Has your Customer Success strategy stalled out while you try to build out your team? Don't worry, we can help. See how Totango enabled Zoom to manage over 32,000 different accounts with less than 50 dedicated Customer Success managers - that is 1 CSM for every 700 accounts! (Whoa!) Totango’s helped Zoom do more with less through smart customer segmentation, facilitating automated communication without sacrificing the personalization that makes each customer special.
Hear from Zoom Customer Success team members Claire Grayeb and Ashley Butler as they share their personal experience using Totango with their Customer success teams and the strategies they use to maximize their campaigns’ impact.
In this video you will:
Claire Grayeb [00:00:07] Hi everyone.
Ashley Butler [00:00:08] Thank you, guys. I figured everybody might be in a little bit of a food coma, so hopefully, you tamed it down on the ravioli. But thank you guys so much for being here. Anybody else first timer in New York? Just me. Oh, OK. Perfect. It's awesome. I'm so excited to be here to talk about our experience at this great summit, specifically using Totango campaigns to truly scale our team in an extremely fast-growing business. So my name is Ashley Butler. I'm our Customer Success Operations Manager, whew, long-winded title. Essentially, my job is to just help our CSMs be as productive and efficient as possible and make their lives easier along the way. And I work very closely with Claire. I'll let her go ahead and introduce herself.
Claire Grayeb [00:00:56] Hey, everyone, I'm Claire Grayeb. I'm the CS Communication Lead at Zoom and I help basically all non-sales teams communicate with their customers, from CS to Billing to Marketplace, a cohesive communication to those customers.
Ashley Butler [00:01:10] Yeah. So just a peek at where we're at, where we're going over the next 35, five minutes or so. For those who aren't familiar with Zoom, we'll talk a little bit about our company and our team, and give you some background to our structure. We'll also talk about our unique segmentation approach, because that's a key factor in our campaign strategy. There may be some people in the room who are not currently using campaigns within Totango. So we'll dispel some common arguments that people tend to say to me about why they aren't using campaign automation. And we'll also share some tips for your campaign messaging and cadence that we've learned through mistakes ourselves and through all of Claire's experience, as well as measuring success. So you implemented these and it's a little bit more than just opens and clicks. There's more to it than that. So we're gonna talk about actual results and what you need to look for in campaign success. And then we're not gonna leave empty-handed. So we'll give you an action plan for when you leave here today that you can implement in your organization. Sound good?
Claire Grayeb [00:02:15] Perfect. Thank you, Ashley. So here's just a few quick facts. For those who don't know, Zoom is a modern enterprise cloud solution designed to help people communicate frictionlessly. It's all over the world. People in 94% of all countries and territories on Earth use Zoom, so that comes out to about 226 out of 241 countries and territories. And we have two thousand employees worldwide. Our headquarter is in San Jose, California. And then we have a Q2 Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 73. And that's something that we're super proud of. We feel like it's very impressive and that just shows how our customers feel about us, and it's also a great way to collect feedback and feature requests. That's something that's very important to Zoom as a culture.
Ashley Butler [00:03:00] Absolutely.
[00:03:11] Our team is spread out globally and this is it. Just like I could tear up. Our team is so fantastic. We are like a big, happy family, honestly. And once a year, we all get together at a growth summit from around the world. It's the one time of year we can actually talk about things that are not work-related and just be friends and hang out. And I would say we look like an amazing, happy bunch. So I thought it was postcard-worthy and I had to inject that into the deck.
[00:03:41] A little breakdown about our team and our structure - and I know that there are folks from different organizations of all different sizes. Right? Some people have CS teams of 1200. Other people may have a team of 5 or10. And this is going to be applicable regardless of the organization that you're in. We have, and this is already outdated because I mentioned we're growing quickly, we have 48 dedicated CSMs. And we also have 18 more specialized roles, which is a little bit unique. In those specialized roles, we've got leadership, our managers. We've got our public training team that used to fall under our support umbrella but moved under CS because we felt it was a little more applicable. We have online event consultants, operations and enablement, and then project managers as well. More technical project managers that work on more complex deployments. You may look at that and think like, wow, you have a lot of specialized roles in your organization for the amount of CSMs. Keep in mind that we did not have a dedicated ops team. Costen will probably remember this. I was a hybrid CSM wearing multiple hats, as we all do. We didn't have a dedicated ops team until February of this year. And that's for Zoom, right? We're a pretty large company, tons of employees all around the world. Anyway, our whole motto is to deliver happiness to our customers as a company. But you can see we developed our own mission statement as a team because we really wanted it to embody how we individually as customer success professionals have an impact on delivering happiness across our organization every day.
[00:05:29] I guess we've been talking about friction points, right? That's the whole theme of today. To understand our friction point and where Totango campaigns truly came to the rescue for us, I want you to kind of imagine this scenario. So imagine tomorrow morning, you wake up in your hotel room. If you're staying at the Doubletree, you fix yourself a really nice cup of that instant coffee. If you're staying over there, you know what I'm talking about. And you check your email or maybe you check your IMs, right? You're trying to get things together for the day, and you get a notification that you are now responsible for managing 32000 more accounts than you have right now. First, what do 32000 accounts even look like? And I mean accounts, not customers. We're talking accounts and in each account, we know has multiple key contacts. Has anybody ever been to Red Rocks in Colorado? Yeah. Awesome. If you haven't been, definitely go. It's a world-renowned venue in Colorado. It's absolutely beautiful right outside of Denver. But to give you some perspective on what 32000 accounts look like, Red Rocks has a capacity of 9500. So managing 32000 accounts is the equivalent of our team of 48 CSMs being mainstage at Red Rocks, looking out onto a sold-out show for three consecutive days and maybe throwing in a little opening act there on the right.
[00:07:00] But it's a lot and it can seem a little bit daunting. You think about that. How does it make you feel? The ratio is around one CSM to every 700 accounts. You factor in two to three key contacts per account. That's about one CSM to every 1400 to 2100 engagements. That's a lot. And maybe you have some of these feelings go through your head. I call these the CSM woes. They can also be referred to as the CSM stages of grief at different times, little feelings of panic, maybe some anxiety. When I was a CSM this is exactly how I would've felt hearing that or checking my emails and realizing that.
Ashley Butler [00:07:49] But today, what we're gonna talk about and focus on is how our team implemented Totango campaigns to make this completely manageable so that now we're feeling a little more like this. And it's all due to campaigns, which is super, super awesome. And we're so, so grateful. To give you an idea of how campaigns have impacted us, I think it's important to give you a sneak peek at our segmentation strategy and how we're engaging with our customers at Zoom. So you can see based on the graphs that we've got MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) value. We segment customers based on MRR, but I will preface with saying that there's a strong correlation we've found between the MRR value of an account and also the complexity of an account. So we can segment our accounts based on MRR, because typically accounts that are over $5000 MRR, they're far more complex. They've got multiple office locations, multiple integrations. So this segmentation model truly works for us based on the level of CSM engagement that's needed to assist these people. And, the type of assistance they're going to need is particularly upfront during onboarding.
[00:09:07] So that said, with regards to our communication strategy, it looks a little bit different. In some of the other sessions, we've broken these out by like high touch, medium touch, and then tech-touch. Right. So we have two segments up here. Accounts over $5000 MRR, these are what we define as high touch and they're going to receive a dedicated assigned CSM. And you can see the ratio is about for strategic accounts, it's like 1 to 10 roughly. There are always variables in CS, not everybody falls into a little box. But then we've got 1 to 30 for accounts over $5000 MRR. When you move to the $500 to $5000 MRR segment, that's where campaigns truly start to make an impact in the workload for our CSMs. This is when we start incorporating automation. We start doing it upfront with onboarding as well as continued engagements through Totango campaigns for our customers that are established. The ratio increases dramatically for customers in this segment, and we can do so because these deployments for us are typically more straightforward. Once we get through the onboarding phases, our CSMs do a lot of the training with each of the customers that they work with. When they get through that and the customer is set up and we can release them and they're ready to go and doing great. The capacity, they can handle so many more accounts here.
Ashley Butler [00:10:41] But for today's intents and purposes, the truly unique butterfly of our segmentation is this bottom segment. Prior to using Totango campaigns, we never had the opportunity to engage. When you calculate all of this, the 32000 accounts, that's obviously only one segment of several that we support. The real number of accounts is over 45000 that we manage with a team of 48 CSMs. So I'll let Claire talk about our tech touch segment and what makes us so unique to the other segments in that we do not have an assigned CSM for this segment. Everything is automated through the system from onboarding to renewal. So go ahead.
Claire Grayeb [00:11:29] Thank you, Ashley. A little backstory here: when I was first hired on at Zoom, my sole first purpose was to deal with this 32000.
Ashley Butler [00:11:39] No pressure.
Claire Grayeb [00:11:40] My boss said this group of people has never been communicated with by a CSM, it did not fall under our umbrella at all. Get to it girl. So that was my first big project and I did it solely using Totango campaigns. What's important to note about this segment, like Ashley mentioned, is it doesn't necessarily have that one dedicated success manager. We've heard this theme of tech touch throughout the day, which was great to hear, but it goes to a more CS advisory team. So start out with one, two. And now we have four within that CS advisory segment and they make up one team and they handle our tech touch customers. So there are a lot of similarities. They get a lot of the same campaigns. They get all the same resources that our mid-market, one-to-many segment gets. It's just a little bit more vague, if you would say so. When I send a campaign from the other segment, it comes from a signature.
Ashley Butler [00:12:43] Yeah. It's a signature line. Essentially, all communications are the exact same sans signature line, which is CS advisor team versus the actual success manager. You might be wondering, "OK, well when does the CS advisor team actually engage these people". What happens is when the campaign emails go out, if the customer replies, then it's going round-robin through the CS advisor team in an email queue and they'll take the account, whether it's a customer that actually wants custom training or maybe they have a support question or they have a feature request, which is really cool. The CSM will then work with them, and our CSMs- I've heard a couple of times in sessions today that there's this term like junior level- the folks who are managing our CS advisor queue, it's not enough replies to even make it and that's 32000+. We don't receive enough replies, which tells us we're doing a good job with the upfront messaging, from customers, that it even warrants a full-time position. Our CSMs still have other managed accounts, right. So everyone is really on the same level. It's just almost an added responsibility. So those CSMs have probably a little bit lower book of business overall. So I just want to make that clear.
[00:14:12] But with regards to anybody who is not using campaign automation because you have your reservations, I completely understand that. Prior to joining Zoom, I was with a small bootstrap startup and our upper management was absolutely against that. They were like, you're going to seem like robots. Every customer deserves a personal touch. I've heard everything. So I want to dispel some arguments that are very commonly heard in my day to day anyways about folks who are against automation and talk about the benefits for you. I'll just list them out here.
[00:14:50] So the first is our CSMs have time to personally follow up with each customer. They have a book business of, you know, it's manageable. That's great. We're gonna talk about how you can improve upon that. Also, automation will make our messaging feel robotic, impersonal. We've all heard this one. It doesn't have to be robotic. We'll talk about making your messaging thoughtful and incorporating your brand's voice to do so in just aCcouple of minutes. Also, we're already successfully engaging our customers. Ashley, we're already crushing it. We don't need to do anything to optimize. False, as Dwight Schrute would say. And we'll talk about that as well.
[00:15:33] So the first argument. Well, Ash, our CSM have time to personally follow up with every customer that they manage. Well, that's great. But is it the best use of your time? And I'm not sure who in the room is a Customer Success Manager or supports CSMs or maybe you manage CSMs. But what you can do with automation is reduce repetition, reduce redundancies, particularly with email communications that are going out, and you can free up your CSM's time to focus on what I consider high impact tasks. It's the core competencies of what makes a good CSM. It's strategic problem-solving. It's building good customer relationships and working directly with people. A lot of times in CS, we talk about SuccessPlays and we need more SuccessPlays. In Ops, we're always talking about that sort of stuff.
[00:16:31] But Malcolm [Gladwell].... I don't know if anybody's read outliers. Anybody? It's a fantastic book. It's about a historical view of successful people if you haven't read it. Read it. It's amazing. But there is one quote in this book that really struck a chord with me when I read it. And it's resonated with me in everything that I've done from the work I do at Zoom, so on and so forth. And he says those three things, autonomy, complexity, and a clear connection between effort and reward, are what most people will agree the three things that work needs to have to be satisfying. So when you think about your team, you want to make sure that the work that your team is doing is high impact tasks that are going to give them autonomy, give them a sense of complexity. And sending an email with onboarding resources, rinse and repeat, new customer, a new email, same resources, maybe a canned response, it's just not doing it. With Totango campaigns, you can actually eliminate that altogether so that your team knows the second they have a new account, "boom, boom, boom". They're gonna have whatever they need to receive immediate value upfront in that communication. They're also going to have how they contact support, how they get the help that they need. And it goes further than this as well, which we'll talk about a little bit later.
Claire Grayeb [00:17:56] Yeah, perfect. And the next, if you remember, is automation can make my communication sound robotic. All the time you think of brand consistency, you think of things like your logo, your website, those like basic barebone things you see right off the bat. But brand consistency is a lot more than that. It's your tone, your voice, how you communicate to customers and the feeling your customers walk away with after you communicate with them. And you may think, "I don't have like a person that I could dedicate to comms (communications) or thinking about things like brand consistency". But it's really about using your resources. For instance, I partner really closely with the marketing team. There's only one of me there. There's like 45 of them, right? So I partner really closely with the customer marketing team. We meet once a week. We talk every day. That way you don't have to reinvent the wheel. If you look at things like your blog, your website, you can see the tone within those kinds of resources. You just have to take a step back and evaluate how you can use them for your own messaging. So it's just, yeah, that's really critical.
Ashley Butler [00:19:00] And, I know that if I draft an email to a customer from my personal inbox, thank God I have Grammarly. So that's a benefit. But I have my own tone right in how I talk. I happen to say, "dude" a lot in communication. So it's a blessing that I have Claire to help out with this type of stuff. But you really don't realize if right now your CSMs are tasked with doing this manually. If anything, that needs to stop, whether you're doing like some sort of canned responses or whatnot. But truly, just let the system do these emails. Anything that's repetitious, you can let it do it for you and just save yourself a ton of time.
[00:19:47] But why is this important, right? Why does brand voice matter at all? Well, it really comes down to revenue for your company. So if you're looking to build a case on why an executive team should really care at all about this, consistent brand presentation, including brand messaging and your brand voice, across all platforms can increase revenue by up to 23%, from Forbes, not me. So it's important and it can impact your bottom line.
[00:20:17] This is my very favorite. So the whole argument of, "Well, we're already touching everybody." Well, we were too. It was going good. But we had the opportunity to do something really monumental, I mean, I can't think of another company in our industry that has the ability for a CS team of 48 to have a minimum threshold for CSM resources of one hundred dollars MRR. I mean, it's pretty amazing. So really, think outside of the box. You might be touching everybody now. But are most of your CS services paid? Could you possibly adjust some things? Campaign automation really allows you to go from playing in a living room to playing to a sold-out crowd at Red Rocks. So think about that in terms of expanding your customer reach because we were really able to do so.
Claire Grayeb [00:21:11] Awesome. Yeah. So I know it can seem daunting. When I first started, we weren't really leveraging campaigns to the best ability. That's saying it lightly. There's like a few campaigns that were created by a CSM in his spare time at home at night, which is totally fine. And that's also me too. But it never was really given that much dedication before. I know it can seem daunting, but I think it's really important to take a step back and find the gaps. And the need for all these campaigns are there and they're easily found. So, the first is onboarding accounts and campaigns. The first being general setup and configuration. What I need to do to see the value ASAP. So think of things you need right off the bat.
Ashley Butler [00:21:52] Profile set up.
Claire Grayeb [00:21:54] How do I sign into my account? How do I set up my profile? How do I use it? Just basic login kind of functionalities. What you need within the first 24 hours of getting my product. And the next is key customer resources. What can I do to learn more on my own? So with this campaign, we really hone in on training and our training resources. CSMs also provide dedicated personalized training. But we also want to provide our live training, our recorded training so that way they could pass it on to their users while they work with the key stakeholder to create personalized training.
Ashley Butler [00:22:30] Our public training team works on a weekly schedule. Right. It's pre-scheduled. So every chance we have for a customer to attend a public training, which is a little more generalized versus requiring time out of the CSM schedule for a custom training, that is essentially the same exact material, that is a win for us. Just allowing them more capacity.
Claire Grayeb [00:22:52] It's leveraging what you already have. You don't want it to go to waste. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. You just want to add in addition to that. So the next we have add-on purchases. I purchased this. I'm excited. Now what? So this was a big project we worked on a few months ago with our new product, Zoom Phone. And we had to create these all these onboarding comms. And we beat marketing to it by like two months, I think. So they're just getting their's going. So we're really proud of that. But if you think about it, if a customer purchases a new product of yours, they're onboarding for the very first time just with a new product. You want to make sure you give them the same service that you did with your core product. Otherwise, it's going to be a bad experience. So you want to make sure that they're onboarding for the first time technically with this new product. You don't want to forget about them. And then next, you have your established accounts. You don't want to forget about them. They've been loyal to you. They just don't go down the wayside. So we have our product updates. What's new? How are you innovating? Innovation is really important to us.
Ashley Butler [00:23:56] And our customers love this.
Claire Grayeb [00:23:57] Yeah. They are really big into feature requests. They're all about it. So we want to show them every quarter with a big release email that they've been heard. Here's your feature request in an email with screenshots, bright lights, you name it. So every quarter, that's one big thing that I push. The next are renewal notices. Do you value me as a loyal customer? We have a whole renewal stream, but we think it's really critical that renewal notice from a CSM comes six days prior to renewal. It's more personalized. It starts a conversation in case you need to think prior to that renewal. So that's really key to us because we really value transparency. And lastly, service comms. Are you keeping me in the know on what's happening? It's not very fun.
Ashley Butler [00:24:40] These are the ones that make people cringe sometimes.
Claire Grayeb [00:24:41] These give me gray hair. I have to dye my hair because of the service comms. But what we really want to highlight is that transparency is always valued. So even though they're not fun to do, data center notifications, service disruption, things like that, the customer is really going to appreciate you being forthcoming and notifying them instead of just them reaching out, and then you reactively let them know what's going on.
Ashley Butler [00:25:07] Yeah, recently we had a situation. I won't dive into details, but we had a situation and the whole team was like, "Claire, notify the team like, hey, this is going out.
Claire Grayeb [00:25:17] And the team was like, everyone buckle down.
Ashley Butler [00:25:21] And then after it went out, everyone was like, we were like OK. Let's get a pulse check, what's the sentiment like? And the CSMs were like, "Actually they handled that really well." They really said they appreciated us reaching out and being ahead of it and letting them know. So it's super important. It builds loyalty and trust with your customers, and our customers truly, truly appreciate it. Whether the news is good or bad. So we let them know both and we'll use Totango to do just that.
Claire Grayeb [00:25:52] Yeah. And then next, we'll just quickly get an overview of campaign messaging and cadence. It's important to note that before I started almost three years ago, marketing was owning all CS messaging. They were owning all messaging. So Totango campaigns are really, really important to us, and close to our hearts because we were able to take back the messaging that we were sending to our customers. And that is invaluable. So within week one, we send a welcome in email, again, onboarding, how to log in, how to access 24/7 support. You know, those basic things you need to know right off the bat. And then week two, training, live, weekly, on-demand training or our YouTube channel. If someone asks that key stakeholder, how do I log in, they can you just point them in that right direction,.
Ashley Butler [00:26:40] Reduce CSM capacity, help customers be self-sufficient with the resources that are available, right?
Claire Grayeb [00:26:46] Yeah. And then week four, reporting. This campaign is really unique because it actually pushes data that we have in Totango. So it's a quick screenshot of their account. Who's using what? So you can see the ROI within one email in week four. Yeah. So it shows their customer data, which it's important to bring the numbers in. It can't all just be words.
Ashley Butler [00:27:09] And customers have that information available in a dashboard within our product, but not everyone is logging in regularly to look at it. So it's nice to showcase that and give people a sense of where they stand. So it opens dialogue, whether it's good or bad usage.
Claire Grayeb [00:27:24] And then down the line, we have in month two to three, more behavioral campaigns. So if there's low usage, reaching out, seeing what's going on, why aren't people using the product? Just a quick check-in. And that's, again, repeated every two, three months as people are having low usage.
[00:27:42] And then lastly, we have my favorite, those ongoing campaigns. Things like product releases, renewal notifications, and then my actual favorite is our 90-day check-in email, which is connected back to Totango touchpoints if you're familiar. So if a person hasn't had a touch in 90 days, they are notified.
Ashley Butler [00:28:03] Yep. So I want to make it clear that we use Totango campaigns as a complement to all of the hard work that our CSMs are doing on a regular basis. Our CSMs are managing anywhere from - well, we'll exclude enterprise - but for the segments that impact our intents and purposes with campaigns, like six to seven hundred accounts. So you have an idea of what we're dealing with. And they're engaging with customers all the time. But it is impossible to, well, I shouldn't say impossible. Unrealistic. But it's not realistic for us to expect our CSMs to have a manual touch with customers every 90 days. But we want that to be a value add for the customer. To know that we're there every 90 days. So we used the campaign just to engage with them. And then the CSM knows, because it's in Totango, and they can follow up as needed.
Claire Grayeb [00:29:02] Gives you that sense of control. You don't have to ask someone who is managing 600 customers, "Hey, are you reaching out every 90 days to customers who are MIA or established." You don't even have to ask. You know it's being done.
Claire Grayeb [00:29:17] This is just an overview of just two of our campaigns. And if you want to see more, you can reach out to us anytime we can send you all the screenshots you want. But this is our first campaign with that, again, tech touch segment. It's a little hard for me to see. So it's just welcoming them aboard, letting them know that more resources are coming. So it's setting the stage. This is the first of many. Stay tuned. More is coming.
Ashley Butler [00:29:46] We're also telling them to sign in. So clear call to ask those people to log in and get things set up.
Claire Grayeb [00:29:50] Yes. The second paragraph goes over how to log in, how to sign in, how to set up your account, how to set up your profile. And then next, the help center. 24-hour support in case they need something urgently. Customers can always respond back to the e-mail and it's going to go to a CS advisory queue and they will get responded to right away. The next is our training e-mail. Again, this is really important. Highlights all our key training. We have a team dedicated to training. So we want to make sure their efforts are being touched. They're not going unnoticed. So again it just highlights all the training and they can forward that along to any of their users.
Ashley Butler [00:30:33] Yeah. And these are the pretty templated emails. We also do the HTML strategy. It looks more realistic. And as we mentioned at the beginning of the session, literally the only difference between the emails that CSM assigned accounts get in that mid-market segment and what tech touch customers get in the lower tier is that signature line. It's either a variable for the CSM's name or it will say CS advisor team. So that's the main difference there.
[00:31:05] So you might be wondering, like, OK, that's cool. You guys created some campaigns, you implemented them. How do you know if they're working? And a lot of times people are, if you're in marketing, looking at email opens and click-through rates. Right. But we want to look at the data and what that's telling us. And fortunately, because this is all managed in Totango, we can clearly see that and we have the data points to look at. So you really have to think about what really matters. First of all, what's the objective of the campaign for onboarding? Specifically, we're trying to drive usage within our product, right? So we have a field in between onboarding and established, typically we're factoring this based on the first customer's first 90 days. They will be considered in onboarding. So we want to see what's happening with their usage between onboarding and established. And this is our bread and butter of "Are these campaigns working for us?". So our tech touch segment has no assigned CSM. We don't get enough replies from customers that even warrants a dedicated full-time person for that role, which is good. And the health between onboarding and established absolutely skyrockets, which means, one, our product team is amazing and our products intuitive. So give them a shout out. But also the resources that we're providing to equip our customers to be self-sufficient and get started with our product, ASAP and see value, they're crafted well and they're working. People know how to contact support because we see when they have open tickets in Totango. So this is what we're looking at. While we have benchmarks for email opens, clicks.
Claire Grayeb [00:32:54] The marketing, we have benchmarks. Again, I keep an eye on it, but it's so much more than that and we want our team to be so much more than that. And it's also interesting, our open rates are way higher than the standard.
Ashley Butler [00:33:14] Some do's and don'ts.
Claire Grayeb [00:33:16] Here are some dos and don'ts, like I mentioned. I've been doing this for almost three years. It's been trial and error. We have a supportive team. We have supportive customers, supportive manager. Don't be afraid. Just get started. That's the most important thing I would preface. Just there's no time like now to get it going and see how it goes.
Claire Grayeb [00:33:34] So we have our dos. My first one is just to be concise and direct with your messaging. Our tone, our brand, we're not long-winded. We're not sending a five-page email. It's gonna be in one e-mail. You're gonna know the important things right off the bat. So you don't want the key message to get lost.
Claire Grayeb [00:33:54] Next, lean on the internal teams for insight into your brand's voice. Like I mentioned, don't reinvent the wheel if you don't have those resources there, just lean on each other. Lean on different departments to kind of craft something that you can work with. And the next monitor performance and embrace iteration. So keep an eye on things and change. If we don't change, we die. So I never just set it and forget it. Every quarter, reevaluate, reassess, and see what can be improved.
Ashley Butler [00:34:24] And it's good to have a regular cadence for when you're reviewing your campaigns because that will keep you - and we'll talk about this in the don'ts - but from pivoting too quickly.
Claire Grayeb [00:34:33] Right. Yeah, exactly. So some don'ts that I've learned through trial and error. Don't overwhelm the inbox. I send emails. Marketings sends e-mails. Billing sends emails. There's a lot of emails. You don't want people to stop reading your emails. If you're sending too many, they're going to stop reading it. So there's a fine line of too much and too little. So just keep an eye on that.
Claire Grayeb [00:34:55] And the next, don't overcomplicate things. Like I mentioned, that Zoom Phone project me and Ashley worked on. We spent hours, weeks working on segments, tears. We really just need to take a day. And then the segmentation that we used was like the most basic segmentation you can imagine. And it's been like six months and it's perfect. So just take a step back don't over complicate it.
Claire Grayeb [00:35:19] And lastly, don't pivot too quickly. I know we mentioned embrace iterations, but don't move too quickly. Give it a few months, three months to see how it's going. And then you can change it up. Give customers time to get those. You can see the bigger picture. You don't want to pivot just from one piece of feedback. You've got to see the whole picture first. You want to have a good sample size. Give it some time.
Ashley Butler [00:35:43] So as far as next steps, raise your hand in here if you have Totango Campaigns already. Most people. Some people. Cool, if you don't have Totango campaigns on your account already, go get them. That would be my next step for you. But then take action. Some people are maybe looking for different ways to incorporate additional campaigns into your business model. So first things first, assess your needs. And this can be a great opportunity for a think tank session with your team to figure out, "OK, what where are there redundancies? Where is the repetition? How could we potentially mitigate this with a campaign email?" So then you can start planning your campaign. You can figure out your audience. Chances are you've got segments already built out in Totango. So it'll make it a lot easier. And what's your objective? What do you want them to do? Are you wanting them to use your product or like what's your goal? So, establish that. And then you can craft your messaging around that. I know we've talked a lot about how Claire's paired very well with our marketing team, and there's a good synergy there. I know that's not always the case in a lot of organizations, but it's a really, really good opportunity to break down that silo and take that initiative to partner and work more closely with somebody in marketing and still maintain ownership of the messaging post-sale, which is super important to CS and what we stand for.
[00:37:18] When you capture messaging, make sure it incorporates your brand voice. That's why I say it's good to have a clear understanding of what that is and marketing can help with that. Or if nobody's owning that, have a think tank session with somebody in marketing and draft something up to present. Spearhead something. Make sure your message has a clear call to action. I've gotten so many emails from companies where there are just infinite things going on. It's like your discounts here, but sign up here for this exclusive club and then go over here. And I do nothing because there are so many things. It's telling me to do three to five things that I do nothing. And that's what your customers will do too. So try to have a clear, defined call to action in your messaging.
[00:38:00] And then just don't hesitate to deploy and monitor. I think that was our biggest fear. When we released this new product, we were so particular about we have to nail it and it's got to be perfect and we were overthinking things quite a bit that we hesitated to actually deploy anything for several days. So, deploy it and start small. This doesn't have to be an elaborate five email onboarding program or information for a brand new product that's coming out. If this is your first go at it, start small with a single email and you can always build from there. But thank you guys so much. I hope this has been helpful. And remember, we got this.
[Moderator] Jamie [00:38:43] Okay. So I think we might have time for one question. Maybe one to two quick questions. I think the audience just really enjoyed this so much. It was really helpful to hear all the detail and all the good advice. So any questions from the audience?
Audience Member 1 [00:39:08] Thank you. So you guys mentioned iterating on your campaigns to kind of find the best fit in lieu of kind of A/B testing them. How do you measure and track, like if you want to change your messaging until you really get it right? How do you guys manage doing that?
Claire Grayeb [00:39:23] Yeah. So in tandem with Totango, I use another larger like marketing software to email random service comms and things like that to kind of fuse together. And that I do A/B testing for, but this is mostly based on feedback. I talk to CSMs every day. We're on the same team and that's why they let me know when customer feedback comes in. Just like little things like confusion like I sent an e-mail last week and there is a screenshot and someone said people didn't know it was a screenshot. They're like they are trying to click on that icon. So it's like, all right, let me go change. Let me edit the screenshot, you know? So I think a lot of my iterations are based on feedback and just working closely with the CSMs who work really closely with their customers and change it around that.
Ashley Butler [00:40:12] And initial comms as well. Yeah, I mean, you share in our chat when you're about to send a comm so the team can review it and give any thoughts.
Claire Grayeb [00:40:21] Totally. Every everything I send, the team knows. There's gonna be no time where a CSM is going to be surprised that a comm was sent out. They always have at least 24 hours to review, give their feedback. There are the customer's mirror. They know better than I do. Give them 24 hours and then I always make a little bit tweaks and then send. Thank you. Yeah. Okay.
[Moderator] Jamie [00:40:42] One more question.
Audience Member 2 [00:40:50] I was just wondering, who's your target audience for campaigns? Is it primarily just the key contacts you're talking about? Is it all your users?
Ashley Butler [00:40:57] Yeah, that's a great question. Our org is set up a little uniquely. So we're contacting account owners and admins tied to the account profile.
Claire Grayeb [00:41:12] And that's like and Ts and Cs. That's part of our contract. We don't communicate to end users. So we don't have really a choice, unfortunately. But that's a great question. That's important to mention. It is admins and owners of the account.
Ashley Butler [00:41:25] So a lot of the information that we provide, it's almost tailored in a way that we encourage admins and owners to pass this along to your end-users, which is super critical in our business to make sure that your key contacts, your champions for that account are ready for that responsibility and that they know what they're responsible for in terms of the deployment.
[Moderator] Jamie [00:41:53] I think we're out of time. Thank you, Ashley, Claire, so much for your time. We really appreciate it.
Claire Grayeb [00:00:07] Hi everyone.
Ashley Butler [00:00:08] Thank you, guys. I figured everybody might be in a little bit of a food coma, so hopefully, you tamed it down on the ravioli. But thank you guys so much for being here. Anybody else first timer in New York? Just me. Oh, OK. Perfect. It's awesome. I'm so excited to be here to talk about our experience at this great summit, specifically using Totango campaigns to truly scale our team in an extremely fast-growing business. So my name is Ashley Butler. I'm our Customer Success Operations Manager, whew, long-winded title. Essentially, my job is to just help our CSMs be as productive and efficient as possible and make their lives easier along the way. And I work very closely with Claire. I'll let her go ahead and introduce herself.
Claire Grayeb [00:00:56] Hey, everyone, I'm Claire Grayeb. I'm the CS Communication Lead at Zoom and I help basically all non-sales teams communicate with their customers, from CS to Billing to Marketplace, a cohesive communication to those customers.
Ashley Butler [00:01:10] Yeah. So just a peek at where we're at, where we're going over the next 35, five minutes or so. For those who aren't familiar with Zoom, we'll talk a little bit about our company and our team, and give you some background to our structure. We'll also talk about our unique segmentation approach, because that's a key factor in our campaign strategy. There may be some people in the room who are not currently using campaigns within Totango. So we'll dispel some common arguments that people tend to say to me about why they aren't using campaign automation. And we'll also share some tips for your campaign messaging and cadence that we've learned through mistakes ourselves and through all of Claire's experience, as well as measuring success. So you implemented these and it's a little bit more than just opens and clicks. There's more to it than that. So we're gonna talk about actual results and what you need to look for in campaign success. And then we're not gonna leave empty-handed. So we'll give you an action plan for when you leave here today that you can implement in your organization. Sound good?
Claire Grayeb [00:02:15] Perfect. Thank you, Ashley. So here's just a few quick facts. For those who don't know, Zoom is a modern enterprise cloud solution designed to help people communicate frictionlessly. It's all over the world. People in 94% of all countries and territories on Earth use Zoom, so that comes out to about 226 out of 241 countries and territories. And we have two thousand employees worldwide. Our headquarter is in San Jose, California. And then we have a Q2 Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 73. And that's something that we're super proud of. We feel like it's very impressive and that just shows how our customers feel about us, and it's also a great way to collect feedback and feature requests. That's something that's very important to Zoom as a culture.
Ashley Butler [00:03:00] Absolutely.
[00:03:11] Our team is spread out globally and this is it. Just like I could tear up. Our team is so fantastic. We are like a big, happy family, honestly. And once a year, we all get together at a growth summit from around the world. It's the one time of year we can actually talk about things that are not work-related and just be friends and hang out. And I would say we look like an amazing, happy bunch. So I thought it was postcard-worthy and I had to inject that into the deck.
[00:03:41] A little breakdown about our team and our structure - and I know that there are folks from different organizations of all different sizes. Right? Some people have CS teams of 1200. Other people may have a team of 5 or10. And this is going to be applicable regardless of the organization that you're in. We have, and this is already outdated because I mentioned we're growing quickly, we have 48 dedicated CSMs. And we also have 18 more specialized roles, which is a little bit unique. In those specialized roles, we've got leadership, our managers. We've got our public training team that used to fall under our support umbrella but moved under CS because we felt it was a little more applicable. We have online event consultants, operations and enablement, and then project managers as well. More technical project managers that work on more complex deployments. You may look at that and think like, wow, you have a lot of specialized roles in your organization for the amount of CSMs. Keep in mind that we did not have a dedicated ops team. Costen will probably remember this. I was a hybrid CSM wearing multiple hats, as we all do. We didn't have a dedicated ops team until February of this year. And that's for Zoom, right? We're a pretty large company, tons of employees all around the world. Anyway, our whole motto is to deliver happiness to our customers as a company. But you can see we developed our own mission statement as a team because we really wanted it to embody how we individually as customer success professionals have an impact on delivering happiness across our organization every day.
[00:05:29] I guess we've been talking about friction points, right? That's the whole theme of today. To understand our friction point and where Totango campaigns truly came to the rescue for us, I want you to kind of imagine this scenario. So imagine tomorrow morning, you wake up in your hotel room. If you're staying at the Doubletree, you fix yourself a really nice cup of that instant coffee. If you're staying over there, you know what I'm talking about. And you check your email or maybe you check your IMs, right? You're trying to get things together for the day, and you get a notification that you are now responsible for managing 32000 more accounts than you have right now. First, what do 32000 accounts even look like? And I mean accounts, not customers. We're talking accounts and in each account, we know has multiple key contacts. Has anybody ever been to Red Rocks in Colorado? Yeah. Awesome. If you haven't been, definitely go. It's a world-renowned venue in Colorado. It's absolutely beautiful right outside of Denver. But to give you some perspective on what 32000 accounts look like, Red Rocks has a capacity of 9500. So managing 32000 accounts is the equivalent of our team of 48 CSMs being mainstage at Red Rocks, looking out onto a sold-out show for three consecutive days and maybe throwing in a little opening act there on the right.
[00:07:00] But it's a lot and it can seem a little bit daunting. You think about that. How does it make you feel? The ratio is around one CSM to every 700 accounts. You factor in two to three key contacts per account. That's about one CSM to every 1400 to 2100 engagements. That's a lot. And maybe you have some of these feelings go through your head. I call these the CSM woes. They can also be referred to as the CSM stages of grief at different times, little feelings of panic, maybe some anxiety. When I was a CSM this is exactly how I would've felt hearing that or checking my emails and realizing that.
Ashley Butler [00:07:49] But today, what we're gonna talk about and focus on is how our team implemented Totango campaigns to make this completely manageable so that now we're feeling a little more like this. And it's all due to campaigns, which is super, super awesome. And we're so, so grateful. To give you an idea of how campaigns have impacted us, I think it's important to give you a sneak peek at our segmentation strategy and how we're engaging with our customers at Zoom. So you can see based on the graphs that we've got MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) value. We segment customers based on MRR, but I will preface with saying that there's a strong correlation we've found between the MRR value of an account and also the complexity of an account. So we can segment our accounts based on MRR, because typically accounts that are over $5000 MRR, they're far more complex. They've got multiple office locations, multiple integrations. So this segmentation model truly works for us based on the level of CSM engagement that's needed to assist these people. And, the type of assistance they're going to need is particularly upfront during onboarding.
[00:09:07] So that said, with regards to our communication strategy, it looks a little bit different. In some of the other sessions, we've broken these out by like high touch, medium touch, and then tech-touch. Right. So we have two segments up here. Accounts over $5000 MRR, these are what we define as high touch and they're going to receive a dedicated assigned CSM. And you can see the ratio is about for strategic accounts, it's like 1 to 10 roughly. There are always variables in CS, not everybody falls into a little box. But then we've got 1 to 30 for accounts over $5000 MRR. When you move to the $500 to $5000 MRR segment, that's where campaigns truly start to make an impact in the workload for our CSMs. This is when we start incorporating automation. We start doing it upfront with onboarding as well as continued engagements through Totango campaigns for our customers that are established. The ratio increases dramatically for customers in this segment, and we can do so because these deployments for us are typically more straightforward. Once we get through the onboarding phases, our CSMs do a lot of the training with each of the customers that they work with. When they get through that and the customer is set up and we can release them and they're ready to go and doing great. The capacity, they can handle so many more accounts here.
Ashley Butler [00:10:41] But for today's intents and purposes, the truly unique butterfly of our segmentation is this bottom segment. Prior to using Totango campaigns, we never had the opportunity to engage. When you calculate all of this, the 32000 accounts, that's obviously only one segment of several that we support. The real number of accounts is over 45000 that we manage with a team of 48 CSMs. So I'll let Claire talk about our tech touch segment and what makes us so unique to the other segments in that we do not have an assigned CSM for this segment. Everything is automated through the system from onboarding to renewal. So go ahead.
Claire Grayeb [00:11:29] Thank you, Ashley. A little backstory here: when I was first hired on at Zoom, my sole first purpose was to deal with this 32000.
Ashley Butler [00:11:39] No pressure.
Claire Grayeb [00:11:40] My boss said this group of people has never been communicated with by a CSM, it did not fall under our umbrella at all. Get to it girl. So that was my first big project and I did it solely using Totango campaigns. What's important to note about this segment, like Ashley mentioned, is it doesn't necessarily have that one dedicated success manager. We've heard this theme of tech touch throughout the day, which was great to hear, but it goes to a more CS advisory team. So start out with one, two. And now we have four within that CS advisory segment and they make up one team and they handle our tech touch customers. So there are a lot of similarities. They get a lot of the same campaigns. They get all the same resources that our mid-market, one-to-many segment gets. It's just a little bit more vague, if you would say so. When I send a campaign from the other segment, it comes from a signature.
Ashley Butler [00:12:43] Yeah. It's a signature line. Essentially, all communications are the exact same sans signature line, which is CS advisor team versus the actual success manager. You might be wondering, "OK, well when does the CS advisor team actually engage these people". What happens is when the campaign emails go out, if the customer replies, then it's going round-robin through the CS advisor team in an email queue and they'll take the account, whether it's a customer that actually wants custom training or maybe they have a support question or they have a feature request, which is really cool. The CSM will then work with them, and our CSMs- I've heard a couple of times in sessions today that there's this term like junior level- the folks who are managing our CS advisor queue, it's not enough replies to even make it and that's 32000+. We don't receive enough replies, which tells us we're doing a good job with the upfront messaging, from customers, that it even warrants a full-time position. Our CSMs still have other managed accounts, right. So everyone is really on the same level. It's just almost an added responsibility. So those CSMs have probably a little bit lower book of business overall. So I just want to make that clear.
[00:14:12] But with regards to anybody who is not using campaign automation because you have your reservations, I completely understand that. Prior to joining Zoom, I was with a small bootstrap startup and our upper management was absolutely against that. They were like, you're going to seem like robots. Every customer deserves a personal touch. I've heard everything. So I want to dispel some arguments that are very commonly heard in my day to day anyways about folks who are against automation and talk about the benefits for you. I'll just list them out here.
[00:14:50] So the first is our CSMs have time to personally follow up with each customer. They have a book business of, you know, it's manageable. That's great. We're gonna talk about how you can improve upon that. Also, automation will make our messaging feel robotic, impersonal. We've all heard this one. It doesn't have to be robotic. We'll talk about making your messaging thoughtful and incorporating your brand's voice to do so in just aCcouple of minutes. Also, we're already successfully engaging our customers. Ashley, we're already crushing it. We don't need to do anything to optimize. False, as Dwight Schrute would say. And we'll talk about that as well.
[00:15:33] So the first argument. Well, Ash, our CSM have time to personally follow up with every customer that they manage. Well, that's great. But is it the best use of your time? And I'm not sure who in the room is a Customer Success Manager or supports CSMs or maybe you manage CSMs. But what you can do with automation is reduce repetition, reduce redundancies, particularly with email communications that are going out, and you can free up your CSM's time to focus on what I consider high impact tasks. It's the core competencies of what makes a good CSM. It's strategic problem-solving. It's building good customer relationships and working directly with people. A lot of times in CS, we talk about SuccessPlays and we need more SuccessPlays. In Ops, we're always talking about that sort of stuff.
[00:16:31] But Malcolm [Gladwell].... I don't know if anybody's read outliers. Anybody? It's a fantastic book. It's about a historical view of successful people if you haven't read it. Read it. It's amazing. But there is one quote in this book that really struck a chord with me when I read it. And it's resonated with me in everything that I've done from the work I do at Zoom, so on and so forth. And he says those three things, autonomy, complexity, and a clear connection between effort and reward, are what most people will agree the three things that work needs to have to be satisfying. So when you think about your team, you want to make sure that the work that your team is doing is high impact tasks that are going to give them autonomy, give them a sense of complexity. And sending an email with onboarding resources, rinse and repeat, new customer, a new email, same resources, maybe a canned response, it's just not doing it. With Totango campaigns, you can actually eliminate that altogether so that your team knows the second they have a new account, "boom, boom, boom". They're gonna have whatever they need to receive immediate value upfront in that communication. They're also going to have how they contact support, how they get the help that they need. And it goes further than this as well, which we'll talk about a little bit later.
Claire Grayeb [00:17:56] Yeah, perfect. And the next, if you remember, is automation can make my communication sound robotic. All the time you think of brand consistency, you think of things like your logo, your website, those like basic barebone things you see right off the bat. But brand consistency is a lot more than that. It's your tone, your voice, how you communicate to customers and the feeling your customers walk away with after you communicate with them. And you may think, "I don't have like a person that I could dedicate to comms (communications) or thinking about things like brand consistency". But it's really about using your resources. For instance, I partner really closely with the marketing team. There's only one of me there. There's like 45 of them, right? So I partner really closely with the customer marketing team. We meet once a week. We talk every day. That way you don't have to reinvent the wheel. If you look at things like your blog, your website, you can see the tone within those kinds of resources. You just have to take a step back and evaluate how you can use them for your own messaging. So it's just, yeah, that's really critical.
Ashley Butler [00:19:00] And, I know that if I draft an email to a customer from my personal inbox, thank God I have Grammarly. So that's a benefit. But I have my own tone right in how I talk. I happen to say, "dude" a lot in communication. So it's a blessing that I have Claire to help out with this type of stuff. But you really don't realize if right now your CSMs are tasked with doing this manually. If anything, that needs to stop, whether you're doing like some sort of canned responses or whatnot. But truly, just let the system do these emails. Anything that's repetitious, you can let it do it for you and just save yourself a ton of time.
[00:19:47] But why is this important, right? Why does brand voice matter at all? Well, it really comes down to revenue for your company. So if you're looking to build a case on why an executive team should really care at all about this, consistent brand presentation, including brand messaging and your brand voice, across all platforms can increase revenue by up to 23%, from Forbes, not me. So it's important and it can impact your bottom line.
[00:20:17] This is my very favorite. So the whole argument of, "Well, we're already touching everybody." Well, we were too. It was going good. But we had the opportunity to do something really monumental, I mean, I can't think of another company in our industry that has the ability for a CS team of 48 to have a minimum threshold for CSM resources of one hundred dollars MRR. I mean, it's pretty amazing. So really, think outside of the box. You might be touching everybody now. But are most of your CS services paid? Could you possibly adjust some things? Campaign automation really allows you to go from playing in a living room to playing to a sold-out crowd at Red Rocks. So think about that in terms of expanding your customer reach because we were really able to do so.
Claire Grayeb [00:21:11] Awesome. Yeah. So I know it can seem daunting. When I first started, we weren't really leveraging campaigns to the best ability. That's saying it lightly. There's like a few campaigns that were created by a CSM in his spare time at home at night, which is totally fine. And that's also me too. But it never was really given that much dedication before. I know it can seem daunting, but I think it's really important to take a step back and find the gaps. And the need for all these campaigns are there and they're easily found. So, the first is onboarding accounts and campaigns. The first being general setup and configuration. What I need to do to see the value ASAP. So think of things you need right off the bat.
Ashley Butler [00:21:52] Profile set up.
Claire Grayeb [00:21:54] How do I sign into my account? How do I set up my profile? How do I use it? Just basic login kind of functionalities. What you need within the first 24 hours of getting my product. And the next is key customer resources. What can I do to learn more on my own? So with this campaign, we really hone in on training and our training resources. CSMs also provide dedicated personalized training. But we also want to provide our live training, our recorded training so that way they could pass it on to their users while they work with the key stakeholder to create personalized training.
Ashley Butler [00:22:30] Our public training team works on a weekly schedule. Right. It's pre-scheduled. So every chance we have for a customer to attend a public training, which is a little more generalized versus requiring time out of the CSM schedule for a custom training, that is essentially the same exact material, that is a win for us. Just allowing them more capacity.
Claire Grayeb [00:22:52] It's leveraging what you already have. You don't want it to go to waste. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. You just want to add in addition to that. So the next we have add-on purchases. I purchased this. I'm excited. Now what? So this was a big project we worked on a few months ago with our new product, Zoom Phone. And we had to create these all these onboarding comms. And we beat marketing to it by like two months, I think. So they're just getting their's going. So we're really proud of that. But if you think about it, if a customer purchases a new product of yours, they're onboarding for the very first time just with a new product. You want to make sure you give them the same service that you did with your core product. Otherwise, it's going to be a bad experience. So you want to make sure that they're onboarding for the first time technically with this new product. You don't want to forget about them. And then next, you have your established accounts. You don't want to forget about them. They've been loyal to you. They just don't go down the wayside. So we have our product updates. What's new? How are you innovating? Innovation is really important to us.
Ashley Butler [00:23:56] And our customers love this.
Claire Grayeb [00:23:57] Yeah. They are really big into feature requests. They're all about it. So we want to show them every quarter with a big release email that they've been heard. Here's your feature request in an email with screenshots, bright lights, you name it. So every quarter, that's one big thing that I push. The next are renewal notices. Do you value me as a loyal customer? We have a whole renewal stream, but we think it's really critical that renewal notice from a CSM comes six days prior to renewal. It's more personalized. It starts a conversation in case you need to think prior to that renewal. So that's really key to us because we really value transparency. And lastly, service comms. Are you keeping me in the know on what's happening? It's not very fun.
Ashley Butler [00:24:40] These are the ones that make people cringe sometimes.
Claire Grayeb [00:24:41] These give me gray hair. I have to dye my hair because of the service comms. But what we really want to highlight is that transparency is always valued. So even though they're not fun to do, data center notifications, service disruption, things like that, the customer is really going to appreciate you being forthcoming and notifying them instead of just them reaching out, and then you reactively let them know what's going on.
Ashley Butler [00:25:07] Yeah, recently we had a situation. I won't dive into details, but we had a situation and the whole team was like, "Claire, notify the team like, hey, this is going out.
Claire Grayeb [00:25:17] And the team was like, everyone buckle down.
Ashley Butler [00:25:21] And then after it went out, everyone was like, we were like OK. Let's get a pulse check, what's the sentiment like? And the CSMs were like, "Actually they handled that really well." They really said they appreciated us reaching out and being ahead of it and letting them know. So it's super important. It builds loyalty and trust with your customers, and our customers truly, truly appreciate it. Whether the news is good or bad. So we let them know both and we'll use Totango to do just that.
Claire Grayeb [00:25:52] Yeah. And then next, we'll just quickly get an overview of campaign messaging and cadence. It's important to note that before I started almost three years ago, marketing was owning all CS messaging. They were owning all messaging. So Totango campaigns are really, really important to us, and close to our hearts because we were able to take back the messaging that we were sending to our customers. And that is invaluable. So within week one, we send a welcome in email, again, onboarding, how to log in, how to access 24/7 support. You know, those basic things you need to know right off the bat. And then week two, training, live, weekly, on-demand training or our YouTube channel. If someone asks that key stakeholder, how do I log in, they can you just point them in that right direction,.
Ashley Butler [00:26:40] Reduce CSM capacity, help customers be self-sufficient with the resources that are available, right?
Claire Grayeb [00:26:46] Yeah. And then week four, reporting. This campaign is really unique because it actually pushes data that we have in Totango. So it's a quick screenshot of their account. Who's using what? So you can see the ROI within one email in week four. Yeah. So it shows their customer data, which it's important to bring the numbers in. It can't all just be words.
Ashley Butler [00:27:09] And customers have that information available in a dashboard within our product, but not everyone is logging in regularly to look at it. So it's nice to showcase that and give people a sense of where they stand. So it opens dialogue, whether it's good or bad usage.
Claire Grayeb [00:27:24] And then down the line, we have in month two to three, more behavioral campaigns. So if there's low usage, reaching out, seeing what's going on, why aren't people using the product? Just a quick check-in. And that's, again, repeated every two, three months as people are having low usage.
[00:27:42] And then lastly, we have my favorite, those ongoing campaigns. Things like product releases, renewal notifications, and then my actual favorite is our 90-day check-in email, which is connected back to Totango touchpoints if you're familiar. So if a person hasn't had a touch in 90 days, they are notified.
Ashley Butler [00:28:03] Yep. So I want to make it clear that we use Totango campaigns as a complement to all of the hard work that our CSMs are doing on a regular basis. Our CSMs are managing anywhere from - well, we'll exclude enterprise - but for the segments that impact our intents and purposes with campaigns, like six to seven hundred accounts. So you have an idea of what we're dealing with. And they're engaging with customers all the time. But it is impossible to, well, I shouldn't say impossible. Unrealistic. But it's not realistic for us to expect our CSMs to have a manual touch with customers every 90 days. But we want that to be a value add for the customer. To know that we're there every 90 days. So we used the campaign just to engage with them. And then the CSM knows, because it's in Totango, and they can follow up as needed.
Claire Grayeb [00:29:02] Gives you that sense of control. You don't have to ask someone who is managing 600 customers, "Hey, are you reaching out every 90 days to customers who are MIA or established." You don't even have to ask. You know it's being done.
Claire Grayeb [00:29:17] This is just an overview of just two of our campaigns. And if you want to see more, you can reach out to us anytime we can send you all the screenshots you want. But this is our first campaign with that, again, tech touch segment. It's a little hard for me to see. So it's just welcoming them aboard, letting them know that more resources are coming. So it's setting the stage. This is the first of many. Stay tuned. More is coming.
Ashley Butler [00:29:46] We're also telling them to sign in. So clear call to ask those people to log in and get things set up.
Claire Grayeb [00:29:50] Yes. The second paragraph goes over how to log in, how to sign in, how to set up your account, how to set up your profile. And then next, the help center. 24-hour support in case they need something urgently. Customers can always respond back to the e-mail and it's going to go to a CS advisory queue and they will get responded to right away. The next is our training e-mail. Again, this is really important. Highlights all our key training. We have a team dedicated to training. So we want to make sure their efforts are being touched. They're not going unnoticed. So again it just highlights all the training and they can forward that along to any of their users.
Ashley Butler [00:30:33] Yeah. And these are the pretty templated emails. We also do the HTML strategy. It looks more realistic. And as we mentioned at the beginning of the session, literally the only difference between the emails that CSM assigned accounts get in that mid-market segment and what tech touch customers get in the lower tier is that signature line. It's either a variable for the CSM's name or it will say CS advisor team. So that's the main difference there.
[00:31:05] So you might be wondering, like, OK, that's cool. You guys created some campaigns, you implemented them. How do you know if they're working? And a lot of times people are, if you're in marketing, looking at email opens and click-through rates. Right. But we want to look at the data and what that's telling us. And fortunately, because this is all managed in Totango, we can clearly see that and we have the data points to look at. So you really have to think about what really matters. First of all, what's the objective of the campaign for onboarding? Specifically, we're trying to drive usage within our product, right? So we have a field in between onboarding and established, typically we're factoring this based on the first customer's first 90 days. They will be considered in onboarding. So we want to see what's happening with their usage between onboarding and established. And this is our bread and butter of "Are these campaigns working for us?". So our tech touch segment has no assigned CSM. We don't get enough replies from customers that even warrants a dedicated full-time person for that role, which is good. And the health between onboarding and established absolutely skyrockets, which means, one, our product team is amazing and our products intuitive. So give them a shout out. But also the resources that we're providing to equip our customers to be self-sufficient and get started with our product, ASAP and see value, they're crafted well and they're working. People know how to contact support because we see when they have open tickets in Totango. So this is what we're looking at. While we have benchmarks for email opens, clicks.
Claire Grayeb [00:32:54] The marketing, we have benchmarks. Again, I keep an eye on it, but it's so much more than that and we want our team to be so much more than that. And it's also interesting, our open rates are way higher than the standard.
Ashley Butler [00:33:14] Some do's and don'ts.
Claire Grayeb [00:33:16] Here are some dos and don'ts, like I mentioned. I've been doing this for almost three years. It's been trial and error. We have a supportive team. We have supportive customers, supportive manager. Don't be afraid. Just get started. That's the most important thing I would preface. Just there's no time like now to get it going and see how it goes.
Claire Grayeb [00:33:34] So we have our dos. My first one is just to be concise and direct with your messaging. Our tone, our brand, we're not long-winded. We're not sending a five-page email. It's gonna be in one e-mail. You're gonna know the important things right off the bat. So you don't want the key message to get lost.
Claire Grayeb [00:33:54] Next, lean on the internal teams for insight into your brand's voice. Like I mentioned, don't reinvent the wheel if you don't have those resources there, just lean on each other. Lean on different departments to kind of craft something that you can work with. And the next monitor performance and embrace iteration. So keep an eye on things and change. If we don't change, we die. So I never just set it and forget it. Every quarter, reevaluate, reassess, and see what can be improved.
Ashley Butler [00:34:24] And it's good to have a regular cadence for when you're reviewing your campaigns because that will keep you - and we'll talk about this in the don'ts - but from pivoting too quickly.
Claire Grayeb [00:34:33] Right. Yeah, exactly. So some don'ts that I've learned through trial and error. Don't overwhelm the inbox. I send emails. Marketings sends e-mails. Billing sends emails. There's a lot of emails. You don't want people to stop reading your emails. If you're sending too many, they're going to stop reading it. So there's a fine line of too much and too little. So just keep an eye on that.
Claire Grayeb [00:34:55] And the next, don't overcomplicate things. Like I mentioned, that Zoom Phone project me and Ashley worked on. We spent hours, weeks working on segments, tears. We really just need to take a day. And then the segmentation that we used was like the most basic segmentation you can imagine. And it's been like six months and it's perfect. So just take a step back don't over complicate it.
Claire Grayeb [00:35:19] And lastly, don't pivot too quickly. I know we mentioned embrace iterations, but don't move too quickly. Give it a few months, three months to see how it's going. And then you can change it up. Give customers time to get those. You can see the bigger picture. You don't want to pivot just from one piece of feedback. You've got to see the whole picture first. You want to have a good sample size. Give it some time.
Ashley Butler [00:35:43] So as far as next steps, raise your hand in here if you have Totango Campaigns already. Most people. Some people. Cool, if you don't have Totango campaigns on your account already, go get them. That would be my next step for you. But then take action. Some people are maybe looking for different ways to incorporate additional campaigns into your business model. So first things first, assess your needs. And this can be a great opportunity for a think tank session with your team to figure out, "OK, what where are there redundancies? Where is the repetition? How could we potentially mitigate this with a campaign email?" So then you can start planning your campaign. You can figure out your audience. Chances are you've got segments already built out in Totango. So it'll make it a lot easier. And what's your objective? What do you want them to do? Are you wanting them to use your product or like what's your goal? So, establish that. And then you can craft your messaging around that. I know we've talked a lot about how Claire's paired very well with our marketing team, and there's a good synergy there. I know that's not always the case in a lot of organizations, but it's a really, really good opportunity to break down that silo and take that initiative to partner and work more closely with somebody in marketing and still maintain ownership of the messaging post-sale, which is super important to CS and what we stand for.
[00:37:18] When you capture messaging, make sure it incorporates your brand voice. That's why I say it's good to have a clear understanding of what that is and marketing can help with that. Or if nobody's owning that, have a think tank session with somebody in marketing and draft something up to present. Spearhead something. Make sure your message has a clear call to action. I've gotten so many emails from companies where there are just infinite things going on. It's like your discounts here, but sign up here for this exclusive club and then go over here. And I do nothing because there are so many things. It's telling me to do three to five things that I do nothing. And that's what your customers will do too. So try to have a clear, defined call to action in your messaging.
[00:38:00] And then just don't hesitate to deploy and monitor. I think that was our biggest fear. When we released this new product, we were so particular about we have to nail it and it's got to be perfect and we were overthinking things quite a bit that we hesitated to actually deploy anything for several days. So, deploy it and start small. This doesn't have to be an elaborate five email onboarding program or information for a brand new product that's coming out. If this is your first go at it, start small with a single email and you can always build from there. But thank you guys so much. I hope this has been helpful. And remember, we got this.
[Moderator] Jamie [00:38:43] Okay. So I think we might have time for one question. Maybe one to two quick questions. I think the audience just really enjoyed this so much. It was really helpful to hear all the detail and all the good advice. So any questions from the audience?
Audience Member 1 [00:39:08] Thank you. So you guys mentioned iterating on your campaigns to kind of find the best fit in lieu of kind of A/B testing them. How do you measure and track, like if you want to change your messaging until you really get it right? How do you guys manage doing that?
Claire Grayeb [00:39:23] Yeah. So in tandem with Totango, I use another larger like marketing software to email random service comms and things like that to kind of fuse together. And that I do A/B testing for, but this is mostly based on feedback. I talk to CSMs every day. We're on the same team and that's why they let me know when customer feedback comes in. Just like little things like confusion like I sent an e-mail last week and there is a screenshot and someone said people didn't know it was a screenshot. They're like they are trying to click on that icon. So it's like, all right, let me go change. Let me edit the screenshot, you know? So I think a lot of my iterations are based on feedback and just working closely with the CSMs who work really closely with their customers and change it around that.
Ashley Butler [00:40:12] And initial comms as well. Yeah, I mean, you share in our chat when you're about to send a comm so the team can review it and give any thoughts.
Claire Grayeb [00:40:21] Totally. Every everything I send, the team knows. There's gonna be no time where a CSM is going to be surprised that a comm was sent out. They always have at least 24 hours to review, give their feedback. There are the customer's mirror. They know better than I do. Give them 24 hours and then I always make a little bit tweaks and then send. Thank you. Yeah. Okay.
[Moderator] Jamie [00:40:42] One more question.
Audience Member 2 [00:40:50] I was just wondering, who's your target audience for campaigns? Is it primarily just the key contacts you're talking about? Is it all your users?
Ashley Butler [00:40:57] Yeah, that's a great question. Our org is set up a little uniquely. So we're contacting account owners and admins tied to the account profile.
Claire Grayeb [00:41:12] And that's like and Ts and Cs. That's part of our contract. We don't communicate to end users. So we don't have really a choice, unfortunately. But that's a great question. That's important to mention. It is admins and owners of the account.
Ashley Butler [00:41:25] So a lot of the information that we provide, it's almost tailored in a way that we encourage admins and owners to pass this along to your end-users, which is super critical in our business to make sure that your key contacts, your champions for that account are ready for that responsibility and that they know what they're responsible for in terms of the deployment.
[Moderator] Jamie [00:41:53] I think we're out of time. Thank you, Ashley, Claire, so much for your time. We really appreciate it.