Moments of Truth: Thoughts and Ideas on VOC Programs
Moments of Truth: Thoughts and Ideas on VOC Programs
Our Moments of Truth interview series provides bite-sized Customer Success advice designed to drive out-sized impact.
The Moments of Truth interview series is all about connecting you with Customer Success professionals with direct experience in the trenches so you can learn how others are approaching everything from strategy to the daily grind.
These short format, raw interviews were recorded so you can gain access to some of the best minds in the Customer Success industry. In this series, you’ll get their take on hot topics and key experiences that have shaped how they are thinking about Customer Success and its related disciplines.
In this Moment of Truth, Keri Keeling from VMWare talks through a VOC Framework and discusses strategies for making it most effective.
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Moments of Truth Session Transcript
NOTE: The following transcript has been edited for clarity and content where necessary to improve readability.
Andrew Marks: This is Moments of Truth, the webcast for Customer Success professionals. I’m Andrew Marks, co-founder of SuccessHACKER. Today, I’m joined by Keri Keeling, Global Head of Customer Success Innovation and Intelligence at VMware. Keri, welcome to the program. Thanks for making time for me today, great to see you as always. Why don’t you tell those who are listening about VMware and what your role entails?
Keri Keeling: Hi. It’s so, so great to be here. It’s great to see you, long time no talk. I’m new to VMware I’ve accepted a role to join their Customer Success and Experience team. I think it’s really actually a fascinating opportunity because VMware is one of the few companies that I’ve seen that are merging Customer Experience with Customer Success. For a long time in my career, I’ve always had question marks floating above my head about the connective tissue between CX and CSM. One of the fascinating things about VMware is they’ve really doubled down on the service delivery to the customer. I don’t necessarily mean the product. I mean the way that we are servicing the customers, the way that we’re driving goodness with the customers, we’re totally focused on outcomes and value realization. It’s been a breath of fresh air to see a company of this size, really wrestle this all the way down to the ground from the outside in, looking at everything from the customer perspective and then driving that in.
With the organization and their merging of the experience and success motions, what’s come of that is a lot of interesting new roles, mine included. I kind of feel a little bit like a mad scientist actually, I don’t know anybody that’s doing what I’m doing. Currently I own the voice of the customer program, working to redesign the complete voice of the customer, the end-to-end voice of the customer program which is inclusive of the board level corporate level relationship, NPS survey, transactional surveys, in product feedback, using predictive technologies, machine learning technologies as well as natural language processing to be able to scrape and listen for customer sentiment.
Then I also own the long tail tech touch and the low, low, low touch of Customer Success, right? When you think about most large companies, 20% of their customers make 80% of their revenue and that kind of denotes that the long tail makes up 80% of the actual customer base, but usually they don’t get the same level of a high touch Customer Success motion than what you would normally expect to see like out in the market, right? My role is to leverage a lot of the data, the intelligence that we have, the voice of the customer program and then turn that into how do we drive value realization and outcomes programmatically, predictable, it’s at scale and we’re allowing our customers to be fully independent and not depending on people for adoption, value realization and their own outcomes.
Andrew Marks: There’s a lot there. I love the marrying of Customer Success and Customer Experience. For a long time, I’ve talked about that. I’ve talked to a lot of CX professionals about that, as well. Customer Experience and Customer Success need to be wed, right? People think a lot of Custom Experience being customer journey mapping, right? You might have that, that vision of how a customer is going to interact with your brand but customer success is the plumbing. I like to use the analogy of when an architect designs a home for you, they do a 3D relief perspective on what the home is going to look like from the owner’s perspective when they’re walking up to the house and then they also deliver a set of technical plans for the contractor, say build this. I look at that as Customer Experience is that 3D perspective, here’s what we want the customer to experience when they’re walking up to their home, what they want to see. Customer Success is the foundation of the home, is what you need to have in place in order to have that vision.
Keri Keeling: Yeah, I agree. I think that it’s kind of interesting because when you look at the way that Customer Experience and Customer Success has existed historically, and even still today, usually Marketing owns Customer Experience. It’s based on customer advocacy, it’s based on what you’re talking about. It’s the human emotion, it’s the how do you feel about our brand? Do you understand? Then Customer Success is really more pragmatic, right? It’s like am I driving your outcomes? Is this working for you? It’s highly metric focused and never the two shall meet in most big organizations. That was where I got excited about the opportunity at VMware was because that marrying of the two, when I look at my experiences at other big companies that I’ve been with, how bifurcated those approaches have always been. Even in smaller companies I should say, CX and CSM oftentimes aren’t even under the same VP. They’re under, like I said, Marketing and then wherever Customer Success reports.
It was pretty exciting and telling strategy for me about where VMware is going with their customers and how they really want to move into that innovative space with how they’re driving outcomes for their customers. What’s even more interesting is we’re getting ready to release a program that brings into view other elements that drive goodness. You’ll have to stay tuned for the announcement at VMware. If you’re listening and you’re a VMware customer, please join us at VMworld. The innovation doesn’t just stop with, with the merging of experience and success and then of course my neck of the world. The innovation really drives forward with merging of very, very key components of service delivery to our customers so that they can continue to focus on what they do best in their own company and we’re really helping them to do exactly that.
Andrew Marks: Right and that’s that whole, once again, that whole concept of being focused on outcome; outcome-focused Customer Success which is how it should be. We actually have introduced a new program called Outcome-Based Selling that talks about introducing Customer Success into the latter stages of the sales process and helping the customer think about what are the outcomes. Not just you got this tactical product, but what am I trying to get out of that and having that flow through all the way from the end of the sales process through the delivery and on through the lifespan of the customer. Introducing common concepts like success plans and to really drive that focus on the outcome.
Keri Keeling: Yeah and I think that that’s such an important strategy for pretty much company when you begin with the end in mind. What do you want to get out of this? Why? It’s not just what features do you need, it’s where are you going with your own organization and what’s good look like for you? What metrics are you being managed by? I think that it’s absolutely critical to be able to sell from that vantage point. The side effect of that is many fold. Lower churn, more upsell, happier customers. I love that you guys are taking that approach. I think there’s so much value.
Andrew Marks: We’re huge fans of beginning with the end in mind. We actually referred to and push as recommended reading, Covey’s Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People and that’s number two on the list, begin with the end in mind. Number one on the list is be proactive. It’s like a manifesto for Customer Success is the Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People. Thinking win-win, seek to understand.
Keri Keeling: Seek first to understand.
Andrew Marks: Be understood, you know? Yeah. I was just talking to somebody about this. They said, “what are some important skills for somebody in Customer Success?” I said, “active listening and open-ended questions. God gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason. We need to listen twice as much as we’re talking.”
Keri Keeling: I worked once with a man who- and just love this individual, he is amazing and probably one of the smartest people that I’ve ever met- it’s funny that you talk about the two ears and one mouth. He has a thing that he calls “hippopotamus syndrome.”
Andrew Marks: Hippopotamus syndrome?
Keri Keeling: I’ll let you take a whack at what he means by that. Think about a hippopotamus. What are the attributes about a hippopotamus that people get?
Andrew Marks: It’s big, it’s dangerous. It can spend time in the water and on the land.
Keri Keeling: I’ll let you off the hook. A lot of people will get hippopotamus syndrome because when they have two little teeny, tiny ears and one great big giant mouth.
Andrew Marks: Right.
Keri Keeling: So it’s that listening, right? You don’t want hippopotamus syndrome. When you’re doing all the talking especially when you’re trying to understand what your customer’s needs are then that should be an immediate clue.
Andrew Marks: Exactly. For sure, love that. That’s great.
Keri Keeling: It’ll be my next t-shirt.
Andrew Marks: Yeah. Will you send me one?
Keri Keeling: Yes, I will. COVID is causing me to create all these neat little t-shirts. I have the you’re on mute, I was on mute.
Andrew Marks: I love the you’re on mute thing.
Keri Keeling: No hippos. I’m building my t-shirt.
Andrew Marks: I would love to, but I know you’re just getting into the role, but the voice of the customer programs, that’s something that you’re doing for all different types, all segments for the customer.
Keri Keeling: Yeah. I’m actually taking a different approach. I don’t know if other people are doing it. I haven’t found it so if you’re out there and you’re doing what I’m trying to do, I’d love to talk to you. But basically, in my mind, the voice of the customer and along with the data that you get on your customers. We have all of this fantastic data. We have telemetry data, we’ve got time to value, we’ve got all of our Customer Success metrics, we’ve got sentiment, we’ve got transactional. There’s so much data. But what’s really interesting is that that data, normally in other companies, doesn’t get overlaid with the voice of the customer. Does your metrics really and truly match with what your customers are saying? If they don’t match, then we might need to take a good hard look at what’s really going on.
Andrew Marks: Right.
Keri Keeling: When you have that overlay and you’re looking at those metrics from a lot of different angles, you then can engage which is what are you going to do about it? You can engage internally and externally. The program that I’m building is really based on three pillars: listen, learn and engage. It kind of goes back to that no hippopotamus syndrome that I was just being cheeky about.
Really I look at this as a flywheel. One feeds the other and it’s a big circle. I envision in my mind little cogs that kind of circle around. First you’re listening. You’ve got what are you hearing and where are you hearing it from? You don’t always have to survey your customers. You can listen in different ways. You can scrape social, you can use natural language processing, you can look at your metrics, you can look at your time to first value. You can look at your transactional surveys.
One of the things that I’m working with my team to build right now is how do we take the customer journey? We have a defined customer journey. Predating me, the business sat down and they defined the high level this is our customer journey and there’s eight points. Within each of those eight points you’ve got your sale and you’ve got your onboarding and so on and so forth, this is a standard customer journey. But when you think about what happens in each of those steps in the customer journey, there are some critical engagement points. I’ll use the section of onboarding as an example.
Keri Keeling: Critical engagement points for onboarding is the first time you access that technology. The first time you complete your educational process. The first time you deploy your product and release it to others in your organization. Those are three major critical engagement points. When you look at those as an example, you have moments like those in other areas of the customer journey.
Andrew Marks: Moments of truth?
Keri Keeling: Moments of truth, critical engagement points. What else do they call them? They call them moments that matter. It depends on who you talk to as to what they’re defined, who calls them what. But really for me, it’s about how do I insert listening posts into those various areas of the customer journey and then perform a real deep analysis around that.
As an example, if I’ve got a cohort of customers that are detractors, why are the detractors? Let’s inspect that. Did they get stuck at step three in the onboarding process? Are they the people that poke the blue button in the application and maybe they don’t like the blue button. How are we overlaying those various metrics together to tell a broader story? Because what I want to be able to do is walk up to my Chief Customer Officer and say, “I bet you, I can reduce churn by 15% and here’s why. I found through looking at what our customers are saying and reviewing our metrics and our telemetry data, I’ve found that 2% of our customers that poke the blue button or the same 2% of the customers that get stuck in section two of our onboarding process. Let’s go and tweak these things.”
A lot of businesses aren’t looking at their metrics in that way and being able to tell that actual story is hard. It’s hard because data is disparate. Sometimes data, the quality and the integrity of the data is questionable. It’s hard on a lot of different levels so the work that I have cut out for me is big. At the end of the day, I personally believe that being able to tell those stories in turn of the organization then translates into customer goodness because not only are we making our company materially better, when we make our company materially better we service our customers even that much better. Right?
Andrew Marks: Yeah. It makes sense. I think one of the problems is, is that most companies obsess over churn and renewals and expansion revenue. The problem with that, those are important metrics, but they’re trailing indicators. This is one of the issues I had, especially with a lot of the first-generation Customer Success tools out there is that there was this lack of focus on leading indicators. The best way for you to get your customer to where they need to go is to manufacture that success. In order for you to manufacture success, you need to make sure that the right people are doing the right things in the right ways at the right times. Whether that’s a high touch and it’s your people in conjunction with your customer that are doing those things or that’s a low touch where it’s all on the customer and they’re doing those things. It’s a combination of the process and also to your point, metering that process so that we can understand we’re going off track here. Then have the systems in place to say before that 2% gets stuck, that we’ve got a system in place that says even if it’s a low touch, they’re going off track, let’s figure out how to get them back on track.
Keri Keeling: That’s right. That’s where the engaged pillar comes in with the strategy because everything that I do is based on those three things. Engage is my grandmother is in my ear. Ounce of prevention, pound of cure. Which is we’ve done this analysis and we see this to be true. Let’s go fix this so that we can stave off future churn. But there’s also, again, remember that 80%. Most large companies aren’t serviced by people. Because no company, no matter how big or small you are, can afford to hire a virtual army of Customer Success Managers. As startups get bigger and they bring on more and more customers, their Customer Success Managers are doing more and more with less. Then the larger companies, they’ve got thousands of CSMs but those thousands of CSMs, because you’ve gone so far up market, you’ve got a one-to-one ratio now between your Customer Success Manager and customer. That’s hard to scale, it’s expensive.
Andrew Marks: It’s very expensive.
Keri Keeling: It’s so expensive to scale and so that’s where you take this listen, learn, and then engage. You engage internally but you also engage externally. How can you use technology to enable those customers to be more independent, to drive their own outcomes? You leverage everything from digital experience, what you see in the tech support world these days with chat bot and knowledge base articles and AI driven support.
I can almost envision being able to build a listen learn and engage flywheel or like a model as when one thing turns red there’s a system that recognizes that and it starts firing off programmatic. It might be up in product. It might be email. It might be text messaging or Twitter. It could be any of those channels. Obviously, ideally you’d want a multi-channel approach but ideally that’s what that engage piece is really all about.
Andrew Marks: Right. It’s engaging with the right people, because to your point earlier… It’s not just about employing a playbook and correcting the course; it’s analyzing what sent them off course and can we fix that? There was one company that I worked for in my career and we were just masters at firefighting. The problem is that we never took the time, and it used to frustrate me, it’s not because I didn’t want to, but other executives in the organization wouldn’t give me the time to sit down and figure out the root cause.
Keri Keeling: Right.
Andrew Marks: We continue to get ourselves into this problem. We should be sitting down and figuring out how to avoid it.
Keri Keeling: Yeah. The dive in catch is so disruptive. It’s disruptive to the customer. Imagine the customer experience. Internal Customer Success and Customer Success leadership and product and all of this. We’re now sacrificing nights and weekends, we’ve got to develop code, push out code, QA. Customer Success has got to be talking to the customer. It’s exhausting, it’s exhausting, on a lot of different levels. Emotionally for the team members and for the customer, by the way, because they’re stressing out that whatever it is isn’t working or they’re looking bad internal to their company because they chose that vendor, as an example.
Andrew Marks: Exactly. They went out on a limb and chose you based off the promises that you made.
Keri Keeling: That’s right. That’s right. Then internal, it’s exhausting to your team members. It’s disruptive. It disrupts your product roadmap, it disrupts financials, it disrupts a lot of things. I think that really where tech touch- it’s kind of interesting because I’d been looking at tech touch out in the market a lot more than I have in the past, actually for obvious reasons- and it’s fascinating to me because “the marke, in air quotes, defines tech touch in any gosh darn way. Inviting a customer to a webinar’s tech touch. Sending an email to a customer is considered tech touch. Digital experience is considered tech touch. Then enacting use cases and maturity assessments and automated success plans, and that’s all considered tech touch. It’s really fascinating. I’ll be interested to see the market mature their definition around tech touch. My recommendation would be, if I could be so bold, would be-
Andrew Marks: Be bold.
Keri Keeling: Machine learning, mature that technology, get that out. That’s the table stakes thing because that’s exactly what you and I are talking about, Andrew. In my mind is that you’ve got to get ahead of it, right?
Andrew Marks: Yeah. You got to get ahead of it. You’ve got to be in control of it. It’s like a manufacturing line. Even though every customer is unique and every customer has their own outcomes, it’s not as black and white as building a model T. They can have whatever they want, whatever color they want as long as it’s black but it’s still a manufacturing line. The more that we can approach Customer Success as a manufacturing line, taking into account the nuances for the different customers that we inevitably have to solve for, the more we control our ability to deliver success.
Customer Success is very much something you’re constantly looking at and analyzing and evolving. That’s why I think this role that you have is even so important, especially for a company like VMware and especially this direction that they’re going being really vested in the customer. I think that’s a great sign for VMware.
Keri Keeling: I love that you bring that up. There is something that I should add. When you look at tech touch, voice of the customer, when you look at any of these larger programs and it doesn’t matter the size of the company that you’re with, incubating your approach is so critical. There’s real credibility at stake. Imagine a world in which you develop a tech touch that says, “Hey Andrew, I see you didn’t log in to the last so-and-so days. Let me start serving you up this content.” You’re like, “what are you talking about? I’m logged in five minutes ago.” There’s serious cred at stake when you’re beginning anything that you haven’t tried before or if you’re rebuilding something in a new innovative way. I think that incubating, and you bring such a solid point up Andrew in that you’ve got to try it. You’ve got to try it. Try it with friendlies. Try it with very small cohort customers.
Andrew Marks: Try it manually. We’re huge fans of try, don’t automate it yet. Try it manually.
Keri Keeling: That’s right. There is something to be said about the good old fashioned way before you start throwing technology at things.
Andrew Marks: Yeah, definitely. You want to try it and fine tune it. Whenever we lay out our Customer Success engagement blueprint, we’ve laid out all of the different steps, one of the first things we tell people is you should not automate any of this right out of the gate.
Keri Keeling: That’s right.
Andrew Marks: Let’s lay it all out. Let’s get a group of people to start using this. Once we’ve decided that we’ve tuned something and we feel that it’s something that’s super repetitive, then let’s talk about actually automating it. But you can’t just flip a switch and say we’re now tech touch for this segment. Got to try things.
Keri Keeling: Yeah. It’s true and you’re going to iterate, I don’t know anybody that has developed tech touch that nailed it on the first go around.
Andrew Marks: Yeah, of course.
Keri Keeling: I don’t know anybody. Most people, when you think about it, and as a matter of fact I’m developing my team right now and it’s interesting because I’m actually looking at that as one of the criteria. Did you deploy tech touch and did it fail? Because if your answer is yes, then I’m going to be like great. Now tell me it’s that iteration and what was the learning because it’s a very nascent approach. It’s defined a thousand different ways. Not only that, but there’s probably that many more ways to skin different use cases or skin the cat, if you will.
Andrew Marks: Yeah. No cats have been harmed in the making of this program by the way. Although, I wouldn’t put that past a Marvel or Matrix.
Keri Keeling: I know, I was just going to say you know I have two German shepherds, right?
Andrew Marks: Exactly. I know nothing about your German shepherds and their proclivity to cats. Cool. It’s great. I loved the conversation. I love talking about this stuff and especially with you. You’ve got such a great perspective, such great experience. I appreciate you spending time with me today. I’m sure you’re going to freaking knock it out of the park at VMware. They are very fortunate to have you and thank you. Thanks for the time.
Keri Keeling: Thank you. I’m equally as lucky to have them. This is the real deal. I’m so excited about the work that they’re doing and I love that I’m a part of it. This is fun. Likewise, it’s been great speaking with you and it’s been great catching up. I’m so, so happy to hear that everybody is happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Andrew Marks: Well, we’re not wealthy enough yet, but yes.
Keri Keeling: Hey, you know what? You’re going to get there. You are.
Andrew Marks: Happy, healthy, and wise. Happy, healthy, and wiser.
Keri Keeling: There you go, wiser.
Andrew Marks: Exactly.
Keri Keeling: Awesome.
Andrew Marks: Thanks.
Keri Keeling: Take care.
Originally published at https://successcoaching.co on November 25, 2020.
