Experts of Experience - #47 Instilling a Customer-First Mindset at BILL

Episode Date: September 11, 2024

On this episode, Sofya Pogreb, the Chief Operating Officer at BILL, discusses how BILL instills a customer-first mindset throughout the organization, the importance of customer support and experience, and how data is used to optimize customer experiences. Sofia also emphasizes the need for cross-functional collaboration and the role of the COO in championing customer focus. Tune in to learn:How to instill a customer-first mindsetThe role of the COO in championing customer focusWhy you should be measuring customer effort and employee effortThe ROI of having a customer-focusThe importance of empathy in customer 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.

We try to always think of ways to help every employee stay connected to our customers. That is very important, whatever you are doing. You may be a back-end engineer or a fraud risk operations professional. We want you to have our customers on your mind every day, all day. And that just doesn't happen unless you explicitly make it happen. Spend supporting, budgeting, data entry, reimbursing, overspending, underspending. You know Bill can help with that. Bill gives you real-time visibility into company expenses all in one place.

I do think of the COO role as a key champion of customer focus and looking out for our customers and promoting their cause within the organization. You feel like you're on a mission to create a change in the world. And at the end of the day, we all want to make the world a better place. Everybody, I'm in love with Bill. It's a financial platform. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today, I am with Sophia Pogreb, the Chief Operating Officer at Bill. Sophia has more than 20 years of experience in operational roles at leading financial technology companies, and she brings a wealth of knowledge in driving operational

efficiency, leveraging data for business decisions, and fostering a customer-first mindset, which of course is what we're here to discuss today. Sophia, wonderful to have you on the show. Wonderful to be here. Thank you for having me, Lauren. So speaking of a customer-first mindset, I'd love to dive straight into that with you. And how does Bill approach really instilling a customer first mindset throughout your organization? So at Bill, putting customers first is very much a value and part of our culture. The company was started about 18 years ago by our founder and CEO, Rene Lacerde. And by the way, maybe I should start with what the company does. What we do is work with small businesses and we help them

automate financial operations. So if you think about the financial back office of a small business, you're probably thinking accounts payable, invoices, payments. We help automate all of that and save time, save pain, increase efficiency so that the small business owners can focus on what they truly love and they're passionate about, which is serving their customers. A quick note on that, just because I am a Bill customer. As a independent consultant, I use Bill for many of my clients. Not all, unfortunately, whenever someone is like, yes, you can send us an invoice on Bill. I'm like, oh, thank God, this is so much easier. So I just want to say I have experienced that simplicity firsthand, and I really appreciate it. That is awesome. I love hearing that. You just made my day.

Thank you for telling me. I'll mention this to Rene as well. But Rene, our founder, is incredibly passionate about customers. He grew up in a family of accountants. And so he saw firsthand how manual and tedious and time-consuming and paper-intensive the work could be. And he was really striving to come up with a tool set that would streamline these processes and make them easier. So customer focus is something that he brought to the company starting day one. And it's something that we've really strived to maintain as the company grew and scaled. We've been around for 18 years. Today, we serve almost 500,000 small businesses.

We work with 8,000 accounting firms, and we partner with eight out of 10 top US banks. So this is now a big company. How do you not lose that empathy and connection to the customer as you scale? This has been a big focus for us as an executive team because we know it's key to our continued success as a business. I love that you bring that up and I wanna dive into that more because it's something that I have seen

as I've grown with organizations. I've been early employees and hyper growth unicorns. And in the beginning, we're so close to our customer and we understand our customer so deeply and how you continue that as you're hiring many people In the beginning, we're so close to our customer and we understand our customer so deeply. And how you continue that as you're hiring many people and bringing more and more people into the loop is a massive challenge. And so I'd love to understand how you've really kept that consistent customer mindset throughout your growth.

Mm-hmm. I think there's a few things. And it starts, as you mentioned, I think with bringing the right people on board. Whether we are hiring executives or more junior team members, a passion about small businesses and a focus on the customer is something we look for in the hiring process. It's one of our key criteria. Two other things that I mentioned. One, we try to always think of ways to help every employee stay connected to our customers. That is very important, whatever you are doing, right? You may be a backend engineer or a fraud risk operations professional.

We want you to have our customers on your mind every day, all day. And that just doesn't happen unless you explicitly make it happen. So we do this through a number of mechanisms, starting with encouraging employees to use our product and kind of eat the dog food, to spending quite a bit of time and effort on collecting customer insights and pain points and making sure that those are shared and available to every employee. We also hold something called customer obsession sessions, where we dive into a specific piece of the customer experience, for example, a specific job to be done. And we watch customers navigate the product. We look at data, at how successfully they add a bank or add a vendor, right? And what stands in their way. And then we foster a discussion,

a very cross-functional live discussion about, is this how it should be, right? If I were a customer, is this what adding a bank should feel like? Is this fast enough? Is it easy enough? Is it intuitive enough? And if not, how do we make it better?

And making sure those conversations are constant and ongoing and very, again, cross-functional, I think is key to maintaining that customer focus. A hundred percent. I just want to stop there for a second. Customer obsession sessions. One, it rolls off the tongue so beautifully, but it's just something that is so, so important. And I think you highlighted it so perfectly that it's a cross-functional discussion. And I get to speak to a lot of leaders on this show who have something similar. And I just, I see that the companies that do this really tend to be a step ahead of the competition because

you're really bringing everyone together and bringing multiple teams together to see other points of view and really deeply understand what it is that the customer is dealing with. And I have more questions, but I'm just going to stop there because it's, yeah, it's just something that's so important. And I love that. If I can, if I can add one thing. Yeah. As I think about, well I can add one thing. Yeah. As I think about, well, how do you make that happen?

Right? Because you have to really find a way to empower employees to create these mechanisms. And I found that it really makes sense to have a team within the company or an individual whose job it is to help folks across the company stay connected to customers and understand customers. We have an advocacy team within our customer experience, customer support organization. And the advocacy team is responsible for advocating for our customers and their pain points throughout the organization. So their job is actually outward looking from the ops organization into the rest of the company.

And they're all about how do we take data and insights and make them available in easy to consume ways. Yeah. So it's a piece of advice that I would give anyone, I think, in a job like mine. Is that a full-time role or is it a committee that they're kind of on as a second job? It's a full-time role and it's actually several folks who we align to various parts of our product. They're more than busy enough.

Yeah. like a big investment for a company of 2,500 plus employees like we are, very high ROI investment that I would recommend folks make. How do you measure the ROI in that? There's not an easy way. However, what I see is the awareness throughout the organization, where people say, I attended an obsession session and we looked at the ad bank process and we realized there's an opportunity to make it easier. That's my ROI right there. Yeah. It's on people's minds. It's top of mind. People are aware and it helps us prioritize. One of the biggest challenges that I've faced in the past when going after customer experience improvement opportunities is the need to prioritize and focus. Our product is very broad, very expansive.

It does a lot of things, which is awesome. It also means there's often a lot of ideas that we have of how it can be improved. And it's very easy to go broad and shallow. We're going to go fix a hundred things and the customer won't necessarily feel a big improvement. And I'm a big fan of focus and go deep. Let's take a specific workflow, a specific job to be done, a specific experience, really go deep, really get the data, get the customer feedback, and think about how to meaningfully improve that so that our customers say, wow, adding a bank has gotten so much easier. Wow, I don't need to call support to find out where my payment is anymore because you're giving me

so much more information and product. That's usually a result of going deep on a particular area. And a team like the advocacy team helps us collect enough information and enough insights to figure out which area to go after next. I love this so much. I want to come back to something that you had shared that your customer advocacy team does, which is thinking about how to communicate customer insights in a digestible way, in a way where people, many people across the organization

can easily intake that information and start acting on it. Can you give us some insights into what that looks like or even better, what you've found to really work? We've gone to a combination of quantitative and qualitative. Data is very important and we get feedback from our customers, quantitative feedback in a number of ways. We do NPS surveys. We also collect something called CES, the customer effort score, where we ask the customer, how easy was it to resolve your issue today? And we get qualitative comments along with the customer's feedback. Here's the distribution of our positive scores by area and our negative scores by area. When customers call us about payment status, the average score is a blah. And here's how that's moving over time.

And here's how it is different for new customers versus tenured customers, or maybe small businesses versus accountants, allows us to gain insights. So we have a wealth of data and then we supplement that with qualitative feedback, right? Because numbers are numbers. It's where you hear the frustration or hear the delight that it really starts speaking to you. So I would say that that combination is important. We are also seeing an increasing number of tools on the market that help consume qualitative feedback and then bucket it into topics and call drivers. And we found that some of these tools help make this work easier

and help us be more efficient in doing it. Completely. I mean, this is the beauty of AI, right? I think it's one of the things I'm the most excited about when it comes to AI becoming a bigger part of our workflow is enabling us to really digest large amounts of qualitative information into easy digestible trends and bite-sized pieces of information that can easily be shared. Is there any tools that you're really excited about these days that you could speak about?

So in terms of digesting insights, we use a piece of software called Thematic, which I'm not close enough to say it's amazing and best in the market, but we've seen value. So I'll go that far. It's something worth investigating. We are looking at a broad set of tools right now and starting to experiment with tools that help us across several areas

of operations, whether it's quality assurance and reviewing advocate calls and providing feedback or training or assisting the advocate as they're hearing a customer call. We found that with our audience, SMBs, customers continue to value human expertise and a human connection when they call in for support. Most of them are not quite ready yet to talk to AI, we found. However, we can still get tremendous value out of these tools by putting them side by side with an advocate and having them help the advocate be more effective and more efficient. So that's the area that we are prioritizing. And there's a lot available these days and more and more coming to market every week, it feels like. I love how you highlight how you can actually be utilizing these tools to see both sides of the conversation.

Not only the customer insights that are coming through and what the customer's sentiment is or what the customer is really caring about, the types of questions that they're continuously asking, but also how strong is the person supporting them? Are they touching on the key points? Are they able to actually answer the questions directly? Or do they need more training?

Do they need more support? That quality assurance piece is so, so valuable. And that's like the other side of the AI world that I'm excited about is how we can really be empowering our teams to show up and really support customers in the way that customers want and need to be supported. I agree. And we can also use AI to pull out of the vast knowledge base that most companies have, the relevant information and put it in front of the advocate, right? Where they used to be, you know, chatting on one screen and then Googling the internal knowledge base on the other screen. Now the AI co-pilot, if you will, can say, well,

here are the relevant articles, right? This is the content you should be walking the customer through so that we're really then using the human for communication, for empathy, rather than for vast amounts of knowledge that are so hard to train and then to retain. So much opportunity. And I know you had mentioned the customer effort score, which I believe to be probably the most important metric when it comes to the customer experience. How hard does the customer need to work in order to do what they're trying to do? And I think another metric, and I'm curious to know if you're tracking this, is the employee effort score, which is really what you're talking about is how we can reduce the effort that the employee needs to take in order to do what they need to do or solve that customer's problem. Is that something you've been

tracking? We do measure that as well. As you know, in the world of data, you can easily be trapped into measuring a hundred things, right? And optimizing for a hundred things. And I'm always a huge fan and champion of focus. So we felt we needed a North Star metric for our customer service organization. And we felt like the customer effort score was the right North Star metric for us. Of course, we are also measuring advocate effort, average handle times, cost per transaction, right? There's a hundred other things that we measure and monitor. But as we set goals and priorities, I find that agreeing on your North Star and then saying everything else is going to be in service to moving the needle on the CES has been very effective for us. And we've seen

tremendous progress as a result of that focus. I've worked in companies where we didn't have that focus and it was chaos. And then a leader came in and said, okay, there's just one metric that we're all working towards. The others matter. They all level up. But if there's one that we're focused on, it is this. And it does wonders in helping teams not only know where to prioritize their own work, but also know where to collaborate too, I find. Because something like the customer effort score is not only a customer service metric. The product has a lot to do with that. And so it forces us to work together. And I think it's just really where the magic starts to happen. And I don't know if you have any reflections on the impact that focus has had. Totally agree. It's so important to remember that customer experience is everyone's job,

right? It's not just the ops team. It's not just the support team. It's also not just the product team, right? We often say, well, you know, the experience is product's fault. We're just here to fix it and assist the... No, right? When you talk to the customer and you say, what is your experience with Bill? They're going to talk about the product and the support and how they were onboarded and trained to use the product. And maybe if they ever cancel, which I hope they never do, how that experience goes for them, right? And how easy it is to do that. And we at Bill talk a lot about everyone owning and having responsibility for the customer experience. But I also agree with you. I think having a clear metric for your support organization

allows us to message across the other teams, well, what are we trying to move the needle on? And how can you help us? And how can you work together with us? I often joke that my job as the COO often turns into a CRO job, which is a chief repeating officer job. Because a big part of my job is to educate the organization about the supporting functions, which in my role include support and operations, data and risk management. These are all functions that I think about as multipliers for our business. We do our jobs well. It's like we're giving other company employees a motorcycle to help them go faster and deliver more impact. But it takes a lot of education. Well, what is it that you guys do And why is support or risk important? And when you say you've gotten better, how do you know? It feels very fuzzy, right? And so saying, here's how we measure it. It's very quantitative. It's dependable. We're not making this up. And this is our most important number that we are trying to make progress on. Here's how you can help us. And then saying that 15 more times over the course of a quarter,

I think is a big key to success. A hundred percent. I actually, I'd love to chat a little bit about your role at Bill as the chief operating officer, because I believe you were the first COO we've had on the show. And it made me so happy when I realized that we were going to be speaking because it needs to come from the top. The customer centricity, the customer centric mindset has what that looks like at Bill, because I know that a COO can take many different forms,

depending on where you are. So this is my third COO role. My first two were also in fintech startups, much earlier stage. And when I took on my first COO job, someone recommended a book to me that I bought on Amazon, and it's called Riding Shotgun. And it's a book about the COO role. And the book talked about how there are seven different types of COOs. And I was like, whoa, seven different types, which one am I? That's confusing. And I found that the COO role can be the most fuzzily defined among, I think, the C-suite roles. All of my three roles were different and they all evolved dramatically over time. So I've also learned that the scope of the role when you start says nothing about the scope of the role two years

down the road. And I've learned to welcome and appreciate it. In my experience, the COO role is really about complimenting the CEO and the other C-suite members. And it's really about what is the CEO passionate about and wants to spend their time on? And what are the pieces of the org that maybe they're less passionate about or less strong at and more willing to delegate that don't belong in the other C-suite roles, right? That the chief financial officer, chief product officer, et cetera, have not taken accountability for. At Bill today, my role encompasses data operations and risk management. But it was a slightly different set of functions when I started. And if we talk in a couple of years, I'm sure

it will have evolved again. I do think of the COO role as a key champion of customer focus and almost looking out for our customers and promoting their cause within the organization. The COO is by no means the only exec that's responsible for it. It's all of our jobs, right? But I found that there is room for that voice talking loudly about the pain points representing the customer in the exec suite. When you're using Salesforce to tackle your company's most important goals, failure is not an option. At Salesforce, they get it. They've made their most highly skilled advisors, Salesforce CTOs, available to help you with expert guidance and implementation support at every step of your journey. Learn more about Salesforce CTOs at sfdc.co slash professional services. I noticed

that you recently brought on a chief customer officer as well to your team. I'm curious to know what sparked that because it's a role that we're seeing more and more, but it's definitely not a ubiquitous role. So I'm curious to know what inspired the jump to bringing on that type of executive. C-suite. Sarah Acton, who was our chief marketing officer, recently stepped into a chief customer officer role where her scope has now expanded to lead all of our go-to-market. So including both marketing and revenue, which I think is extraordinary because those two organizations work so closely together to bring the customer into Bill and then to shepherd them through their journey. Again, from a go-to-market perspective, right? Product marketing, educating the customer is so important and it cannot be a ball that we drop once a customer has signed up. Sarah is super, super passionate about our customers, spends a lot of time with them, is very connected

to the customers, and is a great partner to me in advocating for our customer experiences. I think like chief operating officer, chief customer officer can also be defined in many, many different ways. So many different ways, yeah. But I think having a chief customer officer on the C-suite signals to me, at least, that the company feels connectivity to customers and care for customers is very important, which is certainly a message that we want to keep sending. I want to go back to something

that we'd kind of touched on, but it's really around the ROI of customer focus. And for example, bringing on a chief customer officer, having this like consistent focus on the customer. What have you found to be the result of that? Like, how do you quantify it? Because some companies, I'm not saying that there are some companies who like never care about the customer, but there's many companies who are definitely not as relentlessly focused on the customer as you are. And I'm curious to know, what is the ROI of that? Yeah. I think we could probably spend 10 minutes and fill a blackboard with ideas, right? Because I think it goes from business metrics, your retention, right? Lowering churn, your NPS, your CES, your product engagement.

So I think customers feel it. I believe employees also feel it, right? The type of talent that you can access and retain if you make your customer your front and center, I believe strongly is very different from the type of talent you attract if you don't. So I think you feel it throughout the organization in the opportunities that you prioritize, right? Do we invest in areas where our customers need help, whether it's expansion or product improvement, or do we prioritize investments based on revenue potential? Neither is wrong, right? And most

companies probably combine both, but having a strong customer need lens, I think shepherds the company in a better direction. So I almost feel like customer focus, relentless customer focus, you use that word, has to be table stakes. Can you be successful without it? No, maybe with certain audiences, right? Depending on who you serve. But I think you're leaving opportunity on the table by not listening to your customer. I think it's particularly true with SMBs. And I'm biased because I'm so passionate about SMBs. But I think SMBs are customers that historically have been underserved. They are usually a second thought kind of audience, right?

If you think about maybe a banking institution, they focus on consumers because there's so many of them and they're so homogeneous and you can build models and processes and workflows. They focus on large enterprises. There's a lot of money to be made. SMBs kind of fall in the middle. Mm-hmm. There's a lot of money to be made. SMBs kind of fall in the middle. I remember working with insurance brokers in my previous company, and someone said, SMBs are 20% of my revenue and 80% of my pain. Because they have questions, and they have needs, and they're all different, and they

think of themselves as bakers and plumbers rather than SMBs. And frankly, you don't make that much money by serving them. And so people don't invest, right? Companies don't invest. As a result, the standard of care is pretty low. The expected service levels are pretty low. But these are things SMBs really value and care about. And so there's a gap there. And I think that that gap is also an opportunity. And at Bill, we believe that that can be and has been a differentiator for us because we only serve SMBs. We're fully focused on them. And our job and our goal is to deliver an amazing level of service and support. the thing that I've always loved so much about having or servicing an SMB customer is that one, there's so much room for improvement. A little bit of magic goes a long way by focusing on them and saying, we want to make your lives easier because at the end of the day, SMBs are also the majority of businesses, right? If we look at the numbers, there's such an

opportunity in this space and more and more people want that. These people are living their own personal dreams and taking massive risks doing it and creating an easier experience for them. I think the thing I always felt is like I'm giving back to the world by just making all these people have an easier time doing, living the lives that they want to live. And yeah. And the tools that they have available to them and myself included as an SMB, I guess I would consider myself that is it's just, there's not a lot of great stuff out there. And so it really makes a difference. I'm always inspired by how the mission of serving SMBs is both big. Like you said, the SMBs move our economy in meaningful ways. And what we serve

them on is very close to their livelihood, right? This is money. This is do or die for them. But also every time I speak with a customer, at the customer by customer level, I am inspired by what they do and their resilience and their appetite for taking risks and their passion for their customers, right? So it's both a big inspiration and it's a customer level inspiration as well, which this is what gets me out of bed in the morning, frankly. Yeah. And it does a lot for the employee experience as well.

You feel like you're on a mission to create a change in the world. And at the end of the day, we all want to make the world a better place deep down inside. I think it's part of human nature. And it's part of why I've always really enjoyed serving an SMB customer because I feel like I can see the direct impact that my work has in other people's lives if I can just make it a little bit easier for them to do what they need to do. Yeah. And I find that most of our employees have be able to deliver what we need to deliver. We need to have a sense of empathy for them. And I think that's why your customer obsession sessions, I love so much because you're really bringing people together to understand the customer. But I'm curious how you ensure that empathy is really something that

stands within your organization. Yeah. I think it's back to the things we spoke about. It's hiring for it, looking for that or evidence of prior demonstration of this. And then it's making it part of the job, right? With customer obsession sessions where we can observe customers struggling to do something, sharing data on pain points. Here are our lowest CES contact drivers. Really? Why is that so low? Let me go try it out. Wow, that is difficult. And so really helping employees stay close to how our customers use our product and what is and is not going well. We recently had our financial year kickoff. And we, as the entire company, spent a full day talking about our plans for the next 12 months and our aspirations, which was an amazing investment, by the way, and did so much to energize us as a team. We made the whole agenda very tied to our customers. We had a customer panel.

We talked about some customers that we are very passionate about and love doing business with. We talked about pain points and opportunities, but we kept coming back to our customer, not our profitability, which is also important, but starting every thought with our customers. And this is just one, it's one opportunity for us to re-infuse that passion and that empathy, right, into every employee. I think it's important to remember that as part of their day-to-day job, not every employee gets to touch the customer every day, right? So we have to bridge that gap for them. It's super important. Oh, it's so important. one of the exercises that I used to do when I worked at too good to go, I was leading customer success, which included, uh, customer success managers,

as well as customer service and the customer service team. They deal with things that nobody else understands and they deal with it all day, every day. The upset customers, the confused customers, the angry customers. We can go to the sales team or the product team or the marketing team and say, we're getting X amount of tickets about this topic. But when you get people to sit in the customer service seat and actually answer tickets, even for an hour, then they were like, oh, I understand. And they really, it kind of gets infused into your brain, these messages or these phone calls that you see and hear. And I just found so often I would have people come back to me months later and be like, you know, I can't get this customer out of my head. I'm like, we're really thinking about this. How can I speak to more? And I think like you said, bridging that gap

in whatever ways possible, whether it is having someone sit in the customer service seat or going out to visit customers or having customers come in to share their experience with you and also share the good, bad and the ugly as well. It can't all be rosy. Just that real connection to the reality of what customers are dealing with is vital and trying to make sure that everyone in the organization gets that. I am such an advocate for that. Even the finance team needs to understand that if they're delayed or if things are slow or whatnot, if things are a little clunky for the customer, that has a meaningful impact on that person's life. And we can all work together to make it easier for them, reduce their effort. Totally agree. And all of the ideas that you're

bringing up, giving employees the ability to do side-by-sides with your customer support, taking phone calls, if that's a possibility, all great ideas and all ideas that we leverage as well. In fact, our CEO, CTO, and I all do side-by-side sessions on a biweekly basis. And we always learn something new and have a good discussion afterwards. So absolutely something I'd recommend. This reminds me of a story when I was with my previous company in continuing to support customers. And so we had every licensed employee, you have to be a licensed insurance agent, right, to sell insurance. We had every licensed employee jump on phones, as did I. And I learned about how difficult it was to do certain things in our system. And our CFO also was taking phone calls

and she got a call from a roofer who said, I need a certificate of insurance, a piece of paper proving that I'm insured. And she said, oh, no problem. I will walk you through how to get that yourself online. It's really easy. And he said, dear Michelle, imagine you have a leak in your roof and you call me and you say, Michael, please come help me fix my roof. And I say, Michelle, don't worry. It's very easy. I'm going to walk you through how to do it yourself. Go ahead and climb on the roof. And he said, if I'm calling you, it's because I want you to help me. Don't tell me about self-service. Get the thing for me. And that was a big insight for her at a time where we were pushing very hard on drive the customer towards self-service options. And it's a story we still talk about today. Yeah. I mean, that's what a beautiful lesson that customer gave you in really showing like, no, this is why I'm calling you. This is what I need. And I think it's always so tricky. I'd love your thoughts on this of balancing productivity and efficiency with a high level of

empathy and service. And how do you find that balance? Very tough. And a question that we discuss every year when setting our goals. I would say we are at a point in our evolution where we prioritize quality of service. We still challenge ourselves to get more and more efficient, but we do it through better tooling for our advocates, better systems, rather than cutting their time with the customer short. And it's a tricky, right? These are tricky trade-offs, but I think it's the right decision for us as a business. I think that spending an extra minute with the customer, but helping them truly solve their issue, right?

Delivering that first contact resolution is worth the investment for us as a business. And our customers feel it, they value it, they tell us and they tell their friends. So it pays off in my opinion. I'm not sure if you ever read the book, Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh, who is the founder of Zappos. And just the Zappos story and how the customer experience was really the key value proposition. That's what they book. I highly recommend anyone read it, anyone to read it because he tells these stories of how they would actually measure the success of their customer service associates based on the amount of time they would spend with

clients, the amount of letters that they would write to customers, not how many calls could they have. And there was one call that was like 13 hours or something. I don't remember the exact number, but they were like the customer service associate was applauded for being there with the customer for so long to return a pair of shoes. But it went far beyond, you know, returning the shoes. And I wish I knew the exact number of hours there. I'm like, oh, how am I forgetting this right now? But you get the gist. And I think you just said something that's so, so, so important that we should all be thinking about is how can we make our employee experience easier so that the employees can spend time with the customers? How can we, rather than telling the customers, okay, go through this self-service

while we have this very clunky backend that is preventing us from helping you, let's focus on streamlining the experience for our employees so that they have more time to spend with customers. I think that if I were to be devil's advocate here, sometimes we find that customers just want to talk. They don't want to be rushed. Totally. They want to have a conversation.

That does happen. Most of the time we find that our customers are busy and they more than us are looking to minimize the amount of time spent, frankly. They want to get something done and move on because they have a business to run. So I think that if I were to encounter a 13-hour call, I would also want to know, why did solving this customer's issue take us 13 hours? Oh, completely. Right? Completely.

And 13 hours is extreme, and I'm sure the customer was an outlier, which happens, right? But in general, if I see our handle times going up, I would say, what is it that we are doing? And why are we not being more conscientious of our customers' time? Can we get them on their way faster without shortchanging their experience, right? And so that is the tricky balance. And just data doesn't tell the full story. You have to go and listen to calls and example of really caring about the customer and not worrying about our time spent and more caring about getting the customer to where they need to be. It's again, putting the customer first, right? It's putting the customer first. Yeah. So two last questions for you. These questions we ask all of our guests. I'd love to hear about

a recent experience that you had with a brand that left you impressed. What was it about that experience that made it amazing? There's a device that I use with my 10-year-old called the Gab Watch, G-A-B-B. It's a simpler watch than an Apple Watch, but it allows a parent to quote-unquote track their child and see them on GPS. And it allows the child to call the parent or text the parent. And that's pretty much the extent of the functionality. I love how simple it is. I've had it for, I think, over two years for my son. Have never had an issue, have never had to contact support. We use the watch every day. And what I love is that it encourages me to give more independence to my

child, which I'm usually not inclined to do, right? This is the thing that encourages me to say, you can bike to your soccer practice on your own, right? And I may be in the office and I'm literally seeing on my phone as I'm on a Zoom call, I'm seeing him biking and it gives me so much peace of mind. But I also know that the thing doesn't give him 16 games to play, right? Or stickers to click. So the simplicity and great execution are things that I really value. And I recently found out that Gab actually uses Bill for their financial automation, which is so rewarding to me. And I'm so delighted. Uh-huh.

And then you're like, okay, well, we're helping a customer that's helping me. And so it all comes back. That's amazing. And I also, I don't have any children, but I am deeply afraid of giving my children smartphones. So this sounds like we're solving it. Yeah. And so my last question for you, Sophia, is what is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear? I think I have a piece of advice that every leader should hear. Great. Even better. Is start with the customer every time. Every time you walk into a meeting where a new opportunity is being presented or people are asking for funding, I would say, why is this important to our customers? How is this critical for the customer's shoes, you will make the right decisions. And as motherhood and apple pie as this sounds, it's something we often don't do. I think that answer a lot because one, I just want to pull this apart for a second.

One, it's forcing everybody to think about the customer for them to say, okay, if I'm asking for something, for example, for funding, I have to go and think about my customer in order to do that. Two, it's helping us to prioritize what really matters. And that's why I think having a customer-centric value as part of your cultural value system is so important. Because when we're trying to make decisions, should we do this or that? If we say, what is best for the customer? It makes things a lot easier and clearer. And then at the end of the day, as we've talked about throughout this episode, is that that customer-centric mindset is really key to business success. And so keeping that core to everything you do is really essential.

Like you said, it's table stakes. So that's a great piece of advice. Thank you so much for sharing all of your wisdom with us. I've really appreciated it and absolutely love this conversation because customer centricity, as you all know, is really what I care about most. It's been a pleasure. Lauren, thank you for having me on. This was so fun.

I look forward to listening to new episodes of your podcast. Amazing. Well, thank you so much. And I hope you have 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? Eh, 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.