Debra Squyres:
We look for customers who have the most feedback, who are struggling with us, and we just ask them to come and tell us about their world and about their experience with us. And people from finance and operations and engineering that don't necessarily get to engage with customers and don't know what their world is like get a better sense of what that experience is. And it helps them have the right context to solve problems in a more meaningful way because they have that empathy.
Speaker 2:
Flourish CX, the only show helping CX leaders do one thing: empower their customers. Each episode democratizes best practices while leaving you feeling both inspired and equipped to take action. Let's get to it.
Alon Waks:
How do you create an organization where every team member, from HR to sales, buys into the idea that they are customer facing? I'm Alon Waks, your host for this episode of Flourish CX. Debra Squyres, Chief Customer Officer at HackerRank believes understanding data, sharing it company-wide, and then acting on it is an effective way to create a customer-led culture. Would you invite a disgruntled customer to your all-hands? Listen to hear how she's leading CX.
Alon Waks:
All right. Fun times, folks, back in the Flourish podcast. Today, I have Debra with me. And Debra, part of the Flourish podcast is I give you 20, 30 minutes to go and tell us about your resume that everybody can read on LinkedIn. No. We'll ask you about what kind of role or position would you do and dream about if you were not this customer-focused executive.
Debra Squyres:
That's a great question, and it's actually something that I've been contemplating for myself as well. I think that if I wasn't a chief customer officer or leading customer organizations, that I would likely be an executive coach. One of the things that I love about my role as a leader and what brings me the most passion is actually helping people not only realize their ambitions for themselves, but helping them get in touch with how they move past what they thought were their prior limits. And so, it's the part of my job that I can't imagine living without.
Alon Waks:
I keep hearing a lot from people that I have on this podcast that teaching, learning, there's a lot of humility in it, but being able to guide people, whether it's employees or whether it's customers, is something that's really inherent in driving value around customer experience. What do you think of that?
Debra Squyres:
I think when you help people bring their best self and their best capabilities to bear and you help them lean into their strengths, they bring discretionary effort, creative thinking, and they go beyond what you, in many cases, have ever expected of them. And you help them tap into their passions. I started my career in the early '90s, for many years we focused on overcoming strengths. We needed to fill those gaps. Well, the reality is people have strengths for a reason, and we need to tap into the strengths and not try to focus so much on the weaknesses. You can compliment those by rounding out your team with different skillsets. But when you tap into people's strengths, they are better engaged and they bring more to the work, which brings more to either the company or their customers or whatever the role is.
Alon Waks:
That sounds like something that today we call a chief people officer, but a lot of HR and employee-related stuff, but it all starts with understanding data and collecting information, right?
Debra Squyres:
Yeah, absolutely.
Alon Waks:
So let's go a little bit into the world of today. What is your passion? What is this thing that you love the most about being involved with customers?
Debra Squyres:
I'll summarize it as I love to help customers solve problems and really improve their experience as colleagues within their company. I think that comes from the empathy that I developed being in in-house HR in the first decade of my career in the early '90s. It helps me understand what the role is like, what the challenges are like, and it gave me great perspective on not only what I do and what I deliver for the company that I work for today, but also how do I fit into a larger ecosystem with that customer, what challenges are they facing, and how do I make them successful, not just in working with us and our product and services, but also just make their lives better? So it's very similar to what I'm passionate about with teams. My team is my customer, my customers are my customer, very much the same approach.
Alon Waks:
Yeah, the service mentality, I think, is something very big, and I like it a lot. The whole focus on empathy is very interesting, and I think it's a lot of talk about it today, but I don't always see, especially in big B2B companies, the balance between being empathetic and caring versus the actual things in play, the channels, the content, the push to self-service without thinking about it. What are your thoughts around driving that balance between the two?
Debra Squyres:
We're very data driven, and we should be, but the data doesn't tell the whole story. And so, part of your job as a leader in customer success is to actually bring the customer to life for your teams. Now, people in the go-to-market realm have great insight on what the customer experience is because they're working with them every day, marketing, sales, customer success, all very clear on what the customer pain points are and what we're solving for or not solving for, for the customer. But I really believe that our job is to bring that customer to life. So it's not only looking at the data. We run seminal customer experience surveys, post onboarding surveys. We capture a lot of numbers, and we use those for sure, but we do things like, we share every tear sheet from every survey response with all of the qualitative feedback from each customer. We look at them at the account level, at the individual response level, at the persona level. Everybody has access to all of these insights.
Debra Squyres:
We do something else as well, we bring customers into a customer spotlight at a company all-hands on a regular basis, and they are unscripted. And we don't just look for happy customers, we look for customers who have the most feedback, who are struggling with us, and we just ask them to come and tell us about their world and about their experience with us. People from finance and operations and engineering that don't necessarily get to engage with customers and don't know what their world is like get a better sense of what that experience is. It helps them have the right context to solve problems in a more meaningful way because they have that empathy. They can ask questions of the customer.
Alon Waks:
I love it. You're giving them a stage. And then, I think it's a good transition into something very important, we talk about it in Flourish all the time, which is the ownership of customer experience. Is it a team sport or is it one person who owns it or one executive? Does everybody need to have it as part of the MBOs? What do you think?
Debra Squyres:
I have a management philosophy that if everybody owns something, no one does. It's like when you're playing softball and the ball goes up and everybody's looking at each other and they think, well, they'll get it. They'll get it. Yep. Nope. There is one owner, and it should be the person who has customer success. Their job is to ensure that customers are achieving maximum value from their investment in the partnership. But it is a team sport in the sense that our objectives across the business need to be aligned. I'm not the only one who can impact the customer experience. I need my chief product officer to impact it in the priorities that we set in the product. I need our CTO to impact it from the perspective of addressing defects and bugs and improving quality and things of that nature. I need my chief people officer to own it because I need to bring quality people in and I need to provide a culture and an environment where they're thriving and we're developing them.
Debra Squyres:
So, I own the customer experience as the head of customer success, but I work across my peer group to help them understand where we need to improve product, process, people strategy, customer engagement model, resources. And we divide and conquer in that regard, and we align around objectives and key results on a quarterly basis for this.
Alon Waks:
And is it filtering down? For example, is the person who's in charge of collection or the financial aspect to customers' billing... There's a lot of places, customers get touched by many departments, sometimes not directly. So how do you try and corral everybody around customer value? And how do you translate that into their day to day?
Debra Squyres:
That's a great question and absolutely. At HackerRank, which is where I'm at today, we absolutely take the customer to heart. Customer delight is one of our four core values. People are assessed for it no matter what role they're being hired for. So when we're hiring, we're assessing for customer delight. When we're developing people and getting them onboarded, we're focusing on how we engage with our customers, what the tone should be. We're setting objectives across every single function within the organization for the way that they impact the customer experience.
Debra Squyres:
I think it's important to highlight that sometimes the way that you impact the customer experience is not directly with the customer, it's because you're working with the people who impact the customer. So some of the things that happen behind the scenes, this mysterious non-customer facing place, which is one of my biggest pet peeves, you either serve the customer or you serve the people who serve the customer. We are all working for someone. I'm fortunate to work in a company where that is taken to heart and we don't have people believe that they're not customer facing.
Alon Waks:
Yeah, I think it's important that even SG&A and support functions, I mean marketing, of course, as customer facing is very important, prospect facing as well. But everybody can understand if we explain it to them, if we talk about it, and we show what the light means and success is, then people feel more empowered that they are providing impact, sometimes not directly. But in order to do that, of course, we need to show them impact. So let's talk about a fun topic about what is customer experience impact? How is it measured? Is it CSAT good, done, or it's a little bit more complex?
Debra Squyres:
Yeah, it's a lot more complex. I would love to have a single metric that says, yes, we're doing great, but the reality is, no matter what you measure, there's always more to it. And frankly, there are internal metrics that are important to us, and there are customer success metrics that we need to be accounting for. So we look at it from both lenses, we do NPS and CSAT and customer effort score. We look at adoption, we look at how well a customer is adopted. Are they using things in the right way? That informs how we build the product or how we evolve the product or what enablement we do for customers.
Debra Squyres:
But we also look at how are our customers engaging with us? Are they advocates? Are they going beyond responding to a survey? And are they evangelizing for us in their community or in our community? Are they achieving what they intended to when they first established the partnership with us? We impact a very critical function for our customers. Their technical hiring processes, we enable them to accelerate their innovation and to be competitive in hiring the best technical talent. So we're heavily focused on how well they are leveraging the product to meet their technical hiring needs. And so you have to think in terms, not only of your own internal and sometimes what I would consider vanity metrics, what we like to show to the board of the market, that's great, but those are internal. What customers care about is, are they getting value and solving the problems that they intended to solve and are they doing it in a way that is easy and delightful?
Alon Waks:
It's always one thing that I try to understand and I never get an answer for it. So, maybe you can help me. Is the one standard public metric that it defines customer value, or is it always going to be the soup of two tablespoons of CSAT, one tablespoon of adoption, a squint of salt from, I don't know, like content adoption, or is it always customized?
Debra Squyres:
I think it's always going to be soup, because we do complex work and solve complex problems for our customers. We have metrics that we need to track that are leading indicators and we have outcomes that are lagging indicators. So it would be nice if we could have one metric and say, check the box. We're done. That's not how it works. And if you isolate around too small of a metric space, you're not going to know what's going on in the business so that you can continuously improve.
Alon Waks:
A good net retention, that's a lagging indicator, but what's happening on the way to net retention? That's what you want to know, right?
Debra Squyres:
Exactly. We get really deep in the metrics. What levers can we pull for a particular customer segment or particular use case or particular region to improve outcomes for the customer, which then has downstream impact on net retention.
Alon Waks:
We talk a lot in this community in Flourish podcast about the things that get us there, like leading indicators or data points that we can track. We talk about customer journeys and about content, product documentation adoption. And we always have the question here about all of that is great and you want to capture it, but do you always have enough ability to capture the data? Do you have enough tools to capture the data, or is it too much data, you're looking for insights? So how are you getting around all this data collection, but then also getting great takeaways? That's always a tough one, right?
Debra Squyres:
Yeah, it is hard. And we've been on a journey on this as well. When I got here, we had very top level metrics and we were doing well on the top level metrics, but we didn't know how we were getting there. So we stepped back and looked at it from the perspective of, if I were to forecast what was going to happen in the business, what do I need to look at? How do I know if the customer is having a good experience? Aside from surveys, which we do, those are kind of table stakes at this point, they're important. I'm not dismissing them, but here's the reality. We spend a lot of time in our ticketing system, looking at what kinds of inquiries are coming in. The how to questions are a good indicator of what workflows we need to improve from a usability perspective. It's great that we can answer questions in 29 minutes, but they shouldn't have to ask the question in the first place, if it's completely intuitive, right?
Debra Squyres:
So we really try to get to that level of granularity, but we really try to focus the teams on the data and insights that help inform what they can do from a process perspective, what they need to do to advocate with other teams. The support team is a huge stakeholder in identifying for product, what they should work on, just as much as your customer success managers and your sales people, because they are seeing day in and day out where people are getting stuck and the less stuck they get, the easier it is for them to work with us or to use our product, the more successful they're going to be.
Alon Waks:
Yeah, for sure. You hit on something crazily important that I love, which is the intuitive journey. Today, we come from a B2C day-to-day world where we should be able to find answers, content, anything we need about the product, it doesn't matter how complex it is, on our own, but that's not always the case. I think it's part of the thing that is also enticing being in this world that you're peeling back layers of the onion and driving people to adopt them, find them on their own, and getting to the really becoming more sophisticated agents or customer support. And then customer success that are really giving important time and knowledge versus just being what I call an answering machine or a knowledge hub, which people should get on their own. It's that balance. But unfortunately we still see a high percent of companies not having a sophisticated thinking about intuitive journeys and self-service. Why do you think that is? What is the root cause of that? I know the product's complex, but that's not the reason that answers should be complex.
Debra Squyres:
Your customers get more complex. The use cases get more complex.
Alon Waks:
It's an iterative world. It's not about here's the product, let's say, this bottle. This is the product and done for the next three years. Customer feedback, agile ability adoption, data helps steer the product model, not just for the future features, but also to optimize for the use cases and value that they're seeing. And that's why we're seeing a lot more, and I believe what you're saying is great, that the people that are handling the customer feedback loop is actually changing the landscape of the product in the semi age, not completely. And that's great. So when you feel like you've uncovered the hill and you climb to the top of the hill and you know what to do with that, with intuitive journeys, well, then you see a little mountain behind that hill.
Debra Squyres:
Then you see the next hill.
Alon Waks:
But at least you covered one hill already. So it's a good start. I like that approach. And customer trust score obviously goes up as well, which we know is a big, big fact in stickiness. At the end of the day, your number one assets are your employee and your number one also asset are your customers. And you should not just treat them like that, but you should also make sure that they get value. Debra, this was delightful. Thank you for being on the show.
Debra Squyres:
Thank you so much. This was wonderful.
Alon Waks:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Flourish CX. To learn more, head over to zoominsoftware.com/podcast and follow along wherever you get your audio.
