Pivot to CS & Technology: Amber Monroe's Healthcare Journey

Welcome to the Customer Success Pivot Your Career podcast. I'm David Loakeets and my co-host is Alex White. Our podcast is focused on people looking to get into the customer success profession or move up into customer success if you're already in the field. How are you today, Alex? Hey, David, can't say I'm doing bad, so I guess I'm doing good. So How about you? How you doing? I'm doing great. Having a good time. Weather's been great here in California. Unfortunately, not the rest of the planet, not the rest of the US, but all's good here in California. So, Alex, what's on your mind today? Today, I would say, and it's probably on everybody's mind, is around AI. I've been delving into getting more educated on it, taking some online classes. Asking people for recommendations, not just the things I'm used to, but asking. Someone recommended a podcast called The Artificial Intelligence Show. I just started listening to it, but they also have courses and stuff, and it seems at the right level to give me a more solid base to understand all the different types of AI and stuff. So I'm enjoying that. It's on my mind. I'm spending every day doing a little bit of that and enjoying it. I've been doing a lot of reading and taking some courses on AI, and I think it's important that we continue to listen to some of these podcasts, take training, and really figure out how to best leverage AI. I think it's a tool and it's going to help us make decisions. It's also going to drive decisions and have a certain level of autonomy. But the more we understand it now, the use cases where it can be applied and how it can grow, I think is really a critical And we need to get in the right mindset. I know there's a huge scramble for every company to use AI and everybody wants to be an expert in AI and it's sort of like the wild, wild west. So the recommendations of these podcasts and training, I think is great. So thank you for that. I'll definitely, on a personal note, I'll go out and check it out. Yeah. And one of the interesting things I heard, and it goes back to the podcast with Alex Raymond where he talked about sales is less efficient and it's they're closing less deals and having to spend more time. So it's even more important for CS to do renewals. But one of the things that I found that I think is related to it when they started talking about AI is AI allows you to actually build applications that might not make you need to go out and buy something. Teams are going, do I really need a real sophisticated CS application? Or can I start by using AI to help me build something that's a basic task collection and alerting that I can evolve and get by for the next year or two? I'm like, I never even thought of that. And it makes me think about all these applications and how AI could disrupt the software industry in general. That was an interesting learning and kind of looking back and thinking about things made me think differently about it. It's a great way of looking at it. You come back to— everybody wants to jump in rather than spending or investing a ton of money. Sometimes being able to identify what is our most important use case or what's the most important problem we're trying to solve right now, and let's at least try it at the lowest common denominator, the lowest level. And from those learnings, we'll be better educated into finding the right tool or the right application Or do we continue down that path? So really interesting points. Great stuff. Good topic. Anyhow, with that said, I'm really looking forward to getting into our conversation. Absolutely. Let's go. Our guest today is Amber Monroe. Amber is Senior Vice President of Customer Experience at Paradigm. Amber has been in customer success for 10+ years, having been recognized 3 times in the top 100 customer success strategists. With over 20 years in healthcare, Amber has led customer success teams through growth, change, and everything in between. From onboarding to support, she builds scalable systems, lasting relationships, and high-performing teams. Welcome to the podcast, Amber. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. To get us started, Amber, why don't you expand on your career and how you got into customer success and some of the learnings along the way? Yeah, absolutely. Well, I appreciate you both allowing me to jump on and share my experience with your audience. My customer success journey hasn't truly been linear. I really started outside of high school wanting to get into the healthcare industry. That's kind of where I started. I knew that I wanted to care for individuals, and so I spent a portion of my career serving clients with developmental disabilities in college, and I loved the work that I did there. And then I really moved into the hospital system. Healthcare was really my domain. It's really what I was passionate about, but I found that the hospital system was really slow to innovate. So I really wanted to consider transitioning more into the technology space because I wanted to move quicker and faster and innovate for patients. And so I switched into the CS space about 10 years ago because I loved people and I thought customer success would be a great place for me to start. And so I served as an account manager for Optum for a couple of years. I would travel all across the Midwest to hospital systems, and I really got my interest in saving accounts. From churning. Any time there was anything major or a risk or a red flag on a particular account, my manager at the time was like, we're sending in Amber. And so I would go and I would meet with the team and I would really help repair that relationship and build that level of trust so we could earn the business and continue earning the business for years to come. And from there, I really became a domain expert in healthcare. So I never left the healthcare industry. I didn't go into any other fields and I wanted to double down in customer success specifically. So I also wanted to be a domain expert there. So I spent a lot of time with mentors, people running CS organizations in larger companies than where I had been. I spent a lot of time really meeting with the community of CS professionals and finding ways to contribute to the CS profession. And so I did a lot of writing content for CS Insider, did that for a couple of years. I would write some thought leadership pieces, I would do podcasts, I would do webinars, and I really enjoyed the work that I did and really giving back to the community and the lessons that I've learned. So right now I'm the Senior Vice President of Customer Experience at Paradigm. We are a revenue cycle management company and payment integrity company servicing the home care industry in the US. So we have over 4,000 customers, probably triple that in contacts, and we are responsible for the billing and payment for the home care industry. We're a services-based organization, so we are responsible for their cash flow. And so we are under pressure to make sure that we deliver the best customer experience possible. So that's really how I got here. That's awesome, Amber. Welcome to the show. Thank you. It makes me think one of the things I always coach people on is figure out what you really love to do, and then it really is fun because we spend a lot of time working and it's better to be working on something you enjoy doing. And you can tell that passion that you have for the healthcare industry. So, they're lucky to have you. So, I have a question for you. What would you recommend? Our podcast is around people getting into customer success or moving up. If someone isn't in the healthcare industry currently but wants to get into it, what would you recommend? Like, what skill sets would they value in the healthcare industry that would allow them to build their resume or do things outside of work, maybe in volunteer work or other things that would position them to go into the healthcare industry? Yeah, I love that question. I really think if you're looking for a domain pivot, I think it's important to find people that are currently servicing the healthcare industry. The people that I learned the most from was my mentors.. And you can do that through a lot of different communities. So for example, I serve on the board of directors for a nonprofit organization called Ideal for Healthcare, and it's specifically designed for women. It is a community of women leaders in the healthcare industry. I would consider joining a community like that. That's a great opportunity that gives you access to women or individuals that are in the healthcare industry. That are senior leaders, executives, very tenured women that are there to uplift other women. And that's what the community is all about. And so finding those types of communities, really partnering with women, really networking with women, and finding, really understanding the healthcare industry, that's like a good way to start. And really there's a lot of certifications that are out there. You really have to define exactly what interests you in healthcare the most. For me, home care was near and dear to my heart because I had two grandparents with dementia and Alzheimer's. So I watched them go through that aging in place in their home. And so for me, that was something I wanted to dedicate a portion of my career servicing. And so I've spent the last 6 years in the Care at Home space, and I really love what I do. So I think there's so many different opportunities in healthcare industry in the care continuum. You really have to understand what is your interest and then really start to dig in. And I think finding the community of people is a really great place to start. I find that fascinating what drove you for the in-home care. We just had in-home care with my in-laws and it was fantastic service and the people were just amazing. So I can understand when you're dealing with the elderly and dementia and the brain bringing the passion to that. I have two fundamental questions. The first one is, you said that getting into healthcare, one of the things that motivated you was technology and slow to innovate. So, I'm curious, taking that comment, what were some of the pitfalls in the innovation specific to helping you with customer success? And how did you overcome that? And are you making progress in that? Yeah, that's such a good point. When I really was talking about slow to innovate, I was talking about my work in the hospital system. So I worked in Health Information Management Department, which is— think of it like going up on the patient floor, rounding on the floor, and collecting all the paper documentation from the nurse's station, and then going down into the system and loading it and scanning it into electronic health record. That's also when you come into the hospital and you need a copy of your care records or your medical records. That way you could take it to your specialist or you could take it to another hospital. We had a release of information department as well, and we did coding, billing, all those fun things. The average tenure of an employee in that department had worked for the health system for over 20 years. And so the— we are talking about people that are long-tenured employees. Very loyal employees, love what they do and can do their job very, very well. And so I came in as this young 20-year-old at the time, very, very excited. I just graduated college. It was my first job managing people. I oversaw a team of 25 and I came in ready to take on the world. And I made a lot of mistakes along the way. I made a lot of assumptions. I learned a lot. I had great leaders that were great mentors to me. I had a great leader that gave me that opportunity initially. But what I realized in the system is that our electronic health record system actually had a mini hub in the hospital, and it was the technology hub. And so a lot of times when we had big projects going on, they would assign me to help with those projects. So I started working on innovative solutions to help my team do their work quicker, better, faster. And so I started working with the technology group and I was like, this is fun. I enjoy this. I enjoy working through process improvement, creating efficiencies, innovating, thinking about what the technology can do to make things easier for the people. And that's where I really said, I think I want to go into technology. It was really at that moment That said, this department needs to have technology partners that help support them in their innovation needs. And so that is really the driving or the catalyst that really helped me transition into the tech space and say, okay, now I want to do what they're doing in that hub, and I want to service clients at the hospital system from a technology perspective. And once I really got in, I learned all the things. I learned about engineering, developers, the product department, the marketing department, the sales department, things that I had not had any exposure with at that time. And I really felt like I had to learn really quickly, but I picked it up really quickly and I found that I really loved it. I move very quickly and I want to move at a very fast pace and that environment allows me to do so. And so I really like the, startups, that space between $0 to $50 million, because I feel like you've got to wear a lot of hats. You got to roll up your sleeves a lot. It keeps you on your toes. Sometimes it's frustrating. It's stressful. I enjoy it. I enjoy it. Maybe I like the chaos a little bit. It shows how much your career, how it's gone from that initial passion and how it's evolved into the technology side. I love that story. Let's start to shift into some of the things around customer success. One of the things that we had talked about was when we were prepping for the podcast was around segmentation. I know you posted something about that. I read that and was intrigued by it, and we thought maybe that would be a good topic for you to explain now that we understand your background and all that. Yeah, absolutely. I've always had an interest in creating unique experiences for customers based on a variety of different ways that we could do that. And the traditional way I always heard, or I always read in articles, or I heard from other leaders that were doing this in larger organizations was start to segment your customers by revenue, start to look at their service level expectations, match that with the revenue, and then start making decisions on how you segment. And quite frankly, with the way we started off and really was And the catalyst for this really came down to the fact that I had hired a new director in Q3 of last year, and she came from an organization that had strong segmentation. And when she walked in the door, she was like, whoa, we're treating every single customer exactly the same, and they're all our special customers. And we could do a better job of creating better service level expectations and meeting our customers where they're at, whether they are a high-touch customer a low-touch customer, whether they prefer phone calls or emails or recorded videos. There's a lot of things we could do to create better, more unique experiences for our customers. And so I really can't take credit for the idea of segmenting customers. I was really knee-deep in a lot of different things, and she really came in and said, I want to do this and I want your support. And I was like, let's go. We started with 5 different segments. And then after we started with the 5 segments, we really started working with the cross-functional teams. We met with the sales team, we met with the implementation and onboarding team, we met with our COO, and we sat down and we said, hey, what do we think about these 5 segments? And we really came down to the conclusion that 5 was too many. We wanted simplicity, we wanted really easy, so we condensed it from 5 to 3. And we really said, okay, we have our enterprise customers, we have what we call our Tier 1 customers, and we have what we call our Tier 2 customers, and all of them have different levels of needs. And so that's really where we started. And we are currently going through the exercise of what are the service level expectations that are needed for each of those segments. We're really trying to define that in our CX department right now, and we're sitting down with the cross-functional teams to make sure they can meet those SLA expectations. I don't want to make decisions in a vacuum. And so I really wanted to sit down with those cross-functional leaders. Let's dig into this and let's explore, is this possible? Is this feasible? We started to get our sales team to start thinking about customers in that way. We really started to get our implementation and onboarding team to say, okay, when an enterprise customer comes in, We want to create an elevated enterprise customer experience. We want to assign a particular type of implementation manager for that type of position because there's more complexity, there's more integration requirements. And so we are right in the middle of the exercise. And quite frankly, I'm excited and I'm pumped about what we're about to do. Your passion just gets me really amplified about, wow, okay, let's move. The other thing that just jumped out at me is at the speed you're trying to move. And I think one of the keys to success is not vacillating, not overthinking it. Get started somewhere. And the fact that you quickly recognize going from 5 segments to 3, you somehow came up with a quick learning. And it sounds like you're able to include more folks that are benefiting from it or can see a benefit. So, I'm assuming, maybe you can explain a little bit more about this. What have you learned and the feedback loop? How interactive is that? Because Where I come from, when you talk about technology, the sooner we learn something good or indifferent— good, bad, or indifferent— the sooner we can correct it. So, so true. So true. I think the way that you're describing my passion, I think my colleagues probably feel the same way too. I absolutely love customer success. I love people. I love customers. I love my colleagues. I'm a people person, and I really, really love and care about my employees deeply. And so I really want to make sure that it's benefiting both our customers and our employees and the business and allows us to scale in a more thoughtful and intentional way because we want to continue to grow and the business will continue to grow. And I just want to make sure I'm setting up the infrastructure to support that growth. And so I have to be intentional about what it is I'm choosing to do and Also, I can't over-engineer. And first thing we did was we started changing account manager hands and we did it with like maybe 100, 200 customers and we started getting, hey, I love my account manager, what's going on? So we made a little bit of mistakes because when we made those transitions, we didn't really assess the risk of moving an account. One of the things we did is we created a new property in our system. It's called transition risk, and we have it in a high risk, medium risk, and low risk. And we ask our account managers with their book of business to really assess whether it would be a high risk, a medium risk, or a low risk to transition account from their hands to another person's hands. That's important for us from a business standpoint, because when we're looking at 4,000 customers, I need to look at data, right? I can't go through all the account— 25 account managers that we have and ask them about each of their individual books of business. I need to do this in a very quick way. That helped me just gain a level of perspective to know which ones were the high risk that absolutely love their account manager. And if we were to change hands, we'd be creating risk on the account, or we need to do it more thoughtfully than just switching hands and emailing. That was something we just couldn't do. And so that was a learning experience for us personally. And I really think too, is that the more we started to get sophisticated in our segmentation, the more we started hyper-focusing on it, the more the rest of the business followed. And so the more people are like, wow, we should have done this a while ago. Wow, this is such a good idea. I'm so glad we did this. Sometimes it's scary. Don't get me wrong, it's scary to pull the trigger and say, okay, we're doing this, like it's happening. And then you make a mistake and then you're like, uh-oh. But the thing is, is that mistakes are going to happen. And if you're trying to be perfect, you will overthink and over-engineer and you will never move. And for a type of organization I work in, it's scaling, it's growing. I have to move quickly and I got to make those mistakes early. And now I've recognized what mistakes we've made and now we're prepping to make sure we don't make those mistakes again. So Amber, one of the things you said in there, and it's probably just part of your DNA and how you work, but I think it's really important for our listeners. You really engaged other people. This isn't just a CS thing and sales and other teams wondering what you're doing and then starting to question it and then starting to fight it. You actually brought them along with that. And the comment you made that make sure it benefits the company, the employees, and the customers, I think shows your empathy not only for your customers, but hey, this is going to impact everybody in different ways. Let's all be on the same page or give me feedback of why we shouldn't do it. And I think that openness, our listeners should really take a step back because I've actually been in a similar situation where there were things rolled out where not everybody was included in that. And then all of a sudden it became firefighting. And then you start doing this invaluable work. So I commend you for the way you did that. Thank you. I appreciate that. I do think that everybody wants to tap into customers, like everybody across our marketing team, our product team, our sales team, our CEO, our COO, every one of them at some point in time has come and asked something of me from customers. And my role is really to make sure that I'm adding value for them too, as a colleague, making sure they have access to those types of customers, that they can get the data they need. They have great feedback loops with customers to help us design product better, to help us market better, to help us sell more effectively. And so I really wanna make sure that I am a bridge builder in every capacity of my job. And so I am the type of person that is strong on execution and very strong in strategy. So when my colleague comes to me, I say, what are you trying to solve for? What are you looking to achieve? And they might have an idea of how to do it. And I know the framework of our department and the infrastructure and what projects we have going on and what we can support. And we can work collectively to achieve or solve for that thing that's happening in marketing or product or whatever. It also helps me to better understand what's happening in marketing and happening in sales. I want us to get out of those silos and I'm the best ex— example of doing that because that's who I am as a person. And so naturally I get out of my comfort zone so much that more of my colleagues start coming out of their comfort zone too. I'm not here to point fingers. I'm here to make the business better because you know me as a person, you know that I would never come from a place of ill intention. It's only to make the business better. You know, a couple things. The first one is leading by example with your passion is just helps drive and helps people. The other thing that came to mind when you were talking earlier is the proverbial three-legged stool. So when you talk about the company, the individual, and the client, you take and wrap empathy around all three of those avenues. And I think that's a really key thing because you get the balance, you get the relationships built, and no one's feeling like they're slighted and they're all feeling like they're heard ostensibly. The question that kind of tagged on to all this is along the third leg, the customer. So the feedback that we talk about from the people internally, that you're getting and the value of the company. So as you're experimenting, as you're rolling this out, what are some of the things that your customers are seeing or experiencing or sharing with you that's helping to improve the process as well? Or are they seeing it as value added to them? Yeah, that's good. I'm right in the middle of doing a customer listening tour right now with some of our— each of our segments of our customers. I'm starting with our enterprise customers. I am setting up meet and greets with the top 20 customers or top 10., and my team is working to schedule those meetings. I've already had a couple of them, and I've learned so much from customers if you come in with no agenda except to really learn from them. And so customers have really shared very openly their thoughts on technology, their thoughts on AI, their thoughts on the care at home industry, the thoughts on the service we're doing, the thoughts on new projects we have. I've now found customers that are great for a pilot. I now found technology partners. If we were to roll out some new tool, I know who I would tap into as a resource. And had I not made that connection and built that relationship with the customer, I wouldn't have had that level of context in order to be able to know who I could reach out to. So for example, we're going through a couple of transitions of those accounts that are low risk of moving. So right now we had sent an email out and I'm obsessively looking at those responses from the email. It's just something that I'm looking at who replied, how many people opened, has anybody said anything negative. Like, I am evaluating the context of those emails to the micro level to really understand how they're experiencing what it is we're doing. One of the things that I think sometimes customers don't always truly understand inside the business of how to escalate an issue when they have an issue. And so sometimes what happens is I see customers will reach out maybe to their account manager, maybe their account manager isn't getting back to them in time. So where do they go? Where do they go to escalate something? A lot of times they go back to their sales rep who sold the deal to them a year ago. So one of the things we want to do is make sure every one of our customers understand their path for escalation. So one of the things we're doing with this transition is we are saying Here's your escalation points of contact for you. In that email, it's telling you who the manager is of the department, who the senior is of the department, who's the director of the department, and you're having direct access to their contact information. So in the future, if you ever need to raise a concern, you know who you can go to and know that you could call the phone and somebody's going to pick up. You mentioned how customers don't know how to escalate. I think that's interesting in how many companies understand that might be a problem and they might churn because they didn't know who to talk to. So they just end up leaving. And understanding that clear path to be able to get your question answered. I've seen it. Yeah, it's interesting concept. Yeah. But it's also, I think for me too, it frustrates me when a customer has to go to social media or go to LinkedIn or email the CEO. It frustrates me that they're not getting what they need, one, from the ground floor. But two, that they don't know how to get ahold of someone. And so sometimes I've been at the end of a churn and I've gone on the phone with a customer and the customer is like, wow, I would have loved to have met you 3 months ago, but my decision is now made. And I think that's difficult for me personally because it's, wow, these are just service level things that we could have easily, quickly adjusted had there been some proximity to know who to reach out to. In these situations. Yeah. And I think part of it is the home care industry. I'm making some assumptions, though. It's all local and they talk to people. Oh, yes. They all know each other. Now they're dealing with technology company that's across the country or another city or something like that. Sure. And they don't know. I'm usually talking to someone that comes into our office and asks us a question or something. Yep, exactly. Alex, I'm seeing a pattern here. This is the second or third podcast in a row where our guests have talked about, if you're at the 90-day and the client says to you, I wish you were here earlier. It's like, is that 90 days early enough? And all we keep hearing is, no, it's ongoing. It's earlier the better. Those touchpoints are making a huge difference. Yeah. And what I always do is 120 days. And because it gives enough time, but really, and one of the things I've emphasized on the other episodes of our podcast is Understand the budget cycle of your customer. Renewals, one thing, but that's about you. Look at the customer, what matters to them, get involved with the budget cycle and provide them the value and the clarification to get the budget approval to continue to use your product versus coming later where decisions have already been made and said, I wish I talked to you 3 months earlier. So it's all good points. We run a 90-day survey. So after one of our customers go through implementation and onboarding, After that, they get assigned to an account manager. We run a survey at 90 days with their account manager. So we run a satisfaction survey. It's really a CSAT survey and it just lets them know, are you unhappy? Are you neutral? Are you happy? And give us the context and the details. That has really helped us understand at 90 days how we're doing, because we know how critical it is to implement and onboard successfully, but also transitioning to an account manager. That experience needs to be really, really locked tight because if that isn't, it gives this long-term perception that it's really difficult to come back from and you got to really work to establish that trust and credibility again. When our account managers first get an account, they have very specific actions they need to meet. It's meeting with the customer, it's introducing themselves, it's really trying to build that relationship, but we assess how effective they are by running that survey every 90 days. So when I get a feedback survey that says I don't know who my account manager is, you bet I see red. And once that becomes visible, that it's one person that keeps happening to, you're like, problem, solve that problem. Yes, exactly. And so a lot of times too, we really— I look at those surveys also very obsessively. I have those surveys, when they get completed, they go directly into my inbox and they go to every leader across the company's inbox. So I did that very intentionally. I just don't keep it to myself. I am okay with you knowing how things are going because if you are seeing it, I'm seeing it, and we can solve for that. Sometimes it talks about their onboarding experience or their implementation experience, or it may talk about a customer support interaction. It's good for the business and the leaders of the business to understand the survey feedback scores. And so I have to go all the way to everybody's inbox. We can't have an episode without talking about AI. It's so ingrained in everything. Talk about your AI journey. Does that— how that impacts anything around segmentation or anything and what you guys are doing in that area? Yeah, absolutely. So a really fun thing that Paradigm did last year is we acquired this organization called CareSwitch, and it is an agency management system that home care agencies utilize. But it's really built natively via AI, where most of the agency management systems that are out there have very long-tenured systems that have been in place since the '80s or the '90s and are bolting on AI. This is a natively grown AI system. And so through the acquisition, we acquired the incredible talent of that team who are true AI experts. And so because of that, I think our business is better for their expertise. And they have really come in and started to really build tools that help the rest of the business and the operators in the business and the managers in the business. So one of our tools we have is an internal tool we use It's connected to all the things— Claude, ChatGPT Enterprise. It's connected to our CRM system, our data. It's connected to a lot of different things. We just, as leaders, have to navigate how we prompt the system to get out what we need. So a lot of things used to take me hours to analyze now takes me minutes to analyze. And so For us, it was really like, hey, we released this awesome tool, start using it. And we created a chat channel and everybody started saying, oh my gosh, here's what I'm doing with the tool. Hey, can you connect it to this? Or can you connect it to that? Then we started really getting innovative as an organization on how we use the tool. Then we started seeing people using the tool regularly in their day-to-day operations. And so for my leadership team specifically, we have a leadership meeting every Wednesday and I always come together and I'm like, okay, What do we learn with the Paradigm Agent? And a lot of times they're like, oh, I did the analysis for a customer to help us with our EBR templates. So I had it pull out all of the data. So the account managers are having to click into 7 different systems to pull the data that they need to input into the template in order for them to do their EBRs. And so they're using the Paradigm Agent with the right prompts and now they're able to get that. I can analyze churn data pretty quickly. I can do sentiment analysis. I can load transcriptions from phone calls. So I'm doing things a lot quicker and it's helping me make more data-driven decisions than I've probably ever done before. So now I leverage those types of tools, but as an org, one of the things I've really challenged the leaders in my team to focus on is really, we will be AI-forward leaders. And as an organization, we are going to be the AI-forward adopters. And so I challenged my team to start listening to podcasts, attending webinars on AI, find ways to get familiar with what's happening. There's so much. You won't be an expert, but you can learn as you go. And then we have a shared learning experience together. Wow, Amber, that was a lot of energy, a lot of great information. I guarantee you I don't need any more caffeine today now. So thank you for the boost. That was fantastic. In closing, we like to ask our guests because our listeners are always going out to LinkedIn and they're either hiring or they're looking for a job. So we want to ask our guests if you have any kind of pearls of wisdom, some sort of advice or pet peeves in using LinkedIn? Oh my gosh, I am very active on LinkedIn. And so I would say there— I don't have any particular pet peeves. Sometimes LinkedIn can feel like a very— almost like Facebook, where it feels like that type of feed, and it sometimes it feels less professional, although we are business professionals with personal lives as well. And I think you can blend the two together in an effective way. I think for me, like my biggest pet peeve with LinkedIn is people randomly adding me and immediately selling me. Like I, that is my biggest pet peeve. It's someone that adds me and has no interest in what I'm doing. They just see my job title. They just see where I work and they say, okay, now I can sell something. So if somebody does that in my direct message, I usually just unconnect with them. I'm really good at responding back to people. Who reach out to me directly. So I'm a big proponent of this community. And so if there's any CS professionals that are out there looking for jobs or opportunities, it's always good to follow me personally because I'm very connected in the CS space. And I like a lot of posts that people may not see on traditional LinkedIn job posting forums because they're little private messages, or I get it in a chat of a friend that's hiring for a particular person. And I really like to share that information. Top CS professionals that share a lot of wisdom and content out there. They're really great people that have nuggets of information, and I love my CS Insider family. They are great. You can be part of that CS community and you can really get a lot. We pull all of the trending topics over the last 2 weeks in CS and we put it together in a newsletter and it comes out every 2 weeks. So it's really great for CS professionals, people looking to break into CS. And it's a quick way you can sign up for the newsletter and gain a lot of value right away. We really appreciate your time. Time is valuable, but I think you've shared a lot with our listeners that are going to get value. So following you on LinkedIn, how else, or specifically, how can our listeners learn more about you and keep in touch? What's the best way? LinkedIn is the best way. I am on it a lot, probably more than I should be. If you ever want to follow me and you just want to send me a direct message and connect, again, I'm really, really good at responding back. It might take me a couple of days to get to you, but I will get to you. Sometimes I do coffee chats for 15 minutes, especially for new CS professionals. I love to give back to the community in any way that I can. So if I could share a little nugget or wisdom, or if you need support on something, I'm always happy to be a resource. Yes. Thank you, Amber, for your time and for being on our podcast. We really appreciate it. It was a lot of great information. We'll also post some information on our LinkedIn post about the CS Insider newsletter. If you can provide that to us, we'll pass that along to our listeners as well. So, thank you for your time. You're welcome. Thank you, David. Thank you, Alex. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Well, David, another great conversation. Amber is a great guest, a lot of experience in the healthcare world and enjoyed that. What stood out in that conversation for you? What stood out first and foremost, very common with our guests these days, the energy level, just the passion, the drive, the love for what she does and the why she got into it jumped out at me. If I was going to start off with one thing to align with our listeners is she pivoted in her career and I was really impressed with what she— how she went about that. She talked about, hey, look at whatever you're going into, whatever vertical or whatever field that is, identify who you can learn from. There's communities out there, actively begin to participate, read. You and I are always following podcasts and taking training. And then she also said finding a mentor. So, right off the bat, she started off with a big pow, is how do I pivot my career? And I think that's so relevant to where we are today. Yeah, and I absolutely agree. And the communities and being engaged, I thought was interesting, right? Because we talk about, well, I've never been in this industry. Well, what are you doing to get engaged with that industry? Are you volunteering? Are you listening into things? Are you just saying, well, my experience translates, so just trust me, I enjoy it. They want to see like active involvement and interest in something. So I thought that was good. I think on that same topic or within that same realm, that's all investing in yourself and whether you're pivoting in your career or you want to grow or you need to learn something new. We've talked about AI. A lot of times, but you have to invest in yourself. And sometimes that means getting involved in these communities, sometimes taking training, sometimes doing something for no charge because you're learning and you have that story to tell. And once you've done something, it resonates better with people as you're trying to move forward. So, big, big takeaway: invest in yourself is how I would craft it up. Cool. So what else? So for me, I have a big laundry list, so be patient with me. The second thing she talked about, understanding who your customers are. So knowing who the customers— and she referred to it as a listening tour. And I can't tell you how many times in my career where I've gone in front of a client with individuals and it becomes a talking tour. Okay, hear what I have to say. Well, pivoting, I'm using the word pivoting here in another approach, but listening is where you learn. Listening is giving the client the stage. She walked into these things with no predefined questions. She had an idea of what she would like to get to, but she really created the space for the clients to talk about what their pain points might be, what they're trying to solve, not necessarily concerned with, "Oh, how are we doing?" but "How can we help you?" Yeah, and that's right in the QBRs. A lot of people look at QBRs as backward-facing. Let me present everything to you. And if people aren't showing up, as I don't know if we've talked about on the podcast, I know I've talked to a lot of people about if people aren't showing up for your QBRs, that means you're talking about how we did in the past and you're not looking forward and listening and trying to figure out how do we continue to add value. So, good section. You know, the other area that I thought was interesting was the segmentation. We don't spend enough time thinking about that, but I definitely feel the segmentation, especially if you're going into a new role and you're in charge of CS, say you're a director or something like that, understanding what the current segmentation was and why you positioned it that way and understanding, is that the right thing to do? I think that's something that's underappreciated. And her talking about that and how she moved forward to understand that and start simple and try to do that, I thought was a very good conversation that hopefully our listeners really take to heart and say, hey, do we have good segmentation? You can do it now if you're in a job. But also if you go into a job, like understanding what it is and how that evolved without you there is really a critical piece. Yeah, I, when she was talking about segmentation, my brain was going a lot of different directions. And part of it was how do we set ourselves up for success? And you can obviously segment by regions, you can segment by geo, whatever you want. But being able to refine segmentation properly, learning from your mistakes, allows you to balance the three-legged stool, so to speak. By segmentation, we're giving our customers that we're having to attend in this segment— we're getting the right attention with the right information. We're not spread too thin. We're not context switching with a lot of different clients. There's things we can share. It helps our company because we're given a concerted focus in a certain segment that is going to get greater value for scalability, for extensibility, for renewals, all that kind of fun cross-selling. And third, and equally important, is we're setting our folks up for success. Does the individual that's managing this segment or the individuals that are working in the segment, do they have the right skills? Do they have the right depth of knowledge? Have we put them in a situation where these clients are too complex for them right now because they're new? So, I think about segmentation and listening to her, learning from mistakes, and taking a kind of a thing from Jim Collins here, going from good to great. Segmentation allows us to get closer to that greatness and balance the stool, so to speak. Yeah. Yeah, and touch just the one last thing on segmentation. When you're looking at change segmentation, make sure you're engaging your customers so they understand the reasoning behind it. So that was a lesson learned, passed along to us. So we get to benefit from Amber's experience. Yeah, this was a great session. The one item that, that she also brought up, which just put a bow on this episode, we started off and what was on the frame of our mind was AI. And when we asked her about her thoughts on AI, I thought it was really, really important that the position she took, and again, there's a lot of learnings, but the way that she wanted her team and her organization to think is AI forward thinking. We will be the AI leaders and adopters. The first and foremost was the mindset, we will be, and we will leverage this. And I thought that was really important to position herself, her team, and her company as they begin to move forward. Yep, absolutely. And it's taking something that said we're going to explore AI and saying, no, we are going to be leaders, is a much different message in how people think and operate on a daily basis. And not just jump in and just buy something or set something up because everybody else, or you perceive everybody else is doing, and it's the only thing that's going to move the bar, but start thinking through what is the right application of AI, how can it leverage us, and how do we have that right? As she put it, how are we forward thinking? Yeah. Well, we thank Amber for her time. That was a great conversation. That does it for this episode of the CS Pivot Your Career podcast. We hope you enjoyed the conversation, encourage people to subscribe and rate our podcast along with leaving comments wherever you get your podcasts or on our LinkedIn post for this episode. Until next time, we hope everyone has a great day and we'll talk to you soon.