Doug Caviness · VP, B2B Strategy & Partnerships · | Expert ✭✭✭

@DeniseStokowski, great insights around customer engagement and higher retention rates, among a cohort of active community members. As a rule of thumb do you find some personas and/or hierarchies more or less likely to engage through an online community?

Thanks @Adrian!

@Adrian, thanks for your input! Are you aware of tech vendors who assign quantitative value to the contribution of Community to Customer Acquisition or Customer Success? If yes, I'm interested to know how they measure this. I just got off the phone with another community leader who reports that around 75% of their…

David, in your question does "CES" = Customer Engagement Score?

6 months ago, I would have highlighted NRR (renewal + expansion) and Adoption. However, after having learned what companies like Plex and Workday are doing to capture customer outcomes during the sales process and then as vendors map their product/service features and/or usage to proactively measure and even quantify…

@Patrick McGowan , great illustrations and thanks for sharing!

To add to the list of @CarlosAlves, I would summarize as something like: product needs to be reimagined now as the sum total of customer experience; and customer experience needs to be intentionally designed and delivered to reduce the customer's friction in achieving their desired outcomes.

@Patrick McGowan, interesting comments you shared and they make intuitive sense. Would you have any examples you could share to help illustrate?

@CrisJohnson, I agree with your assumption that consumer self-service adoption is a very good indication of what we need to adopt in traditional direct sales/support models. Legacy B2B tech vendors seems roughly 5-7+ years behind in self-service adoption compared to what we see in B2C. Most points of resistance against…

Loved the book! Finished reading it about 2 weeks ago and found myself constantly underlining and adding margin notes throughout.

Hi @EdlyVillanueva, I've responded based on my experience interacting with a wide variety of software & SaaS clients and customers. Preference of hosted vs. on-premise offerings? There are a lot of variables involved behind the buyer's preference, but it's clear that most hosted offerings increasingly the preferred option…

@ThomasLah, I agree with your comments above. I would just add that once a customer relationship is digitalized and there is a robust set of analytic-driven insights associated with each account and persona using the vendor's solution, digital can actually provide an insights-driven and personalized, albeit digital,…

I've seen cases in which the internal cost or value of CS given away for free is deducted from the revenue or gross margin that is commissionable to Sales and/or applied to quota retirement.

Great question @ThomasLah. I know VMware relies heavily on Partners to scale their CS capabilities and would also suggest an on-demand webinar discussion w/Meenu Agarwal, SVP Customer Success at VMware: A Tale of Scale… for Customer Success Teams. Some highlights for me: Digital and Tech Touch – for All Accounts -- is here…

@JasonSeals, Kyle Poyar did a recent post about Sales-assist selling in PLG, which is common in a Freemium world. Thought you'd like to see it: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kyle-poyar_productledsales-plg-growth-activity-6930879608825257984-t3gB?utm_source=linkedin_share&utm_medium=member_desktop_web

Agreed. The concept you mentioned about "data flowing to the right people at the right time" is definitely critical. And doing this at scale is really only possible by digitalizing customer relationships. In addition to enabling vendors and partners to deliver value more successfully, it also helps empower the customer…

@JasonSeals, you're absolutely right. I've had a lot of experience supporting companies that use freemium and free trial offers where we handle the automated transactions through ecommerce. Sales still plays a very important role to take those customer insights that are collected and then nurture what is often an…

@GailPropson, thank you so much. I'd enjoy a speaking with your consulting partner. Thanks, Doug

@LauraFay, nice visiting with you at TSW Las Vegas! Have you seen any research that demonstrates the benefits of Customer Advisory Boards to vendors that use them?

@LauraFay, I appreciate the thought leadership on PLG that you and Thomas Lah have been sharing. I recently saw the Cloud 100 report of OpenView Partners (link below). A couple of interesting things to highlight: 56% of Cloud 100 companies practice PLG. Examples of more established tech companies that transitioned to…

@Pavlo Paoliahushko, I did an interview with a customer success leader at PandaDoc in a blog post that deals with arming customer success teams with product data, digital scale customer success and PLG. Thought it might be interesting to you based on your previous question.…

Thanks @LauraFay. I just completed the survey!

Helpful response @SumitBhat, thanks!

Since originally posting this thread I've learned of cases where companies are using #RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to generate a high volume of renewal quotes automatically and it seems inevitable that we'll soon be hearing more stories about TSIA members beginning to use this type of automation technology in their…

Hi @Pavlo Paoliahushko, speaking of Digital Customer Success -- I just viewed this terrific TSIA TSW session recording entitled, "How to Incorporate Digital to Scale Your Customer Success Practice", by Teresa Anania, of Autodesk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7ry2KGdzJg

@Jim Bignell thanks!

Hi @Edly Villanueva. Thanks so much for the suggestion and great to know about the polling function! Doug

Hi @Darryl Benjamin. Great question your asking. Not sure if you're a member of the Service Revenue Practice, but I wonder if @Jack Johnson might have some insights he could share on this. Thanks, Doug

@Goncalo Pereira, welcome!