How can brands scale their digital customer success programs efficiently? (feat. Samantha David of monday.com)

Episode topics

01:10 Why is it important for brands to scale digital customer success initiatives?

03:03 Who is Samantha David and what is her role at monday.com?

06:37 How does monday.com segment and personalize their digital customer success approach?

10:07 What are office hours and how do they work as a scalable solution?

13:09 What challenges did monday.com face when first implementing office hours?

16:51 How does monday.com structure and refresh their office hours content?

19:13 How does monday.com handle office hours across different global regions?

22:02 What metrics does monday.com use to measure the success of office hours?

26:32 What are the three key trends shaping the future of digital customer success?

28:04 What are the key takeaways for implementing a digital customer success program?

Transcript

[00:00:01] Robert Zirk: As a CX leader, your brand's success is tied to your customers' success.

[00:00:07] In the business to business context, that's why customer success teams are crucial — they ensure customers get maximum value from your product or service, and can even drive growth by generating and acting on cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

[00:00:23] But when your B2B company is growing rapidly, it can be difficult for customer success teams to scale their current efforts at the same rate. When customer success managers go from supporting dozens of customers to hundreds, a one-to-one approach for every customer is no longer a given.

[00:00:41] A survey of B2B Software as a Service, or SaaS, companies conducted by Vitally and Pulse shows that 63% of CSMs manage between 10 and 50 accounts while another 13% manage anywhere between 51 to 100 accounts.

[00:00:59] So how do you maintain quality support as you scale, even if the resources at your disposal aren't growing at the same rate?

[00:01:10] I'm joined by Samantha David, manager of digital customer success programs at monday.com, to find out more about the growth the brand has experienced over the past several years and how monday.com has leveraged office hours to support. So today on Questions for now, we ask...

[00:01:28] Robert Zirk: How can brands scale their digital customer success programs efficiently?

[00:01:40] Welcome to Questions for now, a podcast from TELUS Digital where we ask today's big questions in digital customer experience. I'm Robert Zirk.

[00:01:53] Robert Zirk: What you're hearing is the sound of me marking the intro as complete on monday.com.

[00:01:58] The company describes its platform as a work operating system that allows organizations to build work management tools and software applications to fit their every need while intuitively connecting people to processes and systems.

[00:02:14] Launched in 2014 and used by 245,000 customers across more than 200 industries, monday.com has the ability to integrate with other tools and apps and it also offers more specialized solutions for different teams, like its work management, CRM, service and dev products.

[00:02:34] During the COVID-19 pandemic, monday.com experienced a great deal of growth driven by the need for digital solutions to manage remote team collaboration. Its customer base grew from more than 87,000 customers in Q4 of 2019 to 152,000 customers in Q4 of 2021.

[00:02:53] Samantha David: As we started our hypergrowth phase, we were moving towards an IPO in 2021 as a way to support this larger group of customers in a more strategic way.

[00:03:03] Robert Zirk: Meet Samantha David, manager of digital customer success programs at monday.com. Shortly after joining the customer success team five years ago, Sam's role shifted to include building the scale touch segment, which essentially means creating digital programs to balance personalized service with automated interactions as monday.com grew.

[00:03:24] At the start of 2025, her role expanded to cover all of monday.com's customer success managed accounts.

[00:03:31] Samantha David: Customer success has always been a priority of ours, but as our customer base was growing super rapidly, we didn't want to over promise on support but not be able to follow through. We've seen that also customers prefer those self-serve methods and not necessarily one-on-one interactions.

[00:03:50] Digital was a way for us to influence the customer at a larger scale but also develop processes for us to identify either opportunities, potential risks for the CSM to intervene and create those avenues to allow the customer to reach out to a CSM or interact with the CSM when they need to.

[00:04:08] From there, I took ownership in the program aspect of scale and started building out our first iteration of office hours. Those were meant to support just scale touch customers at the time to allow our scale CSMs to be able to do more with their book of business since they were now supporting hundreds of customers instead of about 30 to 50.

[00:04:28] Robert Zirk: According to Gainsight's Customer Success Index 2024, seven out of 10 companies leverage content and events as part of their digital CS strategies.

[00:04:38] Sam noted that digital customer success programs complement traditional customer success by taking programs that are usually seen as high touch, like a one-to-one call where you might answer questions, and delivering them in a way that businesses can scale.

[00:04:53] Samantha David: Digital provides more of a tailored experience through customer segmentation and communication strategies. We use both to combine that digital touch, high touch to be a hybrid model for the customer. Digital CS really scales the traditional CS models with automation, with our data and with our different communication channels for us to interact with our customers and meet them where they are.

[00:05:19] The goal is still the same. It's all customer success. We want to drive customer adoption, our retention, but we want to deliver that value in a scalable way.

[00:05:29] Robert Zirk: Sam spoke to the importance of embedding digital CS initiatives in the customer journey to ensure customers have the information they need at the right touch points.

[00:05:38] Samantha David: We know how to make our customers successful. We've done enough digging on our customers, received feedback from them. We use our data to see what are our customers doing, to improve their ROI, to move them towards a renewal, to drive adoption and what do our customers that are not as successful need to know and learn at which stage in their journey to be as successful as their peers.

[00:06:04] With all of that information, we're putting it together and we are automating that journey to give them information or the opportunities to interact with the CSM at specific times there.

[00:06:17] Without aligning our digital strategies to the customer journey, we're making too many guesses about the customer and when we're approaching this model as a one-to-many instead of high touch, we really can't make guesses. We want to be able to understand and read our customers extremely well before automating this content to them. .

[00:06:37] Robert Zirk: To align digital CS initiatives with the customer journey, monday.com takes a segmented approach that accounts for customer persona and account size, employing a combination of automated campaigns, in-app notifications and one-to-one interactions with customer success managers.

[00:06:54] Samantha David: When we talk about persona, we're talking about champions, workflow owners, admins, our buyers. And then the customer journey has its highest level of segmentation for that personalization.

[00:07:08] From there, we're also segmenting on the company size. Our larger accounts, more strategic, receive more one-on-one time with a CSM. Larger organizations have more of an opportunity to grow. We want to address those differently than our smaller SMB customers. Also, an account of maybe 25 customers is addressed differently than an account with 500.

[00:07:31] So there's a lot of different ways for us to look at that, but we can still personalize it in a way of creating one-to-many content across these different-sized customers and who the customer actually is through their persona without the customer feeling like this is a one-to-many content. They're feeling like it's more personalized and it's going to apply to them much easier than if we were to just address our customers as a whole every single time.

[00:07:59] Robert Zirk: Sam noted that by tailoring one-to-many content to customer personas and business sizes, monday.com's messaging resonates with more customers.

[00:08:08] Likewise, monday.com evolves its overall digital CS strategies based on the customer journey stage, as well as product development and customer insights.

[00:08:18] Samantha David: We're always taking feedback. We're always keeping tabs on how the tool is adapting to our customers, what features are new, how our customers are successful using the tool and that's changing the way that we're interacting with them, the content that we're pushing towards our customers, and also the segmentation. .

[00:08:37] As long as we can be flexible with even other cross-functional teams. Let's say product has an initiative that they're driving with our customers, we want to tack onto that and also embed those initiatives into the journey. We're being extremely communicative internally with our internal stakeholders, and that's also influencing how this is evolving over time. .

[00:09:00] Robert Zirk: And monday.com is exploring how AI can do more with those customer insights to deliver relevant interactions.

[00:09:07] Samantha David: What we want to do in the future is build automated email campaigns, automated content and app notifications that are leveraging AI to target the customer's needs better based on their product usage and not just their stage in the customer journey, because we're able to do that.

[00:09:24] But by bringing in their actual usage, maybe of the user or the account, we can teach the system on what to send the customer that's going to be more personalized and in the moment for them that will approach their problems better than just the customer journey.

[00:09:41] Having that framework is gonna be important because we can build on top of that as we're automating it more and using AI. But what we're really focused on right now is just that foundation to digital.

[00:09:54] Robert Zirk: A big part of that foundation has been the establishment of office hours, which are set times where small groups of customers receive live training from a CSM with an opportunity to ask questions and receive support afterward.

[00:10:07] Samantha David: The first half of that session is a demo of the topic. We're constantly switching things up to show our newer features, show you different use cases, new demos, but still around the foundational topic that we're touching on. And then the second half is always going to be our Q&A from our customers, so they can rely on the fact that there is going to be 30 minutes no matter what, for them to ask questions and hear other customer questions.

[00:10:35] Even though you are there live and you have that interaction with a CSM, it's still one of our lower touch programs because they're reoccurring, they're structured and we're inviting all customers to join.

[00:10:46] Now we cap our sessions to only allow that certain number to still keep it to that small group feel, but we are sharing information in a low touch one-to-many way, but also using the backend of those sessions to answer questions for our customers in more of that live atmosphere and really using those recordings or repurposing that content that we're sharing with the customers, putting it in other avenues of communication, taking that feedback or a question is asked and we take it a step further with that customer. Maybe we identify that opportunity for upsell on one of these calls. We connect them with their CSM to address it and they can follow through.

[00:11:31] Robert Zirk: Through the implementation of office hours, CSMs can be more strategic about the time that they allocate to one-to-one interactions. For example, a very specific question asked during office hours might prompt a one-to-one follow-up call with that customer. Conversely, a CSM can address frequently asked questions more efficiently by suggesting office hours to customers.

[00:11:54] Samantha David: We want to invite these customers to join that reoccurring office hour on foundational monday topics or just our general Q&A sessions to have the CSMs on office hours address these questions and then the CSM will take it a step further by being more strategic with their customer.

[00:12:12] So we're taking that time out of the CSM schedule and putting it onto the program side and then the CSM can do what they do best, which is being strategic, account planning and understanding the underlying goals of a customer that we're not really able to determine as well with digital.

[00:12:34] Instead of the one-to-many content, a CSM can be very personalized, but at least the customer is getting that baseline knowledge of where they should be and getting those questions answered to meet them at step one instead of step zero.

[00:12:49] Robert Zirk: Sam described how office hours began as monday.com started building its scale touch segment.

[00:12:55] Samantha David: We started very small. We had these about every other week. And we marketed them to only our skill touch customers through one-on-one conversations and sometimes our one-to-many campaigns when we were running them, which those were very early on as well.

[00:13:09] We barely had any customers at first. I remember having to cancel most of them because our customers just weren't attending and we almost scrapped the entire program as a whole. But what I realized is that it takes so long to build the awareness for this type of resource that a lot of what we saw with our customers is that they really appreciated this being a resource to them.

[00:13:33] We couldn't offer them as many one-on-one support hours as other customers, but they really liked that this was part of the offering from our customer success team. So knowing that this is a resource for them to join when they need to gave them that much more ease of just being in the platform, not being worried about something coming up, a technical issue, a question about a feature. They knew that they would be able to get support when they needed it.

[00:13:58] Robert Zirk: Although office hours weren't an overnight success, they gradually became more widely adopted over time. Sam recalled some of the early challenges in establishing office hours and how her team built greater awareness and participation amongst customers.

[00:14:14] Samantha David: It takes a lot of time to get the customer to register and show up for this type of session. For webinars across the industry, there's about a 40% show rate. So just getting them to register first is a task and then getting them to show up to these sessions is second task. But since then, we've really gained momentum by showing the value that they can receive on this type of a session, getting them to come back for future sessions.

[00:14:40] Robert Zirk: Sam highlights that the interactive Q&A component of office hours is crucial, both from a customer service perspective and in terms of building trust with customers.

[00:14:50] Samantha David: We want to show up for our customers and if they take the time to register and show up for a session, we want to make sure that they're getting their question answered. If it can't be answered on a session like this — sometimes it's a little too specific of a question, it requires more time and understanding of their workflow — we will address it offline. We'll loop in their CSM. If they don't have a CSM, then we'll take the time to close the loop on what their question was to make sure that they're seeing that value, that they're getting their questions answered. We're going to lose trust with these customers when that end goal isn't accomplished.

[00:15:30] Robert Zirk: Customer trust plays a vital role in maintaining and driving revenue. A Forrester study shows that 61% of B2B revenue comes from existing customers through renewals and expansions, such as cross-selling and upselling.

[00:15:44] And an article from McKinsey and Company notes that it can take three customer acquisitions to offset the financial impact from losing one existing customer.

[00:15:54] I asked Sam how monday.com uses customer insights to adapt and improve their office hours program.

[00:16:01] Samantha David: I know I touched on this earlier, but I think the number one insight is that customers just really appreciate being able to rely on office hours as a resource, knowing that they exist, knowing that they happen at a certain time every single week and that they'll cover a topic that they know they'll need to learn or become an expert on is part of the value of office hours.

[00:16:22] And sometimes it's just knowing that they don't want to use a full hour from their CSM resource on something small. And office hours are there to fill in the gaps when they really need to ask a smaller question instead of one that is more personalized. So that reliability is huge there.

[00:16:42] Robert Zirk: The topics in content developed for office hours cycle every six months, running once or twice monthly in a particular region.

[00:16:51] Some of the more foundational topics like automations will always have a spot on the office hours schedule, but refreshing that topic could mean explaining it in a different way or highlighting enhanced features.

[00:17:03] And customer feedback informs how monday.com allocates office hours sessions between foundational and specialized topics.

[00:17:10] Samantha David: We really take a lot of feedback from our customers. We send them a form every single time that they join. We put that form out there for CSMs to give their customers. We give it to customers that don't show for these sessions because we want to know what they want to learn during these office hours.

[00:17:28] We're constantly getting suggestions and feedback on the sessions that we have and what content they want to see covered. We've really adapted to what they're wanting to see and we're still taking that feedback and changing things on an ongoing basis because the product is changing, our customers are changing. So we want to make sure that we're addressing that.

[00:17:45] Robert Zirk: More specialized topics for office hours tend to be selected alongside company priorities. Sam highlighted monday AI, launched in early 2025, as an example of a specific area of focus.

[00:17:58] This suite enhances monday.com's existing platform with advanced features including modular, customizable AI actions, embedded AI capabilities and an AI-powered team of agents.

[00:18:10] Samantha David: It's a huge push for our company, and the capabilities are infinite with monday AI, but we want to make sure our customers are understanding how to use this, how to implement it into their workflow, into their current boards so that they can be successful and see the benefits.

[00:18:26] That's why we are using a monday AI session as one of our main topics at the moment, this quarter, probably next quarter, because we see a lot of customer questions about it. We also take what our CSMs are hearing in their one-on-one interactions because, like I said before, we want to move those questions over to office hours so that they're not as redundant for our CSMs.

[00:18:51] If our CSMs are constantly getting questions about monday AI or a specific feature: "How do you use this? What is it? Walk me through it." Let's use office hours instead to approach that question so that every single time you're hearing about that from a customer, you can direct them to office hours instead, because it's a highly requested topic.

[00:19:13] Robert Zirk: With customers all around the world, Sam noted the importance of localizing office hours to different geographies to ensure as many customers as possible can participate, regardless of time zone.

[00:19:25] Samantha David: Office hour sessions are meant to be live, so something that we've had to think about is offering sessions across the globe. We have a couple sessions per week offered by the CSMs in that region on our office hour schedule.

[00:19:39] Robert Zirk: This includes sessions local to the Americas, EMEA, or Europe, Middle East and Africa, and A PJ, which is Asia Pacific Japan.

[00:19:48] Samantha David: We don't have to worry about inviting them but them not being able to attend because it'll be midnight for them. It being a reoccurring schedule allows us to just set it and forget it. We have our CSMs structured to host in those different regions now. All we need to do is just allow the customer to register.

[00:20:08] Robert Zirk: Having gone through the process of setting up office hours herself, Sam's advice to any customer success manager looking to do the same is to start small.

[00:20:17] Samantha David: I've seen others get way into the weeds of having a fully blown out program of a complex schedule, having multiple sessions built out, all the follow up information, and also embedding it into every single piece of their one-to-many content. But that's something to move towards and maybe not start with just so you can get it off the ground.

[00:20:42] We started very small and we weren't as worried about the numbers in the beginning. We were having just a couple of customers on each session, and we were worried about "Is this worth our time if only a couple customers are showing up?" to today, where we're maxing out almost every single session to 40, 50, 60 registrants through our expansion to all of CS.

[00:21:04] But we built the structure as we determined what our customers wanted through learning what our customer feedback is, taking CSAT from them, giving them feedback forms to get their suggestions on what content they want to see, what times work for them, how often they want to join, things like that. That will influence the structure that you're building.

[00:21:26] But I think it's better not to have that fully blown structure in place at first, so you can be more flexible with adapting to your customers. So being consistent with that reoccurring time, with how you structure these sessions, the communication of them, things like that, is going to be really important when you're starting this from the beginning.

[00:21:45] Robert Zirk: The biggest obstacle most frequently identified by businesses in scaling their digital CS initiatives is demonstrating ROI through analytics, with 33% of respondents citing this as their top challenge in Gainsight's Customer Success Index 2024.

[00:22:02] I asked Sam about the specific metrics monday.com uses to assess the impact of office hours and how they influence the direction of the program going forward.

[00:22:12] Samantha David: Something we've been tracking since the beginning is just our registrant numbers, the attendees, our attendance rate, are customers actually showing up to the session live, not just registering? How can we get them to show up live? Our CSAT feedback from them. That's all showing us just a general picture of the program performance.

[00:22:35] Not as much of the impact side of things, but we wanted to start with the program impact. Are they receiving value when they leave? That will be determined within CSAT. Are we able to answer questions and also, are we seeing return customers to these sessions because they want to come back for more?

[00:22:52] That all goes into the metrics that we're tracking to determine how we're making those small changes to better approach our customers. We also didn't have as much access to data at the beginning when we first rolled these out.

[00:23:06] And I would say that's something else as a piece of advice to CSMs that are looking to implement their office hours: don't be as focused on the data at first. Just start and then you'll be able to gain metrics and measure the effectiveness from there once you have content to drive data from.

[00:23:24] Robert Zirk: Customer engagement is another important data point for office hours.

[00:23:28] Samantha David: We know the collaboration, the discussion side of office hours is huge. So we started measuring their effectiveness by how many questions were asked by our customers. How long did the session last? Because if it ends after 30 minutes, there's probably no questions from our customers. So we're not really delivering that value on the discussion and collaboration side of things.

[00:23:51] But if it lasts to the full 60 minutes and there's five questions that were asked instead of one, we're answering more questions, we are sharing more content just by answering those questions, so we see those as more impactful. Those numbers have increased over time , so our CSMs are doing a better job at driving that conversation with our customers to get them talking more, to get those discussions going and now we're seeing more customers return than we had before.

[00:24:20] So it's all a loop here. We're still working on more analysis of the product impact side of things, not just the program impact. How are these sessions impacting the way that our customers are using the product after they attend a session? Are they taking what they learned and implementing it? Are we addressing some of our main CS metrics: adoption, retention, growth, things like that through office hours and that being a resource for them?

[00:24:47] Robert Zirk: Sam noted that while monday.com is in the early stages of tracking the impact of office hours on feature adoption rates, it will be an important area of assessment going forward.

[00:24:57] Samantha David: We're still learning from the data that we have in front of us and we're gonna be looking at it month over month. We only have a little bit right now to look at, but it's something that's gonna grow with us.

[00:25:07] But it's also something that we can apply to every program within digital. Did we impact the feature that we're sharing through this content? Are they using it more 30 days after versus 30 days before? Is their account using this feature more actively than they did before? Are we influencing not just the user that attended, but everybody within their team, within the account?

[00:25:30] Looking at their performance before and after, either interacting with this content, attending an office hour, clicking on a resource — that's something that we're just now getting into analyzing a bit more because we have that data now.

[00:25:46] It's finding the data, it's also creating the structure to analyze it. It's different than a lot of other things that we're analyzing within CS because this is being driven from very specific digital engagements and tracking the emails, tracking the office hours, which we haven't tracked before, other than our one-on-one communication with our customers.

[00:26:07] Robert Zirk: While office hours remain an important part of monday.com's customer success program, customer preferences for receiving information and support are continually evolving.

[00:26:18] Looking forward, Sam views several emerging trends that underscore digital CS as an essential component of every B2B company's CS strategy — the first being that digital CS programs must be universal:

[00:26:32] Samantha David: It's not just something that's for low touch customers, but it's for all CS segments or all customer segments within an organization. Taking your current resources and putting them into the customer journey, just being the basis of digital success and making sure that we are meeting the customers where they are.

[00:26:51] Robert Zirk: The second is community-led success:

[00:26:53] Samantha David: I think there's a way for us to look at this within digital with our office hours and building the community that way, but using our customer peers to influence each other rather than hearing from that point of contact at the company. We're here to influence the customer, teach them, support them, but sometimes what their peers say goes that much further than what we say.

[00:27:15] Robert Zirk: And finally, Sam highlighted AI-driven personalization:

[00:27:19] Samantha David: Using AI as that predictive tool to create more personalized content for our customers maybe based on how they're using the product, based on their personas, anything that we can read on the customer, the data that we have access to, and creating the channels and the content based on what we know and also just learning. Is the way that we're approaching our customers working? Can we change that in any way? Can our AI adapt to how successful our customers could be and alter the content and the channels that we are using to better fit our more experienced customers and be more successful with this digital content?

[00:28:04] Robert Zirk: To wrap up, Sam reiterated that one of the key factors of digital customer success is starting small so that you establish consistency as you begin to scale.

[00:28:15] Samantha David: Starting a program, seeing how your customers interact with it and measuring the success, building it and structuring it from there without digital programs being something that seems like a project that's too big to accomplish and that's going to take a while to lay down the foundation or to build for your customers.

[00:28:35] I think just starting really small on those quick takeaways for your customers to see value in it and constantly iterating on what they're receiving and what our product is doing to better fit the need for our digital success programs.

[00:28:52] I think that's customer success in general. We're not people that are going to sit still and do the same thing over and over again. We're a department that is constantly evolving based on what we're seeing, the industry or product or customers. So we're used to that change.

[00:29:10] But I think with digital, you have to be a little more fluid with the change than before because this is all new.

[00:29:24] Robert Zirk: I'd like to thank Samantha David, manager of digital customer success programs at monday.com, for joining me and sharing her insights on scaling digital customer success.

[00:29:34] And thank you so much for listening to Questions for now, a TELUS Digital podcast.

[00:29:40] If you enjoyed today's episode and want to hear more compelling insights on all things digital customer experience, be sure to follow Questions for now on your podcast player of choice and make sure you're getting notifications every time there's a new episode.

[00:29:55] I'm Robert Zirk, and until next time, that's all... for now.