Jeff Breunsbach: all right, welcome back to another episode of Chiefcustomer.io. This will be coming out on August sixth. Jay, how's it going?

Jay Nathan: Can we can we talk about something real quick? What is what is this podcast actually called? I think it's called the Chief Customer Officer Podcast, but you always say Chief Customer Officer dot IO. What is it?

Jeff Breunsbach: I guess chief customer officer. I just put the IO so people just go to the website if they're hearing this.

Jay Nathan: okay.

Jeff Breunsbach: So I'm like trying to like tie in the website address so they're like, okay, like let me go to the website.

Jay Nathan: Okay. Okay. I wonder if it's working. All right, well we're gonna talk about that today, aren't we?

Jeff Breunsbach: No rhyme or reason. Probably not. I mean it's there's two hundred listeners, so you know if we get a one percent conversion rate, you know, that's that's point what point two percent of a person or something point two of a person who's going to the site in g Google analytics terms.

Jay Nathan: Who's the fraction of the person who's visiting the website? Well, I think I think we're gonna have a good discussion on that today though. And so you wanna tee it up? You're good at teeing things up.

Jeff Breunsbach: Sure. let's I think to summarize, I think you and I have known each other a long time. I think we've operated in businesses together and separate, but I think we've always tried to have something that tied us together. And that was chief customer officer, and that was writing a newsletter. And I think we were really energized by that in the beginning. I think we found like the joy in writing again. I think we had a lot of fun with like starting this podcast, coming out with new ideas and talking through and I think like really sharing about the practical things. I think some of the things that have carried us through this whole period has been really the idea of almost like trying to apply what we're seeing, hearing to like the real day-to-day of like what's happening. And I think like that's maybe been a staple of like all of our content. the like the customer imperative business we ran, gangro retain, like all these things have all kind of had this idea of like, how do we help leaders out there actually do implement. things, how do we bring like a a practical piece? so I think we've been operating this newsletter and this podcast under that same premise over the last year, year and a half. I think we've been doing this now for almost two years maybe. But I think as of late we've kind of lost a little bit of the spark. I think we've we've each got you know successful businesses that we're running and so and then we've got families, right? And so you just kind of see How we've our energy has maybe dissipated. And so I think we had a nice conversation earlier this week about like, are we energized about this? How do we get, you know, reinvigorated? What's what's kind of happening here? How do we do this? So I think that's kind of like where we find ourselves today is maybe how do we look at chief customer officer going forward and ultimately like what do we want that to be? And ultimately is it going to be something that like we can invest time and energy into? How's that?

Jay Nathan: Yeah, that's good. And I think I think the answer is yes. we decided that the answer's probably yes. But there's one other piece of it too that I'll add to what you said, which is really good. But we've always thrived on having conversations, a lot of conversations with people who are actually practitioners and trying to learn as much from what they're doing as share what we know. Whether we were consulting or whether we were working for a software company, which we did together for a while, or or you know, whether it's been this podcast and what we've been doing over the past six months with it. And I think it's a really important element of what we do. what I what I've noticed and and I continue to see it, you know, my world has moved a little bit from customer success to more of the product organizations that we work with. Yeah, being a Pendo being our primary partner, we work with a lot of product organizations. And you can see I think the customer success community is very community oriented, generally speaking. Everyone every once in a while we'll run across people that have never heard of what Gang Grow Retain was or you know that don't, you know, sort of know the you know, they're not they're not paying attention outside of their company. But for the most part, I find that people in customer success do pick up their heads and they're looking around, they're part of communities and that kind of thing. It doesn't have to be ours. But I but I've seen more and more in the product world. How how that's really not the case, right? And and although there are some big communities in the product world, there's a lot more people with product management titles and sales titles than there are people with customer oriented titles, professional services, customer success, implementation, so on and so forth. There's a lot more of those people. And a lot in my in my informal math, I think a lot fewer of them do sort of participate in community style anything. And so, you know, in our business, we've been trying to bring that community style approach to our marketing, what we do there. We run, you know, you could call them office hours, Jeff, like what we used to do for Gangro Retain.

Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah.

Jay Nathan: but they're there we call it the digital experience round table. It's a Zoom call. It's not a webinar, right? It's everybody gets to talk and raise their hand, contribute something. We do have a speaker teed up who comes in and shares some really cool insights usually and what they're doing. but I guess my point is we've always looked at whatever we do as as sharing knowledge that we're getting. We're learning as much as we're sharing and we're sharing what we learn from other people and using those examples and how we sell and trying to just disseminate information as freely as possible. I think it's always been our goal. information being best practices, ways of working, that may not be as valuable as it used to be. Honestly.

Jeff Breunsbach: I think, yeah. but I think like that that thread that you mentioned is like I guess where we're trying to get back rooted into and like the excitement of of where we're trying to go is is getting back to this concept of like the practical, hey, I'm I'm putting myself in the leader's shoes and you know, the things that they're coming across every day, how they're the questions they're getting asked from their other executive team members, from the board, from their own team,

Jay Nathan: Board.

Jeff Breunsbach: maybe, right? Like they're it's kind of coming from both of both sides of their role. but I think like to your point, you know, we've maybe we've dabbled around the edges of like, okay, are we really talking to chief customer officers or are we talking to other executives? Are we really AI forward? Where are like where do we stand? And I think like I guess you and I coming together earlier this week and getting a little bit like back and centered around, hey, we want to build for customer success leaders and we want to make sure That we're looking at this from a lens of like, you actually need core principles as a customer success leader. You still need many of the core principles of building a business, building an organization that can help scale with your customers. And AI is not going to come in and solve all of those problems, but it is a tool and a thing that you can bring to the table that will help you and your team get more out of what you're trying to do. and so I think, you know, as we look at like, okay, what does that mean? I think to us, like, how do we get back into content about Helping you build organizations that can help scale, helping you partner with other organizations that you deal with, product leaders, engineering leaders, how do you bring perspective that, you know, brings the customer perspective to their side of the aisle? I think it's about, you know, how do you enable your teams to go have great conversations with customers, great experiences? and then ultimately, I think like how do we wrap what we're learning with like from AI and like the ability to automate things? have tools at our disposal that we haven't had before. How does that come into the fundamental building and looking at a customer success leader saying, hey, you need to do these things and then, yeah, now you've got more keys to the castle with AI. And that needs to be a part of your strategy as you go forward.

Jay Nathan: Yeah. And a lot of leaders, whether they're in customer success or some other function, are are just trying to figure out how to deploy these new technologies to their advantage. They're hearing a lot about it, they're feeling pieces of it. They're seeing by example some of it, but they're not it's not real clear yet how to how to deploy these systems at scale for teams. Right. And I think that's something that you and I are both passionate about. It actually doesn't matter what function you're in. Like we s and when we say customer success, by the way. We mean all the post sale functions that make, you know, customers tick, including sales, account management, renewals, all that kind of stuff. So all right.

Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah. it's funny. I just I one quick anecdote for you. I just got off of an interview in one of the interview the as I was talking with the woman on the interview, we were talking about onboarding and cause she had at a previous company they reduced onboarding from like twelve to eighteen months down to like three to six months. And so we were talking through that whole, you know, transition and how that happened and all the things. And I I think this gets back to maybe the point that we're talking about where she said Well, you know what the first step was? you know, she's like, we have all these AI tools and whatever. You what the first step was? Was actually just going through onboarding ourselves. Like just ourselves, like, let's just buy

Jay Nathan: Yeah.

Jeff Breunsbach: the product. Let's let's, you know, basically go through step by step.

Jay Nathan: See what this feels like.

Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah, like let's actually go through this. And she's like, you know, actually by doing that, we realize there's steps that we didn't think about, that we didn't know, like we didn't but it just kind of I I guess like re again, kind of re triggered for me, like, okay, like yes, we have like all these sexy tools at our disposal now, but there's some To some degree, right? Like there's no passing the fundamentals, like to get to I guess a a faster mode without doing those things first.

Jay Nathan: Yeah, that's right. The there is no such thing as a free launch, even with with AI, right?

Jeff Breunsbach: I wish.

Jay Nathan: we have some great great tools at our disposal, but it's not it's not to be all in all. all right, so one of the things that we sort of got re energized about is, you know, I think there's very much in our world, you know, everyone is is being asked to rebuild their own their functions. With respect to how AI is going to influence those functions, right? and you know, that certainly is happening in the customer success world, maybe more so in customer success than ever. I actually was on a a call yesterday. I got asked to speak at a company like mid year kickoff kind of thing out here in Charleston, believe it or not. Jeff by one of our friends. and I was talking to their CEO about his team and just asking, like, hey, like, when it comes to all the teams in the organization, like where do you who do you think who's maybe a little bit behind or or maybe the most hard pressed right now in your organization? They're an enterpr they serve enterprise clients and and you know the team on the call gave sort of the the The politically correct answer, which is like, everybody's got, you know, some things they gotta work on, but everybody's got some fine, whatever. not answer, right? But what they said was the customer success team actually is probably one of the most difficult roles that we have because they're still sitting at the intersection of, you know, the customer, the product organization, some of the kind of things that you've described to me, you know, in your in your world as well. You deal with large, small and large customers. And by the way, that everybody deals with that, right? But there's these pressure points that sort of end up on one part of the organization or the other. So anything we can do to help, you know, the post sales teams, services, success, support, so on, sort of scale what they do and do what they do better, like I think that's a a noble thing. And by the way, these roles aren't going together. we had Chad Hornfeld on one of our roundtables a few weeks ago talking about his organization, how they've sort of moved from CSMs to more technical roles, technical account manager roles. They have four deployed engineers who participate with their customers as well. They also have an onboarding and implementation team. They have a support function. Like everybody's got the same functions still. But what we started to get excited about was this idea that, you know, in in You know, arguably we should have had a clean framework like this years ago. And I think this also sort of dovetails with Wayne McCulloff's book, The Seven Pillars. I don't know if these are the exact seven pillars, but I think we're pretty close here. but we came up with seven capabilities that every every technology firm needs, right? When it comes to main managing and maintaining customers and the revenue and all the kind of stuff that comes with that. Support, onboarding. Adoption, engagement, feedback, renewal, and expansion. And so when you look at these seven capabilities, there's sort of a lifetime worth of learning and experience in each one of those pillars. And each one of them changes whether or not you're serving enterprise customers, middle market customers, SMB customers. There's a lot of different ways to implement all of these capabilities. And then even if you think about some of the organizations out there. Most technology firms work with the smallest of the like SMBs all the way up to enterprise. So you might have all of those in one company, right? Which makes this very, very complex. And so we sort of got, I'm speaking for both of us, but I I think we sort of got re energized around having a little bit of a framework, the capabilities that we could sort of dive into. and explore in parallel to all of the, you know, AI specific learning that we've both been able to do over the past year, in terms of how to apply that to our businesses. So

Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah, I think there's maybe like the the nuance in customer success that has been happening is like everyone maybe has been looking at roles and titles and like I

Jay Nathan: Yes.

Jeff Breunsbach: guess not looking at the capabilities or not looking at what that's really providing to the customer, right? Or like what we need to provide to the customer in order for them to be successful with our product. And so I think this Like the trigger moment when you shared this slide with me and we started talking through this was like just that, that like, man, we're so focused on like is it called a forward deployed engineer or is it called a TAM? Is it called a CSM? is it called an account manager? And at the end of the day, I think like getting back reoriented to like, you know, the user actually the things, the capabilities or the moments that we need to prepare for. order for a customer to be successful with us, I think like was a good reframing for me to like get back to the core pieces of like, okay, these are the capabilities that we need to plan for. And I think why that also stood out for me in the way that you explained it was you can clearly see if I was to take these capabilities, how I could start layering things on top of them, right? Like what is the what is the digital experience for support? Okay. That means that we have maybe self-service, we have a hub. they can submit support tickets, you know, via a form or maybe via Slack, right? Like there's that's a digital aspect, right? Then there's probably a support rep. What are they doing as part of that capability? You can start to see how this might break down, I guess, like when you look at these capabilities, I guess based on some of the delivery methods that you have. And then you can start to see how like AI would layer into that, right? Okay, like how if I'm in support, what are workflows or agents that would need to be built via AI or automation? That would help us get more effective or efficient at delivering support, you know, as we think about, you know, something's broken, how do we fix it? I don't know. So it just started maybe to register for me of like, okay, now maybe this is a framework to start building you know, content around in terms of playbooks and/or like moments that we're gonna have with customers. but then I think you start to see, okay, I can start to layer or I can start to maybe visualize for my teams, and we can start to see as a business, okay. like for example, here at Junction, like one thing I can talk about from a support perspective is our we have a technical support engineer and he looked at our intake process for tickets. And he looked and said, you know what, we should really have an agent that goes through those tickets and is starting to auto-triage those, like as they come in the queue and basically starting to assign a priority level and starting to assign a support rep. You know, is this technical in nature? Does it need to go, you know, X, Y, and Z? And so like that, but that process, right? He built an N8N. he's got our it's either Claude or Codex hooked up to that so that we can use, you know, some AI to essentially like go through our API docs and triage some of these things, try and give some first almost like first responses back to our team, not to the customer yet, but like to our team to like help triage some of these things and look at like a first response. But like, I don't know, to me, I started thinking about that like, cool, like that is almost like a subset under under support that you could clearly see. And then you know, you can start thinking about other workflows or engines or AI and and automations that are built off that agents is the word I was looking for. But anyways, like this capability I this set that you like put in front of me like started to really, I guess, make clear for me like, okay, we're building things around these moments. And this is what's this is what like we need to prepare for for our customers.

Jay Nathan: Yeah, because the the customer needs really haven't changed just because we're we have AI enabled products now. In fact, the the needs probably have gotten more complex, right? Particularly around not necessarily the individual interaction, but even I mean, even how to communicate the value of of the platform that you're that you're providing to them. Right. But to your point, it it's not you know, no the the there's a lot of gradient across each one of these capabilities around how you go implement it. So, the seven pillars, do you wanna hear what Waynes are, by the way?

Jeff Breunsbach: I looked this up the other day. I thought they were pretty close. I thought there was maybe one or two that were named that were named different maybe. What are they?

Jay Nathan: They are pretty close. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you've got onboarding, adoption, expansion are identical. And then he's got one called retention, which, you know, monitoring health scores and mitigating mitigating churn risks to secure customer renewals. Yes, I think so. I I think when we think renewals, we think a little more explicitly about the renewal program. Which is actually, I've said this before, less of a customer success function and more of a finance function almost. And so by his definition is right, which is like, you know, being able to forecast those, being able to drive the outcome of retention by way of renewals, which is you have to know the health of the customer, you have to know how to intervene if they're off the off the rails. he also has strategic advising here. And maybe I would I would I would couch that as engagement, right? Because engage strategic advising may not apply if you have SMB customers. Right? I

Jeff Breunsbach: Mm-hmm. Yep.

Jay Nathan: mean Well, it would, but but you would drive that strategic advisory through content, right? Through content engagement. So but maybe that could be the equivalent there. And then there's one called operationalizing customer success. That's really more outcomes is probably the w the way he's thinking about

Jeff Breunsbach: Phrasing that.

Jay Nathan: it, right? Yeah. Which I think that's probably a missing part of the puzzle here is outcome management. You may may put that up under engagement. Maybe it's engagement and outcomes. I sort of like the idea of having seven pillars, you know, not eight.

Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah. well it could I think it could also it it doesn't necessarily fit under adoption, but I think like the idea behind adoption is that you're trying to deliver against an outcome, like you're trying to push towards like what their outcome is. I think maybe like the question that that comes into mind when you look at these capabilities, is the dreaded word of like customer journey like the gre dreaded concept of customer

Jay Nathan: Mm-hmm.

Jeff Breunsbach: journey. Like do you think these are customer journey moments? Do you need a visualization of this? Like I guess how do you think about capabilities to like a a customer journey? Like do you still think customer journey is a necessary aspect of like

Jay Nathan: I think well you you know my perspective on that. I think there's an operational blueprint for how you try to orchestrate the customer's journey through your product, but the customer journey is really more of a maturity model kind of thing, right? The customer is level one, two, three, or four in terms of how they operate as a business around the domain into which you sell a product. And and that that's the journey the customer's on. Like this is not the journey. This is this is the the operational blueprint for how they should interact with your company. And how you try to drive outcomes and how you try to move them up the ladder, you know, up the up the the maturity ladder in in their journey. but these are levers, they're not they're not a direct influence. The customer's gotta get there on their own. In most cases.

Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah. You could almost I think like another way that I I think about this is like some of these things influence where they are in that maturity, right? Like if we're if we're doing engagement in the right ways, that means we're driving best practices, we're helping them think about their business in a different way, we're driving, you know, towards what their major goals are, then like that should be helping them move along that spectrum. so yeah, I think I still largely agree. I I think like to your point, like these are Yeah, these are internal methods that we need to really hone in order for us to make sure that we can successfully drive customers in the right direction.

Jay Nathan: Yeah, and and it depends a lot on what kind of product you sell to depends on what kind of product you sell as to how far you can push them up a maturity model or or how how broad the transformation in their organization is. If you sell, you know, Loom is a great example, right? Loom is the screen recording, you know, video capture kind of app that you can use right on your browser and you can, you know, share your screen, record a video and send it to your colleagues. That's cool. If you get everybody in your organization doing that, that does provide a little transformation, right? It helps you communicate more asynchronously, get more efficient with time, probably communicate better, be better prepared for meetings. There's a lot of goodness about that. I would say, you know, what one of the platforms I use to to sell and and deliver is a essentially like a CRM platform for large nonprofit organizations. And by implementing that, a single platform with a with a single database behind it where all the different pieces of a fundraising organization could talk to each other for the first time ever and share a common customer record. That was transformative in an organizational way because all of a sudden, you know, one department could see across into what another department was doing with the same customer record. That transformed the entire organization in a in a very strategic way, right? But I think understanding the you how a product helps move the company and and what what type of influence you you have on that business is really important in thinking through like the maturity model and the impact that you actually have on the organization. It's really your value prop at the end of the day.

Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah. One one other thing that I'm thinking about as I look at these capabilities that you listed out also is maybe to me this gives a simple framing that I think now you can go to other parts of the organization to inspect some of these processes. So for example, like feedback. I like the like what you put here, which is basically a route from problem to decision, which is hey How are we going to capture feedback about the the core product or maybe feature enhancements? There can be like sub designations here, but like, you know, that really engages our product team or probably our engineering team. And so now we have a little bit of a framing like, okay, there's a process that lives under feedback about how these things ultimately get routed to the right people, the right teams, what the follow-up procedure looks like, right? But you start to see how I think like there's some layers to this of getting other teams involved

Jay Nathan: Yeah.

Jeff Breunsbach: in in impacting the customer. And so, like another one is like renewal and expansion. I think you mentioned this, but like clearly our finance team would probably be involved. Okay. How do we how do we expect these terms to get ratified? How do we think about what are the levers that we can pull on contracts? Where do we think we can like give flexibility? onboarding is probably product related as well. Like, what's hard for us to to get a customer onboarded? Like, what are the the challenging steps? Are those really product enhancements that we could be pushing to, you know, reduce time to value? so anyways, I I I think the other thing that I'm sitting here thinking about too is like is it maybe gives a more direct way that you could get product and engineering teams, finance teams, to see how they're impacting the customer a little bit easier. Like I think it's hard when you go to a, hey, let's go design a hey, I need to design a feedback loop process and you're starting to talk about okay, what systems and tools, how am I gonna get it to you? But if you came with a framework like this that said, Hey, look at we really need to figure out this capability around feedback and Here's how you fit as a part of like how we're going to make customers successful. I don't know. It just seems to me like maybe an easier way to rally excitement around the business that like every function does impact the customer and like if they renew, if they stay, if NPS goes up, like all those things are company metrics.

Jay Nathan: Yeah. I just had a flashback to reading Frank Slootman's book, Amp It Up. And you know,

Jeff Breunsbach: yeah. Yeah.

Jay Nathan: Frank Slootman, for those who don't know, is the he's sort of an iconic CEO, Snowflake. I think it I think he probably retired after he left Snowflake, but he might still be on the board there. But like one of the things he famously did is said we are not going to have a team called customer success because I don't want a bunch of people Pointing at this one team asking why the customer's not successful. And it's such a brilliant point because I looked down this list as you were just talking, Jeff, and every single one of these capabilities, support, onboarding, adoption, engagement, feedback, renewal, expansion, every team sort of has a role in that. I could almost see, you know, I was even envisioning like what would it be like if you had an organization with almost like general managers that didn't actually manage the people. on these teams, right? That were general manager of customer support experience, general manager of customer onboarding, general manager of, you know, customer renewals and expansion. Like what if you had that? And then your job was to pull together the right, you know, combination of operational people who have different managers who aren't necessarily account well, that creates all kinds of other problems, by the way, right? So this is This is a utopia that doesn't and probably will never exist, but you could see like how leading with capabilities like this and not having it be a functional leader would be a better way to go because the functional leaders necessarily protect their teams. And what we're saying, and the actual really interesting thing here too, as AI has come into the picture is what we're seeing is that the lines between these things are necessarily blurring again because everybody's trying to find product market fit. No matter how big you are. So you can't have these stark lines between these these parts of the you have to think of them as as capabilities, not not teams to protect. And I think that's part of the problem. Doesn't matter what part of the order you're in, everybody usually is trying to protect a team, which is half the problem, right?

Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah. I think it goes back to the man, who said it? where you're part of the executive team first. Like you're the first team you're part of is the executive team, the second team you're part of is the team that you manage. and

Jay Nathan: Yeah. Right. Yep.

Jeff Breunsbach: like that's the that's the mindset that you need to come in with. And I think the other thing I was just gonna mention too is like your like this idea, I think, or maybe like what you're trying to convey is that like getting some outside thinking on these capabilities, I think is where the Like where the excitement and energy comes, right? Like so how are we going to approach renewals?

Jay Nathan: Yeah.

Jeff Breunsbach: Can I bring can I almost bring an engineer, product manager, or finance person together with a CSM and basically say, Okay, CSM, how do you handle renewals today? And like what if we were to re envision that with people who have not been around the problem for twenty years, who have thought, okay, the only way for us to do a renewal program is to, you know, make a better playbook and give them levers to pull on a contract, right? But there's maybe again, like I think they're like I guess like to me, like that's another part of these capabilities is like they seem it it seems if you presented it in this way to the business, you can bring in other voices in a more in a way that could be helpful to thinking outside the box and bringing probably AI and automation into these things at a better level.

Jay Nathan: Yeah. Exactly. I was just thinking back to a call that I had with another one of our friends a couple of months back. this person works at Gong and she was telling me about how they essentially they got rid of the customer success role too. They call it a revenue architect now. It's more of a consulting role. But they re

Jeff Breunsbach: Okay.

Jay Nathan: reshaped their whole team. But to your point, like I just that idea it came into my mind because it was such an interesting idea. And this is actually a company that's you know, somewhat of scale, trying something in the real world and learning from it. Like that to me is the exciting part of what you and I do, Jeff. back to your the point you just made. Which is like how do we uncover that stuff? How do we get to learn about it and then share it? And then put those people in the spotlight to give the good, bad, the ugly to the point to the extent that they can, you know, share that kind of stuff. Like that that's actually what energizes me. so back on the topic of the of the podcast itself. Have you noticed like there are there are three podcasts that I listen to a lot and I didn't used to listen to them but I've fallen into the trap. I listen to All An. That's like the Jason Calicanus thing. I listen to 20 VC, which is Harry Stebbings and Jason Lempkin and Rory, I don't know his last name. Do you ever listen to that one?

Jeff Breunsbach: occasionally, yeah. not on

Jay Nathan: Okay.

Jeff Breunsbach: like my daily you know, not a not a daily driver, but a

Jay Nathan: Yeah.

Jeff Breunsbach: like if there's an interesting episode, like I'll try and tune in.

Jay Nathan: They pump out a lot of content, but the one with those three that they do, I think once a week, is very interesting. They're all I th I like Rory, the he's very insightful, got lots of deep takes on the investment side of of tech. and then the other one I listen to every once in a while is Topline. So that's our friend Sam Jacobs, and his crew. But but the thing I noticed about those podcasts is they all have three hosts. And they bounce off each other pretty well, you know. So I don't know if that's like a thing if you have to have three hosts to have a successful podcast, but I did it did get me thinking, Jeff. So 'cause we we've

Jeff Breunsbach: We should find a third host.

Jay Nathan: well, we have we've shied away from having guests, right? Because it's just sort of a it's a scheduling headache that we haven't wanted to undertake. And we have, just so everybody knows, we have one hour every week. It's blocked off. We've sort for the most part count it as religion, right? We don't ever miss it.

Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah.

Jay Nathan: And it's helped us stay very consistent with this. so having guests really cramps that style. And the the few times we have had guests, it's like, hey, we record it this day at this time. If you can't make it, you can't be a guest. Sorry. I'm fine sticking with that.

Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah, we might w maybe we'll yeah, I don't know if we'll loosen that or not. But I think yeah, but I think like the and I think you I think there was a another podcast that was like this. Or like we had another iteration of this podcast before we called it Chief Customer Officer. and I forget what you called it then. What was it? Lane and expand.

Jay Nathan: Land it land and expand. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jeff Breunsbach: I think one of the things one of the things that I think you did well on Lane and Expand though is that you had actually a a number of great guests who brought like their their actual things they implemented to the table. Like I remember the woman from Home Depot talking through like how

Jay Nathan: Yeah.

Jeff Breunsbach: she, you know, like basically captured feedback at the store level and how that infiltrated into like everything that they were doing from like a loyalty and how that really okay, how do we win customers over, you know, from in a competitive landscape with lows and other things. and so I think like that that still like you said, like You know, we need to bring probably other perspectives on the podcast, but like can we get them to share like the real stuff they're working on, the things that have worked, like the the practical pieces? Cause I think that's what the what peop people continue to latch on to and like the world of all these shiny toys is really okay. That's great. It looks like it can do this, but did you actually go implement that? And like what did you like how did you, you know, actually get any value out of that thing?

Jay Nathan: Yeah, as I listen to as I think about like the most impact like the the podcasts that I listen to that I literally stop them at minute thirteen, I'm like, shit, I gotta go do something about what I just heard. Like they're all like practitioner level discussions, right? Where people are talking about the thing that they're actually building, doing, working on, whatever it is. It's like, okay, I need to figure that out. That that trips my trigger, you know? And so, yeah, this this podcast should be a reflection of But trip's our trigger, right? And it's ours. It doesn't matter. Yeah, if people like it or not. Sorry. Thank you for listening though.

Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah, yeah. No, no, no. but I think like that's the yeah, I think like as we, you know, as we depart on this episode, I think the the key for us is like how do we align back around doing the fundamentals well, layering in AI to help CS leaders like figure out how to implement it in their businesses. And ultimately, like how do we bring on perspectives, learn from new people, bring on interesting things that are happening in the market that we feel like will be impactful. if we can get that flowing in the podcast, I think that flows into the newsletter. And then I think ultimately like

Jay Nathan: Yeah.

Jeff Breunsbach: we've got this little budding community of uncommon, where we've got some people talking about like how they're taking AI into their businesses. And I think like those three things together are are going to be a harmonious thing, where we continue to learn in the market alongside of other people.

Jay Nathan: Yep. the one other thing that maybe we can depart on is, you know, Jeff and I have been talking about this for a couple of months now, but he and I are both he mentioned at the top we're very busy with our with full time jobs and you know, families of both both have three kids, right? Some some a little older than others. but the we have sort of gotten to the point where we feel like we're probably ready to bring in somebody. Somebody I'll say is probably a profiling thing you can't hire against this 'cause you'll get in trouble, I guess. But we want somebody young, energetic, who who would like to pick this thing up and run with it. And maybe, you know, maybe run this little tiny media company that we've launched and invested months and months of our lives into. Like and we're still willing to participate. and and help make it successful. We want to do that. But we actually are are gonna put together a job description for somebody to come in and and run this thing part time for us. And if you can figure out how to make it make money, guess what? You'll be entitled to a lot of that money. you'll be able to use our names and likenesses to help do that. Not that, you know, that's worth much, but you know, we've we've certainly, you know, been around and and have garnered a little bit of following in the in the SAS and customer success world over the past decade. So anyway, so we're gonna do that. And if you're interested or know somebody who is, have them reach out to us. Jay at customer success.io, Jeff at customer success.io. We'd love to chat with you.

Jeff Breunsbach: Let's do it.