Experts of Experience - #55 Unlocking Customer Success: How BetterUp Uses Data and AI to Transform Workforces

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

Are we relying too much on technology in customer success? Sarah Parker, the SVP of Customer Success at BetterUp, discusses the balance between automation and human touch in customer relationships. Is it possible to scale customer success without losing the personal connection? Join us as we explore this critical debate in the industry.Tune in to learn:Why data is essential for driving customer success at scale.The importance of AI readiness for organizations today.How understanding customer business context enhances service delivery.Why engagement strategies must focus on the end user experience.Why standardization in processes allows for better automation.How AI can enhance the capabilities of customer success teams.How proactive engagement can prevent churn and improve satisfaction.–How can you bring all your disconnected, enterprise data into Salesforce to deliver a 360-degree view of your customer? The answer is Data Cloud. With more than 200 implementations completed globally, the leading Salesforce experts from Professional Services can help you realize value quickly with Data Cloud. To learn more, visit salesforce.com/products/data to learn more. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

How do you go from being a passenger of AI and just waiting for it to happen to you to being a pilot and chartering yours and your function's destiny with it? It's wild to see the shifts in AI in the past few months even. I feel like something that we thought was coming conceptually is now here and our work is going to change drastically and I can only imagine that a lot of your clients, employees and their workforces are facing some fears and hesitations around this new technology when really what we need to be doing is embracing it. Hello everyone and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host Lauren Wood.

Today I am joined by Sarah Parker, the Senior Vice President of Customer Success at BetterUp. Today, we are going to explore how she's driving human transformation at scale and really reshaping customer success for the modern workforce. Sarah, how are you? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Lauren. Thank you so much for coming on the show. So it's really interesting to have you on the show. I've been following Better Up for many years as you've been growing rapidly.

I myself am a leadership coach, so it's been really interesting for me to see how Better Up has positioned themselves as really supporting organizational transformation on that one-to-one level between a coach and an employee. And I'm curious to know, when it comes to organizational performance, what are the problems that your clients are facing and how are you helping them to overcome them? Yeah, I'd say there's some very pervasive themes right now that enterprises across industry are facing as it relates to kind of unlocking their workforce performance and potential to drive business performance. So I'd say first is just resilience in a world

where change is a constant. So that resilience, adaptability is a very major focus area for organizations that are partnering with us to help transform their workforce. The second big theme we're seeing is around AI readiness. So no longer do you just have to be in an IT function or in a tech-focused company to care about AI. It's everywhere. It's ubiquitous now. And so there's a lot of companies that are seeking our support and partnership in helping ready their workforces of all levels, from senior leadership to their individual contributor workforces for what's to change with AI. Something we like to call, how do you go from being a passenger of AI and just waiting for it to happen to you to being a pilot and kind of chartering yours and your functions destiny with it? It's something I

think about a lot. I mean, it's wild to see the shifts in AI in the past few months even. I feel like something that we thought was like coming conceptually is now here and our work is going to change drastically. And I can only imagine that a lot of your clients, employees and their workforces are facing some fears and hesitations around this new technology when really what we need to be doing is embracing it. I'm curious to know a little bit more of how you're helping your clients really adapt to this new AI world. Yeah, I mean, you know, when I think of it through're helping your clients really adapt to this new AI world. Yeah. I mean, when I think of it through the lens of my team where we come in and help them adopt and extract value from the solutions we've sold them, I'd say the first way we

help them is help them target the right populations that could benefit this the most. For example, if organizations trying to solve for AI readiness as it relates to their supply chain operations, we will help them do the diagnostic of who's the critical talent to unlock first within your supply chain division that will then have a cascading impact on the largest number of people possible. So we will, one, help them, you know, for one, diagnose and isolate on a starting critical population. Then we're there to help make sure that we're seeing enough engagement with the coaching, like in qualitative engagement with the coaching, that are going to yield them the output they want, which is a shifted mindset in how they're approaching AI in the workplace.

My team has a ton of data. Our customers have a ton of data. We're there to help them serve almost as like a translation layer. How do you harness the data that leveraging a platform like Batter Up offers you so you can pace where your people are and therefore prescribe where you need them to go. So I would say we are definitely acting as like data translators, helping them elevate the narrative of what the data is telling them around how their organization or critical talent is progressing, as well as what might be other new different areas

or mindsets that we need to unlock with them based on what we're learning in aggregate through their coaching journeys with us thus far. Interesting. So you're really taking a consultative approach with your clients to help them approach what you are offering them in terms of this coaching support, but doing so in a way that is very strategic and also data-driven. Yes. It's absolutely a consultative approach. Must be data-driven. We are science-founded. The data is the true unlock here. Traditionally,

we've worked primarily within the HR function, learning and development type sub-functions and groups. Where I'm pushing my team and where I think the market's going is, it's not enough to just study the data in your people through the lens of talent, but incorporating business context in performance indicators as well as evidence that calendar workforce transformation is actually happening so i would say that's another level of translation and other types of data sets that we're looking at beyond just the data around who's getting a coach but to coach, but being able to reconcile or extrapolate that to the business performance indicators and how the two correlate. Wow, that's so interesting. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? So like what kinds of data are you using? And, and I specifically want to understand how you're tracking who's

being coached to the performance metrics that the business cares about, because I think that's such a, an interesting thing. And I think a lot of leaders think about like, what's the ROI of investing in my employees' abilities to, I mean, there's so many different things that coaches can tackle or you can work with with a coach, but I think it's difficult to track that ROI. So tell me a little bit more about how you're doing that. Yeah, I can give you a really, I think, tangible example. Can't name the customer, but they're a large tech company that is probably one of the more legacy names in the market.

The competitive landscape for them has really dialed up in the last few years. They came to us of wanting to instill more competitive mindsets within their particularly first and second line sales leadership divisions or roles, I should say. So as we're preparing and designing the Salute, like optimal coaching solution for that population, we're also designing what are the performance indicators, both talent-wise and business-wise for them. So we're able to connect into this customer's or integrate with this customer's CRM, Salesforce, let's call it, to actually see based on how they're progressing through the coaching and as evidence of their mindset shifting towards more competitive, how is that translating

to pipeline conversion rates, quota attainment? And then we're able to do the studies with the customer of like A-B testing. How did the teams fare under leaders who did undergo the coaching versus did not? So that we can actually prove, like there's proof points, not just people telling us like NPS, like, oh yeah, we love, everybody loves coaching.

It's hard not to. But where it really kind of differentiates and you truly get validation of the impact is did the talent transformation unlock business transformation and outcomes? And we were only able to prove that because we were able to work with this particular customer and get actual sales performance data to kind of draw that correlation. Yep. Yep. Wow, that's amazing.

And I think that's something that I can just as you're speaking, I'm like, ah, this is the value proposition of working with someone like BetterUp versus someone like me, who's just a lonely old coach who doesn't have all the data per se. So it's really interesting to see how you're tying all that together. For sure. That's how I would kind of reframe it as the difference from just going with a coaching solution or offering, of which there's many great options out there, versus a platform. And the platform allows for integration into your operating and tech stack. It allows for much richer data insights. And that's why we see organizations versus individuals

and enterprises are a lot more keen on looking for a platform partner if the outcome they're looking for is true workforce and ultimately business transformation, which is not what everyone's looking for. For sure. So it's interesting as I've been thinking about your business bottle, you're very much a B2B2C type of company where you have your enterprise clients, but then you also have to, I'm assuming, engage the employees who are being coached. And not everybody wants to be coached, I would assume. And there's probably some work that you need to do in order to really get that population on board and acting in the way that you need them to act

to create a successful project. Firstly, tell me if that's a true assumption because I am making an assumption here. And then I'd love to understand how you approach it. Yeah, no, it's a very true assumption. The word customer here can mean many different things. So for us, our primary customers are one we call our partners. So those are like the enterprise, that's the buyer, it's the organization. And us supporting

the partner means they're getting help implementing, they are getting help with the data and insights of their coach populations, and we're helping them make decisions of where to go and hunt next. Then there's the second part of our customer equation and that is the member. That is the end user who is ultimately getting coached and coaching solutions through our platform. And I'd say a lot of, we have a lot of focus, my team, on the member experience because essentially you roll up the member experience and that naturally points to the experience of your partner and enterprise. If the members are not engaged, actively using and finding value in the solution, then the partner will never reach their value. So what, ROI?

I would say there's a lot that we've been doing to drive member engagement. There's obviously a lot of operational and marketing-like approaches to engage a population from activation and keeping them on. But we've made a lot of investments in what I would call product-led growth. So how are we constantly innovating within the product experience to drive better engagement with our end users, our members? And AI plays a very big role there. with our end users, our members. And AI plays a very big role there. And we use AI to enhance both the member experience, making it easier, more intuitive,

helps them reinforce asynchronously. So outside of being with your human coach, there's a lot of AI prompted reinforcement of what you talked about. So it stays front of mind and keeps you wanting to come back for more. We also, I would say uplift or enrich our human coaches with AI for them to deliver an even greater experience for members,

which we know has a very direct correlation to them wanting to come back and keep engaging with our platform. So yeah, I think a ton of tactics towards driving member engagement, your traditional marketing type nudges and all that in events and fun, delighter type experiences. But I found that product led kind of innovation, especially with AI has been particularly influential for us for driving up member engagement, especially as we're scaling as an organization. It's one thing to do it with 200 customers. It's another thing to do with 1,000 or more. I have led customer success teams in B2B2C environments similar to what you're discussing

right now, pre really having AI. And it is very challenging to come up with different ways of targeting a group that you can't necessarily connect to. I mean, you can send them an email. I've always struggled to find those things that we can really do that are going to engage that user other than making changes to the product. And so now that we can be a little bit smarter about where

we're putting those product efforts, I think it's really exciting to see some of the changes that are coming. Are there any examples of something that you have implemented that you found a lot of success with in terms of engaging that group? Yeah, I would say early warning systems. We can generate a lot because we're a platform, we can generate a lot of data around how the member is experiencing and navigating the platform without them telling us. I think in the traditional days, you're waiting for the negative NPS or CSAT survey or an

angry customer email to let you know there's a problem. There's a lot that we can do to detect problems before they arise. So that's a big focus of my team where we've been looking to institute early warning systems that help us flag, I would say, irregular use of the product or lagging or stagnated use of sessions. we have statistical data that we know like, when do you have the member? Like once they're on that third session, they're locked in. So we know the moments that matter and the particular milestones we need to get an end user to, to know that we've got them on a set path forward for us at an engagement level that

we know will yield them their own personal individual outcomes that they're hoping to get from coaching as well as the organizational outcomes that the partner or enterprise level is looking for. So if we have the data to tell us where they are in the journey, we have the statistically proven milestones that we know we need to get them to, now it's just a matter of just pacing and detecting when they're on or off track from that pathway. We've instituted data alerts that meet our account teams and the flow of their work. We're a Slack house. You will get nudges in your Slack. You'll get an email digest. We've got dashboards galore. I, you know, I think it's not just about having a lot of data, but how you set it up and operationalize it in a smart way to prompt the right actions or decisions by your frontline teams to go intervene proactively. So I'd say we've done the work we've done around the early warning system that allows for more preventative maintenance or early risk interventions

with our customers has been, I'd say, a great example of how we're using data to keep our ultimate end user population well engaged. Yeah, it actually leads me to another question that I had for you is how are you approaching customer success at scale? Because from the sounds of it, you have a very high touch. You're supporting your enterprise clients in a very high touch way, but then you also have this other population that you have to consistently be supporting and nudging through the journey. So I'd love to hear a little bit about you.

You just gave us a taste of it. But if we could even pull back for a moment to understand what has your strategy been as you look to really scale up customer success efforts at BetterUp? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a very timely question because we're like in the thick of that journey right now. I think- Amazing, amazing. I would say to date, the customer success was synonymous with a high touch CSM. Everyone thought customer success meant I had a name dedicated CSM supporting my account

and customers. Yep, and you can pick up the phone and you can call that person whenever you need to and they're always available. And that's great when you're like 100 million, even 250 million ARR is like, it's tough to stay like that. So we were very much graduating to, I think, a much more evolved engagement model where customer success is not just people, it's programming and it's data-led, it's data-formed

programming that where you could have digital or automated agents do a lot of the prompting and outreach and nudges that humans previously did. But I would say our recipe for how we're starting to scale customer success and that's scale it globally. It's scaling it in terms of our customer demographics are changing. Not only are we growing in logo count, but the maturity and pervasiveness of BetterUp in our existing customers is greatly expanding. We are moving customers from a single point solution to multi-product platform type experiences. So, scale is in, scale means 10 things for us. So, a couple of like our ingredients, one is standardization. I think you hear a lot of this about earlier stage companies

like ourselves is that when you're first in growth mode, it's forget the standards. We just got to make our customers successful by any cost. But now we're at a point where we need to start standardizing process. Standardization is the precedent for automation. Once you have more standard process and workflow, it becomes much easier to allow for automation to augment the human aspects of customer success, which are our CSMs, we have implementation experts, we have technical integration experts. There remains a big human component, but we want to augment those humans with automation data at the ready and the flow of work to make them productive and expand the span of how many customers they can cover and interact and successfully manage. I think there is definitely a place where we could almost get to a fully digitized experience

for select segments of customers, more thinking through the SMB mid-market type segments. So that's an area where we're looking for much more of a end-to-end digital type customer success experience. But yeah, I think where we're at right now, it's how do we start standardizing workflow so we have the foundation for doing more automation and we have a lot of data, but again, like how do we then operationalize said data in alerts and automated triggers based on what the data is telling us that will act on behalf of a would-be human in the customer success organization. So that's the journey we're on. We're definitely in the earlier parts of it. But because we have such a good bedrock of data,

I find that this will go probably a lot faster than it would have or it has been in previous customer success roles. When you're using Salesforce to tackle your company's most important goals, failure is not an option. At Salesforce, they get it. They've made their most highly skilled advisors, Salesforce CTOs, available to help you with expert guidance and implementation support at every step of your journey. Learn more about Salesforce CTOs at sfdc.co slash professional services. Where you're kind of putting your finger in there and being like, we know this, like we can intuit that this is the way that things happen or what's happening for our customers, but we might not necessarily be able to say at this point this happens and have a lot

of data that we can kind of say, okay, definitively, this is the best way to do it or the right way to go. I really like what you're sharing about standardization to automation. And I feel that a lot of companies delay that standardization effort because you're testing and learning and playing and you have some big clients that you're willing to do anything for. But eventually you get to this place where that's no longer sustainable and you have to go through that, in my experience, painstaking effort of standardizing everything that you do into very clear offerings that have their playbooks and all of that. So my

heart goes out to you and knowing what you're in the middle of at the moment. And it's also a fun thing because you can see, okay, now we can just repeat this. Now we can see clearly what are those repeatable actions that we, we can help our team to do. Yeah. And I believe the standardization isn't just self-serving for, for the vendor or for the enterprise software company. It's huge for the customer. Consistency of service is such

a critical lever in overall customer experience. Trust me, I read about it all the time in my surveys. So I find that standardization is also just deeply in service of the customer. And you'll always have the special snowflake. You'll always have your top 10% of customers driving 50% of your revenues. That's just such a normal dynamic. We will never use standardization as a crutch to deliver under what we need to for those types of customers. But 80% of my customers do need a more standard approach. And this more standard approach means they're going to get more support from us and more touch from us than they do today. from us and more touch from us than they do today. So, outside of being a great capacity lover for me in terms of workforce planning and how I do more without completely exploding

my cost basis, I really do recognize the customer experiential factor as being very positively impacted through more standard workflow and experience with us. It enables us to support our customers faster, it's clearer, it's more consistent as you share. Those are things that customers want and that's why that standardization process is such an important part of customer experience. And it's something that just in my own consulting work,

I find sometimes I feel like what I'm saying, we really need to standardize everything here so that we can provide that consistency. I'm like, they're like, why are we talking about that in the conversation of customer experience? And, but it's, I believe it to be really core to enabling a team to provide a great customer experience that hits on all those points you mentioned. So I'd love to talk a little bit more about AI. It sounds like this is something that BetterUp's

really invested in both in terms of what you are providing to your customers as well as how you're supporting your team. And when it comes to really like utilizing AI to drive your customer success efforts, can you tell us a little bit more about what that's been like to incorporate it into your flows? Internal application is, again, I'm gonna be a broken record,

but I feel very lucky and privileged to have as much data on our customers as we do here. We have great telemetry. We have, even from when the company was much smaller, really rigorous means of tracking and documenting the customer experience end to end. It's not enough to just have great data, but how do you draw correlation between how the customer is using the platform to actual commercial outcomes for us?

So a commercial outcome could be propensity to renew, propensity to churn or contract, propensity to expand. We have a great team of data scientists. We give them our currency, our data, and they're applying AI to help us drive real predictive insights around the commercial levers that we need to pull as an organization. So I think using AI to help us predict propensity for growth or contraction on an account helps not just my post sales customer success teams, but quite frankly, our sales organization get into the proper posture. Are we on the defensive? Are we on the offensive for this customer? Or are we

coasting for a bit? So I think that helps us, especially with early stage companies that where you don't have thousands of people like you can be really smart about how you prioritize and focus your time and energy on accounts. It is essential. Very essential. That you are able to do that. Yes, very much so. You know, I would be remiss if I didn't mention just how leveraging the publicly available

LLMs like ChatGBT, every single member of my organization, especially my leaders, are using it at least daily. So we are just hacking our way to more efficient ways of not just servicing our customer, but knowing our customer. So one thing about, you know, we're selling workforce transformation software. To be a good CSM or good post-sale partner, it's not enough to just know what they bought and know your product really well. You have to understand the context of that customer's business and their industry to best guide them to apply your product in the best possible way. So we're using GBT in many ways to get really smart, really fast on the business context, in

industry context of our customers. So I think it's also outside of unlocking like capacity for our CSMs. I think it's unlocking a level of capability, or specifically around business acumen, that I'm really excited about. I'm a big fan of consultative CS, and that's exactly where I see us heading with more of this AI kind of empowered tooling. Oh, that's great. On that point about really understanding your customer, it's just so incredibly important for us to be able to develop a relationship and for our customers To see that we understand them if they get that we get them and we can show them that we get them That creates the space for us to build trust with them for them to allow us to give them

Advice and take on that consultative role if they don't feel like we know what's going on in their business, our advice lands on deaf ears because they don't believe that we actually know what we're talking about. So I love that use case of using AI to really help educate your teams quickly and efficiently on these industries, on these customers. That's such a, I haven't heard that one before. And I'm

definitely putting that in my toolkit. A hundred percent. That's great. Yeah. No, it's, it's helpful. And I think, yeah, it builds trust. Like your, your closest friends are the people that are most known to you. So why would that be any different with your closest customers? And in a world where there's unlimited points of view on where AI can completely do a large part of our jobs. And absolutely, I think with the pace at where things are heading customer success can look very different in a short window of years. Where I don't see it replacing is the trust building aspect and the nuances of building deep relationships, trust, and the unique insights that unlock through that. Those have to be driven by a human. I think the difference it's going to be is that human is going

to be empowered and uplifted through AI. And I think the people that will do perform best, and that goes for any frontline function, customer-facing, not just customer success managers, but sellers, account executives, et cetera. Those that know how to harness AI to know their customer better, faster, and anticipate their needs, those will be our winningest frontline personas of the future. I'm curious to know a little bit more about how you think customer success is going to change and what skills are really required for those CSMs to be successful in a new age. Yeah. I think we're just going to get really, really smart, really, really fast on our customers. we're just going to get really, really smart, really, really fast on our customers. So like the early warning system I was talking about, like still was pretty manual for us to put together or

to help us identify the data, like train models so we understand statistically what are the milestones they need to hit for us to have a positive commercial outcome and then set triggers when they're off track with that. I think those models will build themselves. What things can we do that actually improve it when those triggers happen, right? Yeah, I just think we're just going to see a dramatic increase in the speed of which we're going to know our customer base, install base very intimately, where we're going to be able to predict issues and intervene. I think where the organization is going is we're going to actually become more revenue focused than retention focused.

I think a lot of the retention and defensive and risk management strategies we do today can be largely automated with, if you have the right data set and right AI engines, you can automate a lot of that work. So then you're focused more on like solutioning. How do I fix it? Or how do I execute said solution? So we'll be less monitoring. So if I were to synthesize, I'd say a lot less monitoring and more active problem solving and solution execution. And I think a lot of the freedom capacity may be going more towards revenue generating versus revenue retaining efforts.

I think what's going to get probably disrupted the most is like SMB and emerging enterprise like your kind of lower engagement model type populations for customer success is going to move to a fully digital digitized experience. And I think we're going to expand in kind of the white glove concierge version concierge level customer success for your top tranche of customers. So I don't see, I think AI will just make that concierge white level support just that much greater. I don't see a ton of human disruption there. I just think a lot more efficiency, of human disruption there. I just think a lot more efficiency probably. And then probably we can

scale delightful moments that are today unique at Sparse. I think we'll be able to deliver delight at scale in a way that we can't today just mainly due to resource scarcity. I think where CS is going powered by AI, it just flips the resourcing model on its head. The data around our customer, where they are, where they're heading, predicted wise, it'll become ubiquitous versus a differentiator of high-performing CS teams. It's just going to be table stakes. We're very aligned in how we are seeing customer success change. I think there's so much opportunity for things to be automated for a lot of the deep analytical work that we do to try to understand trends in our customer

base. That's going to be taken off of our plate. It'll be much easier to automate outreach and really at scale tailor what we are doing to our customers' needs. But I think the area, and you shared this, where skills will be needed is really in those human-to-human relationships. When we think about the high touch versions of customer success, what that is really going to need is the ability to build relationships

with customers expertly, and we can use AI, as you had shared, to help us understand our customers, but AI is not going to help us listen. AI is not going to help us empathize. We're going to need to really turn those skills on because that's going to be the differentiator, in my opinion. Yeah, no. I mean, I would maybe challenge the point of it won't help us listen. I think it's already helping us listen and digest information faster because it can listen to your customer calls, give you the takeaways. There's something like that, but what it doesn't replace is you're right. I think the EQ aspects of kind of client-facing roles are going to

be under greater scrutiny or expectation, right? Because you're not doing all the other operating work. What I mean listening, I mean like actively listening to someone's verbal and nonverbal cues, which is something that AI isn't going to be able to help us with. At least yet. Yes, they are listening for sure. And they are able to hear, oh, someone's getting a little angrier or whatnot. But I do think that there's this like when you're in the room with someone and you can feel their energy, I think that that's something that I assume AI won't be able to figure out. But hey, who knows, it's

changing real fast. Yeah, no, I completely agree. I think there's also with like the work, the amount of work that comes off of someone in customer success's plate with all the AI efficiencies and productivity wins to gain. There's then more onus for us to have a point of view. We're no longer just like execution horses for driving adoption and engagement and value and customer sentiment, right? A lot of that busy work goes away. So now it's like, so what is your unique value proposition? Deep customer empathy, because of your very nuanced and contextualized understanding of customer problems, needs,

and how they're using solution today, there's no one better than you to have a very formulated point of view of what the future of the partnership should look like. So that's where I do see us going to be more in support of revenue generation versus just retention. And I think just, and this is more just a broader philosophy I have that's not really unique to customer success or even enterprise SaaS. I mean, we're just going to see across all facets of our life, like AI powered digitization is just going to replace a lot of what was previously human delivered operating labor to the point where there's going to be such a market, like a premium market for like true human like crafted service and capabilities. And so I think that just reinforces your point that like there's just gonna be so much more higher stakes for human to human kind of delivered services and experience than there is today.

And it's honestly not something I've thought about a lot in the scope of my own role, but you're absolutely right. Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting. I mean, just as we're talking about this and I think something we speak about a lot is scaled customer success.

How are we making a customer success function operate so that we don't need to have that one-to-one, but it can really be a one-to-many execution of services and support in that post-sale environment. And just as we're talking about this, it's like, yes, I mean, I'm like a scale super nerd. If we can make things more efficient, we can take away repeatable processes that don't actually need to happen, and we can just have that be taken care of by technology, like great. But then there's this opportunity for surprise and delight in the human-to-human interactions.

And I just think it's something, as we're talking about this, I'm just thinking about how can customer success leaders who have really gotten to that automated scalable system, then use the human-to-human interactions to really go above and beyond with their customers in unique moments or situations. And I don't know what the answer to that is. It's just something I'm pondering,

because I feel like that is where there's going to be differentiation. Yeah, absolutely. Scaled CS has been around like scaling support and engagement. Now we're going to like, how do we scale the light? I think that that's how I'm reflecting on what you're sharing. I love that. Well, so I have two last questions for you that we ask all of our guests. The first is, I'd love to hear about a recent experience that you had with a brand that left you impressed. Tell us about that experience. I spent a large part of my life in New York City and you can eat at a different restaurant

every day of your life and not repeat anything. So it's easy to be unknown as a customer in your interactions there. And three years ago, I moved to the suburbs. And so over these years, we've kind of started to land on our go-to spots. And for me, a customer experience like data point that's relevant, that I look for in my personal lives and decisions of where I shop and buy is to feel like I'm known. And I think walking to a restaurant where they know me, they know my son, they know my husband, they're asking me about our updates since our last interaction. I don't know, I'm very simple. I just want to feel known beyond, yes, I'm going to pay you, yes, I'm

going to tip you. But I find that. So's just very fundamental and I take this approach to my kind of CS hat that I wear. But you can't underestimate the power of knowing your customer and knowing the whole of them, not just how they're using their platform, but understand their business, the context of this business cycle that they may be in or industry cycle. Knowing them as a full person in terms of what's going on in their life outside of work, that's something that my team does such a phenomenal job at here. So when I think about vendors or places I frequent where I feel truly known, for me, that is the best feeling as a customer. I love that you're saying that. The relationship that you have with the business, the relationship that you have with the business, the relationship that you have with the humans

inside of the business that you are a patron of, goes so far for your opinion of that business. And that's why I think as we are talking about the human aspects of customer success and where those opportunities are to really create a relationship and connection with our customer, we are all human and we want to feel like we are seen, known and understood.

And restaurants are great examples of great customer experience. Whenever I'm going to a great restaurant, I'm looking at like, what do they do? How can we then apply this into our SaaS businesses? Because restaurants know how to make you feel so special, even though you are one of hundreds every night. because restaurants know how to make you feel so special, even though you are one of hundreds every night.

Some restaurants, not all, but the good ones. Yeah, for sure. My last question for you is, what is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear? Know the business of your customers. We naturally fall into the habit of just learning ourselves on the aspects of the customer's business that they're actively telling us about versus getting a fuller,

more comprehensive understanding. I don't know, it served my teams and I super well in my career and customer success to truly spend the time investing and understanding the customer's business and industry, how they make money, what are their competitive pressures they're under, has just equipped us to be so much more of an effective consultant in how they leverage and extract value from our platform or solution than without that information. I'll even give the example of, you know, I started my career at GE, General Electric, and we were like a 330,000 person company, 150 billion market cap.

I knew like one thousandth of GE. My aperture working inside the company was just so small. I would use my vendors, my software vendors who were selling to many other parts of GE, I used them to inform me what was going on around my company. They were like my intel and they were third parties. So, that was so impressionable on me in the early part of my career of how much the vendors through their third party objective lens and their much more kind of pervasive network across my company than I would

ever have and how much of value that was to me. I'm like, I want to do that for my customers going forward. So yeah, I would say that's my advice for any customer experience leader there, not just what they model, but what they expect of their teams. That business acumen, understanding the business of your customers is just so critical. And like we had said earlier, that business acumen, understanding the business of your customers is just so critical. And like we had said earlier, that's what allows you to really take that consultative approach and add real value. I think understanding what your customers care about, like what are their measurements

of success? It's so easy for us to say like, well, we're measuring NPS and we're measuring our retention and we're measuring our NRR. So that's what we're going to drive. But your customer doesn't care about those metrics at all. So if we're not hitting, if we're not helping them achieve their metrics, are they going to stay with us when it comes time to renew? It's such a lever for trust credibility. You're helping your customer even think about what their next layer is going to ask about the money they're spending with us. Exactly.

Yeah. Exactly. Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Sarah, for coming on the show. Thank you. It's been wonderful to have you. Have a wonderful day. Take care. You are a business leader with vision.

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