This Week in Startups - How to create great customer experience | Customer Basics with Salesforce’s Tiffani Bova | E1297

Episode Date: October 5, 2021

Startup Basics is BACK! This series will focus on one of the most important aspects of any successful startup: the customer. On episode one, Salesforce's Tiffani Bova joins to break down all things customer experience: defining it, what an amazing experience looks like, how startups can beat the incumbents, and more!

Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Startups. We're doing our Startup Basic series. Again, this is a very simple series. It is what we named it, startup. Startup Basics. We are going to explain to you some of the basics of running a startup and building a company. Now, we've done legal, we've done finance, and you can visit some of the archives at this weekinstarups.com slash basics. Really easy to find this weekin startups.com slash basics. On this series, we're going to dive into customers. And it's super important to understand your customers and how to build a customer journey and basically find out who your ideal customer profile is and to cater to them and build products and services that delight them. Sounds very basic, but there is a science to it. So joining me today, Tiffany Bova is the global growth and innovation evangelist that sells for her. She's been there for the last four or five years. She's the author of Growth IQ, get smarter about the choices that will make or break your business and the host of the What's Next podcast. Welcome to the program, Tiffany. Oh, thank you, Jason, for having me. Okay, so let's get right to it. We hear the term customer

experience thrown around. Let's try to define exactly what that is to somebody who's just starting a company to have an idea. Maybe they're building their MVP, their minimum viable product. What does customer experience mean? And what's a great example of, you know, good customer experience? Yeah, you know, it's often a question I get from startups as well as large organizations. You know, I think that many people don't understand that so many pieces and parts plays a role in a strong customer experience. So as a startup, the products you develop, the UIs you create, the websites, the FAQs, the ordering process, all that plays a part in customer experience.

But sometimes people get really stuck on just the selling, you know, actually the action, right, of that moment of truth of when you sell and when a customer buys, or even customer service when someone comes back and needs something more from you. But it's all of those things. Even if it's the legal document, you said you had another show on legal, right? If it's 22 pages and you have to print it out and sign it and fax it back versus allowing a customer to actually sign something online, all of that plays a role. So kind of what you sell is interesting, how you sell is interesting, but what's more important is how a customer feels when they, engage with any part or piece of your brand. That to me is customer experience. And who typically

manages this customer experience process? Is it the founder? Is it the sales team? How does that get assigned in a company, especially in the earliest days? Yeah, the earliest days, you know, I want to be clear here. Everybody plays a role, but someone, to your point, has to have sort of ownership of what that looks like. In a startup, it's probably going to be the founder, right? Understanding what is that experience you want to build not only for your customers, but also for your employees, but I know we're focused on customers during this conversation. So, you know, what is that experience? What do you want it to feel like and look like? Do you want them to be able to self-serve? That's part of the experience, right? The ease of use on the UI, that's part of the experience.

So I think founders staying close to it in the beginning is really, really important. As you start to grow, and especially as you start to scale, and the founder's attention is across too many things, maybe it becomes the person who's responsible for marketing. And so some executive that has responsibility will look at that and say, you know, how are we measuring it? What are we doing to improve it? What are the things we're doing now that's working and not working? And how can we constantly kind of keep our eye on that from a focus perspective? So I think as you get larger and as you scale, it has to shift away from the founder because the founder's paying attention to too many things. And that is an area, by the way, if you get customer experience wrong, it doesn't matter how

great your products are. Your customers are either not going to come back for more or they're also, you know, potentially going to share the poor experience in a more public way. So I'm sure you've got a dozen examples of bad customer experience. I'll share one. That has always driven me crazy. Super easy for me to sign up for certain publications that shall remain nameless that cost a lot of money that cover Wall Street. And then I tried to unsubscribe from this newspaper, this journal that covers the financial district in Manhattan known as Wall Street. And they make me pick up the phone and I have to call between certain hours. And then they put me on hold. This is this terrible customer experience. But I know what's happening. There's somebody who is trying to reduce churn.

They're trying to reduce the number of people unsubscribing. So they purposely add friction. They purposely make it bad. What do you think about? these kind of moments when, let's face it, you know, sometimes business decisions or people who are trying to solve their issue in their department of the company are basically ruining the experience of customers. Yeah, and you nailed it. That's the unintended consequence of a decision made from somebody who's not even close enough to that cancellation process. Meaning, so now all of a sudden you call in, right? You just said you tried, at one click I can order, super simple. Nine clicks and a phone call and three.

days of, you know, 10 minutes of time in between calls, you finally get it canceled. That's not a great experience. But if the person who made those decisions actually sat in a call center or listened in to those cancellation calls, they very quickly would realize that it's doing them no service there, right? And while you mentioned that you think that it could be to reduce churn by adding friction, I almost don't think it's that strategic. I don't think that that's the thought process. I think they don't really even understand how clugi it actually is and how many steps it actually is because somebody in one organization part of the business might say, let's do these two things. Someone in another part of the organization says, let's do this one thing.

And then the third person says, let's do these three things. You add it up, it's five. But in isolation, they're like, it's not that complicated. I'm asking them to do one thing. And so that's why that disconnection between different parts of the company, so it could be, whoever's responsible for churn, it could be finance, right, on that churn. It could even be the customer service organization. You have to make sure that they're connected. It's all of those touch points that are important, as you pointed out. And in a way, this is, I think, one of the

advantages startups have over large companies. Large companies have departments. They might have a little bit of politics on the margins. They might want to be thorough, maybe too thorough at times. and instead of having one people make a crisp decision, they tried to get consensus from five or six people, and each one of them may have varying degrees of frontline knowledge from what you're saying. Yeah, and you're right. In a startup environment, it might be one person. And in that instance, especially if it's a recurring revenue business, they are looking to reduce churn. But I think it's much better to then let someone cancel, find out why they cancel,

capture that information so that you can reapply the learnings to others so that they don't cancel. And if you do it right, you might even be able to win back that customer to have them come back into the fold because maybe they just didn't understand they had access to something. And so they felt like it wasn't enough value for the dollar they were spending, but they actually did have access to it. And they went, wow, I didn't know that. And so understanding why customers cancel in this case, you know, goes a long way for you to make sure that you can try to.

to be much more prescriptive. Now, I actually covered in my book, I have an entire chapter on churn, and I don't talk about it in a defensive way. I actually talk about it to be proactive, to get ahead of why someone would want to cancel so that you're not trying to win them back. And the place you can learn that is in those connections

when you're making someone cancel. Now, as a startup, maybe you do make them call. So you could ask them three quick questions or one quick question. And as you start to gather that information, you make it much easier and easier for them to cancel. But those early customers that leave you are a wealth of information that you can apply in the future to your business.

Yeah. Said another way, people are going to leave. That's the nature of relationships, personal business and everything in between. And if people are leaving, one of the great gifts they can give you is telling you why. Somebody at some point decided when you click unsubscribe in an email to instantly unsubscribe you and then say, can you tell us why you unsubscribe? Too many emails. I never signed up for this list. And I absolutely click. I never signed up for this email or I'm not

interested in this subject or it's too many emails. And it's delightful when somebody says, oh, an e-commerce merchant. Oh, you're getting too many emails. Would you like us to put you on the monthly list? And what an amazing experience that is because I have a lot of e-commerce merchants and I think somebody told them that they need to email me every day or two times a day after I buy one item. So I buy the first T-shirt and now I'm getting two emails a day. And I'm like, you know, I would like to get it once a month, but not 30, 40, 50, 60 emails a month.

Great point. And that's a simple fix, simple fix, right? But that goes back to, especially for founders and startups, is that you don't know what you don't know. And, you know, one of the big reasons startups fail. is because, oh, it might not have been a market fit, or they couldn't sell enough, right? Or they ran out of capital. Well, the reason you're running out of capital is because you're not able to keep and capture

customers, or capture and keep customers. Let me put it in the right order. So, you know, it's really important. It's super expensive on the CAF, right, for the customer acquisition cost for you to pull a customer in. And so it's much easier for you to sell to the existing customers that you have. But the only way that works is if they don't feel like you're emailing them 60 times trying to sell them all the time, right, that you start to,

capture the data and use it to your advantage. What's the best way to capture data and to understand your customers? Do you believe in listening labs? Do you believe just studying the path in which people use the product, you know, customer service desks when people get frustrated? What seems to be the most effective way or the first thing people should do when trying to make their product more elegant, smooth, and easier to use? Well, I'd almost say yes to everything you just suggested,

But it also just depends on what the product is, where you are in the development of it, what kind of demand there is in the market. If you know anything about the Gartner hype cycle, prior to joining Salesforce, I was a research fellow at Gartner. And if you know the hype cycle, if you're a founder, you know, at Tech Trigger on the left side of that hype cycle, that's a very different selling motion than if there's already market demand and you're on the slope of enlightenment, right? And so those are very different go-to-market models. And so it depends. But pretty consistently, I'd say that you have to stay close to the customer,

whether it's customer advisory boards or to your point, listening posts, or even through the data saying, wow, interesting, customers who came for this particular source tend to do these things with us. Customers who come from this other source do very different things from us. And so what are we missing? How do we get these two kinds of customers to do what we're looking to do? And that only comes if you are actually using technology to capture the data, analyze the data, use those insights to change your behavior with that perspective customer,

because through those signals, you'll get smarter and smarter about how to capture more customers that look and have the attributes that those most profitable with the greatest lifetime value actually bring to the business. The best example of that is kind of the Amazon recommendation engine. You think about Amazon's recommendation engine, it's crazy to think that some 30% of all their revenue on Amazon.com comes from that recommendation engine just from that. And everyone has copied it, but it was like, people like this do that and I'm like this. So I want to know what that is. And if you can think about that in your philosophy, then you'll be much more, you know,

you have much more insights in order to plan for the future for the customer that you're going to acquire six months from now or 12 months from now. Yeah. So if you take that example from Amazon, people were using the service, they were delighted. Somebody decided, hey, this person keeps ordering, you know, this category of electronics, et cetera. The next thing they would search for after they search for this specific dongle is, you know, this cable or this adapter. We might as well just surface that now because we know that's the second or third search.

Kind of a brilliant insight that somebody had. How does that manifest itself in a SaaS product or other consumer products that you've seen, this anticipating and figuring out what the person wants before they even know they want it. Well, there's two things I'd say there. And without naming names, right? In the app, the recommendation engine works. Out of the app, that example you just gave, like, you know, when the pandemic hit, I'm normally doing keynotes around the world. All of a sudden, boom, I had to build a studio in my garage. And they should have figured out based on what I was buying, what I might want next. I never got that email. So, you know, it's a matter of not just taking it in app, but then looking for those

behaviors, right? They've bought these three things. They're more likely to buy this dongle, right? Or need earbuds to listen instead of it coming through a speaker. Whatever it might be, if you know that I've bought three mics and two cameras and I've got, you know, this and that, I'm probably going to want that. But when I'm out of the app, instead of coming back to me and going, hey, you know, people who have bought all these things are more likely to buy this. And if you buy it right now, you know, maybe it's some special, but that doesn't happen. And so there is a ton of opportunity, even for brands we hold up as being really great at customer experience. So, you know, if you think of a coffee brand that has a really great app, I order the same thing every time.

Why is it that I need to order again every time? I order the same drink every time. But I come in, I know there's a beacon, they know that I'm there, right? And I walk up, it should just push to me and say, do you want? Yep, that's what I want, right? Or I'm close by. So there's lots of ways to improve, but every example I just gave and you gave relies on data. So as a startup, as a founder, that is not a place you want to cut corners on because it will be the fuel that will power your business into the future. And a lot of times I think people will do this manually as a test. So if you in fact knew that people ordering a certain camera and a tripod and a microphone were probably putting together a streaming studio or a Zoom studio, something to do webcasting,

you're probably going to need lights too, aren't you? That should have come in an email. So whatever retailer you were working with, it was B&H or was Amazon or whoever it was, why not send that follow-up email? Or, you know, when the box arrives, it could be in there as well with, hey, here are other things. There's so many opportunities, and you can test those manually. You could just try an email to those folks saying, hey, you know, do you need any other help with this? I think that's why that chat box on a lot of websites is such an amazing place to get product ideas. Maybe you could talk about the introduction of those chat boxes and how they've changed

customer experience and product design. Yeah, you know, when the pandemic first hit, that was probably one of the most discussed areas from our customer base around customer service. Because normally in call centers, everyone's in a call center. Boom, overnight, all your customer service agents are at home. And just think about a call center. It's desktop.

So it's not like people go home with their laptops, right? So now they're home, they're told they can't come to the office. They are customer service, the first line of support, and no one's in there taking calls. very quickly, people had to spin up these chat bots in a chat window to just try to answer the basics. Like, you know, here's the FAQs or here's a, you know, the website link you need to go to track your package or whatever it might have been or here's where to go to ask for a refund, just to answer those very quick customer service questions that you tend to get, you know, in mass.

Now, the only way you could set that up is if you actually knew what those top 10 questions were. So that goes back to that data. It's really important. And I know it's overwhelming for small businesses, especially startups, to understand how much of a tech investment they need to make. But if anything became clear over the last 18 months, it is the fact that those that did not make those investments were really caught flat-footed in one area being service, which is really that very critical piece to keeping a customer that you've spent a lot of money to

obviously acquire. but also that connection point to keep them as happy customers so they will not only buy more from you, they will buy more frequently from you. So chatbots is a great example of at least let the system and analytics, machine learning and technology get those 60, 70 percent of those very quick questions answered right away, delivering a strong customer experience and then have the ability to up-level it to level two support, if you will, that will be a human. And so the new power couple is human and technology, not tech alone, not human alone. It is really the marrying of those two things. Augmenting human performance with some AI, with some suggestions, feels like a great combination.

Some people, I've been pitched many times on using AI and, you know, machine learning to do chatbots. Do we like that as a concept or do we prefer a human who is given a choice of how to respond and saying, like, oh, here are three pre-programmed responses and just a little bit of that polish on it, or do you think we're at the point now where, you know, some answers can come directly from the AI? Yeah, I would answer that differently today than I would have two years ago. I would have said two years ago was probably a little more human, a little less tech, you know, and how do we bring that together? And then, you know, over the last year and a half, people have become far more comfortable with this digital,

virtual engagement. and regardless of sort of age ban, right? You might have had those that were like, I absolutely need to talk to a human. But now, you know, they're like, I'm looking for an answer and I want it quickly and I don't want to sit on hold for 20 minutes or an hour or multiple hours. I just want a very quick answer to a question and if AI can do it. And, you know, most of the time people don't realize, oh, that's machine learning with AI underneath it is, you know, big algorithmic, you know, searching capabilities. and they don't need to know that. They just need to go, you know, I'm looking for the answer to this.

And then a link comes, you're like, that was a great experience. Do you know it's a human on the other end answering or do you know that it's a, you know, an AI answering? All you care about is that was a great experience. And so that's the balance you have to get. Now, don't hear me saying that I'm not saying replace all the humans with tech. Once again, you have to have different levels of support based on whatever the issue may be. And if you can solve some of it quickly with AI, do that.

and then understand when and how you need humans to get involved. All right, listen, I think we got customer experience nailed for this first part. When we come back on episode two, we'll talk about customer engagement and building that relationship with customers. If you want to see all the startup basics in this series, including customer basics, as well as legal and finance and some of the other topics we've done, just go to this week in startups.com slash basics, and you'll see the entire catalog. And stay tuned for episode number two. Thank you so much to Tiffany and the team at Salesforce for helping make startup customer basics possible.

Go to Salesforce.com slash twist to apply for Salesforce for startups. Qualified startups will get 50% off their first year of Salesforce Essentials, 90 days of free support, coaching access, and much more. Once again, that's Salesforce.com slash twist to apply for Salesforce for startups today.