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Josh Schachter:
Hey, everybody, and welcome to this week’s episode of UnChurn. I’m Josh Schachter, your cohost with Christy Falter Russo, not with John Johnson. It’s one of those Mondays. He’s he’s multitasking, and his multitasks took the best of him. And Christy just woke up from a nice 5 minute nap, But

Kristi Faltorusso:
It was 3 minutes because you guys interrupt me.

Josh Schachter:
Well, because you you texted me, and you’re like, I’ll I’ll be there in 3 minutes. I’m taking a 3 minute nap. I’m like, well, then why the heck do

Kristi Faltorusso:
you guys do this to me right now? John started bothering me. Like, I just wanted

Josh Schachter:
to say birthday? That, yeah, really

Kristi Faltorusso:
bothers me. Like, I was trying to go down for, like, a 17 minute nap, and then, like, for some reason, my phone just kept going off with, like, questions about work and places I’m supposed to be and things I’m supposed to be doing. 17 minutes. That’s all I wanted.

Josh Schachter:
Sorry. Sucks to be important.

Kristi Faltorusso:
It does.

Josh Schachter:
Well, happy birthday. I’m not gonna sing it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Thank you. But Why?

Josh Schachter:
Well, in my head, I just did

Kristi Faltorusso:
John was here, he would sing me happy birthday. I’m just saying.

Josh Schachter:
And John is nicer and more musically talented.

Kristi Faltorusso:
It is true on both fronts. Yes. We are a

Josh Schachter:
hard chef. Our guest today, Eric. Eric Nonsima, who is the senior director of CS at Searchspring. Did I get your pronunciation correct?

Arit Nsemo:
It’s Eric Ansemo.

Josh Schachter:
Oh god. I was so close. I got the first name.

Arit Nsemo:
You did. You got the first name. You got half the battle.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. And Semo. Yeah. Well, thank you for coming on to the show. We met in Chicago about 2 months ago, almost 3 months ago at this point, actually. Yeah. And you were saying some you were telling us some amazing stuff that you do using AI to enable your strategy and yearly preparation of things. And then we got to introduce you to Christy who invited you to CS 100 to speak last week

Arit Nsemo:
Yes.

Josh Schachter:
In Utah. And you spoke about that and some other topics, I’m sure. So I wanna start by talking about CS 100 to both of you. You know, Christy is the the hostess with the mostess of this event every year, and we know it’s like a hallmark event in the customer success industry. Got a lot of buzz. I just was on LinkedIn 20 seconds ago, and I see somebody posting about it. And that’s just all the feed these days, all the rage. So I wanna but I don’t wanna talk to Christie about CS 100.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I was gonna say I don’t wanna talk about it because I’m super biased.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. I wanna hear from Erin. Oh, also, this was her first c s one hundred request. So that makes it even more special.

Josh Schachter:
So what were you expecting going into c s one hundred? Let’s start with that.

Arit Nsemo:
So I’d heard a lot about it. I’d heard a lot about from the industry. I’d been wanting to go for years. It just never worked out scheduling wise. And so I had heard that it was, like, the unconference, like a conference, but not really. Like, more like summer camp for CS leaders. You make real connections with your peers. You learn a lot.

Arit Nsemo:
You have actual takeaways and, like, tactical things you can do immediately. Whereas a lot of conferences and, like, no shade to other conferences, but a lot of conferences are, like, very high level and, like, thought leadership by people who haven’t worked in the industry in 20 years and are just kind of making things up. And it’s, like, not super valuable, a little exhausting, frankly. So I, like, hate conferences. Like, I’m just gonna say it. Don’t like them. You have to, like, drag me to conferences. And my expectations were high because I had heard really good things about it, but I have a different conference, like, scale in my head, and it just didn’t disappoint.

Arit Nsemo:
Like, it was so incredible. The thing about genuinely making, like, real connections with people is true. Like, I literally I have best friends now. Like, I’m I like, I’m like, okay.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I have

Josh Schachter:
You’ve never had best friends in your life before?

Arit Nsemo:
Never before have I had

Kristi Faltorusso:
best friends. No. Honestly 1st best friend charms was split at this event.

Arit Nsemo:
Yeah. Oh my gosh. I was telling my real life best friend since I was a freshman in college. I was like, oh, I made a couple of really good friends, and she’s kind of jealous. And so she was like, excuse me? Like, who are these new people that you wanna hang out with all of a sudden? Do they live in Chicago? Like, are you gonna have to travel to see them? What’s going on? She had so many follow-up questions. I was like, listen. There’s plenty of room. But, yeah, I’ve made really close connections, like tactical information.

Arit Nsemo:
It was amazing. It was Who

Josh Schachter:
who’s the closest connection that you made?

Arit Nsemo:
Oh my god. Either Christy because I, like, made a

Josh Schachter:
because she’s on the show right now.

Arit Nsemo:
No. And then

Kristi Faltorusso:
I and I like to think that I facilitated some of these other friendships. So I’m gonna see I wanna guess who your number 2 is. I have the name in my head. I wanna see if I’m right.

Arit Nsemo:
Number 2 is Nisha, obviously.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Who I introduced you to your first day after check-in after check-in.

Josh Schachter:
Nisha Nisha who?

Kristi Faltorusso:
To register. Nisha Baxi. Baxi over over at, At Gong. She leads their community?

Josh Schachter:
Oh, yeah. Nisha? Of course. I know her. Yeah. She’s great.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I fell in love with her at CS 100 a couple years ago. She was a speaker, and her and I became instant besties. So when Eric walked in, I had Nisha here. I was like, wait. Hold on. The 2 of you I was like, I love you both, so you 2, I know will love each other. And I knew that was gonna be a match made in heaven. It was.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Or at CS:1.

Arit Nsemo:
We like Seth we, like, started talking for the next several hours just about, like, all these challenges on our teams and life and everything. It was amazing. It was amazing.

Josh Schachter:
What about which which, which presentation or which, like, part of the the event stuck out the most?

Arit Nsemo:
Okay. So first of all, there was a power outage, which was kind of incredible because I’m not and I’m gonna give you props here, Christy. Like, you and your team just kept it rolling. Like, it was like we didn’t miss out on any content. Like, we didn’t get any no loss of value. It was just like, power goes out. We’re just gonna keep on moving, which was incredible. Very memorable.

Arit Nsemo:
But I think in terms of the content, Janelle Friday did an amazing presentation on, like, emotional awareness on Teams, and that was super actionable because, like, obviously, CSMs tend to have, like there’s a lot of stress and burnout, and you are dealing with a lot of people’s feelings and emotions all day long when you’re talking to your customers. So that was super applicable. And then there were some really interesting stuff, honestly, from Dave Blake talking about the future of CS and, like, where he sees CS 5 point o. And then Christy gave great insights about inserting AI into, like, every basically, every layer of CS, which is, like, obviously something I’m very interested in because, like, if I can use something to help me do the things I don’t wanna do, I will do that all day long because I hate doing things I don’t wanna do. That was really actionable. Honestly, all of them, all the presentations were like, you walked away and you were like, oh, wait. I can implement video into my onboarding, and all I need to do is this one thing when I get back. It was just

Kristi Faltorusso:
it was great.

Josh Schachter:
Nice. Christy, what is Dave’s, CS 5 point o vision?

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’m gonna send you a link to go read his article that he wrote on it a couple minutes I was just say a couple minutes ago a couple months ago. It’s long. It’s lengthy, but, basically, it’s, like, kind of the future state. He kinda talks to the evolution of customer success in its early day being, you know, reactive, which was through the lens of support all the way through then kind of moving to this proactive motion and this kind of valued outcomes into, like, this future state that he sees it at, including, like, AI. Right? And so this, like, kind of led with, like, you need humans as the the kind of I wanna say, like, the driver of all this, but from an empathy and relationship standpoint, but how the future will be the evolution of AI and technology to kind of power us to be the best versions of ourselves, to drive efficiency and productivity and all of this stuff. So it kinda just talks about it through that lens of, like, the evolution of all these stages of customer success. But I’ll send you the link

Josh Schachter:
No. And maybe the the link That that

Kristi Faltorusso:
was here.

Josh Schachter:
Can I have those 20 seconds of my life back? There was nothing informative or educational about

Arit Nsemo:
what it is to say.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Read the article. Do you what was the I have a lot

Josh Schachter:
of faith in you, and it’s your birthday. I figured you’d be on on top of things, but okay. Alright. What, tell us about your

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’m too busy opening all the presents from all my other friends, Josh, don’t include you.

Josh Schachter:
Mine’s in the mail. Eric, tell me tell us about your presentation.

Arit Nsemo:
So I talked about using AI, specifically Chat GPT, to do capacity planning and modeling for my team, which is actually something I did because I was, like, banging my head against the wall and don’t like spreadsheets. I honestly think that the biggest takeaway from the conference might be, like, Eric hates spreadsheets. I think I said that, like, 87 times. Like, hate them, which is a funny thing for a CS leader that, like, has to work in spreadsheets to say. But, basically, I talked about how I leveraged EdgeDBT to solve a problem, not just for my team, but for me as a leader. And I think one of the things that we end up doing as CS leaders in particular is we are so team focused, which we should be. Right? Like, our job is to advocate for our team to make sure that they’re successful, to make sure they have everything they need. They’re enabled.

Arit Nsemo:
They feel empowered. Those are all amazing things. What I think it does, though, is sometimes it leaves out a little bit of burnout on the leadership side where you’re like, okay. But I have all these things I need to do, and I’ve optimized stuff for my team. But, like, how do I make my life easier in reporting and capacity planning and modeling and things that are absolutely critical for a leader in CS to be good at and get right, but take a lot of time and a lot of energy and are the things that you don’t necessarily wanna prioritize that over time with your team coaching or time with your team strategizing on a big renewal. You wanna be able to do that stuff, get it done, feel good about it, present it, have the strategy, and, like, then go back to your other tactical things. And so it was kind of the idea of how can we pull these tools down as leaders and use them to push forward some of the objectives that are gonna help us and our team, but to take some of that stuff off of our plate.

Josh Schachter:
Awesome. I I mean, I love the story of of your using JWT under your own initiative to do capacity planning and to give OpenAI all that information and data about your company and to do

Arit Nsemo:
I anonymized the data. She did

Josh Schachter:
talk about Amazing. Cool.

Kristi Faltorusso:
How she anonymized it. I even I even made sure I talked about her anonymizing it in my use cases. Yeah. Because what I did is I replaced all the customer names and any data about our customers, and I replaced it and I mapped it. So, like Yeah. The first customer was customer a, b, c, d, and I kinda just used it all the way through, like, z z. Like, just I assigned a letter attribute to the customer name. So when I looked at the recommendations and the data and insights, I just mapped it back.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. I’m I’m just joshing you. Listen. I I

Kristi Faltorusso:
Are you just joshing us?

Josh Schachter:
I’m just joshing you. I I have to be in a position to be very strict and very, like, serious about data, privacy, and compliance and everything. But at the end of the day, OpenAI is not doesn’t give a shit about your your, you know, CS They do. Specialists.

Arit Nsemo:
They might we’re very important. I think OpenAI cares about us personally.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Okay.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Just Josh doesn’t.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. No. I do. I do. I think it’s a very serious topic, for all my prospects listening out there. So, Christy, anything else? We it’s we’ve this has been an awesome ten and a half minute unpaid, plug for c s 100. Any other question I didn’t ask before you ask Garrett about her role at Searchspring?

Kristi Faltorusso:
No. Let let’s keep it moving because, honestly, anybody who cares can go and and listen to or go find people

Josh Schachter:
on the podcast. Link to from Dave

Kristi Faltorusso:
Blake’s recap. To re recaps on all of the speakers and all the wonderful stuff at CS 100. No. I’m just super thrilled, Josh, that you actually facilitate the introduction because I had a great time with Ararat last week. I wish you could have been there too. I think you would have really enjoyed yourself. So Thanks. Grateful for the introduction.

Kristi Faltorusso:
She added so much value to our event, and we’re grateful.

Josh Schachter:
Awesome. And any other last birthday updates you wanna share with us? Like

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’m old. 42. I’m tired. I was really banking on that 17 minute nap. Didn’t get it. Thanks.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Sorry. Eric, tell us what’s going on with SearchSpring. Tell us a little bit about your role. You’re are the senior director of customer success. You’re based in Chicago. Tell us a little bit first about the company, and then we can jump into a little bit about your role in the the org that you work with.

Arit Nsemo:
Yeah. So Searchspring is an ecommerce search and merchandising solution and personalization for, like, ecommerce brands and retailers. So if you have a website, maybe you build it on Shopify, when you, like, search for something on that website, our software is what powers the search. And there’s a lot that goes into actually, like, surfacing relevant search results. Who knew? So there’s, like, algorithms and AI and all the stuff that goes into actually, like, surfacing that. And so that’s primarily what our customers are using us for. There’s also personalization. So if a customer, like, comes to your site from a specific geography, maybe you show them coats versus if they live in a warm climate, you’re showing them, you know, tank tops.

Arit Nsemo:
Right? So it allows us to, like, basically empower merchandisers and people who are running ecommerce sites to, like, create a really good customer experience so customers can find what they need quickly.

Josh Schachter:
Awesome. Awesome. How how how big is the company? How long they’ve been around? What’s your ARR? What’s your ACV? No. I’m just joking. But but tell us a little bit about the the four one one, about the company. I was

Arit Nsemo:
gonna be I was like, oh my god. What when did when was Search being founded? I I’m, like, a terrible person, and I can’t even give you the name because it’s been acquired a couple times. That’s not my fault. That’s acquisition’s fault.

Josh Schachter:
Okay.

Arit Nsemo:
But 2011 ish, I think, is when it was originally founded. So it’s about 13 years old, roughly. So it’s not like start up start up, but we’ve gone through a couple of, like, strategic acquisitions. Both, we were acquired twice, and then we’ve also acquired other companies. So it’s one of those companies that is, like, not in a bad way, but almost like a Frankenstein’s monster. Like, if things had not gone awry with Frankenstein’s monster, like, that’s what you get. When you, like, add things on to a company. Now you have this thing to sell because we acquired this company.

Arit Nsemo:
So, you know, the usual kind of SaaS eating SaaS kind of a vibe. Yeah. But right now, we have about I think total with the newest acquisition, we’re at around 250, 270 employees globally. So my team is about 15 in terms of CSMs, CS managers, program managers, which is like a new role for us. And I’ve got folks in the US, primarily based in Denver and San Antonio, and then we have a team in Australia that that leads our APAC business as well. So, we also have folks in EMEA that will eventually roll up to the CS org here, but that’s like, a very new acquisition. So that’s kind of the why we’re a team. We’re broken down with, like, scale, digital experience, SMB, and enterprise.

Josh Schachter:
Cool. Awesome. What’s a big rock that you’re pushing uphill these days?

Arit Nsemo:
Oh my god. I I wish that I I wish there was, like, one big rock. That would be wouldn’t that be nice if it was just the one?

Josh Schachter:
It all to us.

Arit Nsemo:
I think the biggest thing for us has been, like, laser focused on getting good at predicting risk in our customer base. We’re in a really unique position because we work in ecommerce, and ecommerce has gone through quite a lot of change. A lot of industries have, but not quite like ecommerce. Right? Like, 2019, they were cruise along. Maybe 15% of sales come from, like, globally are going to our ecommerce sales. People really shopped in person a lot. Pandemic hit. Suddenly, all of these ecommerce sites, just like a lot of other industries, saw huge booms because no one could shop in person.

Arit Nsemo:
And then now our customers are seeing that kind of relevelling out, which doesn’t feel like leveling out. It feels like we’re losing now, when actually it was just like an arbitrary two and a half year blip. And so what we’re doing is trying to get a better understanding of, like, where our customers sit in this arc. Like, where do they sit? What are their businesses doing? What are their new priorities now that they’ve gone through this huge boom, how to adjust to it, and then are experiencing now what they’re seeing as a decline, but it’s really just, like, relatively on par in terms of growth of what they would have seen in 2019. And so it’s a very interesting time. And so because of that, we’re reestablishing, like, how do we actually calculate our customers’ risk? Like, if we’re thinking about a health score, like, what are the real indicators that customers customers are maybe looking for another solution or that customers are ripe to buy something else? And so we’ve had to kind of reevaluate all of that. That’s probably the biggest rock is just making sure we’re laser focused on identifying risk in advance and then being able to take action on it once we actually are able to identify the risk.

Josh Schachter:
So so can you double click into that for us? Like, how are you identifying it? What are the different vectors of identification, you know, categories that you’re identifying, that sort of thing?

Arit Nsemo:
Yeah. So we we used to identify risk based off of, like, oh, like, we’ve got the data, and, like, this doesn’t look right. But we’re seeing that even with the data looking good, like, even if a customer is, like, for all intent and purposes, hitting all the benchmarks that we would establish that, like, would indicate a healthy customer, that doesn’t necessarily tell us how well their business is doing. And so what we’ve realized is that we need to know really deeply, deeper than we have before, how how a customer’s business is actually faring, like, financially. Like, from black and white, like, are they the red? Are they black? Like, are they what’s going on? Because some of them have experienced such a drop that they’re like, oh, crap. We can’t keep. We have to get rid of something. Like, we literally can’t support it anymore, and some of them are not.

Arit Nsemo:
So that’s actually required much more manual. I’ve been moving much toward, like, in the past 5 years, automation, understanding, like, from a high level, looking at all the data as, like, a whole thing, what’s rising to the top. And we’ve actually had to pull back a little bit and just, like, cross section our customer base by certain attributes that we’ve identified. So, like, certain industries in ecommerce, certain platforms in ecommerce, certain regions in ecommerce that, typically, before, wouldn’t have been, like, a huge indicator of risk, but now they are. And so diving into what those are and then figuring out, okay, in this vertical, in ecommerce, what are the challenges they’re experiencing? How can we understand what those are? Identifying them more manually and then finding ways to put them into an automation so that we don’t have to continually do it manually. So it’s been much more actually, like, taking a step back from a perspective of, like, our health scores were not they didn’t make any sense to what actually matters, and let’s manually like, things like reviewing calls and Gong and, like, listening to sales calls to find out what kind of problems customers are talking about now versus when we sold them a year and a half ago. So those are the kinds of things that we’re doing. It’s much more manual, which then, of course, will hopefully feed into something automated in the future.

Kristi Faltorusso:
How are you using the data that you’re getting from the conversations you’re having with customers? Like, how are you parsing through that? Because one of the things that I do not enjoy is going back to listen to calls

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Or listen to conversations. So I don’t have time for that either. Right? I don’t have time to be on the call. I don’t have time to go back and listen to it.

Arit Nsemo:
Get it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So Yeah. How are you parsing through that information, and what are the signals that you’re looking for to indicate risk?

Arit Nsemo:
Basically, what we’re doing is we’ve we’ve modified the way the CSMs log risk when they identify it. So we did we did enablement on, like, here are some of the things that we need you to be paying attention to. These are the risk factors. They used to be this. Now they’re this. Let’s focus here. When they identify those, it’s manual. Like, we use our CS tool.

Arit Nsemo:
We put a note in the CS tool. We, like, make sure we know that it’s actually happening, and then we can either export that. And I know, Christy, your face is exactly

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. It it my face is for those listening and not watching, I’m uncomfortable because you’re talking about very manual manual things.

Arit Nsemo:
So much manual right now is what’s happening just because some of the indicators that we’ve we’ve, like, noticed aren’t things that are gonna show up in, like, usage data. Right? Right. Like, they just aren’t. So we have to dig into the customer, take note of it. We classify it. Right? There’s, like, buckets of What

Josh Schachter:
are some things? Like, what’s examples of some of those things that come up?

Arit Nsemo:
So ecommerce platform is one of them. That wasn’t a thing we packed. We we, like, paid as much attention to. We knew what they were on because, like, some of them integrated better than others, but we’re, like, platform agnostic. But now, one of the ecommerce platforms, for example, that we have a good chunk of customers in, they’ve developed a competitor solution, right, in house that’s free. So that changes things. Whereas, previously, these customers that were on, like, the most streamlined integration we could offer are suddenly being presented with the potential for not the same at all. Right? It’s, like, definitely not the functionality, but it’s enough that they’re like, oh, maybe this might be an interesting so that’s something we weren’t paying attention to before.

Arit Nsemo:
We were tracking it, but not as a risk metric. We had other ecommerce platforms as a risk master, and now those aren’t as risky because they don’t have there’s not an internal competitor living there. There’s more technical challenges we can manage through doing that for years. So that’s one example. Another might be we’re seeing a lot of changes in, like, team restructuring. And funny enough, AI, where, like, customers in our industry and I don’t know if this is true for other industries. I’ve heard it a little bit. They’re asking for more and more AI solutions for us to deliver to them.

Arit Nsemo:
And so that’s another thing when customers start to ask about AI, start to dig deeper, specific questions about a you know, customers are always like, what innovation do you have? But there’s some signals when you hear a customer asking about the road map that you know that their expectation is that you’re gonna deliver something even because they’ve heard it in the market that it might exist. And so but if follow-up. Every time a customer is like, what are you doing with AI? And I respond, I’m like, what particularly are you looking to solve for? Like, I have not once gotten a response to that. Like, they don’t know. They just know it exists. Right? Like, that’s

Kristi Faltorusso:
A 100% of the time. Yeah. A 100 because they need to check their boxes that their tech stack has has AI. But, like, what does that even mean? What are you solving for? The the the breadth and depth of the responses, I agree with you, it’s so shallow. Nobody knows what they want. They just know that they want something to be a better experience and to help them, but they don’t know what they’re seeking help around or what their expectations are around how your technology will even provide that. A 100%.

Josh Schachter:
I think that’s gonna lighten up, by the way. I think at first, you had people, like senior executives saying, okay, what are we doing with AI? Like, what what’s our our strategy and approach here? And that was putting pressure on leadership to go out there and explore what’s out there. And I think now people understand that it’s not the AI that you need to look for. It’s, again, what’s the problem, like you said. And then potentially, AI is something that helps that problem.

Arit Nsemo:
Exactly. Yeah. Because sometimes the problem they’re having, we’re like, oh, we do that. You just need to do it this way. Right? Yeah. Right.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Hey, everybody. It’s Josh. I’m taking a quick break from the podcast to tell you a bit about UpdateAI. I started UpdateAI to solve 2 major challenges for CS teams. The first is that we save CSMs 4 to 5 hours per week with our productivity through AI. Secondly, we give leaders a window into all the conversations across each account and the entire portfolio. So we help knowledge transfer, we help increase the coverage model of your CS teams, and we help you detect emerging patterns and what your customers are telling your CSMs across all the risks, product feedback, advocacy moments, and expansion opportunities.

Josh Schachter:
So come check us out at www.updateai. It’s completely free to sign up and trial. Okay. So where were we? We you something sometimes things come up that product usage data does not otherwise track.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
And, Christy, you were asking about how do you take what you hear from the customers and be able to synthesize that into more proactive types of actions. Yeah. Right?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Like, how do you scale that? Because, I mean, to your point, like, right now, you guys are doing everything very manual. I can’t imagine having to listen for specific words or things that are coming up in conversations, manually track that, and then synthesize it into a program that your team can execute against and understand across your book where is there real risk versus, like, you know, where is there maybe long term risk, but, like, where is it imminent and where is it long term maybe?

Arit Nsemo:
Yeah. No. It’s it’s painful. It’s painful, and also in parts of it, like, having to do it manually, it reminds me of, like, when I was a CSM, the stuff that I had to do as a CSM back in the day. Right? Like, I there weren’t tools like this when I started to see them. I literally just had to intimately know every single one of my accounts, and I didn’t have small books of business. And that’s not really the expectation. It should be, but it’s not as much more because we’ve given so many tools.

Arit Nsemo:
And so if you’re a CSM if I’m a CSM today, like, frankly, it feels like a very crowded situation where you know your mandate is, like, know your customers, identify risk, work to show value, like, get them to renew and expand, like, generally speaking. But you’re given, like, sometimes 5 or 6 different tools. Right? You’re like, customer marketing is sending this, and then you’ve got your success tool doing this, and then you’ve got office hours. You have a newsletter. You have a community. There’s so many things that a CSM is, like, supported by that I think in some ways, it’s caused a little bit of atrophy because they haven’t had to stay on top of stuff in the same way they had before. So me having to go in and do this manual stuff, I was like, oh, dang. Like, this is like when I was a CSM.

Arit Nsemo:
Like, look at that. It’s, like, come full circle. I don’t wanna keep doing it. Like, I’d like to solve it, but, like, at least I’m, like, learning a lot. And, like, I’m like, oh, this is taking a lot of time. It is.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Since you’ve started this, do you feel like you have a better handle on the book?

Arit Nsemo:
Yeah. For sure. And I think it’s it’s also, like, context wise, it’s important. Like, I did I’ve only been at Searchring less than a year. Right? And so doing something like this in your 1st year at a company is always gonna be a net positive because you’re gonna have to learn the business in a different way when you’re diving this deep into certain things and then figuring out what actions you need to take that are actually gonna move it all. I mean, we’ve identified a few of these, and we’ve just been trying stuff. Right? That’s what you do. You identify risk.

Arit Nsemo:
You’re like, okay. This is a new this is this is a new risk profile. I hadn’t seen this before. What kinds of things would derisk the situation? And you just try them. Right? We’ve we’ve there’s one risk factor we identified that we have tried literally 4 different types of things when this shows up. Nothing worked. And then last week, we saved a customer using the 5th thing we tried. And I was like, did we find something? Did this work? Like, what’s happening? It’s just like there’s so much more experimentation now than I think has previously even been necessary because your customers have so many tools that they’re using.

Arit Nsemo:
I mean, they just do. No matter where you are, they have so many tools. So you just have to get good at iterating.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. By the way, the the the challenge that you talked about a second ago around how during COVID, there was more, you know, commerce that was helping you guys, grow faster, and now it’s, like, back to normal. I think that’s something that resonates with a lot of people out there. I mean, we spoke to to Daniel Silverstein. He’s the the SVP of, post sales at Carta last week. And you can imagine in his space, it’s been completely top tier world where, you know, he was riding those 2020, 2021 highs, and then all of a sudden, like, we’re in this downturn. So I think there’s a lot of folks out there that are are trying to figure that piece out.

Arit Nsemo:
Yep. For sure.

Josh Schachter:
Christy, I Why? Yeah. Go for it. Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I wanna go back. I’m gonna go backwards a little bit, and then we can go forwards again. So how did your team respond to this? So you gave your team a manual a manual project to go sink their teeth into. Right? And you’re very clear on the why we’re doing this. But I have to understand, like, how did your team respond? Because I’ve given my team a bunch of stuff to do, and nobody ever likes me. I’m I’m no one’s friend. I’m no one you know?

Arit Nsemo:
That’s a good question.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Did you manage the people part of this change and this project?

Arit Nsemo:
I will say there’s a couple things that were on my side in this situation. 1, being a new leader. So, like, they expected some change to come. And 2 and this isn’t good, but there have been a lot of huge change sweeping changes to how CS is run at Searchring since I joined. Like so night this kind of almost blended in with the other things where I was like, pay attention to what these things are, and I need you to put a note. You do this thing. Like, I don’t think this felt like a huge additional lift in many ways because what was previously asked to them was also quite manual was not necessarily, like, taken they didn’t do the connect the dots as to, like, we need you to do this maybe annoying thing, but also here’s why. Like, these are the whys behind it.

Arit Nsemo:
So I would do a lot of reminding of why, but, like, really, when I joined, just because of all of the change that had happened, there were there were no CS tiers. Right? There was no there was no deciding what customer goes where, what service they get. None of that existed before I like, there’s a lot of stuff that has fundamentally changed about the whole department. And so this isn’t really luckily, hasn’t been like, you’re asking us to do this other manual thing because the other manual stuff they had to do was, like, figure out when this account renews because our Salesforce data is bad. Right?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Like Oh, wow.

Arit Nsemo:
Yeah. So this is like this was like, oh, okay. This is, like, for a purpose. Like, this is called, I think, a little different. At least I hope it does, unless they’re all lying to me and, like, they’re low key, like, I hate Erin.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Like, she Which, like, listen. As leaders, we have to be okay with that too. Right? Sometime Oh, yeah. Sometimes our teams will not like the things we ask them to do, but we have to do them. Yeah. So let’s just do it, and hopefully things get better. Okay. I’m just always curious because I hate tasking my team with doing things.

Arit Nsemo:
Hate it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Not more than they hate being tasked with them. But

Arit Nsemo:
Yeah. But it sucks. Especially for a CS team, like, they’re probably getting asked to do stuff from other comp like, other parts of the company ask CSMs to do crap all the time. Right? So you’re just piling on.

Josh Schachter:
Is that true at you at, at client success, Christy? Do other parts of the company ask you guys to do stuff all the time? I feel like you probably, like like, hold your ground over there.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Well, let’s put it this way. Like, they have to ask for permission before like, they can’t just go to my team and start making demands and putting things on their plate at all. That is never going to be acceptable, and I’m a leader in any organization. But but I am a business leader before I am a CS leader. And so because of that, there are things that I have to partner with our cross functional peers on, right, whether it is marketing, whether it is sales, whether it’s product. And there are things that I just know have to be done because it’s good for the business. Right? Whether it’s helping us drive our road map and we need to engage with customers, and so we need to be capturing different things about their tech stack or their needs or use cases or things like that. Yes.

Kristi Faltorusso:
That’s gonna be more work for my team, but it’s real it’s additional work with a very clear purpose. And so long as we understand the overarching business impact of the work that we’re tasking them to do, I’m on board with it. What I’m not on board with is, like, the busy work because some other team is trying to, like, scramble and get something done. And so now it’s all, well, CSM’s go do do do do do do do do. And, like, no. That’s that’s never okay. But if you come with a very clear purpose around this and it’s a business initiative that we’re all as leaders behind, then, absolutely, I’m gonna get my teams and my resources on board with it. It just has to be how we communicate it because I tell my team all the time I want change to happen with them, not to them.

Kristi Faltorusso:
And I think that is important. I think it’s important to distinguish that. So as long as my team feels like they’re coming along and this is part of something that they feel like is in their control because they understand the why, then I’m okay with it. I don’t like people dictating to my team what they should be doing with their time given that their time is limited.

Josh Schachter:
I there are 2 real juicy quotes in that. I love that. You want your team to to have change to change with them, not to them.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Not to them.

Josh Schachter:
And then you’re a business leader first and a CS leader second. I love those. That’s great. Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. And I think both both are important, and both are things that I had to learn, the hard way. I will say that. If you wanna be an executive

Josh Schachter:
Tell us the story behind the hard

Kristi Faltorusso:
way. Oh, okay. I’ll alright. So the my old leadership style was, like, my team is never wrong. My team will always be my number one priority. Like, my my my my my team.

Josh Schachter:
It was like long and learn meets Latina CS leader?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Basic yes. Like, this Latina, half Italian, half Puerto Rican girl was, like, very territorial, like, not in my sandbox, not today. Get out. You’re wrong. My team’s always right. They are the best. And even if I thought they were wrong, I would never admit that to anybody else. Right? Like, it was only, like, in private we would talk about this.

Kristi Faltorusso:
But what I learned really quickly is that my my focus on my team doing the things that served us limited our ability to drive organizational impact. And so and I also learned very quickly that I wasn’t making friends of my cross functional peers, and we weren’t we just weren’t working the way that we should to drive the business forward. So I had to learn how to just take a step back and think about the business instead of just my team and understanding that if I was focused on the business, my team and their needs and the impact that they should be driving would kinda fall in line with that. So the higher I moved in my career as I moved from, like, director to VP and then VP to c level at client success, I very much had to change my mindset about that. The second one, though, I used to be very much like a just I’ve decided all of these things, and here, you’re just gonna go do it with my team. I’m a very bad leader in the sense that I never gave people context, and I always just gave orders. And and and the resistance there is very clear, right, because nobody likes the way that feels, especially when you have mature professionals who are experienced on your team. Many of my team members are have been leaders themselves at other organizations, and the expectation is that they’re treated like children.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Right? Like, they joined this because they wanted to be a part of something bigger, where they had impact, where they had a say, where their voice was heard. And so I learned very quickly that if I wanted to have a high impact team where everyone was bought in, I I need to be working with them. And so bringing them into the process and making them feel like they are part of what we were doing and this was a joint endeavor, whatever it was, I got buy in a lot faster and the change happened more organically. I’m a hero.

Josh Schachter:
Erin, what’s the number one request that you get at Searchspring from other cross functions for your team?

Arit Nsemo:
Gosh. Number one request? That’s a really good question. We we get requests to jump in presales for, like, more high impact deals. So we get requests for that, which I’m not opposed to. Like, I used to have a process for this at other companies where once it hit a certain deal stage, like, you had the right to pull in a CSM that was gonna own the account for sale at over a certain MRR. So we get request from that. We request from product a lot.

Josh Schachter:
You get a kind of commission on that too. Right?

Arit Nsemo:
Come on, Josh.

Josh Schachter:
Sorry. I’m just I’m I’m in a needling mood today and everything.

Arit Nsemo:
That doesn’t happen. We get a lot of requests from product on because we’ve been doing a lot of product road map changes and innovation in the last year, which, like, yeah, every SaaS company has, but we’ve really changed our pro product road map significantly. And so lots of requests for, like, customer feedback, for beta program participation, for customer survey responses. Like, things like that have come up a lot. And there’s just, like, general our CSMs, we are in a good position where our CSMs really are the product experts, and some of them are the most tenured at the company. And so, honestly, like, I’ve actually had to intervene because, like, I am I’m also, like, a very I I learned the hard way too that I needed to be more cross functional because, like, I would so mama bear my team all the time. And then I was like, hey. Nobody wants to talk to me because they’re scared to ask me for anything, so they think the answer’s gonna be no all the time, which sometimes it is.

Arit Nsemo:
Fine. But I realized that they need to be able to, like, jump in and help sometimes because they do have so much institutional knowledge. So that was one thing that is kind of actually unique a little bit to SearchRing, where the CSMs have been at the company for quite some time. And so there there are times where, like, their Slacks are, like, insane. Like, if I talk to one of my senior CSMs and I’m like, how many people do you answer on Slack every day internally that, like, need something? And I finally was like, stop it. Like, you have to stop it. Like, people have to learn to fish. And so that’s actually that was, like, one of the biggest time sucks is, like, individual CSMs.

Arit Nsemo:
So not going through me to, like, partner with a cross functional project, but, like, reaching out to the enterprise CSM directly because you know that they probably have your answer, which I don’t wanna stop that because I try to think of it as, like, we’re a remote company. But, like, if you’re in an office, you might walk up to the CSM and be like, hey. Had a question. I don’t wanna kill that. Like, that’s important. That’s a part of, like, cross functional team building, but it happens a lot where you, like, can’t in the remote world, you can’t see that everyone else is doing the same thing as you. And so, like, half of the day of this enterprise CSM is spent, like, answering questions for other team members.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Alright. I got a question on that. So are the questions about a specific customer that that person is managing, or is it about the product or process or things like that more in general where somebody else could answer it?

Arit Nsemo:
Oh, it’s the latter a lot of the time, which is what So then why

Kristi Faltorusso:
don’t you have the questions go to a channel and just kinda put the kibosh on, like, the direct one to 1?

Arit Nsemo:
They will go in a channel, but sometimes they go one to 1. So it’s like Mhmm. There’s this big thing that, like, people post in a channel, and if they don’t get an answer fast enough, like, they message directly. Right?

Josh Schachter:
I’m that guy.

Kristi Faltorusso:
And I’m like Yes. You definitely are, Josh. You’re so good.

Arit Nsemo:
I’m all for it. Like, I get it. And it’s funny because, like, I do it too. I’ll be like, someone needs to answer this question for me. Like, please, I’m the number one priority. But it just like, knowing that it takes on average, what, 25, 30 minutes to, like, get back on task and knowing that we’re looking at risk in a different way, and we have all these new initiatives and programs and other things, think like, tiny stuff like that, like, takes away energy from your team. Like, it’s like death by a 1000 cuts for sure.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Eric, did you include that in your capacity modeling?

Arit Nsemo:
Oh my god. I included ad hoc Slack. That was literally where I told you. Yeah. I told you because I wanted to get a sense of, like, what they were actually doing with their time and, like, what they needed to be doing with their time. Right. And I didn’t know.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I couldn’t remember if the Slack because I know you talked about, like, internal meetings and you talked about all this other stuff. I didn’t realize that Slack was in there. Okay.

Arit Nsemo:
Well, ad hoc hoc ad hoc Slack, I put internal meetings. I put email as, like, answering Yeah. Reviews or whatever. But ad hoc Slack, like, some of them would put, like, multiple hours a week in that week in that category of things that they were and I was just

Kristi Faltorusso:
That’s wild. Yeah.

Arit Nsemo:
That’s why because we don’t we don’t we don’t

Kristi Faltorusso:
think about that. Right? When we think about all the time and where everyone’s time is going. Mhmm. But a couple hours a week in a 4 like, in a typical 40 hour we’ll say 50 hour a week. Time. That’s crazy.

Arit Nsemo:
Yeah. That’s time you could be doing all kinds of other more impactful things or, like, taking a little nap. Right? Like

Kristi Faltorusso:
17 minute nap. Exactly. Highly encouraged. We’re

Josh Schachter:
gonna leave it there, everybody. Great episode. Eric, it was so great to have you on the show. So great to have you at CS 100 even though I was not there. I’m sure it sounds like it was an amazing session that you’ve led.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Her session will be recorded and shared. So for anyone who wants to hear more about her capacity planning, we will have that up on YouTube soon.

Josh Schachter:
Oh, wonderful. That’s great. Yeah. I want to. I wanna see it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. It’d be so great.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. And, Christy, have a wonderful, happiest of birthdays.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh, I will. Thank you, Josh. Be great. Thank you.

Josh Schachter:
Bye, guys.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Bye, guys.