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• For our first episode, we will start with Chris Detzel who will talk through his work so far in getting Imperva's new customer community through launch.  
• We will also talk about the importance of customer engagement and its automation
• A mini case study on how Chris and I solved our customer engagement problem whilst at Rexel 
• Note: The interruption you hear about mid way through the podcast was a public radio canvaser who kindly reminded me that I have yet to renew my membership.  I of course did with the gentleman.  

Transcript:

00:03
welcome to our inaugural podcast of
00:05
peers over beers
00:06
your hosts michael sandoval me and chris
00:09
detzel
00:11
in our inaugural podcast we'll start off
00:13
with chris
00:14
chris is going to talk us through a
00:15
little bit about his new community over
00:17
at imperva
00:18
we're also going to discuss this idea of
00:19
the importance of engagement automation
00:21
in the community
00:22
engagement overall a little mini case
00:25
study of our
00:26
effort that we did at rexell with
00:28
regards to
00:29
engagement automation and you're gonna
00:32
hear an interruption somewhere about
00:34
halfway
00:35
that was the public radio canvasser
00:37
coming to my house
00:38
apparently i forgot them this past year
00:40
don't worry
00:41
yes i gave all coming up
00:45
next
00:46
[Music]
00:50
so i mean i just want to make sure i got
00:52
the name of the beer correct
00:54
of yours yeah it's called i think it was
00:58
number 21.
00:59
oh yeah beers over or piers over beers
01:03
got it it's from lewisville
01:05
or louisville i was thinking that too
01:07
that's why i brought a beer just i was
01:08
like we got to talk about
01:09
yeah it's called uh
01:13
old town brew house double vision
01:18
okay so we're recording um
01:22
my name is michael sandoval and i'm
01:24
chris dettel
01:26
and i'm chris detzel excellent oh go
01:29
ahead and have a seat if you do
01:30
is it better standing i like to stand
01:32
but yeah it's fine no no i got it
01:33
that's all right because i can do uh i
01:35
don't know let's lift it higher
01:37
i don't know do you guys
01:41
um so once again my name is michael
01:43
sandoval and i'm chris stetson well
01:45
hello chris how are you doing i'm good
01:46
how about you i'm doing good
01:49
so this uh this is a very interesting uh
01:52
point in how we got some discussion we
01:54
were just having a beer and we thought
01:55
hey we should probably record our
01:56
conversations because
01:58
they're pretty they're pretty good yeah
02:00
we're talking about a lot of cool stuff
02:02
yeah uh and mostly on the community side
02:05
and so we thought well hey how about
02:07
piers over a beer
02:09
wouldn't that be kind of fun so we are
02:10
having a beer and this one is that's why
02:12
i would look it up
02:13
old town brew house from louisville
02:16
texas an ipa
02:17
pretty good eh it's it's excellent
02:20
cheers
02:24
so with that we were already having the
02:26
discussion uh before we started
02:28
recording
02:29
but chris was telling me so well
02:30
actually i'll let you chris tell me
02:32
what are you doing yeah um
02:36
so i'm building or have built an
02:39
online community for um for a
02:43
cyber security software company called
02:45
imperva
02:47
so what why did they one
02:51
yeah i think that um it's a good
02:54
question
02:55
the biggest reason is to kind of think
02:56
about a few things
02:58
um is retention
03:02
so and then also case deflection
03:05
so we had a big issue with support um
03:08
not being able to answer
03:09
cases in a timely manner so you know
03:12
the thought was well if we can answer
03:15
some of those easier
03:16
questions online and have customers
03:19
really answer some of those you know and
03:21
share their
03:22
um uh share their experiences with the
03:26
products
03:27
then what better so i think that was
03:29
kind of the initial thought
03:31
right you had come on i mean they had
03:33
already made that decision right that
03:34
they wanted to do something
03:37
community-ish um
03:40
well if you want another real story is
03:42
or the big story is
03:43
that so yes and no um the story i got
03:47
was
03:48
so about a year ago i talked to somebody
03:50
that i knew
03:51
um and uh she was like hey look there's
03:54
this job description that
03:56
that needed the community and we needed
03:57
a community manager and i thought of you
03:59
and so um
04:02
they just started a customer success
04:04
organization
04:05
um the company's been around since 2002
04:08
i believe
04:09
and so they're like well we also need a
04:12
community manager and
04:13
she she went after it and they thought
04:14
of you specifically
04:16
um one person did yeah we'll look at you
04:18
specifically
04:20
so yeah i know it was a nice gesture and
04:24
so they
04:26
um thought you know
04:28
when i think of customer success i think
04:30
of retention and i also think of
04:32
case deflection so how do we help our
04:34
customers get the answers that they need
04:36
quickly and
04:37
community kind of came to their mind
04:41
and so i really started to develop the
04:42
strategy roadmap et cetera and
04:44
yeah so they you said they had a problem
04:47
with it already
04:48
obviously something was getting to the
04:50
top echelon of the company saying
04:52
you're having a customer service problem
04:53
yeah a retention problem
04:55
because also the customers are bolting
04:57
that's right uh interesting
04:59
and uh and so you came in and thought oh
05:02
i figured i know how to do this yeah
05:05
how do you know
05:06
let's go do a plan
05:09
so you recently launched it didn't you
05:11
yeah so i uh
05:13
you know we decided to go with a vendor
05:15
back in April
05:16
of 2019 which um and then we just
05:19
recently launched october 14th
05:21
so it's ready to go how did which
05:23
vintage use we use
05:24
uh we used a company called higher logic
05:27
what do you think of them
05:29
you know something I really liked about
05:31
higher logic is uh
05:33
they have this great marketing so before
05:37
you and i worked together um we worked
05:39
with a company called intelligent what
05:40
they didn't have was
05:42
kind of this engagement piece of
05:44
customer so when customers create a
05:46
login and
05:47
start looking at the content there was
05:49
really no not built in anyways some
05:52
some engagement type things that they
05:54
have um
05:55
what i call or what they call automation
05:58
rules
05:58
so you can set up different types of
06:00
personalization
06:02
and type different types of marketing
06:04
things that you can do within the
06:06
platform
06:07
and that really um is what sold m...