Masha
Tell us a little bit about your role at BlueConic. But also your background, how did you get into Customer Success?
Jackie
Yeah, so at BlueConic, I’m the Chief Customer Officer. So I oversee everything that falls into Customer Success per view, which is very different in every organization, but for us, it includes Support, so kind of frontline ticketing. It includes Training and Enablement, CSMs and then Account Managers, because we break out the two and we can have that discussion if you want, because I know—
Masha
Yes, we will!
Jackie
And then Partnerships as well, which is interesting and different than I think in a lot of organizations.
Masha
Okay, wow.
Jackie
Yeah, and we have an office in Boston, an office in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. And then we have a number of remote folks as well.
Masha
How are you folks organized at BlueConic? Where do you report into? And I mean, I think you already mentioned the teams that reported to you, but organizationally?
Jackie
Yeah, so I report into our Chief Operating Officer. And she reports into our CEO. And then we have a Sales team separately, so they cover kind of the initial sales process. And then the handover happens to Customer Success, where accounts are assigned a CSM and Account Manager, both as well as you know, implementation and technical teams, depending on the structure of the account.
Masha
What does Customer Success mean to you? And how do you know that it’s working?
Jackie
Yeah, that’s a great question. To me, I mean, Customer Success is really simple. It’s about making our customers successful every day. It’s kind of like one of the taglines that we use here. And I always joke, I’m like, because our job is literally our title, right? It is our job to make customers successful. So to me, when that’s working, you see it in most of the standard metrics that you’d be tracking and the business efficiency. So that retention number should be going up, advocacy numbers are going up, your churn rate is going down. And that should happen organically. If we’re making our customers successful every day, they’re going to pull us into more opportunities to serve them, they’re going to connect us to other people, they’re going to take us with them wherever they go, they’re going to want to get you know, on stage with us and talk about it. And to be able to do that it really takes all of those components that we’ve put into Customer Success. So frontline ticketing and support needs to be on point and making sure that we are responding to things quickly and getting our customers up and running. Our CSMs need to be helping our customers understand how to use the platform and how to align that with their business challenges. Our Account Managers need to be making the connections through the organizations and working on expanding there and making sure that we’re at the right levels in the organization. Training and Enablement needs to be empowering the rest of the customers to see the art of the possible too, like what else comes next. It’s one of the bigger challenges that we have in the CDP space, because it’s pretty complicated. So once a customer is in with their initial use cases, what else can they be doing without getting overwhelmed? And I think Training and Enablement is important there. And then partnerships are really important because for those customers who need additional support in actually leveraging the tool, maybe they don’t have the teams internally to use it, then our partner program will they kind of ramped up there to support them on that. So if we’re doing all those pieces, then the numbers kind of take care of themselves.
Masha
Define CDP for us?
Jackie
Yeah, customer data platform.
Masha
What would you say organizationally is the best way to set up Customer Success teams versus the worst?
Jackie
I think, honestly, I don’t think there’s a single wrong or right way to do it, I think it really depends on the organizational structure. I would say that really the only way you can go wrong is to kind of hide Customer Success away somewhere where it’s really just seen as a cost center or like a box to check. Like, ‘Yeah, we have a Customer Success team, they’re over there kind of doing their thing.’ But not really given light within the organization. And I think that’s really the difference that you see, between companies who are truly customer centric, they’ll put Customer Success as a main pillar within the company, versus people who claim to be customer centric or try to check the box. But really, they either aren’t giving the resources to it, they aren’t bringing the leaders into the strategic management conversations. They’re kind of four levels down in some org chart somewhere, again, in the back room. I think that’s really the difference.
Masha
How have you seen the Customer Success role evolve in the last couple of years?
Jackie
Yeah, I mean, to be frank, I think Customer Success really has become a thing in the last few years, right? I mean, I was thinking about this before our conversation and recognizing, I’ve really been in Customer Success roles and Customer Experience roles since my first job at a restaurant, right?
Masha
Oh wow.
Jackie
But you don’t really think about it that way. Right. But if you’re in a job that’s of service, and in service of your customers, you’re in a CS role. And then with the rise of technology, and the recognition of the value of retaining your customers from a revenue perspective, you saw the kind of growth of CS. So I’d say, really, in the last couple of years, because of the rise of the SaaS business model, also, because of kind of revenue pressure and how challenging the market has gotten, people recognize, okay, it’s much easier to put, you know, the dollars against retaining what we have, then going after new business all the time. So you really saw that growth. And I think that’s evidence when you look in the market at the technology that’s now at play, right? I mean, the things that you’re thinking about from a tooling perspective for CS, why do we need that? Because people are recognizing what value there is in CS, and they want to empower the teams. And also from a staffing perspective, when you search and see the number of jobs and types of jobs that are now related to CS in the marketplace, that’s another recognition that companies are finally understanding that this is really a high value position and a high value part of the organization.
Masha
What are some of those pressure points that you think are driving companies to finally be like, oh, yeah, we should be spending time and money in Customer Success?
Jackie
Yeah, I think it’s just the general challenge of—well, for us, we’re in MarTech. But if you look across any of the high tech areas, there’s so much competitive challenge in all of the verticals, but MarTech especially. If you’ve seen that like MarTech landscape slide, it’s like the first years, everyone’s like, wow, that’s a lot of things. And now like, every logo is like, so tiny.
Masha
You can barely see it!
Jackie
Yeah, I mean, hey, it’s easy for customers to jump somewhere else. And it’s really hard to constantly have frontline reps who are out there, bringing in new business. And especially when you go through something like a transformational piece of technology, as a CDP is, that’s a really long sales process that is costly from a customer perspective, from a business perspective. And so then when you balance that with kind of the resources that you could put against retention and the pressures that a lot of startups are seeing to meet certain margins and growth scales, then CS kind of comes a no brainer. It’s like that five to one ratio of cost to retain versus cost to acquire.
Masha
Sorry, what’s that ratio?
Jackie
A 5x cost to bring in a new dollar of revenue versus to retain it.
Masha
Huh. Good to know.
Jackie
Yeah. So if you look at it through that lens, then why wouldn’t you focus on the easier piece of revenue, right?
Masha
You essentially have four times the dollars to spend in tooling. [Laughs]
Jackie
Right!
Masha
Thank you, Jackie!
Jackie
But yeah, so I think that plus, I mean, I think COVID was also a realization point for a lot of companies. When in those initial stages of COVID, when sales just kind of ground to a halt because budgets were freezing, and people were like, ‘How do I sell without like trying to wine and dine you somewhere?’ Companies all of a sudden, it was like, ‘oh, let’s pay attention to the people that we have over here.’ And so I think for a lot of companies that weren’t already have a customer mindset, that was also a clicking point for them. It’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, we should probably do both.’ Like it is fun to land the big logo, to be like, hey, now we have this customer. And I love those moments, don’t get me wrong. But I love the moments that are like, ‘Oh, this customer that we’ve had just promoted.’ And they can attribute that to something that they were doing with the tool. Or they come back to us, and they’re like, ‘Hey, I just presented this to my boss, or whoever, and we’ve launched this campaign, we’re doing this thing.’ Whatever it is. Those moments of celebration to me are equally, if not more exciting.
Masha
If I were to hand you a crystal ball, how do you see the role of Customer Success continuing to change over the next, let’s say, five years?
Jackie
I think, again, I think it varies by organization. And I think you’re going to see a lot of fine tuning of what CS really means for each organization. I think most of them start out as like, okay, CS is Customer Success managers, let’s start a Customer Success management team, and then maybe it’s support. But I think we’re gonna see a lot more advancement of what CS as a function, and I like to call it like, CS as a mission within a company, right? It’s more about just being a CSM. It’s really about making customers successful every day. So I think companies will really start to fine tune on that. I think the technology piece is super important. And we’re going to see a lot more in that space. I don’t think tech is the full answer. And I know some companies are trying to push tech first, and tech enabled interactions, which is important. But to me, you know, there’s always going to be the human element. So over the next few years, I think we’re really going to find companies finding that balance of like, okay, where’s the line between those two things where we’re still driving value and staying connected to our customers, and recognizing how tooling can empower our organization. And then finally, I’d say probably, I don’t know, I feel like everybody talks about this, but the Operations role is a super popular one right now. And it’s important, it’s an important one, too. So I think for those organizations that don’t have a CS ops group, I think you’ll see that added as well. But more broadly speaking, I think you’ll also just see more CS and CX leadership joining kind of the C-suite and making sure that it’s, again, going back to that idea of pulling the CS and CX leaders into actual management, strategic discussions, versus having it as a function somewhere else in organization.
Masha
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And so you said something about value in particular. Does value mean the same thing as revenue to you?
Jackie
No, not necessarily. And I think they’re related. If a customer is getting value out of your platform, it kind of comes back to that idea of if we’re naturally doing our job and making our customers successful, which to me translates to they find value in our product and what we’re doing with them, then the rest of the revenue pieces, the mitigated churn, all of those things will come into play. So from a company perspective, the two are related but not the same thing.
Masha
What would you say is the most controversial opinion that you hold about Customer Success that you wish that folks would just hurry up and get on board with already?
Jackie
Man, that’s a challenging one. I think maybe that CS can be solved completely with technology. I think a lot of people would like to think, if I find the right tool, then I can maybe have two CSMs somewhere that are just, they’re on call or whatever. But really the tooling is important, but it is an accelerator of what your team should do. And the human element should, in my opinion, never be removed from a CS organization. Because otherwise it’s not really Customer Success, right? It’s just—I don’t know. It’s just like a function somewhere in the organization. Again, I keep coming back to that. But yeah, the CS has to have a human element. Otherwise, it doesn’t really work.
Masha
Do you have any examples where you’ve seen that go really well, versus go really poorly?
Jackie
Yeah, so I’ve spoken to a few different leaders, because we were going through the process of actually identifying what’s the best CS tool to bring in house. So I did some due diligence and heard some horror stories of companies that had implemented tools, and either the process of implementing it didn’t go well, because the tools are much harder to use than they were. So then you end up spending a lot more time on your team actually trying to figure out how the heck to implement it and use it than actually have it helped you and kind of scale with the team is doing. But also, I think, using those tools to automate too much of the process, right? So I heard from a couple folks that there was so much pressure to kind of keep overhead costs down and staffing levels low that they wanted to use the tools to run, for example, all of the onboarding. So you have like a touchless onboarding experience where the tool is like sending out like, ‘Here’s what you do next. And here’s what you do next. And here’s what you do next.’ And for some tech solutions, maybe that would work for simple solutions, where you’re dealing with people that are savvy in this space and can handle it. But for me, that onboarding portion of the engagement is so critical, right? It drives and it’s linked to customer satisfaction, higher revenue rates, expansion, the whole nine yards. So the way that I view it is that the tool should really enable you to do your job better. So the way we’re setting it up is actually in the pre sales process, developing some playbooks, so that between that time where you’re talking to somebody about kind of the final stages of the sales process, and they’re super excited, and they’re like, ‘Wow, this was gonna be amazing.’ Having playbooks where the tool is helping us by sending them some proactive content. But with specifics around, ‘Hey, here’s this whatever framework, read this, this is how we’re going to discuss it in the onboarding, these are the things that we would expect you to cover beforehand, that we when we get to your kickoff, you’re ready.’ Which is very different than like, ‘Here’s the document, go fill it out. And then once you fill it out—’
Masha
‘Read this, watch this video.’
Jackie
Yeah, then we’re never going to discuss it again. So that’s really the way I think about, is using them to enable the team and scale the team but not replace the team.
Masha
Yep, totally hear you. And I forgot to ask you this back when we were talking about sort of the the teams that roll into Customer Success at BlueConic. Can you talk to us a little bit about how like expansion is handled, because that does seem to be falling onto the shoulders of Customer Success alot of the times, but you folks have two separate functions. And maybe we could talk a little bit about, you know, why you chose to do that and how the process works?
Jackie
Yeah, maybe I should’ve used that one in that controversial topic.
Masha
Okay, go for it.
Jackie
I will die on the hill that CSMs and AMs should be separate functions, I feel very passionately about that. And so in our org, they are separate functions. And so CSMs are really the ones who are working with our customers and translating their business challenges into functionality in the tool on the platform itself. So ‘I need to drive additional revenue from this top segment, help me figure out how to make that happen in our tool.’ Great, we can absolutely do that. Account Managers are responsible for making sure that the renewals are accounted for, for identifying upsell opportunities and expansion opportunities. If there are additional business units or brands within an account that we’re working on, then the Account Managers are responsible for planting and expanding those ones. Of course there has to be a close synergy with the CSMs and AMs so our CSMs and AMs have regular check-ins, the Account Managers are responsible for developing the original account plan, but with information from the CSM and in partnership with the CSM, and then revisit it and kind of figure out what the strategy is. And then our CSMs also identifies the needs for the AMs. So if they hear like, ‘Hey, we have a new team that’s joining.’ Or ‘There’s this new functionality that somebody needs.’ They’ll pass the lead to the Account Manager to follow up on. But that really relieves that stress, right? I feel like there’s always that stress point when, especially when the CSM is responsible solely for the revenue component of the account, too. It’s like, am I helping you? Or am I trying to sell you? We’ve heard that a lot from our customers with other platforms that they use, they’re like, we wouldn’t want to get on the phone because every time we tried to bring up a challenge or a problem, our CSM would say, ‘Oh, well, we have this other product functionality feature, whatever, all this, let me sell it to you.’ Which is just an awkward place to be and gets you away from that trusted advisor position that the CSM should really be in. If the customer thinks that every time I bring you a challenge, you’re going to try to find some part of your platform tool or whatever to upsell me, then you lose that functionality.
Masha
What’s interesting in your organization is that Account Managers actually roll into the Customer Success organization under you, versus being part of the Sales organization. So how does that work?
Jackie
Yeah, I think because of the way that we structure it, and where the CSMs and the Account Managers are really a true partner team. It works really well. And I would also say that our Account Managers are a little bit different, in that they’re also strategic advisors. So they are as equally skilled and talented at having a strategic conversation with our customers to say, ‘Here’s the business challenge.’ They might not be able to translate it exactly to like a technical, here’s how you’re going to configure this in our platform. But they definitely have a conversation around, this is how this might happen in the CDP instance. And because they work so closely together, and they’re like a strategic team, it’s really important that they are completely aligned and kind of reporting up and focusing on the same goals.
Masha
We’ve heard a lot that Customer Success, folks want to be sort of superheroes for their customers, kind of saving the day and making them successful. If you had a Customer Success superpower, what would yours be?
Jackie
It would probably be the ability to read customer’s minds and really understand what it takes to be successful. Because I think that’s one of the challenges is not being able to speak the same language, sometimes. It’s probably one of the bigger frustrations in the CS role. You’re like, I really want to help you, I’m trying really hard. But sometimes the language that you’re using internally to define things is different than the way that they’re doing it. And then also, there’s a process of building trust, to get to the point where you can even know what it is that they need to be successful, because they might not be letting you into those higher level goals and strategic initiatives that they are tasked with. And so if you could just kind of go in knowing that and then maybe on the back end also have the ability to translate it back into the language, that would be really helpful.
Masha
Yep, I see it. That one’s a popular one. [Laughs] I know we’ve got a few minutes left. Maybe I’ll just ask one last question, which is, what is the one story about Customer Success that you wanted to tell us about but we hadn’t asked about?
Jackie
I don’t think—I didn’t actually come up with like a single story that you didn’t cover in those other questions.
Masha
Fair. Yeah, no worries. And I guess just because we have a few minutes left.Do you have have any questions for us? Just want to leave that open to you as well.
Jackie
Yeah, so endgame here, are you kind of interested in developing content that serves like CSMs, Customer Success generally? Are you also working to kind of curate and cultivate talent in the CS space? Like? What’s the goal for both of you?
Masha
Yeah, that’s a super interesting question. So one of the more, I guess, personal goals we have in this space is elevating the voices of Customer Success leaders, I think you mentioned it’s becoming clear to organizations that this role is really, really strategic. But it still does seem to be under recognized. And just completely being completely frank with you, this is one of the only roles that I’ve been in tech for, whatever, 15 years at this point. And this is one of the only roles in technology that actually is majority women. And for me, personally, that’s like a big deal to elevate and uplift. And so I think that’s one thing. From an Ampersand perspective, we’re actually as I mentioned, we’re exploring product opportunities to the kind of the longer game is, right now we’re creating a community for Customer Success leaders. However we can help you that we’re happy to do. And so part of it is, you know, the blog series, but then we’d love to have, some of the other folks have mentioned, like, ooh, I’d love to read like what other people have said. And what other folks are saying, so we’ll share that just as an initial piece. And then over time, we’d love to figure out like, if there are ways that we can help you and your team, kind of scale yourselves without replacing, because that’s another really big value for us, we would love to have that conversation, too. So that’s kind of the endgame, is we do want to create a product in this space. We think that we’ve got a unique technology, but we also don’t want to technology first, kind of knock people over the head with it.
Jackie
Technology enabled.
Masha
Exactly.
Jackie
I think your point on kind of it being a very female centric role is really interesting. And not that we have to cover it in the blog, but just as an open topic of conversation, although we can, I think it’s also interesting for two points. Well actually, I should say three. Earlier in the conversation I mentioned, this idea of CS roles be in service of right, that that’s a natural place that women tend to thrive in those types of roles. What we see in the Account Management versus Account Executive kind of flip in roles. So it seems like a natural progression there. I also think it might be related to why you see the revenue piece of it live elsewhere. One, because you don’t have as many senior leaders, I guess, in kind of the management team level of an organization where most of the revenue related conversations have, but also because you don’t have as many female revenue related leaders in general.
Masha
Absolutely.
Jackie
And so I think a lot of times, because of that combination, that matrix, you see the revenue piece going elsewhere in the organization, into a sales organization, which realistically is more often led by male leaders.
Masha
Exactly. And I think to your point, the fact that companies are just cluing into how strategic retention is and how strategic expansion is, right? Which sales is normally not responsible for. This is like, oh, wait, we have all these amazing women leaders that are holding the house together. So I think there’s there’s this recognition, but maybe not quite fast enough. Maybe not quite enough of it. So anyway.
Anwar
I do have one question. How does this dynamic, I guess, play out with relation to other, let’s say teams, such as like Engineering or Product that are more male dominated? Are there really good collaboration is really happening between these teams, or are there pitfalls there too?
Jackie
Yeah, so speaking to the kind of BlueConic environment I think we’re really unique because we have phenomenal collaboration with both Engineering. So our Professional Service teams are pretty technical. And we have a lot of like data scientists and engineers, who mostly happen to be male. But the entire organization is really customer centric. So there’s a lot of collaboration that happens easily when we come to them and say, ‘Hey, this customer has this problem, let’s figure out what this looks like.’ So we’re lucky on that front. Our CS org actually is not dominantly female, to the point where we’re trying to intentionally shift it a little bit. And probably less so than others. But also interesting because our CSM folks are also pretty technical. So just from a resourcing perspective. But yeah, generally speaking across the org, collaboration is phenomenal. I was just gonna go back to your earlier point about the revenue piece. For me, if you think about it, one, they show that, leaders who are tied to revenue have risen through the ranks of roles faster and are the people who become like CEOs and stuff because you have that revenue ownership capability. Again, rarely women, because of the goals that they get expanded to. Another reason I would challenge other CS leaders to get more involved in the revenue is because your team is with the customer every single day. You know how they operate, you know their personalities, you know their challenges, you know their successes. It’s so natural to have expansion conversations when they know that you are there to make them successful every day; the expansion comes naturally. And it’s not a place of like, ‘Oh, man, I have to get an upsell goal.’ It’s is a ‘Hey, this is how software works, you need to do X. And in order to do X, we need to do this in the platform that costs a little bit extra money.’ And they’re like, ‘Okay, that makes sense.’ To pass that opportunity off to an Account Manager that lives somewhere else in the organization and doesn’t have that same relationship, at least from my perspective, which is like an empathy lead perspective, that feels very disjointed. Like our CSMs are empathy, expertise and partnership. That’s what we lead with every day, every single day. And if you’re doing that, then all the other components that we talked about, kind of kick into gear too. But it’s really that empathy, partnership and expertise, which both are CSMs and AMs are rockstars in, that really develops that relationship with the customers.
Anwar
I see. I do have one last question, on this note. So outside of passing that information to Account Executives, does it ever move upwards from a CSM to say you? And how do you go about that and pass that information, if at all, to the execs above you about your customers?
Jackie
Yeah, so a lot of regular check ins. So we have CS sharing sessions, where we take learnings from customer accounts and monthly, we have a call where we actually meet with the entire CS organization, Sales, Product, Marketing, and really anybody else who wants to join the call. And we talk about like, ‘Hey, here’s the challenge that customer was facing. This is how we went about solving in the platform. This was kind of the end result.’ So that we internalize those. We also do a CS monthly all-hands call where we talk about those things. And then findings are laddered up to the organization. I mean, as a management team, we meet every week, and we each of our units gives an update. And so they’re constantly hearing my feedback. Here’s the challenges that our customers are facing, here’s things that are going well, this is what we need to work on. So the Product leader can hear like, ‘Hey, customers are running into an issue with a bug in this rollout or in this functionality that’s not meeting its needs.’ And then they can take that and run with it. So it’s like a constant connection of feedback, which again, gets back to your earlier point of CS not being in that strategic position. So you miss out on that feedback cycle. And I think that’s a really, really important point. It’s great if you’re learning all these things in CS, but if that voice of the customer is not disseminated through the rest of the organization, then great, we made our customers happy. But then what about the next one. Like we only scale if we take those learnings and then we move it on to the next thing.
Masha
Makes total sense. Cool. Anwar, if you don’t have any follow ups, we should Jackie go.
Jackie
This is fun! We could do this all day.
Masha
We could. Jackie, thank you so much for taking the time. Just so you know, the next step is and we’re like super fortunate to have a little bit of a backlog now, but in a few weeks I’ll follow up with the cleaned up transcript and just vet it by you one more time to make sure you’re cool with us publishing and then we’ll go ahead and publish. And also just so you have something, a little bit of time to think about this. We’re going to ask you for an ask. We want to share this and we want to help in any way that we can right away. So if you’ve got, if you’re hiring or if you want people to read something, or if you want people to go somewhere or do something, let us know and we’ll make sure to share that as we promote the interview through our channels too.
Jackie
Great. And is it okay if I loop my PR team in so then they can know of it?
Masha
Of course. Absolutely. That’d be great. Cool. Well, it was awesome to meet you. Thank you so much, Jackie. And we’ll chat soon.
Jackie
Perfect. Have a great afternoon!
