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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.
CHURN FM
E268 | Simplifying Customer Success: The Key to Retaining Loyal Customers at Scale with Evgenia Mkrtychian
Today on the show we have Evgenia Mkrtychian, the Director of Customer Success and Corporate Communication Strategy at LoyaltyPlant, a full-scale customer engagement platform.
In this episode, Evgenia shares her decade-long journey in B2B SaaS, emphasizing practical strategies for customer engagement and retention and discussing LoyaltyPlant's 30% revenue growth, process improvements, and the introduction of gamification elements.
We then discussed the release of her new book, "Customer Success Playbook: Your Practical Guide to Winning Customer Loyalty in B2B SaaS” and we wrapped up by discussing simplicity, decision-making, and critical thinking in customer success.
Mentioned Resources
Churn FM is sponsored by Vitally, the all-in-one Customer Success Platform.
[00:00:00] Evgenia Mkrtychian: Decisions have to be made. You may end up realizing tomorrow that it was not the best decision, the right decision, but at any given moment, just make decisions and just move faster.
[00:00:20] 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.
[00:00:32] 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 boosts the strategy, profitable and growing.
[00:00:46] 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. Hey Evgenia, welcome to the show.
[00:00:58] Evgenia Mkrtychian: Hi, thank you so much for having me back.
[00:01:01] Andrew Michael: It's great to have you back.
[00:01:02] Andrew Michael: For the listeners, Evgenia here is the Director of Customer Success and Corporate Communication Strategy at Loyalty Plant, a full-scale customer engagement platform, and Evgenia here is also now officially an author with the release of a new book, “Customer Success Playbook: Your Practical Guide to Winning Customer Loyalty in B2B SaaS.” So, my first question for Evgenia here is, what motivated you to write your new book and why should Churn.fm listeners get a copy?
[00:01:28] Evgenia Mkrtychian: Yeah, absolutely. This is my first book ever and my key motivation came from the experience I gained over the years. Interestingly, I do not have background in technology and my journey in B2B, SaaS and customer success started maybe 10 years ago. It all has been very new to me, but I think it happened naturally. And I kept this human aspect of the job, someone coming from a non-technical world.
[00:01:58] Evgenia Mkrtychian: And there are a lot of great books out there. What I think was my motivation and one of the reasons to get a copy is I tried to make this book as practical as possible and very honest. You know, there are a lot of theoretical stuff about customer success, what works, how you should do this, apply this framework. It does work in a lot of cases, but equally it doesn't work often times.
[00:02:28] Evgenia Mkrtychian: And the reason behind that is that a lot of young companies and fast scaling companies are undergoing a lot of issues and challenges that are typical to startups even. They may not necessarily be in this mode, but still the reality is that it's hectic, it's challenging, you have to wear multiple hats and overcome many, many issues as you go, as you grow. So, I try to make it as practical as possible.
[00:02:59] Andrew Michael: Very nice. And you said it like this is the way you phrase that this is the first book I've ever written. It was like there's more to come, like you were just getting started.
[00:03:11] Evgenia Mkrtychian: I'm getting started. I'm thinking of releasing the second edition. I want to make this book even more practical as I was working on the book. I was thinking, okay, I need to add this and this, some frameworks, some case studies and more and more. So, I realized that with this approach, this book will never ever be published, and I decided to release the first version of this book, but I'm thinking to release the second edition next year.
[00:03:41] Andrew Michael: Okay, nice. Yeah, cause I think it's like the way you phrased it was like, "Ah, this is just the first one of many, but like just releasing a book on its own, it's a lot of work and sweat and tears, I'm sure, as well to get to the finish line." So, a big congrats on the launch and we'll definitely make sure to leave links in the show notes as well for listeners if you want to check it out.
[00:04:02] Andrew Michael: You mentioned as well, like wanting to make this really practical, especially for companies that are going through sort of hyperscale and we're chatting just before the show. And this is actually something that you've been going through recently now at LoyaltyPlant. And so, I'm going to just hear like maybe getting started a little bit of an update since we last spoke. Like what's been going on at LoyaltyPlant? How have things changed over the last, maybe a couple of years now since we last spoke? I think.
[00:04:27] Evgenia Mkrtychian: Couple of years. Yeah. So yeah, we are showing a 30% year over year growth in revenue, and we are transitioning towards more high touch segment of customers. We are not growing that significantly in terms of the headcount and this is one of the pressure factors for customer success, product support, well, all teams in general. In terms of our product, we have also made several pivots I would say and one of them is our approach towards adding as much gamification as possible to our product.
[00:05:10] Evgenia Mkrtychian: It comes in all sorts of way. Tiered loyalty is one of the big wins and we have been, you know, I think, moving towards releasing our brand-new loyalty program with the tiers for the past 10 years, accumulating a lot of experience, and it's finally out there. And we are seeing great feedback. And we are seeing improvements in lots of indicators like average spend per user and other metrics that we would normally look at. Gamification also big hype.
[00:05:44] Evgenia Mkrtychian: And I think we are one of the leaders in this aspect in terms of adding lotteries, mini games to the app, making it this unique experience for the user. So, they want to spend more time in the app and place their orders directly in the app, as opposed to websites, aggregators.
[00:06:06] Evgenia Mkrtychian: I would say these are the main things that have been happening in the past years and internally, I mean, within customer success team, we have been going through a lot of changes. Because, well, obviously we are growing as the team in terms of the customers, locations, the projects. Our headcount is limited, the resources are limited, so we are trying to allocate them as efficiently as possible by automating certain things by implementing the role of CS operations, which is, I would say, a little underrated these days. And, you know, many, many other things that make us more efficient as a team.
[00:06:51] Andrew Michael: As a team, yeah. So, because you started out saying that you've been growing 30% year on year over the last couple of years, but you haven't been growing the team. And sort of, first of all, maybe like what is the decision behind that and how are you sort of understanding like when is the right time to grow the team versus staying the same? Because if you keep continue keeping this up, like, especially on the high touch side, there's only so many people, like individual reps can deal with. So, what is the thinking behind the team size and the scaling of the business?
[00:07:23] Evgenia Mkrtychian: Well, one of the reasons we end up being snowed under a lot of tasks is because certain processes are either outdated, I mean they do not work for us anymore and we would need to upgrade them regardless of our growth. This is just something that we have to do and I'm looking at the bright side of this. Growing the hat count is relatively easy once you manage to identify what's the best talent for you is and how you onboard and retain this talent.
[00:07:59] Evgenia Mkrtychian: This is not the path for long-term success. In the long term, this is really hard to sustain. So, I think at this point, this is a very good push for us to make our internal improvements in terms of the processes, self-service aspects of the product. I mean, that can be self-serviced without the need of CS at all. So we are undergoing these changes. And I do believe these are the right changes for us internally that would be end up being very fruitful in the long term.
[00:08:34] Andrew Michael: And how has the team been taking to these changes? So, you've been scaling a lot from a business perspective, but not from a team. So how are you sort of dealing with the team aspect?
[00:08:45] Evgenia Mkrtychian: Good question. Well, we are trying to keep this reasonable sense and where we can actually sustain this work-life balance, and we have started to firstly delegate. Some of the processes that historically have been under the customer success umbrella are now delegated to other teams like tactic basis. The help that we have been waiting for and it's proving to be efficient for us. I mean, whatever time we spent doing this. We can now spend two words communicating with the customer, engaging them and driving higher product adoption. So that's the first thing. The second thing and-
[00:09:29] Andrew Michael: Before you get to the second, can you give an example of what that might look like?
[00:09:32] Evgenia Mkrtychian: Oh yes, absolutely. I mean, well, firstly, the customer activation phase used to be someone that our big customer success would be dealing with, and we would have one high touch manager onboarding a new customer and also having 10 other customers in their portfolio. So now we have a separate activation team. We are delegating more set up, which is not purely technical, but yet, this is some manual set up. So, we are delegating this to our implementation teams. Our support team, I mean, tech support team is now more involved with our customers in terms of interactions, communications, like troubleshooting.
[00:10:19] Evgenia Mkrtychian: We are trying, we are not there yet. My dream is to create the environment in where we can focus purely on product adoption, customer engagement, all those things that matter at the end of the day. It's not like the rest doesn't matter. It's the foundation that would allow us to do those things that customer success teams are designed for.
[00:10:42] Andrew Michael: No, absolutely. So, in one way you have been scaling the team, but just in a different way and that's by delegating and outsourcing. So, it's not like the team has just had to pick up the exponential workload while maintaining the same. You've actually done a better job of delegating. With that in mind, I'm keen to sort of hear though, because a lot of what was handled previously by customer success is now being distributed.
[00:11:07] Andrew Michael: How is this impacting like the end user experience and how are you resolving the broken telephone situation where you'll have a conversation with your activation onboarding manager and then you'll start chatting to CS and like I've experienced this in the past where I've had to like repeat the same things over again. It's like aren't you a team? Don't you work together? Like so I'm keen to hear how sort of your operation, I always get this word wrong, operational, I can't even say it now, but how you trying to put this into operations now and get the team aligned so you don't have these issues of broken telephone?
[00:11:43] Evgenia Mkrtychian: Unfortunately, I can't say that we are not having this issue at all. It's not more related to the activation part though. I think we have a great process there and we have strengthened the onboarding process, and we have minimized the time to value. But this broken telephone, it does exist. I think it's more on the verge of support operations and customer success. It does happen, we are trying to avoid it as much as possible by simply making sure that customer success manager stays on top of everything that's going on with the customer and they would serve more as a mentor, and they would advise and suggest but staying behind the scenes. In that way, the customer experience is not affected as it could be in case we just disappeared.
[00:12:38] Evgenia Mkrtychian: We are just trying to scale the expertise within our customer success team and our big team in general. But more by mentoring, coaching and advising and preventing some things that we do not want to double check with the customer because we know this like, hey, don't do this. Just because we have a history of relationships, this is how it works historically, or you'd better ask this.
[00:13:05] Evgenia Mkrtychian: Well, I am now a fan of you know, creating those mentoring opportunities as much as possible. I believe it's one of the ways, maybe one of the only ways to scale the expertise within the team by creating those mentorship projects, opportunities, shadowing. And well, oftentimes you end up realizing that although you work in B2B, SaaS, tech and you do work with technology at the end of the day, it's still made by a person and for a person. So those human aspects are still very, very critical and many companies struggle realizing that it's really hard to find the top talent on the market.
[00:13:56] Evgenia Mkrtychian: And even if you do find this top talent, most likely they know nothing about your product unless you are a fortune Android company, and your product is something that is so embedded into our daily life. So, you have to do this.
[00:14:16] Andrew Michael: And so, these mentorship opportunities you're speaking about, it's like your own internal team training each other on different aspects of the business. So, would this be the case then as well, like from CS to support or CS to your onboarding specialist? Is there sort of knowledge transfer happening there as well? How do you facilitate and set these training sessions up then if it's like cross-domain or cross-departments as well?
[00:14:41] Evgenia Mkrtychian: Yes, I think that right now we are doing this more internally within our customer success team. We have high-touch, mid-touch, tag-touch customer success managers and operations and activation. So, we are trying to make sure that our most experienced managers share their expertise, especially if they have been with us for many, many years in the case for a lot of our team members. In terms of sharing the expertise across teams, we also have our internal training sessions, I would say, and it's for everyone. I mean, our product would share their expertise, CS would share what they're strong at.
[00:15:27] Evgenia Mkrtychian: We have been having those events for a number of years now and we in general, we value the culture in where we can grow. And we may not necessarily need to hire a mentor from other companies to teach us something. I mean, we have a lot of talent within our team.
[00:15:51] Andrew Michael: Yeah, absolutely. Nice. And do you have a do external resources or then bring in a training then? Is this something the team does or, and what does that look like if you do?
[00:16:02] Evgenia Mkrtychian: Right now, we are not doing this a lot. I think that right now it's the opposite. It's us participating at a lot of industry events as speakers and sharing our knowledge in loyalty, marketing, e-commerce, because we do have a lot of experience in this area and all of our case studies, they are supported by data. It's not just our theory, like we think this will work. We are backing up by tons of data that we have been collecting and analyzing, and we are happy to share this expertise at industry events.
[00:16:45] Andrew Michael: Nice. You mentioned something as well at the beginning of the show in terms of like the product experience, and like it triggered a thought for me, and I wonder if it's something that the team is considered as well in the context of B2B SaaS, is that you said the product had a new feature, which was loyalty tiers. So, and I'm assuming what that meant is like based on their loyalty, they'll get greater discounts, maybe on repeat purchases or things like that, depending on how long then.
[00:17:11] Andrew Michael: And I wonder if there's any company and if anybody's listening and they've applied this and they're seen at work is that if they apply the same sort of mentality in a B2B SaaS environment where depending on your tenure and how long you've been with the business, you actually end up making a saving or get special treatments or anything like that. Cause I think like some business, maybe we do like grandfather pricing where existing customers get to stay on the old price and if they do, but I wonder if anyone's productized this where, because typically we try to expand accounts.
[00:17:42] Andrew Michael: We try to extract more value from those accounts over time. But I wonder if the inverse is true where for retention companies have actually tried to reward their most loyal customers over time. So, can you see how it's working out for you on the one end? But if you've even maybe considered this on your end from your own internal customer, actually using your own product with them.
[00:18:04] Evgenia Mkrtychian: Yeah, absolutely. Just one comment here, our loyalty program is designed to create this emotional connection between businesses and the end users. So, we are not about discounts, we are more about rewards that you get from the business just because you have a place to purchase or a place to order.
[00:18:29] Andrew Michael: So, this was just like the first thing that came to mind. But like, you mean different types of swag or gifts or things like that?
[00:18:36] Evgenia Mkrtychian: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, I think this is a trend in hospitality, in QSR. This is a trend that we haven't seen for the past year, I would say. Before this, I would say the trend was a pre-descending that was more about personalized offerings for the customers as opposed to bulk offers that are just lack personalization whatsoever.
[00:19:06] Evgenia Mkrtychian: So, this is a trend in the industry and a lot of companies are pursuing those opportunities. And as someone who has ever stayed at a hotel, you might be a member of some loyalty program. And the more you stay with a certain brand, the more perks you have. It might be free parking or cardless check-in.
[00:19:32] Evgenia Mkrtychian: So, these are the small things that actually matter and based on the data that we have been analyzing, it works so much better as a discount. But yes, we are seeing this trend everywhere we go now and in one way or the other companies are trying to implement that.
[00:19:55] Andrew Michael: It's interesting because like the most of the examples you gave are more on the usage based. So like with airlines, with hotels the more you go the more you fly. The way you describe it, I understood it was more of like tenure, like the longer they'd been with you as a customer or client. And that's why I'd like sort of click more translatable to like B2B SaaS. We're even B2B SaaS, we have usage base, but we always try to retain by month or by year and we have these annual contracts and things like that. And yeah, I think it's just interesting. I wonder if anything serious has been explored and like, do you potentially do this yourselves at LoyaltyPlant? With your existing customers?
[00:20:33] Evgenia Mkrtychian: Okay... I think what's worth mentioning here is that we are B2B, but essentially we are B2C. And those tier loyalty programs that we are delivering as a part of our product, it's more for the end users. So it's more like for the end users, the end customers. As for our customers, that is a very good question. Now, I don't think we have a implemented any tiered loyalties so far or something of that matter.
[00:21:05] Evgenia Mkrtychian: We are having different thoughts on how we can obviously retain our B2B customers more. And the, while a lot of things are hidden somewhere in terms of the offering, I mean like what features are available within the certain price tier, I would say. One of the things that we find to be working really well for our customers and in terms of retaining our customers is also personalization.
[00:21:40] Evgenia Mkrtychian: And it does not mean that you have to stick to this one to one approach. It can be one to many, regardless of the product you have, any recommendations, any guidance on how to adapt to a product and how to use it better. It has to be customized. The needs of your customers, regardless of the tier.
[00:22:02] Andrew Michael: I think it's very interesting though as well, like trying to think about it in the context of your business. Obviously I understand like your B2B but there are B2C predominantly in the thing but I think you started out saying like being empathetic and then sending all humans at the end of the day. And I think we all get motivated by these things. And there probably is like a version of the product that you've built in the B2C environment that can work in a B2B environment.
[00:22:23] Andrew Michael: And like you say, maybe not discounts, but it's also maybe people are on the starter plan and they've been with you for a couple of years, you can unlock one or two features and say like, for your loyalty, you're not getting upgraded, but you're getting these two features now that you never had before. And I wonder if there is something in there, like for businesses to think about how can you be rewarding, like your most loyal customers over time, so that they feel the sense and thing.
[00:22:51] Andrew Michael: Like swag is an obvious one. I think that most companies would do and say, "Oh, I will send a sweater or a mug or things, but something more directly relatable to the actual product itself, I think would be interesting. Maybe it's higher tier support or whatever it is." Like you're creating these concierge services for your longer tenured customers.
00:23:09] Evgenia Mkrtychian: Yeah, absolutely. I would think that, and what I'm seeing is that what customers really value is the success plan. How do I get the most out of your product, regardless of the pricing, the features that are available. The customers, they do value your expertise. And if you can find a way to share this expertise in a way that is also scalable for you as for the business.
[00:23:38] Evgenia Mkrtychian: This is the key to build those long lasting relationships. Many, many times we are seeing that our customers, many, many other customers they think they need to achieve this goal in this particular way with your product. But you as an expert, you might be seeing five other ways to achieve this easier, faster, more efficiently. And you should communicate this. You should find a way to educate your customers.
[00:24:06] Andrew Michael: And how are you scaling this then as well? So you're developing these playbooks, you're trying to productize parts of it. Like what does your process look like in CS today for it?
[00:24:14] Evgenia Mkrtychian: We're analyzing a lot of data in terms of our product usage. And I have come up with a more simplified house scoring system that basically just looks at three main criteria. Before then, I was thinking that I need to invent something complicated, something complex, something that would cover all the aspects of our product usage. And I was kind of stuck.
[00:24:42] Evgenia Mkrtychian: With this initiative, so I have simplified that. And I have a dashboard and I know exactly what our customers are doing, and most importantly, not doing with our product. And having this data, we can segment the customers into the groups in terms of not the segments, but the product usage. And we know that this aspect is not being utilized or is not being utilized correctly to the full capacity, then our success plan and our recommendation is this.
[00:25:14] Evgenia Mkrtychian: And we communicate this, in different forms. Might be email marketing, might be webinars, might be one one-on-one Zoom sessions. That depends on the customer segment now. But it all starts with what your product was made for and how your customers are utilizing it. Our product is pretty complicated in terms of multiple functionality, the features, all of them have, I can't say equal value, but they have a lot of value.
[00:25:45] Evgenia Mkrtychian: So all combined, it does create this strong proposal for the customers. But how do you do this? And how do you find the time to do this? The users of our product are CMOs, marketing managers. They are busy, they are handling so many things. They are using a lot of platforms. They have social media to run. They have operations, stuff like that. We are striving to help them as much as possible and automate a lot of processes for them, as well.
[00:26:20] Andrew Michael: Nice. Yeah. I think it's definitely like one of those things now as you start to sort of scale the different processes and figure out ways to improve the experiences for users across the board, like keeping into consideration as well. Like, who the customer is and where they're at.
[00:26:37] Andrew Michael: Nice. So talking about this now over the last year, you've been scaling quite quick, early as well from a business perspective. You've been trying to scale the processes now through other delegating or through mentoring and teaching team members. How much of this is like these learnings have gone into the book and is there any like specific moment or anything like from the past, like two, three years, that has really been like a standouts point in the book for you?
[00:27:05] Evgenia Mkrtychian: Well, in the book, it is based purely on my practical experience, and this is was my goal when writing this book. So, I do cover a lot of topics from customer handoff, from the sales team to creating success stories and identifying what your success metrics are, to you know, where do you actually hire, how do you hire the best talent and how do you retain your best talent?
[00:27:39] Evgenia Mkrtychian: So, I do mention mentoring opportunities and the importance of creating those shadowing opportunities within the teams. So yes, all of those topics are covered. I would say that the book in general is a guide that can help you. If you are at the beginning of this journey, or if you are amidst the growth and you end up realizing that, okay, this used to work, but it doesn't work anymore, or how do I do this, given that I have twice as many customers?
[00:28:15] Andrew Michael: Well, you mentioned as well then, like the health score being one example of a learning that you had where you tried to overcomplicate things, and then you came back to sort of three points and made it a lot more easier to understand. How did that process go and how did that learning come about? At what point did you realize, okay, no, this is not the right direction. We need to just simplify this and strip things on.
[00:28:36] Andrew Michael: Had you implemented the health score and then gather that feedback? What did that process look like, actually?
[00:28:42] Evgenia Mkrtychian: I was trying to implement and advance this health score for, some time before, I ended up you know, realizing that in my pursuit for perfection or, a sophisticated health scoring metric. I'm not looking at anything, so I'm missing a lot of opportunities. And that made me remember, you know, that this is what I would share with my team. Decisions have to be made. You may end up realizing tomorrow that it was not the best decision, the right decision, but at any given moment, just make decisions and just move faster.
[00:29:26] Evgenia Mkrtychian: You will wake up tomorrow just having some more thoughts and realizing that, okay, we also need to do this. That's fine. But just do this in the next iteration of whatever project initiative you are working on, but just make a decision. At least one decision a day has to be made. Obviously, in more senior roles or leadership roles, you make more than one decision and day, but just do it.
[00:29:54] Andrew Michael: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of the things that takes time as well to get to the point where you realize how important it is just to make decisions. I think there's a really great framework that a lot of people follow as well from Jeff Bezos, which is the revolving doors. Is it a one-way door or a two-way door? And if it's two-way, make the decision. If it's one-way, be a little bit more deliberate in the decision-making process. But definitely, I like simplifying things. I see that as well.
[00:30:20] Andrew Michael: Like, It's very easy when we start to think about these health scores or lead scoring, like to overcomplicate things. And the problem with overcomplicating is one, it's obviously takes a lot longer to figure out how to implement it, but two, it's not very easy and straightforward for the team to understand or for the team to action. And like these scores need to be actionable. So when they become overly complex, they become less actionable and it becomes difficult for the team.
[00:30:43] Andrew Michael: So like a lot of people I've worked with and spoken to at the end, like it always comes back to this is like, what is the simplest way that we can have a measure of health that the team gets and that the team can action. And I think like getting to those two points and often is not this overly complex system that needs to be sophisticated to the next degree. And yeah, I've seen this play out. It's not only in like health scoring, but in lead scoring and like ICP modeling and all of this as well. Simple always wins, I think.
[00:31:14] Evgenia Mkrtychian: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:31:15] Andrew Michael: Nice. So obviously I've asked this question to you in the past as well, but what's one thing that you know today about channel retention that you didn't know when the last time we spoke on this podcast, two years ago. So what's something new you've learned about channel retention in the last couple of years?
[00:31:31] Evgenia Mkrtychian: Well, as we just discussed. I think I have learned a lot about simplicity and the importance of a lot of things to be over complicated in terms of customer communication, renewals, product usage, anything. And, I think this has been one of the goals of this past year for me to try and streamline many, many processes and just get rid of something that's complicated, outdated, doesn't work anymore.
[00:32:08] Evgenia Mkrtychian: Sometimes admitting the fact that, okay, we are not doing great here is 50% of your success and it used to be more complicated for me. I was thinking, no, no, okay, no. It's just that we have to improve this a little bit more, a little bit more. And at some point, I just realized that, okay, no, we just need to stop doing it completely, see what happens. And maybe we'll continue growing without this process, without this feature, without this meeting even, or document, or whatever it can be.
[00:32:46] Andrew Michael: Yeah, keeping things simple and removing friction. I think that's also like a part of the problem is like as companies grow and scale. Processes get implemented but very rarely do processes get taken away or challenged as well. And I think like just as many things, you add you also need to be removing and to ensure that you can maintain speed as you grow and scale. Nice.
[00:33:07] Andrew Michael: Then, maybe the last question I have is obviously like you're in CS, you speak to a lot of customers, you speak to a lot of team members, coaching, mentoring and so forth. Like what's one question that you wish more people would ask you about customer success or about retention that they don't?
[00:33:25] Evgenia Mkrtychian: Oh, that's a good question. It's really hard to choose one question. I would say that it's not maybe one question, but it's a question that starts with why. Why are you doing this? Why does it work this way? Why don't you do this? So this curiosity about, not necessarily doubting everything that exists. But trying to get to the core of the process, why some process exists, why does the product work like this? And whenever we are hiring candidates, I'm looking for this, any question that starts with why. I really appreciate people having this curiosity in a good way.
[00:34:11] Evgenia Mkrtychian: And, again, one of my, ways of thinking in the past months was it's either I have to build a scalable machine where we have a process for every action or we really need to develop this critical thinking within the team members. The success obviously is somewhere in the middle, but I do value this critical thinking and curiosity and any questions someone would ask me that starts with why. Sometimes you really do not have a good answer. And you really start to think, yeah, good question. Why? I don't know. Let's think about it together. Yeah.
[00:34:53] Andrew Michael: I love that. And yeah, I definitely like this just general curiosity. I think it also goes back to like thinking through things in first principles and, like just from the very, not accepting things for truth just because they are the way they are today. And yeah, I think that's something like, everybody should be doing regularly to improve over time.
[00:35:13] Andrew Michael: Well, Evgenia, it's been absolutely pleasure chatting with you today. Before we drop off, is there any sort of final thought you want to leave the listeners with? Obviously, everything we've discussed today will be in the show notes for them to pick up, but do you have any final thoughts to share before we wrap up today?
[00:35:26] Evgenia Mkrtychian: I just want to inspire anyone who is in any way related to customer relations or customer success as a concept. It's challenging and it's not for everyone. I mean, it's a hard job. If you are enjoying this role, that means that you are on this great mission to help someone get their value, their result that they were hoping for with your product. And, I think this is a great mission to be on.
[00:35:59] Andrew Michael: Absolutely. It's a great way to end the show. Obviously, we have a lot of listeners in CS and wanting to serve customers and improve their experiences. Hopefully, that's why they're listening to this right now. And yeah, Thanks so much again for joining. For the listeners, definitely check out Emilia's book. And as you said, there'll be a link to it in the show notes. If you share it as well with me, please. But yeah, thanks so much again for joining and I wish you best of luck now going forward as you start to continue the journey of scale that you're on.
[00:36:28] Evgenia Mkrtychian: Thank you so much.
[00:36:29] 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.
[00:36:49] Andrew Michael: 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 at 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.
