Masha
Chris, set me up. Talk to me about where you're currently at, your role, your company, but also, how did you end up in the field of Customer Success?
Chris
Good question. So I'm the Vice President of Customer Experience here at Epicor. And I've been here just coming up on my fourth year now with the company. Prior to that, I spent a 20-year career at another global software organization, Fortune 100, Fortune 50 type of company. And I've always been in the Customer Service realm in my entire career. And when I say I've been in the Customer Service realm, I've always coupled that within the technology industry. So no matter what I was doing, whether it was working for a major company, or in a retail component, or in a customer facing component, it was always in service, I was always focused in that area. And it's something I've always been very passionate about, is getting that win on the board every day, getting that W to put on the board, that you're able to help a customer, it's very satisfying. It's satisfying both internally, as well as to the customer that you've helped them. But more importantly, it's how do we go ahead and take that and be able to reproduce it without reproducing—I'm sure my mom would testify she doesn't need 100 or 1000s, or many more Warticki's running around, mini-Chris's. Okay?
Masha
The world can't handle that, Chris! I don't think so. [Laughs]
Chris
Exactly. Well, and in the technology sector, I can teach anybody technology. I can show, instruct, help somebody, you know, get it when it helps them, you know, helping them understand what we do, and how to leverage the technology. I'll be honest with you, I can't teach everybody how to be nice. There are a lot of obstacles in that. It could be and most of them are past experiences that hinder the ability for somebody to feel empowered, or for somebody to feel like they can engage in a way that is to the benefit of the customer. Without being—there's a fear factor there in some ways with individuals. But I don't want to get all psychosomatic here. Okay?
Masha
We're gonna dig on that. I'm very curious about that. Maybe just super quick, because I have a ton of questions. And I have many, like the ones that I've planned. But now I have many that I didn't. I guess what does your team look like at Epicor right now? Who reports up into Customer Experience? And where do you report into?
Chris
Sure. So Epicor brought me in three and a half years ago to start actually a Customer Success Program at the company. And when I met with our executives, I said, so why do you want this? And they said, "Everybody else has one, I guess so should we." Okay? I'm not kidding you. Like we need one of these. Everybody else has one. And I said, well, that's great. So you probably want them for your largest accounts, key accounts, strategic accounts, your cloud customers, your on-prem, like all these verticals. And they said, "Oh, my gosh, Chris, you are reading our mind. That's exactly what we want." And I said, "Yeah, I don't want to do any of that." And they were like, "What?"
Masha
Okay... How did they take that?
Chris
They're like, "What are you talking about? We just hired you?" And I said, well, first of all, how many resources you're going to give me to do this? And they said, "Well, that's easy. We're only going to give you five." And I'm at a team of a half a dozen right now. And I said, Okay, that's fine. But do you, will you acknowledge that what you just described that you want isn't scalable? Okay? And they did. And furthermore, I said, well, then how you transform an organization from a customer service or Customer Success perspective is, if I understand this company correctly, you've been around for 47 years. Did that mean before today you did not care about Customer Success? And they were like, "No," and I said, exactly. So what do you want this new team to do that the company isn't doing for themselves or the lines of business? And again, I challenged that a lot. And I said, well, what a CSM team and a CSM program can do, is we can take a portfolio of a smattering of accounts, and we will do CSM like KPIs, throwing around, you know, CSAT and renewal and all sorts of other things like that, that can be measured. But at the end of the day, we're going to ask them, we're gonna give our customers a soft ask and the soft ask is how easy is it to do business with this company, with Epicor? Changing that likelihood to recommend to how we the ease of doing business with. And they were like, "Well, why?" And they said, "Well, why do we get rid of NPS? Why do we change that?" And I've been—I'll be honest—I've been anti—NPS for well over a decade.
Masha
Oh, I want to know this.
Chris
Probably 20 years. And the reason is this: likelihood to recommend has nothing to do with your loyalty.
Masha
Okay, say more on that.
Chris
Okay. So, Masha, you like where you work, right?
Masha
Mhm…
Chris
You would recommend it as a place to work, right?
Masha
Mhm…
Chris
If I offered you 10 times as much money to come work for me, would you consider that? Would you maybe do that?
Masha
Yeah…
Chris
Okay. Do you see that your likelihood to recommend your company has nothing to do with your loyalty?
Masha
Ohhhh. You're blowing my mind, Chris, I see it. Yep. Yep.
Chris
But, if you ask customers, you know, how easy is it to do business? They're gonna be very forthright, they're gonna be very honest with you. And by the way, they've already told us, and they've already told other companies the same thing. They're just not responding to it. They're not listening to it. And so Customer Success here at Epicor is how do I take 30 managed portfolio accounts and impact over 30,000 customers in our entire portfolio? Okay?
Masha
That's some scalability.
Chris
Well, so it becomes a governance program. Customer Success is a continuous process improvement program. We already—we don't need to survey them again. We already know where the bodies are buried. They've already told us for 40 plus years what the problems are. And nobody's fixed it. Nobody's been accountable. Nobody's been responsible.
Masha
So nobody's been listening?
Chris
Well, we've been listening. But we haven't actioned anything. My predecessor gave me dozens of surveys on the transition. And I'm like, great, where are the action plans? And they're like, "Yeah, we don't have those."
Masha
Huh. No, closing the loop, huh?
Chris
No, closing the loop. And so I completely changed that coming in here saying, okay, we're gonna go ahead and make this a CSM program. But it's not going to be what the industry is doing. And so for probably six, the first six months, I had to really change people's perception about what Customer Success was. Because Masha, every Vice President came to me in my first six months and said, "Hey, Chris, come here. My customers need CSMs. My customers are special. Mine are different than everybody else's." And I said, well, that's great. I'm still not doing it. Because what they want is they want whack-a-mole, as I call it. They want whack-a-mole Customer Success. They want me to handle the customers that for years—and when we first met them, everybody raised their hand and said, "Hey, whenever you have a problem, call me. I'll help you." And they've been calling. And they don't want them to call you. They don't want to take those calls.
Masha
Right, nobody's picking up the phone.
Chris
Well, they don't want to take those calls anymore. These are ankle biters.
Masha
Right. Okay.
Chris
And maybe they're not ankle biters because that what they have is important. But at the same time, they want to deflect. So when I met with our executives, I said if we create the CSM team, if you want—well, I'll just say this, what I don't want to do is crisis management, case management, project management, escalation management, you know, any of that. And they're like, "Well, what are you going to do?" Again, if that's what you thought CSM was, if you wanted crisis management, escalation management, case management, we're going to talk about your project every week and open up a queue of all your tickets. I go, that's not me. And they're like, "Well, what is that?" And I go, that's critical accounts. That's crisis management. If you want critical accounts, hire somebody else. I'm not your guy. Customer Success is about taking those customers’ business needs and objectives and looking to three, four or five years out strategically, relationally, operationally and saying, "How can we match our products and services to what you want to do? And not how do we do it just for you, but for everybody else?" Right? So the program is about expansion and education and adoption of the features, functions and products and services we have. But at the end of the day, it's about how can I replicate what we're doing with a handful of CSMs programmatically for all customers? So here's a great example. When I first got here, you know, one of our customers said, you know, "I inked a deal with your company, and it's been a month and we don't have a cloud environment provisioned, like what's going on?" And I said, I don't know. Let me go back to the office, find out. And so I started this inquiry, and it was never documented, nobody knew what the process was, it was not in a workflow. Nobody had any idea. And so we take one customer, and we go ahead and say, how can we go ahead and now apply this to all products? We took a provisioning process that was quite honestly three weeks, and shrunk it down to less than a week. by documenting it, by integrating it, by leveraging the resources, the tools, the talent, the technology. And so I didn't have to assign CSMs to all these customers. Right? And that's where I get back to that request of VP saying, "Well, I need CSMs for these six accounts," and I'm like, well, good, I can take those six accounts. But then in a year, I'm going to fix their problems, and I'm going to drop them. And then you're going to give me six more. How about we develop something that will address all 1000 customers in your vertical? How about we programmatically fix, you know, what's happening for the benefit of everybody versus like I say whack-a-mole?
Masha
Right. That's incredible. Thank you for sharing that, Chris. Really appreciate it. Talk to me, I guess, you've started already defining what Customer Success and I guess Customer Experience by extension is not. If you had to kind of narrow in on a definition, you know, our Customer Success, what would you say it is? And you started talking about this about kind of figuring out the customer's business needs on a, you know, quarter, half a year, next year, kind of horizon? Is that what you're thinking? Is that how you would define it?
Chris
Even further. So from the highest level of Customer Experience—and this is I say, not to sound cliche definition, but it's the sum total of every interaction that our employees have with our customer. So, Customer Experience is everything that the company is doing: the marketing, the website, the branding, the awareness, the product, its execution, its deliverable, the services, the support, cross-sell, upsell, resell, all those things in the customer lifecycle. That's the Customer Experience. Customer Success, on the other hand, is the outcome of how the customer engages with us, according to the customer's objectives.
Masha
I love that. Say more.
Chris
So those customers—actually, let me reverse this. Let's start at a foundation, customer service. Most people look at customer service as a department. I'm like, no, customer service is not a department, you can have a customer service department. But shouldn't all of our employees have customer service skills? Like whether they are customer facing or not? Internally, they should have customer service skills. Right? So customer service is not a department, it's a skill, it's an attitude, it's a transaction, it's an engagement, that's something that's taking place with your company. As a result of that engagement, is customer satisfaction. The next level. So CSAT is not just a survey. It can be. But it's a positive or negative or neutral result of that customer service transaction that took place. It's a result, it's an outcome. And then if we take the aggregate of those outcomes, apply it to a project or an objective that a customer has, that's Customer Success.
Masha
I like that.
Chris
So they stack upon each other. And then finally, all the interactions, whether it's with billing, whether it's with the, you know, the front desk admin who took their phone call, the phone system, the website, whatever, all of that is the Customer Experience. But Customer Success is not one title, it's not one team and it's not one individual. It certainly isn't me. And so it's everybody. So I asked everybody here at Epicor, take your title, put a comma after it and write Customer Success. It'll change the way you look at your job. You could be a Developer, Customer Success. Solution Architect, Customer Success. Support Engineer, Customer Success. Everybody has got to get on board with that. It does start with a culture at the top by the way, because you can work with companies with C-level executives that will talk that but won't walk that. I'm here to let you know that Epicor walks that walk at the highest level.
Masha
I love that. So okay, so we hate NPS. CSAT is maybe okay. But like, if I were to press you for the one metric that you would take with you to like a desert island, if you had to measure it on a desert island... I guess both at both levels, right, if I take down your kind of like framework of layering, how would you know that your Customer Success is working? And then how would you know that your Customer Experience is working?
Chris
So this question gets asked a lot, both internally and externally. And in the industry, I have a very simple answer: Are we profitable or not, is the metric. Is this is this company making money? Then I'm doing the right thing. It's not, then I'm not doing the right thing. And then there are problems. Again, bodies are buried, everybody knows where the stench is coming from. Customer Success, I'm not going to clean up your house, but I will shine a light and say, "Hey, there's where it needs to be cleaned." And I'll help you through that journey. I'll help you understand what's going on. And then let the responsible lines of business be accountable to that, not abdicate that responsibility.
Masha
Right. Not shove it to Customer Success.
Chris
Correct. Yeah, not my problem. I mean, I've got this one opportunity from one line of business, it is a non-customer facing role. It's just billing and accounting. And, you know, do we want to just push paper and shove buttons and just, you know, just do the same thing? Or do we want to own and be creative and say, how can we transform billing to give a great Customer Experience? Like, what would that look like? And so, I'm in the very early stages of challenging a group that's like, "I wasn't hired to talk to customers. You know, I never thought about owning a portfolio of accounts." Well, why not? Why does my team need to be involved in that? Why don't you create your own Customer Success team inside of billing?
Masha
I love that. You're basically saying that not just change your title, but change your mindset, like everyone is delivering the Customer Experience. So you'd better be thinking about how are you going to make your Customer Successful no matter where you sit across the org, right?
Chris
Correct. Every line of business should have a Customer Success goal. And by the way, they may only have one that they might do per year. I don't care. Right? But know where the biggest impact, low-hanging fruit kind of things could be. Exactly, we've heard it. And the one thing that that we did, that this company did very well was give our customer survey fatigue, in our history. And I came in and obliterated them all, except for maybe less than a handful, actually. And our customers, they can breathe. We weren't smothering them, and they weren't frustrated that we weren't listening to them, we actually could go ahead and just do the things that they've already told us about.
Masha
Right. Nothing worse than submitting an answer to a survey and nothing changes.
Chris
Absolutely.
Masha
Chris, talk to me about what you consider the right relationship of Customer Success folks in particular to revenue. How do you see it? I know this is a controversial question, but...
Chris
Very provocative question. But I love it. And here's how I wrote this. I gave some thought to this. I'm like, I have six CSMs, alright? And we're a billion-dollar company. Privately owned? Okay? The ratio is six to 1 billion.
Masha
That's an incredible ratio.
Chris
Yeah. Okay. Six to a billion. And so once again, how can a team of six handle 30,000 customers and a billion dollars in revenue? Again, it's by programmatically impacting everybody at the same time, not taking, not your highest grossing customers, not a certain vertical or go-forward product. Otherwise, then attrition, everybody's walking out the back door because you're not paying any attention to them. Right? Let's do programs that are success related for everybody. So that's where my team comes in. It's not only do they have a very small portfolio of accounts, but they're responsible for engaging all the lines of business and saying, "Hey, how do we go ahead and create success for everybody?" Let them come up with some solutions. Some things can be done with technology, some things can be done with process improvement, other things can be done with resource, you know, additions, but let's figure that out. And so what we do is we challenge the business. Do you want to flip burgers every day? Or do you want to do something really cool?
Masha
I love that.
Chris
And I came by the way, I came from an organization with over 1500 CSMs. I trained them all, globally. Okay? But see, you got 1500 resources going "No, no, no, me, my, I, what my customer wants is more important than the 1499 of them next to me." They're just all fighting for the same limited resources. Companies don't need CSMs in mass. What they need is like a technology software company like Epicor, they need more developers, they need more support people. They need more people who can fix the problem. They don't need more people shouting, "Hey, my customer needs their problem fixed faster than the other one." 'm trying to plant the seeds at this very moment about putting Customer Success programs in development.
Masha
Wow.
Chris
CSMs in development, a development CSM. They have a portfolio. Why stick CSM, post-implementation, post go-live, even post-Support, put them further up the customer lifecycle, pre-sale, even in marketing. How did we even sell to these people?
Masha
Right. What did we say to them?
Chris
What grabbed them and gripped them? Let's do more of that. We're not even, we're not scratching the surface on that yet. But at the same time, I'm trying to challenge development say, "Hey, you guys want to pilot this?" Because what's happening is, then there's escalation so far down here, and we're just coming back to you and knocking on your door and having to fix it anyway.
Masha
Okay, let me challenge you then. Because my question is like, what are the top three qualities that the most brilliant Customer Success folks that you've worked with have? And maybe this is where we figure out why it's not in development?
Chris
Yeah. So the first one is, they're courageous. They have no problem saying, "I will—" "Who will talk to that customer about—" "I will talk to them." "I will listen. I will listen." Right? And then second, is you have to be accountable to what you heard. Okay? And then the third piece is, don't be afraid to be honest. They have to be honest with customers. And I always say "Hey, I appreciate your honesty. Would you appreciate mine in turn? Because I'm going to tell you, you know, yeah, you're right. We messed up, but I think you guys did too." Or "Here's where I think things went wrong." And sometimes, hey, there are plenty of customers in my 25-plus year career that don't ever want to see me or hear from me again.
Masha
Okay. [Laughs]
Chris
Because of honesty. I'm serious. So those are the courageous, accountable, honest.
Masha
So you said in the beginning of our conversation that you felt like a lot of folks fall prey to fear. And I hear in all those three things, some semblance of no fear. Like, what is it that you're trying to kind of root out? Like, where does the fear come from?
Chris
They don't know how to articulate what they need to articulate. They want to placate and solve the customer's problem. Or just say, you know, "We'll credit you; we'll give you a refund," like, this is Target or Walmart or something. I didn't come into this role and they gave me a chequebook and said, "Hey, make customers happy." Right? We have business practices that are in place that keep us profitable. And I will always ask customers, I will say, "Are you asking me to do something that you do as a business practice for your customers?" And they're like, "Yeah, okay, yeah, we don't do that either."
Masha
Okay, I like that. Okay, I know we've got like, two minutes left. I don't want to hold you forever.
Chris
I'm good if we want to run over.
Masha
Let's run over a little bit. I do want to let you go on time. But tell me about, we talked a little bit about the challenge that you kind of came into Epicor, kind of the expectations, right? And it sounds like you've been able to reset those and articulate what the right expectations should be. What do you think is the kind of biggest challenge that's facing Customer Success as a function, but I guess also Customer Success as a role right now in this exact moment in time?
Chris
So, I hear a lot of people say, especially executives, we need to over-delight our customers, we need to super-delight them, we need to uber-delight them, we need to just satisfy our customers above and beyond and give them this uber Customer Experience, right? That's what's gonna help make them successful. And then I follow up right behind those same executives and I'll be like, no, don't do that. Like, I'm the VP of CX and I'm like, no! Do not super-delight our customers, do not over-delight them. And everyone's like, "How can you say that with your title" And I go, here's how I can say it, because you can't deliver it every time. So therefore, you give the customer super high highs, and super low lows. And what's never been done is, they've never developed a standard that the customer could expect. Once you deliver the standard that everybody agrees on, then you go from good to great, then you go from better to best. So I think the stumbling piece is they just want—and by the way, I hate buzzwords like "AI" and "machine learning" and all these other things, or some platform solution. And I'm like, how about real intelligence before we get to artificial intelligence? We already have data, like, let's move on that first before I invest in something else. I'm like, we already have the tools, the technology, the talent, respond to the customers' needs. That's it. It's not found in some magic box somewhere. But every customer need also needs to be evaluated for its application and its feasibility. Right? That's where the honesty comes in.
Masha
I love that. How do you see the role evolving over say, the next two to five years?
Chris
I don't. I don't see it evolving. It's rinse and repeat across the industry. I'm having this conversation with you. And I interview recruits for this role. And I'm like, we're not doing crisis management, escalation management, project management. And they're like, "That's what I've been doing for 15 years." I'm like, yeah, you got to think differently about your job. And a lot of people can't get out of that, "Well, I've been getting wins on the board. I've been getting, you know, these things every day leaving the office because I escalated something, or I got something done for them. And I fixed it." And I'm like on my team, that might come once every quarter. But when they come, they're gonna be huge. Because you've done it for 1000s of customers, right? So I don't see it changing. I see a lot of repetition in this. And as I discuss this with industry peers, they're like, "Wow, this is amazing. You're doing this with six people, you're having this type of impact." I'm like, Yeah, this is how it should evolve. Customer Success is not one team, title, or person. It is everybody's job.
Masha
I love that. That's great. People kept throwing, like AI at me and whatever else.
Chris
Yeah, this is a toaster, you just plug in your network, and it just automatically tells you what needs to be done. [Laughs]
Masha
Right. No. Okay, so I know we've thrown around a fair amount of provocative opinions. But I do want to ask you this one. What would you say is the most controversial opinion that you hold about Customer Success? And maybe Customer Experience also, that you wish other folks in industry would just kind of get on board with already?
Chris
My most controversial opinion is why are we focused on Customer Success before we focus on company success? We haven't defined what it meant, what it means to be for our company to be successful. What is sales success? What is implementation or consulting success? What is support success? What is billing success? What are those things that we are trying to now just change the C from customer to company? We haven't even thought about—we're just, hey, let's just do our business the way that we want to do it without thinking about what is it that is going to make us successful to do this? Changing the C from customer to company, not in a selfish way, but in a way that's introspective that says we gotta fix us before we can actually, you know, tell our customers what's gonna make them successful.
Masha
Sounds like you ask the hard questions. You sound like a Customer Experience coach or therapist or something. [Laughs]
Chris
Yeah, I'd say therapy is probably it. You know, I've done my fair share of it personally.
Masha
Introspect!
Chris
Different vocabulary. [Laughs]
Masha
Okay, last question. And I promise I'll let you go. We know that Customer Success and Experience folks have this affinity to either feel like superheroes, as you've mentioned, saving the day for their customers, or to be fair, makes their customers feel like superheroes. So the most obvious question. If you could have a Customer Success or experience related superpower, what would yours be?
Chris
I gave some thought a long, long, hard thought to this question. It would be the Jedi mind trick superpower. "This was not the experience that you had..."
Masha
Love it! Why bother? I fixed it!
Chris
"This was not your experience that you had..." And they're like, "Yeah, you're right." [Laughs] "These aren't the droids that we're looking for..." So yeah, I had to throw a little Star Wars analogy in there. But it really would be it. You know, that would be my superpower.
Chris
And in turn, what would your superpower be?
Masha
I want to predict the future. I want to know the future. And I feel like it's doable by asking questions...
Chris
Yeah. Okay.
Masha
You ask the right questions, and you can know the future.
Chris
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Masha
Chris, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me. I really appreciate it and it was super fun.
