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Josh Schachter [00:00:00]:

Hey, everybody, and welcome to this week’s episode of unchurned. I’m Josh, actor, founder and CEO of Update AI and host of unchurned, and I’m incredibly excited today. Joining me are Ali Dystornia, chief Customer Officer of Churn Zero, and Abby Hammer, chief Product Officer of Churn Zero. Ally, Abby, thank you so much for being with us today.

Alli Tiscornia [00:00:21]:

Thank you, Josh.

Josh Schachter [00:00:23]:

Absolutely. Churn Zero. I love the name, by the way. I always have. And I’ve also really always admired your branding around the little characters and the old Churn monsters. The churn monsters. There we go. Churn Monsters. Yeah. I love it. So you’re a CS platform. Abby, you’ve been with Churn Zero pretty much from the beginning for seven plus years now. Tell us a little bit briefly about Churn Zero.

Abby Hammer [00:00:48]:

Yeah, absolutely. I’ll attempt to be brief. Ally knows that’s not always my forte. Churn Zero is a platform and a partner for teams that manage customers, certainly the customer success Team. But we also support a variety of other customer teams, like account management teams, onboarding teams, professional services teams. We’re really trying to make sure that anybody who’s involved in helping the customer have a great experience realize the outcomes that they bought for that. Everybody’s working out of the same place with the same deep, rich data so you can make data driven decisions, so you can be really proactive about how you work with customers. So our goal is to just give CSMS and other customer facing teams that proactive edge, whether it’s getting in front of changing health or finding the right moment to upsell or cross sell or understanding renewals that are coming up and better forecasting, all of that can be done and much, much more.

Josh Schachter [00:01:42]:

And tell us a little bit about your role as part of the story here because go ahead.

Abby Hammer [00:01:47]:

Yeah. So I’ve been at churn zero since the beginning. I was employee number one after our two co founders, our CEO Yuman and our CTO, Mark. And the Churn Zero came from a really natural place for us, a previous organization that we were at. We had real churn and we couldn’t figure it out. We couldn’t get our hands around it, we couldn’t get in front of it. And so that’s what got the three of us into being really interested in the world of platforms that support customer facing teams. There was so much out there at the time for sales teams, for marketing teams, and basically nothing for customer teams, which is so strange. So actually originally joined as our director of product, but then as we needed someone to get our customer team off the ground, I have a background in customer success, call it that at the time, aging myself just slightly there, but I had a background in customer success. So I ran that team, our customer success team, our implementation team for the first six years. So it was a really interesting opportunity to run both product and customer success, and it helped our solutions grow in a really well rounded way because we were users of our own product as well. But those are two incredibly important functions in the organization that cannot reasonably be done by a human, even one as stubborn as me, for forever. So I was super thrilled and so excited when we brought in Allie last year, which has just been revolutionary for us as a customer success team in our own maturation of customer success. So with her coming on board, I switched over to just focusing on product, which has been very lovely.

Josh Schachter [00:03:19]:

And Allie welcome to turn zero. It’s been a year now, so it’s.

Alli Tiscornia [00:03:22]:

Been some whole year.

Josh Schachter [00:03:25]:

Yeah. But tell us a little bit about your role and what brought you over.

Abby Hammer [00:03:28]:

Yeah.

Alli Tiscornia [00:03:29]:

So I am the chief customer officer at Churn Zero, and I have responsibility over everything post sale. So basically, after a customer buys, my team is the one that makes sure that we implement them, that we have a customer success function that makes sure that they adopt and optimize Churn Zero, and then we have a support function as well as professional services and solution engineers. So we run the whole gamut of the post sale experience.

Josh Schachter [00:04:00]:

I want to talk focus the conversation today on the interplay between product and CS. Right. I guess that’s an obvious theme here. By the way, that’s also my background because I spent 15 years in product management and now running a company in customer success as well. So it’s personally very interesting. What does that marriage look like in the case of Churn Zero, I guess. Abby, let’s start with you. How are you gathering information from the CS team to make informed decisions in the product?

Abby Hammer [00:04:31]:

Yeah, it’s a really important question, and I’ll start by saying you need to have more than one method as much as possible. You want the data that you get from customers to be as textured as possible so that you can understand it through several different cuts. So we certainly have mechanisms like survey NPS that goes out, CSAT that goes out after support CSAT that goes out after our implementations. We have lots of opportunities for customers to talk directly to us about the things they love and the things that they find challenging. We also sort through all sorts of data that we get naturally through working with customers, whether it’s emails or recordings of phone calls or support tickets that come in, because you can find these gems of feedback all within those sort of naturally occurring engagements. But something that Allie and I have worked really hard on and really changing up the process of it in the last year is also how we have our team submit feedback on behalf of our customers. So we have a process that we go through to submit that feedback. And we like having our team do that because they can give us super clear feedback. They’re going to have the opportunity to talk to that customer, fully understand what they’re going for, what they’re asking for, why they’re asking for those things, so they can be a really rich source of feedback for the product team to have this system set up for them to be able to MIT feedback to us. Product reviews that feedback on a very regular basis, weekly, in fact, because what we want is we want to set up a loop for our internal teams and for our customers. So I think one of the most challenging points between product and CS is that feedback loop. Like, there’s usually lots of ways that feedback is sort of slingshot at product, however well it may or may not be passed. But it’s that loop that sometimes really falls apart. We want our team to know that we’re reviewing things and understanding what’s there, and we want them to understand how that then folds into roadmap, what we prioritize, how and why. And we want to equip the CS team to be able to go back and talk to customers about the things that they ask for. So that feedback loop was super important for us, as were regular meetings that we run at least quarterly, if not more frequently, where we talk through that feedback together and try to understand not only what the quantitative data is telling us, but also what the qualitative data is telling us.

Josh Schachter [00:06:47]:

Allie, how have you set up the Customer Success Group so that you have that rhythm of feedback going? Like, tactically speaking, you’ve got a lot of CS leaders that are listening to this podcast. Abby did a good job in describing it. But specifically, how does your machine run in that sense?

Alli Tiscornia [00:07:00]:

Yeah, I think you have to be very organized. So one of the things that I’ve learned in my experience with product leaders is they are highly responsive to quantitative data, not just qualitative data.

Abby Hammer [00:07:15]:

Right.

Alli Tiscornia [00:07:15]:

So telling your chief product officer about how a customer is not going to renew because of a certain feature set, it’s not going to carry a lot of weight.

Abby Hammer [00:07:25]:

Right.

Alli Tiscornia [00:07:25]:

So we really, really have to be able to provide quantitative data. So we get very specific in terms of CSMS are responsible for actually putting in enhancement requests, either through support or directly within a system so that Abby and her team can actually pull that data out and review it on basically a weekly basis. They go through all of the different tickets that we submit that are enhancement requests, and they validate whether or not that is going to be something that we want to focus on in the roadmap. And then I think the other thing that is really responsible, the responsibility of the CS organization is pattern recognition. We are the ones that really need to define what are the things that we see over and over and over again. What we hear over and over and over again. And then we need to be able to assign a value, a dollar value, to those different themes. And once we do that, I feel like that’s something that is much more digestible to a product team because they actually see the business impact of that as opposed to just hearing that a particular customer is going to churn if they don’t get that.

Josh Schachter [00:08:38]:

How are you going about that today? How are you assigning those patterns and categories of feedback that you’re hearing?

Alli Tiscornia [00:08:42]:

Yeah, so one of the things that we do is we try to organize it around actual feature sets within the product and then we basically take the dollar value of the account and we assign it to those different themes.

Josh Schachter [00:08:57]:

Makes sense.

Alli Tiscornia [00:08:57]:

So we try to add all of that up and say, this is going to be X amount of dollars to the business if we can get this.

Josh Schachter [00:09:05]:

Particular money always talks.

Alli Tiscornia [00:09:07]:

Money always talks. It’s amazing how that happens.

Josh Schachter [00:09:09]:

Yes, it is. So you’re providing a lot of value to product for sure, in that feedback from the customer for the front lines of the customers, product is what’s product giving you.

Abby Hammer [00:09:21]:

So I think one of the reasons.

Alli Tiscornia [00:09:23]:

I joined Turn Zero is because I was a customer of Turn Zero before and I had the privilege of being able to work with Abby. So when I went about deciding on what my next adventure was, I was like, oh my gosh, I get to work with a chief product officer who was also somebody who worked in customer success. I mean, how lucky and blessed could I be, right? And so it’s been so much fun to have such a great partnership with somebody that I respect and admire so much. But I think what Abby has done and I really appreciate this, is she understands the customer perspective. She’s not afraid to go talk to customers. She enjoys going and talk to customers. But one of the things that I think has been really beneficial for us is she has developed a roadmap that she’s been able to present to customers and she’s been really great about being able to tell customers, hey, this is what we’re focused on. This is what our roadmap looks like. This is the impact it’s going to have to you. This is the impact it’s going to have to other customers with also not being super specific around individual features and dates because you don’t ever want to put the product team on the hook to be like, I will develop this feature in the color Blue on Wednesday, December 22.

Abby Hammer [00:10:44]:

Right.

Alli Tiscornia [00:10:44]:

I mean, that’s just never going to happen and you don’t want that pressure on your product team to do that. So Abby has been really good about developing this kind of higher level roadmap that gives our customers an understanding on what we’re going to be focused on, a higher level expectation of when they can see those features.

Josh Schachter [00:11:02]:

Allie, I’m going to put you on the spot a little bit. Which function is the most sacred relationship with which you hold? Is it product or are there any other groups out there?

Abby Hammer [00:11:11]:

So I think it’s I think as.

Alli Tiscornia [00:11:14]:

A representative of the customer, you have to hold pretty near and dear the relationship you have with product, right? Because at the end of the day, we sink or swim based on what the product does for our customer. So if the CS team doesn’t have a good relationship with product, or conversely, if product doesn’t have a good relationship with the CS team, it is a massive impact to the company. I really do think that that is, to me, the most sacred relationship. And then probably next up, the CFO, because that person usually gives us the money right at the end of the day. But again, it really has to be about the product.

Josh Schachter [00:11:55]:

The CFO is always the most sacred relationship for anybody in the business, that’s for sure.

Abby Hammer [00:12:00]:

Everybody wants to be their friend.

Alli Tiscornia [00:12:02]:

Everybody wants to be friends with the CFO.

Josh Schachter [00:12:04]:

And when you guys are having these meetings, it sounds like there’s lots of collaborative sessions between product and CS. Are the entire groups participating? How are you kind of structuring those conversations?

Abby Hammer [00:12:16]:

Yeah, it depends as much as possible. We want as much of the CS team to be involved, but obviously there is a real too many cooks in the kitchen phenomenon, especially at certain moments in the development of a feature. And I think that’s another thing that product can really bring to CS is where do you involve them and how do you involve them? So a lot of times we do it heavily at the opposite end, like feedback on feature ideation and sort of priorities on feature ideation and then maybe some feedback right before you release, like this sort of imminently it’s going out to customers and we skip all the middle. And to be fair, we skip the middle because it’s challenging to do a lot of coordination in the middle. As a product person, I’m always getting challenged on how quickly I can produce good features, get stuff ready for the business, get ready for stuff ready for Ally’s team and for our sales team to really push us forward as a business. And the more people you put in that process, the slower it can get. But I think there’s so many lovely spots throughout the process to drop in CX to give them more notification of what’s coming up, to give them opportunities to influence how you’re thinking about things. So we involve different members of the team and different levels of the team at various points. And I’d say the closer we get towards actually releasing a feature, the larger number of people we want included, because at that point, we’re really now starting to go out and want the CS team to be comfortable with the feature before they have to be comfortable with it in front of our customers. So I think you have to pick your moments there, and you want to make sure that when you do put people in the process, you’re super specific about what you want from them from the process. Because if you don’t give people direction, they’ll give you some scattered sort of thoughts or feedback that they may not understand the role you want them to play, depending on where you’re dropping them in the process.

Josh Schachter [00:14:03]:

Turn Zero is very active in the customer success community, and I know you both are active as well. We’re in Q Two now of 2023 already. What are some of the trends that you’re seeing in talking to customers and just being immersed in the world of CS right now?

Alli Tiscornia [00:14:20]:

Efficiency. It’s all about efficiency. It’s all about how we can leverage the resources we have as effectively as we can. And of course, that old adage, more with less, I think is really being felt across the board. But specifically within CX, what exactly can.

Josh Schachter [00:14:40]:

You get a little bit more specific? I hear the same thing with efficiency and more is less. How does that impact what customers are asking for, the types of features they’re asking for, the types of negotiations you might be having? What’s been the impact downstream of that?

Abby Hammer [00:14:56]:

Yes, in terms of the features, luckily for Churn Zero, shouldn’t say luckily, it was intentionally, but we’ve always been very interested in how you can support multiple types of CSMS. So from a very high touch CSM, someone who may be ten customers in their book of business, 20 customers in their book of business, they can really do a lot of hand to hand combat versus a high velocity CSM, someone who might have hundreds or even thousands of customers in their book of business. And the tools that those CSMS need are very different. There’s a lot of overlap, but the more you need to do, the more you need to rely on smart automation, the more you need to rely on things that are as much as possible taking the busy working guesswork out of your day. You can appreciate that very much. Josh given what update does? So that’s a lot of the features that we’re hearing is if I’m trying to make sure that the human resources that I have can be used in the best way, you can use a human resource, which is for strategic discussions, helping unstick situations, what else can you introduce to free up their time? To do that?

Josh Schachter [00:16:00]:

You referenced my company, so I want to segue from that there. We’re obviously focused on chat GPT and large language models and this new, really generational changing technology that’s that’s out there now. And Churn Zero was one of the first in the CS space to quickly adopt it. Tell us a little bit about your vision for a little bit of current state of how you’re effectively using your large language models, but also future vision and where you think Chat, GBT and these NLPS can take the industry.

Abby Hammer [00:16:33]:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we are just at the beginning of understanding what Geni is going to do for a lot of job functions, not just for customer success, but.

Alli Tiscornia [00:16:41]:

For a lot of job functions, a.

Abby Hammer [00:16:43]:

Lot of human functions in general. So it’s both very exciting and very kind of it’s a lot to take in. I think probably the closest thing we’ve seen is the invention of the internet. It might be a little dramatic to say it that way, but I think it’s going to become that big of a change in terms of what we do. So I think a lot of what Churn Zero is focused on here in the shorter term lines up with some of the initiatives that you all have put out, Josh, and that is, hey, there’s a lot of our day that we spend doing things that aren’t higher level processes. Like, just think about a single meeting and what happens around a single meeting, prep for that meeting, free notes, sending out invites, then during the meeting you have the notes of what’s happening and follow up items and things you got to update and whatever your system is like, things you got to update and turn zero. Then afterwards you got to finish off those notes and write those emails. There’s a lot of noise around a thing that CSMS do every day, all day, sometimes back to back to back all day, every day. So I think if we to just sort of broadly talk about it, I think there’s a lot that some of the new technology we’re running into can do to take over some of the low level functions that we do every single day to give us more time to do different things. It can also help us understand lots of data very quickly, which has always been a huge challenge. Data is beautiful till you’re drowning in it and then it becomes unhelpful. So I think it’s those two very broad categories. I think we’ll first start seeing an impact and that we’re interested in helping bring about an impact.

Josh Schachter [00:18:16]:

And I do think what it can do for productivity is we’re just now skimming the surface of it. They’ve seen that in other products that have had it for years and yeah, very excited. Last question for you guys is you’re both female leaders and I know you have a very close relationship and it’s a bit unique, right, frankly, and unfortunately at a tech company to have such a weight of female leadership. Tell us a little bit about maybe Ali could start with you, what that means to be working so closely at the leadership level with Abby. Yeah, let’s start with that.

Alli Tiscornia [00:18:47]:

Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting point. I think we all know, and it’s been proven that representation matters.

Abby Hammer [00:18:54]:

Right.

Alli Tiscornia [00:18:54]:

So when you have a partner who is similar to you and understands and sees the world in a way in which you understand and see the world right, it makes a huge difference. And I think for me, particularly whenever going into a board meeting or going into an executive team meeting and knowing that I have a counterpart who has a shared experience, not just from the business perspective but also the world perspective, it’s great. It’s incredibly helpful and I feel a lot more comfortable and I feel like my message is being heard and delivered and also I’m being supported. It makes a fantastic difference. I think it also gives our other executive team members a different perspective that they haven’t necessarily heard or seen before.

Josh Schachter [00:19:47]:

That’s wonderful. I mean, Abby, you were there, obviously, before Ellie came on board and so when they may have had that different perspective that wasn’t seen or heard before. So how has it changed things for you having been at turn zero for seven years?

Abby Hammer [00:19:58]:

Yeah, I said this to Allie a few months after she’d started. I’ve been blessed to work with really wonderful leaders at turn zero, but for a long time, I was the only female in leadership, and I almost didn’t fully realize the absence until it wasn’t absent anymore, until I was in a meeting with ally. And we were able to connect on these points and understand one another and support one another’s perspectives on these things. And that’s not to say anything negative about what was happening before, but it’s just you don’t realize the full realm of possibility when all you’ve ever known is a different reality. So for me, it’s been a big confidence builder in how I enter a room and how I’m going to be supported by a fellow female colleague in the room. And it’s also been very interesting for me as someone who’s being on the technical side of the house, women in general are less common than they should be. So this is a thing I care about a lot of, how we get more women in leadership and more women in technical leadership. So thinking having this realization for myself and understanding what it means to be in the room with another woman is an important thing for me to have in mind as I try to bring other women into tech and raise into tech leadership because I frankly didn’t fully realize it until until I got the different experience.

Josh Schachter [00:21:17]:

Yeah. Allie Discournia, Abby Hammer, thank you so much for being on this episode. Have really enjoyed our conversation and best of luck to you and to turn zero in the year ahead.

Abby Hammer [00:21:27]:

Thank you so much. Josh.