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good afternoon and thanks for joining us today my name is corey pierce and i'm the marketing director here at churn zero and i'd like to welcome you to our webinar titled customer success operations why you need it and how to set it up for maximum revenue impact before we get started i'd like to remind you that we are recording this session and a link to the recording will be available 24 hours after this webinar throughout the presentation you're welcome to submit your questions via the questions tab on your go to webinar console and we'll try and answer them as we go we'll also address as many as we can during the q a portion of this webinar at the end um now i'm pleased to introduce to you our presenter today dianzica who is a founder of growth molecules growth molecules is a consulting firm that jump starts growth by simplifying customer success to make companies more profitable they provide organizational assessments customer success onboarding revenue growth playbooks and customer success education amelia's going to walk us through her experience with customer success ops and how to set it up for success and profitable growth and with that i'll turn it over to you emilia thanks so much for having me corey and hi everyone thank you for joining me and corey today while we're getting started i would love to find out if everyone can put in their chat where they're located today i will tell you i'm at saster as you might be able to tell i'm in a hotel room but right after this i'll be heading over and it's quite exciting to be around other people after this past year and a half so um i'm in an extra good mood uh and really excited to be sharing what i've learned throughout my career with you today so today i'm going to talk about what is csobs and how to position it for budget approval i think this is one of the number one questions i get from people like coach and mentor who are trying to get budget for customer success approval when it comes to operations and then the roles and responsibilities of a csops person or team will also talk about measuring impact if you want to get past the cfo you have to be able to measure the impact of this role and then how does cs ops influence growth modeling so first of all before we get into what is customer success operations i would love for corey to launch a poll right now and find out uh if you have a cs operations role currently within your organization so corey you're you're launching it great let's give everyone a few minutes to go ahead and fill that in and while we're doing that i'm going to peek and see where everyone's calling in from because it's quite exciting all right we're getting some answers in okay it looks like cory's shut it down so cory will you be able to share with us the results yeah i just shared the results with everyone um so it looks like the highest group was that 46 percent have a formal cs ops team or manager which is kind of surprising to me i don't know what you what is your experience with that i would agree actually when i was at some of my previous companies just the idea of operations just was unheard of and trying to get budget for it or budget that you could actually hire people who knew what they were doing with the data was very hard and so this is not only refreshing to see but it really shows that companies are sh are moving in the right direction when it comes to enabling customer success so so what is it first of all uh it like i mentioned it is to enable and while there are enablement managers out there and i do believe sometimes they may fall under operations and sometimes they may be their own uh department i do believe that cs operations really enables your team and it's not just success it can encompass support technical account managers anyone who is customer facing operations can have a big impact on them as well streamlining best practices all too often when i work with clients and i'm listening to their call recordings of their customer success managers csms are saying the same thing in very different ways but often how you convey that message will have very different impacts on your customers so it's really important to have operations be part of that how do we streamline the best practices of not only playbooks and things you think of when you think of customer success but enabling your team to have the conversations they need in a way that will impact their customers in a positive way and that is when customer success managers can educate can really help work with the enablement team to make sure that all these practices are streamlined and in a place that are easily accessible to the entire team and then i believe potentially most important is data driven decision making while sentiment is so important and when i build health scores for clients i absolutely believe sentiment is an important part of health scores and relationship scores data's really important too it is very persuasive when you're talking to executives and so another reason why having an operations manager is critical and i'll just add one more thing before we move on to getting that approval your vice president your leader is being pulled in so many different ways and when i recently did a project for a client where i interviewed some of the top 10 professionals in customer success globally many of them shared that one of the hardest things about remaining strategic and really being able to do their job of mentoring and coaching and leading the teams as well as the customers is they get so bogged down in excel sheets and reports because they can't get the data they need so that's yet another um reason for operations so positioning it for approval the first thing you want to do is uh when you're putting together your use case or that deck that you want to showcase your management you need to show how it will and continuously improve your business methodologies because after all your product is changing constantly your customers needs are changing constantly and your team continues to evolve and mature so as that happens you need to have someone there to help your team scale and have a more proactive approach because i'm sure many of you who have been with the company from early stages or joined a company they may not tell you right away that we're in a reactive state and so how do you get out of that you start putting in place continuous improvement methodologies to enable the team so again speaking to metrics and given i met saster i wanted to select a quote from jason lemkin who's putting it together from his book from impossible to inevitable a customer success operations plan can really help increase your retention and while five percent may not seem significant what the research that jason and his partner did show that it can actually increase your profit substantially and these are the kind of metrics that you want to be able to start tracking and showing your executives so why you need customer success operations it can feel a little bit overwhelming where to even start well this might be contradictory when people think about well what is the salary of a cs ops person and you might share it if you live in the bay area like i do the the cost may seem significant however i believe that it actually will save you time and money and the story i'll share is when i was at walk me and i put together my first v2 mom as the as the senior director of customer success when i started i put in ops in and the ceo and the president said we don't need that right now we hired you to do that and i said but we're scaling globally we're in tel aviv australia across the us we need to save time and money by hiring one person who can really be almost like a chief of staff helping with all the data that i need to be able to make decisions and so they will save money because they will save your team time and they will make them more efficient uh data driven storytelling there is a book actually called data driven storytelling one of my friends who's a vp of enablement her husband just got a job at amazon and he told us that every single person has to read this book as an executive joining the company and why is that well they're not allowed to use powerpoints in their presentations and when they're speaking in meetings so imagine if you have someone in operations who can help you paint a story without a powerpoint that can be very powerful and your customer success managers just don't have the time to be building relationships and be storytelling with data so that's another reason i i believe is really powerful and then third but not least is just having consistency again with the messaging many people think that their soft skills but no longer are soft skills really soft they're actually essential and your operations team can ensure that those skills are being are being laid out with your team on a regular cadence so that your customer success managers and team can practice what they're learning and then make that messaging really consistent uh especially as your product matures and you have more segments you have to be able to speak to not only the personas but be able to explain what they're getting as part of the the value proposition so customer actions for budget approval on the left you'll see customer or customer related with your product if you're not measuring their adoption of those key moments that will drive to really leveraging your product uh time to first value not enough companies i believe are really measuring that and then the number of products is you that you they adopt is really really important and last but not least where are you measuring those points for expansion opportunities expansion can start as early as the onboarding if they're in that honeymoon phase and they're having a great experience with your product and you're better understanding them asking the right question again because of that consistent nature that operations is rolling out you'll be able to identify more opportunities where you may bring that sales person back in because you've realized they actually may have purchased a product but they're missing an essential element that your company can offer them now on the right i've put in other approvals that may that may help when the last time i was a chief customer officer i was very challenged with trying to understand who was getting certified by persona or why were some why weren't others why were some people attending webinars others were not and then how many questions are customers asking by segments by cohort what kind of questions how do we look at that information in a way that's digestible i've looked at tags that people put in their support system and one company i worked with had over one thousand that is not scalable and that is very hard to really understand the customer actions and so that's where operations can really help not only bring in your customer data but your support data and marry it together to again give a story to your leadership so that they can make better decisions responsibilities of customer success operations depending on how mature your company is will determine this i believe that the operations leader is truly a hero that will give you insights that that are really data driven and uh it's just really important to think about the operations team is not doing grunt work but they're actually your best friend uh your operations team will make you look like a hero not only to leadership but your executives because i'm sorry to your customers because if you're going into an executive business review and you have metrics and data that they actually care about that are going to impact their business you will look like that hero that you're seeing in this image cs responsibilities uh auditing and improving this should definitely be on a quarterly cadence obviously technology selection implementation and management is critical as your company grows uh creating and maintaining standards i just cannot mention this enough because as you grow very quickly the geography may have different ways of communicating they may be in different places in their maturity model it's just really important that you're encompassing all of that and maintaining those standards workflows so important how many people are pausing in their day and thinking about how am i going to spend my day how can i manage myself how can i stop from feeling completely overwhelmed not just by today but this entire week your customer operations leaders can help you with that and then forecasting capacity planning all of that will really help make your customer success organization that more readily available across your entire company with these type of insights now i want to pause and go to technology which i think is really important you cannot scale to a thousand customers for the early stage companies uh leaders who are on this call today it's really hard to think about getting to a thousand if you're just getting your first 10 but if it's anything like what i experienced at walkme we went from sub 300 to over a thousand in less than a year and so with that type of growth it's just really important that you're constantly thinking about technology and scaling and predictability right you want to automate as much as you can with triggers with uh playbooks that your team can leverage and then it really enables them to focus on customer relationships and that's where i believe that you can really grow with your customers they your csm should not be in the leads and spreadsheets they should be building customers with your clients i stole this from nuff said i wanted to show how how uh complex cs operations can become now obviously if you're just starting your organization they will not be doing everything like this if you have them something like this they'll probably feel completely overwhelmed but this is something that you can think about and then i always recommend break down everything by priority and quarter so if you have this many things that your cs operations leader may be responsible for think of where the biggest fires are where the biggest opportunities are and then let's build a strategy around around those particular playbooks or those deliverables for the first quarter reflect on them and then start biting off the next ones selecting your platform you want to make sure that your cs operations manager leader understands and knows the budget all of the requirements are incredibly important and often if you don't understand the technology you may not know what apis do you need what type of automation reporting walkthroughs not only uh for your customers but maybe your customer success managers and then are you measuring the sentiment of the client and while nps is definitely was built by a professor for b2c it still can give you some indicators of your customer sentiment where they're feeling at that particular moment and can help trigger playbooks and often when you're selecting a platform and you're implementing it it can feel really overwhelming for your csms so it's important to start with phased approaches let's have quick wins for your csms and in the first 30 days what can we accomplish with the implementation to allow the csms not only to start getting comfortable but to actually start using it and feeling excited that oh no this isn't another tech i have to learn but rather something that's going to make me poor more powerful as a customer leader and then who will manage the platform it's great if you hire a consulting firm to implement a customer success platform but then what happens afterwards you need someone to continuously keep a pulse on it to make changes as your company and your customers grow and the customer health score uh one of my colleagues sabina when she was running maven link she had 26 different uh elements that went into the health score that really helped with her forecasting so how you measure health score is not something that you just slap together it's something that's thoughtful it's iterative over time over quarter you want to be thinking about does this health score still make sense now that our clients are maturing and so is our product and then most importantly you can have the best data in the world but unless you're leveraging it to make decisions unless you're showcasing it to your executives to your board it's useless so make sure that you're getting that data and presenting it in a way that they can really understand and i'll go back to that's when storytelling becomes important so operations they're definitely responsible for being part of the decision making with high low and self-service uh self-service i don't know if they'll ever be completely self-service products maybe calendly slack might be but uh in general more high touch or technology the more complicated is is difficult to completely go self-service you want to make sure that your operations team is looking at what can we self serve across all our segments what can we move to low touch and then for the more complicated how do we make our customers success managers partners of the customers all right i just want to pull this up because i get this question all the time uh well what should we do be doing for capacity modeling when it comes to csms 2.5 is a made-up number it's really impossible to give you a number if we you have to look at the product where it is in the maturity and then uh work from there i mean you can have a customer spending 10 million dollars with you a year across many different departments and you may end up having two or three csms for that customer so i would say this is when your operations manager can really come in and help you how do you measure impact of a operations manager uh well i mean the i love this quote your office team can spend uh can help you spend less time on running a better success team and instead you can focus they can focus on customer data to run a better company i think this quote is really powerful and something that you can share when you're presenting to your own team uh you'll see here i pulled this off um turnzero's website but it's very easy to understand the metrics that i'm looking at as a csm or as a leader actually this is a leaders dashboard of the top uh five customers managed by csm so more metrics um i love david scott for any of you who don't follow him he's uh an amazing entrepreneur and writer i i love this quote from him there are two causes of churn that occur more frequently than others loss of champion and a poor onboarding essentially so things like your customer success platform can help you identify with triggers when a champion leaves for example uh of course you want to be educating when you're on boarding your csm's when you have a new champion make sure you connect with them on linkedin you should be connected with all of them on linkedin so that you start building those relationships and you can start following them and then your operations team can really help with onboarding your customers uh there's another author who wrote the book the first hundred days and the first hundred days is he argues is all is one of the places where you will lose the majority of your customers if they have a poor onboarding experience so really important operations if they have to start with somewhere on the customer journey make sure they're they start there and make sure they're measuring that journey there's so many measurements that your customer success operations managers can be responsible for uh but you want to make sure they have reports that are visible to the the company uh you want to be reporting on them in your all hands of course these reports will help you break down silos they'll help you build your playbooks to get a full view of the customer experience and journey uh they will help uncover areas where your csms are just not being efficient and they may not be doing that anything wrong but they they need to be surface these challenges first and then you can address them this year with coved so many companies are going through change management uh we we've even developed some workshops around change management for organizations really rethinking how are we doing customer success the the pandemic allowed them to give this reflection because they realized wow our customers are more valuable than ever we need to hold on to them so really putting change in process to better service the customer requires change management uh there's a reason why it's a multi-billion dollar industry and so you can really measure the impact did your csm's did their morale boost with the change was there fear uh are they improving the customer experience is the nps going up are the csat uh numbers going up those kind of things your operations team can help uh measure and then just things like deploying and managing cs technology without someone dedicated i've just been in part of too many experiences where the implementation was poorly done and then the customer success platform is blamed for not doing what they thought it would do and actually there's nothing wrong with the cs platform but rather how it was implemented and i think one that's really important is your brand integrity operations can really uh be responsible just like when i was at walk me operations was responsible for looking at how customers were deploying the walk me walk throughs and making sure that they were being deployed in a way that that kept our own brand integrity so the coloring the sizing all of those things we were able to start looking at a broader scale thanks to our operations team all right one one more stat i think before um we'll take we'll take some questions but 80 percent of companies believe they're delivering a superior experience to their customers yet when they're surveyed about eight percent agree and so when you get so far in the weeds and things uh as a leader you sometimes forget to take a step back and look at that customer journey and measure those moments that matter and then understand why you're 92 of your customers not don't believe that you're delivering an exceptional experience being able to step back and work with operations to build that that playbook that journey is incredibly powerful to get these type of numbers up so with that uh let's talk about strategy i love this quote from tomas tongues i hope i'm saying his name right uh from red point new bookings from customer success will exceed new bookings from the sales team it's kind of exciting uh i think of companies like um oh there's this this um company who spoke at saster the last time it was live ringcentral and they talked about how much growth was coming from their customers and this is happening right now even i'll mention sabine again when she was at maven link she her her her revenue that she was managing from the customers was either close to or started exceeding the sales team uh revenue so these are really powerful stats for you to think about and why operations can help course data needs to be part of the strategy operations can help motivate can help with stretch goals all too often we're so obsessed with the kpis and okrs what about putting some stretch goals out there what happens if you do meet them how do you celebrate so getting cs involved in that can be powerful data modeling trends of your customer behavior and then actually analyzing it customer success leaders just don't have enough time in the day to be able to do all of this modeling and really looking at the behavior where there are outliers where the trends going quarter over quarter month over month that's what your cs operations can help influence and then of course forecasting forecasting is so incredibly important being able to look at your health scores uh your teen capacity your ar where is it going why looking at those numbers uh in your health score and i stole this uh from one of my colleagues they turned their early churn list obviously not public they called that uh report the health score hit list they wanted to make sure that they hit every single customer to ensure that they were successful all right so to wrap up don't you don't expect and this is from me coming from me no one else you don't expect your sales managers to do sales operations right your account executives who are selling your products are not in the admin section of your sales force setting it up so why are you asking csms to also be cs ops for your team uh if you really want to enable your customers and enable your csms to build those relationships that matter invest in an operations person for your customer success team they will uh really allow the team not to get lost in the back end tedious tasks that tasks that honestly can lead to real burnout and uh you if any of your csm's i'm sure many of you are or have been i was a csm for six years uh it's just a really challenging job and just being able to take some of the tedious work away and being able to have a more proactive approach allows just for so much better conversations and better questions to uncover opportunities for growth so with that i'd love for all of you to think about one action that you can take away from today's presentation to apply to your own company and um if we had time we'd go around the room i always love love hearing uh the answers for people you're welcome to put them in the chat and then i'd love to take any questions that people have been adding awesome thank you so much emilia for that presentation uh we have had questions come in and i'd like to invite the rest of the audience to take this time and to go ahead and submit their questions and we'll get to as many as we can so our first question that we have um says [Music] amelia can you provide a couple of examples of low touch versus high touch strategies yes so high a low touch strategy can be something like walk me uh cast app those are apps or pendo i'll say pendo as well those are all apps out there i've used app cues for some of my smaller clients that needed simple walk-throughs uh in their platform those are things that you can put across your platform that don't take a lot of effort that operations can implement one of the teams i worked with there were only 17 people so uh we i had an intern that was helping me so she quickly learned the platform and then was able to scale it across all the csms there are five generations in the workforce right now people who especially the newer workforce very much want to figure things out on their own they don't want to to make a phone call uh so you want to make sure that you're rolling out these low touch strategies i don't believe that there's ever tech touch that it is an enablement touch it is an opportunity for you to engage with the client in a way that they want to engage with your product and that's more self-service a high-touch experience may require for example that they have to designate someone to get training or certification for example i just think of aws you have to have someone who really understands that platform before you can really deploy and maintain it so that will require more of a high touch experience with more of the white glove customer success manager hopefully that answers your question great um our next question is do you typically see cs ops sit on the customer success team or within a broader ops team and who do you typically see a cs ops manager report to this is a debate i'll say that's out there i will say their pros and cons to wherever you put your cs operations if you put the cs operations under uh the chief operating officer they can scale across with sales for example sales cs product they can really have this aligned streamlined way of rolling everything out under customer or under operations if they're under sales i have seen in my experience is sales always gets priority right the the sales team wants something done in salesforce it's going to take priority over the customer success team needing something in their customer success platform and so i've mixed feelings about that uh being under customer success can be powerful but you just want to make sure that if that person is under customer success they're very well aligned and working very closely with the cs or with the sales operations manager and i'll just share a quick story i was working for a company as an interim leader and whenever the vp of sales came to a meeting about numbers and data and metrics whatever reporting he never showed up without his sales ops his sales ops knew all the numbers was able to rattle them off i never had that person i was constantly expected to do all my own data analysis and uh had to become had to show up just as prepared and so you can imagine how some of those conversations went uh somehow sales always looked better so you want to make sure that you're placing equal weight regardless of how or where this person is living i think that's great advice um let's see our next question is how many ops individuals have you had or what is that number compared to number of customer success managers or maybe even support oh that's a good question i believe it depends how much you're putting uh in their responsibilities so if they're very good with technology but they've never rolled out enabled playbooks you may need someone on the team to help really understand the enablement of customer success managers they may be more tech savvy if they cannot if they're not an excel wizard you might need a data scientist or data analyst to be part of the team uh i think it just really depends on your use case i will say when i was at walk me when we did get our first cs operations team at around month six of my tenure we i moved a very strong director into that role who really understood use cases then i hired um a designer to be on that team and then a data analyst and between the three of them we got through maybe 500 customers and so uh and we had at the time around 35 csms on the team so it really depends on what do you want them to do why and do they have the skill sets because you may need to supplement awesome um we have this next question the first part might be a little tricky um but the second part might we might have some suggestions here um but the question is how much sea us ops talent is in the market and what are other ops roles that translate well or maybe other roles in general if not specifically there aren't a lot of cs uh operational leaders out there that i know of right now i do know that a lot of vps call us often asking do you have a cs ops uh manager that you would recommend there are two people on my team right now going through certification and better understanding of cs technologies so that we can serve our customers uh as consultants helping them get technology up and running so i do believe this is an emerging field that the it's hard to get certified in it because there's so many technologies out there but what i would recommend is looking at people like data scientists sales operations they can be really powerful you just want to make sure you don't assume that a sales ops person is going to and build your enablement playbooks because they probably don't know the customer journey you you want to make sure you educate them before you hand them enablement as well it's a very different function excellent um our next question is what type of yeah what um our question is what type of timeline would you expect to see for implementing the cs ops enhancements you've suggested i don't know which enhancements you're referring to but i do love putting together a quarterly one-page business plan by quarter so the average human gets overwhelmed when you put more than four tasks on their plate so uh and and that's even scientific we the average can remember up to four things so i would suggest break it down by quarter what are the top do a brainstorm get get a whiteboard behind you put everything down in your ideal world that you wish this person could do and then prioritize them enable them to be successful and i would say a reasonable date is a hundred days month one you set up a goal month two what's phase two and month three even when you're rolling out a customer success plan what can we accomplish in the first 30 days for time to value then what's phase two how are we integrating more and more csms and then can we roll it out in month three and you always want to make sure you leave 10 days for reflection what went really well let's celebrate but where were there missed opportunities and gaps that we can work on in q2 i think the scrum methodology of rolling out any technology and being iterative with enhancements is really powerful excellent yeah i think that's some great recommendations um for timeline and setting out expectations our next question is what are some skills csops managers should start developing definitely need to understand excel and technology and how it enables customer success managers i also believe and we someone on my team just finished working with one of our clients and so i got to know the head of operations he has a title of head of operations and strategy and i don't believe you can really lead strategy and operations unless you really understand not only the technical piece so your crm your csp um outreach whatever it is that the company is using but also understanding the human element your csms and understanding your customers the personas because how can you possibly do capacity planning or building playbooks or even maintaining them in a cs platform how can you give recommendations if you don't put yourself in the customer's shoes or you don't put yourself in the customer success manager shoes and that's why i believe the person that i moved from a director role in cs into the cs ops he was super technical great with numbers but also had been a csm had built the plot had had used the platform well was certified and really understand understood the use cases he was exceptional today he's a vp at a company as well and all of those operational skills are things that you can develop with time but you have to put yourself in the customers and the csm shoes to really be successful in that role great um those are some great uh skill suggestions um our next question is what is the right time to start integrating a customer success software into your tech stack and what might be some kpis to drive this this this decision definitely if you're in a fire i'll answer the second one first if you're in a fire fighting mode and you're and you're serving your customers with just sentiment it's probably time to get a technology to enable your csms i've uh interviewed someone uh yesterday for a role for a client and she's using a customer success platform and i asked her how many csms do you have on your team and she said three and i have budget to hire a fourth this quarter and i said why are you using a cs platform out of pure curiosity i was actually taken a little bit back and she said well they're managing a lot of customers and these customers have high arr and there's no way three csms could possibly be managing this much arr without having deep insights of customer usage and without triggering actions in an automated fashion so my answer is you could have as few as three people where you're really leveraging the platform uh to to guide your customer conversations and automation and then some companies i believe just wait until they're they're too they're too much in a firefighting mode and then without ops compounds the issue and then the cs platform is set up for failure so i'd be thoughtful think about your use cases think about your playbooks do a brainstorming session i love white boards i love writing all of the house the things that might go in the health score and then another column should be where does this data live because if you can't extract the data how will you create a health score that actually matters uh before you implement take the time do a workshop with your team for a few hours go back think about it and then come back and say is this the right is this the right approach the right use cases before you go out and shop for a platform great advice um our next question is what are some good sources or ways to get educated on customer success operations do you have any recommendations yeah i mean you can definitely just google uh cs ops if you did that maybe a year ago i don't think there would be that many uh uh articles out there but when i was even just thinking about what did i want to speak on uh when you invited me to be on this webinar i realized there there's a lot of lacking information i did find the one that chris hicken wrote um from naf said really valuable probably the most robust uh white paper we'll call it on cs operations um there just hasn't been a lot written on it there is there are cs ops slack channels and then there are cs ops linkedin groups so i would search for those and join them someone recently invited me to an enablement squad on slack which i'm finding quite interesting and hopefully that's helpful i think that is thank you our next question is do you see customer success manager training falling within customer success ops similar to sales enablement or is that a different type of role that isn't usually on under cs ops so when i ran cs ops at bright edge with a colleague who ran more of the support operations we had 80 customer success professionals under our ops team and what we found was that we can't do all of it we can't possibly train on all of it we were not uh seo experts like some of the people who had come from agencies so every monday while i was responsible for the education series at 8 am i was not responsible for all the content and so it really gave every single person on the team an opportunity to shine practice their public speaking skills uh do research and share ideas and then that 30 minutes while i was only 30 minutes it got people excited about learning a new skill and then the other thing i was responsible for was testing so after those sessions 10 questions sent out to the csms and then if they did fall below 8 the manager was responsible for working with that csm to ensure that that csm grasped that content so no your csms are not responsible for all of it uh when i was even rolling out a cs platform there i had a data analyst doing all of the api stuff um helping me with all of that and then i had the design team helping me with the playbook so i could roll it out to the csms because it can be overwhelming especially if you're rolling it out to 80 people so hopefully that answers yeah i bet that's right um our next question is how do you divvy up responsibilities between what a cs leader handles and what a cs ops manager handles yeah so the cs leader is definitely responsible for carrying out the mission of the company the vision uh boosting the morale and just and keeping a pulse on everything the operations is like the foundation operations and enablement they really ensure that that vision on the top is being met so from people metrics processes they're really helping layer in the different layers of that foundation i i do really see operations as the right arm of a cs leader you just can't expect a cs leader to be able to do everything and do it well and so if you have someone who's really good with the data and the technology they will enable the cs leader to go into those executive meetings to share at the board meetings the metrics that matter so that they get the budget they need and that they're able to build a best-in-class customer success or customer experience awesome um our last question for today um is how what metrics or roi stats should you be tracking to measure success of a cs ops role this is a difficult question for most companies to answer and i did this all the time when we were onboarding at walkme the csm's responsible for onboarding customers would ask how much time are you wasting on support or how much money are you wasting per support call or how much time would you like to gain to make this a successful implementation so you what i'm trying to say is you have to have some sort of foundation and sometimes that will require a brainstorming session with your csms looking at their calendars seeing how much time they're wasting on things that could be automated and then doing a comparison of what can that cs operations person handle or take off their plate by automating a lot of it so things like ai intelligence we have course and gong out there now they're taking notes right for dsm those platforms are about twelve hundred dollars a month i mean you can do the math think about how many notes how many triggers are lost because the csms aren't taking the notes fast enough they're trying to focus on what the customer customer's saying now with that kind of automation in place you can think about how much time your csm is is saving so i always say it's about saving time making people more efficient reducing errors errors in your customer success platform and your crm uh are rampant and you can really reduce them by by having things in one central place and then just saving your your vp time so that they can really focus on the more strategic and looking at the the long vision instead of trying to put all of these different excel sheets together to be able to tell a story that actually makes sense to leadership that's what i would be looking at time and effort how can you make people more efficient awesome yeah i think that makes sense and doing that math to you know make the case and then also to prove the roi piece there so thank you so much amelia for sharing all your advice on customer success ops i know i learned a lot i hope others of you did and i just wanted to remind everyone that we were recording this session so we will just be sending out a follow up email tomorrow with a link to the recording and a pdf of the slides also at the end of this webcast you'll see a survey pop up and i'd appreciate it if you would just take a minute before logging off to complete the survey just to provide your feedback um for this webinar so we can take that into consideration for other thought leadership webinars coming up in the future so thanks again everyone for joining us and have a great rest of your day bye everyone thanks for having me you