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CHURN FM is the podcast for subscription economy pros. Every Wednesday we hear how the world’s fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention & engagement to fuel their growth.
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E257 | How to Build a Customer Success Team Leveraging Subject Matter Experts with Szuyin Leow
Today on the show we have Szuyin Leow, the VP of Customer Experience at Transcend.
In this episode, Szuyin shares her experience transitioning from IT security consulting to customer success, and how leveraging subject matter experts has transformed her approach to building effective CS teams.
We then discuss the strategies and benefits of hiring industry experts to enhance customer experience, and the practical steps Szuyin took to implement these practices at LogicGate and Transcend.
Mentioned Resources
Churn FM is sponsored by Vitally, the all-in-one Customer Success Platform.
[00:00:00] Szuyin Leow: We have an internal kind of metadata point where they are ranking, how easy is this step today. And just using, like emojis, like, is it painful or is it easy? Does it make me feel happy when I'm done? Documenting all of that. So yeah, our goal, right now we're kind of on a timeline of the first half of the year. Our goal is that by the midpoint of this year, we'll have a lot more smiley faces on that sheet and less frownings.
[00:00:00] Andrew Michael: This is Churn.FM, the podcast for subscription economy pros. Each week we hear how the world's fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth.
[00:00:00] VO: How do you build a habit-forming product? We crossed over that magic threshold to negative churn. You need to invest in customer success. It always comes down to retention and engagement. Completely bootstrapped, profitable and growing.
[00:01:04] Andrew Michael: Strategies, tactics and ideas brought together to help your business thrive in the subscription economy. I'm your host, Andrew Michael, and here's today's episode.
[00:01:16] Andrew Michael: Hey, Szuyin, welcome to the show.
[00:01:18] Szuyin Leow: Hi, Andrew. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
[00:01:21] Andrew Michael: It's a pleasure and it's great to have you. For the listeners Szuyin is the VP of Customer Experience at Transcend, a privacy platform that empowers brands to enhance regulatory stances for the laws of tomorrow and prove customer relationships through respectful and compliant data transparency, consent and control. I got that directly from your site, so I wanna get some more details in that in a sec, but Szuyin is also an Executive Member of Pavilion and a Featured Thought Leader for Sales Assembly. Prior to Transcend, Szuyin was the VP of Customer Success at LogicGate. My first question for you, Szuyin, is what motivated you to make a career switch from an IT security associate into customer success?
[00:02:02] Szuyin Leow: Yeah, I started my career in consulting at PwC, where I was really focused in the cybersecurity world, doing strategic consulting with CISOs and their organizations. And to be completely honest with you, it was kind of a serendipitous moment for me where I was kind of at the point in my consulting career where I was starting to experience burnout as many consultants do. And I happened to receive a LinkedIn message from the CEO of LogicGate. And he said, hey, I'm starting this company. We’re working with cybersecurity professionals. I'm looking for someone who has a background in consulting to come be on our customer success team.
[00:02:44] Szuyin Leow: And to be honest, I did not know what customer success really meant at the time, but he told me it would be like running a mini consulting engagement. So I said, oh, I can do that. And I jumped in and really found that there were a lot of parallels between my consulting background and this sort of relationship building and problem solving that I needed to do in the customer success space. And yeah, the rest is history, as they say.
[00:03:11] Andrew Michael: Yeah, and you've made a career out of it. And currently, now as well at Transcend, VP of Customer Experience. So maybe you can just explain a little bit about what Transcend is and what it does.
[00:03:22] Szuyin Leow: Yeah, definitely. You did a great job reading from the website. But yeah, Transcend, we are a data governance platform. And where we really specialize is we work with companies who have the most complex, messy data ecosystems and work to encode modern privacy requirements into that complex tech stack. So that requires us to work with teams across legal, engineering, information security, marketing, to help them really operationalize the compliance requirements, like data subject request fulfillment.
[00:03:59] Szuyin Leow: So that's, you know, consumers or customers being able to request access to their data or delete their data. That's consent management, making sure that companies are getting permission to collect and use data in the ways that their consumers have granted. And then we're also building out a full suite of products that are helping our customers understand what data they have within their systems, where it lives, how it's being used, where it's going.
[00:04:29] Szuyin Leow: And finally, our last kind of big area is really getting into the AI governance space. So with all of the visibility that we have into our customers, tech ecosystems, and sort of control layer that we've been able to build on top of it, it really has positioned us well to be able to provide the guardrails that companies need as they're starting to get into this nascent space of really utilizing AI across all of their processes.
[00:04:54] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I think we're definitely at an interesting crossroads with all of this, especially around data governance and privacy as well being like a big topic that's only getting more and more important and probably going to grow in every importance as well now as we move into this next phase of generative AI.
[00:05:11] Szuyin Leow: Absolutely.
[00:05:12] Andrew Michael: It also, as well, like just jumping back as well to the start, like where you came in as a consultant and you joined a company as well previously LogicGate at that time. And I think this is a very common practice. I've heard actually from other CS team, like CS folk on the podcast, where they came from a background as a subject matter expert and ended up joining a team as a customer success rep.
[00:05:37] Andrew Michael: And we were chatting just previously to the show as well, around this is an area of expertise of yours, we've actually done this previously at LogicGate and now at Transcend. I can understand why, because like these are really complex spaces to navigate through. And so I'm just keen to hear a little bit about your experience.
[00:05:54] Andrew Michael: Like, first of all, like, as you mentioned, you have a practice in place of hiring subject matter experts. First of all, like, how did your experience going, transitioning from that associates in IT security to LogicGate influence and inform like your practice around hiring subject matter experts?
[00:06:11] Szuyin Leow: Yeah. So one of the big things I saw when I made that transition myself was that I was able to draw a lot of connections and call back to the experiences I'd had in consulting that were really resonant to the real world problems that my customers were trying to solve in our platform at LogicGate. And certainly I think that there could have been a world where I hired folks with customer success experience and then trained them on, you know, the lingo, the terminology, the sorts of challenges that folks in the cybersecurity or Governance, Risk, and Compliance space faced.
[00:06:52] Szuyin Leow: But I actually found it was much more genuine and much more authentic to hire folks who had actually been a bit more in the shoes of our customers and had multiple at bats at solving those sorts of problems. I think that's one of the really beautiful things about consulting, is many consultants haven't just worked in one organization, but they've had exposure to multiple different clients and have seen the same sort of problem in different industries and different size clients.
[00:07:22] Szuyin Leow: And so, you know, when a customer asks them, how would you recommend I solve this? They can point to multiple different examples from their consulting days. And so to me, that real world experience and being able to point at those prior actual examples that they'd seen in other organizations was really invaluable.
[00:07:45] Szuyin Leow: I think, especially in these more technical spaces, at least with the personas we were working with, like cybersecurity folks and you know, risk professionals, they really value someone who has actually been there and done that and you can't really substitute for that, you know, I guess to having people read or get a certification.
[00:08:07] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I could see it being a lot easier to train people on customer success best practices, then like teaching them about security best practices and privacy. And I think the intricacies and the details there go a lot deeper.
[00:08:20] Szuyin Leow: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:08:21] Andrew Michael: And the complexity as well. So maybe let's just get started then. So you realize, okay, this was, there was something here as well from your experience coming in, you were able to provide a much better experience for your customers based on the experience that you had during your consulting days.
[00:08:37] Andrew Michael: You wanted to roll this out then and start to try and attract others like you. Maybe let's start there. Like how do you attract, like, subject matter experts to come in and work in your customer success organization? Cause I could also imagine at the same time, like these consulting roles, they probably have varying degrees of compensation as well that maybe aren't in comparison to traditional customer success.
[00:09:01] Andrew Michael: Like getting somebody out of one of these big companies into maybe an earlier stage startup to work on customer success. And so how do you get started with setting up a program like this to attract?
[00:09:15] Szuyin Leow: So I do think a big part of the growth of the program was that when I was first hiring at LogicGate, we were, very early stage. And so a big part of the story we were able to tell was just the amount of impact that they would be able to have coming in and joining a team that was small and nimble.
[00:09:35] Szuyin Leow: In comparison, most of those folks that I was hiring, they were coming from big four consulting firms that are giant. You can definitely have an impact, but often you're just a number on a sheet and a cog in the wheel. And so for a lot of those folks, that was a really compelling story for them to be able to come and apply their skill set and really see their impact in a much bigger way.
[00:10:01] Szuyin Leow: That was, I think, the headline of the story when we first started hiring for the team. But as we continued to grow and scale, we did have to shift it, obviously, because it wasn't gonna be as significant of an impact. And I think a couple of the things that we leaned in on, was going back to the burnout. That's still a thing in consulting.
[00:10:20] Szuyin Leow: Many consultants, even with the shift to more remote work, are still pretty tough road warriors. And so finding folks who wanted to get out of that constant travel mode, that was often a compelling argument for them to be able to do similar sort of work, but apply it in a different space.
[00:10:40] Szuyin Leow: And then I think there's also a lot of folks out there that are in consulting, especially for the areas that I work in, in cyber and privacy, where it was just exciting for them to get more into the technology side of things. So a lot of these folks are more so designing like processes or, you know, working more in the operations of the program and for them to be able to get into the SaaS space and learn more about how a technology company runs was also exciting for many of them.
[00:11:09] Andrew Michael: Yeah. So you really lent into the benefits then, like at the earliest stage, really about, like having a much larger impact, but then at the latest stage, sort of technology making in terms of, like the impact and being able to work and understand these new spheres.
[00:11:25] Andrew Michael: The other thing is all that, like when you're talking to, at least from like a outside agency perspective, which I'd imagine is similar to consulting is a lot of times when you're working as a consultant and you're working with many clients, you don't tend to see like the fruits of your labor, like it's you come in, you set things up and then you go.
[00:11:43] Andrew Michael: And I think that it was always like, at least for me in my early career, when I had an agency, I just didn't enjoy that aspect of the business. It was nice. Like we made good money, but then you never got to win as a team. And you were sort of, you were this third party as opposed to this environment. And I wonder if that's also something that you ever played on or, no.
[00:12:01] Szuyin Leow: Yeah, 100 percent. I'm so glad you mentioned that. That is definitely something that is a big differentiator for our team members coming from consulting. And consulting, it's often like you're delivering the final deliverable, you're plopping a deck on the desk, and then you're not sure if it ever sees the light of day again.
[00:12:21] Szuyin Leow: Versus here, because we're really going for retention of these customers and ideally partnering with them to grow and expand over time, a lot of them have seen it to be a much more meaningful and valuable experience for them to see how the work they're doing translates into long-term success for their customers.
[00:12:42] Andrew Michael: Yeah. You're actually a lot more accountable for what you end up delivering as well.
[00:12:46] Szuyin Leow: Oh, for sure. Yes.
[00:12:48] Andrew Michael: Nice. So this is one aspect, sort of attracting them with sort of these characteristics and valid points as well. When it came to compensation though, like, how does that differ from your traditional consulting and teams and are these points enough or are you creating different packages for consultants? How did you set it up?
[00:13:09] Szuyin Leow: Yeah. So for us, it was more focusing on the maybe non-salary components, the benefits that we spoke to, and really selling and celebrating those. But certainly, that is something we thought we had to think about. The consulting industry, they've been impacted by the same economic pressures that many of us have. But oftentimes, their salaries are more competitive than what we can offer in a small SaaS startup.
[00:13:43] Szuyin Leow: And so a couple of things we did look at is, especially as the team grew and at LogicGate, as we built the CSM team out and started to ask that team to focus more on expansion, we did look at building in upside for them and their incentive plans so that as they were helping to grow customer accounts, they could see additional ways for them to earn more through influencing or sourcing expansion opportunities. But honestly, before that, it was really more just focused on the sort of non-tangible benefits.
[00:14:17] Andrew Michael: Nice. I think that's always like the case in most startups that, as well, is really need to get good at selling the non-tangible benefits and the vision and where you want to go. And obviously it's a certain type of personality as well that's willing to take that risk and wanting to join–
[00:14:31] Szuyin Leow: For sure.
[00:14:32] Andrew Michael: A company like this, which is almost like self-selecting in its own right, which is great.
[00:14:35] Szuyin Leow: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:14:37] Andrew Michael: So you're attracting talent this way. Somebody joins the company. They've never worked in CS before, but they're an A-star consultant. Like how do you help somebody like this get started in this transitioning phase now going from an external consultant now to actually becoming a customer success rep for the company. What does the onboarding experience look like for them?
[00:15:00] Szuyin Leow: Yeah, for us, we did a lot of hands-on learning. So we would often set it up where the first month or so is them shadowing an experienced team member, learning about how the different touch points are run, seeing how they run through our various playbooks, and then the second month being... them actually being in the wheels of running some of those projects and engagements themselves with a team member that's experienced their first support.
[00:15:33] Szuyin Leow: So a pretty traditional, you know, kind of, like apprentice type training program. But I definitely found that the hands-on learning was really the fastest way for most of our team members to learn the entire customer journey and the depth of product expertise that they needed both at LogicGate and now at Transcend.
[00:15:56] Szuyin Leow: And the other big thing that was important to make that onboarding program successful was that we needed to have the structure and sort of the, you know, all the operational resources in place that they could refer to. So a big effort that we went through at LogicGate and that I'm actually currently in the process of doing at Transcend is ensuring that there's really, really clear documentation of each stage of the customer journey.
[00:16:22] Szuyin Leow: And each of the stages, there's clear problem statements that the team needs to help address. And I think when you can kind of break it down into those problem statements, that's something that's pretty easy for someone with a consulting mindset to understand, like here's what I need to be focused on, here's the core objectives I need to deliver when I'm engaging with the customer in this meeting or during this phase.
[00:16:46] Andrew Michael: Nice. Can we double click into that? Cause I think it's very interesting. The documentation of the customer journey and maybe walk us through what goes into this as well. So like I'm somebody. I've just joined now Transcend. I'm going through my onboarding experience. Like what can I expect to find in terms of this documentation around the customer journey and the use cases?
[00:17:07] Szuyin Leow: Yeah. So we are currently building our customer journey at Transcend in Notion, which is what we use as, like our internal intranet. So, would definitely recommend that wherever you build it, it's in line with where the rest of your company documents their policies and procedures. And what we've done is we have the kind of the initial landing page where they can see, visually the full breakdown of, from the moment the account becomes a customer and then all the way through onboarding, adoption, expansion, renewal, all of those phases.
[00:17:47] Szuyin Leow: And then within each of those phases, we have kind of sub landing pages where they can click into it and understand who are the key roles, who are part of this phase, who's the primary owner, who's supporting. For each of those phases, we then break it down into high level steps that are typically followed but also try to call out, maybe edge cases or where we might deviate from that path.
[00:18:15] Szuyin Leow: And for each of them then, there's always a resources section that links out to key templates or examples that they can reference to understand in more detail how to actually execute on those steps. So those are the core components of what we've documented in our customer journey.
[00:18:32] Andrew Michael: Nice, and can we double click a little bit further on to maybe pick one of them and one of these stages and like what would I expect to find in that stage, let's say like an onboarding, I open up the onboarding landing page, like what would I learn there?
[00:18:46] Szuyin Leow: Yeah. So I actually just built this out the other day. So this is fresh in my mind. So with our onboarding at Transcend, we actually have today 14 technically distinct products that we could implement our customers on. Those 14 products make up a holistic platform, but of course, customers might buy different packages and have different products that we need to implement them on. And each of those products kind of has a different level of service required for it in order to get a customer up and running. Some of them we consider to be more full blown implementation projects, while others might just be a quick training session to get the customer enabled and they can run with it on their own.
[00:19:30] Szuyin Leow: And so what we've built out in this onboarding page of our customer journey is templates that our CX team can use to apply in each of those different scenarios. So if a customer has only purchased, let's say one of our core products, we've got a deck template that shows them, here's the typical content and talk track that you should use for a single product kickoff, versus if they have multiple products, here's the template you can use for that. And in these cases, we need to think more about project planning and order of operations. And so we've got recommendations on how to run projects in parallel, projects subsequently.
[00:20:14] Szuyin Leow: So we kind of just really try and think about, for each customer that might go through this journey, what are the different paths they might follow and make sure that all of the resources are linked in there. I will say since we're in the process of building this out, we definitely have placeholders for some of the templates still, but we thought that was really important to do at this point as well, just so the team knows where there are gaps today. And what we're then trying to do is empower my team members to sign up, to help create some of those resources where we have gaps, so they can help contribute to maturing the journey over time.
[00:20:49] Andrew Michael: Nice, I like that. It's almost like productized to an extent where eventually you could see it being automated to some degree is like, as you know, somebody signs up for the account and having this material good to go as soon as they sign up. So, I like that.
[00:21:05] Szuyin Leow: Yeah
[00:21:07] Andrew Michael: What's been like, one learning from doing this specific process that you've had that you would maybe perhaps do again and/or are doing again now the second time round with Transcend?
[00:21:20] Szuyin Leow: That's a good question. I think one of the big things I'm feeling in our process right now is that I do wish I would have engaged the team in helping to develop some of the resources sooner, because they really are the ones that are in it day to day and talking with our customers. I actually have a tip I would give to any customer success or CX leader is if possible, work with your leadership team to hire a dedicated CS strategy and ops person as early as possible. I found it to be so invaluable in an early stage company to have a dedicated person that can help me with these sorts of initiatives.
[00:21:58] Szuyin Leow: So the way we actually started building out the journey is myself and my strategy and ops team member, we were really driving the development of these templates and these resources. And I've definitely found that as we've shared the resources and templates with our solutions engineers and our team members that are actually talking to our customers day to day, they've had a lot of great feedback and tidbits.
[00:22:22] Szuyin Leow: So I think, one thing I would definitely tweak is seeing how we could have built out the framework of the journey earlier to identify all the different resources we need and then seeing how we can engage them to build out those first drafts. Another, I think an interesting thing that we're working on, you asked earlier, you know, like with all the development of these resources, how it could be productized eventually, that's a big focus of ours as a company right now at Transcend, is thinking about how we can build more of this experience just into the products, so that ideally there's less touch points needed from the CX team.
[00:22:59] Szuyin Leow: So one of the things we're working on with the full team right now is for each of our core products, building out new and improved step-by-step onboarding checklist, thinking about for the customer, what are the things that they need to do, in what order, how long will they take? We took a first pass at that. One of the things we realized is, we were definitely approaching it first from sort of our point of view at Transcend, where we were writing the steps, kind of in line with our technical documentation, like, you should load this script on your site.
[00:23:36] Szuyin Leow: But when we actually thought about okay, if I were the customer and I wanted to go and do this task, could I actually sit down and complete this task and then check it off the list? Or would it actually be more like, I need to sit down, read this documentation, there's two decision points that I need to make in this documentation. The first decision point would require me to go talk to engineering. The second one would require me to go talk to marketing. And when we thought about that, we realized like, wow, we actually need to break these steps out into more distinct tasks so that it's something the customer could actually check off a list.
[00:24:08] Szuyin Leow: And so that's the exercise we're going through right now with the team, is really kind of forcing them to sit in the shoes of the customer and think about truly, how would I go about doing each of these tasks and documenting that out? And with the goal of eventually passing that over to our product and engineering teams to see how they can smooth out and remove as many of those steps as possible.
[00:24:32] Andrew Michael: Those steps, yeah. It's interesting as well, because I think, like going through this process, there is a lot of different paths, like you mentioned, you have a, like a big product portfolio that all come into different suite, there's many different experiences in terms of onboarding that you would go through and get things set up, and it will almost be impossible to like build a standard, like a product onboarding experience, catered for all of these different scenarios and so forth, just off the gates, but doing it this way, where you're actually like going through each individual path, putting together playbooks and paths in order to it, slowly you can understand, okay, which ones could be productized first, and then over time, get to the point where you have the full coverage, but it feels like it wouldn't be an easy task to say, okay, like we're gonna roll this into the product, do onboarding now and that's that, you're just gonna get a subpar experience for everybody involved, and it's very, very interesting the way you're approaching it.
[00:25:33] Szuyin Leow: Yeah, I think you're right. Like you need to actually get your product into the hands of customers, and then, learn from how they're actually using it and learn where they're actually feeling the biggest pain points. One of the other things we're doing as part of this process is, as our team is building out that list of steps, we have an internal kind of metadata point where they are ranking how easy, is this step today and just using like emojis like, is it painful or is it easy? Doesn't make me feel happy when I'm done, documenting all of that. So, yeah, our goal, by right now, we're kind of on a timeline of the first half of the year, our goal is that by the midpoint of this year, we'll have a lot more smiley faces on that sheet and less frowning.
[00:26:22] Andrew: Continuous feedback and iteration.
[00:26:21] Szuyin Leow: Yes.
[00:26:22] Andrew Michael: Cool. So we've gone through the process now, like as an external consultant, I've got a really robust onboarding. I get to learn, that experience. I, now like, gone through all the different onboarding options and I'm actually starting now to work with customers. What would then my first month look like when I start to work with customers coming from that background, traditional consulting, but now from a CS perspective?
[00:26:51] Szuyin Leow: Yeah. I would say, honestly, I think one of the benefits of hiring consultants is that many of them already have a lot of the foundational skill sets in terms of customer and client engagement. So for them, if you've successfully set up the playbooks and the structure we talked about, most of them are able to run with that. I will share though, so at Transcend, I haven't hired former consultants. The tool set, the product at Transcend is much more technical. And so the implementation team that we have at Transcend, all of those team members actually were software engineers in their careers before they came to us.
[00:27:34] Szuyin Leow: And so for them, many of them have not had at-bats talking with customers before. And so this is a bigger thing that I've been working with my current team a lot more on is we do have, you know, we're building out those playbooks. But for them, there is a lot more enablement and coaching on how do I approach, you know, difficult customer conversations or how do I go about resetting expectations with the customer? And so, a big way that we're doing that is, you know, I mentioned earlier shadowing and making sure that you have someone on the call who's a bit more experienced.
[00:28:10] Szuyin Leow: We definitely do a lot of pair customer conversation handling. And, you know, actually, I haven't done this yet, but one of the things we are planning on doing is utilizing Gong more. We use Gong to record our customer calls and using that as a coaching tool to help our team members just build more confidence in handling those difficult customer conversations.
[00:28:38] Andrew Michael: Interesting. Because that was actually one of my questions, is like what do they struggle with? And I think, obviously, as you mentioned, in this case, you're dealing with subject matter experts who used to be engineers or software engineers. So they're needing to work on so that this handling objections and working with customer conversations and so forth. From the consultant's perspective, is anything that they typically struggle with coming into these types of roles?
[00:29:02] Szuyin Leow: Good question. You know, like I said, I think they don't struggle with the objection handling part. I think maybe the part that I don't know if it's that they struggle with it, but certainly there's more enablement that's needed is just on helping them understand how the work they're doing ties to the key business metrics in a SaaS company. So making sure that they understand how their work is impacting net revenue retention and how their work might impact NPS scores and just familiarizing them with those core metrics that we ultimately are delivering as a customer success team.
[00:29:47] Andrew: Nice. Okay. And the next thing then as well is like, how long does it take you to understand whether or not this person can make the transition? So as a subject matter expert and now becoming a focus in CS, how do you know if they can make the cut or not? Are there any signals that you get early on?
[00:30:07] Szuyin Leow: So at LogicGate, when we first started building out the team, we actually did try and hire some folks that weren't prior consultants in the Governance, Risk, and Compliance space. And we learned pretty quickly there that it was going to be much harder to onboard those folks. I think we could have eventually gotten them to the point where they could support our customers, but it would have taken a lot more time and investment in coaching. So I think some of the things we saw that were kind of signals of that were that really the individual couldn't operate on their own. Oh, Andrew, am I having connection issues?
[00:30:52] Andrew Michael: No, you're right on my side.
[00:30:55] Szuyin Leow: Okay, fantastic. The team member wasn't able to onboard the customer on their own. They required support in most of their calls. And a lot of it was because there were specific subject matter questions that they were being asked, where the customer was asking them for guidance that was really specific to the Governance, Risk, and Compliance best practices, not necessarily specific to our platform.
[00:31:27] Szuyin Leow: So that was I think the big signal for me. I will say, once we then kind of honed in on, we need folks with Governance, Risk, and Compliance experience and this consulting background. Once I honed in on that persona and just started hiring those folks, we saw incredible retention across our team. Like really very, very few people left. And if they did leave, it was, you know, to go to a bigger, better job. It wasn't because they, you know, didn't like what they were doing at LogicGate.
[00:32:02] Andrew Michael: That's nice. So you sort of like part of your ideal customer profile, but your ideal consultant profile as well.
[00:32:09] Szuyin Leow: Exactly. Yeah. The ideal candidate profile. We really honed in on that and figured that out.
[00:32:15] Andrew Michael: Nice. Okay. And so you've got this practice up and running and now it's the second time you're putting it in place in Transcend. Are there any specific companies where you think that this is a must for them to do? So like, obviously the case where, like the products are very technical, it makes a lot of sense. Do you think there's cases where it wouldn't make sense to implement a program like this, or are there any signals that you have that you'd say, okay, if these scenarios apply to you, you should really think about hiring subject matter experts.
[00:32:47] Szuyin Leow: Yeah. So I think you are right. You know, there's different areas of subject matter expertise that LogicGate, the platform that we had built, was at its core a workflow builder. And what we were enabling our customers to do was to customize applications within that workflow builder that happened to be in the space of Governance, Risk, and Compliance. But because we were focused on that space, and there was so much customization we could do in the platform, the questions we were getting from our customers were related to best practices and industry standards.
[00:33:26] Szuyin Leow: And so in that case, any time that you're being asked, about those sorts of best practice standards questions, I think subject matter expertise is gonna be a huge accelerator for you on your team. If the product you are delivering does not require those sorts of customizations and is more standard and is something where you're not gonna have deviations in the journey, I don't think that's required because that's a lot easier to train the team on how to onboard and implement that sort of solution.
[00:34:02] Szuyin Leow: And then I guess the other area of expertise is, as you said, if you have a more technical product as we do at Transcend, so at Transcend we actually have both worlds of a highly technical product, as well as a space where there's a lot of regulatory requirements that are constantly changing. So customers always have questions on guidance and best practices, so we actually need sort of both of those areas of more technical, in this case, software engineers that can support the platform, as well as…
[00:34:35] Szuyin Leow: I didn't mention this to you earlier, but the kind of flavor of consulting that we've built here at Transcend is we actually hired a former customer of ours who was running a data privacy program, has all that experience and those at bats, solving those problems in the real world and is now it has come and been able to apply that from a consultant perspective in a CSM role.
[00:34:59] Andrew Michael: Nice. That's actually something we've heard quite common on the show, where like previous customers end up getting hired into CS roles and then having that experience really helps accelerate their career and their journey there. Talking about that as well, like, what advice would you give to others perhaps listening who may be subject matter experts in their field and considering maybe a switch to CS? Like what are some of the things that they should be thinking about when going into an opportunity like this or applying for a role from that perspective?
[00:35:30] Szuyin Leow: I think one of the best benefits of having that real life experience is not forgetting about where you felt pain when you were in that role, because oftentimes that's what's going to help you relate best with your customers and then know where to focus your problem solving. So that's definitely something that I chat with my team member, who is a former customer of ours, about a lot.
[00:36:01] Szuyin Leow: Remind me, where were you struggling with this the most? What was the hardest thing for you to accomplish? And then thinking about, from our side at Transcend, how can we help to make that easier or remove that burden and pain for our customers today? So I think, you know, not forgetting about those challenges and the pain and really make, living there can be really helpful. It's probably the primary.
[00:36:30] Andrew Michael: Would you recommend anything in the application itself and applying for these roles? Like what would make a candidate stand out to you who's coming across as a subject matter expert applying for a role like this?
[00:36:41] Szuyin Leow: Yeah, great question. Certainly, I think any time that they can show how they were able to drive a value using the product, if they were able to do that in their own organization, that makes me confident they can help coach a customer on how to do that as well. But on that note, since as customer success managers and folks in the customer experience space, we are often having to coach and enable, I think any experience where you can show that you helped to create resources or documentation or training and enablement, whether it's within your own team or beyond, that's really valuable experience as well.
[00:37:26] Andrew Michael: Very nice. Well, I see we're running up on time today, Szuyin. So before we wrap up, I wanna make sure I ask you a question I ask every guest, which is what's one thing that you know today about churn and retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career?
[00:37:44] Szuyin Leow: I think one of the big things that we've been really focused on when we look at churn reasons is how important it is to manage your stakeholders and your relationships. At LogicGate, maybe not as much here at Transcend, but at LogicGate, the number one reason that we had for churn was stakeholder turnover. In both industries that I've worked in, there's so much constant change in folks finding new jobs and switching to new companies. And so really thinking about how you can operationalize that moment to capitalize on it as a way to grow the relationship rather than it being a moment of churn, I think is really, really important.
[00:38:35] Szuyin Leow: At Transcend right now, we're looking into a tool called UserGems, which can help flag when those changes in roles happen. And we're really trying to think about how we can, within the customer, use that as a way to branch out to other folks and empower them to be able to take up the mantle and kind of become a champion of Transcend. But then for that customer that leaves, ideally we had cultivated a great relationship with them and also, capitalizing on how we can then use that to drive ideally a new customer at another organization. That's a big thing that we're thinking about right now.
[00:39:15] Andrew Michael: This is definitely a top three reason on the show for churn, like when the customer champion leaves so much so that I actually consider building an exact product like UserGems. I put together a landing page, like everything, like started crafting the product and then just getting into it. I felt a little bit creepy tracking individuals as they switched between roles. Like I get it. There's products that do this all the time and there's different analytics and tracking, just it felt for me like it was just one step too far what I was comfortable with as an individual doing.
[00:39:45] Andrew Michael: But definitely see like a lot of value in it, and obviously like the one aspect, and we also had [Jim Caban] on the show previously, who was actually the inspiration behind it, where he said at their time, I think it was the other segment with Drift, and they, what they were doing was they were analyzing for when this churn happened and typically what you would see is like when a champion leaves, the first thing that happens is they cut the email address.
[00:40:12] Andrew Michael: So they just put a monitor on whenever an email was sent out, they've got a hard bounce. That was a signal that there's potential for customers left, and then they would check. And then what they would actually do then is try, find out where they went. And then they would send them a set of Bose headsets just with a note and say, congrats on the new gig. Wish you best of luck. We're here when you need us. And like, they would turn out to be one of the biggest and best campaigns in terms of ROI.
[00:40:38] Andrew Michael: And you'd think it gets like a three, $400 headset, but they counted they were closing as a result of it later and they already had these champions that lost them, but now they were selling into them at the new accounts. And his logic as always, like they've just joined a new company. Like, nobody wants to say no to the new guy or a new girl. Like, they're going to be able to make these decisions and purchases if they're a key decision makers. So it made so much sense at the time for him.
[00:41:03] Szuyin Leow: Yeah, I love that. That's such a cool campaign. Yeah.
[00:41:07] Andrew Michael: So I'm pretty sure UserGems is going to be doing something similar. They're not already. But yeah, very nice. Szuyin, is there anything that, any final thoughts maybe you'd like to leave the listeners with as we wrap up today on the topic or over and above that is anything that they should be aware of or how can they keep up to speed with your work?
[00:41:25] Szuyin Leow: Yeah, I think, you know, just on the note of hiring subject matter experts, it is something that I really strongly believe in terms of being successful in the customer success space. But certainly I don't think it's a requirement. You know, like I think as leaders, it's just about us being thoughtful about how much time we're willing to invest in enablement and really how much the organization can afford to invest. So I do think that it's a great way to accelerate getting into that motion of being a trusted advisor and really being able to provide that authentic guidance.
[00:42:06] Andrew Michael: Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining today. I'll make sure to leave everything we discussed in the show notes for the listeners. And I thank you so much and I wish you best of luck now going forward.
[00:42:18] Szuyin Leow: Thank you, Andrew, same to you.
[00:42:20] Andrew Michael: Cheers. Bye.
[00:42:28] Andrew Michael: And that's a wrap for the show today with me, Andrew Michael. I really hope you enjoyed it and you were able to pull out something valuable for your business. To keep up to date with Churn.FM and be notified about new episodes, blog posts and more, subscribe to our mailing list by visiting Churn.FM. Also don't forget to subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you have any feedback, good or bad, I would love to hear from you. And you can provide your blunt, direct feedback by sending it to Andrew@churn.FM. Lastly, but most importantly, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and leave a review as it really helps get the word out and grow the community. Thanks again for listening. See you again next week.
