Customer Success is so close to the customer voice. Having all of that valuable insight can be overwhelming, but it is that information that is crucial to the success of any organization.

Masha

So maybe for our context, if you could set us up in terms of what's your role at Guru? What's your past been into Customer Success also?

Hillary

Yeah, totally. I don't know where to start. So my role right now, I'm the Director of Customer Experience, is what we call it. Which encompasses Customer Success and we also have a Professional Services team. I used to also kind of oversee Support, but that over time, it sort of evolved and moved underneath our Marketing arm because a lot of it was becoming more automated, it makes sense. It makes sense for us. But we still collaborate with that team a lot. And so in my current role, Customer Success at Guru, when I first started, we were managing all of our customers. So pull up a spreadsheet of every customer, and they either engage with us or they didn't, and it wasn't because we didn't try, it was very simple. And then as we got bigger, and we have more and more customers, we started to sort of tier who we would reach out to and who we would support. And now the Customer Success team only works with our I would say, top 100, 200 customers. So it's more strategic in nature. So most of the people that are on the team have been in Customer Success for several years, or even decades, and really know what customer success is and how to do their job. And so we're working closely with our customers, oftentimes meeting with them weekly, or bi-weekly, or every other week, and really making sure that we're driving the outcomes that they're trying to achieve with the product. We have executive business reviews, usually every quarter, or, you know, depending on how frequently they want to do it. To talk through all the things that they've done with the product, what they want to do with the product, partnership opportunities. And then we're just constantly trying to make sure that they're getting value and seeing like a return on their investment in buying the software. So we work really closely with, we have an Account Management team here as well. And so the Customer Success Managers, because we're working with such large, mostly enterprise customers, they're paired with an Account Manager who they work with, so they can help with expansion opportunities, or if there's renewal sort of commercial conversations, they would loop that Account Manager for that sort of side of the house. Any questions on that? Oh, the professional services team also is closely tied to the enterprise side, because our product takes—probably like most any product really—takes a fair amount of time to sort of like get on-boarded and get implemented. And there's a pretty heavy lift to get a lot of knowledge that people have internally at their company into our product. I always use the comparison, if I was selling Slack, you can just turn it on and it's helpful, right? Like people are working. Guru is only really as powerful as the content that's inside of it. Because it's a knowledge base. So if there's nothing in there, it's not going to be helpful. So a lot of the success for our customers really is dependent on how much content they're putting in, if it's organized, if it's designed correctly. And so our Professional Services team, which has a couple people on it, and engineers, as well, mainly is responsible for getting that part of the journey really solidified. And then they kind of slowly hand it off to the customer service manager to talk more about kind of goals and continuing on in the journey. Does that make sense?

Masha

Yeah, totally makes sense. And you've seen lots of different configurations here. And maybe this is my first controversial question for you. But how are you folks organized in terms of who reports into, I guess Customer Experience in your case? And where does Customer Experience report into?

Hillary

So right now, it's going to change soon, because we actually just hired a new Chief Revenue Officer.

Masha

Oh cool!

Hillary

Yeah, so excited. And right now I report to our VP of Sales and Success. So we're very closely connected to the sales function, I'd say. As far as most of the collaboration that we're doing is with Sales and with Engineering. So we're kind of in the middle, right? And Product. CS is sort of like—I think if there's a wheel that have all the different jobs, CS is sort of in the middle because you're working with everyone. To be transparent, I think at Guru, CX is sort of within our own little island, in a sense. We work with so many different teams that even though I've reported to the VP of Sales and Success for a couple years, I work with our CEO a ton, I work with our Partnerships VP, like I work with a lot of people outside of these teams, just because there's so much overlap in customer things that are happening. And so I've kind of felt like I've had, like 10 managers? [Laughs]

Masha

I mean, you folks are growing also insanely. So it makes sense that there's a lot of change there, too.

Hillary

Yeah, it's been fun. When I first started here, CX reported to—I reported to the CEO. And then for a brief time, we had a Chief Customer Officer who sort of oversaw CS and Marketing. So it's been different every year, really.

Masha

That's super interesting. And I guess, especially since you've had all this experience in kind of different configurations, if I were to ask you, what would you say is kind of the best way to organizationally set up Customer Success for success? And what's the worst?

Hillary

Yeah, I mean, I definitely think you have to have support from your CEO and from your leadership team, for anything customer centric. Our leadership team is very involved in customer stuff, in the weeds even which is great to get them more perspective. I think I've just been lucky that Guru has always sort of had that mentality. So I've never felt like I've really had to advocate for it with any opposition. So I think the best structure really would probably be having a VP of CS or someone that's a little higher who's those strategy discussions. I feel like my voice is representative because I talk to so many people. And our VP of Sales and Success is a great at his job, too. So that's never been an issue. But I do think being as closely aligned to kind of executive strategy is really important. I think it's also really great for CS to own some sort of number that's important to the business. We've never really owned a number since I've been here. I think we're transitioning soon to start to own Renewal. So the account management team and sales has sort of owned that since we've been here because we didn't have a huge book so that was like a big number to own. Now that we're getting bigger, Expansion has become such a big number that they can own that and we can own Renewal and it feels a little less bearing on them. So I do think that's going to help us just have more outcome goals driven—we're very much like against churn, like anyone. You don't want our customers to leave, but it feels different when it's reflected in your compensation and even if it's a smaller percentage. So we'll see how that affects the team and sort of dynamic. But I think that definitely helps CS have a little bit more of a voice at the table when you're directly responsible for a number that the business cares about and that the board will care about, that kind of thing.

Masha

Totally. If I were to actually step back, I kind of jumped right in. Just step back a little bit. What does Customer Success—and maybe you could contrast it with Customer Experience—mean to you? And how do you know that it's working?

Hillary

So I didn't tell you my background. So my background is very—I don't know if it's different. Everyone has different backgrounds. I actually came from nonprofits. So I've sort of been all over the place. But sort of after postgraduate or post-college, I did a ton of work with nonprofits. And I was doing a lot of data research, I thought I wanted to do a Master's in Public Health, I was really into health care. And one of the things that I ended up always end up doing at different nonprofits and whether they asked me to or just sort of fell in my lap was solve a technology problem or issue. So I would roll out different products, didn't even know that was a thing that people did. And so I ended up sort of falling into software and SaaS specifically kind of threw these jobs. And then one of the problems right before I joined Guru, that I was really struggling with, was knowledge management. And I didn't know what it was called, it just, we had a Wiki, we had all these different things, it was a nonprofit that was global. So we had different languages. There's all these problems. I rolled out Slack there and Salesforce, and all these different tools to try to help and they did help. But there still was not just one place where you could go to find information. And so I really felt the pain of the product that Guru solves, or the problem that Guru solves, before I joined, which I think has made my job here even more fun, because I actually care about what we're doing. I think Customer Success is when—try and make this an eloquent statement. I think it's when the customer's vision for what they want to do internally, whether it's champion kind of hits all the points that that they envision, but also goes into a direction that they may have not envisioned for the better, right? The product can also help them see things more clearly, or maybe like differently in a way that helps them shape kind of the outcome. What's been really cool to see a Guru is that a lot of our champions who've used Guru also often get promoted or kind of establish a new career around knowledge management they never would have thought existed before they use the product. And so that's kind of cool to see that you're almost like creating this space for yourself, because you've used this product and understand it and it's more than just software, it's kind of like a movement, a culture change. People have to know and people have to be bought into “knowledge is important here”, for Guru to really take off. I think if your company is just sort of not really caring about where knowledge lives, and the feasibility of finding it, and how quickly people can access it. And that it's up to date. It's gonna be really hard to have success with it. So there's a lot of Enablement, people and Support team and Sales teams, Internal Communications and Human Resources, who really can, once they get it, and they understand it, and they see the impact really quickly, that create this whole new area of information and excitement internally at the company that like everyone can contribute. So I would say that the ultimate success is that everyone is using the product, and they're using it and you honestly don't even really need the Customer Success Manager because it's just sort of running on its own and improving over time. Customer Experience to me is more of the whole encompassed journey. So it's like from your interaction with the website to how you're handled by, maybe if you engage with the support team or chat into the Customer Success team, all the way through kind of your renewal. The whole thing would be a customer experience. Our department has always been called that because we sort of evolved over time. But I think, really currently I'm more focused on this sort of Success arm, sort of that higher end part of the journey. But we just left it. [Laughs]

Masha

Makes sense. Cool. Well, thank you for sharing that. That really clarifies it for me. And I guess, if you look back a couple years, because I know of course, everything's changing all the time. But how have you seen the role of Customer Success evolve in the past, let's say, two years?

Hillary

So specifically in a SaaS company, maybe a little different, but I think when I first started at Guru, which was four years ago, but I think Customer Success was more about just getting them to understand the product and it was all about getting them to use the product, understand all the bells and whistles and, and really get to the—understanding it—I'm trying to use an example of something that you know. Like if you just got an iPhone, understanding how to ask apps work, how to take a photo, like the functionality, right? I think what's evolved, maybe this is just because we're bigger and more grown up a little bit. But now it's not just about the features and sort of what it can do for you. But it's more about like, what are they trying to do? And how can I recommend and tailor this and even improve certain features based on the feedback and things that I've seen in order to really help them create outcomes. So not like if someone buys an iPhone, and they really are into photos, what other things could I show them on their phone that are really going to help them take really great pictures? And then maybe they'll get like a prize because their photo won a contest. You know, that sort of thing you have to think about, it's like what are their goals? How can I help them reach those goals? And then what metrics can they track to sort of prove that this is happening? So we do a ton of kind of brainstorming with our champions around like, “Okay, well, if you're really trying to improve your internal experience for your employees, how can we track that? Do you want to send a survey? Do you want to measure kind of how long it takes someone to onboard, and if it's faster after Guru?” There's a lot of things you can do to sort of prove the fact that it's working. And so, the shift, at least for our team internally, has been more around kind of outcome based success, trying to figure out how is this actually benefiting them? And if it is, can we measure it? Can they go and show their leadership team about how great it is? And use numbers and maybe survey data to prove it? Because that just helps you grow and kind of expanded organically because people are excited. Does that answer the question?

Masha

Yeah, it even sounds like—and I just want to play back to make sure I understood—but it almost sounds like you're not just driving towards outcomes with Guru. It's almost like you're setting up the customers to figure out what the outcomes are.

Hillary

Sometimes, yes, 100%. Sometimes people come with a, “This is what I have to prove, or I'm gonna get fired.” But most of the time, it's, “I really like this product, there's a problem I'm trying to solve.” And then we have to be like, okay, how are you going to do—you sort of have to guide them down this path. I think if anything, the thing that I've really learned— and this probably is, I don't know, probably true for anything—but people really want you to tell them exactly how to do things. [Laughs] They want it to be as easy as it as possible, right? There's always innovation and things people can do that are creative. We've had some really cool things come out of our customers creative brains. But I do think most of the time, and we'll share those learnings with other teams too. But the easier that you can make, here's where you are, here's where you're going to get and here's the seven steps you have to do to get there. People are super excited. Versus being like, well, there's A or B or C or D. And you can pick one of those or you can make your own version, and then people get overwhelmed. And then they're like, I don't have time for this.

Masha

I wonder if it's also kind of the value proposition around Guru being kind of the knowledge management piece. It's like, our point is not to overwhelm you.

Hillary

100%. You're spot on. We want to make it simple, right? It's kind of part of the product is that it's already overwhelming. So we're trying to make everything else simple. Right?

Anwar

I have a question, is this experience for just your top 200 customers? Or do you provide the same experience for everyone?

Hillary

Great question. So we have a little different experience for other customers. We have a—we call them a Product Specialist team, which are, I would say, kind of a mixture of Account Development, Support and Customer Success. And those folks manage a lot of our inbound chat. So they're talking to customers, more so through chat online. And those are more for our one employee to, you know, I don't know, 100. And so those, those customers are being communicated with a human but it's through chat. And then they also offer up a call. So if they're asking you a bunch of questions, they're 100% down to hop on the phone and have a, we call them consultation calls, they have a quick consultation call to walk them through whatever their problem is. Because so many problems that people have with our product are because they're trying to solve a very specific problem. So it's hard to kind of tell them an exact answer unless you really understand what they're trying to do, what the company's like. Getting on the phone is always an easy solution. So we have a Product Specialist team that does a ton of consultation calls and chat a lot with our customers. And then we have for teams that are maybe a little bit bigger, maybe they have a couple consultation calls and then they purchase the product but they want a little bit more. Our Services team, the team that I also look over, has sort of packages, you call them that. They'll work with you for like three months or six months to really make sure you get on-boarded correctly, because that's the most important part. And so you would be working with one of the Professional Services people to on-board all your users or implement all your, you know, move all your content over, migrate it over from whatever solution you're using. And that can take time. And so having that team for support is really helpful. So those are sort of the two other groups. We also have a Technical Support team that just is answering any questions you'll have like bugs, confusion. They answer sort of any technical problems, and they're always on chat all the time. So an Enterprise customer and a one employee customer could speak to the same rep on Technical Support or on Product Specialist, but I think the ones that are going to have more Customer Success, one to one relationship, and that outcome conversations are more of the ones that are assigned someone, which are going to be in like the top 200, 100 customers. Does that makes sense?

Anwar

That makes sense.

Hillary

Yeah. And every year, we kind of tier it, we kind of change. As we get bigger, we sort of say, okay, which of these customers make—how many people do we need to have on the team in order to continue to serve this percentage of customers? Or is there a way we can maybe automate this or build out like—a couple years ago, we built out an academy, so lan online sort of learning system. And that's really helpful. So a lot of our people were writing in for trainings. And so we automated a lot of that where people can go online and take multiple courses on like setting up their content, permissioning their team and all that stuff. It's all online now. So there's also that component that also is connected to our Marketing and Support team. So they do a ton of Guru Academy that builds out a ton of information for kind of those customers that are always asking questions and maybe more mid market and small, medium businesses.

Masha

Yeah, that makes sense.

Hillary

Yeah. It changes every year. [Laughs]

Masha

It makes sense. It sounds like you guys are really agile in the way that you organize.

Hillary

Yeah, you have to be, I think.

Masha

If I handed you a crystal ball, how do you see the role of Customer Success evolving in the next five years? What are some of the early, maybe, trends that you're seeing? That you could see kind of moving forward?

Hillary

I don't know if Guru is ahead of the game or behind? So I don't know. I mean, one of the things I've heard before is that when some companies hear that word Customer Success, they think it's the same as Customer Support, and it's definitely not right, it's very different. It's more Sales, Expansion, Retention, Outcome. It's a lot more of a heavy weighted role, I guess you could say. Customer Support is really, really important. And we would not be anywhere without our technical support team. But I think Customer Success is very different. So I don't know if just over time—I mean, I know when I talk to my friends who work in other software companies that they know exactly what Customer Success is, but I talked to my family, they still don't understand the difference. So that may evolve as more and more people try out this. I think we're seeing more people coming from moving into this sort of space from like Sales backgrounds to Account Management. We've hired some people who are teachers. The cool thing about it is you get to engage with clients, you also get to sort of control your own schedule, in a sense, because you're working with different customers. You're not held to like this crazy number every month, because you're not trying to sell. And that's really, really hard. I could never do that, like cold calling people. And so I think people who maybe didn't do the greatest in Sales, but are really, really good with people might move into Customer Success, if they figure out that's where it fits them, or most people from Support teams or sort of Account teams or even Product teams, maybe you're more inclined to work with customers, move to this team. I think Guru specifically, I think Customer Success will continue to be really engaged with Product. We try to really make sure that there's a way that we can—I think one of the hardest things is making sure that all the conversations that you hear across all of your customer service managers are like—there's no way to do this perfectly right now—but codified and themed. And then you can say, “Here are the seven things people ask for the most this month.” It's really hard to do that. We're logging feedback, we engage, we bring Product people onto the team. We are on to the customer calls, we do all the things we can. We have a voice of the customer program where customers will come and sort of share their story and what they want to change in the product and what they love about it. And it's all really helpful but I think that is a very hard thing to do, is to take this giant amount of information that we're hearing and kind of boil it down to what are some actionable things? Or really great insights that we can share with the Product team and Engineering team and even the Sales team, Marketing really, with everyone, to kind of help them improve what they're doing. Hopefully that will continue to improve. And there's a ton of products out there that do different parts of it. But I still think it's hard. It's really hard.

Masha

The reason Anwar and I are reacting so violently, is that this is literally the product that we're building. [Laughs]

Hillary

Oh good!

Masha

It's really great to hear.

Hillary

It's hard. I mean, I've seen people try to do—like, we've done a lot of feedback logging systems, we've had a couple different versions at Guru. We have a community now that it's been really helpful where customers can kind of drive, if they upvote things that can help. Yeah. But I definitely think it's still really hard. I mean, we have so many calls. If you're talking to a customer twice a week, there's gonna be stuff that you have in your head, like, oh, that's a really cool way they're using it. But if you forget to write it down, or share it with someone, like it's just lost. So it's hard.

Masha

Totally. Yeah, would love to follow up with you some other time. But okay, wait, we've got like, two minutes left. I've got a couple more questions for you.

Hillary

I've got a little bit more time if we have to go over. No rush.

Masha

Okay, yeah, we do want to let you go on time and be respectful. Okay, last question before a couple rapid fire ones is, what would you say is the most controversial opinion that you hold about Customer Success that you wish other folks would just like, hurry up and catch up to already?

Hillary

Okay, I would say—

Masha

Remember, I'll send you the transcript before.

Hillary

One of the things I've noticed, and this is nothing against any Product Marketing or Marketing teams, they're amazing what they do. But we are so close to the customer's voice. It's, again, so hard to distill all those insights down, that we often will experiment on our own, and come up with new ways to explain things or tailor it for a certain customer. Because we have the flexibility because we're a start up. And we'll do this on calls or in decks. And then I feel like, oftentimes what happens is we talk about something and we're like, “Hey, we had this idea.” And we share it with them, and it's just too much too early, or it doesn't fit where they're involved at. And then typically, maybe a quarter later, or two quarters later, they're working on that exact thing. So it's great because it eventually gets there. But I just always find myself, just give them time and it'll come around, it just takes a little longer. Maybe because we're more focused on the higher level customers. And they also are trying to market for a much wider base. But I feel like we get to experiment with things, which is an amazing thing that Customer Success, but I would say like if there could be a better, quicker reaction to like Customer Success insights from the Marketing department, there could be a lot there. Because I think they're the ones that are explaining the product to other people who don't understand.

Masha

If I dig a little bit on that, what's usually the thing that causes the lag in your experience?

Hillary

I don't know. In my experience of other teams, Marketing usually has a very structured list of things they're working on. Right? Customer Success is very proactive and reactive. I always joke, like, we have tasks, but it's not like in a task management tool, which we could use, but it's evolving every day, because you're sort of having to react and change and sort of think on your feet. Whereas Marketing is like, these are the seven things we're going to produce, here's our timeline, here's all the people that need to execute. So when you throw four new ideas in there, it can totally change your timeline. And I think that's part of the problem, they have to remove things that they were going to work on in order to work this out and work on other things. So usually it takes a couple tries, and they're like, “Oh okay, we get what you're saying. We will focus on this and maybe it can connect to something else we're working on.” So it usually all ends up, but it just takes a little longer than normal.

Masha

Yeah, I totally get that. Cool. Anwar, do you have any other questions for Hillary? I wanted to ask one rapid fire one.

Hillary

Yeah, that’s fine.

Anwar

I'm wondering if this is actually the question that you're gonna ask. If you could have a superpower in your job to basically make you successful in Customer Experience, what would it be?

Hillary

I mean, so many things. I think the first thing I can think of just top of mind would be a really easy way to connect with the C-level or executive decision maker at a company. I think sometimes it's really easy to do it, and sometimes it's really hard and we have to kind of play politics and figure out who we should be talking to, even though our champions are amazing. Sometimes they don't even have the power. But we often bend over backwards to try to get in front of them. And when we do, it's awesome. But sometimes that can be like a really hard thing to do. And if you don't do it soon enough, then they can make a totally different decision. And then you're out of luck. So, some sort of way to quickly connect with the decision maker, buyer, C-level person.

Masha

I'm trying to think, is that like teleportation through the organizational structure or something. [Laughs]

Hillary

Yeah, the direct line and their attention.

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