Ep 71 | Veronica Bianchini

Veronika Bianchini: Foreign.

Irina Chismash: Leader Insights, the podcast where we dive into the world of customer success with industry leaders. I'm your host, Irina Chismash and today I'm joined by Veronika Bianchi, Senior Strategic Customer Success Manager at uh, Discus qualitative research platform for enterprise Insights teams. Veronika, I'm really happy to have you here. Thanks for joining.

Veronika Bianchini: Thank you so much Irina. Uh, lovely to be here.

Irina Chismash: You've worked in research, consulting, enterprise analytics, and now you are in CS at the qualitative research platform. I'd love to start by understanding your world at uh, Discuss today. What does the platform actually do and what does your role look like in practice?

Veronika Bianchini: Yes, and uh, thanks for highlighting my journey into CS and into this particular role because I can tell you a bit more of how I'm using everything that I've learned in that journey today. So first and foremost Discuss has been as well on an exciting journey going beyond being just a pure qualitative research platform. And nowadays we're actually a lot bigger than that. We joined forces last year with a quantitative market research provider as well and we're investing heavily into our features and our capabilities, uh, as an Insights repository as well. So we are positioning ourselves to be like that place where you can do every single methodology, your360 when it comes to customer insights and have all your customer knowledge in one space to really accelerate the way that you people in consumer insights are really doing their jobs. So really excited about the fact that we are getting a lot more ambitious and bigger into what we deliver. And as I was saying, my personal journey has put me in a really great place to embrace the fast pace and ambiguity that always comes associated with CS roles in software. Right. You have to be thinking on your feet all your time embracing changes. A lot of people refer to it as building the plane while the plane is flying. There is a little bit of that as well. A lot of what I've taken from my experience has had to do with the soft skills of interacting with customers and understanding their needs, but also the ability to problem solve and build things from scratch. Currently using a little bit of all of that in my day to day role.

Irina Chismash: And in all this setup, what do you spend most of your time on?

Veronika Bianchini: It's a tough question because personally I think that you usually go through stages where something takes most of your time that has to do with where your customers are at in their life cycle, the time of the year as well. Sometimes market changes, internal changes in your company, sometimes you're very dedicated in onboarding and enablement, especially when you have an influx of new customers. And some of the times you're just in troubleshooting mode or building and in shifting mode when you're trying to solve difficult problems for your customers. So I think it's a mix and I'd be hard pressed to say they this is what I spend most of my days with because one of the beauties of all CS jobs in general is that not today's are the same and you have this seasonality to it.

Irina Chismash: Speaking about the customer journey that you mentioned earlier, let's talk about the onboarding. When you are onboarding a client, what are you actually aiming for? What does a good first 90 days look like to you?

Veronika Bianchini: When we involve customers, we know that it's absolutely critical that they run a project with us end to end and that they get a good experience of doing that. That is one of our key markers for success. But also personally I think that something critical to do in those first 90 days beyond that initial activation is setting down the rules that you ah, want to govern that relationship going forward. And I've learned the hard way that whenever you set practices that are not sustainable at the beginning, it's incredibly hard to change them down the line. So whenever you think, okay, I'm going to let them do this for one time only, um, it usually backfires because once you set some things m in motion, it's hard to change. So first line today critical to get a positive experience on usage and secondly, set down the rules that you want to govern that relationship going forward.

Irina Chismash: I'm curious if the onboarding, um, phase is the phase that determines if a renewal is happening or not. In some industries, in some companies, the renewal is decided on the onboarding. I'm curious, is it the same on, on you guys or you still have chances? If onboarding was clunky, you still have faces to recover along the journey.

Veronika Bianchini: I do think that there is a chance to recover even if you start your onboarding a little bit late. But what I am seeing, which is an interesting trend, is everyone is focusing on onboarding for really good reasons. Like you said, it is a period where you make or break that relationship. But surprisingly what I'm seeing is that software onboardings are becoming faster and simpler and any other thing is helping alleviate a lot of the effort behind it. So two, three years ago, what I think was very common was for some lengthy implementation stages when you bought a new software, a lot to learn, a lot to plug in, a lot to build, and everyone now is making that first approach to your product, a lot easier. On one hand, that is good news. But on the other hand, if onboarding is now so easy that you don't have to fear the pain of onboarding a new tool, then it also presents a bit of a challenge for renewals. Because if it's so easy to just onboard any software, then suddenly you lose a bit of that protective mode of people not wanting to move because of the costs associated with learning a new tool or setting up a new thing. So, yes, onboarding is definitely something that is critical, but I think that we're getting into a, um, maturity moment in tech where we're going to need to go beyond that to get that renewal. In

Irina Chismash: staying on this, on this path, what's the earliest signal you've seen that tells you an account is going to struggle before it shows up in usage data or in renewal conversation?

Veronika Bianchini: So I believe that having a good point of contact on the other side is absolutely critical. So having someone that is engaged, someone that's asking questions. I personally have a controversial opinion about customers, which is that, uh, I do not mind a difficult customer because a customer that is always pushing back, a customer that is there to say, this is not working, or I need this faster or whatever that is. It's a customer that is engaged that wants something for you. I'm a little bit more worried when customers are not saying anything. So the earliest warning signals ace silence. When you're not hearing anything from your customers, good or bad, even before that's reflected in usage, that's when I really worry.

Irina Chismash: Do you also have the situation where a customer is pushing back because it was and he's complaining and he is doing feature requests because he was sold something and the platform cannot deliver? How do you distinguish between he is unsatisfied, where he is vocal because he was promised something and okay, you cannot fulfill versus he is vocal because he wants to get the value from the platform, that value that it was sold initially and needs your help to basically unlock it.

Veronika Bianchini: Yeah, that's a good question. I have to say, being really lucky in the last few years to be working with mostly really great sales partners that are very ethical in their approach to selling and also to be working with products that actually deliver on the promise.

Irina Chismash: Okay.

Veronika Bianchini: But sometimes the biggest challenges arise not because the product objectively cannot do something, but because expectations are not very well defined at the sales point. Right. So everyone approaches the cell thinking, oh, I understand what the other person is saying. To me, we're both on the same page and Sometimes when you are at the execution point you realize that there were some gaps there in understanding. The client thought that seamless mean one thing. Yeah, sales delivery team thought that seamless meant a different thing. And for me as a cs, it's really critical to try to understand when there is a product concern or a feature request, what are you actually trying to achieve. Because there's not always a product or feature. Solution is not always the solution. Sometimes solutions are as simple as introducing a ah, rule into how people should uh, engage with the platform or redefining the customer's process. And I do feel that sometimes, especially when it comes to software, when it comes to technology, most of our platforms are there offering to do something good for the users, being that like saving costs, reducing time, improving quality, whatever that is at uh, the trade off of doing things differently. And I think that a lot of clients and a lot of users just fail to hear this last bit of the sentence. Whereas you will need to change the way you're doing things in order for this product to work. In order for the software to really help you, you need to change the way your operation is done, the way your journey towards this is being currently done. Right. My role has usually been to try and work a bit on this change management aspect of things and say yes, there's a way which is creating a completely customized solution for you and your process. But actually if you did this couple changes this could work for with the tool as it is now staying on

Irina Chismash: that usually enterprise clients usually mean a lot of people in the room. And you discussed a little bit earlier, once the contract is signed, how do you keep all those stakeholders actually moving in the same direction? Because in some cases they might have different objectives and expectations.

Veronika Bianchini: Yes, this happens a lot. It's not just about different functional roles. Sometimes it's about different seniority levels when you have sometimes a disconnect between the person that signs the renewal and the day to day users and you have to bridge that gap and make sure that everyone is really happy. I think that the best way to go about it is really work with your internal champions on the client side, identify them, build them up if you don't have them and try to understand what are they trying to do and how do you fit into that wider organization ways of working on objectives to work towards that as well. So sometimes you really need to learn about the organizations you're working with and understand their nuances to understand that this team and that team are completely siloed, but actually they have an overlapping objective okay, this is something that you can get them to agree on, etc. And find out what their ways of communicating. Are they uh, a kind of team that prefers email first? Are they a kind of team that want to jump on calls that also helps you be in sync with your stakeholders, even if there are many.

Irina Chismash: In a qualitative research platform success isn't really about logging rates or feature adoption. It's about whether the clients are making sharper decisions from what they discovered. Or at least this is how I see it. How do you start to measure that? How do you prove the value?

Veronika Bianchini: I think that for proving value you always have to um, partner with your customers because there's always going to be a piece that you are missing, which is what is happening with the data, the insights, the outcomes from your platform once they leave your platform or once they put it in practice. So getting that kind of feedback from your customers and building those success stories is quite critical to be able to document your roi. But something else that you can do is really use all of the data you have available as a customer success. And that is not just your average usage data. Uh, but sometimes there's a lot of software information that your customers are sharing with you. For example, we work a lot on projects on um, projects for market research for customer insights. And usually these projects have a title, have an objective and that is just like metadata that is embedded in the platform. But if you start looking at it in an aggregate level you can find trends and you can help your customer understand better uh, how they're using the platform and, and give them information as well about how they are operating in this space which is really valuable for them as well.

Irina Chismash: With a uh, data science background, you are probably not just using the AI part to summarize meeting notes. I'm curious, how do you leverage AI in your day to day CS operations? What are your use cases or main use cases that you used for?

Veronika Bianchini: You're absolutely right that I tend to shy away from those kind of like low fruits. So for example, I don't write any emails. With AI you have the rare template for an invite to an event or something. But as a general rule whenever I'm replying to a customer that is my voice 100% and that's a personal choice and a outline. But what is interesting for AI is I believe it's really powerful where when used to synthesize large numbers of data, uh, find data patterns. In the example I was just giving about understanding the main use cases for customers, that was done using AI so first and foremost because of my background, I'm really careful to always be using data that is non sensitive, anonymized to make sure that I'm taking all the guardrails appropriate to not endanger or put my customers in any awkward positions. I'm really careful with that. But I do try to use it to get more insights about what is important for them. And that is not only looking at um, this kind of like metadata that we might have, but also looking the information that they publicly share about themselves is really useful to use AI as a sparring partner to understand what are your customers main goals, understand what is their competitive landscape, where they are at, where are they going. AI tools, whichever that you're using can be really helpful to make this kind of back background analysis go a little faster, farther away.

Irina Chismash: What's your biggest challenge? You are trying, what's the biggest challenge that you are trying to tackle right now with the accounts that you are managing?

Veronika Bianchini: I think that it's going back to this idea that once you get them to use you, then you have to sustain this in time. And really for them to be the top users that you want them to be, the biggest challenge is that you do need them to change their approach to the way they're doing things. So I think that this change management aspect of things is the most important and something that is a continuous, a continuous challenge because this market research, consumer insights is currently going through huge transformation. The entire industry is in a bit of a turmoil. There's a lot of reorganizations, people turnover and really an industry that is, I think, reflecting on the ways of doing things in a, in a very profound way. So the biggest challenge is to navigate all of this effectively, being a good solutions partner and, and taking the feedback as well from all these changes and using that to, to improve the way that you are.

Irina Chismash: You've built your career across three countries, five languages and completely different industries from research consulting and now cs. Is there something from that path? Maybe a mindset or a lesson that still shows up in how you work today? One, one thing that will basically summarize our whole conversation.

Veronika Bianchini: I very much believe in the power of people working to solve people's problems. So going back, and this is I think my political science background. So going back to uh, what I was saying about reframing those product requests or product not working challenges, I do believe that at the root you always have to start with an understanding of people, people's challenges and start working first on those frameworks, on the ways of working on, um, on their interaction with the platform and providing support and partnership to your customer by understanding what they're trying to do and helping them build a road to do that. And then the tech follows, the features follow that. It's start with people first.

Irina Chismash: Not every CSM comes in with a, uh, decade of being the client and that runs through everything we talked about today. Thank you so much for joining. To everyone listening, thanks for tuning in. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning and mastering m customer success.

Veronika Bianchini: Thank you so much. It was great to be here today.