In this episode of The Support Automation Show, a podcast by Capacity, Justin Schmidt is joined by Kristi Faltorusso, VP of Customer Success at ClientSuccess and Founder of Keeping CS Simple. They discuss the automation concept in a high engagement model and use technology to compliment your efforts.
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Justin Schmidt: Welcome to the Support Automation Show, a podcast by Capacity. Join us for conversations with leaders in customer or employee support who are using technology to answer questions, automate processes, and build innovative solutions to any business challenge. I’m your host, Justin Schmidt. Good morning, Kristi.
Kristi Faltorusso: Good morning, Justin. How are you?
Justin: I am just splendid. Where does this podcast find you?
Kristi: I am in Long Island, New York. About 45 minutes outside of Manhattan.
Justin: Love it. We have three or four salespeople on our team, are out there in New York and throughout my career, I go out there probably once or twice a year for various reasons. I haven’t been since the world shut down a little bit but I would love to get back to New York. There’s nothing like it. How’s it? Is the city waking up out there?
Kristi: Yes. It’s still interesting. We’ve got different regulations in place and I think they’re becoming a little bit more strict. I think we locked down some days for a while and haven’t gotten that back. A few different mandates in place but it is nice to just see people back in the city and especially with the holidays. There’s nothing more magical than New York during the holiday season. It’s been great to just see tourism backup and people around the tree and just celebrating and despite everything else, which I think the world is navigating, different extents everywhere but it’s nice to just see New York come to life again.
Justin: Love it. Why don’t we start off with a little background, catch us up to your path to where you are now with client success? Maybe a little background on yourself and what is client success and what’s it doing?
Kristi: I’m going to give you the very condensed version because my journey seems long and daunting. I spent the first decade of my professional career in marketing, specifically digital marketing. As a subject matter expert, I transitioned into working for a SaaS company called BrightEdge where I was focused on SEO and managing programs with our customers through our platform. I actually spent the most recent decade as a customer success leader at various hyper growth SaaS organizations where my remit is always responsible for building, scaling, and transforming customer success, which in many cases often includes support, consulting, onboarding, implementation.
Various roles and functions across the different businesses that I’ve been a part of. Then most recently, I am the vice president of customer success at ClientSuccess. ClientSuccess is the customer success management software. We help companies basically operationalize their customer success process through our solution. Really standardizing their practice and making sure that their customers are getting what they need through the partnership.
Justin: Very, very cool. It’s always interesting to me when I talk to people on this show to see the roads to where they’re at and it’s very seldom a straight line where I got my degree in marketing and I started off as a junior associate at a marketing firm. There’s always some–
Kristi: Be fun either, right?
Justin: Well, we are the product of our experience and the life that we lead. It’s a cumulative impact on who we are at any given moment. It’s particularly interesting these days and I think we’re going to touch on this a little bit. I think in the conversations, it’s a global theme that typically comes up. Life is so multifaceted and the amount of just things you have to be aware of to navigate the world I think necessitates a broad base of experience and this hyper-connected lots of distraction, lots of information overflow is also something that professionally, we have to manage whether it’s with marketing, managing customers, sales, hell, even engineering, and product design to build something that fits in this world.
Diversity of background helps manage the diversity of stimulus that we have as people. I think that as the world continues to change, we’re going to continue to leverage the diversity of backgrounds to manage those expectations and make the world manageable. The best place to start this conversation I think is always with a simple question. That is when you hear the words support automation, what does that mean to you?
Kristi: Oh, gosh. Well, first of all, I feel like there’s more feelings than there are words-
Justin: Very interesting.
Kristi: -when I hear support automation. Just because I feel like it could be really good and it could go really wrong. I think about it when I hear support automation, I think about really streamlining and simplifying the processes to support our customers in a way that would otherwise require human intervention. That feels like a very clinical definition. When I think about it from a feeling standpoint, I think it excites me and also terrifies me. I think that’s why I am evoked with emotion more than words.
Justin: Why do you think people find the concept of automation scary? As a follow-up to that, how can leaders manage the implementation of some automation into the work function to make it less scary for people?
Kristi: No, I think the fear comes from just folks thinking the worst possible outcomes. What could possibly go wrong? Then I think people get stuck there. I think that’s the challenge, is when you’re stuck behind these fears of the what-ifs. I think that’s something that folks are trying to navigate. When I talk about it, it excites me. I think about the human capital that’s required to manage the customer base that we have from a technical standpoint right now.
If I can give those folks hours back, days back, and enable them to do things that are more proactive and help really lean in to support our customers in a more strategic way, why wouldn’t I do that? Those are the things that I think support what’s possible, breaking through the fear of, “Well, what if this happens?”
Justin: Very interesting. When we were going back and forth before we booked the show, one of the things that you suggested we talk about was automation and a high engagement model and using technology to complement your efforts. This is a particularly interesting concept to me because I think it touches on some of the high-touch world we live in that I was referring to earlier but it also gets into some of the feeling and softer stuff that you were talking about with why people find automation scary sometimes. I’d love it if you could just double click on what you meant by automation, a high engagement model, and how tech can complement those efforts.
Kristi: Absolutely. We’ll use both customer success and customer support to talk through this narrative but the reality of it is that there are technologies and there are companies that require us to have a high level of engagement with our customers in order to help them achieve the outcomes that they intend to through the partnership. They buy your technology to do X, they might need more guiding and support in order to achieve that. That would require a higher level of engagement.
It could be because they are a big company, it could be because your product is very complex and configurable but whatever the reasons are, you’re going to have a staffing model that might suggest that maybe you’re acting as an extension of your customers’ team. You might be meeting with them on a weekly or daily basis even some basis where there is that high level of conversation and engagement and participation. Now, where I think technology really lends itself well is there are a lot of things that happen in that level of, in that engagement model that don’t need it to be driven by a human.
When I think about creative ways to introduce automation, it’s to remove the administrative burden and to give my team and my resources more time to do the work that’s going to drive value for my customers and reduce that burden that can be automated. If it’s a follow-up email, if it’s some automated response, if it’s a campaign that’s going out sharing information, those were all the examples of things that would complement the efforts in a high engagement model, don’t require human intervention, they don’t require a human to do it. If you can rely on that, again, it’s how you’re distributing your time and resources. I think automation empowers us to do better work faster.
Justin: It does. What’s always interesting to me is that when you implement those time or convenience saving measures is one way to look at it, you’re going to give people two things that are extremely valuable in the client-customer relationship. One of the most obvious is you’re going to give them a fast, convenient experience. That’s ultimately what we’re here for is that we want to make sure that the people who are paying us money to leverage our product are having the best possible results with it.
On the other hand too, if you can free up more time for your customers and they’re spending less time dealing with the same thing over and over and over again, you’re going to give them the bandwidth to then create something new and push the ball forward in whatever it is they’re doing. That’s incredibly powerful for me. It’s something that we’re kind of professionally, both sort of trying to do this, both Capacity and ClientSuccess here where we want to make our customers’ CSAT scores higher, right? Obviously, I’d love every CSAT score of our customers to be high, but we’re really doing our job when our customers are happy, right?
As you get these hops away from where you can control and drive value and your increasing value further down the line, you’re really making something special and automation and technology really enables that because, without it, you really have to leverage these sort of one to one interactions. It’s just really hard to do that at scale. When you look at the adoption of technology and automation and AI and all this other stuff that’s coming into the customer success, customer support world, what do you think has been the most impactful in the last five, six, seven years you’ve seen it, and then what is something that you think is, was a great promise, but never ultimately delivered?
Kristi: I think that the thing that I’ve seen that has been very impressive, and I think that has come to fruition more is I think more of the insights that are captured through AI and ML, right? I think being able to understand the sentiment, right? I’ve seen a lot of technologies be able to understand, read and interpret communication through sentiment, and how people are communicating and using that language to really detect where there’s risk and opportunity and points of intervention. I’ve seen that actually really transcend well into support and customer success in being able to have us proactively intervene in ways that we hadn’t before, right?
You don’t have the ability to understand and interpret every single message that comes through and not everyone reads and interprets things the same way, but when you do take advantage of technology in that way, we’ve seen really amazing efforts from different solutions that we’ve used, where we’ve seen and understood how our customers are feeling and how they’re engaging, and what are the signs based off of what they’re saying and the frequency and the cadence and all of these things and using that data to really inform how we engage, what we do and how we drive our business forward.
That’s just stuff we wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. I think there’s, even more time and more bodies probably wouldn’t have resulted in the same impact that has had for the teams and organizations where I’ve operated. Things that I feel like haven’t yet come to fruition, I don’t think there is a fully automated experience, right? I don’t think that there is any experience that I’ve seen to date that doesn’t require some level of human intervention, involvement and engagement, and so I don’t, at least not well. Let’s put it that way.
I think the experiences that I’ve had where I’ve been forced through engagements that have solely been automated, have been frustrated and have caused more friction and done a disservice to me as a consumer or end-user. Then if there was some human involvement at different points, and so being able to understand and interpret when interventions required and then enabling humans to do the job that they should be doing. I don’t feel like technology can solely replace 100%. The thing is that humans can still deliver today.
Justin: It can’t, and the best it can do, and this is not a bad thing. This is a good thing. The best it can do is augment and enable the people that are doing the work to be in the position to be able to do their best work. You get a lot of advantages in having a frontline customer team, whether it’s a success or support like fully present and not worn out and tired. I always use this example but imagine the frontline customer support call center person for example a major retailer on Black Friday or something, having to answer the same question over and over and over again.
By the hundredth time you get that question, you might not be as chipper, so to speak, to make that engagement, but you can leverage technology to help. Technology and just a good help center, support center section on the website mitigate a lot of that and deflect a lot of that so that only the media issues require human attention. A client success, do you have customer support and customer success in the same team?
Kristi: We do. I actually oversee our customer success, our technical support, our consulting arms. All three of those functions roll up under me.
Justin: How do you manage the workflow communication between those three? Because I would assume they all have a slightly different, but the same north star, right?
Kristi: Yes. The big thing for us is just, yes, obviously for keeping that communication flowing, there’s a couple of ways that we do that. One is the democratization of data, so making sure that all information lives in centralized places where people have access to it, where they can understand it, and they can use it.
That’s really important for us and whether that is all in one system, which I will tell you, we don’t have everything that lives in one solution. Not even our platform can provide us with the level of consolidation that would be required because all these tools do provide value and insight in different ways, so just making sure though starting with the fact that all of our members in our organization have access to all the tools and technology and access the data and insights that are required to properly support, engage and empower our customers. That would be the first thing.
I think the second thing is we do treat the teams as we are part of one organization. I have been part of different groups where support wasn’t under my [unintelligible 00:16:24] and I would oversee customer success, but not support. I almost rolled up under a different leader and that disconnect was almost, it was a bit of a disservice to our customers because there were things that were happening over in our team that weren’t being shared outwardly and communicated early and often with those other functions.
With our organization, I think the second thing that works really well for us is having one team acting together in harmony to your point, we do have one north star, how we get there by each function. We all have different ways to get there, but at the end of the day, operating together and having that same message being communicated always together has really served us well. I think we’re all hearing the same things. We understand how we contribute to solving the problems that we have to solve, whether they be internal, organizational, customer-related, whatever the case may be.
Justin: Why are you describing that one thing that popped in my head, I’m curious if this is true there. That probably gives that unified team and sort of everybody rolling up to the same leader probably gives you a really great view and ability to then do the customer storytelling internally to product marketing sales, et cetera. That to just galvanize the rest of the company around the ClientSuccess’ customer journey and the customers in that journey.
I would love it if maybe you could help me understand how you approach taking the data and the stories. I don’t mean stories like in a case study, I mean the broader story of a customer’s use and enjoyment and in areas of improvement with a product, how do you tell that story internally to the rest of the team over there at ClientSuccess? Do you guys do like a standing meeting where you go over certain data points? Is it more how you work with products is a little different than how you work with marketing? This is a very interesting topic to me because it’s different in every single organization. I would love to hear how you all are tackling this.
Kristi: Yes. I think that there are a few different opportunities that we have to tell different stories. There’s the one that we had shared at the leadership level. For example, our leadership standup meeting that we have every week required us to talk about the different metrics that are powering the outcomes that my team is responsible for. I think that a big part of it is having one metric, almost like a kind of one line of metrics that each of these metrics support. If I’m responsible for customer experience, for example, and we measure that in different ways, how is customer success supporting the outcome of that measurement, that metric, how is support playing a part in supporting that?
We’re looking at all these different benchmarks of measurement in support of the same outcome. In the leadership meetings, that’s how we’re talking about it, right? What is this team doing to support that? What is the other team doing to support it? How are we getting there? That’s the first story that we’re telling is just from just straight data because at the end of the day, and I can’t disagree, we do feel like data doesn’t lie, and so that there is some truth to be said about what we’re seeing in the metrics. We use that to really help us drive what’s happening there at that leadership level.
Now, the other conversations that we’re having, we do our organizational town hall meeting every week, and so this is where we get away from really the metric-driven data and we talk about it through the lens of customer experiences and storytelling. We might select a couple different customers, where we’ve done really great things and we talk about how success support and consulting have been a part and played a role in the achievement of those things. In other cases, we talk about major failures and where our team failed to do those things.
It transcends through the metrics but really into the experiences and that’s what we try to focus on is really, what is that story telling us about the work that we’re doing to support our customers more specifically. Those are two ways that we feel like we do that really well. Then listen, when we’re dealing with cross-functional teams, there’s insights and learnings. When we’re working with product teams, for example, the conversations that we’re having are going to lean in more heavily on the product and what they need and what they care about. Again, when we think about those stories, the narrative changes because of our audience and what they care about. That’s how we adjust accordingly.
I would say the big thematic thing that I like to emphasize is that everyone in our company always knows what’s going on. There are no blind spots for us because we do make sure that we are socializing and sharing information broadly and often. It’s just making sure that we’re sharing it the right way. I think that’s the big difference between all those. Leadership is often very data-heavy, very metric-focused. With the organization, it is through the lens of storytelling that they can relate to where you don’t have to be in our function to get what’s actually happening here.
Then when we think about partnering with cross-functional teams, whether that be sales, whether it be marketing, whether that be product or engineering, it’s specific to what those teams are, how are we going to work together? How do those functions partner, and what’s going to be important for them to listen to and learn from?
Justin: I absolutely love, capital L Love the concept of at the town hall with everybody there, you’re always focusing on the storytelling, because the customer-facing teams in an organization, I don’t think they give themselves enough credit for how powerful their evangelism is to the rest of the org. Engineers like to build things, marketers like to talk about things. Salespeople like to drive up their travel and entertainment expenses but kidding aside, the engineers like to build things and then they want to know what they built is driving value and being used by people.
If you can keep them on board with the storytelling, it’s a hard thing to do. I’ve seen it. It’s just a hard thing to do at organizations. The fact that you guys are leaning into this and taking the, let’s just run through our, whatever, six or seven KPIs that we’d normally run through in a just a pure data reporting type session, instead, talking about, hey, so and so wanted to do X and we enabled them to do that and now they’re off to y and they’re asking us how we can help with that. That is incredibly powerful.
If there’s one thing that I think people could take away from the last 20 or so minutes we’ve been talking, I think instituting something like that would be it because it’s a great way to create advocacy for the CS and CX teams within companies. That’s beautiful. That’s awesome.
Kristi: You know what, it’s easy to do. I’m shocked that a lot more teams don’t embrace that. Honestly, we pick one customer every week and it’s not a happy customer. Sometimes it’s a customer that’s very unhappy or we just pick a customer and we have the same framework that we use to tell that story. Who are they? What are they doing? What are they trying to do with us in partnership? What are they doing that’s working well? What are they doing that’s not working well? We do that and we give very concrete examples in that customer’s business or operating model because it’s going to look different for everybody.
That’s where I think everyone across the business has those aha moments where, you get it, when you can tell through a story. If I just said, “Hey, they’re not adopting the XYZ feature,” because of whatever reason, it doesn’t substantiate the story. It doesn’t evoke the understanding that the storytelling does.
Justin: I ask a similar question on a lot of these shows and I’ve not heard that response yet so kudos to you guys for putting that effort into it. It’s very cool. When we think about the future of automation and technology in CS and the support and service side and success side of everything. What excites you the most? What coming down the pipe in this world do you think has the most potential for changing things?
Kristi: I feel you get excited about the potential for a lot of things. I think the bigger thing for me is, if I think that time is the greatest currency, how do I get my teams back the time to do really thoughtful value-based work for our customers. I want to eliminate all of the redundant tasks, all the busy work that both functions are responsible for because that administrative overhead almost makes it I want to say 60% on the customer success side of the work that we’re doing. Imagine 60% of the work that you’re doing with customers being administratively driven.
I want to be able to reduce and cut that in half. I want to be able to do more strategic and thoughtful work. I am seeing a solutions that are providing more of that ability and whether that be through interesting technology that I’ve seen with certain companies being able to take meeting notes, for example, you have these conversations with your customers, being able to capture all the notes from your call, identify what those next steps and actions are, to then be able to record that. Push it out how it streamlines your task management solutions. You’ve just given me an hour back from the tasks that would never be required for a meeting.
I’ve got to do the follow-up. I’ve got to make sure that the next steps happen and all of that. The memorialization of these conversations and then the follow-up and the next steps and the tasks that come out of it, we have automating that. You’ve given me back something real. I see more and more technology pushing the envelope and really I think trying to understand where’s all the time being spent and making that their barometer of success is saying, if we can give people time back, so that they can go either reduce resources, from a business standpoint, you can spend less on headcount.
That money could go into resources to go do other things that are going to be equally important to your business. To then give people that you do have in place the ability to go do better, smarter, work faster, I think it’s super impressive. On the support side, you use the example earlier of that retailer this Black Friday, and they’ve got the same question being asked over and over again. Oh, my gosh, just how daunting it must be to answer the same question 100 times plus being able to just identify all those things.
It excites me there in the support world is really just machine learning around what are people asking what they need, and then being able to provide that without human intervention. More of that and I think in a smarter way, and I think even the tools that I’ve experienced as an end-user and a consumer, I’m seeing things be smarter and better, and engage differently. I’m hopeful that we’ll see more of that in different applications and in different ways to help us be better.
Justin: I agree with you on some of the transcription-type technologies, shout out to Otter.ai, they’re one of the big companies that does that. From my point of view, it’s interesting too because we’re a Gong customer here in Capacity, we use Gong to record all of our sales calls and demos and stuff. Oh my goodness, it is just magical to go in there and see the summary of objections and what competitors are mentioned most often and in what context and be able to do all that in this browsable. There’s a lot of power in record keeping and using technology to manage that. It definitely makes a huge difference.
I’m going to switch gears on you just a little bit. When you think about building a team for success, if you were to give a piece of advice to someone who’s just getting into managing a customer success team, they’re taking their first say director level or senior manager level job where they’re really working on some process design and organizational design. What would be one or two pieces of advice you would give that person stepping into that role?
Kristi: I think the first piece of advice that I’d give is to be very methodical about mapping out the points of engagement that impact your customers. I feel like there is when people think about mapping out the engagement model or the experience map or whatever the case may be for their customers, it happens to be internal out and not external in. It’s not with the customer in mind, it’s always often with the company in mind and what we are trying to achieve and our objectives. The first thing I would think about is mapping it out reverse. What is the experience that you want your customer to have?
This is what’s going to help you to understand, what are those different touches or those points in time that require human engagement or things where you can start to think about automation and introducing technology to really help drive that forward. I’ve always tried to do that. What is the desired experience for our customers? Then mapping out that entire journey, that works to support success, it works to support consulting and implementation, onboarding, and all the different various functions that reside in a customer experience organization. That, to me, has always been step one, it’s just mapping it out and putting that pen to paper to see what that looks like before I start to try to solve these things.
Justin: I love that the– How’d you put it? When people usually do this, they do it from inside out rather than outside in?
Kristi: Yes.
Justin: To build that map from the customer’s point of view, so do it outside, and it’s wonderful. This has been a fantastic conversation, Kristi. I’m so grateful for your time and I think we’ve covered some really interesting areas and this has been great, I hope that as many people as possible listen to this, you’re dropping some wisdom here.
Let’s close with our little quick-fire round here, and before I begin, it’s worth the listeners knowing you also have a website Keeping CS Simple that is incredibly well organized. It’s sort of chock-full of actionable useful things, you rounded up all sorts of communities and books, and resources. You’ve got links out to good stuff, you’ve got great content, you’ve created yourself a really great resource for everyone in this space. I highly recommend everyone check out Keeping CS Simple. I give that upfront because I know you’re going to be able to answer these questions very, very easily because a lot of them are covered on your website, but what’s the book that you most often recommend to people?
Kristi: This is just probably based off of the people that I’m speaking with and the conversations I’m having, but it’s probably going to be The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins. Like I said, the team and the people that I work with, that I interviewed, that I meet with, they’re often leaders who are starting new jobs or roles, moving up, moving into new organizations, especially now. Right? With so many people taking new rules. The First 90 Days, I feel like that’s always been my guiding light, my Bible, as I take on new roles, new organizations and it’s a friendly reminder of where I should start. That’s a fan favorite of mine.
Justin: That is a good one. I also noticed on your reading list on the website, you have one of my personal favorite business books of all time which is The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
Kristi: The Hard Thing About Hard— It’s so funny that was going to be the one I was going to mention, I happened to have The First 90 Days in my desk because I was just talking to someone about it, and I’m like, “Wow, I really do reference this book a lot.” That’s so funny though, that would have been my other one.
Justin: There’s two books I recommend to people, one is The Hard Thing About Hard Things because a lot of business folks don’t talk about the shitty part about the job the way he does. You get done, you’re like, “Whoa, okay,” but like it’s all good stuff. The other one I really like to recommend to people is The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, that book has changed my life. He discusses the battle against procrastination and mental blocks from an artist’s point of view, specifically writing, but it’s useful for everything from business to how to tackle social and relationship– It is just an amazing book.
Kristi: I haven’t read that, so I just wrote that one down.
Justin: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.
Kristi: I would like to add that to my list, maybe I’ll get that into my holiday reading.
Justin: The last 25% of it goes slightly off the rails, but you will never look at a daunting project or sort of writer’s block, or creative block the same ever again, it’s great. What’s the best productivity hack or tip you’ve ever heard and that you have folded into your practice? That one you don’t have on your website, that was my–
Kristi: You’re right, so now I have to add a whole nother section on productiviness. One of my favorite tools that is so under-appreciated because it’s so simple, but Boomerang in my Gmail. Oh my gosh, I sent out a billion notes a week and I always forget to follow up. I have this quick, easy tool that just reminds me when I have to follow up. It sends things, it automates things and so for me, my inbox management, that is a huge one for me. I’m going to give it up to Boomerang for that.
Justin: Shout out to Boomerang. That’s one of the classic examples of something very simple, doesn’t cost a ton of money, but is great. You know what I mean?
Kristi: The impact of value, is where I said I like, and have a real like fun, powerful, sexy tool to talk about, but Boomerang like if I think about impact on my day to day, something that like I really feel is Boomerang.
Justin: That’s how I feel about Notion. We don’t really use Notion at Capacity, but I do personally, just manage everything and oh my God, I love it so much. I love it so much. If you could recommend one website, blog, slack community, LinkedIn group, et cetera, for support and success leaders, besides Keeping CS Simple, which would it be?
Kristi: All right, I’m going to recommend Gain Grow Retain as a customer success support CS Community, just because I think that the team over there has done a great job bringing together thought leaders, as well as peers and community members to really share and ideate in a safe place where the information just flows freely and people share selflessly. I think it’s a great resource for anybody who’s in space or trying to break in.
Justin: I spoke to Jeff Breunsbach several episodes ago, Gain Grow Retain is fantastic. You were involved in that too, weren’t you?
Kristi: Yes. I was one of the founding members and then Jay, Jeff and I do a weekly podcast that we have as part of the series. I love those guys, but more importantly, I think that the community and what it’s growing into is that– Really it’s nothing to do with Jay and Jeff any longer, it’s kind of taken on a world of its own. I think just the members and the content, and the value that you get out of it if you have to go one place and you’re in this world of success and support and CX, I think it’s a great resourcing tool.
Justin: It really is and I can say that without hesitation, it’s a very good one. If there was one person and it doesn’t have to be in support and success, just you get to take one person out for a coffee or cocktail, depending on the time of day and the mood I guess and get to pick their brain about what makes them great. Who would it be?
Kristi: Jeff Bezos.
Justin: You answered that very quickly.
Kristi: I did. He’s– I don’t know. There is something about a man who starts Amazon in like his one-room basement with like a whiteboard around books and has it growing into the largest e-commerce retailer in the world like I don’t know– I want to go talk to him. I want to know how packages get here the same day as I have questions about logistics and operations, and process, like I don’t know. [laughs]
Justin: It’s remarkable. I can’t think of another– It’s not even business, just an entity in the world in history that has taken cost centers and turned them into profit drivers. They’re looking at their hosting costs and the infrastructure to run amazon.com, that’s a cost like, “Don’t worry, turn it into AWS.”
Kristi: Yes. [laughs]
Justin: Then they look at me like, “Well, we got all these customers, we’re shipping this crap all over the world. You know what? Let’s just make a logistics company inside of it.” You know what I mean? Literally, the only thing they’ve really sort of failed at was the phone that they tried to do.
Kristi: They can’t be great at everything.
Justin: No. I’ve got my– I don’t want to say the A word because there’s one sitting on my desk in front of me and I don’t want to wake it up. That product is a little wackadoodle, but he has built something remarkable and I think he gets a lot of flack for being who he is. I agree with you, he’d be a fun one. If we’re going to play make-believe in like that I can get an hour of his time– An hour of his time’s worth what? However many millions of dollars, right?
Kristi: Yes. When we’re talking about time as a currency, here time is a currency.
Justin: I think there’s a lesson there that all of us can sort of fold into our pra– I’m not suggesting people get too overconfident or sort of bullies here. Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, if you want to take an hour of these people’s time, it better be– It needs to be a multi hundreds of millions of dollars thing that you needed. You know what I mean?
Kristi: Oh, yes. Listen, I wouldn’t walk into that cup of coffee without probably weeks or months of planning. How am I going to make the best use of that one hour, right? That would be the most, or hopefully, the most important 60 minutes of my life professionally. I don’t even know where I would start my line of questioning, to be honest, Justin. I have so many places I want to take it.
Justin: If I ever get him on this podcast, Kristi, I’ll–
Kristi: Just share the episode. I’ll tune in.
Justin: I’ll email you first, and see if you can suggest to him my first question. Kristi, this has been a fun conversation. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us. If people want to learn more about ClientSuccess or yourself, where should they go to find it out?
Kristi: Absolutely, so I would say, two places to go, on me, you can check out my website as you mentioned earlier, Keeping CS Simple. It’s going to have all the information about me, about the things that I’m sharing and talking about. Ton of resources that I think are really just a great plug for the community. ClientSuccess, if you’re interested in having a solution, a simple, easy to use solution that’s going to help you streamline your customer success management, head over to clientsuccess.com. Tons of information, or you could reach out to me directly on LinkedIn.
Justin: Thank you so much, Kristi, for coming on the Support Automation Show, and I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful day.
Kristi: Thanks, Justin, you too.Justin: The Support Automation Show is brought to you by Capacity. Visit capacity.com to find everything you need for automating support and business processes in one powerful platform. You can find this show by searching for support automation in your favorite podcast app. Please subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes. On behalf of the team here at Capacity, thanks for listening.