What is what were some of the hardships that you faced when you were, kinda trying to prove this? On the graph, you talked about, like, proving the value of the department and some of those things. Right? I mean, anytime you kinda stick your neck out and you say especially in this fucking market, like, it’s a little bit risky. Right? But I think you’ve done a really good job of laying out that it’s not just about, hey. I’m driving $1,000,000 in revenue. There’s also optimization processes, and luckily, you’re in a mature organization that actually values and understands that.

Jon Johnson:
Walk me through some of the the like, what was the selling that you had to do? Like, how many speed bumps did you hit? How many bounds did you have climb, to get into this? Or has it been kinda smooth sailing? It seems like this was something that was needed, so it it makes a lot of sense to me. But

Seth Terbeek:
Yeah. It was definitely a needed thing. So there was definitely some, you know, grassroots efforts in the company of, hey. We’ve got some customer experience needs that we need to fix. So there was some good timing. Was involved with it for sure. One of the things that we started out doing was trying to just find processes. So not talking to customers and just saying, hey.

Seth Terbeek:
That process is really hard. Let’s go, you know, redesign that process. Well, that ended up being ineffective because there was just not a whole lot of improvement that we could find with just one individual process. So we were we were pulling our hair out trying to find, ways that we could actually say, okay. Here’s the dollars we helped the company save. And we had it amounted to very little. So, like, the Q1, then we were, within that department still, trying to figure out what we could do about the company, making the ex experience better. It was really hard.

Seth Terbeek:
There was a real concern that if we don’t prove this out, we’re gonna be out of a job, because, like, we haven’t been able to find a way to make this valuable for the business. So that was 1. Another one was, you know, when you’re talking with customers, it’s really critical to have open ended questions. If you lead the witness in any way, it really hurts the feedback that you get. So if you ask, you know, yes, no questions or sort of lead the witness when you’re asking a question, you’ll end up getting really bad feedback, and you won’t hear that open ended, you know, sort of thinking out loud approach that the customers really, start to give you deep insights, into the process. So that’s really good. And, you know, folks wanna hear or discuss about, you know, open ended questions, happy to work with folks on that. But it’s really hard, to to not ask leading questions because you and you you you know where the problems are, you know, internally.

Seth Terbeek:
And so you want to say, yeah. That’s right right customer, but you can’t do that because that really damages the process. So those were some big ones. And then I think the last one would be, don’t be afraid to pivot. If it’s not working, don’t die on a hill. Find some other area, test things out, and continue to iterate. It’s that fail forward mentality that I think really got us, you know, my my cofounder and I to where we are, with this department running as it is today. Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. That was actually one of your big lessons, I think, is that, like I think how did you put it? 2 ways. Failing forward was crucial to success and and and providing structure and a safe space to encourage customer centric thinking. And I think this is something that is is a longer topic than this podcast, but how you actually build that safe space, if you don’t have somebody that is intentional about it in in a way that you’re doing it, your whole purpose is actually to create safe spaces for customers and employees to share where there’s operational efficiencies or pain points or challenges so that you can then fix that. Right? So I I really love that it this is almost, like, based on the fact that we all know that there’s a lot of shitty things that happen in in our day to day, whether it’s a process or a person or an experience. And, like, that’s just the way that life is, and it’s because of the way that systems are built. And if we don’t actually take a step back and have a person or or an or organization that can actually kinda start to rebuild the Legos. And I wanted to ask you about that because that’s how you ended this presentation in New York, is, you know, something about, like, feel like, make sure you share your Legos.

Jon Johnson:
Is that does that get back into am I kinda hitting on the fact that you said you wanna build recipes? Like Yes. I love the way that you said that is that you wanna be a recipe maker and not, anything else. Like, it’s like, I can just give you a playbook, but let me just show you how it’s built.

Seth Terbeek:
Absolutely. So one of the things you realize is there’s there’s so much improvement that we can make. Like, there’s so many areas that we could focus on to the point of prioritizing that we’ve realized. I don’t want myself and Carolyn to be a bottleneck for the company to experience improvement in the customers as well. So one of the things we’re trying to do now is we’ve got this process that works really great with, journey mapping. How can we start to bring folks along into doing that with us to say, why don’t you, you know, we’ll show you how to do it and you take it and run it in your team or run it in your area for this problem, and then start to, like, have other people be able to do that and say, hey. I see this problem. Let’s do a customer journey map, and they’ll run it on their own.

Seth Terbeek:
So that would be huge, you know, that if if we can help scale that across the business that way. And then, you know, giving away the Legos is really critical because yeah.

Jon Johnson:
If you want Molly Graham, by the way. Thank you, Molly Graham. Absolutely. Quantify things. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
Who so Sorry. I don’t know. Who’s Molly Graham?

Seth Terbeek:
So Molly Graham is, she’s worked at Facebook, and I believe at Google as well. So she has done some amazing things in the startup world. This is just one of the things I followed her online. That’s it. So, she’s got some great insights. I would encourage folks to check her out. She is really helpful in the startup space. Some really great insights.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. She’s the Chan Zuckerberg, organization right now.

Josh Schachter:
Cool.

Seth Terbeek:
Awesome. So

Jon Johnson:
Hey. So give it’s phone’s ringing.

Seth Terbeek:
Maybe is that her

Jon Johnson:
calling Molly? Did you hear?

Seth Terbeek:
That’s amazing. So giving away those Legos is the idea of you’ve built something. And if you want to scale and do more, you’ve gotta be willing to give this thing you built away to someone else without any, you know, you know, pressure on them to build it the way you were building it. So give them the ability to take it, run with it, create on top of it, iterate it, and allow them to, build that system themselves so that you can then pivot and focus on other areas to try to, you know, improve what you’re doing for the company or come up with new ways, to, you know, run things, in new areas.

Jon Johnson:
I love that. That’s great. Yeah. Thank you so much. This is so cool. Josh, are we gonna be able to link this the presentation in the show notes? Is that something that we could do? Did he leave us?

Seth Terbeek:
I think he took a break.

Jon Johnson:
I’m gonna say yes. Okay. Cool. Well, that’s fine. We don’t like him anyways. He probably had to go answer that phone that was ringing. Well, let’s

Josh Schachter:
I’m back. I’m back. Sorry. Sorry for that, awkward departure there. My dog, who I haven’t seen in 2 weeks, was just delivered to me, And, he’s going nuts up to date. Situation. Answer the door.

Jon Johnson:
They finally returned him to

Seth Terbeek:
me. Yes.

Jon Johnson:
Okay. So, Seth, thank you so much. I I really appreciate it. I do wanna ask, you do a lot of speaking engagements. You kinda you’re you’re out in the world, out in the streets, as I like to say. Yeah. Is there any, upcoming events that people can kinda hear you speak, or are you doing any webinars, any any other, appearances where we can catch you?

Seth Terbeek:
We’re trying to tease some things up. So right now, there aren’t, but, definitely will be in the future. So, you know, be on the lookout. Actually, I would just say I do I did start a podcast, so that’s out there. You could go to chroniclesoffailure.com to check things out. We’ve got Yeah. Some, you know, a failure that I specifically, experienced that’s out there. We’ve got some other guests teed up.

Seth Terbeek:
So if folks wanna hear some about what I’ve done, others are there too.

Jon Johnson:
I’ve got, like, 13 years of stories that I’d love to share with you, Seth. Sweet. And, there’s actually I I I noticed that, and and I’d love to talk to you about, about some of that stuff. So I love I I love the principal the principal behind all of that too. So so good job on that. You guys should meet up.

Josh Schachter:
I feel like you guys would be good friends. I feel like you guys will get along well.

Jon Johnson:
Woah. Woah. Woah.

Josh Schachter:
You’re both the same age, I think. Like Josh

Jon Johnson:
is always trying to set me up to people. Like

Josh Schachter:
I know. I know. But, like, Seth is in New York. He’s a little bit more upstate, but he’s in New York. John, you’re coming into the city this week. You’ll be here on Saturday. Right? Yeah. I think it’s I I I get this vibe that Seth likes live music.

Seth Terbeek:
Why don’t you take him with me?

Jon Johnson:
Like, in the Emo, Screamo? Yeah. That’s the Okay. So little little, for those listening, because this actually, this will be posted on Wednesday. So it’ll be posted the the week before a couple days before the show. Right, Josh? If I get my dates correctly. Yep. Okay. So on Saturday, there’s this band called Gatsby’s American Dream, and they’re they’re from Seattle.

Jon Johnson:
And I’m originally from Seattle, and they were, like, the first kinda, like, mass post rock emo band that I got into. And I wound up becoming very good friends with the whole band. And this is, like, their first show in 20 years, and it’s the 20 year anniversary of their album Volcano. And it’s the only East Coast show. And so I I creatively schedule customer visits Well, New York.

Seth Terbeek:
Well done. That’s the way to do it.

Jon Johnson:
During the week, so that on Saturday night, I can go to the Gramercy in New York to go see Gatsby’s American dream. And I gotta I’ll send you the record, Seth. If you’re interested, let me know because I

Seth Terbeek:
got Yeah. Please do. Backstage passes

Jon Johnson:
for the event. But, and if anybody’s listening and you’re in New York and you wanna seriously, like it’s some of the best. Like, every every elder millennial in the city will be at this show with their lower back pain and their checkered bands. So Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
Xenial. Xenials.

Jon Johnson:
Zenials. Or zenials.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. So Gatsby is American Gatsby is American Gramsci.

Jon Johnson:
Gramsci. And John Johnson will be there in flannels and skinny jeans. But okay. Before we wrap, I did wanna ask 2 things. Josh, you did a meetup in New York or in London last week. Correct? You did a CS meetup. This is why you work with us on this stupid little podcast that we do, the number one customer success podcast. I’m sorry.

Jon Johnson:
Attribute it correctly. How did that go? Love to hear about it.

Josh Schachter:
It was great. You know, the I think the London community is, like, really thirsty Mhmm. For some kind of of of, like, community there. Yeah. Yeah. The boy. So, like, there there was I wasn’t expecting, quite frankly, the turnout that we got, because we only really had, like, 15 sign ups, which is all we really wanted. Right.

Josh Schachter:
We just wanted a very kind of intimate type of meetup. And so we got what everybody showed up. And, I’m trying to think now. Oh, man, John, you put me on the spot. I’m scratching my mind of what we talked about. It’s really bad that I can’t give you the summary.

Seth Terbeek:
I’ll

Josh Schachter:
have to come back to you.

Jon Johnson:
No. That’s alright. And,

Josh Schachter:
I didn’t have UpdateAI to record the conversation there in in at the bar, so I I’m, you know, I’m blanking.

Jon Johnson:
That’s good. Alright. Well, then the last thing, you guys are sponsoring Pulse this year. Correct? You’re one of the sponsors. And I think are you guys is Jess speaking at Pulse? Did I see an announcement this week?

Josh Schachter:
Jeez. Thanks for these plugs, John.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. Of course.

Josh Schachter:
Ask you for this. You know, so Jess is Jess Cohen, our head of customer success. She’s, like, one of the smartest people I know.

Jon Johnson:
It’s intimidating how intelligent this woman is. Oh my god.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. Very intelligent. And, I mean, Seth you met her, Seth, actually. Yeah. You met her. Well, whether you were in the same room with the same room. I’m not sure.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. I can confirm you were in the same room. Yeah. And, but but she has a background in in UX research and design thinking as well. And so she is going to be running a workshop masterclass, and the topic is all about, in the world of AI, let’s together map out the ideal customer success manager work week. Like, using AI as we know it or, you know, what’s our vision for this, to save time, to be more productive, to increase outcomes. And so we’re gonna actually put that on with Gainsight. I think it’s around 3 o’clock on the 1st day.

Josh Schachter:
So anybody go on a Pulse? It should be in the app. Sign up for it. We’d love to have you.

Jon Johnson:
I I just I also wanted to make sure as we kinda wrap down that that that, I wanna call this is gonna be a very different experience for Josh in UpdateAI at Pulse this year. Whereas last year

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
I’m pretty sure you got kicked out. Right? Is that

Josh Schachter:
Well, I didn’t get kicked out. Whether I should have gotten kicked out is another story. Yeah. But they didn’t appreciate my

Seth Terbeek:
solution. Guerrilla marketing. It’s Guerrilla marketing. Guerrilla marketing.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Of business cards,

Seth Terbeek:
everywhere.

Josh Schachter:
Asked me to step outside. And then when I stepped outside, they asked me to step further outside.

Seth Terbeek:
They did. And they locked the door behind you.

Josh Schachter:
And they locked and just to be clear, this was not Gainsight. This was the the Moscone Center staff, security staff. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So

Jon Johnson:
we’re coming triumphantly back. We’re coming as the, like, Easter sun. I don’t know what analogy you wanna use.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Well, now it’s legit. It’s paid to play. Clearly, it’s working.

Jon Johnson:
Can’t argue with results. I know. Totally. Yeah. Seth, thank you so much for your time, and I do. I really appreciate you walking through this. I, I’m I’m gonna have some follow-up questions for you. Like I said, like, this is very timely because we’re kind of in this process of, like, I I need to work on kind of some career pathing for some more senior level CSMs as to not just be ICs, but also how do we actually apply the same skills and logic into the processes that support them.

Jon Johnson:
And I think this is a great framework, and I’m really impressed with the work that you’re doing. And I’m really excited to to catch up on, where this kinda goes for this next year. So thank you so much for the time.

Seth Terbeek:
Awesome. Thanks for having me.

Josh Schachter:
I love this this budding bromance. That’s right. I’ll see you on Exactly.

Jon Johnson:
IPAs and, Pabst Blue Ribbons.

Seth Terbeek:
Sounds amazing.

Jon Johnson:
Yep. So

Josh Schachter:
alright. Thank you, Seth. Thank you guys. Appreciate it. Bye.