Episode 4 | Meet Instructure's new CCXO
Welcome to EduCast 3000. It's the most transformative time in the history of education. So join us as we break down the fourth wall and reflect on what's happening. The good, the bad, and even the chaotic. Here's your hosts, Melissa Lobel and Ryan Lufkin. We have a very, very exciting podcast today. I'm excited. Yeah, so am I, Ryan. As many of you know, I've changed roles at Instructure, and Ryan is now part of my team, but that's to come later. We have a very special guest with us, our new Chief Customer Officer, Rachel Orston. Rachel, it's wonderful to have you here. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. know, part of my preparation coming into this role was I listened to dozens of Instructure Cast recordings. So I'm a fan and I'm thrilled to finally be a guest. So thank you for having me. yeah. I love it. A listener. This is great. Sometimes we forget people actually listen to this. And when I first met you, Rachel, you were like, I've listened to your podcast. And I was like, my gosh, yeah, people actually listen to our little show. it's not just Ryan and I having fun over a set of headphones. not at all. love it. Well, Rachel, I am so thrilled that you have joined Instructure. And you're now two months in, which is amazing. You have a really deep background in customer success. We'll get to that in a few minutes. But typically on our podcast, as you've heard, we love to just get to know someone a little bit before we jump in. So would you mind just sharing a little bit about your background, a little bit about who you are, maybe a fun fact with us? Yeah. So I originally was a journalism major. I was editor of my high school paper. I wanted to be like the next Christiana Monpore for those of you maybe this will age me. Hopefully most people may be listening. She is. She's a CNN correspondent, international correspondent. And my background was I was a really bookish kid and just loved world of global events and languages and all that good stuff. And I went to journalism school. went to Northwestern, got into journalism school kind of, and then actually ended up at CNN, which is kind of an interesting story. My career has been an interesting one where I took a sharp left when I got to CNN because at that time the internet was booming and I said, gosh, you I don't know that I want to be in front of the camera. And instead of television being my medium, I really started to embrace the internet and technology and went back later on and got my master's in computer science and then my MBA and really have just developed a whole career in technology. It's been a love and I've traversed, gosh, the last 30 years, a number of careers in everything from support and services. account management. It's been an amazing journey. But a fun fact about me and my background before we get into all that stuff was just, I'm still very much into journalism. Like I read newspapers every day. I subscribe to probably six different newspapers and I'm still a big news junkie. It's still a big part of who I am. I love that. And if I can ask a little personal question. So where did you grow up or where do you live? And do you have any? our listeners are both love to learn someone's children, but also any fur babies that might be at home. Yes, I hear them in the background and I apologize. So I've got two fur babies. I've got Rigby and Jojo, who are my soft -coated Wheatons. They are sisters and they come with me everywhere and they travel. They're amazing travelers. They're great with road trips and they've been all over with me. And then I've got two kids that I call them my canvas kids. You know, I'm not a stranger to canvas. Both my babies, my 20 year old Max and my 19 year old Sophie were K -12 Canvas kids. And now I'm very proud that they're at Canvas universities. yeah, Canvas has been a big part. And you know, they were also COVID high schoolers, right? Both of them. So while I knew Canvas, I want to be really transparent. Canvas and I got to know each other really well during That was like, I think it was a combination of like the high school years combined with COVID. It was like, okay, I got to get plugged in in like a different way. And Canvas was a real meaningful part of that experience. And yeah, and I live in Atlanta, proud, but you won't necessarily hear a Southern drawl on me. I grew up in Los Angeles. I'm a Californian, but a proud Atlantan as well. And now I live in Florida. So I'm part time there as well. So all over the map. So Rachel, like you shared, you started to hint at for us, and I know you have deep background specifically in customer success and customer experience. As you think about that journey, do you have a particular favorite learning moment or something that sort of solidified your career and customer success? Yeah, you know, it's an interesting question because as I mentioned, my 30 year career, I held many different roles across support services and what's now called customer success. Back then it was client services or account management. And I mentioned that I got my degrees. I consider myself a lifelong learner. And I went back to school and got my master's when I decided to really dig into technology beyond journalism. But I found that as I continued in my career, I needed ongoing education. And I struggled to get that because there was no roadmap for customer success. As the craft evolved and SaaS and software as a service boomed, this whole idea of how do you service customers? How do you support them in this new cloud environment? I found myself taking a lot of online classes, but also just going out to user groups and meeting up with other people in my field to learn from them. And I share that background because a big learning moment came from me. I've been an executive, like I mentioned, for many technology companies. I was a CCO most recently for Smart Recruiters and BetterCloud, but I think probably the biggest opportunity that came my way was at IBM. I was a vice president at the time and we were acquired. The company that I worked for was acquired and IBM came to me and they tapped me. to lead their entire customer success organization across their entire SaaS portfolio. You can imagine how intimidating that opportunity was for someone that was relatively new to IBM. This is IBM, right? I'm this acquired executive and we're talking, they've got hundreds, they've got a hundred thousand employees at the time. And I asked the question, I said, why me? I mean, why me for this role? Because I was very new to IBM. IBM very much is about, you know, they very much had ridiculously tenured executives and people with patents all these great credentials and I said, why me? And they said, you you have skills that we don't have. You have acquired skills that we need in the business that we don't have. And that kind of blew me away because I thought to myself, really? And it really validated that I was on a learning path and that I did have skills that I had acquired that were unique. And I will never forget that IBM took that bet on me and saw something in me that I think at the time I didn't see in myself. And it was an incredibly powerful learning moment for me and just the power of also investing in myself and investing in some of my ongoing skills acquisition. And it's something that I'm very passionate about today. talked a lot about the lifelong learning journey and how that's evolved, right? And as adults, we're going to change careers. love the, you said you took a hard left turn, right? A lot of people find themselves in that same situation. And so as they need to reskill and upskill and even prepare for encore careers or completely different careers. 100%. that customer success is now taught in universities. My friend Mary Poppin is a professor as a she was a former chief customer officer now she teaches it and so it's exciting to see the craft actually be taught in schools and hopefully that more schools will do that. It's so funny because most of my time has been spent in the marketing side or the product side or the product marketing side but I've always been so close with the CX or there's something about CX leaders that I've always you know been drawn to they're always great partners. What is it about that customer success that really draws you back to I think there's a couple of things, you know, I think customers are essentially the lifeblood of any business, right? Even before software is a service and customers are the lifeblood of any company, right? You can't survive without customers and customer relationships. And I think as companies continue to evolve and grow and embrace technologies, whether it's, know, AI or other types of things that continue to disrupt us in our lives, this idea of how do we continue to maintain and nurture and grow customer relationships is just It's just something I'm just really passionate about. it continues to be probably one of the, you know, it requires skills and adaptation. It's relationship management. And it's why I just, love the field. It's ever -changing and sustaining relationships is really hard. You know, it's like, it has its ups and downs, right? There's bumps in any long -term relationship. And I love that. I feel like I've grow just like any long -term relationship. You weather those bumps. and it makes you a better person along the way. And so I think when you've gone through that enough times, just, it's really hard to not do. I mean, it's just, it's something that I just can't imagine not doing for a job. I love it. I think I have the best job in the world. It's so much part of your DNA, like to hear you talk about it. And you and I have had a lot of chances to chat even before this. And I love that, like that it's just part of who you I know you also pay it forward into this space quite a bit. So you've done a lot of work mentoring, advising other CS leaders. You were a founder of CS Angels. Like share a little bit about, especially for those listeners out there that are in the customer success field, how have you helped others grow and develop in this space? And are there opportunities you encourage people to go seek in order to help them develop themselves if they also feel like customer success is part of their DNA? Yeah, absolutely. Look, it goes back to what I was sharing before, right? This idea of skills acquisition. Back when I was doing it 20 plus years ago, there wasn't. I wish I had more mentors, right? I had to kind of blaze my own trail. And so I'm very passionate about paying it forward because I wish I had had more people lead me through things or share their experiences as much. So I'm very committed to doing that now for younger leaders that are just trying to grow their careers. So CS Angel is an investor group actually of practitioners like myself, chief customer officers and executives who are actually putting their money where their mouth is, which is how do you grow this industry and start a new portfolio of technology companies in the arena? You you think about it, sales and marketing, you can look at, there's so much tech out there. Think about how many tools each we all have around, if you're listening and you're another technology company like Instructure, you know, think about how many applications you have to help your sales and marketing team. But why don't we have that same kind of investment in customer success, right? And so what's exciting is there's a ton of new development on the market and a lot of people are putting money like I am in developing those technologies. So that's why I, and that is what CS Angel is all about. And that's why I'm a proud founder of it. And then as far as advising folks, I think my advice would be, and what I'm also proud is in structure, we have a lot of former educators. And so there's a lot of people that move into customer success. and go into technology companies because they're excited about the technology or they've used the technology, right, in their domains. And so my advice would be just if customer success is something that you're interested in, seek out someone who's doing it, you know, and talk to them about what their experience is. How did they make the transition? What has them really enjoyed the job? I'm very much relationship driven. So yeah, there's articles you can read and there's certainly podcasts and things you can listen to. But I'm very much like seek out people who are doing the job through your network and who you might know. and learn more about it one -on -one from those individuals themselves to get more information. Yeah. On a recent podcast with Martin Bean, we actually talked about change and change is scary, right? Like people struggle with change throughout one of my favorite books, which was Who Moved My Cheese, which is about addressing the challenges of change. This is kind of a big change, the transition of Melissa in a new role and Rachel, you coming on board. Melissa set a high bar, that's for sure. It's not easy. Yeah. I mean, what can you say to our customers who are like, wow, change is hard. I'm scared. I would say give our team and give me an opportunity to demonstrate why I think these changes are going to be even better for our customers. think Melissa has done an amazing job laying just an incredible foundation, amazing growth time for Instructure. If you think about what everyone's gone through, not just with COVID, but just the last few years, Instructure has acquired companies. They've just gone through so much. And of course, we now have the parchment acquisition. I feel like in many respects, I'm so lucky because I walked into a business that is incredibly strong and that's due to a lot of the foundational work that's already been laid in front of me. I honestly think, yes, there's going to be change, but change on top of what you have very strong foundation of success already. And I don't tend to change all of that. Like there's a lot that's working well that will continue, right? Because we know that it's working, right? And because we know that customers value it. So I think if you're customers and you're listening, my hope is that you're here is that in your life, a lot of things won't change or shouldn't change now. Some we've done some reassignments of CSMs. We actually think that that's a good thing because what we're doing is we're actually focusing our customer success organization to be more state specific, more region specific so that they can actually go deeper and be more focused on the needs of our customers in their regions and in their states. So to me, that's actually a positive and that's going to take a little bit of time for those CSMs to now adjust and get oriented. But I think over time, this is going to actually prove to provide a deeper relationship and knowledge for that CSM to have and really what's going on in the day in the life of our customers, right? You described so well a foundation, but opportunity to build on that foundation and really elevate the customer success experience at Instructure. One of biggest reasons, and I know our listeners have already, can already see this, that I was so excited that you joined our organization, is that deep background that you have. I am not a trained customer success leader or even individual. You I'm an educator, our audience knows that. All of what you bring is such a great opportunity for us to innovate on how we serve our customers and how we serve the broader education community. Tapping into experience that you bring in customer success, where do you think the future is going in customer success? What do you think in general, not even necessarily just at Instructure, but in general, where do you think this field is going to evolve? Well, think it has to, I fundamentally believe that customer success exists to drive business outcomes. Or in the case of Instructure, I would like to say learning outcomes, right? We want to drive better learner outcomes for the learners in the communities that our customers serve, right? And so I really believe that where it's going is all around making the CSM drive value even closer to the business. And by that, mean, to now, I feel like it's very focused on how do we get customers to adopt more of the platform, use more of it. And that's important, by the way. But where I think it's going is how do we use data? How do we use data from our products, from what we're hearing, and really further embed in how do we actually use that to drive impact in the business, in the institution, right? And get closer to what are the measurements that our customers are trying to drive? How are they being measured, right? So taking it a step further, that's really where I want to see customer success go is how do we get the craft and the role and just the function of customer success even closer to the outcomes that our customers want to see? Because that's a huge win -win, right? It's not just about how do we get our customers to use more of our Obviously we want that. We want to be that feedback mechanism. We want to get feedback back from our customers. We want to make sure that they're trained and that they're learning everything. But at the end of the day, it's really about, we driving the results and the objectives that our customers set out when they first purchased Instructure? Those business outcomes, those learner outcomes, that is where the craft needs to continue to stay focused on. And I think the capabilities with AI and data will continue to help inform and help CSMs, because it's a tough It's a tough job and it's very data centric, right? You've to have good data. And that's where I think AI and some of the great advancements are going to hopefully come to play where they'll help make the CSM's job easier to surface those insights better so that they can be more of a truly trusted partner. I that's what every CSM wants to do. They want to be a trusted partner. They want to be an advisor and they want to make that impact. Yeah. I love that advising aspect. You actually mentioned that yesterday. We were in the office. We had one of our great customers in and we were chatting with them and you mentioned. You know, in this time of so much change in education, really being a partner and a consultant and being there side by side with our customers was so important. I loved how you conveyed that to our customers yesterday. Yeah, for sure. Now, I'm all about impact. It's a big focus of mine. And it starts with just the relationship. mean, how do we make an impact in the lives of even just the admins and the teachers and folks and the district leaders that we serve? and the provost, are, we have to be very individual focused as well in terms of, you know, these are human beings, right, that have made their bets on us and our brand. And so we owe it to them, in my opinion, we owe it to them to make them successful in the journey with us, right? Yeah. So in your first two months, you've actually visited quite a few customers you've chatted with a lot, and you've really gotten to know us as an organization. Anything surprise you in their first 60 days at Instructure? Honestly, not as much as you would think in the sense that I had heard a lot upfront about the tenure and the commitment and just the knowledge, the deep knowledge and passion that Instructure employees have, and all of that proved out to be true. So it didn't necessarily surprise me because I had heard about it, and so it really just validated. I would have to say I was a little bit skeptical. I was like, Like, I don't know. And then I got in, I was like, wow. these people, I mean, it is true. Everything that I heard was true in terms of people's passion, the depth of knowledge. And you know, I think the other thing that surprised me was just there's some amazing tenured folks at Instructure. know, at a time when there's a lot of turnover in tech companies, Instructure is really fortunate to have employees that have been here, especially in the CX organization, five, 10, 11, 12 plus years. I mean, that's amazing. Yeah. I was actually just talking to somebody about how many employees. leave and then come back within a very short period of time just because they're like, the grass look green over there, but I really, really love the structure. yeah. Yeah. So I don't know if it was as much surprise as it was the things that I heard really played out. It was a bit skeptical, kind of like, but yeah, they're all true. One thing, in fact, it was we were at the digital credential summit earlier this week. And one of things that somebody said was, you know, AI has sucked all the air out of the room, but AI, I think every conversation we can plug some AI into that. And we're talking about some great features that are going to be announced internally. But how do you see AI and some of those emerging techs impacting customer success? I knew you'd ask this, Ryan. I knew it. Ryan is the resident AI nerd. And I was waiting for him to ask, where does AI fit in customer success? So many. If you think about it, there's so many ways to interact with a customer. how do we get both what I would call implicit and explicit data, right? So what is directly shared with us through conversations. So I think meeting notes and call recording. Now granted, there's privacy issues, we've got to get permission. can't just, know, but I think if you think about all the meetings that CSMs do and all the conversations, one of the things I'm really passionate about bringing forward at Instructure is how do we record those for the purposes of training and feedback? where the CSM necessarily isn't the filter where we can use AI to summarize, to look at sentiment, to pick apart, you know, different products or things that are mentioned and really harness AI to better equip our product teams and just inform a lot of our decisions and our investments. And I think AI is really well suited for that, right? If you think about just summarizing large amounts of data, if you think about all the conversations our CSMs are in daily across the globe, that's kind of like a low -hanging fruit that I think is just ripe to go after. And do it appropriately and do it securely, right? And within the right privacy constraints. I love that. can keep going. mean... know, honestly. That's why we try to… How do get enough AI conversation that it's not overwhelming everything, but we really don't want that to be Self -service and knowledge, right? You know, as we've grown, one of the things is how do we make it easy for our customers, whether those are students, whether those are teachers, whether those are administrators, right? How do we make it easier for self -service, for information discovery and consumption? And that's also where AI, so how can we not just incorporate, I know we've got an ambitious roadmap from AI from a product perspective, but I think in parallel we need our own AI roadmap. So when I think about success, for how does that feed into our community? How do we make it easier for our instructor community of learning professionals to get information on everything that's going on? Cause what, any given week we're releasing 20 different updates and I mean, there's so much going on in the product, it's hard to stay on top of, honestly. And that's something that I think AI can help with in a meaningful way. Absolutely. I love that. And maybe as a sort of final and follow up question to that, and you've hinted at a little bit of this earlier in the conversation, what do we have to look forward to over the next six, nine months? Like, what are some things that you're excited about, either implementing or exploring or even some changes that we can kind of keep our eye out for? That's a really good question. think some changes that we can be looking forward to. think the first is just, know the executive business review is a big part of how our CSMs connect with our customers. And there are some things that I want to do a little bit differently in how we guide those conversations. And so I think my hope is if you're an educator and you've connected with your CSM. We're going to start to do some different things in those conversations and just get back to making sure that we're driving the right level of impact. Those are some more immediate changes that I'm looking to implement. But the other is just, would say, over the coming months, just more outreach and education to our customers. I think that's going to be really important. And how do we do that in a more streamlined, scalable way? Those are probably the more immediate things that I'm really excited about introducing. Love it. We'll have you back at the end of the year if you'll come back on our podcast and we can reflect on some of these changes that are really, like you've said, having a positive impact on our customers and educators more broadly. Yeah, I'm just I'm excited. And and I know everybody watching this also on YouTube, we do post these if you're just listening, we post these on YouTube can just see the constant smile on my face. Because again, I'm so passionate about instructors, so passionate about this space. And I love it when someone was such depth of experience and such big vision comes because we can, there's so much more we can do. And it just gets me beyond excited. Rachel, thank you so much for joining us on this special edition of our podcast. Again, we're gonna hit you up end the year to talk more and share more and find out how the kids and the doggies are doing. So thank you for joining us. was my pleasure. I'm so glad to be part of this and I can't wait to join another time and thank you so much. Thanks Rachel. I'm so excited to have our customers meet you in InstructureCon this summer. that end, yeah, good to meet you in person. It'll be amazing. Thanks for listening to this episode of Educast 3000. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and drop us a review on your favorite podcast player so you don't miss an episode. If you have a topic you'd like us to explore more, please email us at Instructurecast at Instructure .com, or you can drop us a line on any of the socials. You can find more contact info in the show notes. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you on the next episode of Educast 3000.
