Building Out Tech Touch - Here's what I'm doing (feedback/ideas welcomed!)

Alex Tran

Hey everyone!

I'm building and owning the tech touch segment for my company, Gainsight. We're calling it the "Digital Led" segment.

SUPPORT MODEL

• In-product drop down widget in which customers can submit questions/issues, and mark their request as Technical Issue, Best Practice, How-to, etc.
  • Technical issues will be routed to our Support team
  • Best practice and how-to product questions will be routed to a CS team member, me (CTA automatically created to take action on)
• In-product self serve widget integrated with our knowledge base and in-app product guides
• Weekly "Office Hours" promoted to all customers (AMA, use cases + product, best practices)
• Community where customers can go to submit questions and ideas to us internally and our other customers

LIFECYCLE - first 5 months (example)

• Monthly EBR Emails - automatically sent with meaningful data to key stakeholders
  • Monthly Active Users (MAUs) - our customers' revenue are primarily on MAUs
  • Top 10 features used in our product
  • Every 6 months, show screenshot of use cases captured during onboarding; attach survey to access progress towards goals/use cases
  • URL link to submit product feedback
• Exec check ins on Month 3 & Month 9 of yearly contract
• Quarterly NPS survey with automatically created risk CTAs for detractors/passives and promoters to leave review on G2Crowd
• Renewal convos begin on Month 9

I'd love to hear your feedback, critiques, or thoughts on this! 

 

THANK YOU IN ADVANCE!

Jay Nathan

This is next-level @Alex Tran, and exactly what we envisioned members of this community would be doing. 

(Oh, and I like "Digital Led" much better than "tech touch")

Alex Tran

@Jay Nathan Thanks for the compliment!

If you have any ideas on what to change, add, or subtract - I'd love to hear since you're the CS guru

Anna Alley

This is very similar to what we're working on as well. I'm curious about the exec outreach even for our digitally led customers - how big is this customer base? Is the exec truly reaching out individually, or is it an automated message that has their signature information included? Our tech touch customer base is quite large, and would be challenging to have an executive engage with each one of them.

Alex Tran

@Anna Alley An exec is truly reaching out individually. Our customer base isn't that large so it's doable.

We currently do this right now with our customers every quarter, and this change will decrease the frequency of exec engagement.

Also curious to know - what sort of information do you put in the "EBR emails"?

Anna Alley

that makes sense - unfortunately not doable with our current size, so trying to figure out what long-term executive engagement looks like. 

For our EBR emails, we're actually finalizing those now, but we include the primary portal usage information that's most critical to full efficiency on the application, based on which products they've purchased. We're transactional based (primarily), so most of the data points focus around those.

Jay Nathan

@Alex Tran this is great thanks for showing your work here. one Suggestion to think about is how you can incorporate a scaled success plan into the mix. 

this really should be the basis of an EBR email as opposed to usage and adoption metrics. Remember, adoption isn’t really something we want to lead exec conversations with - live or digitally. 

The way to do this with “long-tail” customers is to capture their objectives from a predefined list, e.g. (for Gainsight customers):

• Reduce gross revenue churn
• Increase customer expansion sales
• Increase customer engagement rate
• etc...

You can use surveys or in-app feedback tools To capture their objectives. Then use what you captured to relate the adoption and usage metrics back to the customer through these emails. 

Another suggestion is to benchmark each customer against a small set (10-15) of similar companies. Zendesk does this (or at least used to do it) with their monthly emails. 

One last suggestion is to make sure you’re measuring engagement with all the touch points you mentioned. Clearly everything you’re doing is meant to drive customer outcomes, and subsequently retention for Gainsight. So monitoring all the touch points in the journey will be key. Cross reference the engagement rates With churned and retained customers. See if there’s a correlation with any one activity - if you find a positive result, double Down on it!

Oh, and never stop talking to customers. Just because you have a scaled program in place, don’t rely on the data alone. It won’t tell the whole story, nothing replaces the context you will gain from speaking with a sample set of customers every month. 

Brian Hartley

@Alex Tran very impressive!  Thanks for sharing your work on this forum.  I am going to share bits and pieces with my team to drive inspiration 

Emma Mailey

@Alex Tran This is super interesting, thanks for sharing! I'm helping to build out the same program at MongoDB right now, and we're in the middle of building out our automated customer journey across setup, onboarding, adoption and growth. The plan is that having these automated means we can focus our time on manual engagement with customers who have growth/risk potential. Would love to sync up with you for a call if you have time, I'm sure we have lots of experiences we can share!

Jeff Breunsbach

Love this connection @Emma Mailey and @Alex Tran  - my one ask is that you bring back any findings into the community and this thread if you don't mind!

Alex Tran

@Emma Mailey I'd love to talk more! Two brains are better than one

Send me an email at [email protected]! 

Let's talk soon, Emma!

Rachel Priest

Wow - this is sweet!  I especially love the automated Support Model @Alex Tran.  So streamlined for not only the customer but the Support team and any CSMs that have to juggle this responsibility as well! 

Alex Tran

Thanks, @Rachel Priest ! Much appreciated!

Emma Mailey

@Alex Tran I sent you an email and @Jeff Breunsbach we absolutely will share findings in this community!

Naveen Nair

@Alex Tran I love how you've visually represented the critical first few months of a customer journey, overlaying all the different stakeholders in play and making it a shared plan. Have you considered converting this into a Relationship Roadmap that you share with clients, so its not just internal to Gainsight stakeholders but something you collaborate on and update the client on as well? Curious if it would create a sense of shared ownership for the various touchpoints and outcomes you're hoping to achieve. 

Alex Tran

@Naveen Nair Thanks for your feedback! I haven't updated customers on this roadmap yet. We are actually transitioning from high touch to low touch for a cohort of customers.

Would you recommend sharing this roadmap with clients when making the transition?

Naveen Nair

@Alex Tran I can see two distinct advantages from sharing this:

1. This could be one of your initial onboarding documents, which explains your relationship model/approach while at the same time helping you set base expectations of frequency of interactions and milestones. It's a great visual, I always find my customers follow expectations better when it's visual, i'd absolutely use it!
2. I'm a huge fan of customer feedback in all things, including our customer outreach strategy. Sharing this would help you crowd-source your digitally led customer segment on what works for them, or not.

Hope you don't mind, but i'm planning to steal "digitally led", so much better than tech-touch or low-touch.

Alex Tran

Thank you so much, @Naveen Nair ! It's good to get feedback from our customers!

Go ahead and take "digital led"! I think many people have already haha

Alex Tran

@Emma Mailey and I met over Zoom to dive deeper into this! Lots to unpack...some key takeaways:

• Ensure that your sales rep fill in crucial information after the deal has closed (e.g. Key use cases discussed, reasons for purchase, personalities, etc. to best equip the CS team and long-term success of the customers)
• You can't automate, and digitize everything. There's value in having customer meetings. Focus on GROWTH and RISK customers. Look at:
  • Implementation blockers
  • Low adoption rates
  • Unengaged key stakeholders
• Send out survey capturing use cases and goals after deal has closed, AND after they renew to capture new goals
• Should the CSM be introduced to "digital led" customers?
  • Not as the "official" CSM, but one of the many team members
  • At Gainsight, I'm technically the only one so I'm still in the process of ironing this out
• Consider recording a short video of yourself and send in an email. MongoDB has experienced much higher open rates!
• For EBR emails, how will we measure success?
  • Leading indicators: Open rates, clickthroughs
  • Lagging outcomes: Increase in adoption, more verified outcomes
• In EBR emails, have something of VALUE to say. For me, I'm going to put in new product releases since we have a monthly release schedule.

cc @Jay Nathan @Jeff Breunsbach