Guest: Philipp Wolf – The State Of The Customer Success Industry And Where It’s Going In 2022

Guest - Philipp Wolf
The Jasons Take On...
The Jasons Take On...
Guest: Philipp Wolf - The State Of The Customer Success Industry And Where It’s Going In 2022
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Episode Description

Join us with guest Philipp Wolf, CEO of Custify, a customer success platform designed for your B2B SaaS business that helps you better meet customers’ needs, reducing churn and increasing lifetime value, and that allows you to see in-product usage insights as well as data from CRM, support, billing, and other systems in one place.

Today we’re talking with Philipp about the state of the customer success industry and where it’s going.

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The Jasons Take... On is Sponsored by Success Chain!

Success Chain provides the tools, services, and support you need to build your change management, user adoption, and customer success capacity. You achieve greater results faster, more effectively, and cheaper than you can working on your own. 

Meet Our Guest

Philipp Wolf

Philipp Wolf

CEO - Custify

As the CEO of Custify, Philipp Wolf helps SaaS businesses deliver great results for customers. After seeing companies spend big money with no systematic approach to customer success, Philipp knew something had to change.

He founded Custify to provide a tool that lets agents spend time with clients—instead of organizing CRM data.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Jason Noble: Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the latest episode of the Jason’s take on podcast. We’re thrilled today to have a new guest with us Philip Wolf from Costa Phi. And we’re going to be talking about the state of customer success in 2022. I can’t believe it’s already nearly.

It is the end of January as the end day in January, but we’re already a month into 2022, but we’re going to have a chat with Phillip, just to talk through some of the challenges with. What are the, some of the changes that he’s seeing in his experience? Jason, anything you’d like to say before we step in?

[00:00:30] Jason Whitehead: Yeah. Just thank you, everyone for joining us. We’re excited to have you back for what’s going on our third year now. So this is great. Very excited to be here. And Phil, thank you so much for joining us, but this is really exciting to have you here.

[00:00:40] Philipp Wolf: Thank you guys for having

[00:00:42] Jason Noble: Phillip look a big welcome just for our listeners.

If they don’t know already, you’re the CEO and founder of justify customize a customer success management plan. Really aimed at B2B SAS businesses. So really a lot of our listeners really ties in a lot with what they’re doing. Your background is really development focus, which I thought was really interesting.

You’ve spent a good portion of your time before cost defy with a Vera building out their protection, antivirus products, a really interesting way to come into it, but just give an introduction for our listeners. Tell us a bit more about yourself, your journey, and what you brought you guys to create.

[00:01:15] Philipp Wolf: Yeah, absolutely.

So you’re right. I was in a in a different industry. Let’s say I was in the security industry for quite a while wound about like 20 years of my life, I would say. And Indiana, however, of this journey, I was spending a lot of time, like in Burrock management and building products. And that’s also when I got in touch with other SAS companies with the leadership team typically, and in that time It came to my attention that these teams typically knew a lot about customer acquisition, typically by the send even like PPC teams and paid acquisition.

And then we do this marketing channel and answer force. And when it came to the question like, okay, what do you guys do? Actually, once the customer is a customer, it’s Yeah we sent them some newsletters or this, so it was clear that there was this huge discrepancy in between what these SAS companies were investing and knowing about customer acquisition versus customer retention.

And that was the first, it was eight years ago or something. And that was the first moment when I actually started looking into this. And tire attention churn a topic for subscription-based businesses. Giving that already back then the market of subscription-based businesses was was already growing a lot, many traditional businesses, Adobe as the best example of bent from a classical approach into the subscription-based business.

So I knew that this market is definitely going to grow. And I didn’t know it was customer success. The term I wasn’t so familiar with it back then. But this research, when I started to look into what are the tools out there, what can people do? What can growing SAS companies use? And certainly the landscape was a bit different back then from the tools that are, that were available.

When we started custody, firearm. Five years ago. But that was the initial trigger to actually create something that helps these growing SAS companies that are not at the enterprises of the world to have also a tool in hand that is easy to use, easy to install integrate into their environment quickly.

So that was the trigger back then.

[00:03:10] Jason Noble: I love that. Cause it is, as you said, a lot of organizations are challenged with it. They struggle with it. What do we need? A lot of them are still trying to figure out what customer success means for them, for their customers. One of the things you talk about, a customize, how you guys have built a systematic approach to helping customers be successful.

I think your background building technology teams and product teams, and ultimately great products helps with this, but what do you mean by systematic approach there? Can you expand on that?

[00:03:36] Philipp Wolf: Yes. I would say the we have two sorts of customers when they come to us one they are very prepared.

They have a customer success strategy. They have all the daytime plays and the others. They need a bit more guidance. And for them we have established a a process over the years that we refine of course a bit, but it helps them to get this consulting. Component in the beginning when they start off.

So basically best practices or what’s, what are other SAS companies doing? What could you also implement? And what we typically do is going as far as looking into their business. So they basically would in a zoom session, they would basically explain their product and their business to us, to our customer success.

And based on what we see there we will then give them advices on the tracking because one crucial part in and that’s, I guess also something we can talk about when it comes to trends for customer success. One crucial part is data. And if the data isn’t right the CS team make decisions that are.

Simply based on wrong assumptions or based on no data, meaning I cannot even take the uninformed decision. So that is approach here to help them really get the right data in the platform. That means we make sure that we connect to the Heights systems and their environment, like the CRM, the payment gateway, and these things.

But we also make sure that we get that data from the product. Because typically all these health scores and everything that is used to measure how likely this customer is to to new those things are typically based on data. They attach points on adoption that touch points within the product.

And if the CS team doesn’t have this information typically it’s very difficult for them to reach out to the right customer with the right message at the right time.

[00:05:17] Jason Whitehead: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting too, because talking about having the data and the touch points, and when you said, when you first started, you’re asking, what do people do after you had your customer help?

We send them a newsletter and it sounds very different of, oh, we have a newsletter to data to, to really customize the message and think about, and be intentional what we’re doing. I’m curious in the five years since you’ve been around, what are some of the biggest changes that you’ve seen?

Your services and ways of thinking and ways of working with customers and customer success in general.

[00:05:44] Philipp Wolf: So I would say the position got more and more as the position of a CSM is more and more challenging. It’s a very demanding position knowing ourselves. We record of course constantly forward him.

And knowing that we’ve worked with other CS teams also knowing their pain firsthand. So I think the CSM position itself I wouldn’t S I wouldn’t say it’s like a product manager, but I’d go security into this direction. For many of our customers, at least why you need to have a empathic part and a part that works, that likes to work with customers, right?

So you need to be empathic. You need to understand you need to be able to eat the home. You need to be able to deescalate certain things that, may maybe some support ticket, escalated, and so forth. So you need to be able to jump in there. So you have this human company. Then you have this business component there.

So very often after time, you need to understand your customer’s business in order to help them best possible with your product. Every business is slightly different. No, typically none of the customers is the same. So we need to understand that part. So you have a business understanding a need for this position, and then you have.

Also this technical position, depending a little bit, of course, on the product that you are selling. But many of our customers, they have a software product and many of the times they have a software product where the audience is not necessarily technically. So that means you have a non-technical audience.

Supposed to use this tool, let’s say a marketing tool or these kind of things that you need to help them to get to the the full potential. That means you also have this technical component there. You need to understand your product, which is typically a software product. So there are some technology components in it, and also the way that your customers are using the product and these three things combined.

Make a good CSM and that’s actually quite, it’s quite a, if you think about that’s quite a demanding demanding position. And I wouldn’t say that the demand was that high, let’s say 5, 6, 7 years ago. So I would say the demand towards the CSM gets higher and higher. And that of course also means that our customers face difficulties in hiring CSM.

So the market market gets a little bit more uneasy there. And More and more SAS companies building these teams means of course even more demand of CSMs out there. That is something that we definitely saw changing over the last over the last couple of years, it was much easier.

I would say to hire a CSM five years ago, then it, Canada is now for the SAS company.

[00:08:07] Jason Noble: Like you say, I it is, CS has changed in itself over the last five, six years massively getting such a demand for these individuals, but also. People with experience that can apply to very different roles. It’s not just about outreaches to customers and being proactive.

There are some organizations where CS means very different things. You will have an element of support. So it’s finding the right individuals to do that. And I think one of the key things is we’ve seen, we talked an instruction in the last two years with COVID I think had been very different for everybody.

We’ve seen some huge changes in transformations in businesses and how businesses. And even how people work with this big shift now to, to remote working and even hybrid working. What impact do you think some of these changes now with how businesses have changed over the last two years are having on how we work with customers, with how we work as business.

[00:08:56] Philipp Wolf: Yeah, that’s a good question. So the most controversial topic I think that we have when we onboard new customers and where there is no, still no clear strategy is the definition of a. Of the responsibilities of a CSM, I would say there is a future agreement on attention. Okay. So if you talk attention, then this is almost unarguably longing to see us, but then the question comes, who exactly does the up sell or the cost sell or the renewal talk?

Is that sales or is it. And we have quite controversial opinions there within our customer base. That’s very interesting. And there’s no, the only time that I can say for sure is that the I have a new responsibility that becomes a Q 10, so that a CS team is carrying a number and they have this debt, big debt becomes a bit more of a number, but a bit more of a 10, but I can still see that Many of the time, it says team would still be involved in upset cost cells, organ yours, then onboarding teams, I think, is something that we also see as a trend.

So splitting the CS team into someone that is specifically responsible for. And I’m coming back to your question regarding the, what changed in the pandemic. This is something that, that interesting enough has has changed in our, from our observation with customers. Onsite meetings that we typically saw, they are completely gone and everybody knows that.

And it’s just like broadly accepted even in the larger customers that we have, like where onsite meetings has had been a must for the onboarding team or for the CS team. That is just not the case anymore. And I don’t think that’s coming back anytime soon or maybe probably ever It’s amazing.

[00:10:40] Jason Noble: How customers have accepted that as well. Haven’t they, people are seeing the benefit of it. There’s no need to travel. And even, I think the other flip side is you could work from anywhere, and it really changes your mindset.

[00:10:51] Philipp Wolf: We, yes, we had however, some customers that it was quite a challenge for them because it was.

The the pandemic was introducing itself or, and said guys in six months, I’m there. So maybe you prepare your Botox. So we don’t need to go onsite anymore. This came pretty quickly. And that was indeed a challenge for many of our customers that had this component of.

Onsite team coming there taking care of your team. And they had all processes tied around this this onboarding event. And all of a sudden they couldn’t do it anymore. They still managed to do it, but that was certainly something that w impose quite some challenges on those companies. Not saying that this is the majority, but you would be surprised how many companies were still sending onboarding teams to customers even in the 2020.

[00:11:38] Jason Whitehead: Sure. So Filipino, I liked what you were saying about the controversy that always comes up around sales and CS and all that, because I find when working with CS customers, that sort of the rule of three is like a third of their time working with our CS team, CS leadership, a third of their time working directly hands-on with customers and a third of the time really doing that internal alignment where that needs to go.

I’m curious as to how you see most companies actually addressing that sales, CS alignment, and one of the biggest hurdles there to them. Getting this figured out. And how does that impact what you guys do implementing a CS technology address?

[00:12:09] Philipp Wolf: So I would say it depends a lot on the product that they have.

What we clearly see is that if the sales team is heavily involved in the purchasing process. So if they have a lengthy sales process and there’s eventually even as a pre sales engineer involved, or these kinds of situations, then the sales team is typically also. Much more involved afterwards, if you have a situation, which is a morbid, like our own process in customize.

So of course we have a sales team and they take you through the demo of the product and they take you to the pricing and so forth, but then they do the handover. In, in, in our example in CACI five, we don’t have a a salesperson involved anymore after basically the agreement is assigned.

But this is something where they’re still a mixed situation within our customer base. This is the most controversial one. And the other one, and that’s also that’s actually one of our most clicked block articles is the difference between customer success and support. What, how much has the involvement of a CS person in.

It all in this not go active but active Sure. I’ll customer questions. And it’s also difficult to draw the line there for some customers, us included. We have a challenge there because the questions that our customers have are typically not be able to be answered by someone in the first level of support that you know, like a random person.

Why? Because for this question, you typically need to understand the business. Typically need to understand the history of this customer and so forth. So who’s better in. In this information, then the CSM, right? So you tend, of course, towards getting the CSM drawn into this kind of conversations. We have we have a pretty good experience.

You said one third, one third, one third, I guess I would, in our case at put it probably in quarters and add another, a piece in the puzzle, which is this So pod component where if it’s not something that the normal support person can handle in our case, at least the CSM is taking care of this.

Now this is absolutely debatable and you can probably have different opinions on that. We have a pretty good experience with this monitor, because this, the way that we can help the customer, if they have an issue is much more. Informed much more quicker and in much more depth, if we would versus handling someone in the support team, having this question answered there,

[00:14:30] Jason Noble: how are your customers reacting to that?

I Do they, are they come into kind of a consensus on what the CSM should be doing, that they agree with that way of working.

[00:14:39] Philipp Wolf: Do you mean if they implement our model themselves? Yeah, absolutely.

[00:14:42] Jason Noble: Say if they listened to it well, or rather than not, if they implement your model, but how they work with you guys, do they use your CSM is like you intending them to you.

Oh,

[00:14:50] Philipp Wolf: they yes. So they appreciate this of course, a lot. So for them, for the customer, this is of course the most convenient a way because I have one person that I can trust too. I know that any question that I asked this person already knows all my history and so forth versus I have anonymous chat where I don’t know the other person and it.

Someone from a support center that let me look into your account first and takes them, I don’t know, 20 minutes to understand the last support tickets and so forth. So for the customer experience, this is in my opinion something very good. The question is just if that matches your philosophy of CSS, right?

So this is the, this is a bit of a debatable question there

[00:15:30] Jason Noble: finding with customers that you have to explain what customer success is to them or. Oh do they have a very different understanding?

[00:15:37] Philipp Wolf: I wouldn’t say that. No, but I would say that some of the customers, they have a customer success strategy, so it’s not a hundred percent the strategy isn’t clear.

So like questions of course, that our team has throughout the onboarding is like, how high touch do we want to get with customer? Because do we put a lot of focus on automation and send them emails? Or do we put a lot of focus on creating notifications tasks and so forth? So where are you there? All right.

So there’s an many of the times you realize there’s not the customer didn’t really think so much about the strategy there. And it starts with this simple questions. It goes do you guys want to QB do QBR send your, so how long is the QBR? What kind of things do you want to discuss with the customer?

Do you have a segmentation of low touch and high touch customers? Where do you draw the line? And these are all questions that’s are part of this strategy. And that is something not every customer has prepared or laid out completely, which is fine, which is also I guess, why they come to us so that we can actually help them to map this out.

And also we can say, okay, if you do it this way, you probably have advantages this and this. However, you also probably have to invest a bit more because. If you really go this high touch model, you cannot do this with two CSMs and you cannot have a CSM handling a portfolio of 100 customers.

That’s simply that wouldn’t scale. That wouldn’t work. It is it’s that

[00:16:53] Jason Noble: scalability. That’s the hard bit. Isn’t it? You can put in place the right processes, people tools. I would say we can implement custom . Hey, how do we make sure it scales? How do you think if we look a bit further out, we’ve talked a lot about kind of what we see as the state of customer success this year.

But if you were to look out over the next three years to say 20, 25, what do you see? Some of the big changes are in what customer success will be, what it means to businesses and how, and what impact that those changes would have on businesses or customers.

[00:17:23] Philipp Wolf: So I would say which is good for us as a business, of course, but I would say, which is not good for you.

And for me as a customer, most businesses don’t have customer success implemented in the stage that they should have. We see clearly that many SAS companies, they start too late. They have a lot of processes in place. Already. Tools are not in the connector. It’s hard to get the information in one place.

That’s the worst. So they start at a very late stage. And that’s one thing that I would say in the project in the five years, also from an investor perspective, what they will push down to the companies before they do an investment, is that this moment when people start implementing customer success, It’s definitely going much more to the beginning of the company early stage.

So maybe your tens higher is a CSM. Okay. So in the right after support. You also think about customer success. You don’t postpone this to CSA. So you have very early on that thing. That’s mindset in the company because it’s also a mindset. It’s a commitment of top level management.

It’s it’s a proactive mindset. It goes through many departments and you guys know that property as well. When you talk to CSMs, they are typically very connected in the company that they talk to product. They need to understand that ultimately they need to communicate this to the customer.

Then they talk to sales. They need to understand eventually new pricings, upsell opportunities, et cetera. So they’re there. They understand support. They understand SLA is so they are quite interconnected also in, within the company. So I think that is one thing starting earlier with customer success that, that becomes a trend down when it, when we look at the CSM position itself, I think that can, that we discussed earlier will also continue.

So it won’t be easier to find CSMs, first of all. That’s, that can goes on and the CSM position itself will also be even more demanding, when we think about the. Capabilities such a person needs to have Yeah, I think so that would be the things coming to mind earlier start and more systemized eventually start.

So you guys also know probably five, six years ago, there wasn’t as much as content and education content there that it is now. So now you have a lot more there you have a lot more podcasts, you have a lot more people sharing their best practices. And that helps of course. Other other companies that don’t have it implemented yet to get started quickly.

And the more efficient.

[00:19:36] Jason Whitehead: Yeah. In in my business, we do a lot of consulting and half of our customers are customer success companies coming in and working with the software vendors to put in their processes and strategy and develop their teams and all that good stuff. And the other half of our customers are actually the buyers of software, their prospects, and their customers, and they help the change management user adoption.

And we have a lot of them actually come to us after system’s been live for a couple of years when people aren’t using it. And. One thing that I find fascinating. There’s still a big disconnect between what the softwares of how they approach CS versus the buyers, how they approach change and adoption and creating and perceiving value.

And it’s still there. And what I’m finding as well as when I talk with buyers of software, they’re like, we have 15, 20 different systems in here or more. That’s even a small company and they’re experiencing a lot of different flavors of customer success. And they’re like, no, this one, I was on a call with their vendor the other day.

Didn’t have a CS group, didn’t have a clue about business outcomes. Wasn’t focused on it. And it was painful. It was painful to, I could just see my customer going, got a thing. So I’m curious because one of things I’ve maintained is that as more and more software, come into the customer success world and start to invest in earlier and then really go out there.

Increasingly I think it’s going to be a source of competitive advantage and they’re going to be able to point to, oh, our customer success team will get you more value in this other perspective software company you should buy from us. And here’s the proof to it. I’m wondering since you work with so many CST.

What are you seeing in terms of how they’re differentiating their CS to some of their competitors or in the next three to five years? Do you see that becoming a bigger issue of if we don’t have a really strong CS program and camp prove to it, it’s going to slow down our sales.

It’s definitely slow down our retention.

[00:21:09] Philipp Wolf: Okay. For sure. So let me ask you a question before I answer that question. So I’m sure that you guys also use some tools. Now, when was the, when was it. Was there a time, first of all, at all, where you had this experience that wow. Someone really proactively, like you had this moment where CS really mattered, like someone who actively reached out to you because you didn’t onboard correctly, or you did have some questions there.

You didn’t use the product. Did you have this experience?

[00:21:35] Jason Whitehead: No, I, I think I’ve had a few automated drip emails and things like that. I will say I had one company actually, it was Upwork, which surprised me of all things, where they did a very nice proactive here’s how to get the most out of your Upwork experience can be, get on a call for 15 minute thing to get you there.

And they had a tight and right. And I’m like, this was really fantastic. 15. Onboarding that helped me move forward and actually spend money with their platform and their tool. But for the other tools that I’ve used now, I’ve actually been incredibly disappointed. Yep.

[00:22:01] Philipp Wolf: See, and this ask this question to almost anyone and the answer would always be that.

So that means there’s still a lot of room for you to differentiate yourself from the competition by just doing, let’s say best practice and customer success. And I think most of the customers They are, the CS teams are not necessarily so much aware of what their competitors are doing. At least not that we talk about it that much in our conversations with them.

But what they clearly want to do is getting this black deafness in the conversation, getting this human touch in the relationship. And then that probably already make the difference, right? Because this experience that you just told me, I can totally share it. I have probably I’m using 20 SAS tools myself.

And I had one really good experience last year where I was like, wow. Th that was nice. That was a proactive audit came in the right moment, but the right message I’ve fed personality care off. And I had also an issue and it was like soft immediately. It was like, magic was like, awesome. This was like in the book, but all the others I had, from well-known brands also where it’s really not that great of an experience.

So I think to to make a difference there it’s even not that hard for CS teams. If you look at what most. Companies are doing poverty included their competitors. Yeah. Are

[00:23:19] Jason Noble: you still using those other 19 tools?

[00:23:22] Philipp Wolf: Not all of them, but most of them, I have to say

[00:23:26] Jason Noble: that’s the problem is I think,

[00:23:27] Philipp Wolf: yeah, I think pain might not be big enough yet,

[00:23:30] Jason Noble: but it shows a maturity, but also you think some organizations just aren’t folks want us, if they put the effort in it and the investment in it, there’s so much more.

Then they could get so much more value they could drive for you and I, to your point, Phillip, I don’t think it’s

[00:23:44] Philipp Wolf: difficult. It’s not, it’s really just a, even if you don’t have the perfect process, even if you don’t have the perfect team and you can take all the customers, pareto principle, 20% of the things implement, will probably already fixed 80% of the issues. And that’s makes already a huge difference to most of what your competitors will do. So that would be also my advice like for the audience, if they haven’t started doing those things. Offboarding things like I was, we did an experiment with with one of our customers about off-boarding and we really researched a lot in this topic.

Papa off-boarding almost no SAS company has a popper offboarding in place. It’s so sad. It’s not just to reduce the churn, but it’s also I have so much to say about your product and you don’t care. I left your product because I’m disappointed. And I have so many things in my mind that I would share with you so you can improve.

You don’t care. You just let me go. Why is that? And it’s also

[00:24:36] Jason Whitehead: sharing with you if they’re not sharing with you though. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:24:40] Jason Noble: Yeah. It’s a simple process. You should do it. People aren’t thinking, we’ve got to think about the whole customer journey and part of that journey could be them leaving.

Let’s make sure we do that. So they’re saying the right things to our competitors, the market.

[00:24:52] Philipp Wolf: It’s not even just about, like you’re saying that I think is after and having, let’s say split up in a good way. It’s also the, all the learnings that you can take. Like, why did this, why does this customer there some turn that you will never be able to to They go out of business, they got acquired and the guys use another platform and they just, yeah.

Want you out. There are some things you cannot influence, but I would say for the, for a good portion of your churn, you can learn so much from this offboarding conversations because they will tell you exactly what went on. So you can do this. It’s like gold is gold. That’s out there and you just need to, you just need to take it and do something about it.

And it’s really simple actually.

[00:25:30] Jason Whitehead: And I think I’ve never really thought a lot about off-boarding, but I’m going to definitely focus on that more too. But I think the other piece of that is for your customer, that’s leaving, or you’re a former customer. It’s a chance for them to have a lessons learned about what they need to be doing differently internally with their next software vendor.

I think if you can, we’re partying the ways and we’re sad to see you go, but let’s see how we both can get something from this exit process and how

[00:25:50] Jason Noble: the key thing is it’s mutual. Isn’t it? You want to provide feedback to them?

[00:25:54] Philipp Wolf: Exactly and there’s there’s we, then we get this excuses.

Yeah, but I have a low touch business. I cannot afford to go with off-boarding calls with all my customer. True you can’t, but it’s about a a portion of them, right? So of course you don’t need to go with all of them, but at least start with a small portion of them. Because if you talk to probably a hundred of them, you don’t need to talk to all the thousands.

A hundred will probably give you a very good picture of why are customers leaving you at this given point in time, what’s wrong with the service, what’s wrong with the product haven’t even got to the moment of your products. Where’s the problem. So this subset of customers that you need to talk to.

We’ll all got to give you a good picture. Yeah.

[00:26:33] Jason Whitehead: Yeah. And if you don’t take the time to learn that you’re going to keep making the same mistakes and the definition of insanity is doing the same stuff over and over. You’re not,

[00:26:41] Philipp Wolf: you will probably still figure things out because also existing.

They might not, they might have the same pain, but they might not leave you. So you might find it on QBR, but it’s, it takes you much more time. First of all, it’s much more expensive because the churn was there. It happened until you find out.

[00:26:56] Jason Whitehead: One of the things that we work with our clients too, is how to really set expectations during those kickoff in early stages and to.

Go over them is how do you set the expectations of here’s we’ll do a QBR. Here’s what we’re going to ask you to give us a reference use. We’re going to ask you for this because we’re going to ask you to participate in a product round tables to make sure we build out the other things. And I think part of that could be adhere at some point.

If you decide to leave, we’re going to request that. Join us for this onboarding conversation. So we can both learn and improve and setting those expectations right up front, I think goes, it’s like a prenuptial agreement before your marriage. Like here’s how we’re going to break up the right way.

Feel good

[00:27:29] Jason Noble: about it. Okay. Because I think there’s certainly some say expectations. It doesn’t, it says that I care about this. We as a business care about this and we’ve got a process in place. So if something does happen, we want to know why. And if there’s something we missed, tell us. And as you said for a bus, how do we feed that back into the loop?

Yeah.

[00:27:46] Philipp Wolf: And this doesn’t mean that you can’t have a concept about in new subscription, right? So if you sell to small SMBs or you have to have this, you have to have the ability there anyway. But this means still that maybe in the beginning you have set the stage and you might not get everybody on the phone.

You might not be having time with everyone who gives you, but a good point again, probably 20% of the conversations will give you really good insights already.

[00:28:11] Jason Whitehead: And kinda like sometimes your employees leave your company, but come back. Sometimes your customers

[00:28:17] Jason Noble: know why they’ve left. There’s things you can do.

So give them a call in a month’s time. We heard you we’ve made some changes in product, or we’ve made some changes in this process. We’d love you to try it again. And people are willing to come back because you’ve done it that right way.

[00:28:31] Philipp Wolf: Exactly. You valued their opinion completely. Yeah. That’s

[00:28:35] Jason Noble: huge for that.

Look super have conversation a really big, thank you for your. What we do like to do with all of our guests before leaving is give you one final question. Our bold challenge question, and the one for you is what one big change should we be focusing on this year? When it comes to customer success?

Start earlier. I love it for all of the stuff you’ve said as well. I was trying to think, what’s he going to say? Cause there’s so many different nuggets that you could pick that, but I love it. Jace we’ve said before we’ve done episodes on this space should be part of the sales process. You should be thinking about it.

And lastly, Phillip, please give a shameless plug for what you guys do at customer.

[00:29:16] Philipp Wolf: Absolutely. Yeah. So if you are looking for a customer success platform and you are a SAS business head over to customer.com, we have all the details there. Subscribe for a demo. Maybe you’re lucky. I still do about 5% of the sales calls to just to stay in touch with the market.

That’d be lucky and you will catch me even there.

[00:29:33] Jason Noble: Fantastic. And we’ll put links where we publish the podcast. Look a big, thank you for that. It’s been really good conversation. Really good to catch up. That’s exciting to start the year like this as well.

[00:29:44] Philipp Wolf: Thanks guys.