Mastering Ever-Changing Customer Requests with Concentrix’s Caroline Grant

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Welcome to the Customer Success Pivot your Career podcast. I'm Alex White and my co host is David Loketes. Our podcast is focused on people looking to get into the CS profession or move up in CS if you're already in the field. So to get us started. How are you doing, David?

Speaker A: I'm doing great, Alex. Thank you for asking. I'm really excited. We have a great guest today. I'm really excited. Looking forward to our conversation with Caroline. Along that line, what's on the top of your mind in cs?

Speaker B: Yeah, well, let's start. I'm, um, excited to talk to Caroline as well. She has a lot of great experience, so that'll be fun for our listeners. The thing that's on my mind is as, uh, CS professionals, we talk with our customers and try to fix their problem, show value. And one of the things that's a trap, especially for new people, is mistaking being liked by your customer versus building a strong relationship with your customer. And I've fallen to this even now, sometimes where you think there's a really good relationship and then all of a sudden they tell you when you get to renewal, we're not renewing, versus them coming to me ahead of time saying, this isn't working for us or our budgets got cut, something like that. So I guess it's just a caution to people, especially new people, to not mistake those two things and really build that strong relationship of fixing their problems and having them be able to come back and push back and also tell you things that aren't nice. And you being able to be a, uh, grown up about and say, well, let me look into that and see if we can fix that.

Speaker A: Yeah, I like that.

Speaker C: It's.

Speaker A: I think it's really relevant. I think our entire careers, we've seen folks that have worked so hard to be liked and have taken their eye off the road as to, hey, did I build a relationship? And is the client or the prospect or my partner co worker, are they being really honest or transparent with me, or are they just answering because they like me? They don't want to hurt my feelings. It's along the line of, I heard this a long time ago. It's give me the news, don't give me the good or the bad news. And sometimes if you're liked and they like you as a person, they may feel, well, I can't tell that to David or I can't tell that to Alex because it's going to hurt their feelings. Well, the truth of the matter is we want to be successful and help them to success. Tell me what's really going on and can I help you or not? And we'll walk away from it as a great learning experience or move on to the next chapter. So, yeah, that's a good subject.

Speaker B: Yeah. Uh, and one of the things I heard on another podcast was it might be just the way you start the conversations with your customer. And instead of going, oh, how's it going? Right. They're not going to go into this whole laundry list of stuff. But if you go in and say, hey, if there's one thing we can improve in our product, what is it? If there's one thing on your mind that you just want to blurt out or something, tell me what it is about our product. Opening up the door to being there versus just saying, how's it going? And always keeping it light to keep it positive. Sometimes you have to kind of. You have to initiate a certain comment to get them to unleash that and be transparent in some of that.

Speaker A: I actually like that as opposed to leading in with my snarky humor.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker A: Anyhow, great, great things that are on your mind, something to ponder. I think we could really unpack that a little bit more in another. Another podcast. But we do have Caroline joining us, so what do you say we get this episode started?

Speaker B: Yeah, let's do it.

Speaker A: Our guest today is Caroline Grant, Senior Director of Strategy at Concentrix, leading a team focused on strategic transformative change and tactical delivery management. Caroline possesses extensive experience in integrating acquisitions, spearheading data engineering initiatives, and currently guiding Fortune 100 organizations through intricate AI, API and modernization programs. She has consistently demonstrated that successful transformations require the right combination of architecture, technology, people, mindset, and vision. Caroline is a technology leader passionate about building exceptional teams and empowering both teams and clients to visualize and achieve what seems beyond reach. Welcome to the podcast, Caroline.

Speaker C: Thank you guys so much. So happy to be here.

Speaker A: Why don't we kick this off with a little backstory on how you got into your role and how it has dovetailed into customer success, specifically being the trusted advisor and leading strategic organizations.

Speaker C: Sure thing. So I feel like customer success is probably something that is just ingrained in me. My first job out of school was actually with a consulting firm building, uh, large software in the federal government landscape in Washington, D.C. and so that certainly kicked off my experience being customer facing and my role there. But as time has gone on, I've really played a lot of different technology roles. I've led application teams, I've Led data teams. I've led strategic implementations inside of organizations, cloud efforts, moving large applications to the cloud. And I think when I look back at my experience and even what I do today, which is as a consultant and helping customers navigate big change in applications typically and in strategy for their software, it really is the skills that I've acquired or that come naturally, being that liaison between the business and the technology teams and helping articulate vision and something larger than just a technology strategy. Strategy. So yeah, I enjoy being with customers, I enjoy business problems, and it's definitely who I am today.

Speaker B: Welcome, Caroline. Excited for today's conversation? You have a vast array of experiences in teams. As you noted. If we start to look at the life cycle of a project, kind of in the pre sales, sales, onboarding side, what's your involvement now in your current role and what's your expectations of the teams that you lead?

Speaker C: Sure. A lot of times the problems the customer brings to the table, uh, those are the ones that engage me or my team. Sometimes it's engagements we're already existing in. They have a problem and they need assistance and it's just picking our brain a little bit and asking for help. Other times it is we are engaged because a specific technology strategy challenge is present and they need some insight. So I'm participating with our sales teams, with other teams inside the organization, uh, trying to figure out the best offering for the customer and their needs.

Speaker B: So Caroline, in what you just mentioned, you talk a little bit about how the customer is bringing problems and asking you questions. What do you attribute your skill set in getting to a point that a customer, instead of just talking internally, actually reaches out to you proactively to ask you questions.

Speaker C: And two things come to mind. The first is truly in engagements, we really want to establish trusted advisor. And I mean that sincerely. I am looking out for their best interest and I believe that customers feel and notice that. And so when you care about their success truly without an agenda, they come to you for help, they will ask advice, and they'll come to my peers for help too, and other parts of the organization who then will pull me in to conversations. I actually have an engagement right now that didn't have a technology component at all. And my peer recognized that they were having some leadership challenges and they need strategic guidance on their leadership team and on their technology and how they move forward. So getting pulled into those type of conversations as well. But really I think the root of it is being sincere and caring about their success and listening. And I also ask questions. So if we're having an executive leadership status meeting or even just a weekly leader, just, uh, genuinely asking, how's it going? You know, anything I can help you with? Sometimes you get answers that you aren't expecting. So I think it's just being there for people.

Speaker A: Really, really important in taking that into account. Caroline, um, as you have these meetings, whether it's an existing customer with a new problem or an expanded problem or new client, you're working with the client, ah, early on to build a relationship and lay out what are the offerings that they're going to need in doing that. You talked about what are the pain points of a customer in doing that? What advantage or what does that give you and your team as the engagement continues? What advantages does that give you and how do you leverage that as you go forward? Managing with the client?

Speaker C: Sure. If they are talking to us, exposing that they have a challenge somewhere, just trying to, uh. Sometimes it's just being an ear too. You don't always have to solve the problem. It's just helping give them advice or helping suggest things. Have you looked into this? But going forward, some of the things that we do, I might bring it up here. Just like I was brought in, uh, to a client recently. I may pull someone from my data team or someone from another area if I hear about their problem and say, hey, let me give, let's just get 30 minutes with my peer here and maybe they can help pick your brain. Now, we don't give away the farm, but I do think being available and helping people solve problems in engagements, that little bit of time can unlock tremendous trust and value down the road, make it unlock a whole nother opportunity. So that's certainly one thing. Another thing is if we are in an engagement and there's an opportunity and I, uh, have some of these going on right now, we're brought in for one thing. And a lot of times those sales cycles take years or could take a full year to get through. And by the time we get in, there's a different need. And so it's learning to pivot and ask the questions, hey, is this more pressing? And if there is a need, being able to adjust or adjust our contract, even with the cr, if needed, to help with that, a more emergent need that has real impact or just being creative and being able to shift some, some of our attention into that area in a creative way using our contract.

Speaker B: So, Caroline, one of the things that I'm getting out of this, because I started out in consulting in my career as well, is consulting has A lot of advantages to people in their career. And uh, I'm thinking of like people that are listening, just maybe they're in college or they just starting in their careers. And consulting does provide you the ultimate in flexibility in having to react to things that maybe you didn't or you come in like you mentioned for one project and do another. If someone was going to be looking at coming into the consulting world and you mentioned some of the things that your background, you have certain key skill sets that you've honed over time. But if someone's brand new and they're coming into consulting, what's your recommendations on kind of what someone should focus on?

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: And you, you touched on a little bit. But I like if you had like a little like top three interesting for people to really kind of keep in the back of their mind like I need to do these things and consulting naturally then when you go into companies and actually work for them, you can leverage those skills. But I'm curious on just kind of a bullet point item that might help our listeners.

Speaker C: Yes. And as I mentioned, I was that newbie that joined a consulting company straight out of college green and had that experience. So looking back, the things that I got the most out of it's learning. Somebody told me, and this is why I actually picked consulting out of college. Somebody told me you can get 10 years of experience in five if you are a consultant because you just see so much. And so my advice is to soak it all in. You don't have to be an expert. I certainly wasn't. You're not expected to be. You're new coming in to the workforce anyway. So uh, I, my first bullet is be willing to do anything, anything asked. And I started out as a tester on software systems. I was testing a 401k system we were building for the federal government and my responsibility was the loan portion. So I was testing how the loan functionality would work. Not really cool or something. I aspired to be, but I learned so much from that work. And the second part that kind of dovetails into that is that be willing to learn from anything because there is. You learn from everything that you're around. So first bullet is be willing to do anything. The second thing is learn from whatever you're doing and do that job the best that you can. That means studying at night. If it means going and meeting other people or understanding how your component fits into that bigger picture, take that on and be the best at uh, what you're trying to accomplish. What ended up happening for me is layoffs occurred not soon after I graduated. And because I was willing to do anything in consulting in any of these projects, honestly, I literally was just happy to be there. There were peers that, you know, didn't want to do testing or didn't want to do this or didn't want to do that, and they got let go. So I think having that attitude that you're willing to do whatever is asked, super valu. My third bullet would be, you may not realize it until after you're out of that experience, but the vastness of being a consultant and even today for me, stepping back into a consulting role, these last five years, I have worked with Fortune 50 companies that I look at and admire so much. And so it's been an amazing experience. Enlightening. At the same time, what really opened my eyes here is that you think that these vast, big, established companies have everything figured out. And the reality is you get in there and they don't. And so there's so much opportunity to help everyone. And so I would say just trying to, when you're in that big environment, back to soaking it up and doing everything you can, but also to take the nuggets away about what they're doing really well and where they have opportunity. Because the scale that you see sometimes at consulting, that learning is invaluable. So if I were to go back into enterprise and work for a company, the things I've learned and what I've seen certainly helps build my perspective and my framework.

Speaker A: Alex, doesn't that remind you, when we first met, about having to be adaptable and all the learnings we had from all the crash and burns on our first engagement together, doesn't that remind you of that?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, uh, we were very early on with PeopleSoft. I mean, I look back and it's so established in the erp, but we're kind of at the very beginning of when that was starting to take off and learning and being flexible and. Wait, we don't know that. Let's figure it out for the next day.

Speaker A: So it was almost a three pronged approach. The uncertainty and the changes of the software, the unpredictability of the client and not understanding what they. Not understanding what they needed. And let's be honest, we had a few really interesting personalities we had to manage as well. Interestingly, on, um, that subject, Caroline, I like the approach, the three points. If we take that to your current engagement and we talk about existing and we talk about the dynamics of the world and everything's changing, what Are some of the telltale signs that your client is not necessarily on board with all the offerings? How do we understand or how do you identify some of that and how do you deal with that? Because we're in a world where things change daily for a lot of these major corporations, even small companies. Just curious to hear some your thoughts on that.

Speaker C: Yeah, I feel like the speed of change, it is getting faster and we're all adapting and everyone is trying to adjust and put a stage stake in the ground and make things meaningful. I think that for us, for me and my teams is really just trying to meet the client where they are now. They have hired me, my team, I'm a strategic technology wing. And so we are trying to help advance some portion of what they're doing in the strategy lane. A lot of times it means improving their processes to be more product based versus specialized, one off type things. We're trying to coach them on how to be more resilient for the future. And so I'm not willing, uh, most of the time to just throw the strategy component out because what ends up happening with these clients is they're hiring us because they need change, they absolutely need it. With AI coming, they need good change in their data practices and their API practices because let's be honest, that's what's going to change and transform them in the future. However, uh, we're in this dynamic where they have a very urgent tactical need and the leader that hired us, their job may be dependent on getting this tactical thing out the door. So it's finding a way to uh, once again be creative. And I feel like that's the theme of my career. It's just kind of being creative and flexible but how to find creative ways to, to implement things tactically with the strategy in mind. And so as an example, I have a current client that, that really has great intentions. They have new people, they want to be, have better resiliency and their API landscape. And they hired us to really put in best practices, to put governance in, help them build their API platform for the future. But they have this urgent timeline and so we're coming in and figuring out ways to help them meet their urgent deliverable, but do it more strategically so that they're doing, they're setting themselves up for the future with this micro part in the right way and we're helping them build a product for example, whereas in the past they would have probably just built a service, we're helping show them how to do that. And we're taking our workshops and really transforming them to use this project as an example so that they can start making the baby steps to get to that correct strategy. And I think what ends up happening when you do that, when you meet people where they are, is that they realize looking back, uh, a year from now or at the end of the engagement, gosh, we made so much progress with those guys and I don't think we could have done it without them. And I need them again to come help me take the next baby step. So back to that. Being authentic and real and trying to help them with their mission. That's how you get to success.

Speaker B: This is bringing me back to my consulting days. You're really looking at, uh, not just what you're working on, but what the bigger picture and all the different things. And then trying to get alignment within the organization of here's the next step and here's the next step. It's uh, challenging and it's definitely an art to be able to understand personalities and be able to do that.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker B: You mentioned instead of implementing a service, implementing a product. Can you explain the difference between those two?

Speaker C: Absolutely. So today, and I'll say it in the data world too, my last role five years ago was building out our uh, next generation data platform. It's the same concept with Data or say an API, but it's taking an API or a piece of data and really federating it, but making it available and making it resilient so that it serves a very specific purpose. So it is truly a product. It is a Lego piece, if you will, it's modular, it performs a very specific function and you can combine functions to make larger products. But it's kind of that thinking of being able to be component based. And if you do that, then you can pivot right really quickly when, when the market changes or when the next thing comes out. And the example I like to use for productization of digital technologies like an API or like Data is Covid. And you see the companies that adjusted to Covid and to being shut down, like the retail landscape or restaurants, I think about the ones that were able to stand up and do same day pickup, same day delivery. You could place an order and your food, you just walk in and grab your food. That was all based on products. So they had the components already built and they just swapped things around to make a new experience. So for example, Home Depot, they probably had a product, an API product for their store layout, they had a product for their inventory. They could go quickly, say in aisle three, we have 20 of these widgets. And if you go in, you don't have to talk to a single person, here's where it is. And you can go to self checkout. And so having those things built in a component type way, that's reusable, that's really the future.

Speaker B: And I ah, remember having to do something similar at a big retail company. Do you have trouble getting customer? Well it's kind of a leading question because I know I did. And I'm not sure how the industry has changed since I did this because this was about 10 years ago. But what I found was trying to get people to be the owner of that product. So as it evolves and gets iterations was very hard concept for them to get and they're just like, well no one owns it, it's just out there. And I'm like, well you want some expertise in the product so you don't get a product that becomes too generic and not meeting the function of what it was because people, a whole bunch of people are changing it. Uh, how has that evolved?

Speaker C: Oh yeah, you're right. I think it's a mindset shift. And so there are companies that are great at this, like absolutely great. If you look at Spotify, Apple, like there's Apple Music for example, well bet you they have a product, uh, owner managing that and even their APIs, Google. So there are companies that do this incredibly well and have changed the landscape. I think uh, the other ones are still catching up. And so some of the companies that we've spent time with are financial services and they're providing these digital products to either banks or to their customers. Think about a background check or an i9 verification or things that you would buy online. They absolutely have to have a product owner for that API or for that data report for example. If you're buying data you have to have someone who's thinking about what the use case is. And so I think the real pivot here is we do it so, so well for physical products. If you think about TVs or shoes, it's like there's so much thought that goes into a product release and I just don't think we've quite gotten there on the digital side of technology being a product. And honestly that's why I have a job trying to help companies adapt to that and to put that technical product lens in. We coach companies how to be a product owner, how to be a technical product owner. We give them um, templates and formats and frameworks. But a lot of it, Alex, really comes down to funding. And if companies are funding things based on a project so it has a start and end date, like, oh, I'm going to build this mobile app and it's done once I release it. And they're not continuing to invest in developing that product like you would a shoe or TV or something else. That's where things kind of fall down. So I feel like we certainly help with the frameworks and the approach, but it really is a core company paradigm shift that's hard to change.

Speaker A: So Caroline, that's really good kind of teaser and information for me, kind of leading into your existing engagements, some of the larger ones. And what we had talked about was the changes that are coming and there's business reasons for, for it, there's chasing the bottom line, et cetera, but there's also technology. And one of the things that I imagine, and also based on experience, is these large companies are signing up for these extensive contracts and then all of a sudden in the middle of it, they are feeling, oh, wait a minute, we need to now refocus on technology. A big one being AI. How do you deal with the introduction of the client saying, hey, we need to focus on this, but we still need to deliver this, but we may not have to deliver something else. So it becomes very complicated. I'm just curious to get your insights on that.

Speaker C: Yeah, a couple things. I do feel like here at Concentrix that we are seeing this need like AI in particular you mentioned, just over and over and over again. And all companies need some help. Maybe not all, but most need some help. Big picture, just trying to figure out how and where they put in AI. And so we have come up with some offerings, some readiness offerings that not super expensive, just ways to help give a uh, perspective and kind of identify use cases with them and for them. And part of the challenge with AI right now is every vendor, every software company that they have is coming to them saying, hey, we've got AI, turn our AI on and you know it's going to solve all these problems. But the they need a perspective that's bigger than this one application. They need to look at the entire ecosystem. And so that's part of where I think we, someone like us can help because once again we don't have a stake in the ground in any one of those applications and we can have a more unbiased opinion. So. So I like that approach and I like when we hear of these opportunities being able to and I actually help lead and my team helps lead some of these AI readiness projects as well. So it's a good fit for us and it's a good way for us to introduce that as an opportunity. We would try to keep that a little separate or with our contract we could potentially do a swap and say, okay, great, you don't think you need this aspect, but you really need this one urgently. Let's swap it out and do a cr. So we take that approach some. I think the other thing, back to my, my earlier comments about meeting people where they are is trying to figure out what's in their best interest. Because I don't want to throw away the strategic reason they hired us, and I think most of them don't either. But it's trying to find a way to still be strategic in the thing they're asking for. So if AI could help and if we can identify a use case or we could implement it in the work that we're doing somehow, then yeah, I would want us to take a look, partner with them, um, on some of those things. So far that hasn't been as relevant. I would say it's more about shifting to deliver. We have to have this thing right now. Can you help us deliver it? Well, that's been more of the take, but absolutely, uh, on board with being creative or finding ways to enable them and keep us there. Figure out how we can still be their partner and if they're coming to us for that partnership, we want to nurture it.

Speaker A: I think along those lines to your earliest, or one of your earliest statements about building the relationship in the trust, when they're openly discussing what they're thinking may not alter the existing statement of work with a change request, but it could unlock other opportunities within our organization or your organization or within the consulting firm to help solve a need. And often companies have some discretionary money to do these exploratory type practices.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: Absolutely.

Speaker B: So one of the things that I think is interesting with AI, because I think there's a great opportunity for consulting companies, to your point, these vendors say just turn on our AI, but they haven't actually asked do they have a problem that their AI will fix. Right. Going back to listening and asking the questions like I get bombarded with AI things and oh, this is going to fix all your problems with churn. I'm like, we have no churn problem. We're like 98% people renew, so that's not even a problem. But you're trying to push this now. Can their technology solve another problem? Then they probably would catch my attention because it probably can be a little bit different. So I think there's a lot of opportunity and I think the winners are going to be the consultants in AI, not the companies that do AI. It's kind of like the gold rush. People that sold the things to get the gold or the ones that made money. And there was a few people that got the gold that actually made money. But the, the real winners were the people actually enabling them and being able to do that. So when you go in, do you look at getting to my, my question a long way to get to. My question is so they have existing products with AI, there's AI products out there in the market and then there's a third option of taking like an open AI and creating a custom AI. How does your company approach that? Do you have lean one way or another or is it really kind of depending on the customer and their needs? Once you understand what their problem is, how do you balance those three different options?

Speaker C: Mhm. Right now it's pretty early in this space I would say. So we're pivoting all the time and learning. Right now most of our use cases are around a very specific problem. A company has a problem. We have one right now that wants to run B2B promotions and so better promotions using uh, using learnings and AI and agentic. And so we're going to come in, evaluate ways to solve that problem. But we have a relationship with this customer and so they feel comfortable that we could solve that. Another one could be an existing customer that wants to improve their customer service. And so they're coming to us saying, hey, we've got these four applications and they all have AI. But here's our problems. Which one of these is best for our problem? And we look at cost and we look at other things that back to your point, like that one vendor is not thinking holistically, they're thinking about their product and we're thinking about how can we improve a process. So I think it's really key. I do think what will evolve for us and others is those custom development projects. And uh, I feel like they're already coming. We go in and do an analysis and see, oh wow, yeah, there's a huge opportunity here. And so it's just like anything, you start, you do the analysis and then we identify opportunities. And hopefully they would choose us to help be their partner to implement that opportunity. So that, that would be the goal. Some companies may try to do it on their own too. Maybe they need help with the problem, but they might have the technical resources to be able to solve the problem. That's another thing that we see off and on is that I think a lot of companies right now are, they need help in that strategic thought leadership and just an outside opinion really helps validate those kind of things. So we're happy to be there for that too.

Speaker A: So in essence basically taking their journey or their use case, their problem and figuring out what is the best solve, irrespective of the applications or the platforms initially, so that they can figure out where it fits into their overall ecosystem.

Speaker C: Mhm. Yep. And this is like everything else in software. A lot of times there's not like a uh, clear cut, best answer and it's changing so fast that it's hard to say that this is the best answer. But at least we can offer options and cost. Like if you go this way, then here are the pros and cons. If you go this way, here are the pros and cons. Sometimes there is a clear like, hey, this is exactly what we should do. But just my experience in everything, not just AI, is that there's 10, 15 different ways to solve every problem and any one of them could be a good answer. Mhm.

Speaker B: So Caroline, looking back, I think you said you were back into consulting the last five years. Looking back at those five years, can you, without naming company names, what is your, in your opinion, your most successful outcome and what do you attribute that to?

Speaker C: Yes, there's a couple, um, there's a customer that we're working with right now, so it's not done. But I would say we are just very well aligned and that certainly helps the most in our journey here. I think some customers and some of our engagements haven't, uh, they haven't taken the learnings or this strategy that we've offered or there's been turnover. So the people that hired us, they are no longer there. And so when you have a leadership shift like that, sometimes it starts feeling like m, gosh, did we really have as big of an impact as we wanted? But the companies that I think about that have hired us where we do the best work on the strategy side are the ones that truly want change. Like they are striving for real, sustainable change. And a lot of times they're newer leaders coming into those organizations and they've hired us because they know about us, they've worked with us before. But that's our most successful profile. And I think part of it is because what we're trying to do is hard. It is hard to turn an existing ship that has its own way of doing things to a, uh, different mindset. And that shift doesn't happen overnight. The other client profile that comes to mind where I feel like we've had tremendous success and even the one I just mentioned about the AI assessment, the one that brought to us about their promotions, that is the client I'm thinking about, they're always there. We've done some very successful projects with them, but we were solving very specific needs. They had a security problem, they had breaches. And we came in and we figured out why and we helped change their strategy around how they, um, used APIs and how they delivered APIs. And we changed it all. And they were willing to make that change because they had a major problem. It's kind of like life. I worked in health care and you see that people are willing to make the biggest change in their health after they've had a major health event, like a heart attack, because it's a wake up call. So those are the two scenarios that I would say. People that really want to start out of the gate and they're bringing us in and then people that have had some sort of major event that requires change.

Speaker A: So, Caroline, those are great examples I'm curious about. Do you have any specific customers that maybe were brand new, completely brand new logos and you've been able to continue to grow that relationship?

Speaker C: Yes. And I was thinking as we're talking, there is another option here. There are customers and I think maybe. Alex, I got hung up because you said the most successful, but success is in the eye of the beholder. And so if you asked my leadership, they may say that some of these other customers where I feel like we didn't have as much impact, are more successful because we're steady Eddie there. We keep getting new work. It's not exciting work, it's not strategic work, but we are continuing just to be there and unlock and deliver, um, and deliver on their tactical goals. So thinking about it, yes, you're absolutely right, David. There is a third profile, which is customers that we developed that trust with. We tried to do the strategic thing. Maybe it didn't have quite as much impact as we'd hoped, but it had a big enough impact that they believe in us and they keep coming back. And we have several clients that I can think of that we unlocked. And I say we, my team and I unlocked the logo. We delivered an engagement and we were able to identify other areas or in that same area. And we just, just keep getting additional contracts year over year. So yes, that is also certainly A definition of success.

Speaker B: Well, Caroline, this has been a really great conversation. We appreciate your time and sharing all your experience. One of the things that we ask all our guests is around LinkedIn. LinkedIn's used for a lot of different reasons. And people out there do things that are, you know, might be a pet peeve of yours or a recommendation that maybe you saw someone there that you wanted to hire, and then you saw something on their LinkedIn profile that made you second guess it. Do you have anything that's like a pet peeve or a recommendation for people looking to get into, like, a customer success type role?

Speaker C: Sure. Yes, I do. I think customer success, a lot of these words, right, have become buzzwords. Not a bad thing, but I think show me the money. Uh, is what I would say. And so instead of necessarily just, yeah, you might have the buzzword there, but show. Show me how you've actually had customer success on your profile. And some of that is, I have a data background. I'm a data person. Show me the metrics. Show me that you've extended relationships, that you've grown them, that somehow. And it's hard to articulate that these are people that you've built such great relationships with that they're going to back you if you needed a job or a reference or something like that. And so you showing that authentic part of connecting with people, I think is super important, and then showing the metrics behind it versus just using the words that really makes you stand out between someone who does customer success and someone who is customer success.

Speaker A: Thank you very much, Caroline, we really appreciate you joining us. A lot of great pearls of wisdom and a lot of good things to unpack. So we appreciate all your time. Thank you very much.

Speaker C: Yeah, thanks so much for having me, you guys. Hope you have a great weekend.

Speaker B: Thanks, Caroline. Nice to meet you.

Speaker C: Yeah, nice to meet you, too.

Speaker B: Okay. David, that was a great conversation with Caroline. Out of all that, uh, conversation, a lot of good topics, what stood out for you?

Speaker A: Yeah, Alex, for me, the session was timely. What I'm seeing day in and day out now are customers and potential customers that are basically stopping or halting projects, programs, or initiatives because budget constraints, or they're looking at things like, what do my customers really need? Or they're looking at things like, hey, I don't have as much value. We need to skinny this down. So I'm seeing a lot of that. So listening to Caroline and Or I found the discussion with her on pivoting and changing the course and how once you understand who Your client is, you understand their pain points. You can help them reallocate or reprioritize initiatives that are already in flight. And you may say, hey, instead of doing this program, this project, what we can do is we can bundle that together and we can work on this strategically. And some of those initiatives we see are wrapped around AI. Some of them are just modernization. But they're all focused on how do we get greater business value as a company and to our customers and enable them a little bit more. So it's really interesting, I thought, the discussion with her on how she approaches it, the intimate knowledge that she gains from them. I think it also goes back to the beginning where we were talking about the whole thing about relationships. Do they like you or is it a matter of they like you, but they trust you and now they can tell you what's going on? So I think all that kind of tied together what we, we started the podcast off with and going through it. So I think it all marries up. What do you think?

Speaker B: Yeah, it does. And it was timely that we talked about that right before talking, uh, with Caroline. So it all meshes together. And having that trusted advisor, they use that a lot. It can't, in my opinion, can't be overused. Because trusted advisor means a lot of things that you start to blur the line between your company and their company and they see you as part of their team and of course you're going to collaborate and talk to someone on your team to get things better. And I think all of that kind of folds together. The other thing I would call out, from my perspective, that I thought was good, was when we talked about when you have really good outcomes, what do you attribute that to? And I think especially in the consulting world, but really anything, I mean, we're well aligned. That means you have something probably documented and you've talked about it and you made sure what we're doing, we're all on the same page. So there's what good alignment. The customer really wants the a change. They're really looking to do something. They have something vested that's going to be valuable for their organization as well as them in their career. Having a very specific problem. Trying to boil the ocean versus trying to narrow it down into some specific things that you can measure and show value return and then just consistently working with them. I think that's really imperative, especially in customer success. Uh, you own these customers for a long time and being consistent, reliable, trustworthy, all those type of things over times will be opening the doors to you to have a good relationship with your customers, so that conversation stood out with me.

Speaker A: Yeah, I thought it was a great conversation and we want to thank Caroline for her time. Well, that does it for this episode of CS Pivot yout Career podcast. We hope you enjoyed the conversation and encourage people to subscribe and rate our podcast, along with leaving comments wherever you get your podcast or on LinkedIn posts for this episode. Until next time, we hope everyone has a great day and we'll talk to you next month.