Account Experience + Customer Success = A Winning Combo for Vonage

Okay, you think you know Vonage, but did you know that they're in fact the global cloud communications leader? Dave?

I did not.

They are committed to accelerating the world's ability to connect. And they've got this fully integrated platform, the communications platform, which is fully programmable. You know what you can do with it?

Go on.

You can integrate video, voice, chat, messaging and verification into your existing products. I know, it's pretty amazing. But you can also build workflows and systems using their vonage APIs. Guess what? We also use them. We send out our millions and millions of SMS's through one of their APIs. Pretty good, huh?

Happy customer.

We have been a customer with them for nine years. On top of that, they've got this whole suite of application programs on the top and contact center applications. You know what if you've just got a phone on your desk, People have that these days. I know my kids would never believe what a phone even is these days, but they will do that. But their mission is to transform how businesses communicate and the fact that you can operate from anywhere. And I think that's a pretty good mission to have, right? Especially in this day and age. So listen, without further ado, let's listen to the podcast which features Victoria Montague and Ethan Douglas from the Customer success divisions of Vonage. Hello, Ethan. Hello, Victoria. Welcome to the podcast.

Hey, Adam, thanks for having us on.

I know it's only for you guys, so thank you for joining us. So, first of all, ladies first. Victoria, can you introduce yourself and tell us, tell us what you do.

Sure. Morning. Thank you for having me. It is early here. It's just gone 8 o' clock in the morning here in San Francisco. I am the Global Director for Customer Success at One Edge in the API business. So we sort of sit in two different parts of the business, Ethan and I. So we'll come with two different perspectives today. But I've been with the company for just over a year and I lead the global customer success team on the API side.

Great, Ethan.

Certainly. Hi, guys. I'm Ethan Douglas. I'm our Senior Director of Customer Success within the North America teams. I reside in Wilmington, North Carolina, small beach town, absolutely love it, work remote. But I represent the application side of the business. I've been at Vonage now by acquisition. I always say five years, but I've been saying that for three years now. So coming up on my eighth year currently, and always been in the customer success department.

Guys, thanks for coming on today. Can you describe a little bit about what Vonage does and what you think your mission is in the business?

Yeah, sure. So, you know, I think our ultimate mission statement really is to accelerate the world's ability to connect. So we offer a massive myriad of different communication platforms around the world. I think most people out there will know us for, you know, the first bit of our business, which was really a consumer facing component of the business, the voiceover IP service that we offered, you know, in home. And that's still something that we do offer. It's a very, very small part of our business, but it's what most people certainly across the US that do call it Vonage, not Vonage, are familiar with. Now our business is massively evolved and we have two very large portions of the business. One is the application side of things that Ethan works in. I'll let him sort of talk to that a little bit more. But the API side of the business that I sit within is more of our customized bespoke solution for businesses so that they can connect with, with their customers.

I'm sort of always interested in how companies evolve. So you started out as a B2C business primarily and then added on the more B2B parts. How did that change the company DNA and how have you constructed your systems to reflect that?

Yeah, I think it's certainly an interesting story. Right. When you talk about home phone services, which is what the business was founded on to representing enterprise customers and a variety of different solutions. Right. It's been a journey to say the least. And that really consisted of several acquisitions that occurred over the last five to seven years at this point. From that though, we've tried to take the acquisitions and boil it down into two large categories. We call it build and buy. Or you know, internally we say APIs and applications. So think of it this way, if you want to build something with your development team, things along those lines, you can leverage our APIs, which is what Victoria is here to represent. On my side, we have applications which are maybe you don't have a development team, maybe you're an SMB or mid market size customer that doesn't have those resources. But you want to purchase them out of the box, configure a few settings and be up and running in a couple of days. When you look across that now from just across the spectrum, we like to say we are communications. Whether you want to build them, whether you want to buy them out of the box, ready to go. We really do have an offering for all types of businesses.

When you've got customers who are using your building blocks or using your fully finished applications. How do they interact with you? I guess one team is technical and the other is more in the business. But how do you react on customer success to that?

It's challenging. It's really challenging. Certainly on the API side of the business, the build side that I sit within, the majority of our customers come to us as developers. They come to us as very highly technically trained, skilled individuals that sometimes they just want to test our code, they just want to see what we're about. And they can do that either for free or very, very low cost, very easy to access. And then as it grows and sort of is further implemented into their platform and their solutions, then the type of customer does change. We start talking to program managers that are less technical. We talk to people in procurement. You even get up to, you know, CEOs that are, you know, have very little technical skill set, but are highly interested in the solution that they are using to, you know, enhance their platform. So the type of conversations we have, the timing of those conversations, the nature of those conversations does massively evolve over time. And it's a, it's a challenge to make sure we're getting the right resource and people in front of those customers at the right point in their journey so that they can continue to build.

And how do you react to that day to day? You know, when you're jumping on a call with a new client, do you know exactly who's going to be on there and you put the appropriate person on from your side, or do you have customer success managers that wear many different hats?

It's a really good question and it's one that we are still working on perfecting the moment we quite frankly throw the kitchen sink at it. Right. So we do have customer success managers, not across all of our customers in the API side. We only do that for our top sort of, I would say 400, 450 customers globally and they are responsible for teeing up that conversation, making sure we know who's going to be on from the customer side, what their experience is, what their needs are, and then teeing up all the other people that should be on from our side so that we are meeting toe to toe. I would say fire with fire, but that sounds too combative really, but making sure that we're meeting those needs in that conversation. So if there's a developer on the call, we're bringing in the right technical skillset to meet that conversation and within that as well. Because there's so many different APIs and different solutions that A number of our customers use more than one. They're building blocks. It's a work in progress constantly. So we would love to say that all of our technical team are completely skilled and trained on every single one of our products and APIs. But that's a dream that we work towards. Right. There's no unicorn in our business that can sit and talk very detailed and very thoroughly about every single one of our solutions. So again, we'd have to bring in potentially one or more people into those conversations to make sure that we're answering everything that the customer has.

And then, then you got to keep the CEOs interested when it gets very technical, right, Exactly.

The shiny stuff, you know, and that's a different type of conversation, isn't it? You know, that's when you sort of elevate the conversation. You're having sort of different stakeholder conversations. You're looking at sort of higher level metrics and really having conversations with the customer about their roadmap, where they're going. You know, it's all about them. You know, everybody likes to talk about themselves. And certainly within business, it's no different. People want to talk about themselves and their business. And it's, you know, a skill set of our success managers that they can pull that narrative out and have that conversation with the CEOs at the right level and like you say, sort of bringing in the right people at the right time. So it's. There's art and science to it, that's for sure.

We have a bit of a blessing and a curse with the offerings. Our cliche question is, does your business use communications? The answer for every customer that we have and every prospect is yes. So we're not trying to fit a square peg into a round hole in terms of what is our product, is it a fit for this customer? It really goes down to what Victoria is saying is figuring out what's the priority for that client at that point, at that point. From there, it's a matter of gathering the right resources to deliver on that. And sometimes that's 10 different resources from 10 different teams. Sometimes it's a blanketed, commoditized use case that we can address with one. But it really does, Dave, depend on what is the customer trying to accomplish? What's the complexity of that?

Right.

And then what's the return? What's that outcome that we can help try to drive? And that's how we have to get the right resources on it accordingly.

I like the way you've segmented this. Let's Go a bit further into this because I think in an ideal world, we'd serve all of our customers in a really wonderful way. How about you guys? How are you stratifying this, Ethan? Do you serve all of your customers or is it a certain subset? Can you give some color around that?

Yeah. So our groups focus in the mid market and enterprise segment. A lot of, again, our applications are out of the box. Right. So you don't have to be a director of IT or an IT admin or anything like that to leverage our applications.

Right.

You should be able to what we say, plug and play.

Right.

Download the client, install it on your computer and start leveraging. In that sense, those use cases are very quick. We can turn those services up very quickly. You don't have to be technical expert or anything along those lines. But where Victoria and I both probably emphasize the most of our role is those customers that have a roadmap.

Right.

The customers that are interacting with thousands of customers a week or a day sometimes and trying to scale how do we fit our services into that. Whether it's internal communications from employee to employee, whether that's to consumer. So our customers contacting their customers and trying to define that experience. But the real big thing we want to focus on and how we do our segmentations a lot of times is focused on the count of communications that a customer will have, whether that's internal or external on a given day.

Good point. Cool.

And in terms of when you, you know, you've got people set up with your applications or with the APIs. I've been working customer success for a few years myself. One of the things that me and my team always try and get ahead of the quickest is making sure that our customers are getting full value out of the tool.

Right.

Because you're only as successful as your customers that are highly adopted with your platform. Do you have warning signs on usage? Do you make sure you're serving and serving them in the right frequency? How do you guys pick out when you need to get the team ready and go in and speak to a customer and make sure that their usage is getting picked up?

Yeah, we do. We'd love to perfect it even more. Like most people. Absolutely. We have, you know, a very variety of different alerting systems. I am reluctant to call it real time monitoring because it does depend on the customer and on the product, the level of sort of monitoring that we can do. But absolutely, yeah, we would look at, you know, different customers and look at their downgrade, whether we see a pattern and a trend around that, whether there are support issues like tickets open that match that downgrade, you know, our customers, some of them, you know, use other providers at the same time as well and they can switch traffic very quickly, certainly on the SMS side and I hope customer gauge isn't one of them. But you know, with the SMS is a very easy API to install, get up and running really. So you can have multiple SMS APIs installed and if the traffic is being, you know, slowed down or blocked for various different reasons, then customers can switch traffic and they have the ability to do that. Certainly our largest customers are very sophisticated in that nature as well.

Yeah, actually, full disclosure, we are a client of yours. It's not easy to do some of the SMS stuff that we do. We're not really a volume sender. For us it's quality because we're in the B2B world. We really lean into the, the abilities that you have to help us track deliverability and it is a different sort of sense. We're probably one of your smaller clients, we need a few million a year or something like that. But it's like it's for us it's getting to the key B2B people and it's not a commodity there and that's huge.

Right, the ability to sort of like track quality, track sort of conversion ratios that we like to do and you know, we are a huge component of that. We are the conduit for somebody like CustomerGage to reach one of their end customers through a text message. But we also work with a number of different carriers and different routing teams to reach those customers as well. So we are somewhat at the behest of that third party as well, which makes things an added layer of complexity and challenge for us certainly in the SMS world, that's for sure.

Yeah, I think so. We have a different use case than most people but it's a really interesting thing. For us it would be more difficult to switch because of the value add that you provide and I think that's.

You know, so we're glad to hear that.

Victoria, you can update the Churn forecast.

Good to go, but let's come back a bit. But can we lean into that a little bit? Maybe Ethan, you can help me. So I like what David's talking about, about customer health. So I'm going to go into a bit about customer feedback and that's one thing to look at trends, usage. But are you actively going out to customers? I mean, for example, how are you, how are you picking up the sentiment about what Your customers think Net promoter. Tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, so a couple different. It's typically through a variety of different interactions, whether that's a service review, quarterly business review, executive business review. There's. There's so many different words for it.

Right.

The number one thing we do focus on is the risk on an account, and we do that in an optimistic way.

Right.

Historically, when you talk about churn.

Right.

What's driving churn, you look at the bottom of the funnel. Why is this customer leaving right now?

Right.

In the reality, though, that's a very reactive way of looking at it. Typically, a customer is one foot, sometimes two feet out the door at that point. What can you do?

Right.

So we've actually tried to create a culture of embracing the top of the funnel risk.

Right.

Where if a customer mentioned something just in passing of, I wish your product could do this, or it would be nice if you could accomplish this. We celebrate the risk. When we say, hey, we've got 10 risk on an account, we don't say, oh, gosh, what are we going to do? We've got 10 early risk on the account. We need to get ahead of these, ahead of time. And we try to track those as they progress down the funnel. And the faster we can pluck them out of the funnel, the better in those situations. But then, to your point, Adam, really considering things of just direct feedback through NPS scores, things along those lines from the customers, we can say there's no risk on an account. But if we get an NPS score of three.

Right.

There's probably something we're missing in those situations as well. And those typically will spark another conversation as well. But on the inverse of that, if we have 10 risk on an account and we've identified them, found them, and then the NPS score comes in at a 9 or 10, that tells us that we're doing something right. We have a pretty good grasp on those accounts. We have a pretty good grasp on the situation and what we need to do moving forward.

I'm learning a lot about this, Ethan. This is brilliant. I'm going to pick up some of this stuff on my side. And Adam, I should say that in comparison, the applications customer success model is definitely more mature and well evolved, I suppose, than we have on the API side of things. Really. Our team is just a little over two years old. We're still in the next, building out what success looks like. And so, yeah, it's always great to sort of learn from other parts of the business.

I think it's a really interesting learning. I'm actually going to go back to Ethan on this because we spoke about how you're serving the sort of technical buyers that you have. Victoria Ethan, you're really looking at business outcomes first, I guess because you're not looking at the building blocks, you're looking at applications to bring in. Does that mean you've got a different profile with your customer success people? Are they able to lean much more into ROI discussions or cost savings? Is that part of what you do?

It's somewhat. And we think of success as two big functions.

Right.

What's the experience and are we driving outcomes?

Right.

Experience things pretty self explanatory. When a customer works with you, are they excited to or are they dreading it?

Right.

When we started our customer success journey, there was a time and place where people were reluctant to get on the phone with us because of I never had a csm. I've called in the support, didn't get what I wanted, things along those lines. But as we've invested more and more into that experience, we can say fundamentally the experience of when customers get to work with somebody vonage is up higher than it's ever been and that's something we want to build on. The second is the outcomes, just like you mentioned, Adam, of what when a customer signed for our services, why did they do that? It probably wasn't just because the salesperson was very nice that day, but there was something about our product or service that they were sold on.

Right.

Whether that's an efficiency outcome, whether that's a cost savings outcome over time to drive roi. And really when we try to marry those two up, if a customer likes working with you and they're getting their bang for their buck, they're getting those outcomes that they've originally signed for and then also addressing those outcomes in the future as more and more come up. That's our recipe right there.

Right.

And it's very easy to do that I think when you have less accounts, smaller account ratios, things along those lines to get that personal feel and have more interactions. And the challenge where we kind of always try to figure out is how low can we push that, how down market can we push that until we can only have so many conversations in a given day, calendar week, month, et cetera.

Are you able to put numbers on outcomes for customers?

Oftentimes I think it's very easy for us when we talk about our specific products for contact center.

Right.

So customers, it's very common. Customer comes to us, says hey, we have a Support contact center. And 25% of our calls get abandoned.

Right.

Like customers hang up before they get to us. It's very, very easy to quantify the contact center outcomes there. Some of the other ones, and I go back to just our commoditized use cases. Sometimes some customers just use us for a phone on the desk.

Right.

We love to talk about 100 different outcomes and things like that with those. But we have to kind of. We have to acknowledge when is a customer in that category from their use case and how can we still deliver outcomes. There's sometimes it's cost saving metrics, sometimes it's uptime and availability. So they can do business continuity in those situations. But we do have to profile, is this a customer that's almost efficiency outcome driven or is this a customer that's more commoditized outcome driven, Both of which we try to address.

Yeah, I think it's really hard to also show value for that because we've moved so far along what they used to call plain old telephone service. Having that application, it's not so much on your desk these days, more on your desktop. And it's integrated with your CRM system. It's a screen pop here. It's cost multiple devices. So I guess for you guys that's part of the education process to make somebody use it across there. So what is judge's success? Is there an easy thing that you've got, Ethan, that says we are a success when a customer is using it across three devices or it's integrated with three applications? Can you share some of those stories?

Yeah, we're working on that aggressively right now. I'm going to sound like a salesperson here, Adam, so bear with me. There's a. There's a lot of bang for your buck in our standard service. Our standard service is called an extension.

Right.

If you're an employee starting at a company and you get a phone number or a soft phone or a video, that's an extension to us.

Right.

The reality is you can use that a lot and get a lot of bang for your buck, or you can use it for the phone on the desk.

Right.

So one thing we really try to look for in our usage and adoption is is a customer actually using click to dial functionality.

Right.

Customers that click on, you know, click on the icons on the screen versus typing into a phone, they're typically high. You know, they have higher NPSs. Like that's a good thing. Customers that leverage integrations to integrate with their CRMs, they're typically happier as well, but then when you start going into it, who, you know, who are the people that are maximizing, you know, our video applications, right. Things along those lines, suddenly it's, hey, this person is. We probably could charge them more for the service. Right. Versus less in those situations, we always want to try to figure out how are we maximizing the value of just an extension in itself, aside from the breadth of products that we can offer at the company level. At the same time, tell us a.

Little bit about a customer story where you've taken a customer who was maybe a big detractor and you were able to turn them around by leaning into them with customer service. Victoria, let's hear from you first about how you've been able to turn a difficult customer around.

I would love to say we haven't got any difficult customers at all, but I think we all know that they exist and that they're out there. Our customers use our solutions for so many different things, and some of them are really our business critical. Right. We have a ton of healthcare customers that in particular, during COVID last year, we saw an absolutely astronomical rise in the amount of people using video embedded into their solution, and understandably so, which was great. And so that is a business critical case. You need be able to reach a medical provider if there is, you know, something that you need to discuss. One of my customers that I work with very frequently, and I won't name them, but they are in the legal space and they record testimonies virtually, right? So they have the judge on there and they will have, you know, the, obviously the person giving the testimony and the various different sort of legal teams asking a series of questions and recording testimony, that absolutely has to work because that is a legal document that is submitted to court and that goes to help to make a conviction or not. And so if there is any level of failure within that, if the audio isn't syncing correctly, if there is a delay, if it's cutting out, if somebody can't hear, all of these components that absolutely have to work. And we had a couple of challenges with one of our customers because this is a business critical case. And so we had to dig really, really deep into where the issues were coming from, providing them with everything from frequent conversations, including access to our CEO, believe it or not, to very detailed technical audits and code reviews to go through. Where is this break in the chain? What is going on that is not working here? Because this, we can understand, is a huge component, and we were able to fix it, which was fantastic. We had obviously a very challenging few months with them, but with, you know, a number of very frequent conversations with bringing the right people in at the right time, you know, having, you know, one on one conversations as well as sort of team conversations, very frequent check ins. That was something that was, you know, turned around relatively quickly, which we were glad to do and, you know, course corrected.

Yeah. What a great story. That's, that's what I said. Because, you know, we all know what difficult customers are like, but often if you can, if you can rescue them and take them through that bad experience, we're all human, you know, but taking them out the other side, that, that forms a really strong relationship. And I think that's, that's the sort of thing that you can really take forward to business. Sounds like you really did a great job on that. Well done.

Have you. Are you also able? So interesting for me, what I found, you know, since working at Customer Gauge, is the challenging customers are probably the ones that have elevated us as a company.

That's so true.

The ones that don't stand for anything not perfect or anything like that. They're the ones that really elevate us as a customer and as a provider. Do you guys have any specific method? I think it's a very unclear science at the moment, but taking all those learnings from a challenging client and then bringing them on to all your other clients and how you're servicing them, do you have a way of pushing that back into the rest of the team and using that experience to grow internally?

Absolutely. No questions asked. We've created a culture, I think, where it says, hey, you know, we're a business that's going through constant change. The number one thing we can do for our change is actually listen to our customers.

Right?

If you've got a customer kicking and screaming because of 10 different product limitations that all seem very, I would say, just simplified use cases. We need to consider what our roadmap is for those short and long term to help that customer versus if we have a customer just isn't a fit for our product. We need to address those as well. And say on the front end, how are we making sure that we're not getting customers in a pickle where we can't even deliver a successful outcome at the same time too, that's where it becomes more full circle.

Well, let's get into that because how do you then continue to provide value for your customers? Because I'm guessing, especially on your side, Ethan, you've got customers who've been with you For a long time they've had their desk, then they're maybe not getting a lot of value out of it, as we would see in the value stack. How do you motivate these customers and bring them along? Because that's a really big part of customer service, customer success. Right. It's just like, look, we have to keep exciting you and bringing you along. Tell us a little about some of the. Some of the tips and tricks you have for that certain.

I think where we've been fortunate in our situation is our change is at the product level, the process level, in the people level. At the same time, right. Our customers that are 10 years old, I guarantee they signed up for a phone on the desk like that is why they chose Vonage. And as we started introducing customer success, it's odd to get your first phone call from a provider that's saying, hey, I'm your csm. I'm here to be proactive and talk to you about outcomes in the future. And the typical response we got then was, I don't think I need anything, actually.

Right.

So that was a huge barrier. When I think back to 2017, 2018 specifically, we had a lot of awkward conversations talking about, I'm your csm, this is what I. I do, and I don't need any of that.

Right.

What we've done since then is we've made it a point, especially during onboarding, is addressing what will I be updating you on frequently, Whether that's quarterly, semiannually, monthly, things like that. And then for the old customers, we have had to try to ease them into that mindset that on QBRs, you will hear about new things from Vonage at the product and process level. We hope you'll adopt them, we hope you like them, but I need to make sure you're educated at the end of the day. So we have a lot of educational awareness that go into those key meetings. I talk about quarterly business reviews, service reviews, et cetera. But a lot of that focal point is addressing setting that expectation ahead of time that we will be telling you about updates just as much as we'll ask about updates on your end. And we see a lot of improvement.

From our customers on the API side of things. We certainly do things in a similar kind of fashion, but because of the level of technical complexity, I guess, of the product, we. What we try to do is encourage, you know, all of our customers who are sort of top, you know, four, 400 customers, that we are success management, managing, for want of a better word. And some of Them pay for that service because of the technical offering that we, that we include within that or by, you know, value of their, by virtue of the amount that they spend with us. It's a value add for them. But, you know, it's, it's certainly a paid service because there is a technical service that comes with it. So what we try to do every quarter, we absolutely do do every quarter, is provide a quarterly webinar product webinar, so we can tell all of our customers, you know, that are part of that ecosystem where we're going and what we're doing, what's in the works, what have we already done, what have we rolled out, what's working, and then we open it up for conversation. So we actually have a really active community of people that are, you know, very engaged and very interested in what we're doing and what they need and they bounce off each other, which is fantastic to see. So it's an hour and a half session and it's once a quarter for each product. And then what we try to do after that in the sort of two to three weeks following that, is the individual QBRs with the customers. So we've answered, we think in the upfront, a ton of the questions that they may have that would naturally come up in the QBR that then does not fall to the success manager or the rest of the team that's on this specific qbr, because we've answered a ton of that hopefully. And then it can be followed up and we can maybe dive into it a little bit more deeply. If the customer has got product requests or indeed if they're interested in going into sort of beta testing and being one of the early access testers, then absolutely we can put their name forward. And that would come from the customer success manager themselves.

It's a good idea. We can take that one.

I just want to shift gears slightly. And again, this is going to sound like I'm just robbing ideas to help me in my specific job, but is there anything that you guys have learned throughout your customer success career or your journey with Vonage that you wish you'd learned when you first started or someone had told you five, 10 years ago when you first started?

I can speak on my side as knowing when to be agile versus knowing when to commit. Okay, I think that's really big. I'm sure a lot of the listeners here in the software space work at a fast paced growing company. Things along those lines. And then I think customer success is just a layer on top of that, right 10 years ago, customer success was a buzzword you would occasionally hear about versus now everybody's doing that. When I think about marrying those two fast paced growing company with a lot of changes, with an evolving job responsibility.

Right.

It can become very overwhelming very quickly.

Right.

So one of the things when we were starting our journey is we were trying to implement a hundred things pretty good, right. Versus now. My team, we really try to focus with what are three things we're doing for this quarter that we have to drive home more than ever and commit to and show the impact of that so we never have to train and things like that on again. That's just embedded into the team's memory at that point.

Point.

And for our customers as well, what are the really the outcomes we're trying to drive this quarter so we can refer back to them in the future as well. But I think it's a great question. If there's one thing I look back on is knowing when to commit and how much you need to commit to those types of things versus trying to do everything under the sun.

Cool. I mean one thing that's been a real eye opener for me certainly in the last six months, you think about the sort of different stages of our customers from the single developer that's just testing out some of our code and playing around with our solution through to the business that is really actively engaged with us using our product every day, wants to develop it and build it as part of their ongoing platform. We always need to be adding value.

Right?

We need to be. When we're having every interaction with a customer, particularly in a qbr, there has to be a value add. For me, the biggest learning I think was that speak to the people that want to speak to you, make sure you're always adding value. But when you're engaging those customers that don't want to talk to you, you've really, really got to focus and double down on where you're adding the value for sure. And that's the next step for us.

Nice. I like that answer. Okay, I'm going to, I'm going to do the last couple of questions here and I'm going to direct them to you 3 Customer Success people as a sort of a panel. Okay. Because it's quite rare that we do this. I really like the interesting perspective. So my first question is, and I'm going to go to Ethan first. Ethan, customer success or customer experience? What is it?

Look, I think everybody has to commit to customer experience. It doesn't matter if you're a and I'm going to just. I'm firing from the hip here. If you're a plumber up the road versus a software company that's worth a billion dollars in San Francisco, you have to have a good customer experience across the board. That's fundamental to any business. I believe customer success is sometimes you have a product that you got to coach a customer on, right? Where not anybody can just pick it up, plug it in, and it's going to work. But you need to show the customer how to maximize that value as much as possible. And I think some companies need that, right. Vonage, I think we do need customer success. There's certainly, like I said, the simplified use cases, which it's hard to measure success. You can make the argument that it's almost impossible to score the success of those commoditized use cases versus there's a lot of complex use cases out there. Victoria mentioned a great one, that there's coaching into that. There's a lot of consultation and advising that will actually go into that. And that's truly customer success, in my opinion.

For me, customer success. I think before too long, there will be not many companies that do not have customer success. I think it was kind of born out a salesforce, right? With early subscription models and things like that. I mean, I've got a bike as a subscription at the moment. Like, there's not many things that you buy now that don't come with a subscription to help you easily manage it, things like that. And I think the training is a side of it that, you know, we do at Customer Gauge, you guys do at Vonage. But I think also the relationship and the constant, you know, pushing for feedback from customers is part of the customer success, the customer success experience, if you will.

Okay, Victoria, I'm going to disagree. I say it's experience, right? And it is. My husband will laugh at me because I use this phrase every day. It's chicken and egg, right? You know, but, you know, with the experience is fundamental, you know, threading the needle from the very point of thinking you might want to engage with that customer, even pre sale all the way through to sort of ongoing interaction and engagement that has to be seamless and friction free because there's a lot of great products out there. You know, I will stand by our product. I think it's great. But our competitors also are hot on our heels, right? And so the differentiator, as we all know these days, is, is the service and the experience that you have with. With that business. Everything from can I pay My bill easily. And is it accurate, you know, to what was the interaction like with the salesperson all the way to, okay, the platform is working and I've got everything I need. I can reach out to the right people at the right time. All of that success for me is a more bespoken, individual component because it should be tailored to the individual customer and it should really be all about them, like, what does their success look like and how are we helping them get there, really? So it's a much more unique, I think, an individual conversation.

Good answer. I like that. Okay, final quick question then. I think customer success is a really difficult role to run. It's very high pressure. You've got the constant fear of customer churn behind you. You've got to look after clients. And yet I do also see it as incredibly rewarding. So I'm going to go around the room again. I'm looking for the high high of the experience that you've had. So I'm going to throw this out to Ethan first. Come on, let's talk about the high point in your career so far.

Can I give a customer story that's just very recent to answer this, by.

The way, that already you can see that's a customer success person there. I'm going to tell you a customer. I love that.

Thank you. So recent customer. It actually, it's kind of the journey of this discussion. There's a customer that didn't want to work with us much to begin with. It was customer with phones on the desk. And I can share. They were a pretty large university in the southeast of the U.S. they originally signed on for Vonage of hey, we want our professors to have phones in their office so they can make calls. Pretty simple, right? For the csm, it's like, I don't know if I can show much value in this situation. And then as the world got crazy, Covid occurred, right? And just I can't imagine being in college right now. And they came to us saying, hey, we actually we might need help in going through this. We sorry we've been ignoring you somewhat, but we need to text our students. And that's where we had to really put our heads together, working with Victoria's team, saying, okay, now we're actually using the whole Vonage portfolio phones on the desk to texting our students at Mass saying, hey, this dining hall is closed today because of a Covid outbreak and things along those lines. And then recently in the southeast, obviously, Hurricane Ida just affecting the entire east coast, making sure customers had all their resources, video notifications that went out to them as well. Well, as well as taking and leveraging a short term call center option as well for those solutions. It was just absolutely amazing seeing that customer go from hey, we kind of don't want to talk to you that much to hey, we just made the students lives better, the community's lives better, our professors lives better and they're attached to the hip with us now. How can we continue doing this in the future? And again, focusing on not just the short term outcomes, but this is a revolving door. I'm sure there's going to be other things coming up with this university that we're going to have to partner up on. Questions kind of what's next?

Great story. Ethan, you failed your exams. That would be another one too much. To Dave. Hi. Hi. From bhc.

Hi.

Hi.

For me, I think it goes back to a couple of points that Victoria and Ethan both said earlier. Sometimes you have customers that aren't particularly used to having customer success management or haven't had it before. So when I think we brought on a customer that wanted to do something very simple with us before, got on calls with them and we had a real deep dive into their usage and challenged them. And I think there's initial shock at saying, aren't you just supposed to say yes or no, sir? Rather than saying no, what are your business goals? What do you actually achieve? What's the target on your head? What makes your boss happy? And then really getting to the core of that then opened up so much more and grew him into one of our best. Using customers of the entire platform. So being able to take them through that buyer, actually challenging them and not just being customer support where it says, okay, I'll fix that for you. Okay, see you later. The challenging work, finding out what their extra business goals were and then helping them to grow from there.

Oh, nice story. I do agree there's something about the world that we live in that really allow us to get behind the business goals. Victoria, over to you.

I'm going to be really cheesy and I'm going to talk about my team a little bit bit. Really? I think, because I mean, if you think for me there's there's three big tick boxes, right, for being successful within customer success, number one. So we all know customer first, right? That's, you know, a given. The second, you got to add value. But the third is really protect your team. You know, they are everything that we have. They are our resource. Right. That's our, that's our commodity. And if they're not engaged and passionate and committed and happy, then, you know, it's all for nothing. And we're not really going to get very far, I don't think. And I'm not just talking about my immediate sort of direct reports. I'm thinking about the gambit of our business. You know, Ethan opened up by explaining that we are a company by virtue of a series of acquisitions. So we have a few different startups that have come together to create the API side of the business, which, you know, brings its challenges, right? You know, small, scrappy startups coming together with different tools and different processes and different direction, you know, forced together to make something work as one business unit. And if anyone's ever been through that, I mean, you know, good luck to you. You know, how hard it is. It's really difficult, you know, to become a, you know, a really big sort of polished corporate professional organization with process and procedure and tools that underpin all of that. And so to make things work seamlessly between teams and to, you know, make people happy and feel engaged and. And fulfilled at the end of the day will obviously help our customers. And so, you know, some of the high points for me have been when we've, like, completely cracked the nut and we've fixed something. And, you know, one of my team has come to me and said, you know, that's such a great improvement. One of the sales leaders actually had a conversation with me last week, and he said, your team is the most valuable team to me, you know, out of everybody in Vonage. Like, every time I engage with someone in your team, it's so valuable, and it's just a joy. And. And that for me was just like, you know, music to my ears.

That's great. And you've made me and Ethan look really bad for not mentioning our teams.

Now.

Or not mentioning that retention really is just as important, if not more so, than the next.

Who won't be happy with that?

Well, on that bombshell, I think we can say we're going to draw it to a close. I'd love to speak more, actually. The time goes really fast, but I've really enjoyed the discussion we had about Vonage. Thank you so much, Ethan Douglas, Victoria Montague, for joining Dave and myself today on the Can Experience podcast. We really learn a lot about it. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks a lot, guys.

Thank you for having us.

Dave, what did you learn from that podcast? It's all about customer success, right? Just up your alley.

Yeah, I've Got a full notebook here. So I think what's really interesting that Victoria reiterated the point there of every customer is very unique. They might all be trying to achieve the same goals or similar goals with your product, but no two customers are the same and no two interactions can really be the same with those customers. So you've really got to adapt and learn to work with those customers. And I think the one thing that stuck out with me from Ethan was learn when to commit and learn when to be adaptable and make sure that you're taking the right agile and committing and taking the right approach to certain situations.

Yeah, I agree. I thought it was quite interesting to hear what three customer success people said was the high. Ethan was probably. Was probably the most politically correct because he goes, it was, you know, I learned this from a client. Great story, by the way, about that school I was in. Yeah, I was welling up actually. You spoke about learning about businesses and about leaning into that and surprising people with that not just being support. And Victoria's one was really good when she says it's about the team. So you can really see there's some aspects on this. It's a great career to go into customer success. That's all we've got on the Account Experience podcast for us this week, but I have to say we got more excitement coming up, so thank you for listening. Do not forget to like and subscribe to give us a few stars on Apple or Spotify and spread the word. If you like what we're doing. We're here to here to help you understand much more about B2B customer experience. Look forward to spreading the word.