Experts of Experience - #23 Building Trust in AR: Niantic's Guide to Transparent Customer Engagement

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

On this episode, Brynne Henn, the Product Marketing Lead, of the AR Development Platform at Niantic,  discusses Niantic's approach to user-centric design and customer experience in developing AR products. The discussion highlights the importance of prioritizing the needs of customers and using a 'blog before you build' approach to ensure that products are built for customer needs. The conversation also delves into how AR can enhance customer experiences, the fostering of a developer community, and the significance of building trust with customers.Tune in to learn:How to prioritize user-centric design and customer experience in AR product development.What is the 'blog before you build' approach and how can you use it to ensure products are built for customer needs?How AR can enhance customer experiences through virtual try-ons, personalized advertising, and game-based experiences.How to foster a developer community by understanding their needs and providing support.Why you need to build trust with customers by being transparent, addressing mistakes, and valuing their feedback.How to create a foundation for product development to streamline processes and improve efficiency.The need to drive cross-functional collaboration by understanding team dynamics and establishing clear communication.–How can you bring all your disconnected, enterprise data into Salesforce to deliver a 360-degree view of your customer? The answer is Data Cloud. With more than 200 implementations completed globally, the leading Salesforce experts from Professional Services can help you realize value quickly with Data Cloud. To learn more, visit salesforce.com/products/data to learn more. Mission.org is a media studio producing content for world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

We want to create augmented reality that really makes the real world better. At Niantic, we have this particular mission. We're trying to inspire people to explore the world together. Walking, exercising, spending time with family and friends. We envision a world where we're creating personalized layers over it. Using technology to just make the world around you a bit more personalized, a bit more engaging, and even find out things about it that you might not see on the surface and helps you connect with the world around you, but doesn't

take you out of the world. Get out of your way and listen to your customers. It is so easy to get stuck on what are our quarterly goals? What are our KPIs? What have I been told I have to deliver? And forget who you're delivering it for. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. A super quick PSA before we get started. If you enjoy this episode or other episodes of Experts of Experience, please give us a subscribe. Just hit that button wherever you listen to your podcasts, as it will greatly help us to continue growing the show and bringing you amazing customer experience content. Well, without further ado, I am so excited to dive into our episode today, where we are

going to get into the immersive world of augmented reality and its profound impact on customer experience with Bryn Henn, the Senior Product Marketing Lead at Niantic. Bryn has more of a decade of experience in content marketing, product strategy, and today she's going to share Niantic's ambitious vision for democratizing AR technology and enriching human experiences in the physical world. Bryn, thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. So you've been working in this space for a while, and I would love to understand, in your opinion, what is essential when creating or improving customer experiences?

Yeah, I think that's a great question. From our perspective, we think what's essential is creating something memorable. And a lot of that comes from these augmented, immersive experiences that we've seen brands launch using our platform, whether that's for creating something more than just buying a Coca-Cola, but you're actually doing it in AR or creating a memorable experience like our recent Ask Santa Anything campaign, where you can talk to Santa in AR and ask him every question that you want to from our reindeer's pets to what's his favorite gift that he's ever received. So it's creating something that's not just transactional, but something that's memorable and makes you have that brand loyalty and that reason for coming back. So Niantic's mission is to enrich human experiences in the

physical world. And I'd love to understand how you were approaching that and really prioritizing that user-centric design and customer experience as you're developing these AR products? Yeah, it's a great question. And it's something I'm really passionate about because I think it's pretty easy in tech to get focused on your own internal roadmap and goals versus actually reminding yourself who you're building it for. So one of the things that we have done, especially since we've pivoted from just making games, but to a platform side is actually taking a bit of an Amazon approach, but our own spin on it, which we call blog before you build. And we ask all of

our product teams to put together a one, maybe one and a half page blog that really answers why we're building something. And if it gets stuck in an internal reason and not an external customer-focused reason, then it doesn't get picked up on the roadmap. So making sure that before we even build, we are confident that we're building it for a need that customers have or a use case we can see them using. Since it is an emerging technology, they might not express the need right away, but it will actually be something they use in their day-to-day lives and not something we're forcing them to use because we think it's the right approach for our bottom line.

I have seen so many product teams do this and I don't blame them because they have great ideas and they're like, oh, this will be cool to build. And we love that. But having a checkpoint of, is this really for the customer is so incredibly essential. Tell me a little bit more about that process. So you basically have like, everyone has to essentially write a pitch for what it is they're building and then who's analyzing it and saying this is actually for the customer or not. We're still refining it to be sure. We've done it for two years now. But the way that we've set it up is that first, the product team looks at it. They make sure that what they're writing is actually something that they can achieve. But the final test is a cross-functional group of product marketing and our user research and comms teams

who all get to basically mark up this document and say, is this real? What does it look like for this person? What about this end user? And if those cross-functional team can't agree, then that's kind of our gut check that, okay, it's not ready yet for customers. Because it's really easy for individual teams to be stuck in the weeds of what they do day to day. So we feel like if we level it up one level with a cross-functional team, we can actually make sure that it's going for the end customers and not for our own goals. Yeah. And then how do you make sure that the cross-functional teams are really thinking about the customer as well? Because the challenge still exists in other functions. Yeah. So we like to use our community team as

kind of the voice of the customer throughout the year. So we'll have different challenges or in-person events or, you know, webinars, et cetera, and kind of collate the feedback that they're getting from customers and make sure that we're sharing that broadly. So it's not just an exercise that's happening when you're setting the roadmap, but basically throughout the year, they're hearing how things are being received, what the actual feedback is, you know, it's not just the ideal user of the product, but everyone who's touching it, what's their experience been, so that all teams feel like they can best speak to what the customer needs. Tell us a little bit about your role. Yeah. So I lead product marketing for our platform team. I'm one of the first product

marketing hires for that team. And I guess for context, Niantic has been around almost 10 years, but it's only been in the last three years where we've had a platform team. And before that, we were really consumer focused building our main title games like Pokemon Go, Peridot, Monster Hunter Now, that kind of thing. But our platform is the first time we're taking the tools that we've iterated over our lifetime as a company, and even before that, when we were at Google Maps, etc., and making sure that they're packaged up in a way that others can build for AR. So my role has really been building kind of that functional foundation of how do we bring products to market for a developer and almost B2B face audience,

instead of just a consumer and gaming audience, and using that as a combination of both go-to-market strategies, but also narrative storytelling and art of the possible and showing what can be done as well as creating all the different assets that need to be created to tell our story. What you are working on is helping to enable many other companies to leverage AR in what they do. Did I hear that right? Correct. If I put it in its most simple form. Yeah, that's way simpler. All good. That's what I'm here for. And then when you think about like how other companies are really leveraging AR, I'd love to hear about some of the situations and applications that you've

been seeing, especially when it comes to customer experience. How are you seeing some companies adopt AR that really enables them to improve the experience they provide their customer? Yeah, we've seen a wide variety. So everything from consumer virtual try-ons. So instead of, especially during COVID, right? Can you try on glasses? Can you try on earrings, et cetera, and make sure it's something that you want to purchase instead of that process of buying and returning and buying and returning, or maybe you're losing money on shipping. It's not environmentally friendly. Can you try it on first and then improve the ability to retain or make the right purchase? So that's one big area. The other spot that we're seeing a lot, especially with our webinar side, is that it's kind of replacing or augmenting out-of-home

advertising for brands and advertisers to create something that connects more one-on-one with the audience instead of just blasting everyone with the same message. It's creating that more personalized touch, which lets people have an experience where they feel like they know the brand better or understand why they'd want to connect with it. And then our third big chunk is always going to be going back to our roots of creating more game-based experiences in AR, whether that's one of our first games was like a D2D-based experience where they're actually using it in real-world locations and creating their own Dungeons and Dragons style gameplay, as well as one of my favorites, which was Deadmau5 creating these sound samples that you can always find on a scavenger hunt and pick up and remix and almost a music based experience in the real world. So it's been a wide variety. Cool. And I want to just circle back to something

you said D to D. Developer to developer. I thought so when I wanted to just circle back to something you said, D to D. Developer to developer. I thought so when I wanted to verify because I haven't heard that before. Yeah, come up with our own language. Yeah, great. I love it. Wow. So there's, I mean, augmented reality, I'll just say the full word just in case everyone doesn't know. But augmented reality has changed so much in recent years. And, you know, for example, the like virtual try on

I've seen, you know, a few years back, like maybe five years back, it was like, okay, this is cute, but like not really working. And then now I'm seeing brands adopt that type of technology where it really does give me that experience where I feel like, okay, I get the feeling of what these sunglasses look like on my face. What is Niantic's vision when it comes to the future of augmented reality? We want to create augmented reality that really makes the real world better. I think there's two ways that you can go with this. There's the Ready Player One style where you are completely in a suit in your VR, you never interact with humans again, but everything's on your face. And there's another one where it's using technology to just

make the world around you a bit more personalized, a bit more engaging, and even find out things about it that you might not see on the surface. So we envision a world where we're creating personalized layers over it, whether that's walking around and you're learning about something historical around you that you've never seen before, or having these glasses on and you're playing a game and you can actually see your characters following behind you. Or if you're shopping, having not the minority report level, but where it's saying, hey, you bought this last time. This is on sale if you want to walk in, where it's saying, hey, you bought this last time,

this is on sale if you want to walk in, where it's fit to you and helps you connect with the world around you, but doesn't take you out of the world. And that requires you to have some sort of hardware to see that. Yes. Long-term, we think it'll be a little bit more of a lightweight glasses, almost like the Ray-Bans that you're seeing coming out. In the meantime, we see that mobile AR and web AR in specific are gonna be the in-between way of doing that, where you're still using it on your phone and it's more accessible to a broad range of people

versus the headsets, which are very expensive at this point. Yeah, it's not necessarily something that's accessible to everyone. And we've also seen a bunch of those glasses or headsets come out that have like a lot of hype around them and then no one actually wears them because they don't look so cute. Yeah. There's always going to be the early adopters. I mean, when Google Glass first came out, everyone knew you were wearing them. Ideally, our goal is long-term, it looks good and stylish on your face.

Yeah, totally. So I want to talk a little bit about this developer community that I know that you've been a pretty big part of developing. Let's just start with, how did you work to really foster that community and relationship with all these developers so that you could be really influencing their innovation, if you could say that, where they can really adopt AR technology into what they're doing.

Yeah, so we have had, since the beginning of our platform side, some incredible community leaders who have gone out and found people where they're already building. I think a key part was not trying to force them into our vision, but to understand a little bit about what they already do and how we could add to it.

And that builds a sense of respect among developers, but also make sure that they have a voice in where we're going so that we're actually building something that they want. And so that's looked like we've joined a little incubator program called AR House in LA. We've gone out to MIT reality attacks or going to Miami Hack Week, places where developers already are, learning what they like and what they're interested in, and then taking the chance, whether that's through a challenge where we sit with them for three days, do basically like a hackathon or through an incentivized program where we ask them to try out our tools, build towards a certain end, and then give us feedback on it. So we're taking a continually iterative approach that is developer-centric and not our end goal-centric, if that makes sense.

Yeah. How are you measuring that? How do you know that you're building something that's really developer-centric? The biggest thing that we're doing right now is, I wouldn't say it's hard data, but we do a lot of qualitative data of doing surveys, finding these kind of ambassadors early on who can be even more ingrained in the community because they're not part of Niantic, who can tell us like, hey, that's actually too many challenges or this tool isn't working the way that you want, or can you build towards this where they feel like they've built a trust both ways and can give us that level of feedback? And then we also manage a Discord where we're taking that feedback constantly. We have in-person events where we ask for surveys afterwards and hear what they want and don't want and use that as a way both in the marketing side to collate what's changing, but then ensuring that we do reports internally and share that through all levels of the company so that people feel like they

have a pulse on where our developers are engaging with the tools. The part around getting real feedback from a community, I think, is one of the hardest parts, to really have that trust so that they feel like they want to go out of their way to tell you what's not working because what will happen if they don't have that trust and like respect for what it is you're doing is they'll just not tell you and not use it. How have you really been approaching that to make sure that you are getting that real hard feedback that you can act on? I think we're continually growing, but one core piece for us is making sure that we don't over-promise. And if we do have a moment

where we're not able to deliver on a promise, feeling comfortable giving them as much context as we can without violating any internal NDAs or anything like that. Basically, living with the ethos of treating them as humans and not treating them as part of our bottom line, they have given us their time and attention to try something out that is new. And it's not always easy when it's new. We don't have perfect documentation. Not everything works the way that we think. And so giving back that mutual respect of saying, hey, here's where we are. Here's where we want to go. Here's where we fell short. And we're going to let you know why and how we're changing it. Because if that's the way I want someone to speak to me more broadly, I feel like that's built

the trust of speaking to them the way you want to be spoken to. Amen to that. I am a massive proponent of making business and tech in particular more human. We need to be looking at each other, at our customers, at our collaborators, at our internal teams as humans. Even as we are trying to advance the world through technology, the thing that technology lacks is that human element. And it's so important to remember that when we're building any type of business, in my humble opinion. It's been important to us too, because it's very easy on the developer side

or even on the community side of games to see tech as like big, evil, super bad. And there's hundreds and thousands of us, but really letting them know like, hey, this is a team of three, or this is a team of four. Here's who you're talking to and making it, taking down that barrier in between so that it is truly a community

and not just a capitalistic exchange. Completely. Have you made any mistakes in building this community? Anything we can learn from? What we've done a lot is make sure that we are not just continually pushing out features, but going back and fixing things that didn't work in the past so that when people have either a first-time experience with us or they're continuing to work with us, they notice that we're making their experience better.

And I don't think when we had a smaller team and we're moving quickly, we had the understanding that we needed to do that right away. And that's probably was our biggest mistake at first. And one, I think we're glad to have fixed most recently. Yeah. Going back to the making business more human, when you see the mistakes or when you see the things that aren't working and you show your customers or your collaborators that you are working to fix that so that what you have now is something that's

smoother before you move on is so important. It's like if in a human relationship, if we just keep moving on, but not really address those sticking points or those things that aren't really working, we start to lose people's trust. And I think that's something that I see so many companies do, especially those that have venture backed funding and a lot of pressure to achieve and grow and show those numbers. They end up diminishing their relationships in the process because they're forcing people to deal with products that are not really great and especially not as great as they could be for the sake of showing more new fancy shiny things. So I see that. I've learned that mistake myself. I'm glad you bring it up. And how about on the flip side,

has there been anything that you've implemented that has really done something amazing or surprised you in the impact it was able to make? I think for me, internally, what I've been surprised with is how much going back to the basics of building a framework for things makes life easier, both for end customers, but internal customers and even yourself. I think I've gone many years where it's just like, okay, let's get moving. We're building the airplane as it's taking off. There's no time to think about what the best practices are, but taking a few seconds to actually put together things like the blog before you build process or a basic framework for messaging, or even just a basic framework for events has given us that ability to rinse and repeat a lot more effectively than I've seen before in my own career.

And it's something that I would like want to shout to the mountaintops of even though you're moving fast, like take a second and think about the foundation that you're going to build on. Otherwise, you're going to regret it later or just feel more pain later. 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. And when you say foundation, do you mean like the process that you want to follow, the checks and balances, the checkpoints that you want to make sure you hit as you're moving through things. Yeah, exactly. Or for us, we've put together very basic before

anything launches. Once we know where it's on the roadmap for anything launches, setting down the same document each time of like, here's the messaging, here's the basic way we're going to talk about this. So no matter what we create after it, we're consistent. So our end audience is hearing the same story and not saying, wait a second, I thought it was about this. Now it's about this. Which one is it? So that we can stay aligned across multiple teams and allow anyone to talk about our product and our vision in the same way and not have to come up with it on the spot or add their own spin to it. Could you give us an example of that in action? When I first joined in January of 2021, we were launching a pretty audacious, not audacious, but kind of confusing product

called our visual positioning system, which is basically taking the idea of GPS, which knows where you are on the X and Y coordinate. But instead of using satellites, it's using images to very quickly know not only where you're standing in the world, but exactly what you're looking at, what you're pointing towards, what your angle is. And so any AR experience would appear exactly as it should. and not like you may have seen when you're in the city using GPS and it has you drifting into a building and then over the street kind of thing. Launching this was the first time that Niantic had to really explain not only a technology, but also why you use it and why it mattered in the real world. And I started and I kept asking, okay, well, how have we done this before? And there was no answer to that. And so I started really just writing it down

on my own and realizing that that wasn't going to work. And so putting together a framework of here's what we're launching. Do we agree on that? Great. Next step. Here's the top line message that we're saying. Great. Next step. Then making the three pillars of how we explain it. And then being able to hand that to our video team, our end customers, our community team, them all understand exactly what we're launching, but also what it can do. And that led to a moment of clear understanding across basically 20 teams. And we've used that same framework for really easy launches to really complicated launches since because it gives a source of truth for everyone.

And then everyone is speaking the same language. They have the same talking points. They know what they're working towards. I think this also goes back to building trust with your customer as well and anyone that you're working with. I'm sure we've all been in situations where we're working with a company or we're a consumer of a company and we're seeing different messaging coming from different places. And it's incredibly confusing. It makes us question everything. And it makes us lose trust in what it is they're really offering. And so I couldn't agree more that having a type of framework of product brief or messaging brief that everyone

can go back to is really important, especially when you're working cross-functionally with many different teams that have different things that they're working on and different goals, it can get really confusing. Yeah, absolutely. It seems very basic, but it is so nice. It's something that I think a lot of companies, I've been in this position myself, where it's like, okay, we know what we're doing. We just want to get going. We just want to get to the end goal as quickly as possible. We don't want to have to slow it down with process and these types of things. And I think there's really a fine balance there of how can you strategically get to the goal as quickly as possible, but do so in a way that minimizes friction and confusion for your internal teams. Because at the end of the day, what you're sharing is that document, I'm sure, actually helps people move faster. It's just you had to

take a beat to put it together before you could start running. Exactly. And there's definitely fine balance. I've been at other companies where it is way too many checks and balances and it took six weeks to write one blog post and that's not good. But having at least something to start with is a good balance. Completely. I think a lot about customer effort. That's something I know we talk about a lot on this show when it comes to customer experience and customer success. How can we reduce the effort of our customer, but it's also important to reduce our employee effort. And if we're going to create a guidebook for our customers and say, here's how you can use our product easily, we should also do the same thing for our internal teams to say,

this is how you do a project efficiently. This is how you can get to your end goal as quickly as possible. And I think it's really important for leaders to think about how we can support everyone working on something by providing clarity and guidance. Yeah. And my hope is with that for the customer, that way, you know, when they're seeing an email or they call into support or they meet someone in person, they feel like there is a sense of consistency for all things and they're not stuck with what you're saying, the burden of saying, well, which one's right and who do I listen to and are they trustworthy? Because that's too much work to put on them. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. I mean, it comes from the inside out,

right? Customers will feel what's going on on the inside of your business, whether you like it or not. So you need to focus on those internal components as well. Exactly. In your product marketing role, I'm sure you deal a lot with many other teams and you need to drive cross-functional collaboration. How do you go about that? What are some tactics or tools that you use to really make sure that everyone is communicating and working well together? Yeah, I think for me, that's constantly an iterative approach. I feel like there's a bit of, I will never say I'm a therapist or a psychiatrist, but I do feel like there's a bit of understanding personalities. The way that you work with someone in engineering versus someone in sales or someone

in leadership is completely different. And taking the time when you first start in a role or start at a company to understand the language of each team is where I like to start. For example, I can tell a marketing team, like, here's the go-to-market that we want to put together, all the assets that we need to create. And there's a shared language there of how much time and money each thing costs. But if I do the same pitch to someone cross-functionally, it's asking them to have a lot of burden of understanding of what my job is. And so what I like to do in cross-functional is over-explain, but in a way that might not necessarily take up all the time in the room. We have like an internal confluence page of how do you work with the product marketing

team or when we start kicking off a doc, some expectations of what will happen now, what will happen later, et cetera. And then clarifying these levels of roles and responsibilities or mutual agreements when we do an event before we even kick it off. So it's those basics. And then from there, making sure that you focus on building that trust. Like when I started last year, I switched. We originally just had our Unity side and then we launched our WebAR and there was a whole new team of cross-functional leaders and product managers that I needed to work with. So I started each of those meetings kind of understanding what their concerns were and

where they were coming from, and then making clear what my commitment was to them and creating that social contract basically as cross-functional teammates so that we could move faster together. And you just jogged my memory about something I heard on a podcast. This is a really great podcast called A Brave New Work. And they were talking about a workshop that they run where they have leaders write their personal user manuals. And what I'm kind of hearing you say in a way is almost like having teams create or what you're doing is you're understanding the user manual of everyone. And I'm just kind of like, I don't know, thinking right now how cool it would be to have a user manual for each team. Here's the metrics we

care about. Here's what we're working on. Here's how we like to communicate all these types of things. Because like you're saying, you've had to really like empathize and understand how everyone wants to be working so that you can really have influence in communicating to them, here's what we need or what other teams need to make sure that we're all on the same page and working together. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. My fiance just started a new company. He's on like week three or something. And every single person on his team has a, here's how I work doc that you start with. And then you write your own, which is intimidating at first. But then I actually sat down and helped him write it. I'm like, no,

these are things people should know about you because you work better at this time and you think this way and you'll communicate that way and it'll solve all of these friction points a little bit better. But for teams, I think it would be huge because I remember thinking like, what is an engineering week? And I used to start and I'd have an entire doc of acronyms and then go on Google and search it. And the worst one at Niantic was our senior VP of engineering. His name is Brian McClendon, but internally his name is BAM and he goes by B-. And for three weeks, I kept searching the acronym BAM, trying to understand what it was until someone actually told me the answer. So if there was a manual, I could have saved so much time. Again, going back to reducing your employee effort and helping everyone to understand each other. I, oh my gosh, I've been there. I've worked at companies where we've made up our own metrics that are like similar to like, you know, an ARR or something like this, but it was like a different metric.

And I'm like Googling what is this, but there is no such metric on the internet because we've completely made it up ourselves, which is cool and fine. But like you need to communicate that. So, so yeah, user manuals for people in teams. I think that's a great idea. Yeah. So when it comes to your customers and your end users, how do you go about gathering feedback and really working to understand who the end user of Niantic's products are? We have a wonderful user research team that they'll set out. We'll work on questions together

and they'll do more like formal research, especially when we're launching a new product or idea. But we also try to kind of take like a multi-step approach. We have some internal experts to start. We have our user experience engineers who are actually building on the product all the time. I'll often grab just a little bit of time with them and explain like, hey, where do you hang out? What do you like to do? What are the questions? Where are you on the internet? And then kind of put our team to start looking there and see what the conversations are. And then continually, like I said before, using our community as a way of asking questions, getting feedback. We use NPS surveys. We do like more official multi-question surveys throughout the year. And then we try to use our events as these in-person touch points where we're asking

everyone who attends, not just the marketing team, not just the people putting it on, but anyone who's there from our team to give feedback at the very end of like what they heard, what they thought we could do better, where they thought a key feedback point kept coming up so that we're getting multiple views of where our developers are and what they're caring about. And then long-term, we'd also love to use a little bit more social listening with our social channels to understand just what are they talking about in XR in general and their experience in general. So we know not just us, like what are they thinking about our competitors? What are they thinking about the landscape and use that as part of our material?

Tell us a little bit more about the events. I think events can be such amazing ways to get that real qualitative information from your customer. Can you tell us a little bit more about how those are set up? Yeah. So we, with developers, it's kind of nice. We have a format that's a little bit different than B those are set up. Yeah, so we, with developers, it's kind of nice. We have a format that's a little bit different than B2, like business to business,

where we do hackathons. So you get more than one day with people. You can get up to three days with the same set of users. And you, our community team has created a wonderful program of where like that first day, whether you know Niantic or not, they're gonna give you an intro to the product, what the potential goal of that time is. And then you'll get an idea from that

first day of like, how quickly do people pick it up? Where do they struggle? Where is our messaging confusing? And then my community manager, Chanel, is wonderful at writing that down and coming back to me and being like, hey, they don't know what this means at all. We need to work on it or this is really resonating. And then the next two days, we bring in our product managers as well as our developer relations teams and some engineers to actually work alongside developers to build some of their hackathons. And that way, not only are we getting the information, but the people directly building the products are as well as the people doing the research on AR in general, and then they can take that back.

So that's one type of event. And then we have more industry-based events like a South by Southwest or an AWE where our sales and B2B team is there. And what they're paying attention to is how are people asking questions who have never heard of us at all? Or how are they coming to meetings? What are they most interested in? What are we having to push to better explain that kind of thing and using that as a way to source where do we stand as a company, but where does AR stand? Where does our vision of a real world AR stand and use that to iterate on what we're creating and talking about? Two things that you just shared. One in the hackathon side of things, like really working with these customers to build something is such an interesting

way to approach it. And I think, you know, people listening may say, well, obviously for in an AR type of setup, that makes sense. And what about me? I actually think it's something that a lot of businesses can do in bringing their customer in to say like, hey, let's like work on creating or solving one of your problems using the technology that we have. And who knows what's going to come from it? At the very least, you're building a relationship. Yeah. Like at the very least, if not new ideas for products or a more loyal customer. Right. And there's smaller versions that you can do. Like I'm sure in more B2B, I used to be in a data analytics company. Obviously, we weren't going to do weekends where we asked them to open all of their company data with us. But we would do smaller events where it's like, hey, it's March Madness and we have this data set. Let's show you how you could get these answers with an open data set and work on it together where you're understanding the tools, but also how people ask questions as a way to refine what they're creating. So it doesn't necessarily have to be what we can do where it's an output directly related

to the product that we create, but it could be something tangential where you're seeing how people use a tool. Yeah, that's so interesting. And then the other thing I wanted to highlight that you were sharing is being at a more broad event with people who may not be as familiar with you and listening to the questions that people ask. Like if you think about your least tech savvy users or your most green user on your platform, what are the questions that they are asking and being able to understand what those are

so that you can get ahead of it proactively and reduce their confusion is so huge. So, I mean, events are such an amazing way to do that. Obviously they can be expensive or, you know, time consuming, but I think you just get so much juicy info as well as the marketing, you know, awareness that comes with that. Yeah, exactly. So I'd love to understand from you, what are some of your favorite tools that you use to aid in your work? I use a bunch. I get tired of one after a little bit of time and find that like refreshing jumps into it. But my go-to tools are very basic. I'm obsessed with paper docs. I feel like they get out of the way. There's

little interface so I can just create like a mind list of everything that I need to get done. That's more for my internal of just like, it's Monday morning, let's set the task list for the week. What do I need to remember? I also really like Asana for managing my team. We have created some really good setups for internal intake forms, kind of turning those into tasks, understanding what the overview is. And then lately, I've honestly been obsessed with ChatGPT as like a thinking partner and have kind of taught the team a little bit of how to use it from a little little bit of a hilarious way my fiance and I started using it on date nights as a way to put in the most ridiculous prompts we could and see what stories came out and it actually helped me realize what was possible from a creative like thinking

tool so I'll start putting in strategy and ideas keeping it vague of course but asking it what would you ask next and what would you think of as a way of kind of doubling my output so it vague, of course, but asking it, what would you ask next? And what would you think of as a way of kind of doubling my output? So it's one of my favorite right now. Yeah. Of course. There's opportunities. There are endless. That's so great. So I have two last questions for you that we like to ask all of our guests. The first is, I'd love to hear about a time that or an experience that you've recently had with a brand that left you impressed. Tell us about it. So I recently moved.

I used to always be based in San Francisco. I recently moved out to the East Bay and my fiance and I have been finding like our new coffee shops, our new go-to places after being entrenched in North Beach for so long. And we found this new one that we loved. Our very first time in there ordered this sour cream coffee cake. And I was so excited to eat it, but I'm allergic to nuts and bit in and immediately had a pecan. It wasn't labeled. And nothing bad happened, thankfully. I recognized it right away, but was really frustrated that they hadn't changed it and was really not sure if I'd go back, but my fiance loved the coffee cake.

So we went back another week and I noticed not only had they changed that sign to make clear that it had nuts in it, they'd labeled all of their items. And then a few weeks later, I came home and my fiance had an entire tray of this sour cream coffee cake because they wanted to make sure that I could experience it without nuts and went out of their way to like get phone numbers and exchange it. And we've become a loyal customer where every Sunday we go to the farmer's market, get a coffee. I don't get the coffee cake, but at least know like all of their products and taking

that level of what could have been like a disastrous experience and using it as a way to build customer loyalty was really impressive to me because again, they went back to the human thing and they went back to the surprise and delight. There's the bare minimum that they could have done, which is change the sign, but to go in one step further to make an experience where I'd want to go there every weekend was really cool to see. That really brings us full circle, both on the human element, as well as the iterating and improving the product versus just making a new cake. We could use that analogy, right? It's like, they're like,

okay, we're actually going to focus. We're going to change all the labels, make sure that that never happens again, because we don't want another customer to have to experience that. And then going above and beyond to really make it right. That says a lot. So I mean, I would go to that coffee shop. Not even to be even nerdier. They didn't change their ideal customer profile. They knew that I was like not it, but they wanted to make sure that they found another tool that would work for me or something to make it a little bit nerdier. But it was cool. Totally. I love it. I mean, this is the thing. And this is why we asked this question is there are great customer experiences

everywhere we look. And there are lessons that we can take no matter the industry or the application that we can take back into our own customer experiences. Yeah, exactly. My last question for you is, what is one piece of advice that you think every customer experience leader should hear? The biggest one that I can give is get out of your way and listen to your customers. I think it is so easy to get stuck on what are our quarterly goals?

What are our KPIs? What have I been told I have to deliver? And forget who you're delivering it for. If I see in PRDs or in docs that people submit to me and it has nothing to do with the customer, that's my immediate sign to pause. And my hope is that anyone who's in customer experience or building products or even just closely related to customer experience takes that insight as well as step back, remind who you're building this for, and then go about your day to day.

Yeah, it's great advice. Well, friend, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. Wonderful conversation talking about the world of AR, cross functional collaboration, and listening to our customers. So thanks so much. And we'll speak soon. Thanks for having me. You are a business leader with vision. You've seen the future as an AI enterprise thriving with Salesforce AI and data, and it is bright. Getting there? It's a little fuzzier. Don't worry. Salesforce CTOs are here to work side by side with your team and turn your AI and data vision

into a reality. We're talking expert guidance and implementation support from the best of the best. To learn more, visit sfdc.co slash professional services.