Matthew Kettell:
Welcome to the CX Coffee Check, brought to you by The Nest. Grab your cup, settle in, and let industry leaders spill their CX beans.
Hey everyone, I’m Matt, from The Nest by Concentrix and today we’re joined by Ally from Yotpo.
Hey, Ally good to see you. Hey, Matt. How’s it going? So, Ally, could you give us a bit of an introduction from yourself to our audience? For sure. So, my name’s Ally. I have been with Yotpo for, goodness, it’ll be five years in October. Hard to believe. I’ve always been in the customer success world here, but currently serve as the Director of Customer Success for our North America region.
Amazing. And could you share a little bit about your background and what was it that led you to your role today at Yotpo?
Ally Zeltt:
Sure. So I initially had started my career in market research, actually. So being, you know, not really a subject matter expert, but knowing a lot, knowing a little bit about a lot. And in that role was very, very client facing, very project oriented and after spending some time in that realm, I was really looking to get into the tech world. It seemed super interesting to me and I was thinking of where my skillset could align. And being in the customer success department at a SaaS company seems to really resonate with my skill set of managing a book of business, building relationships, helping customers to see value. So that’s where I kind of tailored my search, stumbled upon Yotpo, really loved the product, the innovation they brought to the space, the company culture.
And also they were very open to people from diverse backgrounds. So didn’t need to like be in customer success to make it there, which was, which was really great. So joined a Yotpo as a CSM at the time focused on our reviews product, our small little business segment. So started on the ground floor, like working with customers directly and really handled everything soup to nuts at the time CSMs did implementation and full life cycle all the way through renewals, cross-sells, upsells, QBRs, optimization, the whole nine yards. From there, we ended up spinning out to start an implementation team at Yotpo, which was really exciting. So I was part of the group that really pioneered that function here, built it up to where it is today, which is like a full service function that supports all of our merchants across the globe.
And then from there, ended up stepping more recently back into the CS world, still managing implementation, but also in a leadership role focused on our customers, again, more in like the SMB sector, but within North America. Got it. That’s really cool that you can have that much impact on the customers in different ways.
Matthew Kettell:
And for those who aren’t familiar, maybe with Yotpo, could you tell us a little bit more about the company?
Ally Zeltt:
Of course, yes. So, Yotpo is really at its core retention marketing platform. We really focus on two key areas when it comes to retention marketing. One is user generated content, be it reviews or photos, videos, et cetera, and then also loyalty programs. So we as a company provide tools to brands to help them turn their one-time shoppers into lifelong customers, really through building trust with shoppers and building and creating more unique personalized experiences.
We are definitely like a very closely ingrained in the Shopify ecosystem, but also do work with other e-commerce platforms as well. And we offer 180 plus integrations with other marketing technology tools in the ecosystem to really create that interconnected marketing and retention strategy that brands are looking for. It’s really cool. I think from research and what you just said there, Yotpo has been powering some of the most recognisable e-commerce brands leaving your footprint is, you know, very significant. We’re talking about customer centric growth and, you know, culture of customer success at Yotpo.
Matthew Kettell:
How is it that you tailor your customer success strategy at Yotpo in your role? And especially given that you’ve got such a diverse range of clients from direct consumer startup through to some global retailers.
Ally Zeltt:
For sure, it’s a great question. I’d say it’s something we’re always still refining and cracking the code on. And I think there’s really three things that we focus on that come to mind for me. I’d say the first is really building out like a tailored engagement model for the different types of customers that we work with. When I say engagement model, I think like it really comes down to two core things. One is, what is the company size and sophistication. So, we… within the customer success group, we segment our customers. We have more of like our SMB vertical and then we have our market vertical that stems from mid market all the way through enterprise. And of course the way that you communicate, work with, tailor strategies to those brands, like they’re very different levels of sophistication and complexity. And as such, you need to think about how are you dedicating different time, different resources, breadth of conversation to those different merchants. So, that’s definitely something that we really strive for is like creating the right capacity within the customer success group to allow them to have like the time to either go, you know, really deep with a few customers if those brands are very well versed in using our tools and really need that more tailored approach. But then also to be able to have a lot of range and work with a lot of smaller customers who maybe are not, you know, that sophisticated with their use case yet and don’t really need all the bells and whistles. So. I think really meeting customers where they’re at based on their resources, based on their level of complexity is super important. So that’s one thing we definitely think a lot about. Uh, second, and kind of goes into that, think is segment specialization. So you know the way that what SMB brands are looking for out of our platform and out of a partner in Yotpo is very different than our enterprise customers. So I think really having CSMs who focus on those different verticals, like ideally even having somebody who maybe has a concentration in the health and beauty sector, CPG sector, who can really bring that industry expertise to the brands and kind of share best practices and learnings is something else we think a lot about. And then I think the last part is really client discovery and connection. Ultimately, you have to balance personalization with scale, but I do think that really taking the time to understand.
Matthew Kettell:
What are a brand’s goals? What are they looking for as an indicator of success? What strategies are looking to employ?
Ally Zeltt:
Like that is going to differ greatly across all the customers. So I think really taking the time to have a good understanding of that and crafting your strategies, your recommendations accordingly is always going to be really important. Yeah. Some really good examples there of how you’re striking the balance between scale and personalization in such a big market. I think that’s something that in my experience, in my conversations, a lot of people struggle with to do effectively.
Matthew Kettell:
Is there anything that you can share around any frameworks or philosophies that you lean on to drive that strategy?
Ally Zeltt:
Sure. So I wouldn’t say we have, you know, like a textbook framework or anything of that sense. I think there’s really two things that we try to do to strike that balance. First is, I think definitely of sharing and refining best practices as a customer success organization. And that knowledge sharing component is really important. So I think here, like talking with the team about what are you seeing success with, whether it’s with a certain type of customer or a certain type of vertical, and really being able to share that information across the team. And then from there, how can you codify that more bespoke information in a way that can make it scalable? So for example, how can you build a playbook on implementing that so that it can reach many CSMs instead of just living in one CSMs head. Or how can you maybe create a webinar around a certain topic and have more of a one to many approach. So I think that definitely taking those unique strategies that a CSM might be trying with a brand and then when you have something that works, building out a resource, a forum, a way to share it at large while also still be like staying true to the essence of what was created, I think that’s something we try to try to do the best of our abilities. And then I think the second thing is, you know, you of course are going to always have your best practices, your advice on what will work for brands. But I also think you need to really pair that with like what you know will or won’t work or resonate with a brand. Like, you know, it goes back to discovery and understanding, OK, what are their goals? What is their business model? What are their objectives? Because even if it’s a best practice at Yotpo to implement a certain feature or a certain strategy, if it doesn’t align with the brand’s business goals, like that kind of undermines your credibility as their true expert in Yotpo. So I think it’s like taking the best practices and let’s try it and true what you know works, but also being really critical about, is this the right thing to bring up to this customer? Should I bring up something else to them? And just really personalizing that experience, I’d say that’s like the other edge of the sword.
Matthew Kettell:
So it sounds like you’ve got two sort of forums for best practice sharing. You’ve got your internal within the customer success organization, but then also alignment with the rest of the business. So product sales and marketing. And how do you ensure as a wider business that the voice of the customer, so not only for like customer success best practices but also making sure that your customer voice is heard and consistently influencing internal decisions and product roadmap when you’re working with the right of business. How do you ensure that that voice of the customer is being heard and taken seriously?
Ally Zeltt:
Sure. So we definitely are thinking a lot about this as a company right now, I think as we’ve grown and scaled over the years, it’s really easy for, for example, folks who are not interfacing with customers everyday like product or R&D to get a bit further away from the customer journey. So it’s definitely something we’re thinking about as a company is like how can we bring those folks to the forefront to really hear the pain points of customers, understand the impact their features are having. So I think we have a lot of ideas and things in the pipeline that hopefully over time will help us to continue to build more credibility here.
A couple of steps we’ve taken in that direction to date. One is we do have a dedicated feature request flow where we can track and manage ongoing requests. So that’s something that’s available to all of our go-to-market teams, even to our product teams. So anyone who’s interfacing with customers, it’s a very easy way for us to share feedback from brands about what’s working, what’s not, what would they want to see in the product and then our product team is always managing those requests and looking to see what makes sense with the roadmap. So that’s one strategy we’ve taken. The second one that we implemented recently that’s been pretty helpful is having a quarterly go-to-market and product session where basically our product team will present to us the high level candidates for the roadmap, sharing insight into why they’ve been chosen and then each different department from sales to marketing to partners, CS, we can all kind of rank what we think the impact of this feature is, how valuable we feel like it’ll be. So that’s been a really nice way to make sure that the different perspectives who are interfacing with the customer, whether it’s at the start of the sales cycle or at an ongoing basis are heard. And then we also have a lot of beta testers for features and tools that we’re looking to roll out. So for some of our more innovative features, like running those by some of the thought leaders in the space, like:
Does this resonate with you guys? What’s missing? What do we need? So we’ve had a lot of, whether it’s more, you know, ad hoc conversations with customers. We also have some like focus and design groups with some of the influencers in the space. So I think like those are a couple of things we’ve been trying out over the last couple of months to really like make sure that connectivity is there with our customers.
Matthew Kettell:
Nice. Got it. Really good answer. And so I wanted to talk to you a little bit about technology and innovation, particularly in CX and customer success. An integral component of tech and innovation is of course data and being the backbone and in your daily operations, particularly when you’re monitoring customer health and leading a lot of these decisions that you’re talking about, how important is data and how are you leveraging it in those scenarios?
Ally Zeltt:
Sure. Data is, it’s mission critical. It’s a… at Yotpo especially it’s a very data-driven company, hard-pressed to get resources, time, energy without having a good case to back it up. So it’s something that we lean on a lot here. I would say that there’s three buckets of data that we’re looking at in a more consistent basis. I think one thing we’ve rolled out in the last year that’s proven to be really instrumental to success is a dedicated risk framework. So we’ve built out an infrastructure where we’re able to compile different signals, whether it’s product data, engagement data, commercial signals, and kind of map them to things we know in the past have created a churn risk for a customer, a poor experience, and we’ve created an interface that allows our customer success team, account managers, other folks as well, to have those risks flagged to them, to put on the radar, and then ideally to help mitigate and get ahead of things. So, that has been really, really valuable for us to unify the way that we speak about risk and also to give those proactive, hopefully signals to CSM so that they can do something about that risk prior to it actually materializing into the churn we anticipate. So that’s one thing we’ve leaned on a lot. Uh, second which is, I would imagine probably very common to any customer success team is forecasting data. Like we have a pretty robust motion to be, predicting our upcoming renewals, understanding what’s a churn risk, what’s not, are we gonna upsell them, downsell them? Do we have the ability to cross-sell them? So we have a lot of mechanisms there to look ahead six months in advance to get a sense of how we feel like things are going with our customers. Are there any things we need to turn around to increase our net retention? So that’s something else we look at a lot would be net retention, logo retention, ability to cross all our customers to new products and really just seeing like overall health metrics there. And then the third, I would say this is still a work in progress, but something we are investing a lot in is more product data. So for example, like helping us to pick up on more signals within the product of maybe good opportunities for an optimization based on how a customer’s program is operating or maybe flagging certain metrics to us proactively or for example, in our case, let’s say review request emails, a notification like, the review request email is turned off, you should reach out to your customer to learn more. So I think we have a lot of room for opportunity within our product to feed us signals based on user experience, adoption, et cetera. So that’s another area we’re looking to double down on in the next couple of months.
Matthew Kettell:
Amazing. That’s really cool. Thank you for that. With AI transforming the options that we have and ways that companies are able to engage with customers, I think it’s always really interesting on this podcast to understand how you might be leveraging AI, particularly to enhance the way that you’re delivering that customer success experience, either internally to leverage the team or for your clients directly. Do you have any examples or experiences that you can share?
Ally Zeltt:
Yes, it is very top of mind across all of Yotpo I think we know that artificial intelligence is not going away anytime soon. If anything, it’s only going to continue to grow and get more sophisticated. So all the teams at Yotpo are really trying to think critically about how they can incorporate it into our day to day, both internally and externally to help drive our customers forward, but also to create more efficiencies and continuity in the business. So I’d say there’s really three things that that we’ve been playing around with as of late. I’m sure this will continue to evolve as we invest more and more time. One is we have Gong, like the call recording tool, which has been really, really valuable for us to introduce. It’s used across our sales team too, but there’s almost like endless use cases for the ways that you can leverage it, but it really helps us with, for example, call coaching at scale and quality control for interactions with customers, they have a lot of AI built into the tool natively to develop insights at scale. For example, you could go to a timeline with a customer and be able to ask a question about interactions in the last 90 days and it’ll spit out an answer for you instead of you needing to listen to all of the calls that you have with the customer. It’s really helpful to pick up on certain keywords or indicators of risk. Uh, also picking up on opportunities when brands mention a certain pain point. So, because there are so many use cases, our team is still figuring out what all of those are. But I think that’s one tool that’s really helped us to unlock a lot of potential. Something else we’ve been focusing on is what tasks in the CSM state of day can we automate and make scalable? Because it’s not really strategic thinking. It’s more of just a mundane thing. So for example, creating a quarterly business review deck. Does the CSM need to sit there and pull all of the metrics from the account? Or can we just create an automation where those flow in automatically, giving them more time to analyze those metrics? Or can we pick up on commonly asked emails and write auto responses for more basic questions? So we’re definitely exploring a lot of those kinds of things to give CSMs more time in the day. And then the last one I’d say is trying out different tools like Ask.ai, for example, and other search bots to help us find information more quickly. I think a big part of the CSMs day to day is answering client questions, advising on documentation, understanding what processes to follow in certain situations. So we’re really trying to create better algorithms and resources internally to expedite that path to knowledge so that CSMs are spending less time finding that information and more time, you know, proactively investing in customers.
Matthew Kettell:
Really nice. It’s nice how it plays back to that customer centric approach, all the use cases that you’re sharing.
Ally, Yotopo has grown considerably over time, very quickly, and you’ve been part of that success story. But the company shows no signs of slowing down. What are some of the biggest challenges that you’ve had from a leadership perspective on how you scale customer success without losing all of these qualities and the strategic direction that you’ve talked about today.
Ally Zeltt:
For sure. Yeah, it’s definitely proven to be a challenge I think that we’ve learned a lot over the last couple of years, but we still don’t have the code cracked on quite everything. There are really three challenges I’d say that we are facing and continue to try to make some progress in. One is definitely navigating account transitions. I think overall, because our organization has grown so much and so quickly and we have talented individuals, there’s a lot of opportunity for folks to grow in the organization, whether that’s, you know, graduating to a different vertical of working with customers or moving to other internal teams that impact the business in a different way. And in those cases, it’s great for the individual, but it’s really hard for the customers. Like, you you just built this relationship with someone for ideally a year, sometimes it’s six months. And so how do you make sure that customer feels really taken care of and doesn’t need to start all over? So that’s something we have definitely had some growing pains with and are trying to figure out how to make this more scalable. So for example, figuring out how artificial intelligence can help, whether it’s Gong or some of those other tools to get insights on the account history more quickly so you’re not relying on one person to transcribe all of that at the time of the transition. Or figuring out how can you have more consistent and visible documentation throughout milestone calls and keeping that in one place so that it’s easy to reference as opposed to just like data or brain dumping everything at the end of a year relationship and having some recency bias. So that’s something that we’ve been thinking a lot about. Because we know we’ve heard feedback from brands that like it’s really hard to have to start new to re-explain yourself. So that’s one thing for sure.
Uh, second is probably just in general change management I think like as a company, like because we’ve grown and scaled so much and have tried out so many different things, whether it’s internally or externally, just like, the product’s evolving really quickly, the teams are evolving quickly. So how can you make sure that you have like a very consistent and scalable team while at the same time not compromising quality is definitely tough. So really investing a lot in like internal training, documentation and trying to get the knowledge from those who are here like out of their heads and onto paper in some way that you can really rinse and repeat across the teams.
And also just getting really good at like communicating what’s going on and why as simple as that sounds. I think like when the company is growing so much, it’s really hard for CSMs to know what’s going on in other teams. Like how does this change in the business impact my day to day and our customers? So really just investing a lot in change management, whether it’s like having, you know, coffee side chats with leaders or do it, having more forums to like talk about company updates. So think that’s something else we’ve been thinking a lot about. And then the last one I’d say is really just how do we showcase value to customers? Like I think as our product evolves, as our company narrative evolves, and also the macro is very different. Like in the era of COVID, everyone had money, people were growing quickly, they were happy to spend money on tools very willy nilly, but budgets are tight these days, brands are struggling and also the competition is fierce. There’s more and more solutions that are popping up and people are very conscious of where every dollar is going. And so, you know, it’s not enough to just have a relationship with a brand. You really need to have them understand what is your product and what is your service doing for them. So I think here, like it was very easy for us to build features that were exciting, but didn’t really resonate with what customers needed.
So, you know, we’re talking a lot about fundamental change in our company. Like how do we shift this to building things that like add value to a company’s bottom line instead of just a cool feature? How do you train and coach CSMs to have more meaningful conversations with customers to really unlock the root of their pain? How do you like think about success? Like how do you talk about like what metrics to have? How do you tie your optimizations back to those metrics? So really just like reframing our whole conversation with the customer, not to be like, this is what Yotpo thinks is success. And more so, how are you defining success? What does value mean to you? And how can we show you that in our product?
Matthew Kettell:
That’s really nice. And you’ve mentioned change a lot throughout this and it being quite a something that you’re well prepared for and helping you to guide your strategy. My final question is on is on change really, but looking out to the kind of industry at large, what do you think will define the future of customer success in the next three to five years?
Ally Zeltt:
Yeah, it’s a great it’s a great question. I’d say that for me, think that you would be remiss not to mention AI. I think it’s every industry, every role, but I definitely think that for customer success, figuring out how you leverage AI to create more time for proactive work and value building work and automating some of those mundane tasks that is very easy for CSMs to fall back on as an excuse for not really adding value to customers, I think that’s definitely one thing.
Uh, second, I just mentioned it, but value realization, I think ultimately, because dollars are tight, teams are tight, brands are really looking for partners that are doing more than just bringing a good product. Like they’re looking for people who are proactive, providing suggestions. And so I think the people who are able to, number one, create the time to do that, but then number two, have the knowledge and have the insight and the relationship to like leverage and capitalize on that time is super important.
And then I think the last thing is just CSMs who really take the time to understand the evolution in our industry, particularly of like e-comm and really invest in this ride. Like there’s a lot of change that’s happening, whether it’s, you know, more investment in omnichannel strategies, more personalization at scale, new technologies like rich communication services. Like there’s so much innovation happening within the space and a lot of brands are experimenting. So I think just not relying on like the tried and true playbooks necessarily, but learning about what are brands doing.
How can we innovate our products and be a part of that as opposed to sitting on the sidelines? I think that’s also something that’s going to be particularly important for people to lean into.
Matthew Kettell:
Great answer. It’s been a great conversation, Ally. Thank you very much, Ally, for joining us today. And thank you to everyone who listened. This has been the CX Coffee Chat.
