Experts of Experience - #15 Jim Roth's Masterclass on Salesforce's Customer Success Strategies

Episode Date: January 31, 2024

Explore the evolving landscape of customer experience with Jim Roth, President of Customer Success at Salesforce, in this episode of Experts of Experience.Join host Lauren Wood as she delves into the strategies of Salesforce to revolutionize customer interactions and organizational efficiency. Jim Roth shares his expertise on breaking down functional silos and integrating customer services to provide a seamless experience. Discover how Salesforce leverages digital technologies and AI to empathize with and better serve their customers. Gain insights into the importance of simplifying processes and understanding customer needs in large organizations.Tune in for a compelling discussion on transforming customer experience in the digital age.If you found this episode insightful, please rate us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.Subscribe Now: https://www.youtube.com/@ExpertsofExperience?sub_confirmation=1Imagine running your business with a trusted advisor who has your success top of mind. That’s what it’s like when you have a Salesforce Success Plan. With the right plan, Salesforce is with you through every stage of your journey — from onboarding, to realizing business outcomes, to driving efficient growth.Learn more about what’s possible on the Salesforce success plan website: http://sfdc.co/SalesforceCustomerSuccess 

One of the things that we spend a lot of time thinking about is that we don't want our customers to feel our organizational chart. We historically had a training website, a customer support website, a customer success website, and it was up to the customer to say, well, which one of those do I go to? It doesn't make a lot of sense from a customer perspective. Let's reimagine those functional silos into what's something that's more customer friendly. And so what we've said is the segmentation should not be functional. The segmentation should be asking this question, what are all of the services and things that customers need throughout the full life cycle of the use of their products with Salesforce? That's kind of one bucket. And the second bucket is what are the services and things that customers need just from time to time?

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. And today I'm speaking with Jim Roth, the President of Customer Success at Salesforce. In this role, Jim oversees global customer success, customer support, and customer training. So he's truly an epic CS leader and I cannot wait to get into it. Previous to Salesforce, Jim spent 17 years at Dell where he led services and marketing IT. And I think the most important thing about this episode that I have been just so, so excited to get into is that we are hearing from the customer success leader of the company that is widely known for pioneering what customer success leader of the company that is widely known for pioneering what customer success is today. So we're going to dive into how Salesforce

approaches its customer experience, how the company has built a customer success function that continues to be one of the most innovative in the space, and how Jim and his team drive success for their 150,000 plus customers. Jim, how are you? Hey, Lauren. It's great to be with you today. Thank you so much. So I want to jump right into it. I know that you work with an incredibly large volume of customers. And I want to hear from you what you're seeing in the customer experience space right now and what you think people may be missing or not seeing or completely avoiding when they're going about creating customer experiences.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. One of the things that we spend a lot of time thinking about is that we don't want our customers to feel our organizational chart. And when we say that, heads always nod like yours just did. It's something that resonates with people in organizations of any size, really. Certainly when you get into large organizations, all organizations of any size are guilty of that. And I think just that as a North Star to say, what can we do to continue to make the experience better and easier so customers don't feel the org chart? I think that's a lot of it. And there's very simple examples that we've all seen, probably the easiest one to identify are websites. And we've all worked with companies like banks. Banks like to make lots of acquisitions and they'll make an acquisition. My bank acquired

a mortgage company. And for a long time, kind of still to this day, the bank's website and the mortgage company's website are separate. And even the logins are separate. And that's the reason for that is because they used to be two separate companies, but you're still filling the org chart. And so what is it that you can do to really break down those walls so that your customers don't feel it? And that sounds easy and it's very agreeable, but it's really much harder to do in practice. I think about this all the time when I'm calling my bank or I'm flying on an airline or, you know, telecom, whenever I'm dealing with these bigger companies that have been around for a long time, especially. I'm always wondering, why is the customer experience so challenging? And I'm curious to know your opinion on that. Is it because it's just

they're massive companies that are difficult to change? Or is it because of technology? In your opinion, what is really standing in the way of some of these very large, prominent organizations from providing really seamless customer experiences. Some of it is just that when organizations get larger, they have specialization and scale, and that leads to them having departments. Yeah. And so that's what leads to when you call into the call center and they have to transfer

you around from department to department. What I think has happened also is that each of those departments and those functions have their own systems. And those systems tend to solidify the silos and build those silos even stronger, which make it harder to work together. And then I think the icing on top of it all is the fact that there aren't really a lot of functions in these companies that are really thinking end to end and designing the experience. Typically, what happens is each of those functions design their piece of the experience, which might make perfect sense to them.

But when you go as a customer and experience it, you're experiencing all these different kind of Frankenstein experiences that don't feel very cohesive. And that kind of ends up being the problem. And so I think a lot of it is making sure that in your experience, you have design. And I really mean designers who are thinking about this end to end is a really important aspect of it. I also think I encourage people all the time, go do your own kind of secret shopper, test your own experience. Because when you actually go do that, you kind of feel all

these things. And it's just, it's a shame that too often people in companies doing their job day to day don't actually step back and walk through the shoes of their customers and what they're feeling and experiencing. Yeah. How do you do this at Salesforce? Like, especially in the role that you're sitting in, you're overseeing a, I'm assuming, very large organization. And that's just the success and service experience portion of the business. How are you thinking about this, both in your own organization as well as with your counterparts, in really creating that seamless experience? In the service industry, for years, we've had a very functional approach. There's customer support. there's customer training, there's this customer success

function, which you've done a good job diving into in other episodes of kind of explaining what that is. But there are these roles like a customer success manager that are in there. Some organizations, if they have a physical product, will have a field service team that can roll trucks and send people on site. And then there are certainly organizations like ours that have a professional services team, which is doing big implementation types of projects and like that. And those are all examples where your customer, you don't want them to feel that org chart, but it's really hard because all those

different teams have their own processes, their own systems and all this types of stuff. And so one of the things we've done is we've said, well, let's reimagine those functional silos into what's something that's more customer friendly. And so what we've said is actually the segmentation should not be functional. The segmentation should be asking this question, what are all of the services and things that customers need throughout the full life cycle of the use of their products with Salesforce. That's kind of one bucket. And the second bucket is what are the services and things that customers need just from time to time? So let me give you an example. If you buy a new piece of software, could be Salesforce or anything else for that matter, you have to implement it. And so

that's a service that you need from time to time. It has a fixed duration, has a start and an end period. But there are other services like customer support or customer training that you need from time to time. It has a fixed duration, has a start and an end period. But there are other services like customer support or customer training that you need on an ongoing basis. And so we're putting those into one bucket. And so really our vision is to take all of the things you need throughout the life cycle for us, that's customer support, it's customer success, and it's customer training.

And instead of thinking about those as three functions, we're thinking about them as one super service. So how do we really design those to be one integrated service? And what we found when we started doing this was, lo and behold, each of those functions happen to have their own website, right? Every company on the planet has too many websites. And it's usually all with good intent where a given function says, well, I want to provide a self-service experience for my customer.

So I'm going to go stand up a website. Again, really good intent. But from the customer perspective, you're looking at the websites of every department in your company. We were guilty of that. So we're now in the process of consolidating those three websites into one website. So we have one customer experience. That's like the most visible example of it. Just so I make sure I understand, like if a customer needs help, they only go to one place. They're not trying to find who to ask for help. We historically had a training website, customer support website, a customer success website. And it was up to the customer to say, well, which one of those do I go to? Which is kind of, you know, not, not, doesn't make a lot of sense from a customer perspective. So let's get, let's get to one website. And by the way,

we start to do that from the customer back. You start to see, well, there's actually some inefficiencies and redundancies in the experience, like multiple parts of our team were doing what amounted to customer training. Let's just solve, let's not solve these problems multiple times. All of our organizations have limited resources, limited budgets. The last thing we want to do is go solve the same problem twice. Let's go solve it once, make it easier for the customer

and be a little more efficient ourselves. I think this concept of silos is something that so many companies and leaders struggle with. I know I've struggled with it myself where it's like, I want to create a seamless experience for the customer, but then I also want to acknowledge the specialization

on my own team. And for example, if someone's doing training, I'd rather them be really, really amazing at training and be able to focus on that rather than carrying customers through various stages of the journey. And it can get kind of confusing. I'm curious to know how you think about that problem in your ever-evolving business. Yeah. So there's no doubt you need to have specialization, right? You can't have full generalization and have any depth, especially whether it's a functional specialization.

Or in our case, we have a really wide range of products. And so not everybody can be an expert on all of those products. It's not reasonable. And so the word that we think about a lot is orchestration. So we have all these pockets of specialization, but what we really want to do is orchestrate a unified customer experience. And we do that in a couple ways. One, we have roles.

This is really the role of our customer success manager to kind of orchestrate that experience. Their job is to deeply know and understand the customer, but also to understand what are all the specialized capabilities kind of behind the curtain that the customer has access to and can point and orchestrate and get that customer to the right specialist at the right time. That's a piece of it. To scale it even further though, we want to make that digital. So we think about what's the digital experience and how do we digitally orchestrate that? And the way we do that is we think about different signals that are coming in and well, what are the things we can trigger digitally in response to that? So I'll give you a simple example would be, we see a customer buy a new product.

That is a signal for us that it's time to onboard them, to introduce them to the product they bought, introduce them to Salesforce. And so one way we could do that is we could say, well, we see that signal and we pick up the phone and call the customer. We can do that digitally and we can send that customer on a digital journey. We'd send them an email, kind of a welcome email to Salesforce, and it would be a smart email. So we would know if the customer opened it and engaged on that email,

that they were consuming the content. But if they weren't, and they didn't go through that content, then maybe we need to send them another email two days later to really ensure that we have the touch. And so that's an example of using signals to send customers on a digital journey. From an economics perspective, that scales better. But there's certainly a lot of customers and a lot of use cases where that's actually the better way to engage the customer anyway. So it's not just about saving money. It's about delivering the experience to the customer in the way they want to receive it. And I think going back to what you had said earlier about really looking at the entire customer experience and actually experiencing what your customers experience is really key to that. Is it that necessary to go and experience your product?

I draw a lot of inspiration from the theories of design thinking. And the word that is kind of most front and center in any book or course you take on design thinking is empathy. And really empathy is walking in the shoes of your user, which in this case is the customer if we're talking customer experience. And so it's really, really important to do that, not just to study it on a process flow chart or hear about it, but actually go do it. Some products and experiences make that easier to do. If it's a retail store or a hotel or something, it's easy to go and kind of feel and walk in those shoes. If it's a piece of software, maybe it's a little bit harder to do, but it's still not that hard.

And I think it's really important and it's a really good reminder for leaders in all parts of the organization to make sure that they're spending time really walking in the shoes of their customer. Because when you do that, you find a lot of interesting things. Said differently, people that are listening to this podcast and care about customer experience tend to be pretty critical of other customer experiences that they experience. All I would say is turn that critical eye on your own experience and you'll be amazed at what you find. Totally.

And I think when it comes to like, in my last role, I was leading customer success at a company called Too Good To Go, which is we were servicing restaurants and grocery stores, which our team was not actually able to go and be the person behind the counter. But what we could do is go and spend a day with them and just go and spend time with our customer and see what their workflows look like so that we could empathize with them and really understand what is it like when they have a customer? Because it was a marketplace. So one of our customers come in to take advantage of the product. How do they actually move through that? And I think that was one really eye-opening moment for me to have that experience with our customer to really understand how they're using it, what they're experiencing, and then where we can really help to reduce their effort that they're spending on that product. Totally. And you make a great point, which is it's important to have empathy and walk in the shoes of your customer, but also to walk in the shoes of those who are delivering to your customer.

I remember a piece of research that we did at Dell, where we spent a ton of time sitting side by side with contact center agents that were serving our customers. And one of the things that just stuck with me from that experience so much was really the what motivates those people delivering service. And what really motivates a lot of people delivering service is helping people. I mean, it sounds very simple, but it's true. People get a lot of energy and satisfaction out of helping other people. At the same time, if you understand what really deflates them is red tape and bureaucracy and filling out forms.

And so in the contact center context, what energizes representatives is when they can spend time and focus and help the person on the other end of the phone or the other end of the chat or the other end of the case be successful in whatever they're trying to do. And what really deflates them is if I have to go click through a bunch of screens and fill out forms and take a bunch of notes and all those things, it just, it zaps their energy. And so if you understand that, you can say, well, my goal is to design an experience that minimizes all the red tape and bureaucracy and paperwork that my customer service team has to do so that they can focus on what really gives them energy, helping our customers. And oh, by the way, that's what our customers want as well. So this whole concept of empathy is so important, both having empathy for the customers, but also those who serve your

customers. Yeah. How do you gain empathy for your team? I think you have to travel and go meet with them face to face. We have a very global team, all continents, and you have to go sit down and talk with them. And typically what I like to do is go and do roundtable sessions with the frontline teams. So not with managers, not with second level managers. I do those too, but to really understand what's going on. And they're a very good proxy for the customer, but they'll also tell you kind of what's going on in their world and what obstacles. And when I go in and do these sessions, I always start them with, I don't have an agenda. I just want to have a conversation. I want to hear from you.

And I really embrace this concept of servant leadership, which is I'm there to help move obstacles for them to make them successful. And I know that that trickles down into a better customer experience. In these sessions, we get all kinds of great ideas. And I really frame it, you know, this concept of servant leadership as an inverted org chart. So if you think about org chart, we're talking about org charts a lot today, by the way. But if you think about org charts, the traditional beginning of the year. People are thinking about planning. It is. The traditional org chart has the leader up at the top and the people on the team down below.

This concept of servant leadership, and I think it also works really well to develop empathy for your team, is to actually think about your team on top of the org chart and the leader down below. And it's your job as a great leader, particularly a great leader of customer experience to say, well, how can I move rocks and obstacles for my team? Because your team, if they're delivering service and an experience day-to-day, they actually know really well

what are the things that work and what are the things that don't work. And so it's your job as a leader to draw on those experiences, hear from them and figure out what are the obstacles. Maybe it's a policy obstacle or a tool obstacle or some systems process or something. Those are the kinds of things. And those are gold when you can kind of pull those out of a roundtable discussion with your frontline team and then go action them. And by the way, when you close the loop and you go

action something and move that rock and come back to that team, it just like energizes them and takes them to the next level. You said a couple things there that I think are really important. One is going in without an agenda and listening and understanding like what are the rocks in their way. I found, and I think many leaders have found that like you can get the most juicy innovative insights from your team when you just like listen to what's happening. You also mentioned something that I just really want to underscore, which is coming back and telling them when you've made the changes. Because the benefit of that in terms of engagement, as you just mentioned, as well as them, you know, feeling trust that you're working in their best interest goes so far. And I think it's

when we're committing to really listening, we have to follow through on that listening as well. No doubt. No doubt. The closed loop is really important. And it's tricky because sometimes you'll do these sessions and you'll get flooded with ideas and you kind of have to sift through and focus because you can't tackle, you can't move all the rocks at once. Yeah. But when you can move them and come back, then it's a huge win and a huge boost for the morale of the organization. When you're using Salesforce to tackle your company's most important goals, failure is simply not an option. That's why their most highly skilled advisors, Salesforce CTOs, are available to help you succeed with expert guidance and implementation support at every step of the way.

Learn more about Salesforce CTOs at sfdc.co slash professional services. I'd love to talk a little bit about customer success since it is something that both you and I share. I'm a total customer success nerd. And something that I find is it is a misunderstood function. Unless you're in B2B SaaS, and even if you are, I think there's so many different variations of it. And so I wanted to ask you, what is your definition of customer success? It's a good question. I'll give you a definition in a second. I think about the origins of it.

And our CEO, Mark Benioff, often says that he was the world's first customer success manager, which I think is true on some levels for sure. And you think about the story of Salesforce, which really started the SaaS revolution and was the first large software as a service company. And what happens in that business model is you wake up one day and you say, well, wow, our revenue is growing a whole lot. We're selling a lot, but also the revenue is walking out the door in terms of customers that are churning on the back end. So the original kind of the OG definition of customer success was a resource that was deployed after a product was sold to ensure the renewal.

So that's probably my simplest way that I think about that is ensuring the renewal. Now, it is morphed into lots of different things, and it's very specific to different products. But I think at the end, the mission of customer success is to keep customers for life. So ensure the renewal, reduce the churn. You could use a lot of different words to describe it, but that's really what it is. And by the way, all businesses really want to keep their customers for life. But the reality is that subscription businesses have an economic incentive to reduce that churn and keep customers for life. Because if they don't, the customers aren't paying for something all up front, they're paying along the way and they might walk away from their subscription, which is not in the best interest of the organization. So you service the largest companies in the world. I think it's safe to say the Amazons, the Walmarts, the American Expresses, just to name a few. How have you learned from those customers

as you've serviced them? Yeah, it's a great question. I'll go back to some of the principles of design thinking. One of the principles of design thinking is that you can learn an awful lot from the extreme users of your product. The large customers, the very sophisticated customers, because they really, really push you. And you have to go solve hard things for those large customers that you can then say, well, let's go bring those back and scale them for others. So a couple of things that come to mind, a lot of our very large customers have told us, we want to have one

very clean, very easy interface with all of Salesforce as an example. And so we have put kind of veneers of triage teams and other things over that experience so that those big accounts can kind of have a one-stop shop and one place to call to get everything that they needed. And a lot of that was actually this inspiration for, why do we have all these silos? And what the big customers are really asking us is we don't want to fill your org chart. We don't want to understand who to go in Salesforce for what, because Salesforce is also a big organization. So just make it easy for us.

They kind of asked for that and demanded that. And we kind of put it in place at a very small scale. But like now that's what we're doing for the whole customer experience. So it's just one example. But just like I would encourage everybody listening to really lean into doing the empathy work with their customers and with those that serve their customers. It's also good to really spend time listening to your most extreme, your largest, your customers that are really pushing you on a lot of things. Don't convince yourself they're just anomalies.

You really want to think about them like, what can we learn about what they're asking us to do and apply to all of our customers? And that's kind of a really good pattern to follow. Mm-hmm. Have you ever received some really tough feedback from a really big client? I think the key thing there is when you get that really tough feedback from a customer, there's always some truth in it. Even though the initial reaction might be to be defensive, you could do that for sure. Just resist that temptation and just listen and absorb it.

And it's okay to tell that big client, which I do a lot now, let me circle back with you. Give me a day and I'll come back with you. It's kind of almost the theory of how to handle escalations in step one. And then I think the follow-on piece of, well, what do you learn from that? Again, I think it all goes into the journal of all the empathy work of like, what can we do from this experience to make all of ourselves better?

And you really wanna do that root cause because the best thing in all of these interactions like that is to prevent them. And so, you really need to have this prevention mindset to say, well, what happened here and how could we prevent that from ever happening again? And if you don't do that and it starts to happen again, again, then that's kind of like shame on you. And that certainly happened to me too, where we didn't really have the right root cause.

Something did happen again and then it came back and it was even less fun the second time. The other thing I'd say that I would learn there is just advice to leaders. Sometimes we all have the tendency, if the reason for that escalation is something on our own team, we will kind of go address it. But if it's on someone else's team, it's a little bit harder to go run it down. And the customer doesn it. But if it's on someone else's team, it's a little bit harder to go run it down. And the customer doesn't care what team it's on. They just know it's with your company. So take the extra time and go do the right thing and work with the other departments in your company to go help fix the root cause, even if it's not in your backyard.

Yeah. It's definitely difficult when you're the face of it. But at the end of the day, just like you're saying, they don't care about your org chart. They don't care. They don't care whose problem it is. That's right. was really excited to see it and kind of wish I was a Salesforce customer at the moment so that I could play with it. Can you tell us a little bit about what that is and what inspired providing that information to your clients? It's an interesting journey. When we first started on this strategy to bring customer success and customer support and customer training together, we went around and asked the teams, how do you measure customer success? Salesforce is a very values-driven organization.

We have five core values. Customer success is our second highest value as an organization. So everybody deeply cares about customer success. So you would think the question of how do you measure it is a pretty straightforward question. But what we found when we started asking that question, even of our own team, was we heard measures that really measured our own success. And this was a big learning from this exercise that I encourage everybody listening to go do this is, and you might not use the words customer success, but pretty much every company cares about customer success in some shape or form.

Ask yourself, how do you really measure it? And I guarantee that in pockets, you will find that you are measuring your own success, not the customer success. And one of the reasons for that is because your own success is a lot easier to measure. Most organizations have a finance person or a CFO who that's really their job is to count the beans on how are you doing on your own success. And so what I typically find is when you aren't measuring customer success, you're usually measuring some sort of financial success of your own. And so that was a really interesting question.

And so we said, well, what if we were really to develop a way to measure true customer success? And we had a couple of criteria for it. One, it had to be something we could do for all of our customers, not just the big, you know, top 20 customers where you have a lot more resources and it's easier to do lots of things. So for all of our customers, and one of our criterias was if it wasn't something

that we would sit down and talk to a customer about, then it wasn't a measure of customer success. So for example, if I have a revenue target or something in my business, I'm probably not going to sit down and talk to a customer about that. Said differently, if I'm only going to talk to my CFO about it, it's probably not a measure of customer success. And so what we did was we stepped back and said, well, what are all of the signals that we have across the entire company? Again, not just in our team, that could be signals we could use to measure customer success and roll them into a score. And so what we did, we said, well, let's look at all these things. And by the way, almost all organizations have a growth trajectory in

terms of the number of digital signals that they have, because more and more of their customer experience is becoming digital. And so we looked across all that and we ended up clustering all of these signals into three buckets. And the first bucket was around the technical health of the implementation, right? And so as a SaaS provider, we have visibility into the back end of the technology and we can see how healthy is the implementation. You know, are customers over-customizing it? Do customers have high page load? So the one thing that no one likes is they go into a piece of software and it takes forever to load. We can see that. And so page loads for us is kind of like when you go to the doctor and they take your temperature.

When they take the temperature at the doctor, they don't actually know what the problem is. They just know you're not well. And so it points you in the direction you have to go do other tests. Page loads are kind of like that for us because high page loads could be a symptom of I wrote too much code. I wrote bad code. I had bad design. I'm trying to look something up in SAP on the backend. And there's all kinds of reasons why that could be bad. And so that's an example of a signal. So we did all these signals, three buckets. The first one is technical health. So how healthy is the implementation of your software? The second one is expertise. So what are customers doing to increase their level of knowledge about Salesforce and Salesforce products? Because that helps both improve the level of their implementation, but it also contributes to the third bucket, which is customer adoption. Customers want to know, are my users using all of the features in the product?

The most common question that customers ask me is they say, Jim, how can I get more value out of my existing investment in Salesforce? It's a very common question. And what they really want to know is, Jim, what are the two or three features that are in Salesforce today that maybe other companies like me are using that I'm not using? Right. And that seems like a straightforward question, but it's not very easy to solve. So we're doing a lot of work right now to be able to give customers that user and feature level telemetry so they know what's going on. And so what we ended up doing, we clustered all these signals together and we rolled them into three scores. We have an adoption score, a customer expertise score, and a technical health score, those three. And then we roll all of those up into a customer success score. And so today we can now measure all of those scores

for all of our customers around the globe. And now what we're doing is we're starting to take action on them. So if I see that a customer has a high page load score or a page load signal in their health score, I can then create a signal to go say, well, I'm going to go send you on a digital journey, or I'm going to have your customer success manager reach out to you to help you. And so this is really how we're delivering customer success at scale. But we're also showing these scores to the customers. And they really like that because one thing that's kind of a misnomer about customer success is that customer success is not just the job of the vendor. It's actually the job of the customer as well. And so by showing the score to the customer, we get on the same page, we're aligned on the same measures, and we can have really rich conversations.

And so now what's exciting to us at Salesforce as well, is we're starting to say that now that we have a way to measure customer success, can we use it as an incentive? So can we use it an incentive for our sales teams, for our professional services teams? Certainly it's an incentive for our sales teams, for our professional services teams. Certainly, it's an incentive for my team, for our partners. And so it's become this kind of way to kind of galvanize the customer experience so that all of the teams at Salesforce and in our ecosystem with our partners, if they're all incented by the same measure of customer success, we're all going to show up as one company and we're going to resist the temptation for customers to kind of feel our org chart. It needs to be what the customer for customers to kind of feel our org chart. It needs to be what the customer cares about.

Absolutely. Bottom line. Absolutely. I mean, every company I've ever worked in, we have a lot of metrics that the customer doesn't care about at all. They don't care about how satisfied they are on a scorecard. They care about how they feel, right? And we may have asked that survey question

when they got back from vacation and they were feeling really good. And it doesn't really give the full picture. And I think what I really like about this customer success score is the transparency aspect to it. Is that you're actually sharing with them, here's the things that we know that you care about. And that's what we care about now as well. How's that? Like, what's the feedback been? The feedback has been great. The feedback has been that these are some of the best conversations that our customers are having with Salesforce. For all those reasons you just mentioned, the transparency is really good. And we're very open that this score is incomplete, right? We're

just getting started on it. And so we're getting a lot of feedback on other signals that we should incorporate. We have work to do to expand it and make it available for all of our products today. It's only a subset of our products. So we have a lot of work that's going on there. But the conversations are a game changer because we're much closer. We're definitely not perfect, but we're much closer to really having a deep conversation with data that's objective about things that customers care about. And that really energizes them for sure. You mentioned that it's not perfect. You're still, you're in

the beginning of it. What's next for the customer success score? Yeah. I mean, it's a few things. One, we want to make it more complete. So we need to make it more complete in terms of the product coverage. We have a big portfolio of products that doesn't cover all those today. So we're working on that. We're also making it deeper. So I mentioned earlier examples like in the adoption score, there's enormous demand from our customers to go very deep on all of the features. They want to know which features are being used, which ones aren't. They want to know which users in some cases are using features and which ones aren't so they can drive change

management. And so there's a lot of telemetry build to go into there for sure. And then I'd say, you know, the other thing that we want to go do is figure out how can we take that signal to go be much more proactive with customers to kind of point out and recommend these types of opportunities. I'll give you another example we're working on right now. We have this amazing app store called the AppExchange, which is just like one of the AppExchange or app stores for, you know, the Google or Apple have with Android and iOS. You can go in there and download apps that are on the Salesforce platform.

They're ready to go and they kind of extend your products. And so one of the signals we're working on right now is to tell our teams like, you know, is the customer, have they adopted anything from within that app exchange? And if they have, that's great. But if they haven't, it may be because they don't actually know that exists. And it's a hugely valuable resource for customers. So something as simple as that, where you can say, oh my gosh, I see now at scale, I can see that these customers haven't experienced this AppExchange, or maybe they have, or there's some problem, but they haven't actually used anything or downloaded anything and installed it. And now that I have that data, I can go send them an email or a campaign or make a phone call

to them to just say, hey, we noticed you weren't using anything in the AppExchange. You actually know about the AppExchange. Here's a video. Would you like to learn more about it? And so it's really about orchestrating these experiences at scale, but you have to have the data to go kind of point the customers in the right direction. And so that's been a big unlock for us of what are the things that we can do now that we have that signal.

By the way, it could be even something that you're on the phone talking to your sales team, or you're on the phone talking to the customer support team, and they can see it and they can actually have that conversation at the end of whatever you were calling about. And that's really valuable as well. So it's really about having all this data. Sometimes I say that customers expect you to know everything about them that you should without being creepy, right? But too often we have these data silos across the company. And so like the, are you using the app exchange is in some database over here, but if I can't bring that front and center into the customer experience,

then I'm not able to add that value. But if I knew that little nugget of information at the moment of truth, when I'm having a conversation with a customer, it's very easy to kind of mention that or recommend it or send that video link, but you just got to break down all these silos of data to again, unify that customer experience. There is nothing more frustrating than telling someone the same thing that you told their colleague

five minutes before, a month before, whatever the case may be. It is something that I think... I mean, I'm so grateful for Salesforce for that reason because it really allows all that information to be gathered. But actually, what I've experienced in the past as a Salesforce user, and I'm wondering if or how you would solve this problem. I had a sales team of about 100 people that were terrible at taking notes. Just awful. And we were relatively new. Salesforce

was rolled out 2 years before I started. So the company had been around for about 7 or 8 years at that point. And I, as the head of customer success, could not get the sales team to put in notes. So then my team's getting phone calls and or they're reaching out to customers to address something and that customer is bringing up something that was said during the sales process. And we had no idea. And I'm wondering how a leader, a person in that seat that I'm describing, could maybe use this data or figure out, because I didn't know how big the problem was until it showed up. Is this addressing that at all? I'm asking selfishly.

It's funny. We've been talking for a while now, Lauren, and the one term we haven't used yet is AI. That's the next thing. I think AI is really the answer to that. The ability to transcribe conversations and meetings and summarize them is now kind of unprecedented. This kind of goes back to the empathy work of the users. What deflates users is entering notes in a system, right? Which is what you just said that the teams didn't want to do. But if through technology, through AI, if I can transcribe the conversation and auto-populate the notes or the transcript into the system, and then leverage AI again to summarize it, what you really want is

the summary of the conversation, which AI can do and completely automate that, which is great because it's going to be more accurate. And your users, your sales reps, your customer success managers aren't going to have to do that, which is something they don't like. And so I think AI is a big unlock for that, for sure. Certainly triangulating with other signal of what's going on in the account can also help. But I think one of the new forms of signal, again, that's there because this part of the experience is now more digital than ever are what can you do with transcripts? If you have transcripts of, you know, we used to only have email transcripts for

a long time and chat transcripts, voice transcripts are relatively new. Now there's meeting transcripts. So if you do it right, really all of these, you know, voice conversations you were having with customers can now become, that was really unstructured data can have some structure, have summarization, you can populate structured data fields and really create other signal out of that. So hopefully you don't miss the follow-up that the customer asked you to do on that call. But because somebody didn't log the follow-up in your system, it falls through the cracks

and the customer gets frustrated. I'm so excited about AI. Tell us what you're doing. Tell us what is on the docket for Salesforce. Because I know there's so much that you're working on implementing, but I'd love to hear a little bit about what we can expect and what actually more importantly, what you're seeing as the biggest opportunities in AI. Yeah. AI is an amazing revolution. We could not be more excited about it as well. We think that the customer experience is really right where it lends itself the best in sales experiences and service experiences and marketing experiences.

So I'll talk for a minute about kind of what we're doing in our team. A lot of it starts with what we were just talking about, which is how do we take this transcription? How do we use that to kind of have better signal of what's going on with our customers? Maybe we can summarize it to make it more productive for our teams. Translation is another one that we see is really powerful, right? So if I'm having a conversation with a customer in a non-English language and I only speak English, I can't do much with that signal unless it's translated to me. We're even seeing really compelling things happen. And I see this broadly with our customers too. More and more customer service interactions are moving to chat. And generative AI is really powerful at doing real-time translations of chat. So we see lots of our customers have agents, you know, typing in chat in one language and the customer, you know, maybe in another part of the world is receiving that chat in a completely different language.

And that's pretty powerful as well. So these kinds of translation things are super powerful. So that's kind of one family of gen AI use cases. You know, the second one that's pretty compelling is I call them these drafting use cases. So that could be an email comes in and Gen AI can draft it for you. I want to create a knowledge article. And instead of doing that from scratch, Gen AI can write the first draft for me. And it's important to have the human in the loop there to make sure there's no hallucinations and that it's the right thing before you present it to the customer. But drafting these responses or the first drafts of content is another really compelling use case. And then we see that on top of that, proofreading is kind of another use case. The Gen AI writes the first draft, I might make

some edits and then proofreading can come in and make sure it's really clean and ready to go. So it's a really powerful accelerator to creating higher quality, better content much faster. So that's a big one. ingrained. And, you know, in the service context for customer experience, you know, you could think about the co-pilot as really what the self-service, you know, website or mobile site of the future looks like. Today, a lot of mobile or self-service websites we have, you know, they'll have a search box, they might have bots, they might have different content you could browse. But in the future, I think what this goes to is just a box that just kind of asks like, well, how can I help you? In the same way that if you walked into a small retail store, the owner of that store would greet you with, how can I help you? And then they would guide you to all of the resources and things in that store that you might be interested in. That's really what self-service in the future looks like. So you could think about the, how can I help you? And you could think about it kind of like a bot, but a really smart bot that can do things like, well, based on what you, what you answer, maybe the response I give you is a, is a link to a YouTube video that answers your question. Maybe if it's something very urgent or compelling, I immediately get you to a person or maybe even better because you, I know who you are and I know your phone number, I'm going to call you right away to engage on whatever this thing is.

So the co-pilot is really that kind of a bot that can also do things like when I do a typical search in Google and I get the list of the 10 places to go, as the user, I have to cobble together what the answer is by going to multiple links in there and kind of putting it together. The co-pilot has the capability to pull all that content together and craft a specific answer to the question on the fly. So it really is like that shopkeeper of the small business that is there to greet you and ask, how can I help?

That's really the future of self-service. People get really excited about that because of the experience. And certainly the CFOs get really excited because of all the costs that that can take out down the road in terms of delivering customer experience. It's very exciting. And I'm going to be totally honest with you. I'm a little bit scared as well because I'm seeing some implementation of AI feel like they're like, okay, we did the AI thing. And my experience is actually worse than it was before. So I'm curious to know from your perspective, what mistakes are you seeing out there? What are companies doing that maybe they shouldn't be doing when it comes to AI implementation? Yeah. I think a lot of companies are under pressure from above on Gen AI from a

boss or a board who's saying, you know, they're kind of asking this, when can we do the press release on Gen AI? Maybe because it's good for your stock price or whatever. And we totally get that that's out there. That's understandable. I think the best thing to do right now is to be running lots of experiments, be running those experiments internally, not externally. And then as you prove things out internally, that's the time when you should go flip them externally. So I think if there's a mistake that people are making is they might be pushing the Gen AI use cases to their customers before they're really tested and proven with their internal

teams. And that's not new. That's like a good approach to all kinds of new technology that's rolled out over the years. Well, this has been a very interesting conversation. I've loved talking to you about all these different facets of customer success and customer experience and how we can implement things. I'd love to know what are some key resources that you use to stay on top of customer experience and customer success, like blogs or podcasts or places that you go to? This podcast is my source, Lauren. This is where I go. I tend to look at a lot of things on design thinking and design. Yeah. I also get a lot of inspiration from B2C

kinds of experiences. I'm kind of in a B2B world. In fact, I ask my staff always in our staff meeting if they've had a customer experience that's noteworthy, either because it was so great or not so great, to please share it. And so we draw a lot of inspiration, honestly, just from our lives as consumers. Because a lot of the trends that we see in B2B kind of start in B2C. I think paying attention to those trends is important. I also tend to look at organizations, like there's a lot of newer, especially during COVID, a lot of these popped up kind of newer direct-to-consumer B2C companies that popped up, and they aren't encumbered by old systems or old processes. And to kind of see what they're really doing from experience, I think is also really inspiring. So it's a combination of, there's no,

I don't think there's any one place that's the perfect place to go look for that inspiration. Well, thanks so much for calling out the podcast where we're trying to speak to everyone who's making waves in the space. And I'd actually love to ask you your own question about a recent experience that with a brand or a company, any type of customer experience that really left you impressed. Tell me about it. I had one over the holidays. It was interesting. I was trying to move some money from one bank to another, which sounds pretty straightforward. I had to reach out. It wasn't something I could do in self-service. And so I

reached out to my financial institution. This one was E-Trade. So we'll put in a plug for E-Trade. And it turns out the number of my representative from E-Trade, because this was like two days before New Year's Eve, was out on holiday, which is kind of, you know, could be expected. And so I was kind of anticipating it wouldn't be as easy a process because the person I was gonna end up talking to didn't know me at all. Well, it turns out the person that answered my call

very, very quickly. And I said, well, I assume you probably want some information to identify me. And they said, actually, no, we were able to authenticate you through two factors. One, your caller ID and two, your digital voice print, which kind of scared me, but then I thought it was really cool. So they actually knew who I was. So I didn't have to answer the, you know, what was the address of the house where you grew up and all those types of questions. I didn't have to do any of that, which was really cool. And then

I needed to transfer the money from E-Trade to my bank. And I said, okay, so this is what I need to go do. It wasn't a lot of money. And the person said, well, you did this once before and we have that information stored. So we have the routing number, we have all that stuff. Is that what you want to do? And I said, oh my gosh, yes, that is exactly what I want to do. And then they said, normally that takes three days, but because you're a good customer, we're going to wire it, which will happen in a couple hours. And so we'll, and we'll waive the fee to go do it. And so I was just blown away because not only was the,

was the experience so easy because they had the voice print. I didn't have to go through all the hoops of who are you and where do you live and all this other stuff. But they knew a lot about me. They knew my history of the last transaction like this I did. And then they kind of went above and beyond. They knew kind of my profile and they waived this fee that they could have charged me and I probably would have paid no problem. And so it was just a, it was really an amazing experience. And it was certainly enabled by an awful lot of technology under the hood, but it didn't feel clunky or complex. I didn't feel anybody's org chart. And I was even more impressed because it wasn't the person I normally deal with. It was

someone that I'd never talked to before. And so huge shout out to E-Trade on that experience. And it sounds like there was a lot of surprise and delight there and then being able to take care of things that you would typically expect you would have to do. There really was. I think about experience. This is what we, in our team, we have this mantra that experience is really all about being easy and expert. And the way we define that is easy. We define as low effort. So it's kind of well-designed and well thought out and high speed, right? I don't want to have to wait. So low effort and high speed. And the expert side of it,

the obvious side of expert is that you need to know, be an expert on whatever you're delivering service on or the experience you're delivering. That's kind of obvious. But the second part of expert is the really hard part. And it involves data and systems and technology, which is you need to be an expert on the customer. And that goes back to the thing of, you have to know everything about the customer that you should without being creepy. And in this case, E-Trade knew, they knew who I was, they knew these past transaction history, all these types of stuff.

And that really led to this great experience. So that experience with E-Trade was both easy and expert, which I think is what we all need to aspire to deliver to our customers. I also think that's a really cool AI tool. I am so sick of having to answer the questions. Yeah. The voice print thing was so cool. And I do recall that long ago with them, they asked me, hey, are you okay if we set you up for voice print? So I had to consent, but it was just really cool that they had it. And it's more secure, right?

Then, you know, somebody could hack the address of my childhood home, but it's hard to hack the voice print. I think maybe, maybe not. That's probably, it's like a sci-fi movie. Maybe it's not as hard, but that was pretty cool. Yeah. And that's, that's when we get into like the demise of AI, but we're not going to go there for now.

It sounds like a great experience. And I can't wait to experience that myself. Last question for you. What is one piece of advice that you think every customer experience leader should hear? I would go back to something we talked about earlier, which is this kind of walk in the shoes of your customers. I just think that it's very easy in our busy lives, in our busy days, to kind of forget and become a little disconnected from the customer experience that we're actually delivering. And there's techniques to go after this.

I read about a company the other day that their whole wall, it might have been Airbnb, the whole wall of their headquarters was a customer journey map. And the idea of that full-scale wall is when you walk into the office every day, you see the whole customer journey map. And the idea of that full-scale wall is when you walk into the office every day, you see the whole customer journey map. And so journey maps and big journey maps on walls are a good reminder, but I don't know if it's quite the substitute

for actually walking in the shoes of your customer and being on the other end of that experience that you're trying to deliver. And again, in some cases, like the B2C kinds of companies, it's probably easier than in B2B. But I just think that's the most important thing. You might say, well, I don't have time for that. But it's kind of like you can't afford not to take the time to do that. And so I think that's probably the biggest piece of advice I would give.

I'm on the same page with you there. Whenever I do customer journey maps with companies, I always ask, how does the customer feel at this stage? And we hypothesize around how they feel, but then we need to actually go and understand, do they really feel that way? We want them to be excited, but they might be bracing themselves for what they expect to be a really complicated process. And actually speaking to our customers, understanding, getting into their shoes as much as we can to understand what is that feeling that they're having throughout the many phases that they go through because it is holistic at the end of the day.

Absolutely, no doubt. Great, well, Jim, it was such a pleasure to have you on the show. I love talking to you and I can't wait to speak to you again soon. No, it was great. Great being on Lauren. Thank you for what you're doing for the whole industry. I love, I love your podcast and can never wait to listen to the next one. So thanks again. You are a business leader with vision. You've seen the future as an AI enterprise

thriving with Salesforce's agent force, and it is bright. Getting there? It's a little fuzzier. Don't worry. Salesforce CTOs are here to work with you side by side and turn your agent force vision into a reality. We're talking expert guidance and implementation support from the best of the best. To learn more about Salesforce CTOs, visit sfdc.co slash professional services.