Toast's Julie Hogan: stagnate, upgrade, or die

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Patrick Campbell

Small gestures have an incredible amount of power. For me, it goes one of two ways. If I get cut off by some jerk when I'm on my way to work, it might ruin my actual morning. But if someone writes a smiley face on my coffee cup, I'm all of a sudden back in the plus column. It's essential to remember that while these small gestures from others can affect you, your small gestures also affect others.

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Patrick Campbell

In B2B SaaS, this concept reaches across all teams, but particularly with your customer facing teams. With customer experience, it's absolutely crucial to empower the team to humanize your brand, because at the end of the day, while we're all working towards company and personal goals, remember you're dealing with people. A kind gesture on a support ticket or going the extra mile when receiving a review is going to pay back dividends.

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Patrick Campbell

And I can think of few people better suited to take on this topic than Julie Hogan. Julien I caught up a long time ago while she was the VP of Customer Experience over at Drift. Julie is currently the VP of Customer Success Strategy over at Toast, but her words ring true then and they resonate so much more now.

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Patrick Campbell

She's got a ton of knowledge and wisdom to share in the CSM world and all that. More coming up next. From Paddle to Protect the Hustle, we explore the truth behind the strategy and tactics of B2B SaaS growth to make you an outstanding operator. On today's episode, Julie Hogan goes deep on customer experience and success. We talk about leveraging people skills, the framework of customer experience, going the extra mile, creating an effective triage system and stagnate, upgrade or die.

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Patrick Campbell

After you finish the episode, make sure you check out the show notes for an in-depth field guide focused on what we all went over to.

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Julie Hogan

Julie Hogan and the view of the customer team at Drift.

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Patrick Campbell

Yeah, and you have been like service oriented HubSpot service us, but you have a little bit of a different wavelength with service. It's not just like answering support targets, it's all about hospitality, which I thought was interesting.

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Julie Hogan

So yeah, so I joke sometimes when I was in school, they, they totally aligned me with the wrong counselor. You know, you go and you talk to somebody and they're like, Tell me what you want to be when you grow up. Yeah. And, and the person immediately said, and don't tell me you're a people person. And I was like, That's what I was going to tell you.

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Julie Hogan

And it was funny because all through going to college, I thought that that was bad because of that interaction has been people person Was it.

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Patrick Campbell

Did you take a test or were they just like people.

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Julie Hogan

They could tap? They could smell it on me. And that's what I would.

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Patrick Campbell

Say, Oh, God.

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Julie Hogan

And so it was interesting because during during college I had this idea that that was a bad thing, not action. And I ended up individually consulting customer facing. And I sort of realized when I was there, yeah, this is not a bad thing. This entire thing is technical conversations are as operational as they are, as strategic as they are.

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Julie Hogan

Your day to day is engaging with people and building trust. And so I started leaning into that more and realizing that this is what I enjoyed and that was what I was good at. I liked building relationships with people and so working at Deloitte, I was customer facing and human capital. But in a company like that, it was wonderful.

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Julie Hogan

But you end up in a place where like your whole life is kind of drawn out for you. And in a corporate setting.

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Patrick Campbell

Here is the wrong business. And this is your job.

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Julie Hogan

At year 3.5, you should be here. And a friend of mine had last to go to a startup. He was like, There's a startup back here from Boston. Back home in Boston, there are like 40 people at it. It's called HubSpot.

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Patrick Campbell

The big old large sprout.

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Julie Hogan

Yeah, yeah. And I was like, What does that mean? I don't know what any of this is, but it's all the things you're saying sound great. So you're in HubSpot and implementation as call work in people facing roles. Yeah. Met the whole time I was there and then Drift came in and DC asked me know, can you build the customer team, both customer success and eventually support?

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Julie Hogan

And I thought, if I'm going to do this again, there's only one other place in the world I would do it. And it's, yeah, that's awesome.

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Patrick Campbell

Let's understand this. You were in the trench for like eight years at HubSpot and like, you were like in, like implementation was like the first, like, name of it, which is very technical. And then it grew into like, the brand. And what I'm curious about HubSpot brand, drift brand, different stages. One catching up to the other, you know, slowly but surely or quickly, I should say.

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Patrick Campbell

How do you imbue that brand into the service element? Because when you're when you're going after like a support ticket or even just any interaction with customers, there's the functional, Hey, I need this. You need to pay me or fix this problem. And then there's like the little bit extra, which is, hey, let's make this a good interaction.

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Patrick Campbell

But how do you approach that? Like, what's your framework for?

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Julie Hogan

Yeah, So I think if you had asked me this question ten years ago or more when I was still in sort of like corporate consulting, yeah, it would be about following the rules and doing it the right way. And I think for both companies I've been at, what's been really cool is it's a shift from that. It's following a very specific workbook to or playbook rather, to treat these customers the way they want to be treated and meet them where they're at.

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Julie Hogan

And also, you and I had this conversation earlier today, solve their problem and be helpful. Yeah. And I think another thing that you often don't or sort of like trained out of talking about in job interviews and things is, you know, any job you had outside of something that seems very professional. So I grew up waitressing, bartending, doing all sorts of jobs where people face.

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Patrick Campbell

You're a people person.

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Julie Hogan

Is that part of me? I also had to make money. I had to pay for school and other things, and I talked to others. Something was a long time ago. But I think in those roles you develop something, I call it the Services Third Eye. We're here responsible for a room of people. So whether it's tables, you have to clear or wait on if it's a wedding that you are catering, if it's a bar and you're sort of keeping an eye on how everybody is, you just learn this, this this idea of making sure people are getting what they need.

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Julie Hogan

And I now look for that and people I hire. Interesting. Sure. That's great. You have this wonderful technical background. Have you ever been responsible for the care of someone else? And if somebody says no, they usually aren't a great fit. Maybe if she were technical and they have the technology chops, but do they do they know what it's like to have to be responsible for problem solving for someone or getting somebody what they need?

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Julie Hogan

And so you're thinking, going back to your original question of brand and being a real person, that's addressed, we talk a lot about that. It's not making sure I hit all the the elements of a script that I must read. And by virtue of checking off those boxes, I've done a great job. It did. I age and it gives this person an experience in the sense that they really feel like that brand that we talk about being human, be impressionable, that come to life for them and the interaction they had.

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Julie Hogan

And as we continue to build out our teams, we look very carefully at the people we hire to to ensure that they embody that. And they have they bring some of those services, third eye qualities to the table.

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Patrick Campbell

Like we talk about hiring for a second. I know that that third eye. So asking someone like, have you ever cared for someone? The implication being you've had to kind of anticipate needs and things like that. Yes. You've also kind of taken it. Or maybe let's talk about other steps. You've taken a step further. You're hiring people with actual hospitality backgrounds.

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Patrick Campbell

What are some of the other things you're doing that kind of suss out like, oh, you worked at Starbucks, that's great. But like, how do we like, how do we maybe ask me those questions? I'm like, Oh, am I a good fit for the care that I care?

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Julie Hogan

I care less about the thing that's on the resume and more about how you talk about it. Got it. If you let's say Starbucks, great example. Let's say you did that.

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Patrick Campbell

I did work a service very.

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Julie Hogan

Very hard there. Yeah. You know, if you talk to me about that experience and you're like, hey, I did it, man. Those people are a pain. And it was so much work. You can't help in a in a person. Person is not going to hide that on your face. Maybe you can't if you're an amazing interviewer, but you see people light up in a way when they talk about and not all of it is glamorous, right?

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Julie Hogan

Like working, working and serving other people is hard. You're on your feet, especially in those in those types of contexts. But you can tell when people are passionate about talking about helping other people. So that's one piece. The other we we heavily leverage predictive index. Have you use that before their customers. Very grateful and I'll share I was very skeptical of that when I first joined Drift a little.

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Patrick Campbell

It's a little like right.

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Julie Hogan

And I very much was like no way because of where if we're in a place where we want to be as inclusive as possible, but I don't want to do is say, well, this person is this, and therefore they're not the right fit. What it's done, however, is it gives you a gauge to understand, okay, for somebody who is equally passionate and then also in their predictive index, it tells you that they care about being helpful.

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Julie Hogan

They have a quality related to caring about the needs of others. You know, what those things are. And so it's another another gauge you can use. So I use that as well. What is what is the presentation of person like in the interview? And then does that help also is engage. Interesting. So I use those two tools for sure.

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Julie Hogan

And also just like hustle, we talk about hustle. Have you had a real job? And what I mean by that is like you've worked with the general public, you've done something probably not glamorous, you've worked crappy hours, all of your sleeves and do that. And I do think whether you enjoyed it or not, whether you were passionate or not, you had to do it.

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Julie Hogan

And I care about that too. Like if you worked summers, if you did things beyond unpaid internships, those those things are important. But I think having some some real world experience and jobs outside of a building teach you a lot about life and people. And those people are really great of the frontline of.

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Patrick Campbell

Experience because they're also like a lot of this is extra mile, right? So there's a lot of like, Hey, yeah, answer the question. But like you need that person to have a third I really liked. And then also that extra mile mindset we call that our I call that like the hardship quotient. Yeah like testing for that where it's like how much hardship and there's some people who have gone through like real hardship and there's other people like, yeah, had to work a summer making rocks or doing whatever, you know.

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Julie Hogan

Building fences.

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Patrick Campbell

Which is helpful, but let's assume, okay, so hiring the right people, huge. Yet now we have a support and customer success team or separate teams. What are the functional things now? Like how do we ensure that when I have a messaging through drift or you're answering an email like whatever is going, how do you ensure that there's consistently just killer customer support or killer customer success?

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Julie Hogan

Yeah, so I'll say it's evolving at Drift. If you're a customer, you are. Yeah, but if you're just 101. So that's actually yeah, my apologies. We didn't have any of this stuff in place. When you start, it's okay.

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Patrick Campbell

It's terrible. And that's fine.

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Julie Hogan

But, you know, if you're a customer and you're listening, one of the things that was part of our narrative and part of what we did at the beginning was everybody at trusted support, which I think was a really cool narrative. It's like, Oh, everybody has a great way to learn this kind of customer experience, because if everybody owns it and nobody really wants it and yes, you're terrible.

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Julie Hogan

So we're love you. But he's really good. But the idea the idea too, is we want to create standards. And so that's we're in the middle of doing. And one of the things I share this with you earlier, but one of the things when we talk about hiring when David and I were talking about building this team and I shared with him, hey, I'm going to kill this, everybody in the company does support because they want us to be a first class function at dress.

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Julie Hogan

I like that. I also want it to be a first class five star function. And he had this idea and sort of crazy talking to one on one. He said, What do we need? The manager of this, somebody who had front of the house experience? So think about somebody who does front of the house. And I literally from that conversation was on a mission and like this person exists in Boston, they have to and I will find them.

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Julie Hogan

That's cool. And so I started doing searches for people who had graduated from the Cornell School, hospitality, probably one of the premier hospitality schools. Yeah. And then sniffing around for people at really well-known brand name hotels. And we landed on 40 Cornell grads from hospitality, nine years of hospitality experience. And then the manager of the Four Seasons Hotel, who also small hotels, you know, just, you know, no big deal who also implemented chat for guest services in Boston.

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Julie Hogan

So I was like, where did you come from? Out of the sky and believe.

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Patrick Campbell

This person exists?

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Julie Hogan

And when she came into interview, it was one of those things where I kind of wanted to see how it went. And when she started talking about the brand, she admired the way she held her team accountable to not just execution. Right. So, you know, we think about technology and the cadence of or order of operations and support.

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Julie Hogan

There is a lot of structure that goes into place. It's not that much different from running a hotel where there are things that have to be met by certain deadlines and treasure class that go through and escalations. And so her capacity to not only understand that, but bring the human and guest element to it blown away by and when I talked earlier about the towel, she was lighting up like a Christmas tree.

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Julie Hogan

When she talked about that, she was passionate about it, she's interested in it. And so from a measurement standpoint, what we're in the process of doing the Four Seasons has something called the Forbes standards, and it's literally like hundreds of pages of stuff that as somebody at the front lines of the guest experience, you should be executing again in each interaction.

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Julie Hogan

And so we're developing the draft version of that so that in addition to execution of the tactical things. So how well do you triage bugs? How well do you problem solve? How well do you partner with our peers in product to come to resolution and brand good response to customers, how those things are important to the operation? And then how do we balance that against the standards evaluation that will put into place?

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Julie Hogan

And so we're developing eight core standards that will evaluate your chart again and we'll see how frequently on a rubric you're you're hitting those. And so interesting, maybe with 100% consistency, you're hitting one of them, but another you only hit 50% of the time. Let's dig into that and lives.

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Patrick Campbell

So you mentioned like triaging bugs. Is there is there like a, you know, Starbucks, they call this creating a five star experience, right? Yeah. That meant putting the smiley face on the cup in addition to the name or like, you know, giving like, oh, thanks. He asking how the previous conversation topic was like, is it stuff like that?

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Patrick Campbell

And so it's going to be and some of it is measurable like, like response time and stuff like that and others of it. It's a little bit more we kind of know what we see it exactly.

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Julie Hogan

It's on that and the know it when we see it, but we'll we'll watch for it. Do you use the person's first name? Do you reference at the Four Seasons or something? We've learned through Tori, which is called Show Me, you know, Me. And they've done studies to show if you recognize like, hey, welcome back. I know I talked to you a couple of weeks ago where I know you were just back in after having X, Y or Z question last week showing that small extra step of personalizing the conversation makes it feel a bit more familiar to the customer.

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Julie Hogan

So trying to leverage that and measuring how frequently you're taking that extra step to do it, there's another component that we're calling the while we have you. So not simply cranking through ticket, so you get off or or you sort of show on the list as having executed to the most ticket because your customers don't give you how many tickets they know.

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Julie Hogan

They don't care. They they want urgency and they want accuracy and they also want a personalized experience from you. And so using that as a next step to make sure you're not simply closing the ticket, asking while they have you, what else can I do for you while I have you? I took a quick moment. I looked at your playbook and I recognized X, Y, or Z.

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Julie Hogan

You could be optimized better. I went ahead and do that for you and not doing it in a creepy way like you've had service before, I'm sure, Which is like this is a little over the top and inauthentic and strange.

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Patrick Campbell

Actually, I love all this stuff. Like, I'm like, Yeah, no, do it. Do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Julie Hogan

And that's those are the things that often people tell you aren't scalable or like, I don't have enough time or say that it's fluff and it doesn't matter. And the reality is customers leave often not because of one big thing. Sometimes it is, but usually stuff by a thousand cuts, a thousand little things happened and they left because of that.

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Julie Hogan

Imagine we are more proactive and more thoughtful about a thousand really positive things that can happen and use that not not as our our catch or the way we're going to keep customers, but a way we're going to be true to our brand and really give customers the experience they need. In addition to measuring the how out of every other thing that matters related to the value they get, the efficiency of our processes and the other the other instruments we use to make sure that the business is running effectively.

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Julie Hogan

We need to be able to do both.

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Patrick Campbell

So if I had to summarize, basically, if I had to kind of take this one step further, you're developing this this Forbes guide, drift guide, you know, for eight principles.

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Julie Hogan

The sort of working title is principles. I also like the idea of calling them instead of key performance indicators, key experience indicators. So cases for our customer is cool.

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Patrick Campbell

I like that. So you have these gatekeepers and then it's basically like hardcore training and then monitoring is that kind of thing.

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Julie Hogan

You got it.

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Patrick Campbell

And then take a step back. We may not be here yet, but is there the functional like, okay, cool. We keep noticing that our five reps, this KPI isn't being met. It doesn't feel like it's a training issue. It's this bug or this thumping. Like how is that relationship with the rest of the company or even with basically figuring out scalable things, right?

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Patrick Campbell

Or is there no scalable thing being like, Hey, we're not going to automate any of this because it's going to take away from the other key? Yeah, right.

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Julie Hogan

So the way the way we're set up and we're actually the perfect timing for this question because we just moved into our new office Looks.

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Patrick Campbell

Great by way.

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Julie Hogan

Of future. Thank you very much. We're excited by it. So saw interactivity is what.

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Patrick Campbell

Yeah the other office it was like a sweaty.

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Julie Hogan

Sweaty you know and what we're doing now because we have more spaces instead of being a team, a customer team sitting in one pod and one part of the company or distributed team. So the customer support team, we call them customer advocates, they sit across all of product and customer success. That's across all of sales and and that way it's not often you hear people talk about success and customer success not being the responsibility of the customer success team only, but shared across the whole company.

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Julie Hogan

That's really hard to do when you don't sit with the rest of the company or interact. And so we want the behaviors that that we want to drive be reflected in the way we operate every single day. Alignment isn't just an alignment meeting. Alignment should be what you do every single day because that's how your office setting and anything.

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Patrick Campbell

Where are you seeing? Like we're sitting across? Like I say, I'm an engineer or product person and you're like support person. Are you seeing those interactions happen?

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Julie Hogan

Well, it's been since Monday, so so yeah, we're making about maybe I will say we started this a little bit earlier in support and a couple of cool things came out of it. One is with with the even a name being a customer advocate as opposed to a customer support agent, your job, the goal is and this really came from Craig who's our VP of product.

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Julie Hogan

His idea was he didn't want people who were representing customers on the front lines who didn't want their job to simply stop at I put it in in charge and it's done and vice versa. We don't want the product team's job to stop at a shift. It it's done. Yeah. We need those those teams to intersect without adding an additional layer of bureaucracy.

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Julie Hogan

And that's usually what happened.

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Patrick Campbell

Was we had this one person who.

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Julie Hogan

Is the champion. Exactly for all teams and you must be the bug police and.

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Patrick Campbell

Got to go to the product meeting.

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Julie Hogan

And.

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Patrick Campbell

See.

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Julie Hogan

Exactly as.

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Patrick Campbell

Like you. And this is.

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Julie Hogan

An internal, bureaucratic and kind of gross. And so our goal of this is that by having advocates aligned to each pod, they then become the experts of that part of the product. And we do a couple of things. One is at the end of the week, we'll summarize borrowed from Slack. Slack there's something called triage captains, so people rotate on managing, triaged and then sharing the core themes of bugs and escalations with different customer advocates.

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Julie Hogan

Advocates will then take those and summarize with their teams at the end of the week and say, Hey, here are the four themes I saw. And then Partner two holds the product managers accountable for knocking out those bugs and triaging issues. And the other thing we do, we call it the Customer three So there's always an ongoing list of three.

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Julie Hogan

We just picked three. Yeah, three things that are the front lines of customer asks that we bring both from customer advocates and customer success and we keep it in the new office. We have to set it up. I'm at our old office. We had a chalkboard. It was a fluid list. We had a slack channel for them as well, and as soon as one of them got checked off, we'd celebrate it.

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Julie Hogan

We would take whoever the developer was or the engineer who was able to check that off. We put the customer hero cape around their neck. Yeah, we'd play the Jay-Z song onto the next one because as soon as we celebrated it, it was time to put a new one out. Sure, sure, sure. So those are some of the things.

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Julie Hogan

One of the thing I'll add to it, are you familiar with the and on called Have you heard the and oncor analogy now? So this is borrowed from Toyota and then also from Amazon where if there is a major bug or a major interruption and most gas companies, there's this hierarchy of red tape escalation stuff that has to happen.

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Julie Hogan

So I must ask permission, see from this person if it's a real bug or not. Well, in the meantime, little things detrimental to companies could be happening. So in the front lines of car assembly and on the conveyor belt that Amazon, if you're a worker sleeves rolled up hands in the job and you see something that's really broken, you pull the end on cord and it stops the whole operation.

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Patrick Campbell

It's like the button.

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Julie Hogan

You got it. Then you're like, Stop everything, stop the presses. Yeah. So we've instituted that as well. So anyone in the company who's customer facing in front lines, if you see something that truly is S.O.S., you don't have to go to our head of product or to listen to me. You just do it. You pull it. Our version of pulling the cord is in Slack.

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Julie Hogan

So you go in, you say, pulling in on cord, and we stop doing everything and we we rally around it. We figure it out. I think that's been really important from an alignment standpoint because it gives the power to the individuals who are talking to customers and therefore gives the customers the power as opposed to it being something that relies on our own internal operations.

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Patrick Campbell

So like common criticism, I'm sure is like, well, that person might not be good at understanding what is a cord situation and what is a filter bureaucratic situation. Like how do you how do you manage? Because I'm sure there's been a couple of false positives. Someone get trigger.

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Julie Hogan

Happy feedback is too bad. We're learning how we would rather to.

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Patrick Campbell

The product team.

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Julie Hogan

It's right. And the reason it's that blunt is because that's the reality. You know, teams are afraid of all those things. You just know what is happening. And so sometimes it will be, yeah, we'll learn from it. And if you don't learn from it and you don't educate people, hey, here's how to look at it a different way.

00;23;22;01 - 00;23;42;17

Julie Hogan

What ends up happening is you have people who get stuck in process and you don't learn the or teach the the real the real way to go about and problem solving. And I talked about problem solving. I think that's where it gets hindered sometimes, is we want to put order of operations in front of everything as opposed to giving people the trust and the freedom to make those calls.

00;23;42;17 - 00;23;54;26

Julie Hogan

And and the reality shows we're going to have a few false alarms. What is the worst thing that's going to happen? Few people get annoyed. 30 minutes, somebody cries wolf. A 30 minutes on us. That can suck. Yeah. Control cash and teach people.

00;23;54;27 - 00;24;03;24

Patrick Campbell

What's good framework as well. One thing I want go back to is the triaging.

00;24;03;25 - 00;24;04;06

Julie Hogan

Yes.

00;24;04;15 - 00;24;16;24

Patrick Campbell

I don't know if that's it that's in the ether as much as it probably is. Can you go through that a little bit For a little bit? Yeah. You guys structure that like you have a bug, you put it into these groups, you have this Jewish captains, like just walk through that a little bit.

00;24;16;24 - 00;24;38;08

Julie Hogan

But yeah, so the goal of a customer advocate is 95% of your day is front line, what we call chat duty. So we engage 100% and support through chat because that's what our customers want to see, want, and they want to have conversations with that. If that individual cannot recreate a bug or an issue that's being reported, they will put it into triage.

00;24;38;17 - 00;24;52;08

Julie Hogan

We have a member of the Customer Advocate team. We're playing around the time frame. It is like they're going to be like every two weeks. They're the triage captain, meaning they're responsible for then managing the bugs that get escalated and they become the first line of defense.

00;24;52;08 - 00;24;55;06

Patrick Campbell

These are bugs that have not been replicated. Correct.

00;24;55;19 - 00;25;00;27

Julie Hogan

So if you can't replicate and move on for the customer, it goes into triage.

00;25;01;01 - 00;25;07;01

Patrick Campbell

So meaning like the customer probably saw it, we can't replicate it. You got someone kind of might have to look into that.

00;25;07;02 - 00;25;24;27

Julie Hogan

Exactly. Exactly. And so first line of defense or similar to triage in a hospital like I'm going to go in, see if I can figure this out. Yeah. And if not, it then is created as a ticket. So then it will go to our product manager and they will work with engineers and developers to do what they need to do.

00;25;25;03 - 00;25;44;26

Julie Hogan

And the goal then is that the triage individual keeps tabs on both fronts. So everything coming in and everything coming out to make sure at the end of the day, do we have a summary of what's left outstanding? Yeah. Do we have a summary of the customer responses? Do customers know where their issues are? Have they been responded to?

00;25;44;26 - 00;26;06;25

Julie Hogan

And if anything is still pending or still an escalation, they're aware of that. And so at the end of each day we get a summary out to the product teams of where things stand and then end of week it's a summary of the themes. So here's the triage captain. This week we have our product teams are organized by crew, so the convo crew or the automation squad here are the conversations that were escalated.

00;26;07;02 - 00;26;19;19

Julie Hogan

Here are the themes I see and hear the recommendations I'm going to make as a result of that and again gives the power to the people at the front line in the customer experience to make some of those recommendations and innovations in the product.

00;26;19;23 - 00;26;24;01

Patrick Campbell

And if if it's something where it can be replicated, does that go right to a ticket, then.

00;26;24;02 - 00;26;41;09

Julie Hogan

If it can be replicated and they can solve it, it'll go right back to the customer. So that triage captain will respond to the customer directly if it can be replicated. But we're still unclear or we're worried that it could be affecting or impacting other parts of the org will then still create a ticket so that it can be looked into.

00;26;41;25 - 00;26;46;18

Patrick Campbell

And the top three things on the chalkboard, those were from the triage.

00;26;46;24 - 00;27;08;21

Julie Hogan

Those are typically anecdotal. So you've got the process of triage and then you've got the trends that people at the front line see. So a good example of this, we have teams who now work our non US hours, so they'll be up four in the morning time for what our team in the absence of having people on the ground and so they may say hey putting on your radar.

00;27;08;21 - 00;27;24;24

Julie Hogan

I was on the phone with four customers in Finland making that up because we're here right now for customers in Finland and they were seeing this related to I'm making this up a lag during this timeframe. I wonder if something happens, putting it on your radar. And we see that as a as a constant theme or trend that it's going to go.

00;27;25;03 - 00;27;35;23

Julie Hogan

Five isn't a bug, but it's an annoyance. Again, kind of a bad example. Sure, that could become a customer three So it's it's trying to voice things that we think because those are things that are different.

00;27;35;23 - 00;27;41;06

Patrick Campbell

Are necessarily bugs and it's not broken, but it's annoying and they're not. Yeah, so.

00;27;41;07 - 00;27;48;14

Julie Hogan

Not sexy, right? Like let's call it what it is. They're not like this sexy. Hey, we're going to have a marketable moment about this thing we fix.

00;27;48;17 - 00;27;50;08

Patrick Campbell

We fix leaks at 3 a.m..

00;27;50;19 - 00;28;16;17

Julie Hogan

Or we fix, you know, there, there are a bunch of better examples I could probably share, but, you know, they're the better little things, the things where people engage with our product in such an intimate way. We want to understand the stuff that trip them up and bug them. Yeah. And over time get incrementally better at not only showing our awareness for understanding what those are and how to impact their experience, but showing that we care and that we're committed to continuing to chip away on.

00;28;17;01 - 00;28;37;09

Julie Hogan

And they'll always exist like a product. Product will never be perfect. Our customer one day is so, you know, that would be amazing. But you know, our processes for supporting customers will never be perfect. These are constantly evolving, constantly reflecting as much as we can the needs that we see from from the market and also from what customers tell us they don't like.

00;28;37;09 - 00;28;45;15

Julie Hogan

Sure, I always joke as soon as you build a structure around something, you're really proud of it. As soon as you're going to put a bow on it, you have to unwrap it and start all over again because it's probably old at that point.

00;28;45;16 - 00;29;05;16

Patrick Campbell

Great. So your customer advocacy support will say, Yeah, customer success. Yes. Right. So now what's everything? What's the difference? Yeah. Like because I know your customer success, at least right now, because you're getting a foundation, not a quota carrying crew quite yet. KPI crew feeling like you have like metrics that you're going after. What do you see as a difference?

00;29;05;17 - 00;29;07;24

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, there's one just I'll let you answer. Yeah.

00;29;08;00 - 00;29;33;22

Julie Hogan

So the way I see it is when you buy direct, they always think of answering these questions as sort of like through the lens of the customer. When you buy a dress, you have a single point of contact who's responsible for ensuring you get the value, the intended value from the product in terms of going through a successful implementation and then continuing to have a single point of contact who can support you ongoing with a cadence that's pretty regular.

00;29;34;01 - 00;30;01;06

Julie Hogan

So you've got that that ongoing relationship. And then anything that happens on the fly where you're unable or really don't need to schedule a phone call to talk to somebody about it. You have 14 days available, 24 seven now. We have 24/7 support Monday through Friday, 24 seven to answer quick questions. And the goal is, is your time not feeling like you must only call this one person, but support is there truly to do that.

00;30;01;06 - 00;30;16;19

Julie Hogan

And so I feel like the best way to describe this is to tell you the story of when I arrived and where we are now. I started in October and we had under 1000 customers and we had five systems and they managed everyone. So we divided customers across everyone.

00;30;16;19 - 00;30;19;06

Patrick Campbell

We had a lot of customers.

00;30;19;06 - 00;30;43;10

Julie Hogan

And so you could be as a CSM, you could be on the phone with a rather large enterprise company sitting somewhere in the world, and then an hour later be on a phone call with a very small business, with one employee sitting in middle, middle somewhere else. And what we realized is we were looking at results is that not just churn results but the result of the team and how they were using their time.

00;30;43;17 - 00;30;50;27

Julie Hogan

It's a lot of thrashing to to go from a conversation with a very small business to a massive enterprise discussion.

00;30;50;27 - 00;30;58;04

Patrick Campbell

So different like it's like and you just think about like in context of sales. Yes, the decks are going to be way different. Like that. Yes, that's.

00;30;58;06 - 00;30;58;26

Julie Hogan

Expectations.

00;30;59;15 - 00;31;00;07

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, for.

00;31;00;07 - 00;31;18;26

Julie Hogan

Sure. And the businesses are often in very different stages. But when you think about an enterprise engagement, there is the stuff we're talking about earlier, whether you like it or not, there's bureaucracy, there's process, there's systems for clients. Exactly. So our edict is being like, let's move fast, let's go, let's get you live in extra days.

00;31;18;27 - 00;31;21;01

Patrick Campbell

Hold on. I have a bunch of things to fill out.

00;31;21;05 - 00;31;42;09

Julie Hogan

Go right. And it's a reality. And can we push in in for driver, you know, drive urgency that's appropriate with that, of course. Then on the other hand, you have another business where you're working with a founder who is really strapped for time and at the same time they're trying to grow their business and asking you specific questions about things they listen to and seeking wisdom.

00;31;42;09 - 00;32;22;11

Julie Hogan

And, you know, can you also, while you're on the phone with me, give me some feedback on my pricing and packaging strategy. So very different. So we made the call as we were exiting 2017 to start leaning into segmentation. So that was one big piece. We also more than doubled the team, so we will exit this quarter with 18 to end segmented across small business enterprise, strategic and then supporting, even though we are only based in the US East Coast and West Coast, we have customers all over the world and you know, my background, they spent five years that have sat sort of straddling time zones, traveling everywhere they were, but you know, ahead of

00;32;22;11 - 00;32;54;01

Julie Hogan

having offices, places, you have to demonstrate commitment to the country. So we have we'll be getting our second CSM ramped up on a MIA time zones and supporting those time zones and our first API, CSM sitting as, you know, supporting West Coast but also taking on our API customers. So that's been one big transition for us, ensuring that we're meeting our customers where they're at when it comes to sort of like their localization and global needs in addition to what kind of business they are and how that changes your engagement, then.

00;32;59;02 - 00;33;04;13

Patrick Campbell

So turns the goal, right? Like preventing chatter, right? Yeah. Was gross churn. So it's like a little bit more defense, right.

00;33;04;15 - 00;33;27;16

Julie Hogan

I'll caveat that. I'll caveat that. And the reason I am is if we only think like a bully and preventing tool. So the idea of score also. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. One big issue is we don't segment implementation from ongoing engagement so we don't have an implementation time separate. And the reason why is you could quite literally go live with drifts the same day.

00;33;27;16 - 00;33;30;17

Patrick Campbell

One button HubSpot if you're using HubSpot. Yeah, Yeah.

00;33;30;23 - 00;33;58;19

Julie Hogan

And so ideally we don't want to unintentionally overcomplicate. I think that's started to happen in SaaS where it's like if you look at any customer lifecycle, it drives me bananas because it's never a cycle. It's this line into infinity people, nine people, and it goes into this place where you stagnate, you die or you upgrade. And if we really want to make this a true customer lifecycle, it starts with the human interaction of you're going to have one person.

00;33;58;19 - 00;34;19;28

Julie Hogan

Yeah, work you through your first cycle of drift, meaning we get you set up, we get you to the initial results and then once, once you're really over that hump of onboarding and your initial implementation, you'll remain with that same person to go through these cycles on a consistent basis to review results and recommendations to continue propelling you in that cycle.

00;34;19;28 - 00;34;43;06

Patrick Campbell

That's a huge shout out to Julie for doing the podcast. Now you have what it takes to master customer experience and success. Today we talked about leveraging people skills, the framework of customer experience, going the extra mile, creating an effective triage system and stagnant upgrader die. Oh, and if you want to support Padel in the show, we would greatly appreciate it if you have a five star review of the or the equivalent rating wherever you listen or watch the podcast.

00;34;43;06 - 00;34;57;21

Patrick Campbell

Gods tend to like that sort of thing and we like to appease the podcast gods. Thanks for listening. Make sure you subscribe to and tell your friends about Protect the Hustle, A podcast from Paddle Recur, the largest, fastest growing media network dedicated to the world of subscription.