Guest: Ben Winn – The Rise and Importance of Communities in Customer Success


Episode Description
Join us with guest Ben Winn, brand and community manager at Catalyst Software and one of the leading customer success community and thought leaders.
Catalyst is the world’s most intuitive Customer Success Platform (CSP), built by an experienced group of industry leaders and integrates with multiple enterprise platforms to provide one centralized view of customer data. Ben specializes in branding, community-led growth, and creative strategy.
Guest: Ben Winn
Ben Winn leads community and brand marketing at Catalyst Software, where he oversees content, events, partnerships, and more. Before founding CS in Focus, Ben previously built out the customer success function at SeamlessMD, Canada’s largest customer success community with over 2000 members.
In 2021 he was ranked as one of the Top 25 Customer Success Strategists globally, and in 2018, he won the Customer Success Innovator of the Year award for creating the account behavior formula.
CONTACT BEN WINN
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benwinn/
- Catalyst: https://catalyst.io/
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Jason Noble: Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Jason’s take on podcast with myself. Jason Noble here in London in the week running up to Easter. I cannot believe it’s Easter already. My partner in crime, Mr. Whitehead, say hello, Jason.
[00:00:14] Jason Whitehead: Hello everyone.
[00:00:15] Jason Noble: Thanks for joining us today.
We are super excited today for a another guest podcast today, a very different topic, something that is big in the world of customer success. I don’t think we’ve even broached the subject in previous conversations, Jason, with guests or with ourselves something that we’ve not even covered. We’re going to talk about the importance of on the rise of communities in customer success.
And we have the one and only Ben wind joining us from Catholic software. So Ben I’m sure most of you know him from the customer success committee. He’s brand the community channel manager, a catalyst software is a data-driven marketing strategists with a background in customer success. And community-building with specialists specialties around community led growth strategy around creativity, marketing led creative.
He’s the manager of events and community catalysts. He also hosts the humans of SAS podcast. So he’s a pro when it comes to podcasts, we were talking about his setup for podcasts versus our own. And we were feeling a little bit embarrassed not embarrassed, but I think he, Ben seen better ways of doing this.
So there’s lots of areas of improvement for us.
[00:01:22] Ben Winn: He’s also the goal coming on today was to show you up some, and
[00:01:27] Jason Noble: you’ve done that. So you’ve done that, but he’s also founded previously customer success in focus, which is an international community. And he really is a fellow customer success thought leader and QC leader.
And he’s also the head of production for Anthony Brocco. I understand. So Ben, please go ahead and introduce yourself a big, welcome. We’re super excited to have you on with us. Most of our listeners will know new, but for those that don’t just give a bit of insight into kind of your own background and your journey into communities and customers.
[00:01:58] Ben Winn: Yeah, thanks. First and foremost for having me on I’ve loved your show for a while. You guys are fantastic. Covered a lot of amazing CS content. So I enjoy pointing people your way when they’re looking for great CS podcasts, but yeah, I think you summed up a lot of my background while there I came from a customer success background.
I was the first CSM. And CS leader at a health tech company called seamless MD for quite a few years before founding CS and focus, which is now 2000 people Canada’s largest customer success community. And then when I started expanding it into the states, that’s where I met catalyst founders.
And they were like, Hey, instead of, doing this as, Your evenings and weekends job for no money. Why don’t you make this your full-time job? And, we’ll give you a team and, just build a CS community for us. And jumped at the opportunity to move to New York and build community for the customer success community full time.
And then
[00:02:47] Jason Noble: difficult to say yes to that was an absolutely jumped. The.
[00:02:51] Ben Winn: Yeah, Kevin to our CIO is very convincing. He’s a very good salesperson and they’ve made good on it. Like I’ve been very lucky at catalyst that it wasn’t just lip service because we were moving countries. So I was banking on them actually being honest and through COVID and through all these challenges.
Cause I was hired two months before the pandemic. They’ve stayed really true to being community centric, community focused, investing in community believing in community life growth. So it’s been an awesome journey. I
[00:03:19] Jason Noble: actually remember, I think I’ve listened. I have listened to one of the podcasts you did with Kevin on talking about your journey.
And I remember it was the beginning of COVID. I can pitch myself now. I was walking home from a session at a physiotherapist coming back and I was listening to it. It’s phenomenal. Really good. I think Ben you’re one of the leading thinkers and advocates for communities and there’s some great work that you’ve done at capitalist and elsewhere.
Why a community is so important now and why.
[00:03:47] Ben Winn: Community is just customer success at scale. When you think about it like in customer success, your whole job is to, you’ve got your customer, you identify their desired outcomes, then you build everything around, helping them to achieve their desired outcomes.
Like it’s a very simple definition, but at the end of the day, that’s what good. Community is just that at scale you identify who is in your communities and CSM doesn’t see us leaders is that everybody is it. CS leaders in FinTech is that you can get as broad or as niche as you want. But at the end of the day to build a successful community, you need to understand who.
Target community members are what they’re looking to accomplish. And then it’s your job as the community builder to then give them what they need to succeed, which can be a variety of things, but that’s why it can be used for customer success so well, because it allows you to scale and do you know, tech touch programs that allows you to give customers a place where they can help each other, where they can meet each other, sell from each other, buy from each other.
Learn how learn, how they’re leveraging your product. There’s a lot of use cases in community for customer success, as well as community for marketing, which is a whole other side of the equation.
[00:04:53] Jason Noble: I think one of the key things they do, they bring kind of advocacy to life. Don’t, they it’s really those engaging with customers.
And in your experience, when you start a community from a blank sheet of paper, whether there is no existing community, how do you go about setting one up and what are some of the key lessons that you’ve learned along the way?
[00:05:12] Ben Winn: Similar to think of it as launching a product discovery is probably the most critical thing that you can do.
So start off by talking to think of the hypothesizing about your ICP and then interviewing a crap load of people that fit that profile. Figure out what is keeping them up. What they’re working on, solving how they’re trying to solve it, where else they’re going now, what other communities they might be in?
When I joined catalyst, the, I already knew there were like eight other communities for CS leaders out there. So why would I be like, okay, I’m going to start a night slack team. No, it doesn’t make any sense. So instead after all my interviews, we ended up launching the co the coaching corner, which is a free mentorship program for customer success professionals, because that was a gap in the market.
That solved problems that people in our ICP we’re actively. Thinking about. And so that’s the, I think first and foremost, the most important thing to do when you’re thinking about launching a community from scratch, it needs to fill a gap. It needs to solve problems for people in your ICP. And then, Val, as you go from there and make sure you’re validating with an early group of advocates and users to be your founding community team.
[00:06:17] Jason Whitehead: You know that it’s great to hear that too. And you’ve described it to a crap ton of work to go on and do all that. Realistically, if a SAS vendor out there wants to create a community assumingly around their product or for some their, for their user base or user population, there may be some other industry ones that are maybe very specific to them.
What level of effort will realistically. Create something that be useful and meaningful to their customers as well as helped create the relationship and engagement that they’re looking for.
[00:06:47] Ben Winn: There, there are definitely variations here, but I’d say a standard, a general rule of thumb is one person’s full time.
I think like a lot of companies, I think I’m a big mistake. A lot of companies make is they make it a third of one person’s job and great. You’re going to have one third of, a community and it’s going to exist, but it doesn’t scale that way where, okay, we’ll get one third of the results and if it’s good, then we’ll invest more and we’re going to have what half the result like with community it’s either you do it right.
Or you don’t do it at all. At least it’s the best practice. Because when you launch a commuter. You’re running a lot of risks. Some of the biggest worries that SAS vendors have is that other customers are going to just start shitting on the product and start saying, build this feature or why isn’t this way, or this is broken and they’ll all just pile on line.
Or that it’ll just be a barren wasteland, right? You’ve spent $30,000 on a community platform, built it out, customized it hooked up SSL. And you have one person posting in there every month and that’s it. So again, there, there needs to be someone who is owning it end to end. In terms of the inception creation project, managing the design who’s fostering activity who is making sure continuously that it drives value.
And it’s not hard to prove out the ROI. Even if you look at simple things like ticket deflection customer advocacy, like you going to touch some numbers pretty quickly to that, but it’s definitely a mistake to have launching a community B a third of one person’s job.
[00:08:15] Jason Noble: I think it’s very similar to a lot of key functions in it.
A lot of people going into customer success, operations. You just do that. It’s that focus. I think that focus sends a very different message to customers, to people in the community. Actually, this we are doing. This is something very serious about how do you go about selling it then when you’ve built the community, how do you sell it to your customers?
And do you ever run into challenges where they see themselves competing with other customers, they may be up against their own competition. How do you get them? Both contributing actively?
[00:08:46] Ben Winn: And, we’re lucky to be in an industry and a profession within that industry.
I should say where people are generally. Really good people like it. It’s weird in customer success. Like people are just great. And it’s funny because we’ve run. We ran a virtual summit last January and half the panels. I think it was something like half the panels had competitors on them. And we’ve done lots of round tables.
We’ve done. Our customer advisory board has direct competitors on it and we have everyone sign NDAs and they’re sharing insights by. At the end of the day. And maybe we’ve just been lucky, but people just really like to help each other. And they’re careful not to disclose anything that’s like super confidential that would directly impact, but.
We’ve never had any issues with people being like, oh, I don’t want to share something smart that our team is doing, because I know that this competitor also uses your product and I’m scared. They’re going to see it. That’s treating it like a zero sum game where everyone just loses and it really doesn’t work out.
So fortunately, at least with customer success leaders, we’ve never had an issue where people were acting.
[00:09:53] Jason Noble: I think you’ve one of the key things is I think it is just the type of people, customer success, people are, it really is. And I think there’s something very special, with our, about OSS, about someone else’s success.
And I don’t think you see communities, people sharing and wanting to share and take part in things as much as you’re doing customer success.
[00:10:12] Ben Winn: Yeah. You guys are dedicating and have dedicated tons of time to just helping give people free advice and helping people level up in their careers. And that’s something that is a trend across our industry, which is amazing, which is why CS communities in particular are so special.
Why UCS is such a special industry and why need to keep investing in.
[00:10:32] Jason Whitehead: So I’m curious as well, too, when you’re launching a community entity one of the things that you found most effective for getting people to really want to participate and engage and keep coming back in that, and it relates to that as well as what sort of topics or content seem to be the most valuable to people.
Is it solving a technical issue? Is it something more strategic level or career related or something else? What about to be the best thing?
[00:10:56] Ben Winn: Yeah. A couple of questions in there. So I might divide it up into two because the first one around engagement is always tricky. I always say like engagement for the sake of engagement is not, and it’s never good.
I would rather see my community be dad, or, how one person posting a week then having 10 gratuitous posts that mean nothing and provide no value. Which again, translates a lot from customer success. Thinking about approach.
It depends. As long as people are getting value engagement matters in, in that you want to drive up the amount of value, but there’s a lot of metrics or benchmarks where people might say this is healthy or that’s healthy, but it’s really, those are really just vanity metrics are more maybe leading indicators in a best case scenario, right?
Like for example, we know as CS people, that product usage is super important, but. Depending on the person and the company, healthy product usage might look a little bit different depending on where you are. So it’s the same thing with communities again, relating it back to, to to a product itself in terms of what people find most valuable.
That’s really again, subjective depends on the company and the. With catalysts, a lot of the questions we get are, people want to customer because catalyst is so customizable in terms of the way you can build layouts and dashboards and configure playbooks and automations. People just want to learn from each other instead of reinventing the wheel.
They want to say, Hey, you’ve had all these great. Oh, braise and attentive and stack overflow and all these awesome people that are using your platform. Can we just do whatever they’re doing instead of building stuff from scratch at ours. And obviously we can’t just take their instance and give it, duplicate it for them, but we can definitely match them up so that they can learn and give them some resources on how they might think about it provided those companies are willing to share, but that’s just one example.
There’s communities I’m in that are mostly about. Technology or there’s one a minute about like marketing operations, where it’s people that are. Experimenting and trying new things and sharing insights, but a lot of it’s at the end of the day, it comes back down to not recreate reinventing the wheel.
And then networking like customer success. Leadership network is like one of the great ones. Gaming will retain another fantastic one. And it’s these places where you can come and network and you can put a problem out there. You can be like, Hey, VP of CS at this company, this is our problem. How have you solved it?
And generally you’ll get a lot of great responses that are super helpful.
[00:13:15] Jason Noble: Did you ever think? I was just thinking, there are so many, there are already so many great customer success communities out there. Do you ever think we’ll hit community fatigue? Are there other, too many? And how do you be actively?
Active in a good way in so many, is it difficult to do because I’m just thinking that there’s lots that I’ve signed up for, but there’s probably only a small number that I really actively contribute to have you thoughts around that, how you can help manage that. And,
[00:13:43] Ben Winn: yeah and it’s something I’ve talked about with actually the leaders of a lot of UCS communities.
And I know they’ve talked with each other about, is everyone recognizes that a lot of this started when. Customer success was newer, right? So it was the fact that it was the customer success community was enough to be like, oh my God, so excited. I’m going to go join the talk about things.
Now we need a specialize because ultimately what will keep your community growing over time is your niche. So for example now I’m no longer running CS and focus, but it has a Nisha. Like the only, and the largest one in Canada. So if you’re in the Canadian customer success space, like that is the best community for you to be in.
If you’re looking to like network and meet other people like Canadian tech companies. With modern CS pros, for example, fantastic one. You have to be a CS leader to be in there and they generally hold very true to that. And so when you send a message in there, it’s going to CS leaders and there’s is a Google group.
So it’s a little bit different. Some of the others, again, the differentiation is breakout CS run by Leah Cheney is a great one. And that’s like focused on being very small and niche. Like she keeps it very limited and has a different approach to building it. So at the end of the day, To prevent community fatigue.
What we need are more niches for those to be very clearly established so that we can engage and know exactly where like for example, I’m in, I think three different community builder slacks. I know one I’ll go to, if it’s Canadian community builders one is Networking and I get matched with people sort of one-on-one if I want to build my network that way and one is great for like just massive library of resources that I can find anything and everything about community.
So again, it’s just carving out those niches and then marketing your community in that way.
[00:15:29] Jason Noble: I love that. I think that is something that is so key and you’re so right. That to start with, it was everything. Was everything. Whereas now there are the specialisms are all these, this needs look at different areas of focus like that is what will keep people interested and that, that has to evolve and change over time as well.
[00:15:46] Ben Winn: But it’s different with a user group, right? Cause in that case, what they have an example, sorry, what they have in common is your product. So it’s still good to think about niches, right? So everyone using slack, whatever could be in a community to talk about the best ways to do SOC, but then within that community, you’ll still want to think.
How to carve out niches and how to separate people into geographies, industries maturity, a company size goals, right? There’s all those ways you can stratify your community. So w
[00:16:16] Jason Whitehead: when you’re launching community in if you’re a tech vendor as well, what sort of things would you need to do to drive internal alignment to make sure, okay.
There’s something the community for the support group for marketing, for customer success, and to make sure people are effectively. Directing customers to the community the right time versus this is something we should handle internally. How did, how do you make it all? How do you make it all
[00:16:35] Ben Winn: gel together?
It’s a good question. Launching a community is definitely a cross-functional endeavor. You need to align on at least for V1, what your core metrics that you’re hoping to move are. For example, ticket deflection is a very common one. So we’ll keep with that for the time being, cause it’s a very simple example to, to prove out.
So for that general, what I would say best practice is you have single sign on with your community, for your. Or through your platform or whatever, what have you, people can access it and then very quickly search the way they would Zendesk or hopefully your community integrates would send us for help scout or whatever your ticketing tool is.
For example, our community that we launched w scraped anything existing in the community, as well as the help desk. So you very quickly see if anyone had asked a similar question or talked about a similar topic, if not then it would prompt you to create your own posts. In which case you could do that.
And then the way we hooked it up was that when someone created a post like that, it would go to a slack channel that had multiple members. From our team. So at CSN, it had marketing in it. And that way we could quickly collaborate and see, okay, is this something where we should escalate it to Zendesk?
In which case we had looked like a one-click integration to turn it into a support ticket or do we let it rest? And what we would do as our policy was let it rest for 48 hours. And if it didn’t get any. Or it didn’t get answered in the best way. Then we would have someone from our team chime in and the community or we escalated designed us, but we always wanted to make sure that we were giving other customers the chance to ought to answer each other first.
And we would also do things like, Hey, we know this person from this company solved this. So we would send them the link to the community and to the post of the community and say, Hey, this person has this question. We know you did this before really well. Do you mind chiming in on what you found most useful or how you did that?
Oh,
[00:18:24] Jason Whitehead: wow. I’d like to being that librarian and coordinator of people
[00:18:28] Ben Winn: inviting them in. Yeah. Yeah. You always want to stimulate engagement as much as possible. There’s also a way I can’t remember which community it was, but it was a good trip. I think it was Jeff from Gainesville retainer told me another strategy is to when you want to post in the community.
A lot of times, what you’ll see is like the same people posting all the time. So a strategy for that is to email people and ask them, what is your or email small group of people and ask them what they’re trying to solve right now, or what challenges they’re trying to overcome. And then when they email you back, you said, can I post this as you in our community?
I’m just going to copy this text and put it in, and then you can spoof them and post as them with. It was honest. I think it’s like gray area, but I think it works because now someone else is posting. They’re getting a benefit because they didn’t have to do the work to log into the community and write up a post and share it.
You’re doing that for them, but then they’re going to get some helpful responses now. And you benefit as the community owner because you have diverse now people you’ve like you’ve widened the people that are engaging in your. I love that
[00:19:32] Jason Noble: I’ve actually seen me gain grow, retain that they do that. I’m going out an email the other day from Jeff.
Exactly like that. And you think, oh, and it does, it makes you want to respond, but it’s very clever. I think it really is very
[00:19:41] Ben Winn: clever. I still, everything clever half of it comes from,
[00:19:48] Jason Whitehead: obviously this would apply to your communities. Cause it sounds like you’ve done a hell of a job. Moving them along and growing and being thoughtful about that. But from other communities you’ve seen or participated in, or who’ve spoken to folks, is there a time when it’s time to shut this community down because it’s hurting our brand, it’s disappointing our customers.
It’s not delivering on the vision. And how would you recognize that? Or advise them on, stick a stick with support, stick
[00:20:12] Ben Winn: with something else for now. Yeah. Community is it’s. The comparison that comes to mind is four-day workweek. Once you’ve let that genie out of the bottle, it’s very hard to put it back in.
People are not going to be like, okay, four day, didn’t go so well. So we’re all going to go back to five days. Sorry. So community is a very similar, the same way. Like you can not. If you’re a, if it’s a customer community. So I think, the out there public ones that you created a passion project.
I think those, you can wind down if you’re not getting the value and it’s just taking up too much time and money to run. I think you can just send an email to that effect and people will be very understanding. If it’s a, if it’s a customer one and it’s, because it’s hurting your brand or something like that’s a problem.
In that case, it’s time to do a relaunch. But again, that goes why that goes back to why it’s important to have one person where this is their job is to own the success of the community and achieve these established outcomes. And if they’re not achieving them, why are they not achieving them?
What is needed? Figure out how we can intervene, recognize leading indicators of why it might be going this way. Do you need more moderation? If everyone’s just coming in with feature requests and complaints about the product, maybe you need more moderation. Maybe you need to redesign the community so that they have a specific outlet where those go.
Maybe you need to change the format where maybe they’re not putting in. Feature, suggestions or feature requests, but you’re promoting in your product roadmap for, 20, 23. And they’re just prioritizing and doing that as a group without votes and downloads. Like you can get creative, but it’s about figuring out each problem as it comes along.
And at the end of the day is it accomplishing what you intended to? I think it’s pretty extreme to shut it down altogether. Cause that just sends a horrible message. That’s like people saying. Nope, no political talk at work, right? Okay, sounds good. It doesn’t work like you can’t people are people they’re going to talk about things.
If you just shut down or even a D ongoing debates about Twitter and Elon Musk and all of the free speech on Twitter, right? If you’re shut down, if people are commenting and your community, all these horrible things about your product. If you close that down, they’re just going to go to somewhere else and you better run as they’re going to go to G2, or they’re going to go to glass door, they’re going to go to wherever you don’t want them to go.
So better it happened in your space and that you moderate it. Then when it happened in the wild without. But
[00:22:24] Jason Noble: it’s also, that, it’s the voice of the customer. You’ve got the opportunity to really listen to what the real voice of the customer is saying and do something with it.
And I think a lot of people quite often are scared of that. What are they really going to say and how to ensure away from it? Do you ever run into challenges where you start building communities and then you get pushback from the stakeholders or the companies that said they want us to do it where they’re saying we’re on, actually, this doesn’t make sense.
And they shy away
[00:22:48] Ben Winn: from it.
I definitely get some of the fear around is it going to be well moderated? Are people going to comment negative things? What if someone posts a question and we don’t take action on it, what’s our liability. In terms of SLS and support time and all that kind of stuff, those things come up, those are all valid.
And they need to be have, thought out responses, but It’s nothing that should deter launching a community at all. Generally the biggest deterrent is just when I really hammer home, the resources required to launch and run a successful community. They’re just like we either don’t have budget to dedicate one person, hire one person specifically to build and run all this, done a budget for a community platform.
So we’re going to hold off until we can do that. Okay. So actually along those.
[00:23:34] Jason Whitehead: When is the right time for a SAS vendor to launch a community of some nature. And how should they prioritize that versus things such as investing support or CS ops or CSMs, what do you think of the trigger points there?
[00:23:47] Ben Winn: You can start a community before your product is even alive. I think it just depends on what your outcomes are going for. You can also start a community late. Like I, I will give an example of each Josh Schachter, who is the founder of update AI, which is based out of New York. Like a pill he’ll cringe at me for saying this, but simplified terms, gong for customer success.
So check out update AI, but he has been doing in-person meetups. The last few months he invites people and always says some special guests great food drinks. And just those, I think, to start building out that community of people that are advisors that are going to be future customers that are just customer success leaders in New York.
Great Mike in his community will evolve and change over time as his products rose. And, but he just came to market. He’s very early on, but he launched this extremely early this community in New York on the other end he is a customer great customer catalyst. They just launched their customer community a couple of weeks ago.
It’s beautiful. If you’re in product or in data, definitely check out the heat community. Most of it I think is open to the public and there, A massive, I think series C company hugely successful and they could have launched community earlier. Sure. But they now is the right time with their resources and they’ve done a great job of it and they’re already getting some great early results, some interesting early data.
I always say the earlier the better, but I know that’s a cop-out cause we always say the same thing about customer success. Like when should you hire. So be your first hire. Okay. Yeah, absolutely. But I would say the earlier the better, but you could really do it at any stage, so it’s, as soon as you can spare the resources, I would say it’ll do nothing except accelerate either your pipeline.
If you’re looking to leverage community for marketing purposes or your customer success outcomes. If you’re looking for community for customer advocacy, customer advisory, board, user groups retention, ticket, affection.
[00:25:35] Jason Noble: W what do you see the future of community? So if we look five years out what does it look like?
Do you see this, something being even bigger than it is today? Every SAS organization, every product has it built in? What are your thoughts around this?
[00:25:49] Ben Winn: Yeah. I definitely think that. It all depends because community is really broad, but I think when we’re speaking about customer communities yeah, I think every organization every, forward-looking, cause even now it’s only a small portion that do.
But I do think in five years it will be very much the norm that. SaaS organization we’ll have a customer community. We’ll have a dedicated customer, community manager if not multiple. And that will sit within customer advocacy customer experience, and it will be the same group that’s responsible for managing customer community.
That’s also doing customer advisory boards. That’s also doing user groups, Tulsa doing research that’s basically managing. Yeah the community side of your customers. And ultimately we didn’t talk about it, but that’s one of the biggest impacts of stickiness, right? Is building a community like you can’t replicate that in other places.
So if you can build something that people really enjoy engaging with and get a lot of value out of it, they’ll have, that’ll make it even more difficult for them to turn and go to another customer because that means losing access to your community. Over the next few years. And there’s also a lot of tech advancements being made companies like comScore are doing an amazing job of bringing all these community technologies together.
So yeah, I think in the five years, community tech stack will be much more robust. There’ll be community teams at every SAS company for both marketing and customers customers.
[00:27:09] Jason Noble: And this has been such a cool conversation. What we always like to do at the end is give our guests what we call a bowl challenge question.
And the one for you is what do you see as the number one action that companies can take today and their customer success teams to really embrace custom communities.
[00:27:31] Ben Winn: I’d say the number one thing you could do is if it’s something that you’re open-minded to. Have a, if you have, it depends on your size, but have someone from your CS team, just do some initial discovery around your, go to your top 10 customers. And your VPs of see whoever you sell to, I should say and do some discovery on what’s keeping them up at night.
What are the biggest pain points? How are they working on solving them? And then see if there’s a common threat, because if you’re a top 10 customers, if leaders from your top 10 customers are all having similar problems you can help solve them. One-on-one or you have a clear use case there for saying, Hey, we can bring these 10 people together and they can help each other.
And we can bring in more people. And if they are having this experience, then more people were not in RCP, definitely are also on the same one. And then you can start justifying the investment. But I would say first, like valid. The concept. So is there a want for it? Is there a need for it? Is there, are there common challenges between our users that could be solved with this?
Are a lot of our 80% of our customers having the same issue. And then when you start seeing those broad trends, it’s pretty easy to validate another easy step is just to even SIM even simpler. Look at your, do some analysis in your health, in your So ticketing system, like what per se, it’s probably 80% of the tickets are like the same three things.
So those are things that you could easily have in a community forum where you don’t need the same someone using canned responses, answering them every time you can have them live in there. And you can actually go in deeper on to these questions. So even just doing a quick analysis of that, looking at support times, looking at common trends should be easy to spin up some numbers around ROI and see if it’s worth going to.
I
[00:29:08] Jason Noble: love that. I think that is such it’s, that’s an actual thing. It’s so easy. Anybody can really, you can go in and do that and really pull out, what are those key things and those that engage with your customers that encourages you go there, make sure you’re talking to your customers.
There will be some commonality. Let’s bring them together. And this has been absolutely amazing. Like I said, at the beginning, this is something that we’ve not spoken about before. I think it’s something that we will definitely keep talking about. I’d love to get you back on with us in the future, as this grows and evolves, and we see more customers embracing this, but a massive, thank you, sir.
[00:29:40] Ben Winn: Okay. Awesome. Thank you doing that. Before we
[00:29:42] Jason Whitehead: go, we always like to do a shameless plug, so please let us know what’s important or exciting to you to catalyst. What have you, and if there’s ways people can get in touch with you, what’s the best way to
[00:29:53] Ben Winn: reach them. Yeah. So definitely check out@catalysts.io, if you are a CS leader and you’re not using catalysts currently we’re getting a lot of people switching from, I’m not going to say name to start from legacy platforms to us for very key reasons.
So I would love to share more about that with you. But so check out catalyst.io and then yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn. It’s just B E N w I N would also recommend for anyone in CS out there and check out CS means.io. That’s our meme library. So if you’re just looking for a laugh and want to take a little break yeah.
CS mediums.io.
[00:30:29] Jason Whitehead: Awesome. Thank you so much for being with us today, Ben really appreciate it. That’s
[00:30:32] Ben Winn: it. Thank you, man. Thank you so much for having me. Hopefully talk to you soon. Take care.
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