See the show notes for this episode: S 01 | Ep 42 Revolutionizing Customer Experience: Unleashing the Power of Employee Engagement | Show notes.
0:00:00 - Alex Shevelenko
Welcome to 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, a SuccessFactors guru, and someone I worked with. She’s authored an amazingly relevant book for us — “Goodbye, Churn. Hello, Growth!” Mary, it’s 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 in 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 in 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. I have so many potential areas where we could go today on what it takes to create a great customer experience, a great employee experience, and where you want to take it. What’s on top of your mind for the audience and RELAYTO in 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 who 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 person who 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, it’s tougher for everyone. It’s tough for employees, and 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 in both, where do you think the start is, and does it really differ by business in your view?
0:04:07 - Mary Poppen
So my perspective is that 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 along with the customer leader to discuss 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 around that. We celebrate creators; we don’t necessarily celebrate creators who connect with 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 is adopting it. It must be customer success's fault. They're not rolling it out or enabling customers on it. Or customers don’t get it.” However, if they understand the business context around what they're building and how customers are going to use it, as well as 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. Then there are measures in place so the customer actually sees the impact and the value.
This is the beautiful thread that connects product design, the ability to roll it out, and then customers actually adopting it and getting value. If you can circle it back and share those stories with the product team, all of a sudden there’s this shared vision and shared understanding 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 involved in 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 probably 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 of that.
The job is not just to answer a customer's question. The job is to help them achieve success and to ensure that, regardless of how we interpret that question, we dig into what’s underneath it so we can relay that back to the product team and design. We can say, “Hey, we’re getting a lot of questions. We thought this was clear. I thought it was obvious. I thought it was a great idea, but it seems like I may have stepped on my own toes here.” You know this. So how do you create a culture of humility where there are many smart, motivated people? We don’t have a problem with demotivation; there are just a lot of moving pieces, and you have to remember the product while responding to the questions quickly and strategically. There are many questions coming in. What have you seen the most successful organizations do to create that 360-degree perspective?
0:08:15 - Mary Poppen
It's really easy to get into a cycle of being reactive, right? If departments don't communicate, interact, or share information and insights, 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 someone presented an issue to you. The mindset revolves around our mission, what we are trying to accomplish, and what that means for our customers. How do we help our customers get there? And then, what is your role in it?
It's about painting a picture of that shared vision and helping people understand how they contribute, as well as how others contribute too. That’s where they see how they can work together and where they can make improvements. The bigger part of it is that they understand that, at the end of the day, they are part of the impact for the customer. It isn’t just that we have a customer success organization; it’s not just your job to 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 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 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.
When we have a Zoom meeting, we have a persona that shows up, and their name in Zoom is "RELAYTO Customer In Search Of Wow." There's actually a person underneath this. Her name is KD. She's awesome. She reacts when somebody does something really cool from a customer perspective to remind everybody in this crazy distributed world that there’s a real human being underneath that. In our case, there are many amazing people. They have a lot going on, and there’s joy in helping someone. That just makes life meaningful. You want to help your colleagues.
But there's joy in having this purpose, and what we do in those meetings is regularly share what those customers are doing on our platform. For example, there's a stake in saying, "This customer is solving diabetes." Do you have a grandma who wants to get access to this pretty soon? We're helping them get this drug out to you faster or better in this market or whatever. There could be many others, and that humanizes it. It becomes not just a software thing; it's about helping organizations tackle important issues. There are gazillions of examples of best practices. What do you want to share with our audience that they could immediately take away in building customer centricity across marketing, sales, and all functions?
Often, the challenge comes from teams not having the right processes or systems to support the desired delivery. 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 does customer success need to do in that process? You should go into a customer meeting with an understanding that has already been built about the customer over months. In many cases, the worst thing you can do, in my opinion, is walk into a customer meeting and say, "Okay, I'm your CSM. What do you want to do?"
We've spent three months talking about it. But the problem is that a lot of times, leadership hasn't taken steps to define that process, the systems and handoffs, enable their team, and incentivize that behavior. 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 can 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 hands 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 that 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, which may include taking a follower role. I feel like a lot of customer success organizations may not share the same cultural mindset as the sales organization. It could be not only a different function but also a different geography. There’s a major culture within the organizations, but every team has its own mini-cultures that develop based on their leaders.
A lot of what I find myself doing is saying, "You're the CEO of this project!" But it needs a reminder, right? There is a sense of, "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 cultures where it's like, "Grab the bull by the horns," and whatever happens, happens. Go and be that: be the bulldozer that makes customers successful if that's necessary and push someone's accountability if they're not responsive.
0:17:18 - Mary Poppen
I think there are a few things. Transparency regarding what’s happening in the company is important. Sharing the overall status with everyone and outlining the priorities for making improvements is one aspect. Additionally, communicating that if employees have ideas, they should bring them forward. It’s crucial to convey that it’s a safe environment. 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 sometimes have to be very direct about it to give employees the comfort that, “Okay, they said they would listen and they have an open-door policy.” So they trust that. But the first time 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, asked everyone how we could become more efficient and how we could reduce costs. People started suggesting things like, "Let’s not use paper coffee cups. Everyone should have their own coffee mug."
I still have one right here. It allowed people to have a voice, and it also generated 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 that 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? It’s a chance to get a pulse. If you can combine the insights from both of those, you can wonder what your customers are saying is missing or what they need, or what's working well. Even better, you can compare that with what your employees are saying they need to help the customer be successful or what’s missing. Now, if you can link those together and start to prioritize action based on that, you will start to see improvement.
But even better, communicate to the employees and 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. This engagement lets employees feel involved, while customers might wonder why they would leave. They're being listened to, and they have a strong partnership.
0:20:06 - Alex Shevelenko
This notion of feeling heard is just a fundamental human need, right? I personally had to work—and continue to work—harder at it, especially when I messed it up. You need to remind me that this is a conversation where I'm a listener, not a problem solver or even a motivator.
It's hard to context switch when you're in an execution and decisive mode, and remember to say, "Okay, this is where I need to exercise listening because this is an important point of connection." So how do you advise on that? If we drill into this, you're doing a lot of employee engagement surveys. How do you advise balancing being heard and executing on ideas? Sometimes you get a lot of ideas, and 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 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. Then, you can share where we're going and why that suggestion, at this point in time, isn't necessarily going to fit with the priorities. However, it will be taken into advisement as things progress.
So it kind of comes back to the messaging of feeling heard and feeling that people are grateful that I'm at least sharing my thoughts. Being transparent about it aligns—or doesn’t—with the vision. This is why recognition is the first step for a leader.
Awareness is the first step to fixing something. You can be real and genuine with your team by saying, "I know there are times when I probably won’t give feedback on your idea, or I might be off exploring something else before you're done sharing your idea with me." So I just ask you to raise your hand and let me know if you have more to say or if you’re not done with your idea. Things like that create an invitation for people to let you know when you’re doing what you know you do. That’s the safety of being able to have open dialogue and empowering them to speak up.
0:23:44 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, I want to build on that. A lot of the things that come up with customers are sometimes related to communication. Sometimes it's junior team members, or maybe it's a new product that you're learning about. A lot of it is that we make mistakes or are learning things.
0:24:00 - Mary Poppen
A lot of it is that we make mistakes.
0:24:01 - Alex Shevelenko
One of the things I like to say to my team is that I’m opinionated, but I make the most mistakes of everyone. I try to create an environment where it's safe to not only have ideas but also to say, "Hey, you know what? We tried it this way, and we missed this" or "We had the best intentions, but it didn't work out." Let's debrief and build a culture of safety around acknowledging that, without falling into the blame game, which is a very natural human reaction. I have to acknowledge that I don’t always do this—my team will give me a 360 review on that—but I've become better at shifting from "Why is this wrong?" which can make someone defensive, to "What can we learn from this?" It’s just a small change, right?
0:25:05 - Alex Shevelenko
I think it enables a culture where we're all in this together to debug the customer experience, debug the employee experience, and debug the product. This is where bug debugging is considered. We also need to debug the sales journey of a buyer whom we want to make feel comfortable. What are you seeing on that? On this particular topic, having worked in very innovative organizations that move fast, the openness to making mistakes is essential.
0:25:41 - Mary Poppen
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head, which is building a learning culture—giving people guardrails but also room to explore. By the way, the term "intelligent risks" is often used in our culture, but if you don't define what intelligent risk means, employees still won't understand it. So you kind of have to clarify that it's not okay for you to negotiate a whole new legal contract on your own, because that's a big risk.
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 risky risk. But if a customer asks for an extra half hour of your time, and you've got time in the day—even though you might become overutilized from a services perspective—it's okay to say yes. Then, let's come back and figure out why they needed more time. Why did we estimate the hours wrong? So, giving them the freedom to do what’s right for the customer, again within bounds, allows them to explore. When there aren't optimal business results, we can look at it to say, "What can we learn from this? What can we do differently?" This approach gives people some freedom in their roles to explore and make decisions, hopefully finding even better ways to do things. It's that learning mindset. It's okay to do things differently than just following a template. If you have a better idea, let's explore it.
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 examples you brought up is spending the extra 30 minutes with a customer, which is a great example. We also talked earlier about reactive versus proactive approaches. One of the challenges that I think many organizations face regarding experiences is that they have different types of customers. Sometimes they’re small, or it's a new unit. They may not have a clear focus on specific types of businesses or very large accounts. It’s just one team trying to balance a broad portfolio of customers and products. The individuals need to make resource allocation decisions.
If I am a people pleaser, a customer pleaser—believe it or not, I’ve realized in some areas that I am a pleaser—you probably would never have guessed that. But I think there are a lot more nice people I work with than me. If I sometimes try not to, you know, be thoughtful of other people—oh my God! There are some amazing people with hearts of gold who want to keep everybody happy. But by trying to keep everybody happy, we introduce a risk to the business. The sad reality is that not every customer has the same revenue potential for the business. The impact of something going wrong with your flagship customer is much higher. The consequences of things going badly right before renewal are also much greater than at other times. There are all these trade-offs to consider.
But at the same time, you also want to build a culture where you can support the small but very important customers who may not be the biggest revenue generators. You want to have some kind of scalable approach. I often feel torn because, on the one hand, I want every customer to feel special, but on the other hand, we need to find a balance. We can use content, in our case, to relate to world and success factors. With our content solutions, we can build resources that provide scalable, low-touch, or automated support capabilities. But it’s hard to always find that balance. I often find myself thinking, “Great, you supported this small customer,” but for the small customers with similar problems, we might need to create repeatable resources. This is different from what we might need for a major customer or a significant employee campaign.
Maybe we need something that’s truly bespoke and helps people think about it that way. You must have dealt with 10,000 times more complexity than I have, so guide us a little. What have you learned from all those trade-offs? How do you help people think through those trade-offs?
0:31:06 - Mary Poppen
You know, I’ve seen it over and over again with startups that grow and become fast-growing companies, and even within public companies, different business units face similar challenges. You get to a point when you start where everyone is all hands on deck. It’s a high-touch experience because you have to find out what your ICP is, how they use the software, and what the best use cases are, even by industry. 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 success looks like—it’s sort of all hands on deck. Then, of course, you grow to a point where 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?
So then you have to start introducing segmentation and looking at customers of a certain size. What does success look like for them? What have we done for them that has been successful? Now we can look at what we can automate—what would give them the same value and make them feel important but with less touch. You can also infuse parts along the journey where they still get that personalized feeling. It really starts with having to look at the journey: What does success look like? Find out what you can automate and then start to move toward that segmentation and 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, putting more in the hands of the customer while allowing the employees to reach more customers. From a success and strategic perspective, this approach reduces the need to answer the same challenges over and over again. It helps the employees feel more engaged; they’re interacting with more customers and bringing more value. Then, the higher-touch customers can take advantage of the self-serve digital model when they want to, but they also have the opportunity for handholding because they’re willing to pay for it. From a revenue perspective, you kind of can’t ignore the need to put more eyes on it. So it’s a natural progression.
You know, say, 20 to 30 million in revenue is where you start, and depending on your business, that’s where you begin to see customer segmentation needed to help the team scale. You can’t hire a Customer Success Manager for every customer you bring on, right? At some point, the model ultimately becomes about defining what success looks like, what the journey looks like, and how we scale it. 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 in the equation in some areas that are not as valued. I think that leads us to one of the quotes we picked up from you in one of your interviews. You said, “Once you get a customer, you should focus on keeping them for life.” I think that’s taken out of context. Obviously, it’s much easier to keep a customer sometimes than to acquire a new one.
But what do you think this is like? Having grown with companies for so many years, what’s your take on customers? They can be hard to work with, right? You have limited resources, and we’re starting to see that even in the pilots, we’re saying, “Well, I’m not sure I want to work that hard to get you on board as a customer.” You’re not organized, you’re not respectful, and you’re asking for discounts before discussing any value. I’m not here working in a bazaar; we’re building something valuable. For me, maybe I place too much value on what we’re building and how important that is, but we believe we’re unique. So, I’m struggling a little bit with this selection process because part of me is customer-obsessed and customer-centric. However, there must be a realization that not every customer is right for every business or product. How do you help organizations think that through?
0:35:53 - Mary Poppen
So it is true that there are some companies that aren’t a good fit for certain solutions, either because of the customers you have or because you learn quickly which ones aren’t a good fit. But I think the reality is, if you don’t view your relationship with your customers as an evolution—if you don’t meet them where they are and think about how to continue to move them along in maturity—you can’t evolve not only the relationship but also the value you’re bringing. Many customers, just thinking about talent management as an example, still use Word documents and other outdated methods. 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 is, how do you keep progressing those customers? At the end of the day, there might be, let’s say, 5% of your customer base—or perhaps 3%—that are at the top of that maturity level. Do you want to invest in them right now, or don’t you? You run the risk of them leaving if another solution emerges in the market. However, if you invest now, it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll gain more customers in the long run. So, you have to balance that. 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? That was missing in my statement, but it was kind of implied, and I think that’s a great way of thinking about it. There are basically two types: the average customer, which is probably good in some ways because it involves 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. However, you don’t want those challenging customers if their vision does not align with your vision, right? That can be a distraction.
And then there are the less mature organizations. Maybe you need to provide educational resources; perhaps they’re not a good customer fit, and you just need to be able to say no. I think that raises an interesting question. Who says no? I don’t think the average sales organization says no. So, does it come from customer success or professional services organizations that say, “Hey, this is not going to end well?”
0:39:22 - Mary Poppen
Well, the most common story is that it ends with the termination of the contract. Maybe they exit a little sooner in the first year when you haven’t been able to get them off the ground, they’re not really getting value, and they’re not using it. In that case, they churn, and that’s an opportunity for learning. Hopefully, you can identify where the disconnects were. What alignment did we fail to establish from the very beginning? Then you can improve the process by putting those things in place.
I think it’s hard early on because you believe you can meet their needs, right? If all their business cases and use cases aren’t discussed, or if their outcomes aren’t clearly defined, that’s where you get into trouble. So, if you get better at asking those questions upfront and can say, “Yes, our solution matches that outcome,” then if they want something completely outside of that realm, you can walk away earlier. You can say, “Well, we can do these three things, but we can’t do these four things.” I think, especially for a startup, it’s really hard to figure that out before encountering some of those challenges.
0:40:42 - Alex Shevelenko
Got it. Mary, as we wrap up our discussion, there are so many things that are still kind of left out there. For me, there are three key questions: Throughout your career, you’ve focused on customer experience and employee experience. You’re leading your own organization where you can influence both. What have you seen change the most, particularly in software-driven businesses that we’ve been a part of? But you’ve also supported all sorts of organizations. I’d be curious to hear 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 that you're starting to see relationships and things you may not have known existed, right? You can do that within functional tools like a CRM or support software. But what’s really exciting is that people are beginning to recognize the opportunity to go beyond that and look at the linkages of insights and data across those systems. This allows for the integration of employee experience (EX), customer experience (CX), and all stakeholder experiences to come together in a total experience. I'm excited about that! Maybe I'm a little biased because we've made significant progress, but I see a strong appetite in companies for building those capabilities, which I think is really exciting.
0:42:52 - Alex Shevelenko
This is really helpful. In the last series of questions, we talked a little bit about the power of repeatable, scalable answers that are visual and have evolved over time. We used to start with some sort of PDF handbooks. Some organizations still use them—perhaps the same ones that are using Word documents for talent management. Some people even still fax things. "I'll fax you the instructions," right?
A lot of our listeners and customers tend to be innovative in this area. They’re saying, "Well, I could use great content to support customers on their own, or it could be a resource."
As a new employee, a new team member, I don’t know everything. The products are complex, and customer 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? Are you noticing a movement toward better content and documentation?
0:44:10 - Mary Poppen
Yes, and I like to refer to it as personalization at scale. There are now opportunities because, remember, marketing has always been trying to achieve this: getting the right message to the right stakeholder. However, what happens is that a generic message goes out to all your contacts at a customer or to the same prospects in different industries, making the personalization aspect really hard. From a customer experience perspective, for example, your implementation experience is exactly the same for every customer. However, going back to maturity, some customers might need different things at different times. On the employee experience side, when you come into a sales role versus a customer success role or an HR role, you have different types of enablement that you need.
Some aspects are shared—like culture, etc.—but some are 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 return to that marketing dream that never happened: we’re still seeing that an admin receives the same email as the CEO, right? Great. Speaking of content, you wrote a book on a topic that is near and dear to us. What was your biggest takeaway? What surprised you in writing it? Was 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 pen to paper and fingers to keyboard, crystallizing my thoughts about what works in customer experience and employee experience. I reflected on the things I observed that overlap, what worked, what didn't work, and the opportunity to bring it all together to help other companies understand some of the pitfalls or implications of certain decisions or processes. This can help them sidestep those mines and accelerate their results. The biggest "aha" moment for me was when someone suggested that I write it with a fictional character throughout. I hadn’t thought about that, so I started that journey, and it was really helpful for me to organize my thoughts around Hannah, who is in the boardroom delivering a message about business results and how the company is seeing a decline, but how customer intelligence can save the day. Using that as my framework, I was able to 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, and I think this is the way to go. I love it! Last question: you now have students in a very unique program. If you had your last lecture—kind of parting thoughts for your students—let’s imagine we’re all sitting in a virtual classroom. What would be the one nugget you would leave us with on creating world-class customer experience and 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 by celebrating my decision to reconnect with you, Mary, because this was phenomenal. I have notes to take and share from my team. It was a wealth of knowledge on all the things we care about. More importantly, every great organization needs to care about their customers and their employees, and that mindset needs to permeate throughout. So, Mary, thank you so much for sharing your insights. How can people find you and buy your book? Please 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. My book is on Amazon: Goodbye Churn, Hello Growth. I appreciate you reaching out, Alex. It's so good to see you! We're going to have to catch up more often—maybe every five to ten years.
0:49:52 - Alex Shevelenko
It's great to have you, Mary. I think it would be worth our time to get together and discuss how you can integrate your philosophy and insights into how people process information, solve problems, and create connections. I was really fortunate to have you here, and I will continue to try to download everything from your brain into scalable, content-based technology for customer experience and employee experience. Thank you so much! You will be named in our product; there will be a Mary Poppins module based on your feedback. You’re part of the journey. Thank you again!
0:50:47 - Mary Poppen
Thank you.