Experts of Experience - #46 Expanding FanDuel's Reach: The Power of Partnerships and Customer Experience

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

On this episode, Josh Ives, SVP of Customer Experience Operations at FanDuel, discusses the customer-centric strategies and innovative approaches that have contributed to the success of FanDuel in the highly competitive sports betting industry. He emphasizes the importance of building customer trust, protecting customers through responsible gaming programs, and creating personalized experiences. Josh also highlights the significance of partnerships in expanding the reach of FanDuel and enhancing the customer experience.Tune in to learn:Why building customer trust is crucial for success in the sports betting industry.Why responsible gaming programs and customer protection are key strategies to drive loyalty.How personalization and understanding customer preferences create engaging experiences.How partnerships play a significant role in expanding reach and enhancing the customer experience.Why consistency is key in delivering great customer experiences.How recovery from service failures can be an opportunity to build trust and loyalty.Why integrating tools and technology can enhance both the customer and employee experience.–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 alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Loyalty is not really a program. It's an emotional outcome that you want your customer base to have. Loyalty is a feeling that people have for a brand, a restaurant they like, or their friends. And that comes from a mutual trust that's been built. And so at FanDuel, we really focus heavily on building customer trust. It's about how do we build that consistency in our operation so that the customers can rely on FanDuel to always have the experience they expect from FanDuel. And when they don't, how do we recover from it? Which is, I think, something a lot of brands miss. What's in it for them? That has to be abundantly clear to any customer. What's in it for me?

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today, I'm excited to have Josh Ives, the Senior Vice President of Customer Experience Operations at FanDuel on the show. We are going to dive into the innovative strategies, cutting-edge technology, and customer-ric approaches of the future of fantasy sports and sports betting. Josh, how are you? Great. Happy to be here. So FanDuel is in a highly competitive market that has been growing rapidly as well. And I'm curious to know what are some of the key customer-centric strategies that you've been implementing as you've been rapidly growing this business?

Yeah. So for us, really, it's been a focus on making sure that we never forget our core values. So FanDuel has a set of 10 principles. And our number one principle is everything begins with a customer. And if you think about most companies, there's always a customer centricity principle somewhere in there. But the fact that we've made it our first value and the fact that it's something that we live and breathe every day, I'll be honest, FanDuel, I've been here four years now. One of the first companies I've worked at where I hear our principles stated time and time again in meetings, in the hallways, we really do live and breathe those principles. And so I think that has been a big help for us. And one of the things I've really embraced since I've been here,

having everything beginning with the customer as our number one principle, is this notion that I probably say more than I should internally, but that at FanDuel, there is only two jobs that exist. And it's either helping our customers be successful directly or helping those that do be successful in doing so. And if you boil your job into one of those two things, then it's real easy to stay focused on the customer, which in turn keeps your customers happy and loyal to your brand because they're having the right experiences and you provide the best experience in the industry, which is what we strive to do every day. This is the best answer I've ever heard. I love this so much because I get to speak to a lot of customer-centric leaders on this show. And this is one of the things that I think really sets companies apart in terms of the customer experience is having it be something that the employees live and breathe. And I really like what you said about there being the customer facing teams and then the people who support that, because we need to be thinking every single person in the company, how are we delivering on our customer promise? How are we creating a great experience for our customers? And if we're not doing that, it's really difficult

to create an authentic experience that stands up no matter the situation. And so, yeah, I just, I love that so much. And I just think it's such an important thing. So I'm so happy you kicked it off with that. So I'm curious to know a little bit more of like, what does this look like in practice when it comes to really creating customer-centric strategies, doing things that are really helping the customer achieve their goals? What are some of the ways that you have been doing that at FanDuel? Certainly, it starts in our product teams and our marketing teams that make our customer base aware and our prospective customers aware of the things that we have to offer in this

space. But then very quickly, it becomes part of what we do in my organization where we are customer facing and we're interacting with customers, whether that be through a service interaction or in their retail experience in one of our retail sports books, taking those experiences and that feedback we hear from the customer and making sure that we close loop it back to our product teams, back to our engineering teams, and back to our marketing teams so that we can make sometimes even very minor tweaks and improvements that just make the customer experience that much more seamless and that much better. And I think that's an area, again, everyone has a VOC program. Certainly, I hope everyone has a

VOC program, whether it's formalized or not. Voice of the customer, just so everyone knows. Sorry about that. No, all good. It's really about how you take that program and make it real. And so one of the things, we just did this last week again, actually, we regularly set up opportunities for our leaders across the organization to come and sit next to customer service people, people on our payments and fraud team, go into our retail environments and see, you know, what those experiences are like and interact with customers in a real way. Nothing makes it more real for someone who works on a product, whether they be an engineer or a product designer, than literally listening to a customer, explaining what problem they're running

into and hearing it in a much more visceral way in the customer's own words. You know, you can run all the reports. And of course, we do that as well that say, you know, X percent of customers have this issue with this promotion. And that's great. And that's super important that quantifies, you know, what customers are experiencing. But it is not the same as hearing a customer say, I thought I was getting this, but it seems like I should have done something different than I did. And very quickly you watch people, they just immediately go into this, oh man, I understand why they're confused and I can fix it right now kind of thing. And it's so impactful and so visceral. And so having those real moments of connection and touch points where our employees really feel what the customers are experiencing on a day-to-day basis. And then also coupling that with the quantitative data that says, and by the way, it happened this many times yesterday,

or this many times last week, or whatever the case may be, is really what drives that and keeps us focused and keeps our energy up. I fully, fully agree with you that it requires both, both the quantitative and the qualitative. And I think that I too have implemented policies where we need someone or everyone on the team has to come and actually answer tickets or listen to the phone calls or like connect to the customer. And what is so helpful about that is that it allows our internal teams to feel the customer's feelings. You can hear the way you can hear that confusion. And then you really understand, oh, we're making someone's day less good because of something that we can fix. And so why don't we do that? And it really helps to contextualize the data

and inspire people to make changes. It does. And it helps kind of remind people who are working on product and they do a great job, but every day they're designing product for our customers. And it's very easy as a product designer to fall into the trap of thinking you are your customer. You're not. The very nature of working in whatever industry you work in makes you not a valid customer because you have inside information that you would no way have if you didn't work in that industry. Just a quick anecdote. My wife, very often, she'll be trying to reach out for help from some company. And she always asks me, what should I do? And I always go, well, I don't want to tell you what to do. I just want to watch

what you try to do. And it's so informative because I mean, I know, okay, first scroll to the bottom of the page. They've probably hidden the support link down there because they really don't want you to click it because it costs money, but she doesn't know to do that. She's like, why don't they want to help me? I'm trying to give them money. They should make this easy. And so it's super, I get, I get a ton of excitement and, you know, kind of insights from watching people outside of this industry, try to, try to interact with support or try to, you know, try to place a wager or whatever. So it's, you know, it's really, it's really insightful to do that and see that kind of non-insider view into how you operate as a company. I mean, we're all customers in our worlds, right? And it's one of my favorite things to do. What you're describing is one going through the

flows myself and then watching someone else like my mom. Oh my gosh. You know, someone who did not grow up with computers trying to figure out how to get help. Oh my God. The stories are like awful. And it's not that I enjoy watching her go through that, but it's like, it's really insightful to see, wow, there is a massive opportunity here. And that is what every company should be trying to avoid is putting someone through that level of pain. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm curious to know a little bit about how you really drive loyalty within FanDuel. And I'm assuming you want people to come back. How do you do that? We look at loyalty as not necessarily a program.

Certainly, you know, loyalty programs exist. They're effective. But loyalty is not really a program. It's an emotional outcome that you want your customer base to have. And, you know, loyalty is a feeling that, you know, people have for a brand, a restaurant they like, or, you know, their friends. And that comes from a mutual trust that's been built. And so at FanDuel, we really focus heavily on building customer trust through

quite a few things. One, obviously, you know, great product, great experiences, transparent marketing campaigns, that's table stakes. You have to have that. The other is really prioritizing customer protection. And that comes in a couple of ways. First, and this is part of my organization, is our fraud function. So we spend a lot of energy protecting our customers from bad actors who might be trying to get a hold of their account, might be trying to use a payment mechanism that's not their own. We spend a lot of energy on that and trying to protect our customers from that risk. We also spend a tremendous amount of energy studying all the regulations that we are subject to and then working very hard to

actually exceed them. And so there's, you know, our industry is a heavily regulated industry. We strive very hard to be above the minimum requirements that are set forth by the regulators, which again, just breeds that customer trust. We don't want to be on the front page as having violated customer trust in any way, shape, or form. And then the other super important thing for us is protecting our customers when they can't necessarily always protect themselves. And that comes with our responsible gaming programs. We have tons and tons of tools available for customers where they can sign up, look at their activity statements, make sure they're betting within means that they should be.

We have customers have the ability to set deposit limits, give themselves timeouts, etc. And then, of course, we also have internal tools that we use to identify when we see a customer that might be on a bad trend and we'll proactively reach out to them to try to mitigate. We also recently were one of the co-founders with, I believe, eight other operators in our industry of the Responsible Online Gaming Association. ROGA is the abbreviation for that, which is really about setting industry standards to drive how do we keep this as entertainment? And that's where it needs to be. And that's where we want to keep it. And we're at the forefront of that. And that's incredibly important to us.

Wow, that's amazing. And I think that really what really is highlighted for me in that is that you're really thinking about the customer's best interest, even if it's not to your business's best interest. I would assume it's kind of good for business if someone just keeps betting over and over and over again. But the reality is, is that that can have a huge detriment in their lives. And so really thinking about how can you help them find the right balance is really amazing. It may seem like it's in the best interest of the business, but in the long term, it truly is not. Because the last thing that we want in this industry is people who shouldn't be participating,

participating and creating problems for themselves. That's bad for us. That's bad for the industry. And it's bad for the customer. And so this really kind of ties back to our viewpoint of everything beginning with the customer. We fundamentally believe that when we put that customer first and we take care of them and we earn their trust,

that ultimately the business metrics, I don't want to say they take care of themselves, but nearly. That's awesome. I'm curious to know a little bit about partnerships because I've been on your website. Personally, I'm not a customer. I'm totally, honestly, not really a sports watcher at all, but I know a lot of people who are, and I've seen FanDuel ads all over the place. And I know that partnerships is a big part of your strategy. I'd love to understand a little bit more about how you approach partnerships. How do you choose the right partners that really serve the customer at the end of the day? Yeah. So obviously for us with sports, those partnerships are relatively straightforward. A big part of what we're trying to achieve from a sports book perspective is making every moment mean a little more to the customer.

If you are a sports fan, placing a wager can make that game a little more exciting for you. We want to live that and breathe that. One of the partnerships that we announced heading into this NFL season, which we're excited for, is an exclusive partnership with YouTube TV, where you place a $5 bet at FanDuel and you get three weeks free of NFL Sunday ticket through YouTube TV as a trial, which gives you that opportunity to make football at the beginning of the season more meaningful for you because you have the opportunity to watch more games than you might if you weren't a Sunday ticket subscriber.

And then again, of course, our partnerships with the NFL, some of the specific teams, Major League Baseball, NBA, NHL, all those partnerships are critical to our success and the fans' enjoyment of our offerings. And I would assume that's also where a lot of your customers or potential customers are already. And so it's really like brid where a lot of your customers or potential customers are already. And so it's really like bridging those two worlds. Yep, absolutely.

That's awesome. What emerging trends are you looking at when it comes to the sports betting industry? I mean, I know this industry has just become so much more prominent in the past few years. Maybe COVID had something to do with that. I'm not totally sure, but I know just looking at your history, that's really been like the growth of FanDuel since then. And not completely, but I think it's grown a lot since then. And I'm curious to know kind of what you're looking ahead to, what kind of trends are coming up that you're aware of and you're planning against? Yeah. I mean, without giving away obviously too much of our roadmap here, what I can say is there's really kind of two avenues that we have to pursue as we're thinking about the future of sports betting in particular. And that's simplicity for new entrants. So you yourself, for example, not necessarily a big

sports fan or not necessarily that interested in sports betting, you're probably not going to jump into a complex fantasy product or a parlay bet with multiple legs on it. But you might be interested in something that you can understand if there's a player that you're interested in. And so how do we create those easy to enter, easy to understand avenues for new audiences that we might be able to capture? And then how do we also at the same time create deeper, more rich products for people that are deep into this and really, you know, they want to do things like almost be able to set their own odds or create their own parlays and, you know, build out more complex, more deep relationships with an operator like FanDuel. So that's kind of critical. And then

beyond sports betting, in our online casino product, in our daily fantasy product, in horse racing products, it's relatively similar, right? It's what are the things that are relevant, that are top of mind, not just within whether it be the sports industry or the racing industry, the casino industry, but even within popular culture that we can kind of attach to and keep things exciting and engaging. So it's really multiple levels depending on the type of user. It really is. And I can't get too specific because I don't want to give away too much of our roadmap, which obviously is proprietary, but yeah, that's the general direction. As you're saying that, I'm thinking about, you must have a very complex segmentation model.

I'm just thinking about like there's probably so many different levels of user. And then as they go through your, as they begin working with you or as they're using your product, they become more expert in the product. Then they probably require different things. And so I'm curious to know how you map that, if you can speak to that at all. Yeah. I mean, look, it's super interesting. We, of course, as you would expect in any industry and any company that has multiple service offerings, we have plenty of customers that are deep focused, right? Like they're a hard sports book customer and maybe really all they bet on is football. And that's great. We love

those customers. And we have others that they bet across a whole array of sports. And then we have others that, you know, they're active in our sports book and they're also pretty active in our online casino product. And, you know, same kind of counterpoint. We have tons of people that, look, they're a casino user. That's what they're going to do. They're probably not going to cross over into sports and that's okay. What's I think interesting is these cross-product users and is there seasonality to that? In cases there are, and in other cases there's not. So you're right, it is incredibly complex and trying to find that balance of how we manage getting the right information to the right customer at the right time along their journey into what they're going

to be interested in is not an easy problem. No. I mean, something I talk to a lot of people about on the show is personalization because every consumer is wanting more personalized communications. And just in thinking of the complexity of your product and how you have people that are using just one part or people who are crossing over to use multiple parts of the product. How are you actually approaching that personalization for your customers? I mean, candidly, a big part of it is user choice, right? So making sure that we present users the options and giving them easy ways to say, I don't care about that. Don't put it in front of me. And respecting that when they do is pretty critical. I've been at companies where it's easy to fall into sort of a overly

commercially led trap of putting things in front of users that they don't want to see. I'll give you a very, very easy example. I won't name the company, but we had it online. It was both a storefront and a library. And what we found is most of our users, when they logged in, they wanted to go right to their library because they wanted to engage with the content they already have. All of our commercial people wanted to put them right into the storefront because it's like, well, of course we want them to buy a thing. You know, we don't want to show them the things they already bought. We want them to buy a new thing. And what we found, and we actually ran a test on this. And what we found was it didn't matter. The likelihood to make a purchase for the user made zero difference, whether we landed them automatically in the storefront or in the library.

What it did make a difference in, it was how hard they had to work to do what they wanted to do, which was usually go engage with the content they already had. And so we presented the data and the commercial leader said, this makes a ton of sense. I so we presented the data and the commercial leader said, this makes a ton of sense. I get that that's better for the user. Land them in the storefront every time. FanDuel doesn't operate that way. We are always focused on what the user wants and making sure that if they tell us they're not interested in something, they're not interested in that. We're not going to keep shoving it at them. 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. Having had both of those experiences or working in those two different environments, what would you say are the pros and cons of doing it the FanDuel way? The pros are obviously you drive consumer loyalty and it's part of why we're the number one sportsbook in America. You drive that loyalty. Again, this goes back to consumer trust from my perspective. If a customer tells you they don't want to see something and you shove it right back in their face the next day, then that's not really building brand trust, right? From a cons perspective, it might make it slightly slower if you're trying to run a test. If you have people that keep opting

out of the thing you're trying to actually gain new data on as a new product, maybe they don't understand what it is, but really there's not a lot of downside. That con is me digging hard to try to come up with one. We honestly haven't really seen it. It's generally positive to listen to your consumers and hear what they want. And that said, sometimes your consumers don't know what they want until you show it to them. So you do have to have that discipline to make sure, hey, are we giving people the opportunity to understand what this offering actually is,

which also puts discipline on you to explain it effectively, which I think a lot of companies miss out on. Making it clear to what the value proposition is and the sort of so what for the customer is huge. And if you miss that and you can't get that conveyed quickly and simply, then you're not going to capture that consumer. What's in it for them? That has to be abundantly clear to any customer. What's in it for me to do this. And going back to, I had an example the other day where I was on Instagram and I'm totally, honestly, I have an addiction. I'm like,

if there's one thing I'm addicted to, it's Instagram. It's so annoying. And there was this little, and there's this, you know, I have like an app that I like pay for to like lock Instagram. So I don't go on it. And it's like, like they should have responsible scrolling like programs, honestly. Um, but they had this little banner that said, we'd like for you to take a survey. And so I take the survey and it's asking like, how do you like the content that we're showing you? And honestly, I don't know about if for those who use Instagram, like the feeds have really declined in terms of quality. I'm still using it and it's annoying, but it's like, these aren't people I know. It's just like, it's like cat videos. I like cats and honestly they are cute, but I don't need that. You know, it's like, I never asked for that. I'd rather it just not be there. And so they asked me all these questions about like,

do I like the feeds? And I'm really curious to see what happens. Nothing changed overnight. I was kind of disappointed. I was like, maybe this will just be the hint that they needed, but it's not. So I think it's good that they were asking, but the big test is what do they do with the information? You know, it's actually, that's a great call out. And I'll tell you, we had this challenge at EA where customers would tell us microtransactions in video games. We hate that. It's terrible.

We don't like it. And then they would absolutely all day long purchase microtransactions in video games. So as a brand, what do you do? And I suspect Instagram is probably facing the same thing. I'm still watching the cat videos. That's exactly right. So that's really difficult. And this is one of the things I kind of love about,

you know, the world I live in, which is direct customer facing engagement is you can do all the market research in the world and it's super important. You absolutely have to do that. But that is always the world of what customers will tell you they think. We live in the world of what they do all day long.

And I love that. And sometimes what they do and how they feel of what they do all day long. And I love that. And sometimes what they do and how they feel about what they do don't always align. Totally. And so I think where you can find those disparities and try to align them better is that's where you create kind of the magical experiences that are very hard to replicate. Yeah. It's a fine balance, right? Because I mean, I think if I go back to the Instagram example, I'm like, I'm telling you, I don't want this stuff. I'm still watching it. So you're like, oh, she does want it. But like, I don't want it.

Even so, it's like, how do you listen to the customer and also predict what it is that they are going to want when they're not telling you directly, it's tricky. It's really hard. But I do think that asking and getting feedback from customers is super important. I mean, I'm actually curious, when it comes to responsible gaming, did you implement those mechanisms because of customer feedback or because you just know that this is a problem? So the reality is when it comes to responsible gaming, some of it is about feedback, right? There's things that we do get customers that say, hey, I'd love a tool to be able to do this. I

don't want to be able to place a bet in the middle of the night. Can you give me the ability to limit that? Great. That's good feedback. We want people that are engaging in safe, healthy ways and that this is an entertainment platform for, not a habitual platform or not a necessity. And that's critical to us. It's core to our TNA and core to who we are. So you're still thinking about what's in the best interest of the customer? Yeah. If anyone from Instagram is listening, can you please do that for me? Because the cat videos are great, but I just don't need them anymore. So I'd love to talk a little bit. What will happen is there'll be some rainy Friday night and you're going to not have anything to do and you're going to be like, where are these damn cats?

I know. I know. It's so true. It's so true. So I'd love to talk a little bit about your team. I know we touched on this earlier, but really having that culture of customer cent with the customer are doing so in a way that represents the company and what the company believes in? So first and foremost, a little less than four years ago, like I said, I joined the company

four years ago. Shortly after I joined, I set a mission for my organization, which is really simple. And it's make FanDuel known for delivering consistently great customer experiences. And there's a couple of key words in that. One is known. We want to build a reputation for that. And the other is consistently. And that's critical. So my function is customer experience operations. And so,

you know, customer experience, everybody kind of knows what that is. The operational part of it to me is equally important because that's where the consistency comes in. And there's a huge number of companies, we've all done business with them, where you might have a great experience once or twice, but then you have a real garbage experience that for some reason you're like, this was the same thing I had a great experience for two weeks ago. What happened here? What broke? And there's just a lack of consistency and operational rigor that drives the policy, the procedure, whatever the case is that led to the initial great experience to be consistent. And so that's really one of the things that we think about is, obviously we want to deliver great experiences, but how do we do it day in, day out, every time, whether you get, you know, this agent, that agent, or you walk into one of our retail locations, or you're talking to one of your VIP account managers, how do we make sure that consistent experience happens that feels like VDuel every single time. And so we drive that. We have a very rigorous

training program. It always starts with responsible gaming, and then we move into the other mechanics of how to do your job and what types of bets we have and all the nuances of our tools and everything else. But really, it's about how do we build that consistency in our operation so that the customers can rely on FanDuel to always have the experience they expect from FanDuel? And when they don't, how do we recover from it? Which is, I think, something a lot of brands miss. It's like, look, we've got hundreds and hundreds of people that are interacting with customers every day. That doesn't always go according to plan.

I'd be lying if I told you otherwise. How do we detect it when that happens? And how do we make up for it? And we have a program where we literally, we find those things. We proactively reach out to those customers when we've detected that we didn't do what we should have done. And we rectify the situation. You would be shocked how surprised those customers are because it's unusual.

And by the way, they become some of our most loyal customers down the road because whether it's, you know, we found out because they filled out a survey and said, this didn't really go very well. And we followed back up and actually did something about it. Or it's just, well, we know what happened here. This should have been solved a different way. And we do that. The responses we get are just like, companies don't do this. You actually read the survey I filled out? You know, it's so true. I mean, I'm sure you've done the same thing. How often do you fill out a survey and you think no one is ever going to look at this and you wouldn't know if they did because they never do anything with it that you can tell.

So same thing with your Instagram story, right? You filled out a survey. You have no idea if anybody ever read that thing. Yeah. But the recovery has such a mass, there's such a massive opportunity in the recovery. It is the moment where you can either build trust or you can let it be broken. And like you said, some of those customers after the recovery become even more loyal. And this is human nature, right? And this is really the essence of trust and trust building

is are we going to accept our faults? Because if we do, then people will trust that you will do that in the future. And I can trust that you've got my back. So there is such an opportunity in the recovery. And I think that honestly, like the fact that people are surprised that you reached out means that there's a really low bar. The bar is so low. Which in some ways is a luxury for the brands that do that. Totally. And in other ways, it's kind of a disappointing indictment of the whole industry around customer experience.

I personally believe that the mindset around customer experience is changing. We have more and more people thinking about, oh, there is an opportunity here for us to grow our business through the experience. And then there's other companies who have just kind of always been doing this. But I, yeah, I just, I cannot say it enough that the recovery has so much opportunity to build loyalty and build trust. And like you said, you have to find it. You have to make a system that says this is flagging an issue and then we're going to reach out and go above and beyond to fix it. And above and beyond doesn't even need to be that much apparently because no one's doing it. So yeah, that's really great. What are the types of things you do? What's the protocol that you take when there has been an

issue, if you can share any details? We have a team that's dedicated to looking, first of all, obviously they're going back through surveys. The other thing that we're very focused on is it has to actually be recoverable. Like I said earlier, we're a heavily regulated industry. There are certain things we have to do because of regulations that we might prefer to not do, but we have to. And that's okay. That's part of being in a regulated industry. But if the customer's upset because of a regulation, reaching out to them to just rehash the regulation, that's not recovering that customer. There's not much I can do there. But if a customer interacted with an agent that maybe they just came out of training or they're

having a bad day or whatever, they didn't get the problem solved the way they should have. Reaching out to that person saying, hey, actually, we should have been able to fix this for you. We've gone ahead. We've solved it for you. And here's maybe a bonus or something to that effect to kind of apologize and make up for the fact that we missed the boat on this one. It's really that simple. So first, what's the customer feedback?

Two, is it actionable? And then three, all right, let's go after it. And let's recover the customer. It's really that simple. So first, what's the customer feedback? Two, is it actionable? And then three, all right, let's go after it and let's recover the customer. It's really that simple. It's not rocket science. It's just about putting the tools in place and the people in place to get after it. Is it something that you feel your team is on board with? I've run teams before where they kind of wanted to brush up the mistakes. It was like, okay, I'm just going to put this over here because I'm afraid that someone's going to come and tell me I did something wrong. And it took a lot for me to make it okay to make the mistakes and talk about the mistakes and share the mistakes so that we could, one, go and fix it,

and two, we can learn from it. I'm curious to know how you've approached that problem. So I would say a couple of things. One, the recovery team is, is isolated so that it's not a, it's not a team that is, you know, integrated into any of the teams that they're, they're recovering things from. So that makes it somewhat easier there. But most of what we're looking for from a recovery perspective is coming to us from the customer's words. So we're not necessarily relying on someone to say, you know, after they end a chat with a customer, man, I really screwed that one up. You know, we're not relying on that, right? It'd be great if that happened.

But, you know, who's really going to do that, right? You know, it's okay. So it's through our monitoring. It's, you know, through our QA processes, we have monitoring that occurs as well, by the way, for that same recovery team is also monitoring for responsible gaming flags. So when we, when we see language that a customer is using that, that might be a red flag for us and concerning that team will very often pick that up and look and just kind of monitor and go, did this go the way that it should have based on what the customer is saying? And most of the time it does. But if it didn't, we can now flag that

and follow up with that customer and just be like, hey, are you okay? Are you betting within your means? Yep. Check in on them. Yep. Yep. Totally. What kind of technology do you use to monitor and manage those customer relationships? So our backend is Salesforce Service Cloud. And, you know, so we're more or less full stack Salesforce Service Cloud CRM, and we're using Salesforce chat products. It's really the full stack. We have Einstein, we have, you know, all these things that are constantly monitoring our interactions and delivering insights to us, whether they be near real time within the Salesforce consoles or later kind of after the fact through Tableau

dashboards. And that's our stack. It's pretty straightforward. I think the important thing for us is deeply integrated into our apps. So you don't have to jump out. You certainly can. You can go to support.fandle.com. But if you're in one of our apps and you need help right from within the app, you can get that help. And I think that's critical.

I don't like forcing customers to go somewhere else to get help. The closer you put it to the experience, the better off they're going to be. That's another thing I think is important is a lot of brands, I'll look at their customer journey, you know, that they lay out at a high level and it'll be like, you know, okay, acquisition and, you know, or awareness and acquisition and, you know, okay, now we've got the customer that made a purchase or signed up, whatever the case may be. Now they're engaged. Okay, now they maybe need some support. And then, you know, on and on they go. I look at support as a complete ring fence around all of that. At any phase along any customer journey at any company, to me, support, whether, again,

that can be your customer service organization, that could be people in your, if you have retail environments, in your retail environments, account managers, whatever the case may be, that ring fence is that ideal journey. If the ideal journey is working perfectly all the time, no one needs to bump into that support ring fence. We all know that doesn't always happen. And when they do, it's really the job of those support customer facing functions to help push the customer back into that ideal journey and keep them having the right experience with your company. I love that image so much of it really

being the support's job to get them back on the journey. It's like, oh, you've gone off track. Let's get you back on track. They don't want to go off track. They're trying to buy something or they're trying to place a bet or whatever they're doing. Yeah. It's such a great image. And I wanted to just circle back to when you were talking about tooling and Salesforce and how everything's integrated. It's just such an important thing to think about. How do we make sure that our tools are really supporting one, the customer journey and also the employee journey. And having been a Salesforce customer myself, where we've only used part of Salesforce and we

didn't use Service Cloud, we were using something else and having to like my support team would have like five tabs open to do one thing. And it was just like a total mess. And so it's something that as a consultant now, I really share with my clients, try to consolidate your tooling as much as possible because it's worth the investment and the time to get there so that you can create an experience internally and externally that's seamless. I could not agree more. We're not all the way to where we want to be yet. We're seeing this multi-year journey as it is almost anywhere. Our agents today, still, there's quite a few times they have to hop into multiple tools, but our vision, and this is a part of my organization as well, is what we call our automation and insights team. And our vision is to create what

I call a single pane of glass for all of our customer facing employees to be able to work through and make sure that when they are interacting with a customer, the information they need is contextual. It's there in front of them. And they're not jumping over to other tools to try to find what they need to do to help the customer. And the value of that is incredibly impactful to the customer because one, they get what they need faster. Two, the agent is able to pay attention to them more. They're not, oh, let me get over to my other screen over here and hop into what I need to find in this other tool. And it just makes it so much more effective as a support experience. Oh, by the way, it also saves you money because agent

time is money. And so the customer wants it to be fast. You want it to be fast from an operational expense perspective. So it's really a win-win when you can achieve that. I'll actually, I'll do a plug right now. Ruby Conda, who runs my automation and insights team, just published this book right here. Oh my God, that's amazing. The Voyager's Guide to Customer-Centric CRM, for those of you who are listening. That looks amazing. Her and her team are phenomenal and have really helped FanDuel come a long way in this space. And I'm excited for what we're going to accomplish in the next couple of years as well. That's amazing. I mean, I could nerd out on this topic, but you said something that's so important,

that agent's time is money, both for the company and for the customer. That's exactly right. Yep. Right. And the enabling agents, support agents to be able to focus their energy on the customer versus jumping through a lot of hoops. It seems small and sometimes irrelevant to a lot of folks, but it is massive because support time is honestly one of the biggest indicators of customer satisfaction. I've done so many studies on, okay, why is our CSAT score not going up? It's support time. That's the number one thing that people care about is, are you getting back to them quickly? And then on the flip side, how much time are your agents spending doing things versus just getting back to customers?

And it's just so important. What's amazing about that to me and what is so great about it is if you think about all the initiatives that you have in any company, whether they're about delivering customer value or they're about delivering cost savings, how often are they both? Very rarely. More often than not, when you talk about, oh, we got to go cut costs, you're probably about to sacrifice something in your experience. When you can do both, deliver a better experience for your customers and cut costs at the same time, you really have to double down here because it's kind of a silver bullet that you don't have an opportunity to fire very often. Completely.

One of my favorite metrics in this realm is employee effort. And I know we often talk about customer effort. How many clicks does a customer need to take in order to get to where they want to go? But the same thing applies to the employees and especially employees and support functions. How much effort do they need to go through? And like you said, like, how can you find that balance of cost savings and customer experience, finding that balance? Like, yeah, it's, it really, to me, it comes down to how is that employee's experience so that they can provide a great customer experience.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It is. And it is a system. I think this is another sort of challenge that a lot of companies have is they get too fixated on a single metric, right? And there's a true story that I like to use within my team to kind of talk about how dangerous it can be to over fixate on a single metric. So in the 1890s, it's a long time ago, India was under British rule. And again, this is true. You can look this up. They actually had a problem with cobras, meaning there were too many cobras. People were getting bit by cobras and dying. Generally not a good thing. And so the British government said, all right, we're going to institute a bounty. And anytime anybody brings us a dead cobra, we're going to pay them for it. So we're going to get people to kill cobras.

We'll pay them for the cobras. There'll be less cobras. Yeah. Real quick, people started breeding cobras and killing the cobras they bred and bringing them and getting the money. British government figures this out after about a year. It says, okay, this program's over. This doesn't work. What do they do?

They released all the cobras they were breeding because they didn't need them anymore. And now they have more cobras than they did to begin with. And so whenever I hear anyone talk about a single metric too much, I always go, are we about to breed some cobras here? Are we like, are we sure we've got the full picture? You know, to me, it's important to have that full picture. Again, you know, KPIs are critical. And obviously there's many, many, many you look at across the business.

Very few of them can you look at in complete isolation. And so that's where I kind of also like that, you know, customer experience and OPEX. How do you marry those two things together? And 100% positively impact both. Great. Or maybe you're doing a great job lowering your OPEX, but your customer experience is tanking. You better be on top of that. We have to look at it holistically. And it's complicated. The human brain wants simplicity. And I think that's part of why we like to fixate

on KPIs because it's just easier to run at one thing. But the reality is that they are all interconnected, just like the human know, the human body, for example, like, like life is complex and we have to be able to look at things in how they all interrelate and the operations and customer experience and the costs, like all of that is so intertwined and we have to look at it all together. So I really appreciate you bringing that up. And are we going to breed some cobras? I'm totally stealing that. That's amazing. So we're coming up on time. I have two last questions for you. We ask these questions to all of our guests. The first is, I'd love to hear about a recent

experience that you had with a brand that left you impressed. What was that experience? Most of the experiences that I have with brands don't impress me that much. The experiences that I most often have that impress me are with small local businesses because their employees are so engaged and they care so much. And that's not to say I haven't had some positive experiences with brands. I certainly have, candidly. And I'll even call out some that were surprising. Like, look, I had a United flight canceled recently. That wasn't great. But the ease of getting rebooked on a new flight is light years from where it used to be. And I'm someone that's traveled most of my career. It used to be a

colossal nightmare. If your flight was canceled or delayed or you were trying to deal with that, it was a giant pain. Don't get me wrong. No one wants their flight delayed or canceled. But the ease of getting rebooked is astounding compared to what it used to be. So, look, there's some big improvements there. Still would be preferable if the operations worked better and we didn't have to cancel flights. But, you know, some big improvement there. But really when I look for experiences that I want us to try to figure out how to replicate, most often I'm finding them in local

small run businesses being delivered by employees that care. And so I'm really focused on, yeah, how do we build out the procedures and policies and everything else that allow us to consistently deliver the same experience? But how do we also drive our employees to really care about our customers and really think about what they're doing for them and be honest with themselves about what they're delivering? So I don't know if that's a cop-out or not, but that's my takeaway on good experiences that I've had recently. I fully agree. And I think that one of the things about those small business experiences that feel so good is because they acknowledge that the customer is a human. Yeah. And often in big brands, especially really big data-driven companies, the customer is a

number. And no one wants to be a number. We want to be respected and looked at as the humans that we are, that have real feelings and real experiences. And I think that's where I also gain a lot of inspiration from just the little interactions that I have with like a coffee shop or, you know, my tailor or whatever. It's like that is really what we need to embody in technology today, especially as AI is coming on the scene. I think people want more human experiences. So yeah. And I'll give you another good example of where that can get lost in a big brand. And this was years ago now, but I was consulting and I was in Austin, Texas regularly and always staying downtown at, and I won't name the, uh, the, the brand, but one of the big hotel chains and, um, like most hotels, uh, you know, lobby restaurant are, and, you know, at least once a week, twice a week, I was eating there with a

lot of the other people that were traveling regularly and the bartender there, her name was Jessie. She was great. She kind of got to know the people that were in there regularly for travel and whatnot, as you would expect. Pretty regularly, if something was going on and service was going to be bad, they had a big conference in town or something, she'd sort of say, hey, I'm sorry, but you know what? Your first round's on us. This is probably going to be a little bit slow tonight. And you know what was great about that? She saw that we were gonna have an experience that was less than what we all wanted. She took care of us.

She got terminated because the brand came in and was doing some basic quality checks and they saw her do that. And they said, well, we don't have a policy where, you know, we expense drinks for people. So guess what happens? We find out the new bar she's working at. Nobody went and ate at that bar in that lobby anymore. And everybody went to the new bar, which was just

around the corner. And so they lost out on all that business because they exited an employee who cared about her customers. And so that's the kind of thing that you can lose sight of as a big brand if you're not careful. What a mistake. Just what a mistake. So I have one last question for you. What is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear? Be honest in the language that you use when you talk internally about what you're delivering to your customers. And I'll tell another story if I may. This is a real world example. And this is from the telecom industry. It kind of doesn't matter which company I was with when I learned this term, because they all

use it. Somewhat specific to cable companies, but I believe it happens in mobile companies as well. Anytime there is a change in your bill, meaning AKA your bill's going to increase, there's this term that those companies will use called a rate event. And there'll be these internal meetings where we're discussing the rate event. What are we going to do? How are we going to communicate this rate event? And I was brand new. I was like, sorry, what is this rate event that we're talking about? And they're like, oh, well, this, that, and the other. And I'm like, dude, we're going to raise the price is what we're talking about here. And they're like, oh yeah, yeah, we're going to raise the price.

I'm like, okay, well, why don't we just say that? I mean, like that's what we're doing. That's what the customer is going to feel. No customer is going to look at their bill and go, oh, I had a rate event. They're going to say they raised the price on me. Let's at least be honest with ourselves instead of trying to polish this turd. It is what it is. This is what we're giving to the customer. And I think a lot of times people get into this trap of making up terminology to avoid having to kind of own the experience they're about to deliver. And the reality of business is there's trade-offs. Sometimes you have to do that. We have to do things sometimes, whether it's because of a regulation, technology limitation, whatever

the case may be, that we know is not the experience we'd really like to deliver. We just call it what it is. And we say, this isn't the ideal experience, but we have to do X, Y, and Z. And maybe we have down the road on a roadmap, something that we can either do to try to get the regulation adjusted, which obviously takes a long time, or make some improvements to the technology that's available that can make it a better experience overall. But if you're not delivering the ideal experience, call it what it is. Don't try to pretend it's something else because you create excuses to let it be that way forever. Mm-hmm. Oh, it's so true. We've all had those experiences where we're like,

they are trying to work around something that they did wrong or they're trying to what is it paint the pig or whatever it is and let's stick on the pig yeah let's stick on the pig that's what it is it just diminishes our trust in that brand or that company that's saying it's the same thing with the recovery thing that we were talking about earlier it's like how can you in this case it's like proactively, don't piss people off. Like you're already doing it by having to increase the price. We get it, but don't make it worse.

Yeah, don't pretend that's not what's happening. Just call it what it is. Yeah, that's exactly right. So yeah. Completely. Well, thank you so much, Josh, for sharing all of your incredible knowledge with us here today.

I really appreciate it. And I hope you have a wonderful day. Thanks. Great talking to you. 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? 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.

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