Experts of Experience - #14 Chris Ho's Secret to The Art of Delegation and Customer Experience

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

Dive into the world of executive assistance and client relationships with Chris Ho, Chief Client and Revenue Officer at Athena.In this episode of Experts of Experience, host Lauren Wood engages with Chris Ho to uncover the intricacies of effective delegation and its impact on customer success.Learn about Athena's innovative approach to enhancing client experiences and how Chris's leadership is shaping the future of executive assistance. Chris shares profound insights on the relationship between successful client management and strategic delegation, emphasizing the significance of empathetic and intelligent client interactions.Tune in to discover Athena's transformative strategies in client service and delegation.If you enjoyed this episode, please rate us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Subscribe Now: https://www.youtube.com/@ExpertsofExperience?sub_confirmation=1 Imagine running your business with a trusted advisor who has your success top of mind. That’s what it’s like when you have a Salesforce Success Plan. With the right plan, Salesforce is with you through every stage of your journey — from onboarding, to realizing business outcomes, to driving efficient growth.Learn more about what’s possible on the Salesforce success plan website: http://sfdc.co/SalesforceCustomerSuccess (00:00) Introduction and Focus on Customer Experience (CX)(01:20) Chris's Journey to CX and Athena's Philosophy(03:37) Athena's Approach to Matching Executives and EAs(06:56) Empowering and Nurturing Executive Assistants at Athena(09:13) Onboarding Clients and the Art of Delegation(11:11) Adapting Hero's Journey in Customer Onboarding(16:47) Client Engagement and Tracking Happiness(20:45) Client-Centric Strategies and Using AI(24:31) Teaching Clients Effective Delegation(28:00) EA's Impact on Clients' Lives and Athena's Culture(30:05) Approach to Unengaged or Unhappy Clients(32:24) Tracking Client Engagement and Happiness with AI(39:00) Chris's Personal Experience with Exceptional Customer Service(41:57) Final Thoughts and Advice for Customer Experience Leaders

Client experience is so important to making sure that that client has a very good experience and relationship with their EA. And then you're also taking care of the executive assistant side and making sure that they're learning and growing. You establish a commercial relationship with the client. You're switching them from the sales side to the onboarding side. And you have to build that flow really beautifully. And I think anyone listening to this podcast will know that building those funnels like in your HubSpot and stuff, building them really beautifully and understanding the drop-off points and all that kind of stuff is technically very important. Formulating your client experience team around understanding what problems the clients are having, even if the data

is not 100% correct, if it's directionally correct, the exercise is more important than the accuracy. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. And today I'm speaking with Christopher Ho, the Chief Client and Revenue Officer at Athena, an executive assistant platform helping to match clients with expert EAs. Previous to Athena, Chris was the VP of Client Experience at Humi, which he's also on the board of. And that company actually acquired his company, Abletribe. Previous to that, he spent some time in consulting at Deloitte. But all that being said, Chris knows the customer experience space very well. And today we are going to tap into his wealth of knowledge to learn about how he's applied CX to a variety of industries.

Chris, how's it going? It's going great. It's great to be here, Lauren. Awesome. I obviously did some digging into all of your experience and noticed that you started your career in consulting and now you've been spending the past number of roles in the CX space. I'd love to just understand, to lay the groundwork for everyone, why have you chosen to focus on CX? Yeah, that's a great question. I think that, you know, obviously, like you said, I started my career in consulting. And then I started my company, it's called Able Tribe, in 2014. So it's almost 10 years ago now. And that was a little Canadian payroll company that ended up turning out very well for us.

I think the interesting part of that is whenever you start a company in that startup phase, you're really doing one of three things. And really, it's one of two things. But you're either building or you're selling and servicing. And so my co-founder was technical. His name's Julian. Awesome dude. Built out almost all of the payments of the structure at that company. And then I did almost everything else, right? Selling, servicing. And I think one of the things that you can fall in love with is just creating a wonderful experience for people, right? And that's something that stayed with me throughout my entire career.

And when Humi acquired our, our company, able tribe, and, um, I joined the executive team there. Um, and it's, you know, a prototypical wonderful SAS company that has, you know, incredible clients that depend on you weekend and weekend because it was a payroll company. I mean, that's a really big thing for our clients to do, right. Every, every of weeks, they're paying their people. If something goes wrong, it's mission critical. It's a disaster. And I say prototypical SaaS because SaaS, software as a service, all of the recurring revenue businesses, you build your revenue off of relationships.

And those relationships with clients are what is really important in the long run, right? That's how you bring home the bacon. So I think just building a wonderful client experience has always been something that's really near and dear to my heart. And that's where I've decided to focus my career. Well, I'm with you on that one. I'd love to talk a little bit about Athena. I actually was introduced to Athena through a consulting network that I'm in, and I've heard incredible things about how you are matching executive assistants with executives and also really easing the process of that. assume like, oh, it's a lot of work to bring on an EA and then delegate to an EA. And there's like a hurdle there. And so I'd love to dive in a little bit into what is your customer experience philosophy to Athena? How are you easing the process for people?

It's a big question. Yeah. So let me give you a little bit of background about what Athena is and what we do. That'll help lay the groundwork for why I think we're doing some special stuff. And specifically for those that want to apply it to their own companies or just learning more about client experience and really sales as well. It's both sides of it. It can help them take some applicable, tangible examples out of it. But on the Athena side. So Athena really, this is going to sound a little corny, but we're really a delegation company first and foremost. And what that really means is that we are working with executives and founders, leaders,

and helping them to learn how to ask for help a little bit better, a little bit more articulately, a little bit more often across, you know, their life, across the surface area of their life. Folks often don't ask for enough help. And a lot of the whole trials and tribulations of becoming a leader and leading bigger companies or to bigger outcomes is figuring out how to get people to follow you. And delegation really is just a really specific form of leadership. It's a specific form of leadership where you've got someone that's delegating and someone that's receiving those delegations. And so the core purpose

of Athena is to work with the fiercely ambitious, those folks that want to achieve more. And of course, that tends towards these executives and founders. And then we pair them up with executive assistants that we've already put through the ringer to make sure that they have an even better chance of success. And so of course, the revenue model is staffing executive assistants with founders and executives and leaders all around the world. But the core focus and mission is like, we're kind of like the get shit done company, which makes it really exciting for me because I just really, the mission resonates with me a lot. And the really cool part about it is that you have to take care of both sides. It's almost like a pseudo marketplace.

It's not really like a traditional marketplace, but if you're not, your client experience is so important to making sure that that client has a very good experience and relationship with their EA. And then you're also taking care of the executive assistant side and making sure that they're learning and growing. Because if they're not learning and growing and having a wonderful time in their careers and getting these incredible opportunities, they're not going to stick around either. Right. So you have to build this ecosystem where everyone is achieving more and not plateauing. And that has been really cool, really special. And I've really loved it, to be honest with you. That's awesome. I always say that employee experience is what drives customer experience. And especially in what it is that you're doing, where the

executive assistants, the internal team, they are essentially the closest people, professional connection at times to the executives that they're working with. So it's a much deeper relationship than, say, your customer success manager, who is checking in with you every once in a while on how you're doing with your product. It's like they are partnering with you on your life to get things done. And I'd love to understand a little bit of how are you really nurturing the EAs? How do you empower them to really show up in the way that you need them to? Yeah. I mean, on, on the EA side, um, there's, uh, there's a whole bunch of stuff. So we work with EAs all around the world. Um, but our, our primary, like where we started and where the vast

majority of our EAs are now is in the Philippines. Um, so we, we started with, uh, um, essentially on the ground in the Philippines, recruiting people. We recruit in out of, out of India now as well, and out of Kenya as well. But there's still the big chunk of our companies in the Philippines. And really what you need to do is make sure that people understand that they have an opportunity to work with essentially some of the, you know, most impactful people in the world. And then everything else is solved from there. I mean, obviously, you make sure that you pay people well. You make sure that there's an awesome work culture,

that you take care of them from a health perspective, from a retirement perspective, all that kind of stuff. And you don't have to, you know, you don't have to be, you know, all about the compensation. What you really have to be is all about the, the actual opportunity to work with some of our clients who, again, they're, they're running companies. They're, you know, it's, it's, it's very, it's a really cool job because where else are you going to be able to kind of, you know, step in the door and be the right hand person to, you know, a CEO, right? It's pretty, it's a pretty, it's a pretty special opportunity.

What I hear you saying is that it's really about matching what the employees like ambitions are with the opportunity that they get to have. And I think, you know, I've built and led customer success teams, customer service teams. And I found that that's such a critical component to when you're bringing someone onto a team. I mean, this is for any team, like anyone who's listening, who's hiring people. It's like finding the person who really wants to have this opportunity and they want to grow in this opportunity and they're committed to it. And then it's still, you know, the leader's responsibility or the company's responsibility to make sure that they live up to that. But that matching is so incredibly important. And I've also hired teams like offshore teams. And I find sometimes it can be easier to find that match in ambition and you can really make some magic happen. Without a doubt. Yeah. And so when it comes to like supporting the clients, the executives that you're working with,

tell me a little bit about how you onboard them and, and get them into the, the game of working with an EA. And I'll just like start with this question by teeing up. I was talking to my partner, Nick, right before this. And I was saying, maybe you should get an EA. He is founding a company at the moment. He has so much on his plate. And he's like, no, there's no way. I am too...

He's insane. The amount of technical detail that he wants to get into himself in his life is like, it's mind blowing to me. It makes me have a headache just like watching him move through his life. But hey, that's him. But you know, especially someone like that. And I'm sure you have many clients who are like, I can't let anyone else touch my stuff. How do you really onboard your clients and teach them that art of delegation that is so critical? I have a two-part answer to this. And this is actually a long answer, but I think it's important for you guys to understand, for the audience to understand kind of the way that I'm thinking here.

And the first part is more philosophical. And the second part, I'll come back and be pragmatic about the way that people struggle with delegation and how we technically get over that. But philosophically, whether a customer is seeking you out or whether you're selling to them, that's where it starts. Because customers don't buy products, they buy an outcome. right this is like very this like a client experience maxim right and one of yeah one of the interesting things is that of course sales and client experience a lot of it is about storytelling and about putting the client into the story that you're telling and so it's really interesting because one of the things that companies do very poorly and probably one of the reasons that athena stands out as having built a wonderful client experience, is that you can adapt stories that have been told for millennia. And what I mean by that is that stories have been being told since the dawn of human time. And there are very famous stories and there's very famous story archetypes. And so one of the

things that I do, because I advise some other companies and we did this with Hume and the type of story that we tell changes. And with Athena, we have adapted what is an archetypical hero's journey. And there's some super famous hero's journeys. So like contemporary Lord of the Rings, Legend of Zelda, right? There's a hero that takes up the sword and becomes something that he once was not right. Beowulf, um, the Odyssey. And it's really interesting because you can, you can actually build out your customer journey.

And it's specifically, you asked about onboarding around a story that has seen success over millennia. And so the prototypical hero's journey has eight steps. And I'm going to do this because I think this is cool for a client experience podcast to actually kind of go through this, right? I'm all about it. Yeah. The prototypical hero's journey goes through these eight steps. It's the interruption of ordinary life. And imagine you can, if you've seen like Lord of the Rings or anything, you can imagine this, right? There's the call to adventure, accepting the call to adventure, right? So that the young boy or the would-be hero accepts the call to adventure. The receiving of supernatural aid, right?

The taking the roads of trials and tribulations. The ordeal, which is like the climax. The revelation, reward, and return. And which is like the climax, the revelation, reward and return. And then it finalizes with becoming the masters of two worlds. And what we did is we mapped those eight steps of that famous story archetype to Athena's story, right? The interruption of ordinary life is like you join the waitlist, right?

You think, okay, there might be something more that we could do, right? So we build our whole sales process around, okay, the person has, it wants more, they're yearning for more in some capacity, right? There's the call to adventure, right? Which is our discovery call. That's our sales call, which we build literally as a call to adventure. Like, Hey, I heard you, you might be interested in doing something a little bit more, right? Accepting the call to adventure literally is our payment process. Right. So it's like, okay, when we, when we're, and this is really important because,

you know, technically speaking, when you're... And this is really important because technically speaking, when you establish a commercial relationship with a client, you're switching them from the sales side to the onboarding side. And you have to build that flow really beautifully. And I think anyone listening to this podcast will know that building those funnels in your HubSpot and stuff, building them really beautifully and understanding the drop-off points and all that kind of stuff is technically very important.

The receiving of supernatural aid is literally how we build out onboarding. So if it's Lord of the Rings, it's Gandalf. If it's Legend of Zelda, it's the guy that gives you the sword, the magic sword. It's literally... You build out the onboarding journey as part of that story and you make sure that the client still understands that they're the hero, but they're the would-be hero. They haven't become the hero yet. For us, taking the road of trials and tribulations is your struggle with delegation. And we have all of these specific archetypes of how people struggle with delegation, whether they aren't delegating enough, which is often a problem that women have.

They don't ask for enough help. That's a broad generalization. Or on the flip side, women tend to be very articulate with their instruction, which men are not. And there's, you know, different age things, there's different, you know, gender things, but people struggle with delegation really badly. And we understand where they're going to struggle so that we can help them. You know, the final part of this, the crescendo of the story, right, is the ordeal, the revelation return. It's confronting and internalizing behavior change, which is where we do all of our coaching and executive coaching and success work. And then really becoming that master of two worlds is finding personal and professional contentment, which is where once we have delivered on our...

And of course, it's an ongoing journey. But once we've delivered on our value proposition with clients, that's where you can start to really harvest that beautiful client base that's incredibly happy, incredibly contented. They've achieved so much more than they thought they could. And then they're telling all their friends. And Athena has never spent a cent on marketing. Not a cent. And we're one of the fastest growing private companies in the world right now.

Very, very cool. Very exciting. And a lot of that is building out that beautiful journey. And again, you can model it after stories. And that's just one story archetype. There's many different story archetypes. But I would really recommend any budding companies and client experience leaders listening to this to try and do something like that. Whoa, this is so cool. So I do a lot of customer journey mapping with my consulting

clients because I'm a customer success consultant and this is a whole new world. So I have a million questions for you. How, tell me a little bit about like, what was the process like for you for mapping this out? How long did it take? What challenges did you come into? I'm so curious. Yeah, I think it's, you know, it's funny. The, the way that it started was actually more on the sales side than on the customer experience side. And one of the things that has always driven me crazy, like truly driven me crazy is when our salespeople, because I run the sales team and the client experience team, when the sales team, when I see them kind of blow up and it doesn't matter when people come in, if they're super excited about your product or not,

like you still have to make, you have to get them to a buying decision, right? And this doesn't matter also, by the way, for people listening and thinking this doesn't apply to me because we're not doing sales calls. It absolutely applies to you because even if it's inbound and there's no synchronous conversation, it's about your copy. It's about your flow. It's about getting someone to the buying decision. The thing that drives me crazy is when people talk about the product. And again, I think I actually started this conversation saying people buy their outcomes, not your product. Right. And when people talk about the product, um, it's just a disaster. And literally the way that I'll describe it,

right. Is that, um, your product is, and we talked about the hero's journey. And I used this analogy, which kickstarted this idea. But when we talk about this idea of a call to adventure, what is really absolutely true about all companies is that your company is the sword. And if your company is the sword, and you know for a fact that telling customers about the features of your product doesn't work. And this is like the Simon Sinek thing, like the why, like the three golden circles. You can make it really easy and understandable when you say, you know, it would be like telling the hero of the story to take on the world because the sword has a ruby in it. Of course, that's ridiculous. You know, that's not the point. The point, the story, the whole point of the story is who could the boy become, right?

Who could the nameless hero become? Your company is the sword. You don't matter. Your client matters. That is what actually being client-centric is. That's the point, right? And so, if you can tell a story and you can tell a story, well, that has resonance, like good stories, you remember them, right? They stick

in your mind, bad stories, they fade there, they become forgotten. Right. And so that's the, that's the start of the process that like, that's what kicked this off to me was I kept telling everyone that Athena was the sword. And I, you know, I would say this back in Ume too, to a lesser extent. So stop talking about the sword, start talking about the hero. And then we would build everything around this hero and trying to make the person become the hero. And the way that you could say this is, you know, not everyone likes the, you know, all of the talk about like the legend is all the Lord of the Rings, like I do. But, you know, when you say, who could you become if you took up the sword, who could you become if you joined Athena, right? Could you, um, you know, have an extra 20 hours a week? Could you spend high

quality time with your wife and your kids, with your husband and your father, with your, whatever it is, could you, you know, grow your company company 100% year over year? Who could you become if you joined Athena? And so you're constantly asking that question throughout the process, throughout the sales process, throughout the onboarding process, throughout the time that they're with you and they're struggling or they're plateauing or they're not engaging or they're engaging a lot. Who could you become? That's what you have to continuously ask your clients. And that's what being client-centric really means. When you're using Salesforce to tackle your company's most important goals,

failure is simply not an option. That's why their most highly skilled advisors, Salesforce CTOs, are available to help you succeed with expert guidance and implementation support at every step of the way. Learn more about Salesforce CTOs at sfdc.co slash professional services. How do you show people that they're becoming the person they want to be? Like, how are you reflecting that back to them or how are they seeing it in the process? I mean, I'm sure that when something gets done and they're like, oh, wow, this is possible. I can now go for a walk with my husband. Like, great. But yeah, is there anything that you're doing to really like show them where that success is? Yeah. And I'll bring this out and make it broader again for everyone that's listening. But

obviously, a software product, for instance, right? There's lots of ways that you can show. You know, funny enough, a lot of like the... At Humie, for instance, we were really good at this, right? A lot of like accounting software and financial products are really good at this because you can gamify everything and then you can show people because you use this, you save this much time or you did this much, whatever. Whatever it is, right. For like live products like ours, where it's not, it's, they're not in front of a, you know, a URL or a software screen all the time. You have to find different little ways to remind people of what they're doing and what they should be doing. And for us in particular,

that takes the form of nudges through email or nudges through the actual executive assistant. And of course, we do a lot of communication through text with our clients in particular. And so just literally flipping text to them saying, Hey, how's it going? Is there anything we can help you with? And you can be a little cheeky. And as long as your brand is built in a way where the tone of the conversation can be like, Hey, did you know one that I love that we send is, Hey, what did you do today that you shouldn't have done? Right.

Just like little things to, and you know, maybe you're using your partner would laugh at that one, but there's lots of stuff that, um, you know, every day, you know, even the best delegators in the world do something they shouldn't have done, something that they should have given to someone else. You know, and so that was a little bit of a rambly way of saying that there's little ways that you can remind people of the path they're on all the time. It's just like little wayfinding things that isn't just as corny as, you know, saying, hey, your EA saved you X amount of hours this month. That, of course, you can do as well. But I think the little wayfinding things are, they work a little bit better. Well, it really connects people to themselves. Like we can quantify numbers and say, okay, I saved five hours this week because I didn't do X, Y, and Z, which is great. But like,

it depends. What really matters is how you feel. Right. And if you're, I love that question of what shouldn't, what did you do that you shouldn't have done today? I'm totally going to say that to Nick and myself, because I'm sure that there are so many things that like couldn't have or didn't need to be done. I mean, I am also a leadership coach and I work with a lot of leaders on these types of things because when we are really stressed and we're just like bulldozing our task list and probably not thinking critically about what really deserves my time, what are the things that I actually need to be spending time on and what are the things that

I can delegate? And I think I see a lot, a lot of my clients deal with like, well, I don't know who to delegate it to. I can't, I can't let these things go, but I also know that it's not my, the greatest use of my time or my skillset or my zone of genius. This is just like a thing I need to do and I can't let go of it. It's hard. It's very hard. That's, uh, I think that's part of the reason we're, we're seeing some success here at Athena. That's the like very much, very hard thing to do. Yeah. How are you teaching your clients delegation? For sure. And so one of the hardest things to do is to get people to change their behavior

that is just like without a doubt it's just a challenging thing to do and usually actually there's like embedded advantages and disadvantages to every company right and one of the embedded big disadvantages to athena is that we're asking people to make a behavior change. And so when they bring on an EA, they have to change their behavior. And the easiest way to do it is actually not to try and engage with the client super specifically all the time. It's to make the EAs exceptional and make them incredibly proactive and not take no for an answer. Right. And so we train the EAs in this like incredibly robust way. We actually took the, our chief learning officer was the former Dean of University of Michigan. Um, and, uh, just like he has whipped up this incredible program for them where really the EAs are taught across the board of life for people, which is not a thing that most people would understand or expect.

It's not the intuition for most people. And so the first thing that we teach EAs is not how to answer an email or how to book travel or how to manage a calendar. The first thing we teach them is how do you keep your client healthy? How do you make sure that they exercise, that they're eating well, that they're sleeping? How do you make sure that they're spending time with their families? How do you make sure that they're making time for their own thoughts? How do you make sure that they're getting some movement every day

and walking and not just sitting at their desk? And so the EAs are built out in such a way, the curriculum is built out in such a way, the curriculum is built out in such a way that they're prioritizing health and relationships and actualization and the fundamental stuff like the house management, the groceries on autopilot, the making sure that the expenses are reimbursed, all that kind of stuff. And then they're focusing more on the professional side after that personal side is taken care of. Because the ultimate reality is that whoever your EA is, they're going to have a

lot more context on you as a human being than they are about your professional world. That is for sure true. And what that really does... And it's not to say that they don't take on your email and your calendar and your travel. That's just not the core focus of an Athena EA in the same way that almost every other EA is trained. Kind of out there. The core focus of the Athena EA is not any of the task stuff. It's not task aggregation. It's not task automation, which a lot of people, that's what their mind goes to. It's becoming an extension of their ward and

their ward is their client and so what their responsibility is if you got an athenaea their responsibility what we literally say to them before they got matched with you is your responsibility is to take care of lauren that's your responsibility it's not to do lauren's tasks it's to take care of lauren make sure lauren has a better life, whatever that means to her. And so we take that super seriously. And I think that's a big part of how you actually get clients to change is to just consistently make sure that they're in the best situation possible to make the easiest choice, which is hopefully to delegate a little bit more

and really work on their leadership capabilities in that way. Want an EA so bad. I'm so down. I would love an extension of my life. Um, Oh, that's so cool. And it sounds like, I mean, for the EA is there's a lot of purpose in that, you know, it goes beyond like, do this person's stuff. It's like really make this person more whole, full, happy, you know? And that's, I can imagine that that does a lot for your company culture to be focused in that way. Is that so? Or I mean, maybe I'm making the wrong assumption. You're making the exact right assumption. I mean, there is one of the other things that like, I'm full right assumption. I mean, there's one of the other things that like, I'm full of maxims today, but there's, there's a lot of, um, there there's like always honor in work, right? There's always, you know, there's always pride

in work. And, you know, I, I like my, my first job was stocking shelves, right? I stocked shelves, not in a grocery store, in a hospital. I stocked shelves in the hospital. I stocked all of the medical supplies every morning at four in the morning, right? And, you know, because you do that, you get to, you know, if you start doing something like that and you do a good job, you get the opportunity to do the next thing and then the next thing and then the next thing. And if you are a founder or a CEO, like, you know, for instance, Lauren, if you started with us, um, your EA, that's going to come over to you is going to do a whole bunch of different things for you. They're going to take pride in the work. They're going to do all the little things. Uh, but you know, eventually you're going to ask them to do something that they would never have the opportunity to do with anyone else because, you know, you run a podcast and you know, you've founded your own company and whatever it is.

And so they're going to have direct access to you and they're going to learn at your right hand as an extension of you. And that's going to change their lives. And that is the actual answer. And we've had, you know, Athena has only been around for a couple of years and we've already seen some EAs literally change their lives because of the people that they've been matched up with. The opportunities that we've seen come out of this have been astronomical. And it's just very special for me and part of the reason I joined the company. Can you tell us a story? There's a lot of different stories.

But I'll tell you, one of the things that we have to be really careful with is that we don't say it just because of the nature of our clientele. But we have some... I have a client that's very near to me, near and dear to my heart. He's working with an EA. And again, I won't say either of their names. But he was one of our earlier clients and he runs an extremely large and public company. And so, just kind of a badass client. We put him with an EA that's... Actually, she was just out of school, but was like super high powered. One of these just like epic young women. And she got paired up with him. And she did such an amazing job for him that he you know after a year promoted her to a senior ea himself her comp changes pretty substantially and then promote her to chief of staff with his family office um and you know again it's been

about two and a half closer to three years now um like a her earning power you coming out of the philippines be her opportunity um she's running a whole you know not only her the family office but a division of of this company it's unbelievable because she got to learn from him she put i mean don't get me wrong like you know most people work 40 hours a week i'm sure she was working like 100 hours a week don't get me wrong like there's sacrifice to everything, but I mean, Holy smokes. Right. I mean, just, and so it's, you know, to me, just how can you, how can you hate that? Like, it's just very cool. Um, and you know, I, you love to see it. Like it just makes me beam with pride. Oh my gosh. Of course. It's so inspiring when you can see people really growing and like with the platform that you're providing them with. That's really beautiful.

Again, out of the Philippines, there's not a lot of economic opportunity. In particular, that woman that I was speaking about changes her life, not only her life, her family's life. Like it's that big of a deal. Yeah. So very cool. I'd love to understand a little bit of what happens when you have a client who isn't really engaged or they're not able to really adopt what it is that you're offering. How do you approach those types of situations? So I'll give you a broader answer here again, before I go into the, the, like the pragmatic, because I think this is also a really important thing for folks that are in client experience and really just anyone that's running a startup or this actually might be one of the most important

lessons I'll try and impart here altogether, which is that client experience in any recurring revenue business is you have to understand the hard side of it and the soft side of it. And the hard side of client experience when it comes to a recurring revenue business is understanding that every single one of your clients is an annuity of sorts. An annuity is just any type of recurring revenue, right? So annuity actually means recurring on an annual basis, but whether it's on a monthly basis or on a... And so what ends up happening is that as a fast company or as any recurring revenue business, what you're actually doing is you're building a portfolio of annuities from the hard side.

Strip out all the human stuff. You're building a portfolio of annuities. And so say you have 1,000 clients, right? Let's just use 100 for an example, an easy example. You have 100 clients. That's your portfolio of annuities. They're each paying you $100 a year. Okay, easy.

You're making $10,000 annually. What you can understand very, very simply is how robust that portfolio of annuities is. And the robustness of the annuity is how likely is it to recur? Right. And so that's, that I think is, you know, very understandable to everyone. But what is really interesting is what everyone should do if you're running a company and you're in CX or you're in revenue, but specifically if you're in CX is you should do this exercise, please. Please do it. You should make it two by two. And the two by two should have the two axes of one, the vertical axis should be engagement

and the horizontal axis should be happiness. and the horizontal axis should be happiness. And the vertical axis of engagement, you can make that up based on what is most important to your company in terms of how a company is engaging with you. So for us at Hume, as a software company, it was really easy to see if people were engaged with the HRIS, with the performance management, with the payroll. Payroll was really easy to understand the engagement because you could literally see the funds moving, right? The other stuff you could just tell are people writing reviews, are people using the HRIS to do whatever.

And so we had really, really easy engagement metrics, right? And then on the happiness side, you can do NPS, you can do the superhuman stuff of how likely is it or how upset would you be if we took this away? You can figure out however you want to track happiness. Right now at Athena, we do client sentiment analysis. So anytime a client talks to us, we use some of the AI. That's actually probably the coolest new AI stuff we're using is sentiment analysis.

Just see what is a client sentiment. So that's what we're using on our happiness metric there. But what you end up doing then is you plot these people on this engagement and happiness two by two. And people that are both happy and engaged are very robust. They're very likely to recur. People that are unhappy but engaged are the people that you're going to learn the most from.

And so they're kind of like the clients that are pushing the boundaries of your product or service. In a software company, they're the ones that are always sending in feature requests. They're super engaged. They're pushing your product to the edge. And they're saying, Hey, we keep breaking your product. We're not happy. We're unhappy. We're sending in bug requests. We're doing whatever. Those are the types of clients that you have to really engage with to make your product or service better. The clients that are unhappy and sorry, the clients that are happy but unengaged. So they're happy, but they're not really engaging with your product. Those are what I call like the fat cats, like they're fat and happy, but they're not really using your product.

Those are the clients that will churn if there's a change, like a pricing change. You raise prices, they're going to churn. There's a change in the economic environment, they're going to churn. If budgets need to be cut, they're going to churn. They're also the clients that you have to practice engaging with, with your actual success stuff. So your success team should be reaching out to them saying, Hey, I know that you're happy, but you're not really using the product very much. Hey, I know that you're happy, but you're not really using the product very much. Hey, I know that you're happy, but you're not really delegating to your EA very much.

Hey, I saw that you gave on your last survey that you were 10 out of 10 happy with your EA, but your EA only logged 30 hours of work this week, which is not nearly enough. Whatever that may be. And so we hit them with, Hey, how can we help you delegate more? You know? And then the unintuitive thing for most people is that the unhappy and unengaged clients, you try and turn them as fast as you can. You don't try and save them. You, you ignore them as much as possible. You don't listen to them and you just get them the fuck off your platform

because they're not the people that you want to serve in any way, shape, or form. And that is a huge mistake that anyone that's listening that has a really young startup, you're definitely making this mistake. They're usually these people that are unhappy and engaged. You try and make them work, but you want to get rid of them altogether. And so all that, that's a long-winded answer of saying, understand... If you can understand the revenue quality that you have at your company on the hard side, then you can layer back in all of the human elements and emotion and say,

okay, for these fat cat clients that aren't delegating enough, or these clients that are... They think that their EA is shit because they're actually bad at delegating and they're not giving good instructions. Or maybe their EA is shit and you actually have to go in and pull them out and rematch them or whatever it is. And again, on the software side, these different client archetypes, you can learn a lot from. But just putting them on that 2x2 and understanding your revenue quality, you're going to really also understand the problem that you're experiencing as a company. And it will help your product team focus their roadmap so much more than if you don't do that. And the 2x2 is a really good, easy way to build out these archetypes without

going into something really big where there's a million of them. Anyway, a big, long answer to your question, but just really important to understand how your client is struggling. And it just, it really helps. I'm so glad that you mapped this out for us. This is an incredible, an easy segmentation strategy, as you said, just to look at how are people using it and where are they on this happiness engagement matrix. When it comes to letting people go and being like, as you said, churn them as quickly as you can, it is so counterintuitive. And I have also, I've been the person within a company saying like, we need to just let them go. Like, don't spend any more time. Like they're

muddling up our data. They're asking too many questions. They're taking more from us than they deserve. And it's just not the right fit. And I think another piece of that is when you understand who that customer is, those people who are inevitably... to understand like, what are the commonalities here? Who, what are, what are the traits or qualities of these clients that we actually could have avoided in the first place? And then working with the sales team to say, don't go after these types of clients. Like I can give you an example. Recently, I was working at a company called too good to go. It's a global surplus food marketplace. And so, you know, we're saving food. It's, it's a food waste company. We're here for climate change. It's like every bagel matters, but it doesn't in the case of the business, because sometimes we would have, you know, a type of customer that just, they weren't a great fit. They, you know, the customers, we were a marketplace. So some of our customers didn't really like going and picking

up food from, from their stores. They never really understood the technology. They only used us like every little bit. But if something went wrong, they would complain a lot and it would take a lot of resources from our team. And we really needed to create that archetype of who are the people that we should not be going after and also acknowledging that if they have been signed up and they are a customer of ours, let's be okay with letting them go. Um, and I, I just think it's so important because otherwise you pour resources into, it can just be a leaky bucket

of your team's time. Yeah. So thank you for explaining that. I think it's so great. Another thing I wanted to talk about is the tracking and measurement of those two parts of the axes. And specifically what you a pretty good idea, but you never know how they were feeling that day. And maybe something just happened that made their experience not great when they were answering that survey. But in actuality, they've been pretty happy for the last couple of months. And so how are you going about that? Tell us a little bit about the technology you're using. Yeah, for sure. So it's, it's actually, um, you're absolutely right. It's very hard. I think historically I have never really found a super good way to measure this at scale. Um, but there's two things. One is that if you don't know, if you can't track the happiness,

that doesn't mean you can't, you shouldn't do the exercise. You should just make up the happiness. And when I say make it up, like literally get anyone that's ever met them or engage with them at your company, on your success team, on your onboarding team to just say,

yeah, there's seven out of 10 or they're a three out of 10 or they're nine out of 10. And then just do the exercise because the exercise is more important than the accuracy, which is not always the case. Um, sometimes, you know, garbage in garbage out is real, but in this case, the exercise of form, like formulating your client experience team around understanding what problems the clients are having, even if the data

is like not a hundred percent correct, it's directionally correct. The exercise is more important than the accuracy. Um, But in terms of the actual software that we're using now, it's some type of mod on Fireflies with some human loop stuff. It's a Frankenstein of things that our data team and a gentleman named Peter DeMov is working on at Athena. It's really cool. I think it's proprietary right now. I mean, we're using a bunch of different platforms,

but it's not something that's publicly available. I wouldn't obviously share that. Yeah. But the point is, is that the technologies exist. And I think we're at such an early phase in AI where we are still frankensteining some things together. And I just went through an exercise of trying to find the best AI note taker for my needs. And I ended up falling on Fireflies, which is solving most, but not all of my, of my needs. And so it's just, there's just so many different tools and they're so early and there's, yeah, it's, but the point is, is that you can start tracking that sentiment. And there's a lot of data that you can be pulling out of the conversations you're having. And I think that the conversations that we're having with our clients are really the most telling.

And it can be difficult if we have a large scale business where we're not able to actually speak to our customers on a regular basis. And we need to be looking at how are they using the tools, what's their activity looking like. And now with AI, I can start to put all of that together. That one conversation that we have every six months, the sentiment from that, plus their usage, plus whatever other data we have, it's becoming a lot easier. And I really encourage anyone who's listening to do some research and ask one, the platforms, the SaaS platforms that you're already using, like what new features do they

have? Because everyone's coming out with new things. And then also look at some of the new technologies that are coming out that can really add to what you're already using. Anyways, I could go on about this for a long time but chris i have two final questions for you this has been such a fun conversation yeah but my my first question for you is i'd love to understand or hear about a recent experience that you've had with a brand that left you impressed with a brand with a brand any brand just what's a great customer experience that you have experienced yourself? I had an amazing experience with Traeger grills the other day. Um, so Traeger is like a wood pellet fired smoking kind of smoker thing. And I was smoking a brisket in my backyard and I couldn't figure out it wasn't turning on for some reason, or it was like flashing something and I

had no clue, um, what was happening. And so I went to get my phone to Google it and I was flashing something and I had no clue what was happening. And so I went to get my phone to Google it. And I went to Google and I typed in the error code. And I clicked on the site. And it was really cool because when I clicked on it, I thought I was going to go to a... When I clicked the button, I thought it wasn't loading. And what actually ended up happening is it was weird to me because it just brought me to kind of a customer page and said, like, we'll be in touch.

And then I checked my phone immediately. I got a text from a live person saying, hey, I know exactly what's going on. Call me if you're there. And so I just called them and they're like, yeah, this is the thing you have to do. And you have to hold this button, whatever. And it was just an unbelievably cool experience. And I'm sure that, you know, I don't know exactly. I'm sure I talked to someone that was very inexpensive, right. For them to be able to do that, but it was really cool to get a text

and it was really cool to the whole thing was just super cool. Um, like the speed of that. Yeah. The speed was beautiful. The responsiveness was beautiful. So it was just an incredible experience. Yeah. Yeah. And it wasn't like, okay, now we're going to put you into an AI bot and ask you a bunch of questions and make you wait here. That was awesome. That was awesome. I loved it. I love that. I love that. And then my last question for you is, what is one piece of advice that you think every customer experience leader should hear? For sure. I think that the, um, the piece of advice that I would give is that there's two, well, I'll, I'll just give the best piece of advice, um, is that you just have to remember, um, that the other person is, is just like you in a lot of ways. The human condition is that you share a huge amount.

Everyone is more similar than they are different. And so you just remember that when you're dealing with customers, whether they're happy or sad or trying to make it to the next level or whatever it may be. It's just very simple, just like building relationships, the golden rule. And just you can make everyone feel special with very, very little effort. So there's a huge asymmetric upside

to just being there and being aware and being on. That's a good one. Well, Chris, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all this knowledge about customer experience, the hero's journey, happiness and engagement, and Athena and delegation. I learned a lot just about that in itself. So thank you so much. We really appreciate having you on the show and I'm sure we'll talk to you soon. Awesome. Thank you so much, Lauren. It was a pleasure to be here. You are a business leader with vision. You've seen the future as an AI enterprise thriving with Salesforce's agent force, and it is bright. Getting there? Eh,

it's a little fuzzier. Don't worry salesforce ctos are here to work with you side by side and turn your agent force vision into a reality we're talking expert guidance and implementation support from the best of the best to learn more about salesforce ctos visit sfdc.co slash professional services