Nanhi Singh:
Customer experience has to be viewed from the perspective of the customer and not from the perspective of the vendor. I think a lot of technology companies make that mistake and think that what they are going to do is design the experience that fits best within their own internal operations and processes. I think that's a big mistake. You have to actually design your internal operational functions and operational processes around the expectations of the customer.
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Flourish CX, the only show helping CX leaders do one thing, empower their customers. Each episode democratizes best practices while leaving you feeling both inspired and equipped to take action. Let's get to it.
Shannon Katschilo:
We all know the end goal is to meet, or better yet, exceed our customer's expectations. But if you sit around, hoping those wants and needs will mold to your systems, you're going to be disappointed. My name is Shannon Katschilo, your host for Flourish CX. In this episode, Nanhi Singh, Chief Customer Officer at Imperva, digs deep into the four pillars of customer success. There's something to be said about breaking CX down into digestible pieces, as it turns the concept of CX from a buzz-word to an actionable practice, like how to see through the eyes of your customers. As you listen, consider your systems and how well they're able to come along aside those ever-evolving expectations.
Nanhi Singh:
I am Chief Customer Officer at Imperva. My job is, basically looking after all our customers, so I own everything that is for sale. Once the customers has bought our solution, then their entire journey with Imperva and their entire experience with Imperva as a customer, is delivered through my team. My team is accountable for that experience.
Shannon Katschilo:
Tell me a little bit more. What departments does that include?
Nanhi Singh:
Under customer success, which is a broad group that I run, I have four separate functions. I call them the Four Pillars of Customer Success at Imperva. The first pillar is support and that also includes our value-added services that are delivered at scale. These are services that are, essentially a combination of automation and people. The second pillar is consulting, or what is more traditionally known as professional services. This is much more human dependent, a lot more customized, based on what the customer architecture or requirements are. It's a lot of bespoke custom work there. The third pillar is customer success management. This is really all about ensuring that the customer is getting what they purchased the solutions for. It's about the business outcomes that they are looking for. The fourth pillar is renewals. This is the function that essentially makes sure that Imperva is bringing in all of, or as much of, its recurring revenue. I'm accountable for all of our recurring revenue from our existing customers.
Shannon Katschilo:
Great, and I really liked how you prefaced it, kind of the four pillars. Love to also understand any misconceptions about your role as a leader over client success that drive you crazy?
Nanhi Singh:
Yes. I think that customer success has become sort of a buzz word. Now, everyone wants to talk about it, but I don't think everyone fully understands what it entails. Very often when I am speaking with different people whether they be customers, even my co-workers in other departments, or people outside the industry, they will have misconceptions about what it means. They will sometimes very often assume that, "Oh well, that's support, Right? Oh it's tech support, that's what you do." No, tech support is only one aspect because it's one of the four pillars I just mentioned. The other is, sometimes when they see that I'm accountable for renewals, they would just assume that, "Oh well, so you're in the renewals sales function, that's what you do". I'm like, "No, that is one of the pillars again and really only one of the metrics that matter. Of course, a very important metric because that is directly tied to your annual recurring revenue, but it's only one of the functions. I think this holistic view of customer success and the end-to-end customer experience ownership, I think a lot of people don't understand that that's what customer success is really about.
Shannon Katschilo:
Completely agree and it is really wonderful though to see a lot of organizations and specifically, technology organizations really start to understand the value and how important value realization is, in the B2B world. On that theme, there's a lot of different ways that people define customer experience. I'd love to hear from you. How do you define CX at Imperva?
Nanhi Singh:
The way that I think about it, is always from the perspective of the customer. I think customer experience is defined less by us and more by the customer. It really goes to their expectations and what is it that they expected when they made the decision to buy an Imperva solution. I think it really just goes from the time that they made the decision and they sent in the bill, cut a check, however you're transacting that financially, what happens next from there. How does that whole customer journey then flow, as it goes from one team within Imperva to another team. Customer experience, I think has to be viewed from the perspective of the customer and not from the perspective of the vendor. I think a lot of technology companies make that mistake and think that what they are going to do is design the experience that fits best within their own internal operations and processes. I think that's a big mistake. You have to actually design your internal operational functions and operational processes around the expectations of the customer.
Shannon Katschilo:
In your onboarding journey, are you collecting the expectations, the goals, or the North Star, from the customer? Is that something that you're actively soliciting from your customers throughout the journey?
Nanhi Singh:
I want to start off by saying that not every customer has the exact same experience. Obviously, depending upon how much the customer is spending in terms of ARR, we segment the customers by ARR, and then that defines how much, in terms of resources, we are spending on delivering that customer experience. For our high ARR customers, which fall into our Tier One segment, we have success plans for them that are individual. That are based on individually what it is that they are looking to accomplish and what outcomes they are looking to achieve. For our Tier Two and Tier Three customers, we have a standard success plan, if you will, which we then make only minor adjustments as necessary. It really just begins with the customer success plan.
Shannon Katschilo:
What are some of the unique CX challenges you have to solve for that are different maybe, to some of your other non-cyber B2B peers?
Nanhi Singh:
One of the biggest challenges, if you will, if you want to call it a challenge, that is different in the cyber security space from a lot of other technologies, is that often cyber security is mission critical. When there is an attack, it can actually take down the business. I think that over Covid and this pandemic that we've been through, there has been an acceleration of digital transformation. A lot of companies were on that journey of taking their business to be conducted online. The pandemic just accelerated that whole process. What that means, is that as everyone goes to do anything that they want to do with the business online, the bad actors follow them. That's what we, as a cyber security company, protect against. If the bad actors bring down the website that is delivering the application that customers are relying on, then as a business, you are actually shut down. That's why I see cyber security as being mission critical and honestly, really personally giving me a lot of meaning to the work that me and my team do here.
Shannon Katschilo:
Yeah. I'm hearing that a lot of B2B clients like you, it really does have a big impact on the end customer as well. Not only for your clients, but when issues do arise, it has a big impact across the organization. A lot of discussions and knowledge around customer experience... I find, sometimes which is great, we have discussions at a very theoretical level. I'm really curious though, if you don't mind sharing the type of technologies that enable yourself to deliver exceptional experience across the Imperva customer journey. You don't have to disclose vendor names, but it would be great to understand more about the tech staff that you oversee that allows you to have such an incredible delivery of customer experience.
Nanhi Singh:
I think that there is a number of different things. I'll try and put this into the various categories or buckets, if you will. The first one is the financial information needs to basically be available in a technology that across the entire company, provides a single source of truth. Right? Because at the end of the day, all of our metrics really line up with the financial metrics. In any business, it's really important that when it comes to the financial metrics, there is consistency in what every function within the company has access to.
I think that for us, coming in to Imperva, myself and my CEO as well, as a new management team, we focus our attention on making sure that there was never any doubt about how much ARR is from this customer. What is the true [inaudible 00:11:39] we spend from this customer? You can't have a debate about that because if you have a debate about that, then you have a problem. You actually don't understand the basics about your customer and what they mean to you as a business. There's the financial side as I would put as one of the most important pieces of technology. Then, it's not just a storage of that financial data, it's the visualization of that data. How do people get access to it? There's a lot of tools out there. Tableau is a popular one now that I think, allows people to get much more granular information, in terms of analytics and what the data tells them, so that's one.
The second is operational.I think operationally, there needs to be technology that is delivering to the people who run the operations and ease of use, so that they can deliver and take that ease of use into the customers experience. Translated into the ease of use that the customer has when interacting with Imperva. For me, that is within support and other functions that need to monitor cases, how cases are managed, incidents are addressed and handled, and so on. All of that needs to be in a single place. Of course again, there's lots of technologies there. People will refer to it as a simple ticketing system, and there is so many different technologies. I think it's a question of understanding how do you define the best processes for your people, for your employees to, deliver the best customer experience for your customers. The technology is only an enabler in that, but that's my second category of technology.
The third is the customer. What they interact with outside, of course, the technology that we deliver to them, which is the product we deliver or the service we deliver to them. The customer portal, where they go to interact with Imperva. How can they receive the best self-service because let's face it, gone are the days when somebody actually wants to talk to a support engineer or talk to a representative of the vendor. They would rather just solve the problem on their own or figure out if they have access to the resources they need to prevent a problem from occurring. I think all of those customer-facing resources that enable self-service, I would put in that current category of technology, which could include communication mechanisms that you enable with your customers. Do you have a soft phone system, for instance, that they can launch from within the portal or do you have a chat functionality that they can immediately interact with somebody at Imperva.
Really, those three buckets. The financial, which relates to not just to storage of the data, but the presentation of that data to the people that need it. Then all of the operational systems that enable you to act upon whatever the customer requires, whatever is defined in that journey that they take with you. Then, finally, actual systems that the customer interacts with when they interact with the company.
Shannon Katschilo:
I think all customer success leaders could really use those buckets and think about, do I have the right tools and technologies to really enable each of these? Because to deliver phenomenal customer experience, as you said, you need all three, right? It's not one, they really have to work in concert with each other. I'd love to dig in a little bit more about self-service, because Imperva is known for having just a really phenomenal service model for your customers. You talked about the different tiering based on ARR. How do you balance the high and low touch at Imperva in a scalable way?
Nanhi Singh:
For a long time, we had not paid attention to the self-service aspect. What we realized was that you can never throw enough people at the requests that are coming in. The best thing to do is to enable the customer to be able to help themselves. We invested in a couple of different areas. One of them is documentation and access to really high quality documentation. Not just on the documentation portal, but also from within our case management system. The customer on the customer portal is opening a support case, then the system uses the documentation that we have to provide suggestions to solve the problem themselves. That has been really game changing. We measure case defection to see whether a customer who started to open a case, was able to solve the problem all themselves without having to actually open the case itself.
The other thing that we really focused on is providing bite-sized nuggets of content to our customers. Video has a been a tremendous media to really deliver meaningful content to our customers. Obviously, what they don't want to see is a talking head. What they want to see is the screens that they have to work with, sample cords that they could use, scripts that they could use, and so on. We really have been focusing on delivering video content in short bites that they can consume easily. These are not like 30 minute videos. These are five to 10 minutes. Some are even shorter than that, which just gives the customer exactly what they're looking for. I don't think this is anything unique. I mean, look at YouTube, it's filled with resources like this, so that's been a big part of it.
Finally, we have started to also bundle our training services in a subscription package, which is included in a number of bundles that we sell. That gives our customers the ability to learn. This is like really well designed content that is designed to enable the customer to do the basic things that we know that every customer needs.
Shannon Katschilo:
Touching on all three of them, what I'm hearing are themes in that you're really looking to replicate a lot of B2C experiences. That's now the expectations in this B2B world, making technical content far more accessible so that answers are at their fingertips. I love this, very snippets of videos. I think we're in this TikTok world where our attention span has now gone to 30 second bytes. I'm really curious on how you're able to link making this content more accessible to support tickets. I think a lot of leaders are thinking about ways to model out ROI when they do launch technologies. Do you mind just a little bit more detail on how you're able to really quantify ROI and the impact of the business when you did this?
Nanhi Singh:
We have a cost-per-case metric, which is basically what it costs us to serve our customers on support cases. Every case that we deflect, basically is that cost saved. A case deflection metric we find is most effective in demonstrating the ROI of that solution. The other metric that we also measure mean-time-to-resolution, MTTR. We focus on getting that MTTR down. The better the documentation you have, the more easily that is accessible, even if it's not something that deflected a case, but was used in a case, that in itself gives you again, ROI. The shorter the time it takes to solve the customer's issue or case, the cheaper it is. Right? Those are two important metrics that we focus on when it comes to our support case management.
Shannon Katschilo:
Thank you. Very applicable to other leaders such as yourself, on how to make the business case for these technologies. It's no secret right now that the market is in a bit of turmoil and probably will be, what they're saying, for maybe the next six to 12 months. How are you thinking about this and how do you think what will be the impact on how companies will invest in self-service, as we navigate through this?
Nanhi Singh:
I think everyone is all rattled about where we're going, where the economy is going, and so on. I think it's important to remember that we've been here before. This happened a few times. What I think most companies that demonstrate resilience in this time, are the companies that will be the success stories. I think that customer success and focus on existing customers is always a good thing to do, no matter whether the economy is good or bad. Interestingly, when the economy start to get a little unstable, that is when people realize that the cost of acquiring new customers is a whole lot more than the cost of keeping customers. There is always a shift to let's focus on the customer attention.
I think as a customer success leader, I am delighted that there is even more understanding for why we need to really focus on the customer experience and do all the things that not only drive the gross retention, which is basically the customer keeping and using what they had originally bought, but also the net retention, which is enabling the customers to buy and use more. Which is a whole lot simpler than a lot of costs that is put into marketing to acquire new customers. I think that in this economic downturn, a focus of retaining customers, is something that every technology company should be looking at.
Shannon Katschilo:
Yeah, I completely agree. I think we're going to see a lot of innovation over the next bit and we'll come out of it on the other side with a deeper appreciation for our customers and a focus on customer loyalty. Well, it has been an absolute pleasure speaking to you. It's quite obvious you deeply care on a personal level about the success of your clients. You've created something pretty special across Imperva with some real business results and we're really excited to share this with other customer success leaders.
Nanhi Singh:
Thank you very much for having me.
Shannon Katschilo:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Flourish CX. To learn more, head over to Zoomingsoftware.com/podcasts. Follow along wherever you get your audio.
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