Dive into an insightful session with Adrian Brady-Cesana as he unveils the rich tapestry of Customer Experience (CX) learnings gleaned from 214 illuminating podcast interviews. Discover how an intimate understanding of your customer interactions, coupled with a judicious application of AI/ML technologies, can significantly elevate your product roadmap and operational tempo. Adrian will share pragmatic insights drawn from real-world applications, showcasing how a customer-centric ethos, nurtured by empathy and shared successes, can significantly enhance customer satisfaction and propel your brand to new heights.
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(upbeat music)
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- All right, and welcome to our next session.
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We're calling this session three CX lessons,
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learned from 214, it might be 215 now,
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podcast interviews with Adrian Brady-Chesana, right?
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I got that.
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- You got it, babe, you got it right.
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- Oh, nice, all right, Adrian, please,
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tell us a little bit about yourself,
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and we got some slides here, not many,
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but this should at least guide our conversation here,
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but let me know if you want to make click
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to the next slide here, but let's get your story.
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- Absolutely, so number one guys,
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thanks so much for having me here today.
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I was super excited to chat with Brian,
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and pumped to chat with everybody today.
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So I spent the last 15 years working in customer experience,
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customer success, customer support.
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I've worked in basically 80 type of customer
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facing role that you could think of.
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I had the pleasure of spending about 10 years
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in New York City, working at a plethora
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of different venture capital back startup companies,
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and all along the journey, man,
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I've had just a pleasure of working with
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different types of customer bases,
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different types of teams, different types of technologies
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that keep all this stuff together.
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And over the last several years, man, two things,
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everyone, I know we're gonna get into it,
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but starting a podcast, the Sea Chronicles podcast,
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because I wanted to do Chronicle,
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or I wanted a document, or I wanted to learn
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about how all these other different
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customer-focused business leaders
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were thinking about their own game,
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and thinking about their own business.
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And then somewhere along the journey, Brian,
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and I know you know this, but somewhere around
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the 50th episode, man, we had a business on our hands.
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We had heard enough stories, and we had seen enough
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of a house with the biggest companies on planet Earth,
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we're kind of thinking about customer experience,
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customer success, and we were able to start
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to build a variety of content, strategic partnership,
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and service packages that we can go out
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and help a bunch of different companies out there
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in the world think about how they can manage
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and scale their customer experience.
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- That's awesome, and so I know you just briefly touched,
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give us again the 30 seconds, like,
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what were some of those companies
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that you were working at before?
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I remember you were talking about B2C, B2B as well, right?
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- Absolutely, so spent time, one of the first companies
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that really kind of cut my teeth
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in the venture capital back space,
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was a flower company in New York City, Brian,
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called HBLU, and B2C.
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So we built a really big business
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on delivering weekly floral, fresh cut floral,
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to businesses across New York City, Washington, DC,
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Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas,
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all of these different markets across the US,
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and then we were doing B2C site too,
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and we were literally delivering people,
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their flowers straight to the front door,
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for folks that wanted to have fresh cut floral
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inside of their home.
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Got addicted to the startup land,
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I think this was maybe the 10th person in the business.
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Over the three and a half years that I was there,
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we grew the business almost to around $20 million in sales,
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we had 150 people across 25 markets across the US,
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delivering fresh flowers every single day,
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making beautiful bouquets,
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and serving both our B2B clients and our B2C clients.
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- That's great, and you just wanna clarify for the audience,
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like what I love about Adrian's story is that,
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like Adrian is a master in marketplaces,
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like that's where really you've learned a ton from,
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and just, in my opinion, marketplaces is a very difficult
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business because it's CX and customer experience
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from both sides, you have businesses,
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as well as consumers, there's two types of experience,
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you really have to understand well.
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- 100%, and again, I think if anything,
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you're right, Brian, those marketplaces,
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they demand that you're thinking about
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all of the different facets and all the different intricacies
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of what's going on in a customer journey
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to be able to kind of build and iterate and serve
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on how you're gonna actually deliver
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upon those marketplace expectations.
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So completely agree, it's definitely been a fun place
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to kind of spend some time for sure.
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- Nice, and so let's get into it again,
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I don't think I can call this out more enough,
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like Adrian has been talking to CX leaders for years,
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right, years now, do I have that right,
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Adrian?
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- I think so, the podcast, Brian,
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I think we're over five years now
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to get to these two years, five years.
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It's been only about three years since I hopefully
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not gone well, my last full-time practitioner CX role
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at a company called ACE,
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Options here at Buffalo, New York,
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and I've been working with amazing executive leadership
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teams and customer experience and customer success teams
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across North America now for over three years.
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- All right, cool.
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So let me tell me again, like,
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where you want me to go in this presentation.
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So obviously we hit yourself here,
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and let's talk about the problem right now.
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Like again, you've talked to so many companies here,
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what do you believe now?
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- Okay, so when I started the podcast,
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and when I started thinking about this idea in my head,
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after working at all these different,
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each group was the start of it,
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I spent time at One Find Stays,
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we talked about which is a white club area,
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B&B, another marketplace where I was working with hosts,
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working with guests,
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working with the customer facing team,
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trying to make everything happen,
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spent time at a home team as well,
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where we were working in the healthcare space,
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where we were working with patients,
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we were working with caregivers,
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we were working with physicians,
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so it's your point, right?
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All these different marketplace things were like,
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there's a lot of stuff going on,
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there's a lot of down-
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- Yeah, so I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and I think that's a lot of stuff going on,
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and that's where those $75 million talk problems
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are proactive of all of us being under supported
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or having expectations not that,
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or just literally missing on the service
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or the support delivery when things do hit the van.
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- Gotcha, and let me clarify,
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this was again the, almost the, like,
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the trigger to say, "Ooh, like, I need,
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"this point, this data point," was then the reason
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to get into all these conversations.
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Do I have that right?
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- It was a big part of it,
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and then it was more importantly just like at the time it was like,
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"This is just too big of a problem to ignore,"
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and after me, it was the catalyst of,
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you know, although I have the pleasure of working
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with all these awesome venture-back companies
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and executive leadership teams,
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I wanted to go and hear our stories.
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I wanted to hear how other bigger, more established,
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more mature companies were thinking about
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not just customers' experience and customer success,
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but literally, how were they building their own,
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what we now call the four CX pillars, right?
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- Yeah.
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- Tools, process, and feedback,
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and I wanted to understand what the great companies were doing,
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what were the things that they had figured out,
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what were the challenges that they had already overcome,
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what were the investments that they had to make
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to be able to mitigate some of these issues,
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or to be able to reduce some of that,
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that trickle through revenue.
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And that was really the big motivator
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for kind of getting things started
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and starting to chronicle some of these conversations
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and chronicle some of these stories.
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- Okay, got it.
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So then, I guess, I asked,
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for those, Adrian and I were talking beforehand,
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and we have like, okay, perfect.
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We got three lessons here,
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but before we even get to those lessons,
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there are some things amongst all these conversations
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that came out naturally, right?
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And that's kind of this next,
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what we were talking about, the market size,
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and then you can bring up the market size,
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but I really wanted to get to the potential solution.
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So talk to us about this.
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- Okay, 100%. So, okay, the problem, $75 million,
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globally being lost due to poor customer experience
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and success, market size here in the US alone, guys,
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90% of companies have dedicated customer experience
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and customer success roles.
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There's millions of us that are going to work on our desks,
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every single solitary day thinking about customer transactions,
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thinking about customer experience,
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thinking about how we're going to make a customer happy,
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keep a customer coming back, thinking about pushing our LTV
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up and forward into the future.
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That's a huge space, right?
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So the other part of what I was trying to think about
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with sort of the podcast and some of the work
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that we do with our clients at CXC was really kind of understanding
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sort of what that looked like.
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Brian, you could jump into the solutions.
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Here's some of the biggest things that we've seen.
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I'm trying to, Brian was joking with me before,
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guys, we jumped into this, we're like,
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"I'm trying to slam 214 interviews into Oslide here,
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but these are some of the big,
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reoccurring trends, themes,
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and reoccurring just stories that we kept hearing
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from some of these incredible customer focus business leaders
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around what they were at least investing in trying to do
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in order to enable their customer experience and customer success.
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So number one, content.
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I know it sounds absolutely crazy because literally me and Brian
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are making content right this second,
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but content is extremely powerful because some of the best
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companies that we had the pleasure of interviewing
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and that now we've been working with,
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content's a game changer, guys, because whether you're a software,
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whether you're a service, whether you're an e-com business,
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whatever you're selling, whatever you're selling,
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stories lead a customer into understanding sort of how they're
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going to interplay with the business.
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And then stories often really kind of lead to how
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exploitation is done.
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So on the content side, we've seen some incredible examples
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of how companies have leveraged podcasts and e-books
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and some of their own living playbooks or FAQs
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to really begin to tell that story or to iterate on sort of the
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evolution of their product and their service.
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That's another big one.
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They had a lot of times when a customer buys from a company,
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if you're fortunate enough for them to keep buying from you,
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things change with that company, things change with that product,
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things change with those services.
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So some of the companies that we had the pleasure of interviewing,
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they did a brilliant job of investing in leveraging their content,
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not just from a sales market perspective, guys,
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for the customers they've already sold for the customers,
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that now their job is to retain them and keep them for the long haul.
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Every one of us has probably been on a webinar or an e-panel
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in the last 30, 60, 90 days.
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This has become a really easy way that companies try to tell that story
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or try to iterate upon what's new in the business,
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what's new with the product.
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And then lastly, just I think COVID-Brine changed this bit.
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The use of living playbooks, how-to guys, ebooks,
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has just rose exponentially, right?
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Because now we're all in a position where many of us are working,
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minimally in a hybrid situation.
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Maybe we have to go in the office a couple of days a week,
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or we have certain meetings in the month where we got to go see our customers.
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A lot of us are spending a big part of our time working in our remote
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environments. So content became a huge area that we realized very quickly.
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Some of the best leading companies out there, they are doubling down on content
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and they're always trying to figure out how they can improve the way that they
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're storytelling.
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Not just to their customers, but to their employees, too, by the way,
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to make sure that expectations and to make sure that mission and general values
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are always being reminded and reiterated upon.
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Yeah.
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I just want to call out.
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I think it's really interesting because, again, I'm a marketer at heart,
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and so when I hear content and tools and services,
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I'm kind of thinking to myself, well, of course, right?
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But you're just reframing it from, usually, it's like, okay,
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how do you get content in front of new business?
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How do you get tools in front of new business?
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How do you get services, a playbook in front of new business?
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But it's just reframing it to how do you do that same thing,
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but with your actual customers, give that value to the customers outside of the
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product, or service that they're purchasing?
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Do I have that right?
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That's exactly right.
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It's almost like we've been so geared into the world going to find that new
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and going to hunt you, going to find them new capture.
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That's great.
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That's fine.
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So most businesses become about what you're at.
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You're absolutely right, Brian.
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We're taking that same information, taking that knowledge, taking that know-how
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and reminding it and passing it and pushing it onto our existing customers,
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that becomes another value adder.
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That becomes another value, and then here's the other part.
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Everybody wants to know about how to get better at upselling and cross selling,
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how to get better at understanding how to identify risk and churning and all
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this stuff.
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Take a look at who's engaging in your content, because those are probably going
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to be the first people that I would start to call to think about upsell, cross sell
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calls.
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Take a look at the people that you think are your biggest, best opportunity in
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your pipeline,
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and they're not engaging with any of your content.
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I'm not saying that in all cases, that's going to be a signal that they're
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dying,
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but I wouldn't be spending some extra time, some extra energy,
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and spending some extra love on those customers to understand what else can we
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give you,
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and your team, and your business, some additional value outside of our primary
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products and services.
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Again, I want the audience to make sure that they come away with takeaways.
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I think this, let's stop here and just call out something,
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because I think this is a pretty big takeaway, where content creation,
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you obviously need resources to do that.
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Maybe one takeaway is you have to think about how you build your customer
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success team,
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how you build your customer support team, and think about it too, of adding in
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a few content creators
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on that team, or at least supporting them with some content creators.
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Do I have that right, Adrian?
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- I'm moving, but what you're doing right now, Brian, for customer, exactly.
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You take some of the people that are already built into the fix of talking to
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customers on the reg,
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talking to the internal team on the reg, understanding the product,
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understanding the market,
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understanding the space, that knowledge, that collective knowledge, you could,
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you guys,
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you have to start somewhere.
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This is the thing, I salivate over some of our clients, we have a CXE,
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who have a million email addresses and a hundred thousand accounts,
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and they don't do any of this stuff, and it's like you would litter if you put
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together a podcast,
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or if you put together an email content series, you would blow up to the top 1%
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in 30 days,
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just because of the volume of people that you have that you could expose it to,
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but you're absolutely right at sharing that knowledge, and it's continuing to
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provide this value for storytelling,
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completely outside of the products and services that you're selling.
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Here's the other thought.
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Brian, for me, I spend most, me and my team spend most of my time working with
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venture capital backstart companies,
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and this is another incredible, easy way to begin to leverage your EX game,
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right? So then, if you know which A players on your team are just,
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they're rare to go and they want to, they want to do more, they want to get
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more involved,
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they want to be a part of story time, leverage those people, right?
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And then the other part is leverage your customers.
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There's so many companies out there that they really don't think about outside
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of referrals,
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or outside of their customer testimonials, and by the way,
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we've all seen a company that oversells that.
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You go to their website and there's just a million testimonials, I'm
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immediately, that's weird.
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I like what they're doing, but there's an opportunity to build a content with
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your customers too,
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and think strategically about which ones that can actually deepen the
15:00
relationship,
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widen the relationship and maybe even open up downstream opportunities for the
15:06
future for how you can do more business together.
15:08
Love it.
15:09
So let's kind of take one step back to take two steps forward.
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So let's get to three learnings about, again, your 214 episodes with CX leaders
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I think the next, yeah, so give us again, the quick lowdown of, you know, how
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successful your podcast has been so far.
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But then these learnings actually come from a place of value, which I know they
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do.
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100%.
15:34
Okay, so like I said, we've been out, we've been out of now for a little over
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five years.
15:39
We always tell people our passions and the listening, man.
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You can't learn something when you're talking, right?
15:44
You can only learn something when you're listening, right?
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And so a big part of what we've done is chronicle all of these stories.
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I mentioned the four CX pillars, team tools, process feedback every week.
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Our shows are really around having these unique customer-focused business
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leaders come to the show,
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talk about how the teams have been built, talk about how the tools or the tech
16:03
stack has been created,
16:03
and how they made their investment decisions.
16:06
Process is one that I always love to say.
16:08
People don't think process is sexy, but oftentimes, the devil's in the details,
16:12
man. If process becomes the glue across the four pillars that keeps everything
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together, last thing is this.
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If you are a fast-paced growing company, your processes are changing every week
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So processes can be a living, breathing thing.
16:25
We spend a lot of time with our clients thinking about living playbooks and
16:28
living how to's and living I think you use.
16:30
That stuff needs to be updated and iterated on a regular basis.
16:33
And the last thing is feedback, right?
16:35
Thinking about how you can get excellent at collecting and managing your
16:39
customer feedback
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and thinking about how you can collect and manage your employee feedback.
16:42
At this point, over our journey, we've got 12,000 CX, CX, support and founder-
16:49
based professionals that are engaged with our CX content.
16:52
We've got over 100 countries listening to the show, which is kind of cool.
16:55
It's funny to see that's not at all something I ever thought about before.
16:58
This was really just literally trying to get a bunch of stories and learn.
17:01
I was trying to self-assess, I was trying to learn.
17:03
I was trying to learn from other people that had been doing this longer at
17:07
bigger companies with more customers and more revenue.
17:09
And I was trying to figure out a way that I could actually just improve my own
17:12
personal playbook.
17:13
We got work 50,000 downloads.
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And then it's funny, the guests that we've had on the show now, we've had some
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really big companies, right?
17:20
We've had the pleasure of having Bain, Comcast, Service now, and HubSpot, all
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these big companies, right?
17:27
And it's interesting because we hear all these different themes across
17:32
different industries, different business spaces, different customers altogether
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and then different employees serves, right?
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The way that their employees and their internal themes are built up are all
17:40
different.
17:40
But across these 200 episodes, maybe you start to hear a lot of trends and
17:44
themes that, regardless of business size and industry type,
17:47
they repeat themselves so they recur.
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So that's kind of the high level.
17:51
Okay.
17:52
So let's go to one trend, right?
17:54
So here's something that you wanted to bring across to me here, which was "As
18:01
pire to understand 100% of customer experience."
18:04
It's not just a sample.
18:05
And that's a quote from when you interviewed Declan, the VP of Customer Support
18:08
at Intercom.
18:09
So give us a little bit of background here.
18:11
Why is this super important and why was this the first learning that came to
18:15
you?
18:15
So, Hema Wood, Declan Irie was absolutely awesome.
18:18
So before Intercom, he spent time at some of the world's biggest companies
18:22
manage customer support.
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So if there's anybody who understands ultra high volume customer support, Decl
18:28
an would be your boy, guys.
18:29
This guy has managed some incredible teams and incredible businesses.
18:32
When he talked about understanding 100% of your customer experience, Declan's
18:37
huge piece in this episode was really around leveraging customer success and
18:41
support to not just drive your CX values and your CTA's when you do extract
18:49
from your sport side,
18:49
but to literally drive your product to roadmap number one.
18:52
And then number two, his big thing is too many companies only pay attention to
18:56
the individuals that respond.
18:58
And think about this.
18:59
Every one of us is guilty of this, Brian.
19:00
Think about it.
19:01
You have whether you're a huge company, you're getting 10,000 pieces of
19:04
feedback per month, or whether you're a little small company, you get 10 pieces
19:08
of feedback per month.
19:09
How many customers do you have?
19:10
Right?
19:11
Because the businesses that have 100,000 points of feedback per month, probably
19:17
have 100,000 different individuals that theoretically have been there.
19:18
And then the business that has 10 points of feedback per month, probably have
19:23
100 different customers that they can get to be back.
19:26
And Declan's point was just, it's our job as CX and CX leaders to dig into the
19:32
dirt, try to figure out ways that you can meet people at every single medium,
19:36
try to figure out how not only are you, because think about it, you can't place
19:39
all of your bets on a sample size when it doesn't encompass the entire
19:43
portfolio.
19:43
Right.
19:44
And Declan's point, it was really around thinking about whatever way you guys
19:49
need to figure it out.
19:50
You have to have an on-view channel type of view for how you're getting and
19:54
assessing and collecting feedback.
19:56
And more importantly, you want to make sure that you're not chasing things that
19:59
aren't right.
20:00
I think the way that I talk about it a lot of times with our clients at CX,
20:04
understand what your common case scenarios are versus your special case
20:07
scenarios.
20:08
A lot of growth companies, and for some of our started friends that are
20:11
listening today, really, really common to chase shiny objects.
20:14
You have one customer who may or may not be one of your big customers, so they
20:18
might be a strategic account.
20:19
I get it.
20:20
One customer asked for one thing that nobody else asked for, and that your dev
20:23
team, your CX team, your ops team, and your sport team goes chasing down a lane
20:28
from the next 30 to 60 to 90 days on something that doesn't even touch the rest
20:32
of your customer base.
20:33
I'll stop there, but last piece, sorry, last piece, Declan also talked about
20:38
investing in AI and then I'll just speed up velocity.
20:40
Obviously, we're here at the AICX Virtual Event.
20:43
A big part of what Declan Stinky is like, there's been so much talk about AI
20:47
over the last year.
20:48
All of us are, and it's great, right?
20:50
Because it's the future we're entering into the future.
20:52
But Declan's big point was like, AI is here to do the things.
20:56
Number one, that it can do more often than not better than humans, much faster
21:00
than humans, more efficiently than humans.
21:01
But it's really to tee up the action points that humans need to go pick up and
21:08
run with to be able to increase velocity, whether that's growing your business,
21:11
or that's reducing churn, or that's speeding up your product roadmap.
21:15
So just a few points from Declan there, and then Brian, feel free to dive in
21:19
here.
21:19
I was going to ask you about the investing in AI and machine learning.
21:23
Does it speed up velocity?
21:25
Would you, let's kind of clarify that thought a little bit, because from what I
21:29
understood with what you just said, it was, how do you speed up processes in
21:35
order to improve the customer experience, where then the human can reach out?
21:40
Is that kind of what you were saying, or describe that another way for me?
21:44
So, okay, for example, specifically with Intercom, some of the AI solutions
21:47
that they're building into their tool, exactly right, Brian.
21:50
They're taking things that traditionally humans might have done from, say, a
21:54
tag meet or a compartmentalization perspective, and they're doing it for you.
21:59
So then what the agent shows up to their desk in the morning, instead of
22:02
spending maybe the first hour or two going through a bunch of tickets and
22:04
understanding show, what are my top threeies today or my top fiveies today, or
22:07
what are the big things I have to prioritize, let AI do that.
22:12
Set up some logic and set up some rules around being able to make that a little
22:17
bit easier for your team. That was one big thought. The other big thought is
22:21
writing, man.
22:21
Big part of what CX and CX people do, we're communicators. We talk to customers
22:25
every frickin' day of the week, right?
22:27
And so a lot of times that's writing, whether it's emails, whether it's live
22:31
chat, whether it's text messages.
22:33
And guys, I don't know about you, but I've written a book and I've literally
22:38
written 214 of these podcasts, summaries.
22:41
There's things that AI can do with writing that I can't do, right? So it's
22:46
leveraging some of these things that can actually aid our day today.
22:49
And some of our manual tools so that we open up a free time to think about some
22:53
of the other things that are a little bit more important.
22:56
Yeah, I like that. And what's most important is connecting with the customer,
22:59
right? So if it's like about tagging, it's about, you know, all the inside
23:05
components,
23:06
like those little things that take up a lot of time, that's where AI can help
23:10
you.
23:10
All right, so cool. Let me go to the next slide here. Okay, cool. So this next
23:16
learning, when you look at the tools,
23:17
don't try and buy a tool through a spreadsheet, buy it based on this will fit
23:21
my company. And this is by Ken Peterson, you said the President CX and question
23:25
pro. So go into this for me. Like, well, give us a little background of Ken, Kate
23:30
Peterson, question pro. What type of company is that?
23:33
Okay, so I literally just had the pleasure of last week I was in Austin, Texas
23:38
with Ken and the entire question, bro team at their x day event 2023.
23:42
Question pro delivers survey and feedback based software for big companies,
23:48
companies have lots of customers.
23:50
They have lots of users. They have to be able to get advanced surveying and
23:55
advanced questions out to customers in a quick, easy to digest type of way.
23:59
So Canada's even built an incredible company really focused on feedback. Two
24:03
things up, not just on customer side.
24:06
They also work with some huge companies helping to deliver employee feedback,
24:10
right? The e-excited game, Brian.
24:12
You're going to hear me talk about a little bit throughout today. But Ken's big
24:16
thing is about, you know, every company, especially when they start to hit that
24:20
growth phase,
24:21
your tech investments and your build out of your tech stack oftentimes will be
24:25
a big part of whether or not you are or are not going to succeed.
24:29
And I think that one of the big takeaways from Ken's episode was really around
24:34
you have to find solutions that are compatible with your company.
24:39
Many of us go by the guys of like, buy best in class. If you buy best in class,
24:44
then you're inevitably going to be in a better position.
24:47
Maybe Ken's point was there's all these different solutions out there that do
24:51
have unique bits and fixtures that can actually be most compatible with your
24:56
business,
24:56
with your industry and with your customer type. So a big part of Ken's story
25:01
was really around thinking about that is your growing business.
25:06
Here's the other big thing you talked about. If you're not baking empathy into
25:09
these numbers, let's say you get excellent at collecting feedback and you have
25:13
MPS and you have CSAT and you've got customer effort scores,
25:15
you've got all these different things that you're able to start counting the
25:18
numbers and measuring the numbers on.
25:20
Ken's made messengers, you know, all the big companies that I've been a part of
25:23
building and growing in my career. If you're not baking empathy into some of
25:27
those numbers,
25:27
it's going to make it really hard for you to focus on what you can control for
25:30
your customers. His thought was like, you have to, like, the point of counting
25:35
and measuring and managing just to do it,
25:37
it's not going to get you. You have to be counting measuring and managing
25:40
things that you are literally going to have some empathy for,
25:43
and you're going to take action on it. I think in the modern world brand,
25:47
companies that ask for feedback and do nothing with it are going to struggle.
25:51
I think companies that get excellent at, you know, you ask, do we listen to
25:56
those type of ideas of like, "Hey, here's the things that we heard from our
25:59
users this month or this quarter or this year."
26:01
Those are going to be companies that modern consumers are going to want to get
26:05
behind.
26:05
And then the last part is just celebrating the wins with your customers'
26:09
eternity. They have a question for again, because they're thinking about EX and
26:11
they're thinking about employee feedback on the reg.
26:14
This is probably a big part of why Ken really wanted to pull this part in front
26:15
of the side of it. Guys, think about some of you that are growing companies
26:20
right now that aren't huge.
26:21
Right? So think about some of you people that are trying to get to your first $
26:23
10 million. Think about some of you that are trying to get to your first $1
26:27
million.
26:27
If you're not celebrating the wins both with your customers and with your
26:31
internal team and your employees, you're missing a big opportunity right there.
26:35
CX and EX, they go hand in hand, man. Like, a lot of people, they'll say, "Hey,
26:40
you know, you talked with all these people, what makes great CX?"
26:42
Hate to say it, but a lot of times it starts with your employee experience. The
26:47
best companies that are delivering world class, kick ass customer experiences,
26:52
they've already got incredible EX baked into their game.
26:54
They've got employees that are engaged, they're turned on, they're informed,
26:59
they're connected, and they're within the autonomy and the authority to go and
27:05
take action up to a certain level so that they can actually make things happen
27:08
for their customers every single solid trade.
27:10
And that's a fun place to work, by the way. Every one of us, there's better to
27:13
come in like that instead of the opposite where it's kind of, you know, one guy
27:16
or guy running.
27:17
Exactly. That's so fun.
27:19
Yeah, no, and I also want to add on to this because I recently talked to a VP
27:27
at a Shopify company called Bobbi, and Bobbi provides infant formula for babies
27:35
and mothers.
27:35
And we're talking about churn a little bit, and obviously there's churn after
27:41
one years old, right? Like, you don't need formula anymore.
27:45
The mother doesn't need formula. And so they celebrate that.
27:50
And that was like so enlightening to me where they lose the customer, but they
27:57
celebrate that milestone with them.
28:00
And they celebrate internally, they celebrate externally, they send the email,
28:04
you have like a firework in the platform.
28:08
And so like that was just kind of like enlightening for me and just a good
28:12
insight and for you to bring it up as well too, how do you celebrate these wins
28:16
with your customers?
28:17
It's just another point in the customer journey to make them feel special and
28:21
to provide that kind of, hey, this is our brand, right? This differentiation.
28:25
100% right? With our clients in CX, I call those milestone moments across your
28:32
customer journey.
28:33
They identified the milestone moments. Everyone of us better know these things
28:36
too, by the way. Getting that first customer onboarded, getting that first
28:40
customer through XYZ groups of usability or just general engagement, keeping
28:44
that customer for a year, keeping that customer from five.
28:47
Those are milestone moments. If you don't know how to celebrate those, it's
28:50
your point, firework, some explosions and balloons and all that jazz, then you
28:55
're missing out man because customers love that stuff.
28:57
So, with employees, you have the right types of employees that are managing
29:01
those milestone moments and responsible and have the authority and
29:04
accountability to manage those things.
29:06
People love that stuff, man. It's authentic, right? That's what matters most.
29:11
Okay, let's get to the last point here. Build a team that believes in the power
29:15
of customer experience, invest in their growth and watch their client
29:18
satisfaction store.
29:19
This is from Alex Groth from Hierarchy Ratio, CX. All right, give us the
29:25
download here.
29:25
Okay, so I had the pleasure of having both. It's one of the only times we had
29:31
the same business. I had Jose Herrera, the CEO of Hierarchy Ratio on, and then
29:36
recently we had Alex Ross and I'm glad we needed an awesome company.
29:39
Hierarchy Ratio, CX is really kind of taking a bunch of the stuff that we're
29:43
talking about today, Brian.
29:45
They're building it for companies, meaning number one, they're building a team
29:50
of individuals that's already fully trained, vetted, sourced, ready to go to
29:54
tackle your customer success and support needs.
29:57
They are super well versed in some of the leading CX and CS software. So, like,
30:02
depending on for some of our, some of our, our startup founders listening to
30:05
that, they can literally start to build out your support and your CS unit for
30:09
you that you're really well.
30:10
The unique part is they're also building their business. They're here in the
30:16
States, but they're also building their business in different parts of the
30:20
world.
30:20
So, they're building on an incredible campus down at the Dominican Republic.
30:24
They just built an incredible campus down in South America.
30:27
So, they're also building for what they already know is coming with North
30:30
America companies. We need to be able to speak to languages.
30:33
We need to be able to speak English. We need to be able to speak Spanish. And
30:38
what, what Alex talked about in his show was, honestly, him and his hair
30:42
constantly talking about employee experience.
30:44
What they, their secret sauce and higher ratio is very different. Many of us
30:48
wanted to invest in customer, customer, customer, customer, you need customers
30:51
and you need money to have blood in the business, in the body of the business.
30:54
Totally get it.
30:55
Their whole spin on this though is, if you're focusing on your employee
31:00
experience, you inevitably will begin to drive your customer experience, right?
31:05
That's the work part. Second big part, this business was born in a drink oven.
31:09
So, this is a, this is a company that they built, this is going to be, I think,
31:13
going to be a huge company today, but they're building a business completely
31:16
remote first.
31:17
Outside of the campuses that they've got in the big, they've got on South
31:21
America, they knew that most modern customer success and customer support teams
31:26
You know, why, why, why, why, why do you need the 40th floor of Manhattan for
31:29
500 people? What are you going to do with that? How much does that cost? Right?
31:32
You don't need that anymore.
31:33
Some people do, Mike Bloomberg would argue with me, and obviously he's way
31:36
richer than I am. So, I would listen to Mike Bloomberg too, but like, for
31:38
modern, for modern, for modern, SaaS companies guys, for modern service
31:42
companies, we don't need to walk the floor.
31:44
We don't need to always, every day, sorry, sometimes there's a time and place.
31:48
I think the power of on sites is the equivalent of where we used to be pre-pand
31:52
emic with the power of off sites, if that makes sense.
31:55
Like, so there's something nice about now that we're all living, working in
31:58
this world. They have a day or two or they have, you know, once a month or that
32:01
, once a quarter, when you get together with a team, you collab, you jam out,
32:04
you rock off things, that's fun. Plus, you just get away from your wife and
32:07
your kids and you get out of the house.
32:08
But, Alex and Jose have built a business, completely focused on building a
32:13
remote first company. And then the last part is just playbooks. So, what's the
32:17
point of collecting a ton of customer feedback?
32:20
And what's the point of collecting a ton of employee feedback? If you're not
32:24
making those learnings and findings into a living playbook, something that
32:28
changes every single solitary week, every single solitary week, immediately
32:32
every quarter where you're doing your controlling and your monitoring,
32:34
if you're actually thinking through what updates, what changes, what tweaks,
32:37
and then remember, the business is always people, guys, then what things do we
32:42
need to go and refresh our customers on, and what things do we need to go
32:46
refresh our employees on to make sure that expectations are constantly aligned.
32:49
I love it. So, let me clarify something, which seems simple now, but I didn't
32:53
really think about it until you brought it up. In order to invest in a customer
32:58
experience and improve the customer experience, you got to invest in your
33:02
employee experience that is supporting your customers. Do I have that right?
33:07
There you go. Yep. All right. Well, let's end there. I think that's a great
33:12
point. Adrian, thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it as always. And
33:18
let's do this again sometime.
33:21
I love it. Thank you so much for the opportunity today. Thanks so much for
33:24
letting me join the join the fun today. I see expert tools on it.
33:27
Thanks, everyone.
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