Editors' note:
From Hustle to Scale: How vCom’s CS Leader Uses CRM and AI to 10x Customer Success.
I recently stumbled upon an unexpected gem—a powerful podcast interview featuring Kirsten DiChiappari, VP of Customer Success at vCom Solutions, on This is Growth, hosted by Daphne Costa Lopes (a HubSpot exec and founder of the media company behind the show).
In this candid conversation, Kirsten shares how vCom's tech stack: Cast.app, HubSpot, FullStory, and update.ai work together to create a seamless, insights-driven customer journey—from onboarding to expansion.
Kirsten doesn’t just talk tools—she unpacks her approach to CS Ops, automation, and leadership in a dynamic B2B space. If you’re rethinking your own post-sale strategy or wondering how to turn your CRM into a growth engine, this episode is worth a listen.
Here’s what Kirsten had to say about AI, Cast.app, CS Ops, her customers, and the future of customer success.
Read about the bi-directional Cast.app Hubspot high-performance Connector here.
Dickey Singh
Daphne Costa Lopes: Welcome to This is Growth, the podcast where we help you build and scale modern customer success organizations.
Hello, Customer Success Crew. It's been a hot moment. It's been a really, really busy few months for me and I hit pause with a podcast for a few weeks, but here I am again and in this episode of the podcast, I am talking to Kirsten DiChiappari. She's the VP of Success of vCom Solutions. She's a member of the CS Angels and an all round great CS leader.
In this conversation, we go into key challenges that CS leaders face. We talk about the mindset of the CSM. And what it takes to win in this current climate. So go grab your headphones and your running shoes because here is my conversation with Kirsten.
Hey Kirsten, it's so good to have you here in the podcast. How are you?
Kirsten DiChiappari: I'm great. Thank you so much for having me.
Daphne Costa Lopes: Tell us. Who are you and what do you do?
Kirsten DiChiappari: I am the Vice President of Customer Success and software adoption at a company called vCom Solutions. And we do IT Lifecycle Management out of California, with our team distributed all over the country.
Daphne Costa Lopes: VP, incredible title, big responsibility. Tell us, how did you get here? How did you become a VP?
Kirsten DiChiappari: This is actually my second career doing the VP thing. I originally went to school and got my Master's in HR Management. I actually spent about 12 years in HR Management, in high tech startups, in higher education, in nonprofits, in banking, and, rose through the ranks there.
And I was VP of HR when I left that career, and did a complete pivot, I would say 18 years ago and changed the trajectory of what I was doing. The industry, in HR. I loved professional development. I loved team building. That's what I loved specializing in and really rallying the troops and bringing the best out of the people that worked for me.
But the economy had made it nearly impossible to do that, and it was, just frustrating work. Really, really frustrating work. And I just wanted something that didn't feel that way. And I stepped, but dragged that with me. I actually ended up working for a wellness company that wanted to crack into corporate wellness and needed someone to help them get into HR offices in companies.
So I did that for a little bit, and through that I ended up on the Chamber of Commerce board and on a bunch of networking organizations and I just kept working with my peers who would ask me personally to help them with their social media marketing, with their, setting up their business structure, so doing their email marketing, doing their websites, doing their mobile sites, and I did all of that and parlayed that into a consulting business.
And I was working with, media companies in the area here where I live to help their advertisers, small and medium sized businesses, get their message up so indirectly, those were all my customers and it really was customer success. Letting your advertisers be successful, get their message across, do what they needed to do.
That brought me to working for an email marketing company, doing customer success, doing some marketing, teaching our customers, sales teams how to leverage our tools and our product, traveling around the country and working with 'em. For me to find that customer success felt just natural. It felt exactly like where I belonged.
It allowed me to do what I wanted to do and that's where I've been ever since. And so I've been working my way, up the ladder of customer success ever since, and I. Really excited about, where I am now and really what else there is for me to learn and to do.
Daphne Costa Lopes: I love your story because there's a story of pivoting, right?
You start in a place, you start with HR management and then you know you have adversity that, that kind of, brings you into a new path and. Go and you found your own consulting agency. You found that niche in the market. And I think every founder really deeply understands customer success, even if we don't call it customer success because they're business don't exist unless you're delivering something of value.
To, to customers, and you truly understand what it is that they need. So I think founders really do get deeply customer success and the importance of that. And for you to like actually get a, a springboard and launch a new career and after having launched your own business, it's like kind of three careers in itself and it's incredible.
Thank you so much for sharing with us.
A lot of folks who are listening to this, tuning in they're trying to build this career as well. They wanna build a successful career, they wanna climb the ladder. What's your top tip for people who are in this journey? They're starting off.
Kirsten DiChiappari: I think the best thing about customer success personally is that you can come to this career from so many different places. So I don't think anybody should get overwhelmed or panicked if that's not where they started, because customer success isn't just a title, It really is, I mean, okay, it's gonna sound silly to say an energy, but it is you are either deeply invested in the overall.
Success of your customer, the long-term success of your customer, creating an exemplary experience, or you're not. And there's nothing wrong with that. There are many, many, many jobs inside our company that don't touch the customer experience directly. So you can have impact and success in your career in other places, but the people that work on my team right now have all come from.
Very different backgrounds, very different experiences. Some have come from sales into customer success or business development into customer success. Some have come from our customers, side of the business to wanting to work with us on our side of the business. Some have come from the service industry.
Some have come from the fitness industry. Like it's just an energy. There's such a great blending of all of the different personalities on our team with different experiences, and that I think makes us a super team. There's no sort of stepford approach to this.
Not everybody looks exactly the same and does the same, and it really, is important that people remember that and the people I'm interviewing when we're hiring, there's a lot of people coming from higher education and making it pivot themselves and parlaying those skills into customer success careers.
So I think it's okay. To start wherever you are and to embrace who you are and what you think you have to offer, the businesses that you're applying to. And then I think it's networking. It's hustling and it's getting out there. And it might be putting you out of your comfort zone depending on your personality type.
But going to events, registering for events, joining the groups, joining the Slack channels, being vulnerable. Asking for help. Asking to help, like, can I help you with that event? Can I help you put that on? Can I learn from you? Can I offer some free services? And just making a way and a name for yourself also helps when the time comes that you need to look for work.
And even the time that I've been in customer success, this career has been a very tumultuous ride. And I've lost jobs and I've had to find jobs and our companies have been acquired and we've acquired and we've merged and gone out. It hasn't been just smooth sailing. You're, it's not, you get in and you're good.
There's still a lot of adversity in this industry. I think there are lots of podcasts that talk about wonderful customer success, people that are looking for work because of everything that expanded over Covid and has contracted. So there's a lot of people out there trying to find their way and I hope they do, 'cause those are good people out there.
Daphne Costa Lopes: This is great advice. I think the, you used the word hustle, which I think sometimes people can hear, hustle and think about it in a negative perspective, but I actually think it's a really positive thing because is resourcefulness right? You know what you want and you go after that and you use what you have.
If you are time rich because you are looking for a job and you don't have a nine to five yet, like, well, how can you use that time? You might not have cash to invest, but you have the time to invest. Or maybe you do have a really incredible network that you build over the years and you can leverage your network and that's your way of hustling.
I love, really do love that concept. You talked a little bit about, having changed jobs, being acquired, acquiring companies. Is there anything that you would say helps people stay fresh and current, to continue to succeed no matter what happens in, in the macro around them?
Kirsten DiChiappari: Looking at your network and listening to them. There are so many good thought leaders out there that come from different backgrounds, whether they're in the, SaaS space, whether they're in the, the, um, uh, professional services space, whether they're in, the founder space, they're telling stories and they're writing books and they're speaking, and there's just a ton of content to consume. And because I think that this career and this industry that I'm in, is in, the tech space continues to evolve and iterate all the time. It's not a one and done. So the things that I did in customer success 10 years ago. Some of it remains. Some of it is evergreen, but a lot of it is evolving. And so I think it's important to try to keep abreast of where it's headed and what kinds of skills you want to start to look into, learn about, take a class in, take a webinar, go get trained. Those kinds of things are really important to stay fresh.
Because it's, there's a lot of technology in this space now that wasn't here 10 years ago. That can make your life infinitely easier and better and make your time more with your customers, more valuable. But you have to know how to use it and you can't be afraid of it.
Daphne Costa Lopes: Yeah. I think that is, a really big salient point that I try to make with people all the time as well, which is you have to stay on top of, what's being created in the field and. It's not like you go to customer success college, right?
There's courses, of course, there's good content that, that helps you get started.
But really the innovation, the new things, it's all unstructured learning format. It's. It's on LinkedIn is in blogs, is in podcasts, and it's, there's no shortcut.
You have to stay on top of this stuff and find the people who you really trust, you admire, and to them find new people and, and just keep current with that stuff. So, yeah, I totally agree with you.
I wanna shift gears a little bit, and I wanna talk a little bit about your customer success team. 'cause people are always curious when we're talking to different companies. What does CS look like in the organization? So I'd love to ask you a few questions around your strategy for customer success.
First of all, let's start with how big is your team?
How many people you have there?
How are you structured?
Kirsten DiChiappari: Right now there are eight people on my team. I have one person who is doing the software development, so he does our training and education, our enablement for our customers. I have six customer success managers.
Three of them are senior customer success managers, and I have one CS Ops person, and that's a role that we created last fall. It was actually one of my customer success managers who was looking for, an opportunity like that and she was going to go elsewhere and we needed that. And so our CEO who's amazing, I now can't imagine how we would be functioning without it.
Daphne Costa Lopes: Oh my God. I love that you have a CS Ops person so early and an enablement person so early because. A lot of companies wait until they're like 30, 40 people and all of their processes are stuck together with blue tack before they actually go and hire a person. And, it's just so great to hear that you have somebody there like from the start.
Can I ask you, how do you leverage your CS Ops person on a daily basis?
Kirsten DiChiappari: She plays a really important role in how we are going to scale.
So our company's been around for 23 years and it has itself evolved immensely in the tech space because the stuff that we're involved in today didn't exist 23 years ago.
But we are still very much a startup, like we're here looking at 2x 3x 4x this business because the market share for what we do is we could multiply by a hundred and still be scratching the surface.
So we needed to set ourselves up for scale and to do that, we needed to adopt some technology.
We needed to revise some processes. We needed to update our onboarding for customer success managers so that they could hit the ground running faster. And we needed someone who owned all of that and thought about all of that and wasn't doing it on the side. And so that's really what her remit is.
And she's so excited about that change management 'cause we change a lot has been something that's frustrated her. She really likes to, to create some calmness in all of that. And so she's doing a lot of our playbooks. Putting things into HubSpot for our teams to use when they're on the phone with customers, um, compiling all of our assets and all of our information and how CSM does their job.
She's created this repository of everything that is current and vetted, and then she leads our tech and we have a couple of big pieces of technology that we've been adopting.
HubSpot used to just be used by our biz dev and marketing teams because we have an in-house CRM, but we have in the last, over the last year, moving our entire rev gen organization in there.
And so particularly from the customer success footprint, she is setting that all up. And our pipelines and our automations and everything to see where she can continue to chip away at ways to give daylight back to the team and create consistency. 'cause again, different personalities, different experiences, different backgrounds, working with different customers, but we still wanna have a baseline of the way we deliver what we deliver.
Then we're also trying to create a lot of engagement with our customers. That does not require a human to do it. We also find our customers are looking for the content, but don't necessarily wanna talk to someone. They're afraid they're gonna be upsold, so how do we make sure they get everything they need to be successful in and in a safe space so that they might consume more?
So we adopted the product called cast.App, at the end of 2022 and spent some time building it up. And we have our customers get at the first Tuesday of every month an automated "Program Health Report".
It's a mini Business Review that says:
Here is all of what you've been doing over the last month or over the last quarter with us.
Here's the orders.
Here's the time to resolution.
Here's the tickets that you opened.
Here's this, here's that.
Here's what we're managing for you.
Here's the number of invoices we paid through.
It tells you everything and it gives it to them in less than five minutes.
And it has tons of recommendations where they can take themselves on a journey to look for more.
They can look at white papers.
They can see some recommendations about some products.
We're curious about why they're not using, and it's all done.
And so the CSMs are able to see more coverage across their own account portfolios without having to work 24x7.
Customers are THIRLLED with what they're getting.
She continues to evolve that program.
What else can we, provide in this format?
We've also done it for onboarding new customers.
Setting expectations with them.
We send anniversary casts.
We do our NPS through that, and so there's a ton of energy and effort right now.
She's been pouring the foundation of that so that, that will be able to run alongside our teams.
We've started using a product called Full Story.
It's really for our software developers and our product management team, but software adoption and the CSMs are really able to understand how their customers are using our product to see their sessions and if they're experiencing frustration, to understand if the directions we're giving them are the directions they're taking.
We keep saying go left, and they're going right.
Either we need to make some enhancements to our product to meet them where they are, or we need to do a better job of training them. And this helps the team understand.
Then the thing we've done, in the last quarter is, update ai. And again, the transcription of the meeting notes, that is immediately written to the HubSpot record, which means that anybody that is on that account team can see, not just that an activity occurred, but what occurred, what came out of it, who attended, what are the takeaways, what are the risks? What do we need to know?
We're able to make better use of our time together than repeating what just happened and getting right down to the, Hey, what do you think about this? What do we wanna do for this customer? What do we do next?
And then from a management perspective, I of course am using both the account level insights and the overall portfolio insights when I talk to the leadership teams about big themes in areas that I think we need to focus on.
So those are things that are entirely under her control and, um. And it just, it's so lovely to have someone who owns those things and takes pride in them and, and is growing them, and growing us as an organization.
Daphne Costa Lopes: Yeah, that is phenomenal. Thank you so much for walking us through kind of like nearly all your tech stack because first of all, thank you for your business, obviously in HubSpot.
I love to hear that, but I also love to hear the amount of innovation that this one person can help you drive in your team. Your team get to be focused in delivering value for the customer because you have this person that's dedicated and ensuring that the processes that you have in place, that the tools you have in place are accelerators for your team.
So it sounds like, this is the best pitch ever for a CS Ops person.
So if you're listening to the podcast and you don't have one yet, this is your cue, to go and have this conversation. I know there are so many people also that listen, that ask themselves, I am a CSM, I wanna grow my role.
There isn't a role for me to go to. And it sounds like this person in your team went about crafting the role, that she wanted and really finding a space for that in your team, which I just think it's phenomenal as well, from a growth perspective for a person to be able to.
Really be clear about what they're interested in and what value they can bring to the business, and then be able to make that role. Obviously, kudos to your CEO for buying into this, incredible to hear that, that she was able to craft this role for herself in the organization.
Kirsten DiChiappari: I think that, I'll say that it does come down to seeing what your business needs and being comfortable and confident enough to speak it.
Worst case scenario, she knew she was going to leave because this role exists in other places, so she had nothing to lose by saying.
We need this.
I think I can do this.
I think it actually plays really well to my strengths overall, and I'd like to try. It was probably a little bit sooner than we might've done it, but actually in retrospect it was act almost late. Because there's still so much that she has to go in and audit historically legacy data and cleaning things up, making it work in ap, our APIs into HubSpot.
There's a lot of work she's doing that makes you go, oh my God, I can't believe we waited so long to do this. Absolutely. Do I think everybody needs a CS OPs person?
Daphne Costa Lopes: Yeah, no, completely agreed. It's funny because the data is like that, right?
The longer you go with band-aiding things, not having a process, not having clarity, the worse the situation gets every single day, right?
Because there's more data records is more conversations. So if, the option is there to have somebody from day one, right? That would be phenomenal. Obviously not always financially, feasible, but even somebody that is passionate at the early stages of your company, that might not be their full-time role, but it's something that they take ownership, see the value of.
Kristen, you talked a little bit about your strategy there. You said that, you wanna scale, you don't wanna be doing things, human-led all of the time.
Can you talk to us a little bit more about that?
What is the overarching strategy for your business?
Kirsten DiChiappari: Our job in customer success is primarily retention.
Retention comes in lots of different ways and revenue retention also includes expansion revenue.
So you're going to lose some things and gain some things.
And so we have a lot of activities inside of customer success that are part of what we do.
We do onboarding.
We're doing education and coaching and enablement.
We're handling escalations and business reviews.
We host events, from time to time and ideally generate expansion.
And so there's a lot of different things that happen inside of customer success here.
And looking at it from an efficiency standpoint and thinking about where we need the one-to-one coverage.
Where we don't, has been top of mind for the past two years that I've been here and trying to look at what is the right way to segment our customers where nobody, is dissatisfied and nobody is abandoned because it isn't really, you get a person or you get nothing. It might be that you have a customer success account manager or you are rich with these digital assets and resources, whether we're sending you the weekly download from our cus our CS champion on how to do this and how to do that, and our latest releases and software and explaining about different things as well as these very personalized, Cast.app campaigns that are all just about that customer's, partnership with us.
It's really important to find the links that we can put people in and we've looked at the base a million different ways. Is it enterprise, mid-market, SMB? No.
Is it their customer health score?
Is it the revenue that they generate?
The number of products they're consuming?
It wasn't geography.
So we've played it a million different ways, but we are right now in the process of evaluating how to set our employees up for success. And not burnout. And not turnover.
And really make sure that we are, getting the best of the best people and delivering the best to our customers.
So we will be probably putting a, swath of customers into a one to many pool where they will receive those.
Most of them have put themselves there anyway.
Most of them are not interested in quarterly business reviews.
They're not interested in on sites.
They know how to use our software.
They know how to get what they need.
They know how to access our Subject Matter Experts because we are a professional services business.
It's not straight SaaS.
And they know what they need and they know how to do it, and they will access things as they need.
So they don't want someone chasing them down.
Nor do we have a bunch of people with nothing better to do than call customers that don't wanna talk.
So by carving out that subset of customers and making sure they get everything they need and have access to everything they need, training office hours, all those things on their terms, on their time.
Is a perfect way then to reposition the six humans that I have on customer success to the accounts that are most complex, that are most complicated, that are consuming most of our products that need someone to really help them understand all of what's going on. And so that's. The focus that we've been going through for the last couple of months, and we'll continue that conversation at the leadership level, just deciding and determining how to do that the best so that as we hit that two x three x four x, we are not, we've already figured out the structure and we're moving into it.
Confidence. Confidence and not questioning, oh, now we gotta go back. Now we've gotta strip all of these people from having a CSM. What does that look like? Why, what does it feel punitive? That's not what we're trying to do. There's no punishment here. In fact, there's only reward if we get this right.
And that's what we're headed towards.
Daphne Costa Lopes: Yeah, everything you're saying makes so much sense, right? So you're segmenting customers in a way that you are positioning your resources where they are going to be most impactful for your customers. That, that, that makes so much sense.
But I know the people listening. They're not used to this. This is a pretty controversial topic because segmentation is usually very static, right? Segmentation is, like you said, it's what's the size of your business?
How much money are you spending with us? And those things usually push large companies that spend a lot of money in a really high touch model where you are on their pockets, you're with them all of the time. And then it puts the customers who are spending less money with you and are pretty small. It puts them in a place where you are spending for yourself.
Go figure this out. And, while financially speaking that you know that, that makes a lot of sense. Actually, when you think about the propensity to succeed, right? Who is actually set up to succeed here? Uh, we end up overinvesting in customers who would happily own their own success because they have the resources, they have, the know-how, they have agency partners working with them.
They, you know, like it's a, it, it really, um, kind of like misplaces over, over invests on one side and under invests on the other one. So, I love hearing that, that you're doing this because like I said, I think it's not the common, it's not the normal or the, let's say the cookie cutter approach to doing this.
So fair play for trying something new.
Kirsten DiChiappari: Thank you.
We really wanted to get it right and it made no sense just to look at it from the customer segmentation out of the industry. Like this is an enterprise customer, we have some enterprise customers, and just to provide context for everyone what our company does in terms of IT Lifecycle Management is everything from procuring assets all the way through to paying them, including operating.
So there are nine phases.
Some customers come to us for one thing of nine things. They come to us for one thing. They just want our, technology group to help them source technology. That's all they need.
They can be an enterprise level company that does that. If they're not truly understanding the value of vCom and looking to chip away at more of the lifecycle. They don't need a customer success manager because there isn't a lot to manage. They're just doing one thing. And so when we looked at customers from a health score and we wiped everything that you could pick out of the health score.
So it's not whether they've come to an event, it's not whether they're certified, it's not whether we have a C-level contact.
We went back and did a health score that is utterly unemotional. It is here are our nine products and how many of these things is a customer using?
'cause you can be an SMB doing all nine things with us. You are 100% invested in the value of vCom and you may need an account manager, a customer success manager to help you with all of what is happening inside your business. So it wouldn't have been fair to say if you don't pay us a million dollars, you're not worthy of.
Because the truth is the value of the CS or the CS/AM is in what you are doing with us, not the dollars. They tend to fall together, the more you're investing in all of our products and services, you tend to be paying a little bit more, but it's still relative and it's still to scale for your business.
And so we wanted to make sure that everybody got what they needed and it wasn't just something that we made a gut decision on based on just one category that comes from the industry, not from us.
Daphne Costa Lopes: And you talked her about you might be an enterprise company using one piece of your product, and obviously the tendency is to say, let's invest the resources there so that they can use more of us, so that we can sell the dream.
We can go wall to wall with them. Is that something that you bake into, this idea of how you place customer success managers in this segmentation or this model that you use?
Kirsten DiChiappari: Well, certainly when we work with a customer who might come through the door for just one thing, the goal is for them to have success with that one thing.
So that naturally and instinctively we would ask what about and what comes next? Because it is the lifecycle. So if you just wanna get, take it and you don't want us to help you manage it, and you don't want us to help you, um, pay for it and we don't, or record it, do your coding, any of that, it must mean you have.
All of that figured out in-house somehow. It's rare. But so we certainly want to keep, close ties so that we can expand. But the truth is that being a professional services organization, we also have dozens and dozens of subject matter experts. So there are technology executives on the mobile side, on the network side, on the cloud and the SaaS side that are talking to your customer as well.
There are people on the account team that are not you talking to your customer, and so ideally, if there's not a lot for the CSM to manage, the rest of the team is still working with that customer and the opportunity isn't dead if it's not the CSM. So as an organization. The way we work with our customers offers lots of opportunities for the right person to contextually open the door to the next thing.
It doesn't, again, we don't want them to not answer the phone when we call because they feel like they're about to be pushed to something they're not ready for. And we know how satisfied and happy they will be. And how many of our customers have been with us for 20 years because they can't imagine doing it without us.
We are the HubSpot, for IT.
That's what we do.
We pull it all together into a single pane of glass and have you work through the entire lifecycle of some of many different parts of technology, but, that's really what we want someone to truly understand and show up for.
Daphne Costa Lopes: Yeah. The concept of the account team is such a powerful one because it takes away.
The CSM is the only individual who is solely responsible for the success or the failure of an account, and actually looks at the broader ecosystem that we have in our organization and who is the right person or the right resource for different problems, issues, opportunities. So I think that I love for more people to look more broadly when we talk about customer success.
At the start just said customer success is an energy. I like saying customer success of philosophy, but this is what it is, right? If every single person in, in the business that touches the account, sees themselves as part of the puzzle of driving success for the customer, I think you end up with something so much better and so much more powerful.
I have a question for you around, measuring value. So in this podcast we talk a lot about the importance of measuring value. I'm a big proponent that if you can't show value to your customers, you're gonna have a very hard conversation when you're trying to say to them, stay with us again for 12 months, or buy more from us.
So are you measuring value for customers, like in customer terms today?
Kirsten DiChiappari: We are, and that's an evolving, proposition, I would say. In fact, when I started here. We don't, we didn't have terms, when you signed an agreement with VOM, your contract continued until you gave 60 days notice. So on one hand, there's a lot of anxiety in that because from a CS perspective, every time the customer is frustrated, they could theoretically be about to give you 60 days notice.
And so it made it a little more, stressful to make sure that we understood the difference between somebody blowing off steam and a real concern inside of a customer and inside a real risk inside of an account. And being able to just take a deep breath and step back and say, and our CEO's perspective is that we have to be consistently proving our value and we don't wanna lock customers up.
So anytime you want, you can go. We have actually changed a little bit in that we are selling on term now. And the truth is that's an industry standard, so nobody was confused when we started sending out agreements that had a term. And so now we're starting to see obviously, renewals because when you have a term that means you actually have a renewal.
So there's a little bit of motion in that. And so starting to measure. Time to value, which we were always probably measuring, but not more formally. So from the moment that an agreement is signed, through their implementation phase, how long does it take to get to that? And the truth is you can be an implementation for one of our products and be in parallel with other of our products.
So we, we have a lot of, education to explain to the customer that you can be building something and using something else at the same time. It's not linear and so where people fall in that can get a little chaotic. So we are going back to some basics. Obviously we've been measuring NPS for a long time.
It's an old standard. The organization has been measuring it. We continue to see really strong, really consistent numbers, have seen some fluctuation inside of enterprise mid-market, SMB. So we look at that and consider again, how do we deliver our products and services differently. We started measuring, we have a risk pipeline, that we're using.
We've got a lot of stuff that we're starting to get around. To adopting and educating the team on how to look at these numbers and how to look at things from a more metrics perspective and not just an emotional perspective on how we feel about our customers, but our overarching target too is annualized net revenue retention, which I know some people I.
Think isn't what you use anymore to measure success, obviously it's one of the things that we use from quarter to quarter, to determine how well we're doing, holding the base, as we're growing the organization. So that's probably our north star, star metric right now. But there's a lot of other, surveys and analysis and, things that we're tracking how long someone's in onboarding, how long they're in the sales cycle, how long to the next thing that they purchase, and so on.
Daphne Costa Lopes: Yeah. And those are all industry standard metrics, right? They are net revenue retention or gross retention and churn, and they really do give you a picture of the outcome of your department to, have you done your job and ha have you been able to retain those customers and drive value for them? But you talked about the stuff that you put in front of your customer, that summary of how they're using and the value they're getting. Is it all usage based or do you have something that says, Hey, you've achieved X with our business this quarter or this year?
Kirsten DiChiappari: The "Program Health Report" that goes to them on a monthly basis, that in particular is activity based. So it's primarily it's showing them the activities that they've done with us that they've asked us to partner with them on, that we've helped them with.
But most of the time the customers have also made it clear in their sort of success planning, that they're here to potentially, create savings. So we give our customers, we like to say that what we demonstrate for them is in the way of Time, Information, and Money. So by leveraging vCom, they're getting back incredible amounts of time because we manage what they shouldn't.
Tons of information that is coming through the software platform, visibility reporting, just understanding where everything is typically. We have some customers that discover they've been paying a bill on a thing that they don't even have anymore, or on an office that has been closed for three years because they didn't have it all in one place.
So the information and the visibility also leads to savings. And then we can optimize on the mobile side, we can consolidate plans, and we can manage your plans to keep you close to the line. And so there's a lot of that is part of it. And so, that's part of the report too. So it's not just in the number of things that you did with us, but whether or not you received this month we were able to save you, in overages by moving your plan up and you spend an extra thousand dollars, you saved $10,000 in overages, which is what would've happened if you didn't have us pulling the levers behind the scenes, things like that.
That we're able to do or on network, we're able to get them better technology or better rates, better installation. So the things that we can do for them. We do need to demonstrate for them there is that soft too. And then we say to them, Hey, when our team was handling those 200 tickets, your team wasn't, and on average at $50,000 a year, we saved you this much.
So, we definitely give them some hard and some soft, as well as some black and white statistical, this many orders, this many tickets, this many invoices.
Daphne Costa Lopes: Oh, fantastic. And I, you gave a framework, you said, time, money, and information. Was that, or was that the three things?
Kirsten DiChiappari: Correct. Time, information, and money.
That's the way we demonstrate our value to our customers.
Daphne Costa Lopes: I love that framework and I think I've heard, obviously I've talked about value in many different ways, but I actually think in a lot of businesses that is true what you do. You know, if you're in technology and SaaS, a lot of what you're, you promising customers is you save them time is that you give them visibility to make better decisions in the organization. And it is the money that either you're making through the technology or saving through the technology. So I actually think this is a great framework.
If anybody's listening to the podcast and you're thinking like, what are some of the things that I can use to measure value for my own customers?
I think thinking those three things, money, time, and information is actually a great way of doing that.
Kirsten DiChiappari: And what I'll say is, whether it's a quarterly business review, strategic business review, executive business review, whatever you call your BRs. What we've said to the team is this can't really be just a dead presentation where it slide after slide of history and past when we're doing a PowerPoint deck we are thinking about how to tell the story through those pillars.
How many places did we save you time this past quarter, whatever the period is that it's been since the last time we've been together.
What kind of success have we had?
And sometimes then you're gonna also find the right place to jump in and talk about the reasons why there isn't a lot of story to tell if they haven't taken our recommendations.
If they didn't go in the direction that we suggested, our subject matter expert is telling them to buy a particular type of technology or to make a move on their mobile plans, it really can crack open the why and or if it's really successful and the what comes next. And those things have to have a jumping off point.
And so if we can summary, roll up a lot of eye rolling data and bring it to you in these quick hits of where we succeeded and what we achieved together is, again, it's a partnership. They cannot just sign with us and step away. We truly are, we do need one another for this to work, and so then we can tell the story and it helps punctuate.
It much better.
Daphne Costa Lopes: Yes. If I had a plus button, I'd be pressing it 10 times on that because it is the Enterprise Business Review, the Business Review, whatever you call it, it's all about the customer and what they want to understand what is valuable for them and you have to tell the story.
If you don't tell a good story of the journey, why those things matter. How are they making an impact on their business? It falls flat and it feels very one sided. So I, completely agree with you on that and I think CSMs need a lot of training to do that 'cause it's not easy. It's the skill of understanding the data, understanding why it matters, wrapping a compelling story around it.
It's something that you developed. Obviously some people are great storytellers from the get go, and they, it's a natural to them, but for most people, this is a learned ability and you have to have somebody coaching you through and helping you, you do it. But what I think it's a lot of businesses forget is.
The fact that your CSM can't be the person figuring out what value your product delivers. And I had a conversation with Diana Di recently in the podcast where she said exactly that and she put it so succinctly. I, again, like you, you have to teach your CSMs. Like why does our product exist in the world?
What value does it deliver? Why is it important for customers? If you teach them how to do that, if you teach them how to think around those topics, then they can have a very valuable conversation. But that, if you just give them data and tell them, go and do an EBR, it's really difficult for somebody that's starting off, isn't it?
Kirsten DiChiappari: Oh, a hundred percent.
And when we talked a little bit earlier about account teams, first of all, I'll say, and everybody makes fun of me for this, I say it anyway, I, my motto is that
"Customer Success does not solve problems.
We make sure problems get solved."
And so our job is to make sure that we in some ways are the translator between the customer and our organization, and we are educating our account teams on what the customer needs and also making sure that account team is sharing the stories with us. They have the information we need.
It can't be that flat statistic on a page.
And we need access to that information. We need to understand the sentiment of the customer, so that we too can walk into those business reviews, ideally with our account teams, but if not, we can represent, oh, Pam told me that you guys worked really hard on this thing and I understand this happened and we had this little hiccup and John said and so that it feels very much like we are moving together as a single organism. 'cause we can't, especially in a professional services organization, you cannot do this by yourself.
'cause your product is also your people. And so I can't just get the data and the story out of my platform. It does require more, and that's why the combination for us right now of update AI and HubSpot means that we can catch each other up. Faster. I can quickly drop in and see the conversation. I can see the transcript, I can see the customer's emotion, and I can educate myself on the types of things I might wanna touch on in our next time together, or avoid or bring in reinforcements because I know this is gonna be a sticky topic and I can't answer that.
Nobody wants to hear more of, oh, I'll check, I'll ask. Nobody needs you to play the telephone game if they don't think you add value, they're just gonna bypass you and start going directly to other people anyway. So you really do wanna maintain the control. We are in the poll position. We are the center spoke of the relationship for the customer, but there's a lot that goes into that and a lot of people that need to contribute to that and make sure that they're also.
Keeping up on their note taking and their accounting so that we can all serve. Customers Better.
Daphne Costa Lopes: Better. Yeah.
Kirsten, this has been such an interesting conversation and I feel like I can talk to you for hours and hours and we'll still be here unpacking customer success. But we need to land this plane and wrap this up.
So first of all, thank you so much for making the time and for sharing so much wisdom.
So honestly, so authentically with us today.
I am sure the audience is gonna take a ton out of this conversation and be able to apply on their day to day. So thank you so much for being here with us.
Kirsten DiChiappari: Oh, I really loved it.
Thank you so much.
Daphne Costa Lopes: If you enjoy this conversation and want to support the podcast, make sure to hit, follow or subscribe wherever you listen. And if you're feeling generous, please share with your colleagues or friends. That's the best way to help me spread the word. And finally, if you're loving this content, don't forget to sign up to the This Is Growth Newsletter.
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