Jenelle Friday of Forecastable and the Customer Success Collective’s “CS Leader of the Year” for 2023 is someone who is easily liked. She's hyper-in tune with what makes people tick, and is even the author of her own framework on emotional intelligence in customer success.

In this wonderful chat, we talk about:
00:00 - Caring for your customers
02:27 - Being Authentic in Customer Success
04:41 - A Journey to Customer Success and Emotional Intelligence
06:53 - The Importance of Being Human in Business Relationships
09:11 - Being True to Yourself in Business
11:19 - Acknowledging Fears and Embracing Imperfection
13:29 - Emotional Intelligence and Self-Awareness in Customer Success
15:37 - The Importance of Work in Relationships
17:42 - The Importance of Human Interaction
20:11 - Elevator Pitch for Digital Customer Success
22:25 - The Importance of Emotional Intelligence in Digital Communications
24:39 - Using Emotional Intelligence for Customer Engagement
26:47 - The Importance of Social Awareness in Decision-Making Process
29:06 - Cultural Differences in Customer Success
31:21 - Building a Customer Community
33:33 - Coordinating Communication Across Departments
35:42 - Understanding the Customer Perspective
38:01 - Living Boldly and Courageously
40:26 - Developing Soft Skills in Business
42:27 - Fostering Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace
44:51 - The Importance of Emotional Intelligence in Digital Customer Success
46:54 - Book Recommendations and Finding Normalcy
49:04 - Soft Skill Development and Giving Back to the Community

Enjoy! I know I sure did...

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This episode was edited by Lifetime Value Media, a media production company founded by my good friend and fellow CS veteran Dillon Young. Lifetime Value aims to serve the audio/video content production and editing needs of CS and Post-Sales professionals. Lifetime Value is offering select services at a deeply discounted rate for a limited time. Navigate to lifetimevaluemedia.com to learn more.

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Support the Show.

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Like/Subscribe/Review:
If you are getting value from the show, please follow/subscribe so that you don't miss an episode and consider leaving us a review.

Website:
For more information about the show or to get in touch, visit DigitalCustomerSuccess.com.

Buy Alex a Cup of Coffee:
This show runs exclusively on caffeine - and lots of it. If you like what we're, consider supporting our habit by buying us a cup of coffee: https://bmc.link/dcsp

Thank you for all of your support!

The Digital Customer Success Podcast is hosted by Alex Turkovic

As we pop the champagne on our 50th show, a heartfelt thank you is in order for every listener & guest who's joined me on this wild ride through the evolving world of digital customer interactions. It's a transformational moment for the show as we shift from focusing on 'Digital Customer Success' to encompassing the broader 'Digital Customer Experience', ensuring we capture the essence of every digital touchpoint. As such, we are changing the name of the show to 'The Digital Customer Experience Podcast'!

In this episode, I'm going through and answering some of the most frequently asked questions that I get on a regular basis, which leads to the following topics:

• 00:47 - New Podcast Name Announcement
• 06:34 - What is Digital Customer Success
• 07:38 - Digital vs. Scaled
• 09:49 - Where to start with Digital Customer Success
• 11:52 - Commonly overlooked vehicles for digital motions
• 13:13 - Building health scores without product telemetry
• 14:31 - Identifying user personas based on their activity within your resource
• 15:05 - SaaS economics and how they impact the proliferation of digital
• 18:43 - Measuring the success of digital CS
• 21:54 - Team structure for digital cs
• 26:54 - Technology recommendations
• 30:45 - Outro & Thank you!

A couple of links from the show:

• Website & Newsletter signup: https://digitalcustomersuccess.com
• Digital CS Definition Word Map: https://digitalcustomersuccess.com/digital-cs-word-map/
• DCS Tech Stack: https://digitalcustomersuccess.com/tech-stack/
• Cover Your SaaS Course by Jeff Bruensbach & Jay Nathan: https://growthcurve.io/cover-your-saas

Support the Show.

+++++++++++++++++

Like/Subscribe/Review:
If you are getting value from the show, please follow/subscribe so that you don't miss an episode and consider leaving us a review.

Website:
For more information about the show or to get in touch, visit DigitalCustomerSuccess.com.

Buy Alex a Cup of Coffee:
This show runs exclusively on caffeine - and lots of it. If you like what we're, consider supporting our habit by buying us a cup of coffee: https://bmc.link/dcsp

Thank you for all of your support!

The Digital Customer Success Podcast is hosted by Alex Turkovic

Kari Ardalan of Qualtrics is a staple in the CS community and has been leading scaled motions for YEARS - which is sometime that not a lot of people can say. She also sits on Gainsight's Digital Advisory Board - so yeah, she's qualified to talk about this stuff. :-)

In this fantastic conversation, we talk about:

• Building digital first with humans coming in off of the back of those motions
• The evolution of ‘scaled’ from just email and outbound events to a push to come inbound
• Building one place portal where customers can go for everything and where CSMs can interact with their customers
• How Digital is structured at Qualtrics across various departments
• Internal cross-collaboration on digital motions
• What to look out for in a digital leader - specifically cross-collaboration and a varied background
• Focusing on Support deflection metrics and areas to automate
• Other interesting metrics in use at Qualtrics: % CTAs launched, penetration rate of closed success CTAs (conversation), Monthly Active Users, Monthly Active Customers, Flow Completion, % of Renewals Not Assisted by Humans
• Balancing being tactical and strategic as a leader
• Using special interests among the team to drive career growth and creativity - including Hackathons
• Cool examples of digital motions including customer-facing scorecards, micro-learning, AI and self-serve portals.
• AI bot & recommendation engine implementation at Qualtrics
• Letting data tell you who the customer personas are
• The dependency on operations work streams to get things done

Enjoy! I sure did...

Kari's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kariardalan/

Link to Kari's post about the qualities of a Digital CS Leader: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kariardalan_digitalsuccess-leadership-recruitment-activity-7175101395631570944-qujn?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Shoutouts:

• Delores Cooper (Zendesk): https://www.linkedin.com/in/delorescooper/
• Austin Kwon (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/austinkwon/
• Kelly Bray (MongoDB): https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelly-bray-1684166/
• Rimple Patel (Eightfold): https://www.linkedin.com/in/rimpledpatel/

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Support the Show.

+++++++++++++++++

Like/Subscribe/Review:
If you are getting value from the show, please follow/subscribe so that you don't miss an episode and consider leaving us a review.

Website:
For more information about the show or to get in touch, visit DigitalCustomerSuccess.com.

Buy Alex a Cup of Coffee:
This show runs exclusively on caffeine - and lots of it. If you like what we're, consider supporting our habit by buying us a cup of coffee: https://bmc.link/dcsp

Thank you for all of your support!

The Digital Customer Success Podcast is hosted by Alex Turkovic