0:00:00 - Alex Shevelenko
Welcome to the Experience-focused Leaders! I'm delighted to introduce you to Mary Poppen. Mary is the President and Chief Customer Officer of the HRIZONS Employee Experience Division. She's a Professor of Practice at Michigan State University, teaching in the Customer Experience Management (CXM) Master’s Degree program, the only one of its kind. Mary is also an angel investor, SuccessFactors guru and someone I worked with. And she's authored an amazingly relevant book for us — “Goodbye, Churn. Hello, Growth!” Mary, so good to see you again!
0:00:43 - Mary Poppen
Hi, Alex, great to see you! Thanks for having me today!
0:01:06 - Alex Shevelenko
You were leading the post-deployment initiatives at SuccessFactors and you were doing it for a company that was delivering employee experience. There was an extra burden on creating an amazing experience. So I've seen you do all that. You're the MVP and the rock star of that universe. We haven't chatted for many years. And then, on LinkedIn, I just see that you're joining companies, leading companies, getting LinkedIn and Glint, and now you're running your own division in an entrepreneurial way. So I just have so many potential areas where we could go today on what it takes to create great customer experience, great employee experience, and where do you want to take it? What's on top of your mind for the audience and RELAYTO at this podcast on creating great experiences? Where do you think there are big gaps today in the experience world and where can we start making a change?
0:02:19 - Mary Poppen
Wow, you're right! We could start in so many places. Maybe starting with the linkage between employee and customer experience would be fun. I do think it makes sense to people. But organizations are still not focusing in many cases on both or even one of those experiences. Companies that focus on both employee and customer experience in parallel and see the synergies and the linkages have incredible results: stock prices increase, retention of customers and employees goes up. There's just so much goodness from having a focus on helping employees feel engaged and important. Helping the customers feel like they're getting a lot of value and that they're an important part of the company as well.
0:03:06 - Alex Shevelenko
So this is super fascinating and, obviously, for those that are relatively new to this. If my employee is just upset, can't wait to shut down on the clock, doesn't really care that much about the mission, and is maybe the type of human being that is not very other-oriented, in terms of enjoying helping people. That sounds like a very bad combination for customer growth and happiness. Obviously, when the customers are not doing well, they're tougher too. It's tough for employees. It's tough all around for the business. But if you had to put the cart and the horse together, which we know we want them both, where do you think is the start and does it really differ by business in your view?
0:04:07 - Mary Poppen
So my perspective is you can start with both in parallel and get the right people in a room to talk about it. You need to have HR in the room and the customer leader to talk about what is the experience of the employees who are delivering a customer experience. By the way, there are customer-facing and non-customer-facing roles, too. So the product team that is completely out of touch and not engaged to understand their customers is building things that aren't going to ultimately bring value. That's not good for the business.
0:04:45 - Alex Shevelenko
Because they're creators. There's a culture of that. We celebrate creators, we don't necessarily celebrate creators that connect to the audience.
0:05:05 - Mary Poppen
But then when these creators go, “Wait a second. I just created this amazing functionality but no one's adopting it. It must be CS's fault. They're not rolling it out or enabling customers on it. Or customers don't get it.” But if they understand the business context around what they're building and how customers are going to use it and the use case, the product is built based on that, the customer-facing team, the delivery team understands how to help the customer roll it out in their organization. And then there are measures in place so the customer actually sees the impact and the value. This is the beautiful sort of thread. From the product design and being able to roll it out and then customers actually adopting it and getting value. And if you can circle it back and share those stories with the product, all of a sudden there's this shared vision and shared vault that it isn't just “I'm going to build this, you're going to implement it, walk away and the customer will use it or not.”
It gets everybody into their role in the story. It's an ongoing journey rather than a one-and-done implementation if you will.
0:06:25 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, I think there's a shortcut meme that we're using, and I'm sure I haven't invented it. I stole it from somebody like you at some point, which is that everybody in customer success, sales, product, and R&D needs to be thinking about those components. But even there, we need to remind ourselves that.
The job is not to answer a customer's question. The job is to get them to success and make sure that, whatever we interpret that question, we dig what's underneath that so we could cycle that back to the product, design and say, “Hey, we're getting a lot of questions. We thought this was pretty. I thought it was obvious. I thought it was a great idea, but seems like I could have stepped on my own toe here.” You know this. So how do you create that culture of humility where there are a lot of smart, let's say, motivated people? We don't have a problem where people are demotivated. There are just a lot of moving pieces and you have to remember the product, respond to the question quickly and strategically. There are a lot of those questions coming in. What have you seen the most successful organizations do to create that 360?
0:08:15 - Mary Poppen
It's really easy to get into a cycle of being reactive, right? And if departments don't communicate, interact or share information and insights, then it just perpetuates that sort of reactive culture and mindset that my job is X. Have you ever heard that? That's not my job.
0:08:40 - Alex Shevelenko
That's not my job, yeah.
0:08:55 - Mary Poppen
Well, it may not be your job, but somebody presented an issue to you. The mindset is around our mission, what we are trying to accomplish and what that means to our customers. How do we help our customers get there? And then, what is your role in it?
So, it's painting a picture around that shared vision and helping people understand how they contribute, but how others contribute too. That's where they see where they can work together, where they can make improvements. But I think the bigger part of it is they understand that at the end of the day, they're part of the impact for the customer. It isn't just we have a customer success organization so, by the way, it's your job to just deliver customer value. You have to figure it out. “Oh, we had customers leave. It's your fault.” No, we didn't have a solution that the customers could tie to value, so that was the problem, right? But if you can build that shared mindset around ownership and accountability and help people understand how they need to work with others in the organization to deliver the outcome, it becomes a “help me — help you” mindset instead of “this is my role and this is what I deliver”.
0:10:15 - Alex Shevelenko
Roles are convenient but problematic in organizations that want to move fast because they just create artificial barriers. But what about large organizations? Even if we are a smaller organization, we need to be deliberate about reminding ourselves what's going on right now. When I was in larger organizations, it was tough.
So when we have a Zoom meeting, we have a persona that shows up and their name in the Zoom is RELAYTO Customer In Search Of Wow. There's actually a person underneath this. Her name is KD. She's awesome. She kind of reacts when somebody does something really cool from a customer perspective, to remind everybody in this sort of crazy distributed world that there's a real human being underneath that. There are, in our case, many amazing beings. They've got a lot going on and there's a joy in helping somebody. That just makes life meaningful. You want to help your colleagues.
But there's joy in having this purpose and then what we do as well in those meetings we regularly go and really tell what those customers are doing on our platform. So there's a stake like this customer is solving diabetes too. Do you have a grandma that wants to get access to this pretty soon? We're helping them get this drug out of you faster or better in this market or whatever. There could be many others and that humanizes it. It becomes not a software thing. It's like we're helping organizations that tackle important things. You know gazillions of examples of best practices. What do you want to share with our audience? What they could go and take away immediately in building this customer centricity across marketing, sales, all functions?
0:12:49 - Mary Poppen
Often the challenge comes from teams not having the right processes or systems to support the delivery that's desired. So the ideal customer journey can only be reached if people have the resources and tools and are incentivized to take the right actions. Unfortunately, employees are waiting for their leadership to provide that vision, processes and tools. For example, how should sales do a handoff to customer success and what customer success needs to do in that process? To then go into a customer with an understanding that's already been built of the customer for months. In many cases, the worst thing you can do, in my opinion, is walk into a customer and go, "Okay, I'm your CSM. What do you want to do?"
We've spent three months talking about it. But the problem is a lot of times leadership hasn't taken steps to define that process, the systems and handoff, enable their team and then incentivize that behavior. But if you're an employee in a company like that, fear not, there are things you can do. You can start to role model a better process. You reach out. I could reach out to you, Alex, and say, "Hey, can we do a quick 30-minute handoff on this customer? I just did this from a sales transition perspective. Here's how it went."
There's a grassroots opportunity for people to raise their hand and be vocal about what's not working or even start to take action themselves. That ultimately spirals. I think all too often employees feel like they don't have the power or they're going to overstep by trying to take those actions, when in reality, it's going to help make the organization better. Anybody listening who's an employee that's feeling kind of stifled, like they don't have what they need to actually deliver a good customer experience, start to raise the challenges, let people know, be vocal. Just do it.
0:15:20 - Alex Shevelenko
Hey, all RELAYTO folks listening to this! Just do it! I think this is exactly right. We have folks from the Philippines, Latvia and Brazil.
Different cultures have different incentives for leading. Maybe taking a follower role. I feel like a lot of customer success organizations can be not in the same cultural mind frame as the sales organization. Or it could be not only a different function but a different geography. There's a major culture for the organizations, but every team has its own mini cultures that develop a little bit based on leaders.
A lot of what I find I'm doing is I'm like, "You're the CEO of this project!" But it needs a reminder, right? There is a "Hey, if this is a safe decision, you can't go wrong, you don't need to check-in." You can go over the fundamental principles here. What are you finding that gives people confidence?
Especially if they don't come from those cultures where it's like "grab the bull by the horn" and whatever happens happens. To go and be that: be the bulldozer that makes customers successful if that's necessary and pushing somebody's accountability if they're not responsive.
0:17:18 - Mary Poppen
I think there are a few things. Transparency in terms of what's happening in the company. Sharing with everybody the overall status and what are the priorities to make improvements is one thing. And then communicating that if you have ideas, bring them forward. Communicating that it's a safe environment is a really important thing. A lot of times we think, "Well, it's just part of our culture. People just know they can speak up." But that's not true. You have to sometimes be very direct about it to give employees that comfort that, "Okay, they said they would listen and they have an open-door policy." So they trust that. But the first time that it backfires, right?
0:18:04 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah.
0:18:06 - Mary Poppen
Then it's going to take forever to dig out. It's really important to follow through and for leadership to be transparent, over-communicate and give that sense of “You're in it with us, we're all in it together, so your voice matters.” Do you remember SuccessFactors? Our CEO, Lars, had asked everybody how do we become more efficient, how do we reduce costs. And people started like, "Don't have the paper coffee cups. Everybody should have their own coffee mug."
I still have one right here. It allowed people to have a voice, but it also created a lot of great ideas that we could execute as a company, right?
I've seen things like that work really successfully. The other thing I would say is if you have customer satisfaction surveys and employee engagement surveys, those are great opportunities to understand and dig in. Where are the gaps, what's going on, right? And to get a pulse. If you can combine the insights from both of those, you now wonder what is your customer saying is missing or what they need. Or what's working well, even better, versus what are your employees saying they need to help the customer be successful, or what's missing. And now, if you can link those together and start to prioritize action based on that, you start to see improvement. But even better, communicate to the employees and the customers that you heard them and that you're taking action on it, what the action is, and then communicate progress. That's how people feel like they're being brought along in the journey and they feel invested. So it lets employees feel engaged. Customers feel like why would they leave? They're being listened to, and they have a strong partnership.
0:20:06 - Alex Shevelenko
This notion of feeling hurt is just a fundamental human need, right? I personally had to work and continue to work harder at it, where I messed it up. You need to remind me this is a conversation where I'm a listener, not a problem solver or even motivator.
It's hard to context switch when you're in an execution, decisive mode, and remember to kind of, "Okay, this is where I need to exercise the listening because this is an important point of connecting." So how do you advise that? If we drill into this, you're doing a lot of employee engagement surveys. How do you advise the balance between heard and executed on, and sometimes you get a lot of ideas. Some of them are not as good like, "Let's stop using cups." Some of them are totally off.
You're like, "Oh my god, I can't believe everybody just heard that idea! Because that is absolutely not where we're going." So there are these moments when you want to point intelligently and when you need to listen.
0:21:52 - Mary Poppen
I think part of it is acknowledging that the person has an opinion and a voice, and thanking them for expressing it. And then being able to share where we're going and why that suggestion at this point in time isn't necessarily going to fit right with the priorities. But that will be taken into advisement as things progress.
So it kind of comes back to the messaging of feeling heard, feeling that people are grateful that I'm at least sharing my thoughts. But being transparent about it aligns or doesn't with the vision. And this is why for a leader recognition is the first step.
Awareness is the first step to fixing something is that you can be real and genuine with your team saying I know there's times I probably am not going to, you know, give feedback on your idea or I might be off already exploring something else before you're done sharing your idea with me. So I just asked you to raise your hand and let me know, right, that you have more to say or you're not done with your idea, right that you have more to say, or you're not done with your idea, things like that. So if you kind of invite people to let you know when you're doing, what you know you do, that's, that's that safety of being able, right to have that open dialogue and give, give them, put the power back on in them, right, empower them to be able to speak up.
0:23:44 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, and I think kind of want to build on that, because a lot of things that come up with customers right, sometimes it's communication, sometimes it's like maybe junior team members, like maybe it's a new product, you're learning things A lot of it is we make mistakes or learning things.
0:24:00 - Mary Poppen
A lot of it is we make mistakes.
0:24:01 - Alex Shevelenko
And so one of the things that I like to say to my team is like I'm opinionated, but I make the most mistakes of everyone. So, and you know, and so I kind of create this, try to create an environment where it's safe to not just have ideas and things but also to say, hey, you know what, we tried it this way, you know we missed this or we had the best intentions. It didn't work out. Let's debrief and build a culture of safety around acknowledging that and, you know, not getting to the blaming thing, which you know is very naturally, you know, you know, just human reaction, and I have to. I don't know if I always do that, my team will give me 360, but I become better at okay, why is this wrong? Which makes somebody, why is this not working, which makes somebody defensive to okay, what can we seems like this is really useful. What can we do to learn from this type of context? It's just a small change, right?
0:25:05 - Mary Poppen
But.
0:25:05 - Alex Shevelenko
I think it enables this culture that we're all in this together to you know, debug the customer experience. Debug the employee experience. Debug the product right, which is where the bug debugging is considered. Debug the product right, which is where the bug debugging is considered. Debug the sales journey of a buyer who we want to make them feel comfortable. What are you seeing on that? On this particular topic right, having worked in, you know very innovative organizations that move fast. You know the openness to making mistakes.
0:25:41 - Mary Poppen
Well, I think you hit it right on the head, which is building a learning culture, so giving people guardrails but room to explore. And, by the way, the word like the term intelligent risks I was going to say you hear that a lot as part of our culture we take intelligent risks, but if you don't define what intelligent risk means, people employees still don't understand it. So you kind of have to define like it's not okay, Alex, that you negotiate a whole new legal contract on your own, because that's a big risk. So that's an area.
0:26:20 - Alex Shevelenko
That's not an intelligent risk, that's a big risk, so that's an area.
0:26:22 - Mary Poppen
That's not an intelligent risk, that's a risk risk, but if a customer asks for, you know, an extra half hour of your time, right, and you've got time in the day, even though you might go over, you know, be overutilized or whatever from a services perspective, like it's okay to say yes, you know, and let's come back and figure out why did they need more time? Why did we estimate the hours wrong? Right, so giving them the freedom to do kind of what's right for the customer again within bounds, but letting them explore and then when it you know, when there aren't like optimal business results, looking at it to say what can we learn from it? What can we do different? Right. So it gives people some freedom in their role to explore and make decisions and hopefully find even better ways to do things. Right, but it's that learning mindset. It's okay to do things differently than just you know, follow this template. If you have a better idea, let's explore. Just you know, follow this template.
If you have a better idea, let's explore it. And if you happen to go outside of this process and it doesn't work, let's regroup, debrief, learn from it, and just not do it again, right? So it's that feeling like they're not going to get in trouble, but we're going to look at it as a learning opportunity.
0:27:42 - Alex Shevelenko
So one of the kind of the you brought up examples spend the extra 30 minutes with a customer right, which is a great example, and we also talked earlier about reactive versus proactive. So one of the challenges that I think many organizations feel about experiences is that they have different types of customers and sometimes they're small or it's a new unit you don't have like, hey, we're focused on these types of businesses and we're focused on these very large accounts. You're just it's, it's one, one team trying to balance a broad portfolio of customers and products and so on, and the individuals need to make resource allocation decisions right. And if I am a people pleaser, a customer pleaser, a pleaser right, which I think, believe it or not, I realized in some areas I am a pleaser, you probablyaser a pleaser right, which I think, believe it or not, I realized in some areas I am a pleaser you probably would never have guessed that, but, like, I think there's a lot more nicer people you know that I work with than me. But like, if I, if I'm sometimes like trying to not, you know, like you know, be thoughtful of other people, oh, my god, you know other, like, some amazing people that like are just heart of gold that want to keep everybody, you know, happy. But by keeping everybody happy we introduce a risk to the business, right? Because, you know, sad story is that not every customer is always, you know, the same potential in terms of the revenue for the business or the impact of something going wrong with your flagship customer is much higher risk, the impact of things going badly right before renewal are much, you know, higher than the other times. And there's all these tradeoffs, right, the you know, and there's all these trade-offs, right, and.
But at the same time, you also want to build a culture where you are able to support the small but very important customers that maybe are not the biggest revenue carriers, but you want to have some kind of a scalable approach. So I kind of always get torn right, like because, on the one hand, you know I want us to make every customer feel special, but that's a you know I want us to make every customer feel special, but that's a you know so, and we can use content in our case, like it relates to, you know, relates to world and success factors. We had a content, you know, content solutions. We could build in resources that provide a kind of a scalable low touch, you know, or automated support capabilities. But it's hard, right, like you know, to always balance it out, and so I'm like always going in like great that you supported this small customer, but you know, for the small customers that have similar problems, maybe we need to have a repeatable resource right Versus for the major customer or major employee campaign.
That's very different. Maybe we need something that's really bespoke and helping people think about it like that. You must've dealt this with. You know 10,000 times more complexity than I have, so guide us a little bit. What have you learned from all those trade-offs? How do you help people think through that trade-off?
0:31:06 - Mary Poppen
You know, I've seen it over and over again with startups who grow and become fast-growing companies and then even within public companies, different business units even have kind of similar challenges. Because you get to a point when you start you are all hands on deck. It's a high touch experience because you have to find out what's your ICP, how do they, you know, use the software and what are the best use cases? Right, and then even by industry and you start to think about all these things. But until you have enough customers to really understand that process and what it should look like, what does success look like? It's sort of all hands on deck. Then, of course, you grow to a point that it isn't scalable to do that. But it's hard to let go of that model because that's all you know as a company and that's the culture, right. And so then you have to start introducing, you know, segmentation and looking at customers of this size. What does success look like for them? What have we done for them that's successful? And now we can look at what can we automate, what would give them the same value and make them feel important but less touch? And then you can infuse parts along the journey where they do still get that personalized feeling, but it really kind of starts with having to look at the journey. What does success look like? But it really kind of starts with having to look at the journey. What does success look like, find out what you can automate and then start to move to that segmentation and to those models.
The important part about the migration with employees is to let them know that we're doing this to help customers get value faster, put more in the hands of the customer, but allow the employees to touch more customers. From a success perspective, you know, in a strategic perspective, instead of answering the same challenges over and over and over right, and so it helps the employees feel more engaged, they're touching more customers, bringing more value. Then the higher touch customers they can take advantage of the self-serve, the digital model when they want to, but they have the opportunity, they have the handholding because they're willing to pay for it too, right, and from a revenue perspective, you kind of can't. You have to put more eyes on it. So it's a natural kind of progression around.
You know, say, 20 to 30 million in revenue where you start and depending on your business and stuff, but where you start to see customer segmentation needed to help the team scale, because you can't hire a CSM for every customer you bring on right At some point. Yeah, and so the model ultimately becomes defining what does success look like, what does the journey look like and how do we scale it? And then that's what you can apply for your smaller customers, because they will feel like it's personalized. At the end of the day, they're going to get great outcomes.
0:34:13 - Alex Shevelenko
You've just taken the people out of certain steps, out of the equation in some areas that are not as valued. And I think that leads us to. You know, one of you know I'd love to get your comment on one of the quotes that we picked up from you. You said in one of your interviews and once you get a customer, you should focus on keeping them for life. I think it's taking out of context. Obviously, you know, without a question, you know it's much easier to keep a customer sometimes than to acquire a new one.
But what do you think this is like? You know, having grown with companies for so many years, right, like what's your take on? You know customers they're just hard. You know they're just hard to work with, right, you have limited resources and we're starting to see even be like in the pilots we're going well, I'm not sure like I want to work that hard to get you on board as a customer. You're not organized, you're not respectful, you're asking for discounts before talking about any value. You know, like I'm not here working at a bazaar. We're building something like valuable, right? So for me, and maybe I'm like a little bit going to put too much value in what we're building right and how important that is. But we do think we're unique, and so I'm struggling a little bit with this sort of selection, because there's a part of me that is, hey, customer obsessed, customer centric. But then there must be a realization that not every customer is right for every business, every product. How do you help organizations think that through?
0:35:53 - Mary Poppen
So it is true. So it is true there are some companies that aren't a good fit, you know, for certain solutions, either because of customers you have very few of them, because you learn quickly you know which ones aren't a good fit. But I think that the reality is, if you don't think about your customers like the relationship with your customers as an evolution right, meet them where they are and think about how do you continue to move them along in maturity and sort of evolve not only the relationship but the value you're bringing, and so a lot of customers I mean just thinking about you know talent management as an option. There are still companies out there that do you know talent management and word docs, you know and things. And so it's meeting the customer at the very beginning. If they're really immature, saying, “Here's how we can help you. Here's how we'll grow together. And then in those quarterly value review meetings, it's looking at when we started, what's the progress we've made and where are we going.”
Now the challenging customers are the ones that are pushing the boundaries of what you've built. They're mature, they're forward-thinking and they're ready. They need your solution today, but they're using it at kind of maximum complexity. So the challenge there is how do you keep progressing those customers and at the end of the day there might be, let's just say, 5% of your customer base or let's just say 3%, that are at the top of that maturity level Do you want to invest there right now or don't you? You do run the risk of them, if there is another solution in the market, leaving. But if you invest now it doesn't mean you'll get more customers longer as well. So you got to kind of balance it. But that was a really long answer to say there's a maturity curve.
0:38:12 - Alex Shevelenko
The maturity curve is very interesting, right, because that was missing in my statement, but it was kind of implied and I think that's a great way of thinking about it. So there's basically these two. There's, like, the average customer and that's probably the in some ways good, right, because it's less friction. And then you do want some of those challenging flagship customers, because they'll make you better, especially if their vision aligns with yours. Because they'll make you better, especially if their vision aligns with yours. But what you don't want is those challenging customers. If their vision does not align with your vision, right, like that's a distraction.
And then there is the less mature ones and that's, you know, maybe you need to provide educational resources, maybe they're not a customer fit right and you just need to be able to say no. I think that's and I think it's it sort of is a a real interesting question. You know, do you does? Does who says no? Is it because I don't think an average sales organization says no? So does it come from from, from, you know, customer success, professional services, organizations to say, hey, this is this is not going to end well.
0:39:22 - Mary Poppen
Well, all the most common story is that it ends the end of the contract. Maybe they get out a little bit sooner first year, right, where you haven't been able to get them off the ground, they're not really getting value, they're not using it, in which case, right, they churn and that's the opportunity for the learning. But hopefully you can identify where were the disconnects. What did we not establish as alignment from the very beginning? Then you get better at putting those things in place in this process.
I think it's hard early on because you think you can meet their needs right, and if all of their business cases and use cases aren't discussed or all of their sort of outcomes aren't defined, that's where you get into trouble. And so if you get better about asking those questions up front and saying, yes, our solution matches that outcome, if they want something completely you know out of the realm, you can walk away earlier saying, well, we can do these three things, but we can't do these four things, you know. So I think, especially for a startup, it's really hard to figure that out before running into some of those challenges.
0:40:42 - Alex Shevelenko
Got it. Mary, as we're wrapping up our discussion, you know there's so many things that are still kind of left out there, but so for me, like three key questions, questions are you know you over your career right? You've looked at, you know, customer experience. You've looked at employee experience. You're leading your own organizations where you can influence both. What have you seen change the most? You know in at least software driven businesses that we've been a part of, but but you've supported all sorts of organizations. So I'd be curious you know what's your take?
0:41:21 - Mary Poppen
I think the technology and the appetite for data, and using that data to gain insights and start making data-driven decisions, have been probably the biggest evolutions that I've seen. Whether it's in customer experience, employee experience or other user experience, AI has really been game-changing. It is starting to look at relationships and patterns in data, with new technologies behind the scenes, raising the most relevant insights and information.
What's cool is you're starting to see relationships and things you may not ever have known existed right, and you can do that within functional tools you know, like a CRM or like a support. You know software. But what's really cool is now people are starting to recognize the opportunity to go beyond that and start to look at the linkage of the insights and data across those systems, which allows the opportunity then for linkage of EX and CX and all of the stakeholder experiences to kind of come together in a total experience. So I'm excited about that. Maybe I'm a little bit, maybe I'm a little biased, that we've gotten further than we have, but I see the appetite and companies building up those capabilities, which I think is really exciting.
0:42:52 - Alex Shevelenko
This is really helpful. Second, of the last series of questions, we've talked a little bit about the power of repeatable, scalable answers, right, that are maybe visual and kind of have evolve over time, right, like where you know we started, we used to start with some sort of PDF handbooks. You know, some organizations still use them, maybe the same ones that are using WordDocs for talent management, right, some people fax stuff still. I'll fax you the instructions, right, I'll fax you the instructions, right. And then, you know, we, a lot of our listeners, a lot of our customers, tend to be kind of innovative on this and they're saying, well, I could use great content to support, you know, customers on their own, employers on their own, or it could be a resource.
I'm a new employee, I'm a new team member, I don't know everything. Right, the products are complex, customer needs are complex. You know, know everything right. The products are complex, customer needs are complex, partner needs are complex. Is there a way for me to navigate through that efficiently? That's what we're seeing. Is that what you're seeing? You're seeing a movement towards more, better content, documentation.
0:44:10 - Mary Poppen
Yes, and I like to refer to it as personalization at scale. So there's now opportunities because, remember it used to be, marketing has always been trying to do this, which is get the right message to the right stakeholder. But what happens is sort of this generic message goes out to all of your contacts at a customer right, or to the same prospects in different industries, and so the personalization aspect has been really hard. Also, from a customer experience like here's your, you know, implementation experience, it's exactly the same for every customer when actually, again going back to maturity, some might need different things at different times. And then on the employee experience side, you know, when you come into a sales role versus a customer success role, versus an HR role, you have different type of enablement that you need to do.
Some is shared right, a culture, et cetera, but some is very role specific. From a content perspective, we now have the opportunity to start to service content by role, by level, by customer. And you can really start to personalize experiences with content. That is an incredible game-changing place to be from where we were with PDFs. Even the last couple of years it's still been a blanket approach to content and I see AI, RELAYTO opportunities to really personalize the experience.
0:45:53 - Alex Shevelenko
So to help you back to kind of that marketing dream that never happened, because we're still getting you know, an admin is getting the same email as the CEO, right, yeah, etc. Great. And speaking of content, you wrote a book. You know, obviously, in a topic near and dear to us. What was your biggest takeaway? What was the surprise for you in writing, you know, or is it just a consolidation of what you've already seen, or was there something new that you want to share with our audience?
0:46:22 - Mary Poppen
It was kind of a culmination of putting you know pen to paper, fingers to keyboard around, kind of crystallizing my thoughts about what works with customer experience, employee experience, what are the things that I saw that you know overlap, what worked, what didn't work, and an opportunity to kind of put that all together to help other companies understand some of the pitfalls or implications of certain you know decisions or processes and to help them sidestep you know those minds and accelerate their results. So I think the biggest aha someone suggested to me that I write it with kind of a fictional you know character throughout and I hadn't thought about that and so I started that journey and it was really helpful for me to sort of organize my thoughts around Hannah, who's in the boardroom, you know, delivering a message about business results and how the company is, you know, seeing a decline but how customer intelligence can save the day, and so, using that as sort of my framework, I was able to, I think, put the content together in a more consumable way.
0:47:39 - Alex Shevelenko
You were customer centric in writing a book about customer centricity. I think this is a way to go. I love it. Last question you have now students, a very unique program, and so what is the number one like if you have your last lecture kind of parting thoughts for your students let's imagine we're all sitting in the classroom virtual in our case. It was you what would be, you know, the one nugget that you would leave us with on creating, you know, world-class customer experience, management experiences.
0:48:18 - Mary Poppen
Starting somewhere is really important. You don't have to be 100% ready to roll out results and new initiatives. You get 80% there and then roll it out. Too often, people get into analysis paralysis instead of taking action. Taking any action and making a step forward is better than trying to come up with the perfect plan. It's never going to be perfect. It's always going to be changing. So take action as soon as possible.
0:48:53 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, I'm going to flatter myself when I celebrate myself for taking the action to reconnect with you, Mary, because this was phenomenal. I have notes to take and share. This was my team. It was just a wealth of knowledge on all the things that we care about. But I think, more importantly, every great organization needs to care about if they really care about their customers, they need to really care about their employees and that needs to permeate throughout. So, Mary, thank you so much for sharing your insights. How can people find you, buy your book? You know? Tell us how we can follow up on all this knowledge.
0:49:33 - Mary Poppen
You can find me on LinkedIn under Mary Poppen. So please connect with me, and my book is on Amazon. Goodbye churn, hello growth, and I appreciate you reaching out. Alex, it's so good to see you. We're gonna have to catch up more often than you know, every like five to 10 years.
0:49:52 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, so great to have you, Mary, and we're definitely going to be thinking. I think it would be worth for us to get together and think through how you can permeate with your philosophy, your insights into I actually you know reaches, the way we people process information and solve problems and create connections. So I was really fortunate and will continue to try to download everything from your brain into scalable, content-based technology for customer experience and employee experience. So, thank you so much. You will be named in our product. There's going to be a Mary Poppins module. I think that's the feedback. So you know you're part of the journey. Thank you again.
0:50:47 - Mary Poppen
Thank you.