Today’s episode features an interview with Morgan Courtney, Director of Customer Success at Taskrabbit. Taskrabbit is a marketplace platform that makes the neighborhood a little more familiar by conveniently connecting people with Taskers to handle everyday home to-do’s. 

With expertise that includes strategy and program planning, customer success, behavioral science, product operations, community engagement, and so much more, Morgan enjoys building strategies for long-term goals and developing paths to get there—using operational, product, brand, and community approaches.

In this episode, Morgan discusses working from a place of empathy, the methodology behind her recruitment mindset, and the importance of “dogfooding.” 

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“Customer success is really an art and a science. You're working with people, and people are unpredictable. So it's really good to understand people and get close to people so that you can try to figure out, okay, how will messages be received? What is the best way to communicate? What is the most effective way to communicate? How do you frame a message? When and where do you reach people? So all of those things are really critical.” - Morgan Courtney 

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**(04:21) - The Taskrabbit model 

**(05:30) - Morgan’s journey 

**(14:27) - Biggest Obstacles 

**(23:32) - Morgan’s recruiting mindset 

**(35:44) - Quick Hits 

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This podcast was created by the team at Totango. Design and run best-in-class customer journeys with no-code, visual software that delivers immediate value, easy iteration and optimization, and predictable scale-up growth. Join over 5,000 customers from startups to fast-growing enterprises using the industry’s only Composable Customer Success Platform. Start for free at Totango.com.

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Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn

Connect with Morgan on LinkedIn

Totango.com

Today’s episode features an interview with Jay Nathan, EVP & Chief Customer Officer at Higher Logic. Higher Logic is an industry leader in cloud-based engagement platforms with a data-driven approach that gives organizations an expanded suite of engagement capabilities.

By serving in a variety of executive roles across customer success, product, services, and account management, Jay has developed a powerful methodology for building, leading, and scaling SaaS companies serving a wide range of end markets and customer sizes.

In this episode, Jay discusses the proper mindset to scale customer success, the challenges of counting on customer relationships, and his homegrown customer success community, Gain Grow Retain. 

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“And now, as you take on leadership roles, and you know this because you do the same thing, you solve problems for groups of customers at a time, not just one at a time. And that's the beautiful thing about customer success and having a more strategic role, go-to-market planning, and all these other pieces is that you're actually solving problems at scale, which is more fun ultimately than solving them one at a time, at least for me.” - Jay Nathan 

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**(04:11) Jay’s journey to Higher Logic

**(12:35) The importance of community in CS 

**(18:54) The Gain Grow Retain podcast 

**(29:51) Relationship, value, and engagement 

**(39:11) Quick hits 

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This podcast was created by the team at Totango. Design and run best-in-class customer journeys with no-code, visual software that delivers immediate value, easy iteration and optimization, and predictable scale-up growth. Join over 5,000 customers from startups to fast-growing enterprises using the industry’s only Composable Customer Success Platform. Start for free at Totango.com.

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Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn

Connect with Jay on LinkedIn

Totango.com

Learn more about Gain Grow Retain

This episode of CS No BS features an interview with Eran Ashkenazi, Chief Customer Officer at SentinelOne. SentinelOne is a pioneer in delivering autonomous security for the endpoint, data center, and cloud environments to help organizations secure their assets with speed and simplicity. 

Eran is an experienced business-oriented technology leader with a mind for business development and customer focus. He’s a world traveler and resident speaker in company events and conferences. His technological experience related to pre-sale/post-sale activities includes consulting, design, implementation, and training. 

In this episode, Eran discusses the importance of maintaining gratitude for the customer, the challenges of prioritizing customer success within an organization, and the pitfalls of being too scrappy with tools.

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“Innovation, tenacity, relentlessness, there's a lot of different values that got us to that particular point in time. But you know, I think everything starts with customers. Customers are the essence of existence for a vendor. And I think that vendors should never forget that, you know, as they focus on top end and bottom line, on savings or growth.

Customers are the fuel that drives all of that, right? If you keep them in the center of your attention, then there's better chances of you succeeding, right? It's still a slim chance, by the way. Not many companies can go through this road and end up where we ended up. So we're very, very grateful for that, and we're grateful for our customers.” - Eran Ashkenazi

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**(03:51) - Customers are top of mind at SentinelOne 

**(07:24) - Endpoint security 

**(16:39) - CS challenges 

**(25:43) - Mistakes along the way 

**(31:35) - Building out the digital journey

**(37:38) - Quick Hits 

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This podcast was created by the team at Totango. Design and run best-in-class customer journeys with no-code, visual software that delivers immediate value, easy iteration and optimization, and predictable scale-up growth. Join over 5,000 customers from startups to fast-growing enterprises using the industry’s only Composable Customer Success Platform. Start for free at Totango.com.

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Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn

Connect with Eran on LinkedIn

Totango.com

Welcome to CS, No BS: Your practical playbook for delivering net revenue retention… the holy grail of customer growth. On our first season of the podcast, we’ve talked to some of the brightest minds and key voices in Customer Success. Today we’re bringing you a bonus episode where our recent guests spotlight the biggest BS in CS and share how to overcome it.

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**(01:06) - Brent Cogswell

**(03:10) - Maranda Dziekonski

**(06:22) - Shona Fenner 

**(08:55) - Kerri Brown

**(12:09) - Guy Nirpaz

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This podcast was created by the team at Totango. Design and run best-in-class customer journeys with no-code, visual software that delivers immediate value, easy iteration and optimization, and predictable scale-up growth. Join over 5,000 customers from startups to fast-growing enterprises using the industry’s only Composable Customer Success Platform. Start for free at Totango.com.

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Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn

Listen to Ep. 1: Customer journey as a product with Guy Nirpaz, Founder and CEO of Totango

Listen to Ep. 2: The power of being proactive with Brent Cogswell, Head of Customer Success at Schneider Electric

Listen to Ep. 3: Building CS from scratch with Maranda Dziekonski, Chief Customer Officer at Swiftly

Listen to Ep. 4: Owning the moment trumps owning the customer with Shona Fenner, Sr. Customer Success Operations Manager

Listen to Ep. 5: Delivering on customer expectations with Kerri Brown, Head of Customer Success Strategy Execution at SAP

Totango.com

This episode of CS No BS features an interview with Kerri Brown, Head of Customer Success Strategy Execution at SAP. SAP is one of the world’s leading producers of software for the management of business processes, developing solutions that facilitate effective data processing and information flow across organizations.

Kerri leads a global team of customer success strategy and execution experts to centralize and unify end-to-end customer engagement roles and processes across all geographies and functions including Sales, Services, Engagement & Renewals.  

In this episode, Kerri discusses the importance of staying curious, promoting an internal common language to support changes within an organization, and how leveraging Totango has helped to exceed her customers' expectations.  

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“When we first launched Totango, we had a lot of customer success professionals who'd been with us for a while, and they were definitely domain experts. And so the idea that we would institute a tool that would tell them what to do and when to do it was something that they had to understand. “Why? I already know what my job is. Do I really need a tool to do it?” 

Well, no, you don't need a tool to tell you. Of course, we know that, but what you do need is everyone orchestrated around the same customer experience in order to deliver upon the expectations of our customers.” - Kerri Brown 

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*(04:50) - First steps of a CS initiative 

*(08:02) - Getting aligned 

*(08:54) - Biggest CS challenges

*(15:28) - SAP’s culture of innovation

*(22:50) - Doman experts vs CS professionals

*(26:32) - SAP’s CS model 

*(33:48) - Make it about the customer 

*(37:53) - Quick hits 

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This podcast was created by the team at Totango. Design and run best-in-class customer journeys with no-code, visual software that delivers immediate value, easy iteration and optimization, and predictable scale-up growth. Join over 5,000 customers from startups to fast-growing enterprises using the industry’s only Composable Customer Success Platform. Start for free at Totango.com.

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Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn

Connect with Kerri on LinkedIn

Totango.com

This episode of CS No BS features an interview with Shona Fenner, Sr. Customer Success Operations Manager at PetDesk. Designed with busy veterinary practices in mind, PetDesk streamlines client communication to keep staff happy, patients healthy, and practices profitable.

With more than seven years at PetDesk in a number of roles, Shona has developed a breadth of knowledge across the company. Prior to PetDesk, she garnered wide-ranging expertise in fields such as video production and editing, sales and service, and customer satisfaction. 

In this episode, Shona discusses shifting from an account management model to customer success, the importance of staying curious, and the secret sauce behind the customer success paradox. 

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“Immediately when moving from the everyone does everything account management model to customer success, whether it's giving someone like one article that's, you know, a thousand words to read or a giant 400 page book, no matter what it was, they could kind of get the idea pretty quickly when they realized that you still had all this ownership over the customer, but it was owning the moment more than owning the customer itself.” - Shona Fenner 

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*(04:36)  - Shona’s journey into Customer Success 

*(08:20) - Shona’s review of Farm Don’t Hunt 

*(11:18) - Biggest hurdles in Customer Success

*(16:36) - Maintaining healthy customers

*(22:58) - What’s next for CS Ops?

*(27:44) - Competing with big box retailers 

*(35:53) - Visibility through Totango 

*(41:13) - Advice from Shona

*(42:30) - Quick Hits 

*(46:03) - Biggest BS in CS 

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This podcast was created by the team at Totango. Design and run best-in-class customer journeys with no-code, visual software that delivers immediate value, easy iteration and optimization, and predictable scale-up growth. Join over 5,000 customers from startups to fast-growing enterprises using the industry’s only Composable Customer Success Platform. Start for free at Totango.com.

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Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn

Connect with Shona on LinkedIn

Totango.com

This episode of CS No BS features an interview with Maranda Dziekonski, Chief Customer Officer at Swiftly. Swiftly, the first Connected Transit Platform, helps transit agencies improve their service reliability, passenger information, and operational efficiency. 

Maranda is a ground-up builder and leader with a passion for setting up the right teams, systems, processes, and overall infrastructure to take both the team and the company to the next level.

In this episode, Maranda discusses the importance of finding your inner voice and advocating for yourself, the benefits of geeking out on standard operating procedures, and the best way to build a CS team from scratch. 

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“If I'm a leader going in and I'm building out CS from scratch, I'm going to want to understand, what type of CS do I need to build out in order to be able to enable and empower my customers and my teams to be successful and then drive a successful business outcome. So I urge folks to stop going out googling and trying to plug and play stuff. I see it happening a lot and you're hurting yourself. Yes. Some of the things may work, but the reality is, is businesses are unique and require different types of activities to solve the problems you're trying to solve. Once you get that understanding of what type of customer success, I like to center myself with some problem statements . So what are the problems that I have right now that I need to solve?” - Maranda Dziekonski

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*(04:53) Marand’s first role in Customer Success

*(09:57) The first steps of launching any CS initiative 

*(17:07) Finding your inner voice 

*(21:56) Advice for building a CS team from scratch 

*(29:40) Maranda’s biggest challenges 

*(33:18) What would Maranda do differently

*(40:00) 3 Key Must-Do’s 

*(41:08) Quick Hits 

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This podcast was created by the team at Totango. Design and run best-in-class customer journeys with no-code, visual software that delivers immediate value, easy iteration and optimization, and predictable scale-up growth. Join over 5,000 customers from startups to fast-growing enterprises using the industry’s only Composable Customer Success Platform. Start for free at Totango.com.

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Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn

Connect with Maranda on LinkedIn

Follow Maranda on Twitter

Totango.com

This episode of CS No BS features an interview with Brent Cogswell, Head of Customer Success at Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric's purpose is to empower all to make the most of energy and resources, bridging progress and sustainability for all. Brent has 27 years of progressive advancement through Schneider Electric, beginning his development through a sales focus. He has held significant leadership positions in regional support, direct accounts, global processes, and the Customer Care Center.

In this episode, Brent talks about the difference between customer success and customer support and shares how to harness data for a more proactive approach to avoid problems and enhance outcomes. Brent also discusses the benefits of “failing fast” and making the most of it.  

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“Customer success is focused on recurring revenue, and it's the life cycle management of the recurring revenue with a very large focus on the customer's desired outcomes. It's very customer oriented on its desired outcomes. Whereas customer care is a reaction. It's when the customer calls or chats or emails us, it's not us proactively going to them. So it's reactive. It's more about solving problems after they happened. Whereas on the flip side with customer success, it's being proactive and using data to avoid problems.” - Brent Cogswell 

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*(02:22) - Brent discusses his role at Schneider Electric

*(12:21) - Brent explains the difference between Customer Success and Customer Support 

*(18:07- From spreadsheets to Totango 

*(21:52) - Keys to success

*(31:56) - It’s a journey, not an event

*(38:38) - The biggest BS in CS

*(43:52) - Brent’s advice 

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This podcast was created by the team at Totango. Design and run best-in-class customer journeys with no-code, visual software that delivers immediate value, easy iteration and optimization, and predictable scale-up growth. Join over 5,000 customers from startups to fast-growing enterprises using the industry’s only Composable Customer Success Platform. Start for free at Totango.com.

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Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn

Connect with Brent on LinkedIn

Follow Brent on Twitter

Totango.com

This episode of CS No BS features an interview with Guy Nirpaz, Founder and CEO at Totango, the fastest-growing, most trusted Customer Success company in the world. Totango started in 2010 when Guy saw an opportunity to use the cloud to process billions of customer signals and make meaning for customer-facing teams. Since then, he’s been on the forefront, preaching the importance of treating the customer journey as a product, a modern business thought process that many companies have yet to adopt. Needless to say, Guy has a passion for improving the way that people do business. Since founding Totango, Guy has become an evangelist in the field of Customer Success and an award-winning author of his book, Farm Don't Hunt - The Definitive Guide to Customer Success.

In this episode of CS No BS, Guy talks about defining, viewing and improving the customer journey as a product, where companies looking to do so should begin in order to find success, and the importance of optimizing for the speed of learning when looking to scale your business. Guy also addresses the biggest changes in customer success to date and how Totango comes in to save the day.

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“Everyone is in customer success these days. Every company’s customer-centered. And if they're not, they're going to be. Because with digital transformation…you know so much more about your customers and you have to deliver a much higher level of experience and value. So now the challenge is more around where to start, what to do first, and how to measure success.” - Guy Nirpaz

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00:23 Founding Totango

02:40 Defining the customer journey

05:03 Viewing the journey as a product

07:55 Improving the customer journey product

10:46 Defining success in the industry

12:52 Where to begin

17:38 Timelines for different journeys

18:58 Optimizing for the speed of learning

23:20 Delivering value to customers

29:34 Cultivating customer success

31:45 Challenges of scaling successfully

34:06 Biggest changes in customer success to date

34:42 Use cases for Totango

35:26 Quick hits

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This podcast was created by the team at Totango. Design and run best-in-class customer journeys with no-code, visual software that delivers immediate value, easy iteration and optimization, and predictable scale-up growth. Join over 5,000 customers from startups to fast-growing enterprises using the industry’s only Composable Customer Success Platform. Start for free at Totango.com.

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Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn

Connect with Guy on LinkedIn

Follow Guy on Twitter

Totango.com

Let’s face it, customer success is full of it. 

If you work in CS, you know there’s a lot of fluff and nonsense out there.  

But you don’t need any more generic advice about putting the customer first or how to run a QBR. 

You need practical, real world tips to help you solve the problems you’re facing right now.

In this podcast, Totango COO and President Jamie Bertasi talks to the top CS leaders in the world about the strategies and tactics they’re using to drive results. 

No nonsense, just a practical playbook for delivering net revenue retention, the holy grail of customer growth. 

Welcome to CS, No BS. Powered by the team at Totango.