How Customer Service Became Strategic Overnight with Salesforce's CEO for Service Cloud

My name is Clara Shai, and I'm the CEO of Service Cloud. Everyone within your four walls and beyond, they are constantly connected. And in that reality, how do you sell better? How do you service those customers? We have to meet the customer where they are. Technology isn't just a way to replace human interaction. It has to be a way to amplify it. Having a human in the loop means that we don't have to get to 99% accuracy. The last mile, the human can decide. In order for us to architect the organization that will succeed into the future, innovation has to be everyone's job. Building and inventing something totally new, all of this starts from questioning the status quo. We can bring people together. We can be a role model and advocate. Without a vision, what you're doing is just giving people a job. But with that vision, with that purpose, you're helping your employees find their calling. My name is Clara Shai, and I'm the CEO— Wow, I can't believe someone took the time to watch all these talks. Thank you for whoever did that. Hi everyone, I am Clara. I've been back at Salesforce now for 5 months leading Service Cloud, which is a portfolio of Service Case Management, digital experience, voice, bots, field service, and workforce engagement. Before that, I was a founder and CEO, like many of you in the audience, for 10 years of Hearsay Systems, a compliance sales engagement platform for Fortune 500 banks and insurance companies, which I grew from myself and my co-founder to about 300 people and from $0 to $50 million in ARR. In the process, I learned a ton about product, engineering and sales, which I had expected. I also learned a ton about HR and customer support, which I had not expected. And I'm here today to talk about the latter. So first of all, let's level set on what I mean when I say customer service. I bet if you ask 4 people what they think customer service is— and if we could just advance— Thank you. If you ask 4 people what they think customer service is, even people at the same company, at your company, you'd probably get 4 different answers. Most people immediately think of customer support. And then if you ask those people what they think the customer support people at your company do, they might not know. They might think they know, but they wouldn't really know. At least that's what happened to me. Of course, it never starts off that way, right? In the early days as a founder, your hand is in literally everything. You are customer support. I was customer support. Here's my co-founder on the next slide, Steve Garrity, and me in our, in our early team in our first office, which was a conference room we sort of took over at Sequoia after we raised our Series A. Back then, I knew, all of us knew every support ticket, every customer, and I personally answered probably half of them. I finally changed my personal cell phone number last year because I was still getting customer support calls. But then before we knew it, We were 20 people, and then 50 people, and then 75 people. And I was relieved to no longer be closing every deal and taking support calls. Then we hit 100 people, and then 200 people, and things were on fire. We were growing 100% every year. We were sailing past $10, then $20, then $40 million in ARR. Gartner told us we were a cool vendor. We started showing up on all those lists of hot cloud companies. At this point, I was laser-focused on building up my executive team and hiring AEs and hiring engineers, and also bringing a second product to market, right? This is where I was spending all of my time. Where I wasn't spending my time was in customer service. Thought it was handled. Now, intellectually, I knew, I thought I knew customer service, right? We'd been in enough renewal cycles and land and expand, that at that point, I knew that customer service was not just support. But I felt like we had our bases covered. We had our on-call engineers, we had customer success, we had our QBRs, we had professional services, had a bit of a slow start there, but check. We were slacking each other, we were GSDing, customers were happy. But what I didn't realize at the time was that things were actually starting to slip through the cracks, just little by little. Because in enterprise software, there are a lot of cracks that get exposed because there's a bunch of people at your company dealing with a bunch of people at the customer organization, especially for those large multimillion-dollar deals, which, which Hearsay specializes in. And your customer stakeholders, well, there's a lot of them. And each of them ask for a lot of things. Some of which are easy, some of which are hard and complex and have dependencies and aren't OKR. They can't be a quarterly OKR because it actually spans multiple quarters to get it done. And then all of a sudden, you realize that— I realized that customer service was actually a lot more than simply support, CS, and PS. I'll never forget the day We lost one of our biggest customers. I was totally blindsided. I'd closed the deal myself in our first year. They'd been one of our earliest, happiest large customers. Their C-suite spoke at Hearsay's customer summits and in testimonial videos. They were over 95% deployed in seats purchased, thousands of seats, with one of the highest weekly active usage rates across our install base. Stakeholders from across the account engaged with our emails. Of course, we were tracking it. They attended all of our field dinners. They spoke at them. They spoke on our webinars, and they just kept growing with us every year. They were even interested in being one of the first to pilot and help us co-develop our second product. I thought everything was good, but one of their key asks, a support ticket logged 3 years earlier, had gotten lost in the shuffle. And it was, it was really the perfect storm. We had just redone all of our territories. And so we assigned a new AE and sales director on the account. Right? It was well-intentioned, it was the right thing, made sense strategically. We hired an awesome new CSM who'd come from the financial services industry, right? Who doesn't like that, having more industry alignment? Again, well-intentioned. And our customer executive sponsor, in part thanks to our partnership and just being, being someone who brought innovation into the company, he'd gotten promoted, which normally would be a great thing, except that now he was too busy to engage at the level he had been before. And so he stopped signing our checks, it became someone below him. That old support ticket, and 3 years of Slack messages and escalations, the feature request in Jira, customer emails, those, those existed in the company, but they were all in separate siloed systems. And the person at the customer organization, let's call him Bob, who had waited so patiently for so long, he finally got sick of repeating the same information to a new account team. And he decided to call it quits on us. And it hurt. It hurt emotionally, took it personally. It hurt financially, because not only was our cross-sell or upsell opportunity now off the table, we had to make up for the churn, which was about 5% of our ARR and affected our growth rate that year and all over this totally preventable, unforced error. So that was 5 years ago. Painful, but every enterprise founder, CEO I know has been through something similar. And in the last year, things have gotten even harder. There are more support tickets coming in, right, as software usage is going up in the pandemic, right? It's a good thing, but it's hard on support teams. At the same time that customer expectations are going up, customers expect to talk to one person. They don't want to be bounced around to your engineer and your PM. They want to talk to one person. And then at the same time, support reps, like all of us, many of us, are working from home. And so it isn't as easy as just walking the halls down to the engineering team and having your issue resolved. And so it's even harder now. So last year, I took a sabbatical from Hearsay. I'd been there for 11 years, founder CEO, and I just, I needed to take a break and think about doing something different. I'm still on the board. As I was thinking about what to do next, I got a call from Salesforce about this role overseeing Service Cloud. And my immediate reaction initially was, I don't really know anything about customer support. Are you sure? But then I thought about it more, and I realized I did. I learned the hard way. I joined Salesforce earlier this year, and I wanted to share 3 things I wish I'd known and done 5 years ago, and which I'm now making sure that our team at Salesforce builds into the product to help other company leaders in SaaS not make the same mistake that I did. The first one is what I call account-based support. We've all heard of ABM. We did that at Hearsay. ABM, though, didn't help us with Bob. ABM actually made Bob matter, because every time we tried to nurture him, with thought leadership or upsell him on a new product, he was reminded that we were working on things other than the thing that he asked for 3 years ago. So if we take a step back, right, first let's talk about what kinds of support cases usually get resolved. First, there are the quick and easy ones, the ones that your Tier 1 support agents can do. First call resolution, everyone's happy. Restart your device. Reset your password, reauthenticate your LinkedIn account. Then there are the high severity cases, your SEP 1s and SEP 2s, right? Your site goes down. Everybody from engineering is rushing into the proverbial office, pulling an all-nighter to get the site back up ASAP, right? All hands on deck. The third category are the issues that lots of customers are complaining about. Good PMs in PM 101 were trained to focus there, and tune out the rest, lest you become a custom development shop. But that leaves the risk zone, the ever elusive important but not urgent quadrant. And this is where Bob's ticket was waiting for us. He really needed it for how their enterprise IT environment was set up. Wasn't a quick fix, didn't qualify as a SEV-1 by any means. It would have benefited other customers too, but To him, it was an enormous pain not to have it. But it got lost in the mix. And so I've been thinking about this pretty much nonstop for the last 5 years. And this notion of account-based support, it's meant to solve for issues like Bob's. And if you think about all of the different customer-facing functions we have, enterprise sales, it's inherently account-based. Marketing has gone account-based in the last few years. Now it's support's turn, it's services' turn. So that we can factor in whether someone is a strategic customer, which Bob was. Whether there's an open opportunity, which his company did have. Whether they issued an RFP, which they had. This data, we know, exists in our companies. It existed at Hearsay, but it was all over the place. It was siloed. And it really shifted my thinking as a founder. I, I used to let every department pick their own systems, right? I'm a big believer of empowerment and decisions at the edges and nodes. But in this case, that resulted in local maxima, not global maxima. And this is literally why companies standardize on Salesforce, right? That's why I came to the company. And the whole point is getting context. Because without context, you can't personalize and prioritize. And you can only have context if you have a 360-degree view of the customer. So once you have that account-based view, that 360-degree view of the customer in support, you use that to inform all of your support channels, right? Most of the high-volume, easy questions can be deflected with self-service knowledge and bots, which are context-aware, right? For example, you can see here, that the Einstein AI bot knows that I'm an existing customer and that I also have an active free trial on a different product. And so that's why it's prompting me with those specific actions based on my CRM data and propensity models. For more complex issues, like a SEV-1, a DevOps outage, or security breach, collaboration and coordination across teams in a short amount of time is required. To problem solve the issue, and then get the right comms out to customers. These are issues that, of course, frontline agents are not going to be able to solve on their own. And this is a big area we've pioneered to enable what we call swarming, right? Just think about like everyone, all hands on deck, swarming and incident management across not just Salesforce, but also Slack, pending merger close. Swarming too needs to be account-based. Which customers are affected by the outage? Don't call the customers who aren't. Let's phone them, starting with the largest, most strategic ones. Let's be proactive and let them know. So in summary, I've learned a lot at— after 11 years of founding and scaling a company. And again, I never would have expected to learn so much about support. Three takeaways. Number one, even a non-high SEV issue can hurt a lot. Personal experience. Number two, excellent service really does take the whole company, right? It's not just lip service. We think about these, these incidents that happen, whether it's a SEV one or whether it's the Bob issue. Number three, account-based support should transcend our system silos. And as leaders, we should be optimizing for the global maxima, not the local maxima. And account-based service at the end of the day is really about personalizing and prioritizing your customer service based on everything that you know about them. And if you do this, you'll never have to wonder again, what about Bob? Just throw that in there. Thank you so much for having me, and I'm looking forward to opening up for Q&A.

Thank you, Clara. That was great. Um, everyone, we have plenty of time for questions with Clara, and so, um, would love to hear from all of you what questions you have for her. You can feel free to drop them in the chat at the bottom of your screen, or you can also unmute yourself and, and pop your video on and ask Clara directly. We'd love to have the conversation be interactive, so Everyone fire away. It looks like we have the first question coming in from Justin. So, Claire, first question— first, thank you for your presentation. So question from Justin is, if you had decided to implement Bob's feature request, how would you have justified this to your team that has been trained that we are not a custom dev shop?

I think the reality is when you're in an enterprise model that you have to think about certain features. And you have to— it's almost like each strategic customer gets a budget. It's not a big budget, but it's some budget of things that they get prioritized. And the thing about Bob's feature was, as I mentioned, it would have benefited other customers. It just wasn't on their burning list. And so there's some sort of algorithm that you can put together. It's both its importance to the— the importance to the strategic customer And then a time-based element that at some point you have to get to it and fill that budget just to keep putting deposits in that customer relationship. But I think it depends highly on the kind of model that you have and whether you're enterprise whale hunting like Hearsay does or whether you're a more scaled model. Thank you, Clara.

Thanks for your question, Justin. We just have a comment here. Clara from Elias, I love the Bob story. Awesome session. Thanks for being vulnerable and sharing the ups and downs so we can learn from it. So thanks so much, Clara, for that. Any other questions? Everyone feel free to jump in. We had one that just came in. Can you talk about the role of automation? What are you seeing in terms of an increase in self-service?

Automation is huge. I think the initial drivers have been on the B2C side. That's what we've seen from a Service Cloud perspective. But you think about these huge B2C contact centers, whether it's banks or healthcare companies or retail, and you have millions of calls coming in every year. And in the pandemic, a lot of these sectors saw a surge in volume. And I mean, that's— as consumers, probably many of us experienced this. In the form of long wait times, being put on hold for, for over an hour in some cases. And so I think that's revitalized and catalyzed a new commitment to automation and self-service. And so something really cool that we're doing at Salesforce with Service Cloud Voice is NLP mining all of the call intents and understanding which are the easy ones that really shouldn't require a phone call, right? It's not It's annoying for the customer, and it's costly for the company to have someone call in to update their address, for example. And then using a data-driven approach to train your bot and also create surface opportunities to do— to create processes, right? So Salesforce is the original OG low-code/no-code platform. So being able to do something like a change of address with a few clicks and expose that button in form on your website and then go after the next one and the next one and the next one. We saw a ton of that on the B2C side early on, and now B2B companies are doing the same thing, right? Because just like, you know, B2B companies also don't want to be inconvenienced with having to call in for something that's really routine. And so I, I, early on, like with Hearsay, I didn't see a lot of B2B companies using bots, for example, but now I do. It's, it's really become the norm.

Awesome. We'll just give everyone a few minutes to have some other questions. Clara, curious, when you came into Salesforce and said you didn't have a lot of experience about customer success, like, what teams did you lean on and like, who did you start collaborating with immediately to kind of get you up to speed?

Well, I talked to our former— my— the support team at Hearsay. They helped me get smart. And there's just so much knowledge out there. right? That, that is, we can just Google. And so watched a lot of YouTube videos, tried to understand the landscape. And I called 5 or 6 of our former, actually they're existing Hearsay customers and asked if they could introduce me to their colleagues who oversee support, which all of them graciously did and just interviewed them and tried to understand what their pain points were. And the thing with the pandemic, is it's been such a disruptive event for all types of functional leaders, but I'd say especially in support, given the need for collaboration across teams, for onboarding new agents. Oftentimes you have a lot of new people coming into the role who need to become product experts really quickly. So that helped me get up to speed.

Amazing. I love to hear that you're just checking out things on YouTube like all the rest of us too. Sounds good to know.

A question just came in.

Are there any specific content about customer success that you think is a must-read or consume for customer success leaders?

There are a lot of resources out there. I would say my experience with customer success specifically is there's no— it's not one size fits all. And the most important thing for customer success is to think about how, how much you're investing there relative to customer lifetime value, and whether you're driving outcomes for the customer that they'll pay you for, and ultimately driving an upsell.

Amazing. Any of your favorite YouTube videos that you watch, Clara, that were super helpful?

I, I don't know if I, I know them offhand. I can— maybe I'll tweet some out.

Later. Awesome. Um, just looking back at your key takeaway about, about talking about getting the whole team on board, um, and just making sure that excellent service takes the whole company, what are some of the tactics that you do to align the rest of the team outside of your immediate group to get everyone in alignment? Are you guys doing regular meetings, or, um, how do you get kind of get everyone on board and in shape for that?

Well, as it's As it pertains to customer support specifically, early on it was all hands on deck for every customer issue. That obviously doesn't scale. It's very disruptive to your roadmap and to maker time that engineers and PMs need. And so something that worked really well for us at Hearsay was creating this on-call system where most of our engineers cycled through and got to sit in on support calls and just literally sitting with the team. This is before the pandemic for things that arose. And it gave them perspective from the customer. And it also helped our engineers get exposed to more of the code base and different products because you never know what customers are going to call in about. And that allowed us to have it more contained while the rest of the team could focus on roadmap.

Awesome. Just had a question come in from Steve. So Steve says, in our org, sales teams obviously use Salesforce Cloud. I have support and implementation using it. Any tips on convincing dev teams to use it more to avoid the siloed systems?

Yeah, I think it depends on the dev team. The new incident management stuff that we're working on is highly relevant, but there's also great connectors that we have between Salesforce and, and Jira and and PagerDuty and these different systems. And again, post-merger between— the post-acquisition close of Slack, it'll connect those two worlds even more. But I think the key is the sales and service are on the same— have a single source of truth. Because otherwise, you end up with sales calling in to a customer who is mid-SEV1 ticket and really upset, or marketing, sending off an ABM campaign to that customer. But again, the customer is upset about something and really not in a moment to be upsold at the time.

Awesome. How do you think tech leaders should be thinking about AI today?

That's a big question. Yeah. That is what I think become— so AI has become a core skill set, just like UX/UI became a core skill set for for great PMs 5 years ago, data science and AI— I mean, you don't have to become a world expert, but basic knowledge of data and AI have become table stakes for great PMs, in my opinion, just because we should always be thinking about data pipelines and how we can use the data that we have to continuously improve performance for the customer end user. And frankly, to create stickiness, right? Because if you have that, it'll be harder for them to leave and start fresh somewhere else.

Amazing. We have a few more minutes with Clara. Anyone want to jump in and have any questions to ask her directly, feel free. We also can drop them here in the chat. Clara, not sure if you had— I know if you had any other questions of like some frequently asked things that come up that you may want to bring up. Related to this topic? I know you're the expert and a lot of folks are asking questions all the time.

I'm not the expert at all, but I think, you know, it just, it's interesting when you, you change roles and you have to become an expert as quickly as possible. And just going back to the early question about resources and, and trying to learn a new, new domain, I think it's a good thing for us to, to each do just professionally to think about What's, what's going on in the world and how do we get really smart on it? And, and starting from first principles, what's broken? I mean, that's a great thing about customer support is that we've all been on the receiving end. We've all experienced what that's like as a consumer. And so probably anyone you ask can talk about ways that it could be better and then just turn that into a product vision and insights that you can actually do something about.

Thinking of it from an enterprise customer lens, Clara, what are some of your top tips for like how that may, you know, it may be a different touch for customer success with an enterprise, enterprise client, and even finding out who the right person is to, to, um, to be interfacing with? Any tips specifically for customer success with enterprise customers?

Yeah, it's, it's really challenging. It goes back to the point earlier about in these large enterprise situations, you have lots of people in, in your company dealing with lots of people at the customer. And then you also overlay on top of that the fact that people are leaving and changing roles all the time, both in your company and also at the customer company. And so the coordination of that and keeping tabs on who's going where, who used to be your check signer, who, who is it now And what open support tickets do they have? What new opportunities do they have open? You have to factor all of that into the engagement, and that coordination isn't easy, and it's, it's basically impossible if you don't have one system to capture all of it.

Any final questions for Clara? Feel free to drop them here in the chat. We'll also be sharing this recording afterward as well too. And Clara has a lot of great sources on her deck too of how to get in touch with her on Twitter. So definitely make sure to follow. Don't see any other questions coming through, but Clara, any final thoughts?

No, I would just say that this is— it's a really exciting time. For us to be building and scaling companies right now. And don't underestimate the importance of customer service and how strategic that it's our role to make it in your companies.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for the time, Clara, and all these great tips. And everyone, we still have a lot of great sessions today. So hope to see you in the next ones.

Sounds good. Take care.

Thanks, everyone.