Experts of Experience - #58 The ROI of Listening: How Brands Are Winning with User Feedback

Episode Date: November 27, 2024

Is your company truly listening to its customers, or are you just paying lip service? On this episode, Michelle Engel, Chief Product Officer at UserTesting, challenges the status quo of customer feedback and discusses the pitfalls of ignoring customer insights. She shares key strategies that top brands use to ensure their offerings resonate with real users and explains the transformative power of truly understanding your audience.Tune in to learn:How integrating human insights can transform customer experiencesWhy data alone doesn't explain customer emotions and experiencesWhy personalization is key to addressing diverse customer needsHow integrating customer insights across departments enhances strategyHow AI can significantly speed up the process of gathering insightsWays technology can transform customer interactions for the better–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.

When I think about customer experience, there's two sides to it. There's how do we not disappoint our customer and how do we delight our customer? And somewhere in that trade-off is an investment level and expense of what you're willing to spend towards these goals. You're not measuring. You don't have a strategy. You don't know how you're performing. And for every business, it looks different. About understanding what is going to make an impact across how you think about your customers and their journey and where they interact with you and all of those points.

Hello everyone. Welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today I'm excited to be joined by Michelle Engel, the Chief Product Officer at User Testing. We are going to explore how integrating human insights, one of my favorite topics, into product design and marketing is really transforming customer experiences across industries. Michelle, so wonderful to have you on the show. Thanks for having me.

I'm excited to be here. For our listeners who have not heard of user testing, can you give us the quick elevator pitch just so they know what we're talking about? User testing is the leader in helping brands and retailers and companies out in the world to have conversations with real humans around customer experience, product development, marketing, to really bring in human insight into whether it is the how they are thinking about new solutions and product delivery to digital transformation. But it is a platform where our customers can come on and set up a study or a test or a conversation, however you want to think about it, connect to a real human and bring in that insight into their

business process to really drive better ROI, better results, because they're not going down the development process or the launching a marketing campaign and then finding out later that doesn't resonate with a human or doesn't have product market fit or doesn't actually provide any type of brand value in doing that and that there might've been a better way. So ultimately we're about helping our customers

really deliver the best customer experience that they can by having conversations at scale with their customers. So it's easy to go, you know, grab your uncle who maybe has an opinion and ask him what he thinks about something, but it's a little bit different if you're looking to do that. A hundred of your customers or a thousand different prospects

and things like that. So that's really where we play. It's something I'm so happy that user testing exists. And as I've been preparing for this interview, the thing that really dawned on me was some of the best advice I ever received in my career was from a boss who said, before you do anything, talk to our customers. Don't spend time building out that solution or that service or working with the product team on that product. Talk to

the customers first. And it's like obvious, but at the same time, it's not what we always think to do because we're in our own little bubbles building the things that we believe are best. And that's great. But our customers are a wealth of knowledge and can help to guide us in where we're actually spending our time and our energy. Yeah, and I think that what is interesting in what user testing does is part of the reason people don't always talk to their customers is it's hard. It takes effort, it takes dedication. Depending on your role, maybe you don't have easy access to them. Maybe there's lots of people who manage

that relationship and you need to get a lot of approval to do it, or you're just not in a part of the organization where that can easily be done. And with user testing, we're sort of doing that hard work for you to find those people. So we're connecting you to humans who use your product, to have experienced your brand, and making having those conversations easier.

So it's not simply just like a Zoom conversation and I'm gonna ask you what you think, but really a structured platform where you can get really high quality feedback from individuals who might be at some point in the buying cycle and you're able to have those conversations, have them recorded and do them in a way where you can utilize our insights and our analytics tools

to really understand what multiple customers are saying and what those trends are and the best things to take action on. So I think to your point, that's great advice to go out and have conversations with customers. I have worked in a lot of startups where the CEO and the founder has the opinion. He's like, I know this is the right thing. And you're sort of like, I'm not really sure that this is going to resonate. And I like for our startups and small businesses, it's great because it's really that third party view. It's sort of if you have this theory, you can go out, test it with a number of people

and come back with data. And one thing that kind of separates the successful from the unsuccessful is like listening to the facts and the data. And so we kind of provide that enablement for you to be successful in your own role by having those conversations, but also giving you the insights and the analysis tools to be able to say to decision makers and to the people that you're trying to influence and convert to your side,

you know, what the true story is. And a lot of times it's not black or white, but there just might be some nuance and better ideas and ways to iterate before you invest dollars into building something. So maybe the concept is right, but it has a slightly different flavor. And you know that ahead of time and you can build that way versus sort of starting throwing it out, finding out nobody really likes it, and then going back to the drawing board. I mean, we can spend a long time building things that our customers don't really want. I know from being on the post-sale side of things, I've definitely had the frustrations

of the product team working really, really hard at a solution that they promised us would solve our problem and then we roll it out and it doesn't really drive the outcome that we were hoping. And my team is then still in the weeds solving problems with customers manually instead of having a product solution that kind of alleviated that pain. And so I can really understand the ROI

on investing in something like this early. And like you said, it's not that easy, depending on the company, depending on the business, it's not always easy to get in front of your customers and actually see how they are using your product. And so I'd love to understand like, who is testing on behalf of your customers? Who are these testers that you're bringing in to actually see how it's being used?

Yeah, from a customer perspective, I love user testing in that we have such a range of customers and they're doing such interesting things. And so from a customer side, we have everything from your sort of big tech that builds a lot of software and they want to make sure they're not frustrating their users or that the newest thing that they're building is really going to resonate. So we see a lot of that, but then we have a lot of the brands that you know and interact with, whether it's airlines or banking and financial services, where it's really about delivering a great experience for the customer and they're testing a lot of different things. So you could easily imagine how you might want to test an app and how you might pick

your seat and how you might check to test an app, and how you might pick your seat, and how you might check your account balance. But what about testing things like the interface that the customer support team is working with, and how fast they're able to answer questions and get the information they need, and the usability of those tools? And then we've had customers who use us

to test physical products. What's the packaging experience like? The unboxing. What is the smell of the potato chip? They'll use our mobile product to go into a hardware store and look at the product on the shelf and give feedback of what they're thinking when they see it on the shelf. So a lot of different use cases from the customer

side. And then from the participant side, the people taking tests, we have one of the largest panels out there and we're really focused on sort of the diversity of that panel to make sure that you're able to sort of find the right audience for yourselves. And then we have partnerships where maybe you're trying to find a harder to reach audience, and it's a little tougher, and we have different ways to find those people. But this is also a plug.

If you have free time, you're looking for a side gig, the user testing panel is a great way to do that, to have your voice heard. You can sign up, and you can take these tests and you can help make the software in a car better. You can give feedback on how easy it is to find the checkout button on some of your favorite brands' experiences. But we're really focused around finding people who want to participate, provide high quality input and matching that up with our customers. I saw that on your website and I signed up immediately because it's literally one of

my favorite things to do. It's to critique the user experience of kind of everything. But I'm just doing it. And that's all you get. Do it. I'm just doing it in my head. So I was like, oh, this is amazing. So I cannot wait to take part in that.

And yeah, I can just really see the value. Do you have any examples to share of companies that have seen an impact in their end product by using user testing? So there's some great examples of how customers have used our software to improve their customer experience. So things like I mentioned earlier, airlines, American Airlines is a big partner for us. And they used a program to make sure that when you're booking and managing your

flight, it's a great customer experience. And in that case, they built a benchmarking program. So really focused around looking at how they perform relative to their competitors and how when they're making changes, they ensure quality in terms of sometimes when you want to fix a problem, you actually make it worse. And when you create a program where you can sort of design and build something to address an issue, and then you have a way to benchmark it

against sort of the previous experience, you can know that you're actually having an impact and having a result. So like an American Airlines example would be the 37% increase in the ability to complete tasks like adding passport details and adding loyalty information or requesting a meal. So they're able to have that track to understand how their investments and how their dollars towards improving their app or paying off. And when you think about task completion, that's huge in terms of driving loyalty, driving repeat usage. I fly a lot, and I can tell you that not all airline

apps are the same. And some of them are incredibly frustrating to use. And I think American Airlines is doing a really great job of sort of continuing to iterate on that, making the experience better for their customers. So I think that those are some great examples there of how customers can do it.

Another example would be Panera utilized us to think about how they could build a new website around catering and servicing the needs when it comes to catering, which is a little different. Those are bulk orders. They're placed in advance. You have a different need. And they were able to reach consumers and users who would potentially buy that service and really build with them and mine from the beginning. So another great example. There's a couple of things that are coming to mind here, just like these light bulb moments for me around.

We talk a lot about effort scores, customer effort scores, employee effort scores. They are big, big indicators of satisfaction and retention. If something is easy to do, we are much more likely to enjoy the process and stay. And often customer effort scores are surveys. But why do a survey when we can actually see how much effort is going into completing a task? And so I think it's just something that we really need to think about as we're measuring our customers' effort is how can we be doing this in a way that isn't just simply seeing how they felt look at these things, but it seems like

user testing is much easier to turn on and work with because that's really what you specialize in. That's very true. I mean, one of our guiding principles is speed and time to insight. So how quickly you can get an answer to your question. And most of our tests and our studies start to field within a matter of minutes. And 80% of them are finished within just a couple hours. And that includes the time to actually take the test.

So you're able to get the results really quickly. I think that as you think about sort of the different ways you can have conversations and you can get input and insight from your customers, you know, surveys do really have a great place in that conversation, but they don't give you the why. So someone can rate you, they can say it's a one, and maybe they're putting in some feedback around like what frustrated them,

but you don't, to your point, actually see it. You don't understand why this customer said your checkout was a one when you have plenty of customers finishing your checkout and you're not hearing that as a sort of common theme, but you can run a test and you can ask customers to go through a flow and you can see in an automated way where they're getting hung up in checkout.

And maybe it's because in a certain use case or for a certain demographic, they're struggling to get through that flow, but it helps you understand the why. So we love data, we think data is amazing, we love to hear from customers, and sometimes we're the glue between a set of data that's telling you there's a problem and the understanding of the why behind that data. So getting deeper and really when you think about how you want to improve or iterate or move forward, it's really, you know, those surveys can help you guide sort of those hot spots and the pain points. But really having those rich conversations or asking customers to complete a task and

seeing where the different flows are that they take through your website, where they get confused, where they drop off is really critical. You're bringing up a really good point. I mean, I think we've all probably had the experience of the data is telling us something, but it's not all adding up. Like when the client facing team is speaking to the customer, we're hearing frustrations, we're hearing things that maybe the data isn't necessarily telling us because maybe we're not tracking the right thing or there's just something else that's there. And so tell me a little bit more about bridging that gap between just the data and also the

emotional experience that customers have as they go through products or services or... Yeah. Yeah. The emotion is sort of a key part when you think about things like an MPS or a CSAT survey. It's so influenced by what was the last interaction that they had with your brand or your product and what might be happening in that moment. And you tend to get sort of one end or the other of input of how you're doing, but it doesn't necessarily help you solve a problem or think about a strategy or where to go for

the future. I think that having that ability to even just develop some hypotheses for how you might fix something and get that early input to it. When you're able to have time with a problem and look at all the data and look at what you know, and then think about how you might solve it, and then go ask some people, how does this one work better than that one? Compare and contrast these two and why, the why behind it.

Why did you think this was frustrating? Why does this design that we all think looks great and would clearly solve your problem, not actually result in that for you. What are the things that we haven't considered? And one of the big pieces of how user testing thinks about it is that customer perspective, bringing it in and helping your teams. The big word around it is empathy and having an understanding of the use cases, of what

they're experiencing in their life, what other things might be going on. Do your customers use your product without multitasking or are they doing a couple other things? And, you know, there's friction in how they're going through their jobs and all of those different pieces. So it's really around that connection to seeing them real life in the product, seeing them real life in their environment, whether it's the size of the monitor, whether it's that they tend to do these tasks

on the go on their phone, you know, all of those different pieces help you really understand your customer a lot better. Empathy is so essential as we look to understand our customer. And how do your insights really inspire empathy within your clients, within those organizations? Yeah, one of the interesting parts with user testing is that you can record customers using your products. And we sort of take that for granted.

When we're listening to our customers and we hear them out, and maybe even if it's on a Zoom, you're still listening and hearing. But in our product, you're really seeing them use your product. And then we have tools that help you create a highlight reel of those tasks. So we have AI tools that will help

you find those really interesting moments, and then you can easily string them together into a really powerful tool to use with your leadership, with your stakeholders, to get by and to say, watch this customer try to actually find the help section on our website, or watch this customer try to navigate to what they're looking for. And you see, oh, the language we used wasn't clear, the button is hard to find, or we're

asking them to do something that's kind of unnatural to get to the place. So seeing them do it is so much more powerful. Having data really supports decision making. And again, it helps you as a business run at scale. But really seeing customers and where those pain points are is so impactful for motivating a decision, for confidence in a decision, and really getting buy-in.

So even in our own group, we recently were testing a portion of user testing itself, and it's something that's been in our platform for a long time, and we were testing to sort of understand a benchmark, and they really were confused on how to use something that we thought was easily understood and easily used. And so it's never not a good time to talk to customers and to see what they're

doing in your product. An AI agent your customers actually enjoy talking to? Salesforce has you covered. Meet Agent Force Service Agent, the AI agent that can resolve cases in conversational language anytime on any channel. To learn more, visit salesforce.com slash agent force. And also to share that cross-functionally. I know it's something a lot of customer success, customer experience leaders struggle with is they see how the customer is using something as they help the customer troubleshoot or they see in the tickets or in the conversations that we have with customers. But actually getting those moments into the hands

of the C-suite or the product team or the sales team so that everyone can understand the impact of their work and how that has on the actual humans that are using your product at the end of the day. It can be challenging and it can be something that takes a lot of time. I have invested months into trying to collect the right bits of information to architect the right argument so that I can make this little change that I just know is going to be so appreciated by my customers. But it's always felt like, why do I have to work so hard to get everyone else to see what I see?

So I really appreciate what you're doing. Yeah, I was talking to a customer today who's a very large organization. It was top down. Their CEO really believes in listening to customers and understanding how they perceive different parts of what they do. When someone comes in to convince her to spend money on something, to prioritize an initiative,

she always asks if it's gone through our platform first. And she wants real customers, real prospects, and what their opinions are, what their usage is, and how receptive they are to the concept or the idea before she's gonna green light something. And I think it's a critical part to how you can help speed up the time to decision making, right? So sometimes getting to a decision is really difficult when you love who you work with, you're very consensus driven, people are passionate, they care very deeply about the customer,

and everyone is trying to do the right thing. But there's a lot of data, there's a lot of conflicting information and opinions and a lot of times what we're there for is sort of decision making support. How you can help speed up the time to a decision and how if you're debating something in a conference room, someone can go into user testing, create a test, set it off to run and by the time the meeting's over, you at least have some input into what the right answer might be. Oh my God, that's so valuable.

I work with a lot of leaders where we'll do workshops to really dive into the mind of the customer and talk about who is our customer. And I do lots of research in a much more manual way than user testing. So this is all helpful for me. But we really dive into the mind of the customer. And then at the end, we talk about what are the questions we still have? What do we need to test?

Who do we need to talk to? What do we need to do to answer these blind spots so that we can make the right decision? Because it's so often, I see so many teams do this. It is impossible to make a decision without the right information. But we are trying to because that information, we don't know where to go to get it. It's a lot of effort to go and get it. And it feels like we can just decide on our own without

actually having to go through setting up meetings and meeting with customers and doing all those things. So this is solving a lot of problems that I know a lot of people struggle with because making a decision without actual customer information is going to waste a lot of time. Yeah, for sure. A lot of time. How do you think about different customer opinions? We talk a lot about personalization. We talk a lot about how everyone wants things to be more suited to them.

How do you work with your clients who have, I mean, I can even think about an airline where you have elderly people who have a difficult time with technology and then Gen Z's who are just like native users of technology. And how do you approach those different segments so that you're able to build for everyone who's using the tool and there's differing wants and needs? Yeah, I think those personas and understanding the personas for your product are the first critical step. So if you don't even have an understanding of, you know, what are those different groups that are in your customer base, you're sort of at a disadvantage

as you're thinking about the needs of your customer. And they're not a monolith. And I 100% agree, you know, to be a successful product. Some products really do have a very target demographic and they can sort of dial into that one. But a lot of products need, you know, to have appeal for a broader range of types of people, ages, things like that.

And I think that being able to test specifically with your target personas and looking at those results independently are critical. So if your product is harder for an older demographic to use and you're trying to appeal to them, how do you design for that? How do you build for that? And then ultimately test it against that. And we hear that a lot.

So if you are trying to get to a broader audience and ultimately a broader set of people with wallets, you maybe have unique parts of your experience where there's a more simplistic faster path and then there's something that's a little more handholdy, a little more tailored to those that aren't as tech savvy, and you have two paths to do that. But I think the first step is really understanding who your customers are and what those personas are. And if you have a business plan and you're trying to expand it, then talking to those in that expansion group really offers that critical insight

into what you could be doing better as you build services or solutions for them, as opposed to trying to guess what someone in a different grouping might want or need or how they might interact with your product. The ability to test and learn rapidly is just so essential for every business, especially as technology is changing so much, for us to be able to create a hypothesis of, we think that this is what someone's going to want and need, or we think

that this is a group that's going to be a good place for us to expand our business into. Coming up with a hypothesis, testing it, and then learning from it is really essential. I just love so much how you're enabling companies to do that. Do you work with your clients at all around how to actually integrate the information that you're helping them to see? Just out of curiosity, what happens once you give them? Here's what your customer is saying.

What do they do then? Yeah, we have a very strong professional services group that is available to help our customers. And we really want to see them be successful in the programs that they're building, as opposed to sort of like a one-off, I'm going to just get some input on this. But it's really a mindset shift of how do we bring this information in in a more systemic way to our business. And we would like love the idea that those insights are shared across an organization. So if you are trying to understand a pain point in your service and you're uncovering things that are in an entirely different department

or have value to say the marketing department or another department, you know, the ability to use those insights in really interesting ways and kind of separating from this is the project we were doing, we were looking to build this new product and we learn these things. Those learnings are really about deeply understanding your customer. And so when you get to your next initiative or your next strategy or something not working, you already have that knowledge and you can, especially with some of the AI solutions that we have, really come in and get to that information easily without having to necessarily rerun a conversation or a test, you can look at sort of what do I

already know? Okay, now what do I want to learn more? What are the additional questions that I have? And I think that helps sort of ensure that you're as efficient as possible and that you can move quickly if you are building up helps sort of ensure that you're as efficient as possible and that you can move quickly. If you are building up this sort of repository of knowledge and customer voices and really understanding deeply how your products and services and innovations are perceived, you can utilize that for your next strategy and your next deployment. And so I think it's really important that when we're thinking about customer experiences, it sort of builds on each other, right?

And so we're not making the mistakes of the past. We are leveraging what we know and what we've learned, and we're then building kind of to continually move forward and progress what we're delivering. So we really think of it as sort of a knowledge hub and an insights repository and love the idea of organizations utilizing that so that I don't have to be the one actually running the tests, but I can learn from the tests and the information and I can bring that into whatever I'm working on. What are some of the AI tools that you've been using or how have you been incorporating

AI into your product and service? Yeah, I think that AI is sort of the great leap forward for the last couple of years. There will be another one in a couple of years And just like all technology will continue to evolve. And I think when you think about customer input, customer feedback, it's really interesting to look a little bit further back to the days when if you wanted customer input and feedback, you would have a focus group and you would maybe have

someone standing in the mall trying to recruit people or calling them on a phone. And then you had to physically get them into somewhere and have an actual conversation with them. And then you're showing them a product that's probably already built. And then it goes away. And maybe all of that feedback does influence whatever it is that you're working on.

But it took a long time to do that. And then when you think about sort of the platform that user testing is using and the way the world has changed, we've really shrunk that so you can recruit online, you can find people online, you don't have to get them into a physical space and you can replicate that. But then once you're doing that,

you have so much information and it really exponentially scaled up how many conversations you can have. And AI comes in and lets us say, okay, instead of having to watch hours of videos, instead of sort of watching and taking notes and trying to find the important parts, we will tell you what it is.

We can tell you what is kind of common and echoing from all of these conversations. What is the sort of piece that maybe you even missed when you did look at it? And how do we find different insights and unique insights? So inside of user testing, we're using AI across the range of what we do. So everything from helping to make sure that participants are high quality,

that they're not faking who they are and what they do, as well as how to best structure a test, how to save time creating a test. You want to test a website for X or Y, AI can just say, here's the questions you should ask. And then you have all that input and the results, and what do they mean? And that doesn't mean that a human isn't still

looking through all of that data, really understanding what is the most important, but it really is a time saver. And it's really about shortening that time to be able to react, to have the next conversation and really let you innovate in a much faster sort of cycle and flow. And so we really look at it as this powerful way just to speed up and make life easier. And it's not going to replace the people and the users of our platform,

but it really can let them do even more for their organizations and solve deeper problems and help with that creativity and looking at solutions. Mm-hmm. I mean, this type of work, these types of conversations with users creates a lot of unstructured data that is very heavy to go through. And it's one of the best use cases of AI, in my opinion, to really help us to process all of that information and get to the answers that we really need.

Yeah. And we're thinking about solutions where, you know, if you have a number of conversations with customers and you intersect it with your help desk data and your tickets and your app store reviews and what customers are saying there and how you get to like one voice of the customer and one view and how to leverage that across even before you go out and have another conversation. How do you start from a place of what do you think? How do you inform those theories, things like that. You're speaking my language.

I love it. You mentioned technology in the future. What do you expect is gonna change? What can we, if we look five years down the line, what do you think we are going to be faced with as it relates to the technology we have at our disposal? Do you have any projections? That's a big, broad question. I think that with the COVID crisis, I think what we saw

was a lot of efficiency. How do you better tailor to where consumers are and what they're looking for in the moment and being able to move a lot faster? I mean, the sheer change that happened from that in an almost overnight pace, and then the way really successful brands really met that challenge, right? Whether it was your favorite restaurant

getting to online ordering and being creative to drop your order on a table outside. But some of those things have stayed, right? I don't go into a Starbucks and order anymore. I only use the app. And I walk in, I grab my coffee, and I'm gone. And I think that speed with which technology can sort of just improve efficiency, whether it is how you're ordering your coffee or your groceries or shopping is transformational.

I think that whether it is AI driven sort of advancements or some other next tech, it really is all about sort of the efficiency and the experience for how we shop and how we buy. And there's lots of criticism of social media influencers and ad targeting and things like that. But at the same time, they're also delivering products that really look like they're gonna to be of interest to you. And how many times do you see something you're like, oh, yeah,

I could use that. And it's really versus spending time looking for those solutions. So I think technology really is that mechanism that can help improve lives. And we see it in health care as well, not having to make phone calls to schedule appointments, being able to schedule online,

being able to see your results, you know, and having an electronic medical record. We take that stuff for granted now, but it really helps improve outcomes, helps improve health, and really empowering people to have that data themselves. It's just across the board of sort of how it can transform and make the lives better. For sure. There's so much friction in our lives once you

start to look at it. Like AI has really opened up my eyes as I'm seeing all these different use cases. It's really opened up my eyes of where am I spending my time? I sit in front of a computer all day, every day. Is that actually the best place for me to be spending my time? Is it the place that's giving me the best quality of life? And am I the most productive clicking through all these things? Like I started using a tool recently called Whisper Flow.

It's like a very new product. I think I'm probably one of the first users, but I can just like hold a button on my keyboard and talk and it will structure things. It will structure written word in the way that I want it to be structured. If I like mess up in what I'm saying, it will like edit it for me.

It's like, I don't need to sit there typing. I can just, I don't know. Yeah. Be looking at the sky, writing an email. And it's little things like that that I think are just becoming more and more abundant. And we are just at the beginning of that. And I think it's really interesting when we pair the consumer or the challenges that consumers and customers are facing with the opportunities of AI, we can really create solutions that people didn't even know they wanted, but once they have it,

they can't live without it. So I'm excited for that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, just that matching up of the intuitive understanding of what you're looking for and what those patterns are and yeah, all how you can creatively meet those needs and address them 100%. But we have to listen and we have to see what are those needs even if they're not stated as a need. I think most of us have no idea some of the friction or problems that we have in our day to day lives because we don't consider them to be problems because we've just become

used to it. But then once we have a solution, it's like the Starbucks thing. Why would you wait in line? Like I was actually waiting in line at a Starbucks the other day and the person at the front desk is like, why are you all here? You don't need to do this. And we're all like, oh, that's true. And so we all pull out our phones and like make our order. Or the ones that I think is like, I tend to do a Target, uh, pull up and pick up your order thing. And I'm like, it'd be great if I could just add the Starbucks that's now in the lobby of the Target,

add my drink. And then like literally the next week,, got added to the app and I was checking out, I was like, would you like to add a drink for quick wrap? I'm like, yes, yes I would, that'd be great. They were listening to you. Natural way of finding those complimentary parts that can help make the customer experience so much better. Yeah. for sure. So you're an experienced product leader.

You've been in this space for a while. I'm curious to get your opinion. What do you think most businesses miss when it comes to customer experience? When I think about customer experience, there's sort of two sides to it. There's how do we not disappoint our customer and how do we delight our customer? And somewhere in that trade-off is an investment level and expense of what you're willing to spend towards these goals.

And there are definitely people out there who would say, you want to delight your customer, and that's how you can retain them and increase lifetime value and all of these things we need to delight them. And then there are certain cases where it's like your customer's expectation of this interaction with you when they call customer support is so low that a small improvement in addressing that would go such a long way. I think it's a little bit about that sort of bang for the buck.

Like with the Target example, having the ability to get the Starbucks there is probably going to make me go to the Target over the grocery store, right? It's just a lot easier. It's all combined. But in other cases, it's like a small improvement that's probably not going to drive my loyalty and not going to drive sort of repeat purchasing.

So I feel like back to your question, I feel like having worked in this space for a while, it's a little bit of like what really understanding what are the metrics for your business that matter? What are the things that you are measuring and calling success? Is it a purely revenue equation? Is it margin? Is it share of wallet? Is it brand loyalty? And then really focusing on the things that are most effective for those metrics. And I think it's really part of strategy, right? If you're not measuring, then you don't have a strategy and you don't know how you're performing. And for every business, it looks different. But I really think it's about understanding

sort of what your business is about, what is going to make the drivers of your business and make an impact in that way across how you think about your customers and their journey and where they interact with you and all of those points. All right, Michelle, I have two last rapid fire questions for you. The first is I'd love to hear about a recent experience that you had with a brand that left you impressed. What made that experience amazing? So we talked about the Target one. The other that I would actually point out was, I have a rock paddleboard and it was coming apart. I didn't have that long. And I contacted them and I said, it's coming apart.

It's still usable-ish right now, but it's kind of more annoying than anything. And I got back literally within an hour. It was an email back and it was like, we are happy to replace your paddleboard for you. We understand that it's the summer and we don't want you to not have your paddleboard for long. So if you could show us you destroying the paddleboard

because they don't want you to keep using it and send us a picture, we will overnight you a new paddleboard. And literally it was the easiest process. I mean, I had to get out tools to make sure the paddleboard couldn't be used again. Sent the picture and had a new paddleboard within like two days. And it was so just like sheer understanding of their customers, right?

If you're outdoorsy and you want to be on the water and you only have a certain season and all of those different things, the way they were so responsive to my needs and that their quality issue, so responsive to my needs and that, you know, their quality issue, if you want to call it that, was going to result in me losing the enjoyment. And then they just addressed it right away. And I had zero complaints about the interaction and the experience. And so that's the one that comes to mind in terms of really delighting your customer.

I would recommend them and I would buy another one any day. That's amazing. Yeah. There's a few things there. One, speed and efficiency, and they just made it easy for you to destroy it, but they made it easy to solve the problem. They were acknowledging the position that they are putting you in. And they took a negative situation of their quality not being great and created a lifelong

customer because of it. And now you're talking about it on a podcast. We can take those moments of friction and how we handle them can actually go beyond just remedying it, but actually create more loyalty. Yeah. Another really interesting example that I've encountered recently is I'm a big electric car person, right?

And my husband and I needed a new car that was the bigger car, right? Not the daily, but a bigger car. And we were on the list for Rivian, and we were on the list for a Ford F-150 electric. And when it came down to it, it's about understanding your consumer and your customer. And the Rivian was basically a digital first experience.

You didn't have to go somewhere. Just ordered the car online, just like I do clothes and groceries. And I was done. And the Ford was like half, like, he kind of ordered it online. But then you had to go into the dealer, and you had to call the dealer. And then the dealer started calling us. And it was just too much. You're like, this isn't the experience of the future. I don't want to go to the car dealership. And I think that it's another way where it's like understanding who your customer is, understanding how you can change the entire experience

for the better, really addressing, you know, what are the friction points and why, you know, what is unpleasant about buying a car today and that whole process and really rethinking it. Yeah, my we have an episode with the VP of user experience at Rivian, an earlier episode who's actually my brother, so I'm gonna tell him. Yes. Unrelated to this, I have lots of feedback because we have the Rivian now and I am a user experience person and sometimes I'll come in I'm like, why is the screen so complicated? But I love them. That's great. So I have one last,

I know we have one minute left so I'm going to ask you a rapid fire question. What is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear? Oh well obviously it's to listen to your customers right? It's to find ways to talk into their opinions and their thoughts and then share back that you're listening. I think that's really important is drawing those dots for your customers to say, we heard you and here's our newest thing or here's what we've changed or fixed and and owning that. I think that's that's really the top one for me.

I could not agree more. Well, Michelle, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been a really insightful conversation and I'm sure we will be in touch soon. So I hope you have a great day. Thanks, bye.