Tag: customer experience

Create a Marketing Strategy That’s Not Annoying, Says Bombora VP

“It’s really about customer experience,” says Nirosha Methananda, VP of Marketing at Bombora. “I think that is something fundamental to marketing. I feel like we have gone down this path of almost over automating and having to constantly pounce on people without necessarily being conscious and mindful of what their experience is on the other end. From my experience, it’s leading to me switching off and ignoring messages. I’m sure I’m not the only one. That’s basically why I’m passionate about creating a marketing strategy that’s not annoying.”

Nirosha Methananda, Vice President of Marketing at Bombora, discusses the challenges of marketing without annoying your potential customers by bombarding them with marketing messages in an interview with Logan Lyles on the B2B Growth Podcast:

Marketing Is Really About the Customer Experience

As a B2B marketer, I get marketed to a lot. It’s something that I have increasingly noticed and I’m probably not the only one. That’s just becoming part of the experience in terms of being inundated with different messaging and different calls and this, that, and the other. Use this, do this, buy this, whatever it is. It’s really not a great experience. It doesn’t necessarily provide value. Marketers are so busy as it is, and I know that is applicable across the board with everyone we are marketing to. Being able to cut through the noise and having an understanding of all these different things is very challenging.

Having on top of it being inundated with this constant flow of messaging like meet me, meet me, meet me, is not very helpful. That’s one of the things that I’m passionate about. It’s really about customer experience. I think that is something fundamental to marketing. I feel like we have gone down this path of almost over automating and having to constantly pounce on people without necessarily being conscious and mindful of what their experience is on the other end. From my experience, it’s leading to me switching off and ignoring messages. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Create a Marketing Strategy That’s Not Annoying

It also leads to this annoyance and irritation which leads to distrust of brands and that’s not great for this industry. From a customer perspective those bad experiences, unfortunately, more than good experiences, they stay with you for longer and you remember that. Another thing that we don’t necessarily think of is that it’s wasteful. It’s wasteful of time and it’s wasteful of money especially for marketing and sales where money is a precious resource. It’s not something to be wasted. That’s basically why I’m passionate about creating a marketing strategy that’s not annoying.

As an example, our Intent Event was our first flagship event that we did last year. It was a closed event so we did have limited numbers and we were limited as to what we could do with promotion. What we did was try to have mindfulness around what we were sending out and ensuring that it was helpful. Making sure that the recipients, the people that we invited, were given all the relevant information, but there was brevity in the communication as well as encouraging them to participate without forcing them to be there.

There was certainly some urgency around some of our communication but it wasn’t you need to attend this and this is why you must attend this. It was more about being a bit more subtle in presenting them the idea and the concept of what it was, why it would help them, and exactly the information that they needed. What that meant was not sending out multiple emails, being very controlled around it, really thinking about what the experience was before the event, to during the event, to after the event. We were really focused on the customer and making sure that all of the content and communication was educational and helpful.

Create a Marketing Strategy That’s Not Annoying, Says Bombora VP Nirosha Methananda

March 8, 2023
Adobe CEO: Pandemic Was Inflection Point For Everything Being Digital

“What the pandemic and the current health situation has done is that it has created yet another inflection point for everything being digital,” says Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen. “The importance of digital in the marketplace is going to be sustainable for decades. You’re not going to put the genie back in the bottle as it relates to engaging digitally and creating content digitally.”

Shantanu Narayen, Chairman and CEO of Adobe, discusses how the pandemic has created another “inflection point” in the move toward digital transformation:

Digital Transformation Is A $120 Billion Opportunity

It was a good quarter all around. All of our businesses performed exceedingly well. On the Creative Cloud and the Document Cloud, not only did we have a great acquisition. in other words, new customers adopting the platform, but we really focused on engagement and demonstrating the value of our products to our customers. Even our retention levels came back to pre-COVID levels which we believe is a really good sign.

What’s happening in the world is the businesses that we’re in, namely creativity and enabling people to tell their story, what’s happening with documents and accelerating document productivity, and what’s happening associated with every single enterprise needing to engage with their customers digitally, when you add all of this up we think it’s over a $120 billion of an addressable market opportunity for Adobe.

Pandemic Was Inflection Point For Everything Being Digital

What the pandemic and the current health situation has done is that it has created yet another inflection point for everything being digital. What we will have to continue to monitor is what happens in the spending environment. But as it relates to the overall need for the kinds of solutions that Adobe provides as well as the importance of digital in the marketplace I think that’s going to be sustainable for decades. You’re not going to put the genie back in the bottle as it relates to engaging digitally and creating content digitally.

We believe that we’re in this third phase of what is happening in the enterprise. Traditionally, businesses first focused on automating the back office, and then they focused on automating the front office for knowledge workers. It’s absolutely clear that the biggest imperative that exists in the enterprise today is how do you engage with customers? This is a category that we call Customer Experience Management.

Customer Insight Is Key To Your Digital Transformation

If you’re an enterprise today and you’re thinking about digital transformation, what’s top of that stack in terms of where you have to invest is to make sure that you have insight into what your customers are doing. How are they engaging with you? What’s the profile? How do you deliver the personalized experience?

We really believe that what you’re seeing in the enterprise spend environment is that the companies that are focused on this next generation of delivering customer engagement, the customer experiences, and the insight associated with how to take the most advantage of that data, they’re going to be the secular winners moving forward.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen: Pandemic Was Inflection Point For Everything Being Digital

January 4, 2023
7 Top Ways To Create A Great Customer Experience Strategy

The importance of customer experience can be realized with the fact that brands are willing to spend nearly $641 billion on customer experience-enabling technology in 2022.

Companies are now selling a brilliant customer experience to beat out the competition and develop their revenue growth instead of relying on unique selling points or brand strength as their competitive advantage.

And there is a good reason for it. Bad customer experience is causing loss of 9.5% revenue to companies.

On the other hand, consumers are 3.5 times more likely to purchase more from companies offering high-quality customer experience (CX).

Indeed, a good CX is the foundation of a successful business but how to achieve it for your business?

In this article, you will learn about the top seven strategies to create a great customer experience.

Let’s start!

1- Define Goals and Objectives

Before designing your customer experience strategy, first, define your core business objectives that show the actual purpose of your CX strategy.

Ask yourself, do want to:

● Attract new customers?

● Retain existing customers?

● Embark into a new market or industry?

● Enhance your brand visibility in the market?

Besides, also set other targets, such as the timeline required to implement the strategy, your budget, and other required resources.

Answering the above set of questions will help you figure out the right strategy that works best for your business.

2- Map Out Your Target Customer Personas

Developing detailed customer personas will help you know the types of journeys that B2B and B2C customers wish to take while shopping.

Personas will guide companies to build a CX strategy that works for every customer. As a result, they will be able to match up customers to their preferred journeys.

To create a precise customer journey map, start with gathering insights into your target audience and existing customers.

For example:

● Collect their demographic details, like age, gender, location, etc.

● Find out their professional background

● Find out the income group they belong to

● Explore the audience’s interests, etc.

Besides, closely observe your existing customer base. Analyze the entire details of your existing customers including their purchase records that you have to understand their requirements.

3- Organize and Consolidate Support Requests

Opening up more channels for support, such as emails, live chats, social channels, and phones are vital for a good CX service. However, managing different channels is a big challenge. Failing to respond to the customers’ issues drives their dissatisfaction, causing damage to the brand’s image.

Hence, the use of a help desk ticketing system is highly suggested. It is a software designed to organize, prioritize, and consolidate support requests from different sources.

Using the help desk ticketing system, organizations can quickly assign inquiries to the most relevant agent, provide context to customer interactions, and track customer inquiries.

It also has a shared inbox, through which all support staff members can coordinate among themselves and resolve the customer issues quickly and smoothly.

4- Listen To Your Customers

A successful organization always has a process in place to listen to their customer, also known as the ‘voice of customer’ (VOC).

Resolving customer issues only when they directly approach you is not sufficient to improve CX. You need to understand their actual experience when they are doing business with your company. In other words, you should conceive your consumer’s problems as information to create a CX strategy.

A great way to understand customers’ experience with the brand is to use a VOC platform. The platform gathers data from the customer service department, customers’ social media profiles, dedicated groups, customer surveys, and other outward-facing sources.

The data collected from different sources will give clarity about what drives customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction. It will also suggest to companies the ways to solve the customer problems, instead of simply responding to the query or the issue.

5- Build Emotional connection

Customers are 3 times more likely to purchase and recommend your product or service if they have an emotional connection with your brand.

Forging emotion in the relation to customers fosters retention and loyalty. Therefore, brands thrive the most that develop emotional connections with their customers.

The best way to do this is to personalize your communication while connecting with your customers. Here communication entails every possible means, such as email, chat, or phone.

Here are some of the most effective ways to personalize communication:

● Introduce yourself to your customer by your name.

● Address customers by their name.

● Talk with a personal and human touch.

● Respond in the form of a new question, advice, or confirmation.

● Send personalized birthday emails.

● Show a friendly attitude.

6- Train Your Customer Care team

By now you know your customers’ perceptions about the quality of your service. Plus, you have already defined the customer experience principles you need to execute.

The next step is to use a quality framework to improve the customer care service. A quality framework includes identifying the training requirements of each individual member of your customer support team.

It also involves the assessment of the quality of phone and email communication based on basic and predefined customer experience principles.

The advanced level of quality framework incorporates scheduling and tracking your team’s improvement through eLearning, coaching, and group training.

7- Calculate the ROI of CX

Quantifying the value of your CX is essential to know if the efforts and the investment put in your team, process, and technology are giving results and paying off.

However, measuring CX is one of the biggest challenges organizations face mostly because of conflicting information and difficulty in providing a clear CX forecast, articulated in numbers.

Yet companies look for the most feasible solution to measure the ROI from delivering a great customer experience. The most accepted solution is the formula for calculating the ROI of CX that goes like this:

Customer experience ROI = Return / Investment

In some cases, the formula is broken down into smaller elements for more clarity, such as:

Customer experience ROI % = (Benefits – Investments) / Investments x 100

Summary

Improving customer experience involves everything from the level of service to how well products fit into consumers’ lives.

Happy customers are more likely to recommend to others and help grow your business.

Hence, if you aim to achieve success as a brand, it is time to focus more on learning from your failures, create strategy-based CX principles, and leverage technology-driven solutions to build deeper connections and relationships with your customers.

November 11, 2022
ServiceNow CEO: COVID Accelerated Digital Transformation

“Digital transformation was the opportunity for our generation before COVID,” says ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott. “Now with COVID, it has accelerated and exacerbated all the issues of broken systems and siloed operations. Before COVID they didn’t want to be told to go into a cubicle. Do you think after COVID once this thing clears up at some point in the future they are going to be told to go into a cubicle? No, they’re going to be digital.”

Bill McDermott, CEO of ServiceNow, discusses how COVID has exacerbated “broken systems” and has accelerated the digital transformation of companies around the world:

COVID Has Accelerated Digital Transformation

Digital transformation was the opportunity for our generation before COVID. Now with COVID, it has accelerated and exacerbated all the issues of broken systems and siloed operations. People are not realizing that 75% of the workforce by 2025 will be millennial generation people. Before COVID they didn’t want to be told to go into a cubicle. Do you think after COVID once this thing clears up at some point in the future they are going to be told to go into a cubicle? No, they’re going to be digital.

They’re also going to absolutely expect their employer to give them the best tools. The big idea if you want to give the customer a Michelin 3 experience is you have to fuse the employee experience and the customer experience on a common platform. This way most things can be automated for the customer on a self-service basis. The things that can’t be automated can immediately be workflow ordered to get the right person in the right place with the right skill set at the right time. That’s what we do and that’s why this is a thrilling moment.

Now Platform Is the Standard For Digital Transformation

The Now platform has become the standard for digital transformation in business today. If you think about most of these companies they’re grappling with the future of work. They have to accommodate their employees. They have very distributed workforces. How are they going to get them the tools that they need and onboard them properly? In some cases, they never even meet the people they hire. Then obviously, how are they going to manage the experience they have digitally?

This also goes direct to the customer. How do you go direct to the consumer? How do you make sure you give them a great service so they stay loyal to you? The ServiceNow Platform is at the epicenter of all of that. More and more, developers are building new innovation on the fly on the Now Platform. The Now platform has become a standard for large enterprises around the world. The ecosystem and the network effect building on that are truly sensational. We’re extremely fired up because we want to make work… work better for people all over the world. What we’re trying to do is get to the essence of everything.

ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott: COVID Has Accelerated Digital Transformation

October 30, 2020
Qualtrics IPO Is A Win-Win, Says SAP CEO

Just twenty short months after SAP announced their intention of acquiring Qualtrics for $8 billion just prior to their IPO SAP is taking Qualtrics public.

“The Qualtrics IPO is actually a win-win situation for both SAP and Qualtrics,” says SAP CEO Christian Klein. “When we are talking about Qualtrics let me first outline that Qualtrics was for sure one of the best acquisitions SAP ever did. They performed in the last 9 months above and beyond all the expectations we have set at the point of the acquisition. Now, three months back when I became the sole CEO of SAP Ryan Smith and I discussed a few options about how to move Qualtrics to the next level.”

“SAP’s acquisition of Qualtrics has been a great success and has outperformed our expectations with 2019 cloud growth in excess of 40 percent, demonstrating very strong performance in the current setup,” Klein stated. “As Ryan Smith, Zig Serafin, and I worked together, we decided that an IPO would provide the greatest opportunity for Qualtrics to grow the Experience Management category, serve its customers, explore its own acquisition strategy and continue building the best talent. SAP will remain Qualtrics’ largest and most important go-to-market and research and development (R&D) partner while giving Qualtrics greater independence to broaden its base by partnering and building out the entire experience management ecosystem.”

“When we launched the Experience Management category, our goal was always to help as many organizations as possible leverage the XM Platform as a system of action,” Qualtrics Founder Ryan Smith said. “SAP is an incredible partner with unprecedented global reach, and we couldn’t be more excited about continuing the partnership. This will allow us to continue building out the XM ecosystem across a broad array of partners.”

SAP agreed to acquire Qualtrics just four days before Qualtrics was to go public in 2018, recognizing the potential of bringing together experience and operational data (X+O) to help organizations take action. SAP currently owns 100 percent of Qualtrics shares. SAP will retain majority ownership of Qualtrics and has no intention of spinning off or otherwise divesting its majority ownership interest. Ryan Smith intends to be Qualtrics’ largest individual shareholder.

Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, discusses the reasons for their IPO and says that Qualtrics has been the best acquisition that SAP ever did:

Qualtrics IPO Is A Win-Win For SAP and Qualtrics

When we are talking about Qualtrics let me first outline that Qualtrics was for sure one of the best acquisitions SAP ever did. They performed in the last 9 months above and beyond all the expectations we have set at the point of the acquisition. Now, three months back when I became the sole CEO of SAP Ryan Smith and I discussed a few options about how to move Qualtrics to the next level. The partial IPO, we are both fully convinced, is actually a win-win situation for both SAP and Qualtrics.

First, it will allow Qualtrics to focus on the non-SAP customer base in a high closed market. Second, despite the IPO, of course, SAP will remain fully committed to Experience Management (XM) and we will develop further use cases for our customers. We will also continue with the joint go-to-market. SAP is fully committed and will be in the long run highly committed to to Qualtrics and also will remain a majority shareholder of Qualtrics going forward.

IPO Allows Qualtrics To Go After non-SAP Customers

We kicked off already in the last 19 months, great use cases for our customers. We launched Human Experience Management (HXM) which helped both to accelerate the sales of Qualtrics but also our core application success factors. We did the same for commerce. In our product strategy, it actually plans to really expand experience management across our solution portfolio.

Our employees are very excited about that because they see the benefits for our customers and this is something that won’t change with the IPO. This will allow Qualtrics more autonomy to also go after the market with non-SAP customers as this is a high quote segment.

Qualtrics IPO Is A Win-Win, Says SAP CEO Christian Klein

July 27, 2020
We Are An Experience-Driven Company, Says Chewy CEO

“Last year we sent about 50,000 pet portraits to our customers,” says Chew CEO Sumit Singh. “We’re an experience-driven company. This is not a cost. This is an engagement mechanism. We’ve partnered with about a thousand local artists across the country. We think of this as an experience building. We have 90 percent re-ups (of our subscriptions). Our customers love engaging with us.”

Sumit Singh, CEO of Chewy, discusses their IPO (launched today) and how customer engagement has driven their phenomenal growth in an interview on CNBC:

We Are An Experience-Driven Company

Last year we sent about 50,000 pet portraits to our customers. We’re an experience-driven company. This is not a cost. This is an engagement mechanism. We’ve partnered with about a thousand local artists across the country. They show up to your doorstep unannounced. It’s a total surprise. You can’t buy them. When they do (the paintings) they create memories. People talk about them. They drive dinner table conversations. They show up on social media. It’s just an emotive category.

We think of this as an experience building. We have this because we want it, not because we need it in some way. Once we get out there and once this shows up on your doorstep the engagement that it creates generates the loyalty, the repeat purchase rate. In fact, our cohorts just keep growing from $330 to $500, $600, and $700 as they go from year five, six, and into year seven. This is what does it. Pets is the only category where a consumer refers to themselves as a pet parent. The only other category where consumers do that is kids.

“Jackson loves his Chewy portrait!” notes Chewy customer Eri Anne

Our Customers Love Engaging With Us

Pet ownership is underrepresented in the growth of e-commerce. First of all today in the United States we’re only about 14 percent penetrated from an online point of view. Chewy, if you look at it, is a $70 billion dollar industry. We’re penetrated in about roughly 10 percent of the households. We have 11 million customers. We’re growing fast and we’re engaging them hard.

They stay with us. It’s the two flywheels, the engagement, and the acquisition. It just spins really well. Our investors love that. Our customers love that. We like it. We have 90 percent re-ups (of our subscriptions). Two-thirds of our revenue comes from Autoship and our subscription program. Our customers love engaging with us.

We Have An Incredible Amount of Data

Our shipping (cost) is built into our gross margins. What you’ve seen is as we’ve gotten big fast, we’ve also gotten fit fast. Our gross margin has expanded over 500 basis points over the last three years. We have a dense network. We have the predictability of Autoship. We can plan supply plan tighter and baseload build a lot tighter and get it to our customers fast and in a reliable manner. That’s how we make it work.

We have a ton of data. When you contact us you’re giving us (information). Pet profiles is an amazing way for us to engage with you. Customers are leaning in. We talked to you via customer service. At this point, we have 11 million customers but we manage over 27 million relationships between pets and pet parents. That is an incredible amount of data and facts to have on base.

Pets.com Was 20 Years Ago

The company (Pets.com) was 20 years ago. Look at the way the e-commerce has built out, the inputs are changing. Look at our stickiness. Look at the number of customers that we’re attracting. The fact that we’re servicing greater than 95 percent of US households in less than two days and the fact that customers keep coming back to us. Also, the necessity and desire to continue to engage and seek information via the high-touch high-class customer service that we provide. We just closed the loop better than anybody else out there.

We Are An Experience-Driven Company, Says Chewy CEO Sumit Singh

May 5, 2020
How Wendy’s Innovated the Digital Journey To Improve the Customer Experience

“Speed and convenience and really driving consistency of operations are core themes,” says Wendy’s CEO Todd Penegor. “You think about how you can continue to drive speed. The digital journey is a big one. How do we drive folks into mobile ordering? How do we drive awareness on mobile ordering? What we do see is when folks mobile order the check size is about 20 percent higher. Those are just great opportunities to continue to connect to that next generation of consumer and create a better experience and gather even more data to connect with them into the future.”

Todd Penegor, CEO of Wendy’s, discusses how their innovative improvements in the digital journey are improving speed and the customer experience in an interview by Jim Cramer on CNBC:

Wendy’s Innovated the Digital Journey For a Better CX

We are connecting to that next generation of consumer through social media and having a lot of fun doing it. It is driving folks into our restaurant. Chance the Rapper tweeted that he would love to have his spicy nuggets back. We challenged him to see how many likes he could get. We said that if you get two million likes we will bring spicy nuggets back. He did that and we brought spicy nuggets back. Immediately, and you see that in our third-quarter results, from day one, even before we turned on national advertising, people showed up in our restaurants to buy those spicy chicken nuggets. They wanted them back and they learned about it through social.

There’s a ton of good things happening. We’re still working on speed, so speed and convenience and really driving consistency of operations are core themes. You think about how you can continue to drive speed. The digital journey is a big one. How do we drive folks into mobile ordering? How do we drive awareness on mobile ordering? What we do see is when folks mobile order the check size is about 20 percent higher. Those are just great opportunities to continue to connect to that next generation of consumer and create a better experience and gather even more data to connect with them into the future.

Delivery Innovation Continues To Be a Great Growth Engine

Delivery continues to be a great growth engine for us. We’ve got over 85 percent of the system supported by delivery. We announced today that we will have all of our ordering integrated on delivery into our point-of-sale system. That’ll allow us to get the food to the customers even faster. We’re one of the fastest today at 30 minutes from the time you order to the time you get the food. Now that it’s going to be integrated into our POS we can probably shave another three to five minutes. It could also open us up to use other delivery providers beyond just DoorDash which will be another great opportunity to expand access to our brand.

We talked a lot today about our brand and really doing fast food done right. Fast food done right can resonate across the globe and fresh is what a consumer is really looking for. It is a true point of differentiation (with competitors). We talked about making a move into Europe over the next 12 to 18 months and really starting in the UK and really front-running some of that with company restaurants. We talked about up to 20 company restaurants over the next couple of years. We will bring franchisees into to play that out in the UK, but it will create a beachhead for us to really start to drive some growth into all of Europe. It’s a big burger-eating area of the world. The category has been growing and we have the right to play and can be differentiated on fresh.

Wendy’s Reintroducing the Black Bean Veggie Burger

We’ve talked about plant-based probably four years ago. We are way ahead of the curve when we had a black bean burger that we were working on. Unfortunately, at the time it was operationally complex and it took additional equipment in the restaurant. Today, we figured out how to solve for that. We’re looking for that flexitarian customer. We’re trying to do it the Wendy’s way. We’re trying to do it with Wendy’s quality. Whether you’re a flexitarian or a vegetarian the black bean burger can solve for that. We have that in tests in one market now and we’re looking to bring that to market sometime during the course of 2020.

Flexitarian is one of those millennial terms and in folks are looking to have a lot of beef but and traditional proteins but also flip into more vegetable and and other proteins. We’re real fresh never frozen North American beef. We are about having great quality food and we always want to do things the Wendy’s way. We think a black bean burger, something that’s natural in a square to make sure that it follows along the lines of our square hamburgers, is a great fit for our brand will allow folks to continue to come into our restaurant to drive frequency.

We talked a lot about frequency. Our average customer comes to a Wendy’s five and a half times a year. We have a huge opportunity to drive frequency. Whether it’s the offerings like a plant-based burger, whether it’s entering breakfast, or driving our digital journey going forward.

How Wendy’s Innovated the Digital Journey To Improve the Customer Experience – CEO Todd Penegor

February 3, 2020
SurveyMonkey CEO: Selling To the Enterprise Has Been Wildly Successful

“We really took a strategic imperative about two and a half to three years ago to step up our enterprise game,” says SurveyMonkey CEO Zander Lurie. “This has been a company that has thrived in going direct to end-users. We’ve built up a user base, a paid customer base, today of almost 700,000 people. But over the last three years, we’ve elevated our game. Today, enterprise represents 20 percent of our business. It helped us deliver our best quarter in history. We’re now growing 20 percent year-over-year.”

Zander Lurie, CEO of SurveyMonkey, discusses how the company is driving its massive growth by focusing on enterprise solutions that are sold by the seat, in an interview on CNBC:

The Category For Experience Management Is Massive

The category for experience management is massive. Companies today are differentiating their products and services by their ability to be customer-centric. Everybody has access to off-the-shelf software and you can buy keywords on Google and you can target folks on Facebook but the ability to really be sensitive to what your customers care about and want is critical. Usabilla is the solution that we acquired earlier this year. They have a customer in KLM Dutch Airlines who was able to improve their app experience by a 2.8 to a 4.2 rating using our product. It really is about, can your managers and can your marketers listen to that feedback, understand the bugs, and then deliver and take action. That’s what survey software can do.

We don’t compete with Adobe and Salesforce at all. Frankly, there are hundreds of thousands of Salesforce customers who need to be buying enterprise survey software. We exist in the Salesforce ecosystem and really try and help Salesforce customers get better data and get sentiment data from what their customers really care about. Salesforce, Microsoft, Adobe, those are big systems of record. They provide you a lot of operational data. Where SurveyMonkey competes and thrives is delivering for customers that sentiment data. How am I really doing? What can we improve upon? That’s where we’re selling a solution into the Salesforce ecosystem and we partner with Salesforce in a really productive way. It’s part of the reason they bought into our IPO last year.

Selling To the Enterprise Has Been Wildly Successful

We really took a strategic imperative about two and a half to three years ago to step up our enterprise game. This has been a company that has thrived in going direct to end-users. We’ve built up a user base, a paid customer base, today of almost 700,000 people. But over the last three years, we’ve elevated our game. Today, enterprise represents 20 percent of our business. It helped us deliver our best quarter in history. We’re now growing 20 percent year-over-year.

We set about on our IPO last year and told investors our plan to make this business a lot more valuable. The two key driving factors first is to elevate our sales motion to sell directly to the enterprise. That has been wildly successful. We doubled year-over-year a hundred percent growth in revenue in the sales channel. We now have almost 5,000 customers, up 60 percent year over year. We now compete in that ecosystem and we have a really disruptive product. Consumers love our product. We’re now selling into the organization with a really talented sales team.

There’s Been So Much Account Sharing On SurveyMonkey

Our team’s product is the collaborative self-serve product. We have a unique opportunity here. There’s been so much account sharing on SurveyMonkey over the years and in the current security environment, we’re asking people to pay for their own seat. That has driven a really healthy paid user growth. We see continued growth in those two areas. As I said, growth for us we’ve accelerated growth now twenty percent year-over-year, but we do it a disciplined way. We’re still able to deliver over $13 million dollars of unleveraged free cash flow in the quarter. We’re just not a company that’s going to grow at all cost. We want to have both healthy growth and disciplined cash flow.

We use politics in a fun way to help get a beat on what’s going on out in the world. Just like we ask questions about if you are potentially interested in buying an electric car or what do you think of Impossible Burger or Beyond Meat, we also ask questions of the two and a half to three million people on our platform every day of who might you vote for and what issues are important to you. That really does give us a particular read on what American consumers are thinking.

Selling To the Enterprise Has Been Wildly Successful, Says SurveyMonkey CEO Zander Lurie

February 1, 2020
The Agreement Cloud Is Going To Be The Next Big Cloud, Says DocuSign CEO

“The new cloud opportunity that we see is in the Agreement Cloud,” says DocuSign CEO Dan Springer. “It is going to be the next big cloud because we think this is about bringing multiple clouds together. We work strongly with ERP and strongly with CRM. We’re actually finding opportunities increasingly every day to make the other cloud investments that people are making have more value before them by bringing them together. What connects them is the agreements those companies do.”

Dan Springer, CEO of DocuSign, discusses their launch of the Agreement Cloud and how it will transform companies to more easily work together and “be more agreeable.” Springer was interviewed on CNBC:

DocuSign Helping Companies Be “More Agreeable”

We’re super excited about the DocuSign Agreement Cloud. We realize that our customers have said e-signature is a fantastic foundation for their business. But they have a broader set of needs around the way they not only sign agreements but the way they prepare them and the way they manage them after they’ve been signed. So we’ve built out a broader suite of products and that’s what we’re bringing to market today.

I think it’s key, the connectedness that Slack is seeing and pushing for is very similar to what we see as well. Companies want to be, in our terminology, more agreeable. Those are the communications they want to have within their companies or their back-office functions that they’ve tried to digitally transform, but also for the front office. They really want to have a customer experience that is what the customers expect so they will be easy to do business with. We see that the Slack moves are very similar to what we’re seeing in the Agreement Cloud.

The DocuSign Agreement Cloud Explained

We Like To Talk About How DocuSign Is Unusual

We’re super excited about the core e-signature business. While we talk about the Agreement Cloud, we think that’s the broader opportunity to really make this one of the most significant cloud opportunities. We don’t in any way want to move away from the excitement we have over the course e-signature business. It’s sort of what brought us to the dance. If you think about the roughly billion dollars of revenue that we will deliver this year the bulk of it will still come from e-signature. The growth opportunities are very broad.

We like to talk about the fact that DocuSign is unusual. We serve from the smallest business to the largest enterprise and across all verticals. We are excited to talk about federal. We had our first million-dollar ACVD deal that we just announced in the quarter. So it’s not just that segment, it really is very broad. We think financial services will continue to be a driver for us and as I mentioned federal will be exciting. You’re going to see us continue to expand internationally and domestically. It really is a broad-based opportunity.

The Agreement Cloud Is Going To Be The Next Big Cloud

If you think about the overall TAM, e-signature is a $25 billion dollar market. With the broader Agreement Cloud that gets into a magnitude of many billions more, maybe doubling the overall opportunity. When you think about the competitive set it’s so early. We’re only about four or five percent penetrated in the core signature business and less on the broader ones. When we actually talk about competition, we talk about paper and manual processes. This business is so early days. We’re in the early innings. We believe that our biggest competition really is paper and manual processes. We like to say it’s a great competitive set to have because they don’t fight back very hard. It’s just a matter of time before we really are going to be able to replace and modernize those systems.

When you think about the infrastructure side, it’s a huge part of where the cloud is going. We’ve been much more focused on the application and thinking about that end-user value. But on the infrastructure side, I think it’s a hugely competitive space. It used to be looking like a two-horse race with Microsoft and Amazon. Now looking at some of the other players, such as what Google’s doing, I think you’re going to see more and more competition in that space. I don’t think it’s going to be necessarily bad for those players because it’s a really large expanding market.

On the application side, the new cloud opportunity that we see is in the Agreement Cloud. It is going to be the next big cloud because we think this is about bringing multiple clouds together. We work strongly with ERP and strongly with CRM. We’re actually finding opportunities increasingly every day to make the other cloud investments that people are making have more value before them by bringing them together. What connects them is the agreements those companies do.

The Agreement Cloud Is Going To Be The Next Big Cloud, Says DocuSign CEO Dan Springer

September 14, 2019
Huge Wave Of Digital Transformation, Says Salesforce CEO

“There’s a huge wave of digital transformation,” says Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block. “A lot of these different technologies are coming together. I have the opportunity and Mark has the opportunity to go around the world and talk to a lot of other CEOs. There’s just this huge imperative around digital transformation. Everybody needs to get closer to the customer. Everybody’s trying to improve that customer experience. That’s where Salesforce really brings value to the table.”

Keith Block, co-CEO of Salesforce, discusses the company’s blowout earnings announcement and how their growth is powered by a huge wave of digital transformation happening worldwide. Block was interviewed by Jim Cramer on CNBC:

There’s A Huge Wave Of Digital Transformation

We are so very excited. We’ve had great execution and lots of customer success. A lot of this is really powered by this wave of digital transformation that we’re seeing all over the world. There’s a huge wave of digital transformation. A lot of these different technologies are coming together. I have the opportunity and Mark has the opportunity to go around the world and talk to a lot of other CEOs. There’s just this huge imperative around digital transformation. Everybody needs to get closer to the customer. Everybody’s trying to improve that customer experience. That’s where Salesforce really brings value to the table.

There’s a huge TAM for CRM. We’re creating that TAM and we’re executing incredibly well and that’s really driven by customer success. There is this thing referred to as the 360-degree view of the customer. That is all about the walls of sales and service and marketing coming down. That is what our 360-degree platform is all about and our customers are looking for that. They’re looking for growth strategies. That’s why you see these great results.

It’s About Bringing Companies Closer To Their Customers

We have been recognized widely as one of the most innovative companies in the world. That takes two forms. One is obviously organic innovation and there’s been plenty of that in our history. That’s why we’ve been so successful and our customers keep coming back. But we also have acquisitions. We’ve got a fantastic history of execution. Whether it is the ExactTarget acquisition, or most recently, a year ago, the MuleSoft acquisition, those have all been wildly successful for our customers.

I had the opportunity to go to Milan to meet with the CEO of Unicredit (in Italy). We’re glad to welcome them to the Salesforce family. They’re going through a transformation that every financial services institution is really going through. It’s all about improving the customer experience. It’s all about reinventing the business model. It’s all about transformation in the retail bank. Unicredit gets it and we’re thrilled to welcome them to the family. They’re doing some of the things that you see being done at Barclays Bank or Citibank or many of the other great financial services institutions. It’s about digital transformation. It’s about bringing companies closer to their customers and that’s what Salesforce is doing.

Companies Are Investing In Their Growth

FedEx is a storied brand. It’s a 50-year-old company, they revolutionized the package industry. Fred Smith is an iconic visionary CEO and now they’re taking it to the next level through customer experience. They’re leveraging Einstein to have predictions and make a better customer experience around knowledge. For example, if you had a challenge in some particular way, and FedEx is high quality, but if there were a challenge an agent can help you by bringing relevant information recommended by Einstein to drive a better experience. There were a million use cases of Einstein just like that in many many industries.

What we’re seeing all over the world is this wave of digital transformation. That digital transformation begins and ends with a customer. We’re seeing CEOs invest. They’re investing in their future. They’re investing in their growth. They’re investing in customer experience across all industries, all geographies, and all segments. It has never been more important. That’s why you’re seeing this growth and you’re seeing these results (with Salesforce). We’re just co-innovating and co-creating with these customers, these companies. That’s why we’re having so much success on their behalf.

There Is A Huge Wave Of Digital Transformation, Says Salesforce CEO Keith Block

September 6, 2019
Our Machine Learning Platform Helps Brands Retain Their Customers, Says Medallia CEO

“We’re a platform that helps some of the biggest brands in the world really understand their customers in live time and communicate with them while they’re in an experience,” says Medallia CEO Leslie Stretch. “Instead of a survey after they’ve left a hotel, they communicate them while they’re there, check in on the experience and improve it. This helps them retain their customer and perhaps sell them another experience. It’s this machine learning platform that does that.”

Leslie Stretch, President and CEO of Medallia, discusses the company’s IPO and how the company uses machine learning to react to customer signals in real-time rather than after they leave an experience in an interview on CNBC:

Our Machine Learning Platform Helps Brands Retain Their Customers

We’re a Silicon Valley tech company. We’re a platform that helps some of the biggest brands in the world really understand their customers in live time and communicate with them while they’re in an experience. So instead of a survey after they’ve left a hotel, they communicate them while they’re there, check in on the experience and improve it. This helps them retain their customer and perhaps sell them another experience. It’s this machine learning platform that does that.

Anything is a signal to us, a survey, an IOT signal, a transaction, somebody buys something, they have a bad experience at the pool, or they’re on an airline and they don’t quite like the service that they’re getting, they can feed that back immediately instead of waiting until the experience is finished. We’re all about platform and signal. We’re very different from the survey companies, the feedback companies, which are the old experience economy companies. It’s the application of deep Silicon Valley technology to the problem.

The Customer Is At the Center of Every Digital Transformation

Customer experience has become really a major theme for every big brand in the world today. I also think that our technology is innovative and very different. The application of machine learning and the platform and just the operationalization of a private Silicon Valley company are really what I’ve done in the past. Just bringing basic blocking and tackling to go to market and marketing and building up the salesforce. So very simple and taking the story out to a bigger market.

We actually just signed a revenue share partnership with Salesforce. We have a partnership for Marketing Cloud with Adobe. They’re great alliances for us. We can present our machine learning, our unstructured data, into their Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Service Cloud. That’s brand new for us this year. It’s great to go to market with leaders like that. Both Adobe and Salesforce completely understand the customer is at the center of every digital transformation and we are at the center of that.

It’s Not For the Faint-Hearted, But We Invested a Ton In It

We spent more than a half a billion dollars building this plot platform. That sets us apart from the traditional simple survey vendor. We’ve spent a ton of money on the privacy layer and on the security layer. We’ve worked already for a decade with some of the biggest brands in the world whose customer information is precious. We’re HIPAA certified for healthcare as well. So we take that very seriously. It’s not for the faint-hearted, but we invested a ton in it and it’s worth it.

Our Machine Learning Platform Helps Brands Retain Their Customers, Says Medallia CEO Leslie Stretch

July 19, 2019
If You Don’t Provide a Great Customer Experience You Won’t Survive, Says Zendesk CEO

“We definitely help companies provide great customer experiences,” says Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane. “That is the new currency of today. You can have the greatest product in the world and you can have the greatest service in the world, but if you don’t provide a great customer experience you’re not going to survive. I think we are in a magical place really being part of this revolution that is empowering customers and empowering businesses to provide a much better customer experience.”

Mikkel Svane, CEO of Zendesk, discusses how the company has helped change the world of customer expectations in an interview on CNBC:

Setting a New Bar For Customer Expectations

We are a software company. We build software solutions for better customer engagement, better customer service, and better customer experiences. We have more than 100,000 brands using our software. We are 3,000 people headquartered here in San Francisco. My broken English is because of my background from Denmark, but we’ve been in San Francisco for ten years and it’s been amazing. What we’ve seen over the last 10 years is that customer expectations have changed like crazy.

We’ve had the opportunity to work and have had the privilege to work with a lot of the companies here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley that have changed the world and changed the world of customer expectations. Companies like Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest, all these companies completely changed how we use services. We have worked with all of these guys and it has helped shape us as a company. It has set a new bar for how people are expecting the customer service and the customer engagements from the products and the services they’re using today.

If You Don’t Provide a Great Customer Experience You Won’t Survive

We definitely help companies provide great customer experiences. That is the new currency of today. You can have the greatest product in the world and you can have the greatest service in the world, but if you don’t provide a great customer experience you’re not going to survive. We started very much in the world of traditional inbound customer service. But in the world of CRM (customer relationship management) all the disciplines within that touches the customer whether that be on the sales side, the shopping side, the service side, the marketing side, all of these things seamlessly flow together.

From the customer perspective, it’s just one big experience. You don’t want to know if you are talking to sales or marketing or support, you just want to have one experience. That’s why it’s important for us to help power all of these experiences and bring them together.

Competition is great. Customers go with Zendesk and customers come to us because they want to keep up with customer expectations. That’s not just about digital transformation. It’s really about staying agile, staying quick, and keeping up with the constant change of customer expectations. That’s the world we are in today. What is working today, what is fantastic today, is going to be mundane tomorrow. It’s a generational thing too. Different generations have different expectations. My kids are going to be ruthless.

Empowering Businesses To Provide a Much Better Customer Experience

What we have done most recently is that we’ve launched a new platform concept that is built on AWS called Zendesk Sunshine. It’s open, it’s super scalable. and it’s very developer friendly. It allows you as a business to tie all the different things together. Amazon Web Services is a huge free platform. Every business is moving more and more of the infrastructure to AWS. It’s because it’s an architectural change. It’s a new way of being able to tie everything together without necessarily having to rely on formal partnerships between these businesses. That’s very much what we believe in.

Our customers are serving about a billion consumers and customers every single year. It’s really like helping our customers in keeping up with the massive demand and the massive expectations of businesses today. I think we are in a magical place really being part of this revolution that is empowering customers and empowering businesses to provide a much better customer experience. We really enjoy it.

If You Don’t Provide a Great Customer Experience You Won’t Survive, Says Zendesk CEO

May 20, 2019
How to Fight Our Caveman Impulses to Create a Positive Customer Experience

This is not your granddad’s customer service advice says Adam Toporek, author of the book, Be Your Customer’s Hero: Real World Tips and Techniques for the Service Front Lines. Toporek recently was on C-Suite TV where he talked about how organizations should train and motivate their front-line employees in order to increase sales.

Front-line employees are the employees that are the first to deal with customers such as the cashier, those working on the service floor or anyone dealing with customers face to face in the store, phone or email. It’s the first level of dealing with the customer at the lowest level in the organization.

Motivate, Don’t Educate

I think education is really focused on imparting knowledge. With front-line employees knowledge isn’t enough, you need to be showing them how to use that knowledge and showing them how to understand their own feelings and their own emotions. The motivational part is actually about getting them confident with the tools and the techniques so they feel more motivated to want to go out and do a good job.

A lot of front-line employees really have difficulty with the challenges of front-line service. And when they do they sort of turtle up and shell in and you want to bring them out of that and give them that confidence.

Customer Service Versus Customer Experience

Customer experience is the entire journey, the entire experience a customer has with the organization. Customer experience involves a marketing piece they may get or an email, it’s not just a point in time. Customer service in the traditional lens is a part of customer experience. It’s more about that one to one interaction and helping to serve you in the moment.

But that may not be the entire experience. Let’s say I’m working at a bookstore and I’m behind the counter, the customer service would be while I’m helping you. Customer experience may be were the isles cleaned, were they neat and organized? All of that feeds the experience or as we talked about the customer journey.

Mentality and Mindset

Mentality and mindset is what I really wish I knew and understood when I was young and on the front-lines. Not only understanding the customers mindset but what makes them tick and why they do what they do. Also my own mindset, why am I taking something personally, why can’t I depersonalize the situation, why am I getting upset when I don’t need to be? So many front-line people, they’re not experienced in the world or in business in a lot of cases and they don’t have these skills and this lens on how we all think.

We Still Have Caveman Brains

If you look at it from the standpoint of experience, what does every experience have in common? The are all filtered through this imperfect organ called the human brain, so it behooves us to understand how that human brain works. The good news is that we live in the golden age of psychology. We’ve learned more about neuroscience and what makes humans tick in the last few decades than we have probably ever known before. The bad news is what we have learned is that we are all basically irrational. Our mind is designed to take shortcuts.

If you look at sociology, society, digital technology, all of these things have evolved very rapidly, but our brains have evolved pretty slowly. We still have, unfortunately, caveman brains which are designed to make snap judgements to survive. These snap judgements aren’t that firm when it comes to customer experience.

Making Our Caveman Brains Work For Us

Here’s how you can apply these principals to customer experience. We’ve all heard of first impressions and their is a ton of research on first impressions and they all basically say the same thing. No matter what the study is, first impressions happen subconsciously and they happen very quickly.

There is another principal called confirmation bias and that is the principal that we all want to be right, which is why politics is so much fun. What we do is ignore the evidence that tells us we’re wrong and we accept the evidence that tells us we are right. When you combine those two things that’s an important factor when you are designing a customer experience. You take a first impression and you combine that with confirmation bias and what do you have? You have a bad first impression and you are already in the hole.

The human brain is trying to tell them that that first impression and what they already believe is correct. Similarly, there is something called negativity bias which is why the evening news always leads with something like ‘your microwave is going to kill you’. We are attuned to negative information, we are always looking to what’s a threat. We give more credence to negative information than to positive information, meaning if you give a bad experience it is going to be weighted heavier than a positive experience.

What I find fascinating from a customer experience standpoint is that you can use all these psychological principals and evaluate each touch point, each place where you come in contact with a customer and say how are we violating them, how are we prepared if we set those off? How are we prepared to deal with that or our team trained for that?

The Customer is the Customer

Customers can not only be wrong, they can be nuts and mean at times, all kinds of different things. The problem with the traditional concept of ‘the customer is always right’ is that the principal behind it got lost and the phrase carried over. That was from a time that their wasn’t customer service and they were trying to teach people that the customer is valuable, their opinion is valuable.

We try to look at it as the customer is the customer. That means that you and the customer are not on the same level. It’s called customer service and we are there to serve the customer. They are our focus and they are not there to give to us. They should be decent of course and there are some lines they shouldn’t cross, but big picture, it’s customer service and we’re there to serve.

We know what a customer is in modern times and if you are a customer centric organization, what you are doing, your actions, your processes, your systems should all be revolving around the customer.

August 31, 2016