Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hey, hey, hey. Welcome to this week's Victory show. I'm Travis Cody, best selling author of 16 books. I've had the privilege of helping hundreds of business consultants, founders and entrepreneurs write and publish their own best selling books as well. And in that journey, I've discovered a really fascinating pattern. A lot of businesses hit a revenue plateau around a million dollars a year, and they struggle to break through. On this show, I sit down with some of the world's most successful CEOs, leaders and business owners to uncover the strategies they used to overcome that plateau and scale their businesses to new heights. And more importantly, how you can do the same. So get ready for an insightful conversation today. My guest is Kiana Taylor, the founder of customer success firm Key Focus Group. As an executive customer success leader, she has 20 plus years of expertise spanning client experience, customer journey management, and impacting global client success. Not only that, but she has a long career in continuous process improvements, transformational initiatives, analytical problem solving, and operational efficiency execution, all while leading high performing teams to support global brands in diverse markets. So, Kiana, thank you so much for being here. I'm excited for our conversation today.
[00:01:20] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: So let's talk a little bit about your journey. Because whenever we get into customer success and also when we're getting into continuous process improvement, those are two things that I have not come up a lot in the conversation that I've had. So let's talk about it. But let's go back to the beginning. What was it in your journey that led you into business to begin with?
[00:01:43] Speaker B: Doing what's best for the end customer, making sure they have amazing outcomes. I just feel like customer success as it has evolved over the years was a natural alignment to my nurturing quality. Quality. Anyway, so aligning my nurturing qualities with helping businesses and nurturing them for the best and most advantageous outcomes was a very holistic and natural alignment.
[00:02:05] Speaker A: What's the difference between what most people say, which is customer service versus customer success?
[00:02:10] Speaker B: Yeah, it's really different, Right. I think there's three prongs or verbiages that people might intertwine and that is customer service, customer success, customer experience.
Customer service is your typical, very transactional, reactive piece of engagement with the business. Right. Something's broke or something's built wrong or someone's not happy.
Exactly. You're not happy with something.
So I'm engaging with you because I have to. And that doesn't necessarily lead to my success. Not a part of my success, it's just a part of my effort or engagement. In how I operate or engage with your product or service. Customer success is a full life cycle and engagement, meaning you have a customer who's a longtime customer. Maybe they have a contract or agreement on file. You have multiple deliverables that are set in that contract. Customer success is to ensure that life cycle engagement. It also is supposed to ensure that there's a voice of the customer, meaning we have a really good pulse or heartbeat to make sure that customer's healthy. And there's so many different components that's making sure the customer's healthy, making sure key performance indicators are met, making sure. We're asking the customer how we can improve how they engage or use the product. The goal is to make sure they optimize and adopt the usage. There's a lot of data as well that goes into that. Because if you have a license, let's say you have a. I won't mention any brands, but let's say there's a license for a hundred employees, but only 50% are using it.
You're likely to churn. And because they're only partially using it, they also might be in the background looking for who's cheaper. Maybe for cheaper there's additional features or things that maybe we're looking to get out of the product that's going to help optimize our time or create efficiencies. You're constantly proactively thinking and solving for those things in customer success. Which is why every business should have a CS strategy. Because you could be really spending money to acquire new customers or clients. It's a life cycle. But you have current customers leaving out the back door.
[00:04:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:21] Speaker B: Which is why companies stay flat. Because they don't realize that they're leaving. They're quietly leaving because they think their sales are high. Right. It becomes a wash. And then there's customer experience, which is a whole nother conversation I would love to embark on. But I'll at least give you the delineation between customer service being very reactive.
[00:04:39] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:04:40] Speaker B: Customer success being very strategic and intentional, methodical. And there should always be an roi, even if that ROI is retaining your current customers.
[00:04:50] Speaker A: Wow. Can I license your process and take that to Hollywood? Because my God, does Hollywood need this process right now? Like their process is you didn't buy our movie and then they spit in your face and call you all kinds of names. And I worked in Hollywood for 15 years as a screenwriter.
My mentor wrote a definitive book called the New Art and Science of Filmmaking, but his subtitle was Fixing the Accidental Industry.
We got Context for this, for why I'm talking about this in the middle of this. But part of the thing that drove him crazy, he had produced 50 movies at one point in time. Seven of the top 25 highest grossing films were his. So he's very successful. And the thing that drove him crazy about Hollywood was they never asked the end user.
So an example of that is most companies, you hear about the minimal viable product, right, let's go, this is the very best thing. And then test it. Oh, they like it. This go make it. Hollywood does the opposite. They'll spend $400 million to make something, and then they come and test it after it's made, and then they go, oh, nobody likes this.
I am going to public call out a brand, because that's the problem. Lucasfilm and Star wars, they have a crazy customer life experience of guys that were fans when they were 8 and now they're 50, and they'll spend thousands of dollars on merchandise. And over the last decade, they have basically not only killed that subset of their customer base, they haven't brought any new ones in. If you see Lucasfilm and Star wars justifying the failure of their projects, they've never asked anyone. Anyway, I'm going on a tangent here, but what you just said lit me up and I'm like, oh, my God, Hollywood needs to listen. If someone's Hollywood listening to us, hire Kiana and her company. Please find key focus group. We can save you. We can save you.
[00:06:32] Speaker B: Absolute, absolutely save you. We need to be proactive. I never thought about that when it comes to filmmaking, but you're absolutely right. Yeah, you go see horrible movies and then you're like, why did they do this?
[00:06:41] Speaker A: But it's weird because they're very secretive about it too, Especially Christopher Nolan or a Marvel film. Nobody can see anything. I just thought it was funny how they make it and then they test it and then they freak out. Why don't you spend $3 million and make a 10 minute or a 15 minute short film version and then go test it? People like, we love it. Great. Now let's go spend $200 million. It's such an easy fix.
[00:07:03] Speaker B: So many companies do it and there's no rhyme or reason as to why they do it. You can unsuccess yourself into a failure.
[00:07:10] Speaker A: Oh, I love that. All right, there's the title for your book on success, your way to failure.
That's fantastic. Write that down. So getting where the rubber meets the road here. And it sounds like you're working. So my. My brain Goes, okay, I could see how a Microsoft or a salesforce, this would apply to them. But these are billion dollar companies. If I'm making a million dollars a year, how does a customer success process work for me? How do I implement that?
[00:07:37] Speaker B: Here's the great thing about key focus group.
Most companies, and typically it's a tech company, but people don't realize that it should be used across verticals and it has not been adopted as such. So what can happen is you have a million dollar company and maybe in your mind you're small, right? But what did you do to make it to a million dollars? You were focusing on what your expertise was. And it wasn't staying in the business and in the weeds of the business, it was doing what you do best at scale. Now you have to level up that scale, which means you need to delegate one, if you've only hit a a million dollars, you probably haven't been in business that long, depending on your business. Now, who's nurturing your current clients and where is your time being spent to grow the business? And what happens is people hit a very stagnant part of their journey as far as business because they're trying to nurture clients that they acquired a year, two years, three years ago instead of doing the very thing that creates revenue. So delegating that is a very critical part. Another piece about key focus group is you can actually delegate to your point, like the Microsofts of the world, they're multi billion dollar business. They have most of the time a customer success organization or arm, whether it's under operations or sales or it's its own organization. When you're a smaller company, people don't have that. They don't have the cost or budget to create that infrastructure. From an organizational standpoint, you can delegate that to key focus group, whether that is staying a third party or if that means white labeling, and we're not talking about white labeling and someone in another country who doesn't understand the culture of your business or customer sentiment, we're talking about someone who is educated, who has worked in technology, who has held licenses and worked across verticals, can actually handle that engagement with your client and think outside the box. Meaning what can be extremely critical is when I'm working with a client, my job is to also understand who their competition is. So when we're talking about a bi weekly, monthly, quarterly engagement, I want to understand in your quadrant or among your contemporaries or competitors, what is it that they are doing or not doing, how do we start doing sooner than them? What they're not doing to keep your clients loyal, make them deeply embedded in adopting and optimizing. What that does is it creates a trusted advisor if they need something else. Because we're engaged and have a close knit, nurtured relationship, who are they going to call first? We have an opportunity to to turn it down versus not even having the opportunity at all. That is what customer success should bring to every table. So it has a quantifiable and quantitative outcome. And there's an roi. People should never get rid of it. And if they feel like there's no benefit, then your CS strategy is not being ran right. That might be where we have a different conversation or consult. We can help you revamp what's internal to you, to your original point. That million dollar company is spending their time in the wrong areas. They're not delegating to those who have the expertise to focus on current clients while they go grow their revenue past their current state.
[00:10:45] Speaker A: All right, so you've been doing this for 20 years and those experiences led you to creating the key focus group in your career.
What was the point where you said, you know what, it's time for me to go start my own group? Was it working with enough organizations where you're like, they're not listening and you finally said, let me just go do it myself? What did that journey like?
[00:11:04] Speaker B: I think it's split. That is part of it. The positive is I've learned from a lot of the organizations what they did well and what they didn't do well. And I'm able to capitalize on those strengths. On the what they did not do well side is the say do ratio change, meaning the larger that company got, the less promises they kept that they originally vowed to their clients.
[00:11:24] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:11:25] Speaker B: My values and principles do not allow me to say one thing and do another. There is a promise, there is my word, whether it's in contract or not. And your say do ratio, when that lowers and people cannot trust you or you feel like you're just too big for your britches, as maybe someone older might say, you become a multi million or multi billion dollar company does not diminish the value of each and every client. The loyalty should only enhance your loyalty and turn to them. And so that did create a separation of values to me also. I love to impact other families, meaning me making a successful organization means that I can hire amazing people to take care of these amazing businesses and help them grow. But that means I get to impact the community. That means I get to impact families and I also get a chance to show what true leadership is because not only does the say do ratio impact the client, but also your say do ratio can impact the morale of your organization.
[00:12:28] Speaker A: So that's a fascinating insight. And does the say do ratio change as the organization gets bigger? Because by nature the the sort of hierarchies you're getting different departments. So this department's saying something, thinking they can deliver on it, but they're not communicating with the ones that actually have to deliver. And so that disconnect creates. Or is it something even simpler than that?
[00:12:50] Speaker B: I think that's part of it. I agree. Right.
The larger your organization, surely the sales.
[00:12:56] Speaker A: Guys would never say something that was the marketing department wasn't putting out there to close close a big contract.
[00:13:01] Speaker B: From a sales perspective, they always give you exactly what you talked about. Yeah, I absolutely think that's part of it. It could be a challenge when you're growing or you're growing quickly, but at the same time, the care and concern that you had when you were small and scrappy changes when you have all the confidence, when you feel clients are just pouring in or you're a trend or you have the monopoly on something, I think it just changes the attitude of the company on a large level.
[00:13:29] Speaker A: Makes it easy for you to coast a little bit.
[00:13:31] Speaker B: And that's another kind of interjection when it comes to customer success. If it's random, becomes the conduit between all these teams. Right. Kind of the mother that can bring them all together that has that connection with the client that says here's the feedback or the voice of the customer. They can dispense all that information to those teams and then manage what those expectations and deliverables are. Set expectations with the client, close the loop. Most people do not do that. They leave the client say, oh great, we heard you, and then they run off. And the client never hears anything about the feedback they gave. Right. And customer success should always close the loop. The client should always feel like they were listened to and not just heard. And another piece is, we know tech is evolving very quickly with AI using the team's time efficiently, we should leverage technology.
Right.
You should leverage it in its proper place and leverage it safely. Because that's a whole another conversation when it talks of policy about AI. But there's safe ways to use and implement it in your daily efficiency that helps you use your time to better serve your client and to have time to listen to them and to execute on their feedback and be transparent. If someone's asking for Something that's not in scope of your business. You have a transparent look. I really appreciate you. We listen to you. However, from a financial standpoint and the scope of the services or products we offer, it doesn't fall within scope. You're a wonderful client. I know XYZ company that might be able to provide a great service for you. Matter of fact, I know Travis or Matt or Sarah and they absolutely make sure that they deliver well and keep their promises to you. So I would definitely make the introduction. How about I do that? So even though you don't do it, maybe you're making an introduction to someone that you trust that can. And again, you're staying in the position of a trusted advisor and you're always ensuring the customer success. It's critical.
[00:15:21] Speaker A: So let's talk about what's been one of the most significant turnarounds that you've been involved with, where you've come in. And maybe there's an organization that's in disarray because they didn't have customer service.
I can see your eyes light up. You've already got a story. So walk me through that. When you came on board, where were they at and what was the crisis and then what were the phases that you went through to get whatever the end result of that ended up being, which I'm sure was probably they everyone was thrilled with.
[00:15:47] Speaker B: It was an ITSM company. They didn't have a really good lockdown of their enterprise level clients. So I came in and helped train and create an enterprise level team which was amazing. Met some amazing people in the process. And also leaders cross functionally that were ready and willing and understood the need for it. But the biggest impact I feel like it made is one, it increased retention.
And we saw the Churn numbers go down. Less people year over year left.
[00:16:14] Speaker A: So do you know what the sort of improvement of that was? It was like churn was 30% and you got it down to 20% or.
[00:16:19] Speaker B: It was double digits. So it was about a 10 to 12% reduction of churn.
[00:16:24] Speaker A: All right, yeah, that's pretty good. On an enterprise level, that's pretty significant.
[00:16:27] Speaker B: Another part of why that impact was felt was we also engaged. Even though customer success is post sales, some of the changes I made were let's be introduced to the client right before they sign the contract, give them a movie preview, a trailer, as you might say, of the support and service and the nurturing piece that we are going to promise to give them after they sign the contract and then making sure it was executed after that going back to that say do ratio and when you pull that pre sales trailer, the ROI of what you're going to get after you buy something is amazing. But then to actually have it happen.
[00:17:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:09] Speaker B: That promise being true was extremely critical in the numbers.
[00:17:13] Speaker A: What comes to mind with that is having dealt with large organizations myself as a business, is that you have an understanding of the sales guy. Once the sales done, you're never going to talk to that guy again. And sometimes these bigger organizations, you can feel like you get lost.
The process you just shared there, I was like, wow, you are essentially creating a success advocate for me. So I'm like, oh, I haven't even signed the contract and somebody's reaching out to me. And now I signed the contract and I'm going, okay, if something goes wrong or I don't know where to go to, I at least have one person I can go to saying, hey, I'm not having a great experience. And you're going, oh, how can we fix that? That to me, that's pretty innovative.
[00:17:47] Speaker B: It's great. Customer advisory boards are a big part of that. I've had the opportunity and pleasure of creating Customer advisory board. You have different people from your clients, right. From your customers. Sit on a.
And you have varied diverse roles or titles in that board. You might have some director levels, some VP levels and also some C suite. Well, the C suite is telling you what is their strategic vision and how does your company fit or not fit. So they can fix that in their strategic vision. And then what is the CES score or customer effort score? A lot of those the directors know because their managers are providing them feedback on their engagement with the product or the people that use the product, how easy it is or not to use the product or service. You have a multi layered approach of a customer advisory board funneling you information constantly to strengthen your position on your customer offerings.
[00:18:42] Speaker A: Wow. So for the key focus group, do you guys have a sweet spot of the size of companies that you want to work with?
[00:18:48] Speaker B: The great thing is we can go a little smaller. So we start, we're starting at about 5 to 10 million on the small end to about 150 million. And that doesn't mean that anything beyond that is not. We would not accept it. But we want to make sure that some of the smaller businesses that have not been educated on how critical CS strategy can be to their profit, we want to make sure that they understand how they can utilize it, that they contact us, that we talk about it and we have a dialogue. Because at the end of the day, what we want is your success.
That's what I get off on. Right. Our whole mission is to see people successful. That's the nurturer in me. And we talk about how does that apply to your organization. And it's not a templated mold. The beautiful thing is it is tailored and customized or prescriptive. If you're in the healthcare industry or for your organization and business and align with your vision is we want to make sure that we're working together in a very strong partnership.
[00:19:44] Speaker A: So if somebody's listening to this interview and first off they want to either learn more about just customer success in general, are there some resources that people can tie into? More importantly, how could they engage with you? How can they find you and get involved with what you've got going on?
[00:19:59] Speaker B: Absolutely. Most of our professional Presence is on LinkedIn. My name is Kiana Taylor so they can find it easy if they rather find me first individually. But then we also have a website which is key focus c s.com so it's K E Y F O C U s c s.com and what we do is we highlight the different verticals, offerings and solutions that we bring. The great thing is if you don't have it internal to your organization, you don't have to always take that overhead. Many businesses I think that's 23, 24 and it's going into 25 is operational efficiency but also cost optimization. How do we do most for less and really utilize the time to make sure that we're putting it towards value driven activity?
[00:20:42] Speaker A: I love it. All right, this has been fantastic. I've got three questions I like to end every interview with. So here we go. We're going to do rapid fire here. If you could go back and give your younger self a piece of advice, what would it be and why?
[00:20:54] Speaker B: I would have started this 20 plus years ago, start CS. If I would have known CS existed and how impactful it could be, I would have started it a long time ago.
[00:21:02] Speaker A: It's interesting. I think most people that end up running their own business, they always say I should have done it sooner. What's a belief or a mindset shift that's had the biggest impact on your success and maybe your happiness in life?
[00:21:16] Speaker B: Balance. Find your why. Sometimes your why is simply to make sure that you can pay it forward or that you can take care of your family during challenging and even comforting time. This world is either an upheaval or people are like, oh, it's the best time ever.
[00:21:31] Speaker A: Some chaos going on in the world.
[00:21:32] Speaker B: Why do you do what you do? Make sure that your why is is authentic to you. And mine has always been my family authentic.
[00:21:42] Speaker A: Because I think a lot of times people depending where you grew up, there's a cultural pressure on what it means to be successful. I grew up in a small town of Utah, so you got the small town plus the religious influence. It's really easy sometimes, especially when we're younger, to get lost in what the societal expectation is versus what is my heart saying is the thing I should do. So I think authenticity is a really key part of that. Final question is, what's the best investment you've ever made into yourself to have.
[00:22:10] Speaker B: A personal board of advisors?
It wasn't money investment. It was a time investment. It was a relationship investment.
My husband has been an executive for quite some time, and before we got married, he introduced having a personal board of directors. I think was one of my greatest teachers. I would tell everyone to invest in that, because whether it's spiritual, financial fitness, like health and wellness, find people that have their expertise in those areas and build a circle around you, because you are your own brand. You are your own company, right? Whether you started or you work for someone else, you are your own brand. So why, just like a company would build a board, My biggest investment is having my own personal board of directors.
[00:22:51] Speaker A: And when did you start that? Did you start that right when you got married?
[00:22:54] Speaker B: No, before that. Because he was a mentor that encouraged me to have that group or those directors or advisors around me. So I started that. I probably would say I've had them for about 10 years.
As long as you interchange and promote.
[00:23:08] Speaker A: People on your board, that's a profound insight. So book number two, build your personal board of advisors.
Kiana, thank you so much. I love our conversation. It's been fantastic.
[00:23:19] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:23:20] Speaker A: And here's to some great customer success.
[00:23:22] Speaker B: Amen to that.
