Salesforce has completed its acquisition of Zoomin

You’ll learn:

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‍- There’s a difference between getting value and getting TRUE value from a product, make sure your customers gain the latter

- Don’t take a metric at face value, keep refining the data to understand your customer’s success

- Watch how your data evolves over time to identify what parts of your services need improvement

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‍Listen For:

‍[01:34] The overlap between teaching and CX

[05:30] Dominic’s CX rant

[09:20] CX as a growth engine

[15:40] Looking at metrics like a pyramid

[23:00] Turning data into insights

[26:57] CX advice for CEO’s

Dominic Constandi:

Keep asking the next question, because a metric is only one lens. Ultimately, you have to get to that point that ties someone's participation, or someone's emotional feedback to something that gives you the true story of their value derivation, whether it be in their usage or whether it be in your outcome.

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VO:

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.

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Alon Waks:

When you look at data as another form of feedback, you can distill it down to figure out what parts of your business are working and what needs improving. Alon Waks, your host for this episode of Flourish CX. Dominic Constandi, senior VP of customer success ZoomInfo looks at metrics like a pyramid. At the very bottom sit the initial numbers. As you work your way up, refining the data each step, you can understand what customers are saying about their actions.

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Alon Waks:

The further you break down the metric, the more incisive they can be. As our conversation unfold, think about how much you're driving data to derive the helpful conclusions as you're hitting the top of your pyramid. Who are you Dominic, and who would you be if you were not a great customer leader, and obsessed person about the business aspect of customers?

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Dominic Constandi:

If I wasn't doing this job and I could sort of do anything I wanted to do, I think teaching honestly. It's a strange one. Obviously kind of being in the private sector for so long and being in SaaS, but teaching for me I think there's some bits that overlap just in the sense of being able to communicate, having sort of someone trust you to sort of take them to a certain place of understanding or of knowledge or whatever else they're looking to get. But for me, there's nothing more rewarding than seeing that moment when the person that you are working with clicks, and they feel empowered to take on a challenge based on something you've worked on together or some potential wisdom that you've been parted in some way. I think that's just a really rewarding feeling. So yeah, I think that's sort of, that gets the dopamine going and something I probably enjoy.

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Alon Waks:

Yeah, for sure. First of all, that's cool and I love it. I think everything around teaching. I have young kids and I admire the way they get taught and I could never do that. Sorry, that's just not in my DNA. But also the aspect of teaching is I think a lot of vulnerability and very humbling experience. Because you are helping people in the most human way there is, which is providing information. I see a lot of actually resemblance between that and the world of empowering and giving customers value.

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Dominic Constandi:

Yeah. I think that you touched on something really interesting there, which I think every kind of CS or CX leader probably has some experience with. Which is just the notion that when you are teaching, it's about the student ultimately. Because I might have something that I am tasked with imparting or a curriculum potentially, or a concept. But ultimately how that student is able to kind of ingest whatever it is that I'm trying to convey, internalize it, understand it, be able to kind really shown it and manipulate it in their own mind is really dependent upon the individual.

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Dominic Constandi:

I speak to myself as a student a long time ago. It's the reason why we have favorite teachers. It's the reason why we have favorite classes, because different teachers have different approaches that might resonate more or less for all those folks that have been through sort of law school or something. I hear a lot about Socratic method and some folks love that. Some folks hate that, but it's just really a method and each individual's going to respond, or a method's going to resonate with someone differently.

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Dominic Constandi:

I think when you think a lot about what we're doing in CS, it's customer driven. It's you might have your set of emotions or playbooks around what you think is going to drive success. Just like a teacher has their own methods or techniques around how they might convey a concept or teacher principal. But fundamentally, if you can't adapt those principles or concepts of teaching to what's going to resonate with your student, it's not going to be a successful.

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Dominic Constandi:

Similar to CS and CX, right? Ultimately you can have your emotions and principles, but if it can't adapt to what it is that your customer's looking for, or the way that they perceive value, then you will ultimately not be as effective. So I think there's, yeah, to your point, there's a lot of overlap there in terms of having it be either student driven or customer driven in our industry, obviously,

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Alon Waks:

For sure. It's also about definition of success. Although success of teaching is having somebody learn, like teach a man to fish. We all know that. It's something important, and that's something that I think we'll get into that in a second, is how do you define the balance between what you teach by just sending content, or sending information? Self-service is one aspect versus the very high touch, the trusted advisors/sharper approach of a customer success manager that really wants to be there to give a lot of value to the customer and not just to say, "Oh, here's when you can find the answer for that."

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Alon Waks:

That's not good use of their time and definitely not good use of your CSM stuff. One thing that we always want people is to get the frustration out on the show and say like, what really tick you off? What pisses you off in the world of customer experience that people don't get, that don't understand? Give us your biggest rant to vent about CX that is not something that people get?

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Dominic Constandi:

I think that, gosh, it's only a 27 minute podcast. There are probably a few, but I'll probably say this, and there's a few different aspects of what I'm going to say. So the first is I think a common thing that people will say is that CX or CS is not just the responsibility of the CS team or the CSM or whatever organization you're you're talking about. But it's the responsibility of the organization. It's responsibility for the business at large. I think when a lot of folks hear that, even those who are aren't in CS, I think everyone kind of nods their head and say, "Yeah, that feels right. It's a nice tagline. I think it sounds pretty good."

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Dominic Constandi:

But I think the challenge between acknowledging that's a nice statement or a semi logical kind of idiom is that being kind of customer focused or customer centric, it has to be pervasive throughout the organization. With that kind of comes a mindset around how you do your job even if you are necessarily tasked with the CS function. A really, really basic one I think that we can think about is something as simple as handoffs.

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Dominic Constandi:

Whether that handoff is a new business handoff, whether that handoff is you've got a sort of a support ticket potentially that's kind of been escalated. The feedback is going to the product team, but then there has to be that handoff or that interlock. We are really adding feedback. Feedback is coming back in to the team. I think that it's really easy as let's say a seller to say, "Look, I really have to focus on progressing my pipeline and all this sort of stuff." Gosh, providing really good handoff notes it's not directly align necessarily with the task at hand in front of them. Similar to a product team.

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Dominic Constandi:

It's easy and it's natural for them to say, "Gosh, I need to get back to constructing my roadmap." Thinking about how I'm going to get the engineering resources to do the things I need to do, and providing that feedback and that handoff on something that came up from a customer and going back to the team creating that feedback loop. I think the more that businesses are able to really live that customer centric mindset and sort of walk the walk as well as talk the talk per se, typically the more successful the business will be.

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Dominic Constandi:

I say that with the complete understanding that not everyone needs to care about the things that I care about. Obviously, we've all got our own domains and things that we need to really deliver excellence within. But when I think about customer centricity, it's customer centricity that if we all realize that delivering value for the customer is how we're going to achieve their goals, and thus through their goals, our goals as a business. If that was a rant, it'd probably be that a lot of businesses can be nascent in terms of how they interpret that statement of CX is everyone's business. A lot of folks don't quite know how to manifest that in the today.

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Alon Waks:

For sure. This is a big topic we talk about a lot here. We call it the ECX team sport. Well, if it is, then you must be the quarterback because you own the customer organization. But the quarterback on his own is not going to get very far as we've seen lately in some super bowl action. You need everybody to have a vested interest, but saying, "Oh, yeah, we care about it." Has to translate into actual tactics, operation, priorities, and sometimes even MBOs.

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Alon Waks:

How are you guys start thinking about that in your company about making sure that people are not just customer obsessed, customer centric or another buzzword if you want to throw out that people use all the time without actually backing it up, right? It has to come down to the end of process, ticket, following up. The process shouldn't be about our efficiency. It has to be customer first. Sometimes yes, that might hurt your bottom line, but it should increase your unit economics over time.

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Dominic Constandi:

So one of the things that is interesting about CS as a discipline is I was an economics person at university. They always call economics the dismal science. The reason why it's the dismal science is because it's always just variable basis. Well, if you assume this, then the answer could be that, or if you think that this variable's weightier, the model fits out a totally different response. So you can really kind of tweak it to whatever you want. Unlike a "hard science" where there is a definitive answer. I think the thing with CS is that oftentimes we have to find that balance of saying where I put time and effort and resources and spend, I want that to drive towards a higher strategic goal I have.

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Dominic Constandi:

But at the same time, I need to be able to demonstrate to all of the people that hold me accountable, where I'm putting my time, my resources and the company's money is deriving an outcome and a positive outcome. So you might say customer training is an area in which to invest. We know that if you have an empowered customer that knows how to use the system or the platform, you're going to have a better outcome. Again, logical minds would agree that is the flow, but a lot of companies will go out and say, "Oh, gosh, I agree. But man, it's really hard to get budget for a training team because how do I quantify the impact?"

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Dominic Constandi:

I think so often we in CS we really prioritize the experience. We know that the experience matters and having it be seamless and value driven matters. But sometimes I think we find it tough to you quantify that and have it be this kind of concrete correlation at least. If not causation at least correlation between activities we're taking and a real quantitative outcome. So I give the example of training. One of the things we implement at ZoomInfo is when we think about training and we look at 10,000 sort of customers, and their experience with us and their journey and the outcomes. When we look at those usage patterns, which usage patterns are the ones that seem to generate the most adoption? Which usage patterns are the ones that the customers seem to be deriving the most value.

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Dominic Constandi:

However, you might measure that for your business, whether that's how much you think they're logging in, whether has how many searches they run, or whatever your particular product or kind of use case is, what are the key sort of steps or usage patterns that point to that, and then identifying okay, so these are the things that we know that if a customer is doing these things, it means they're actually like getting value.

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Dominic Constandi:

They're using the system in the way that we hope them to and the way that they are finding the value. So then you kind of reverse engineering, you say, okay, so these are the usage patterns that seem to derive the most value. Then let's orchestrate our training to highlight those things, and really steer the customer in the direction of these are actually the really high value activities are going to take your investment in this platform to the next level. You are going to see more than just that surface level initial value.

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Dominic Constandi:

The example I always give here is, and it's obviously a slightly different example, but my iPhone. There's that difference between initial value of this iPhone, which is my time to first value with my iPhone is I can unwrap the box, turn it on within 20 seconds. I could probably send a text message. So one could say, "Well, Dom's getting value." That's great. Look at that, brilliant, five minutes, time to first value, but really how valuable is me sending a text message on my phone?

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Dominic Constandi:

Because I could send a text message from almost any phone. I could set an alarm on my 2004 razor flip phone. What's interesting is how do you key your investments and your time and your resources around value that isn't just first time to value, but it's actually true value. So Apple I would imagine, would say is Dominic using the sleep feature, the sleep tracking feature, or the exercise I health and fitness features, which are deeper elements of usage that are maybe particular to Apple and their special source.

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Dominic Constandi:

That might denote real value versus me sending a text or setting an alarm. So when we think about training here, we try and key in on like, okay, what's not just time to first value, but what's real value. When someone says, "Well, how do you define real value, Dominic?" I say real value is the things that they do that show they're really highly adopted and users are in there every day. Potentially if that's your business. Users are in there every day. You're down now, whatever measure you right for your business in, I think about the long term versus the short term balance.

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Dominic Constandi:

I think about that dismal science concept. For me, a lot of it's about finding that right balance between saying we believe in the experience. We believe that in CX. Not everything can maybe be quantified in this binary fashion that maybe is the case with sales or some other parts of the business. But if you can think sort of, if you can take the experience that you want to provide and you can try and distill that down into quantitative way of looking at that world, I think that you will tend to see more success. I think that CX as a discipline tends to feel weightier. It feels a little bit less theoretical. It feels a little bit less kind of philosophical, and a little bit more of what you said there, where you're saying, "Well, your CS leader is your new revenue driver." That concept of CS as a growth engine.

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Dominic Constandi:

If you can think about CS in this way, if you can think about CS and say, "I need X amount of dollars to invest in this training program, because this training program is going to drive this type of usage, which we know is super valuable for the customer. Which we know is also good for us as a business." That CS is a growth engine versus CS just being purely experiential and theoretical. That's how CS evolves from being an important discipline and the trusted advisor stuff. It goes to being this thing of like, we are a critical part of the growth machine for any business.

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Alon Waks:

Time to value is critical measurement because at the end of the day, CX is not off the shelf, NPS isn't the metric, and that's it. Every company to define what value for its customers are. That's, I call it the super of metrics, because it's different by each company.

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Dominic Constandi:

I always like to think about metrics like a funnel, or if you want to flip it upside down a pyramid, whatever geometric shape you prefer. I think that if we take some something as simple as, again, I'll just go back to the training example, because it's easy and we've talked about it. If I say, "Okay, so we offer training." Then I say, "Well, my first metric is how many people took the training?" That's like an obvious one. How many people of my total universe took the training. Okay, great. So that gives you a metric and you might say, "Well, that's brilliant. We've got 80% of our potential... those eligible for the training. 80% of them took the training. That's brilliant."

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Dominic Constandi:

Then you kind of go out the funnel and you got up the pyramid down the funnel and you say, "Okay, well, of the people that took the training, how many of those people like the training or found it to be valuable?" So you've got an initial number, which is how many people participated. Then your second metric maybe it's a smile sheet, or an NPS, like how many people thought that training was valuable. A lot of companies I think will kind of stop there and they'll say, "Oh, okay, great. So I had 80% of people training, and guess what? 80% of that said they love the training. So it was great.

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Dominic Constandi:

Then they kind of stop. Now you're getting to the part of the pyramid that is really incisive because then you're saying, "Okay, 80% of the people that took the training liked it. So of that 80% of the 80%, how many of those people are exhibiting usage behavior?" But the training really talks about being valuable. Then what you end up getting is you get down to the impact metrics, or whatever sort of nomen thing if you want to use.

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Dominic Constandi:

But your initial base of metrics of that pyramid is fairly broad and generic. Then you hone in. But as you keep pulling on that thread, you start to determine to your point that you need different metrics to be able to tell you the different story. So initially it's just participation for the training. Then it's NPS for the training. Then it's usage patterns for the training. Then you could even go to the next step and say, "Okay, so of the percentage of the people that took the training liked the training. Did the things that the training prescribes them to do to derive maximum value, how many of them wanted to renew or expand or do more with your business?" Then you've got your tip of the pyramid.

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Dominic Constandi:

So keep asking the next question, because a metric is only one lens. I'm not so anything that's rocket science, but a metric is only one lens. Ultimately you have to get to that point that ties someone's participation or someone's emotional feedback to something that gives you the true story of their value derivation. Whether it be in their usage or whether it be in your outcome. I think it's sometimes those last two steps that get missed a little bit.

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Alon Waks:

Yeah. I love it. It's how you take a leading indicator, which is something in agile control, which is for example, registration, participation, training taken. Those are all secondary metrics as we call them, but it's not the main metric. The main metric is what did that do for lifetime value, adoption, retention rate, net retention growth and so forth. The same thing can be applied training.

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Alon Waks:

You can do the same thing for content and self-service. If you're pushing people to self-service journeys, is that leading to adoption, success, less tickets, case deflection and overall happiness. If you just mention CSAT that's a point in time, that's not enough, right?

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Dominic Constandi:

Exactly. I think as you think about the self-service piece, you've got different sorts of echelons of either digitization, self-serve or kind of scale plays. If you're a company that has tens of thousands of customers, you are going to be in a position unless you have an absolute veritable army of just CS people just falling off of trees. I think every CS leader would say, "Gosh, I could really use more people." But one of the things to think about there is that notion of whenever we think about something that maybe more digitized, or maybe something that scales, the thing that we often think about is to your point, if I were to run let's say one on one trainings versus webinar trainings versus university knowledge center type trainings. You've got three different sort of flavors of customer education, customer empowerment.

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Dominic Constandi:

Anytime we think about introducing these or where we bring those various resources and vectors of education to bear, I'm always looking to say not just to your point. Well, what's the CSAT coming out of this one versus this one versus this one? It's really digging deeper and saying, "Well, okay, the CSAT a story, it's a lens." The NPS is a lens, but ultimately, what's the journey that those people then go on from there? Measure that, measure my cohort that signed up for the knowledge center or the certification course. Measure the cohort that took part in the webinars. Measure the cohort that got maybe the one on one session and follow that journey and be really, really data driven around how you are comparing that journey and that outcome for those folks. The lifetime value piece.

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Dominic Constandi:

That's going to tell you... when you look at things that critically and you try to be as data driven as you can in that respect, it's going to kind of tell you what vectors are the ones to invest more in, or the ones that aren't working for you. I think that what I'm probably espousing for here is trying to sort of, even with digitization, even with scale motions, remembering to kind of benchmark yourself against other vectors through which you can deliver that service for the customer.

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Dominic Constandi:

So that you can get a sense of is the customer deriving value, because you can tell me that you've got this really fancy knowledge center that you've invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in. But is the content good? Is it easy to navigate? Do customers not know it's there? So I think thinking a little bit about some of, again, those funnel metrics, right? How many people logged into your knowledge center? How many people checked out the article, how many people went and did the thing that the knowledge article said?

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Dominic Constandi:

So I think just trying to make sure that you are with digitization, you've got a wonderful sort of digital exhaust that tends to come from that. But remembering to keep pulling on that thread and asking question around it. What's the outcome, what's the value? What are the things that you look at for your business that say that a customer is deriving value?

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Alon Waks:

For sure. I love this. As we talked about training or self services as example, if you, for example, Zoom is one company that does this is if you are really providing the right content and the right answer at the right time to the right person through their share of choice hopefully knowledge base or wherever they're going. Then it's not enough to just say they got the answer. It's called cross session. If three days later they came and chatted with your support on the same issue, then they didn't get the answer and your content may have not serve them right.

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Alon Waks:

How are you going to close the loop? Because it's not just serving the answer that you think. It's analytics, post the answer and understanding how to close that gap for the next customer that might ask the same question. So the feedback group is also critical I believe. What are your thoughts on that?

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Dominic Constandi:

Yeah, 100%. Why do we do any of this? It's because in both of the things we talked about, whether it's your training funnel and those metrics that I discuss, or whether it's our little knowledge center example here, fundamentally, by understanding what each of those things tell you, it's that feedback loop that tells you where in your pyramid or your funnel is your slippage. Where's your leakage in that? You could have the coolest knowledge center and it could look super, super good, but if the content's not good, it doesn't matter how intuitive it is.

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Dominic Constandi:

So if you are saying, "Look, I got lots of people logging in. I got lots of people navigating to the right article." But then it seems that the people that click and read the article or read the content piece, they end up calling support with the exact same thing they looked up. Then you know your content's no good, or it's not clear, versus you could say, "Man, I get a lot of people sign up for the neural center log in, but I just don't have anyone clicking on articles."

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Dominic Constandi:

It just doesn't seem that. Then it's a question of is it my UI? Is it search ability? Is it not clear to the customer how they can get to the topic they want? So the feedback loop is almost you are looking at where your leakage is in whatever flow you are looking for. How quickly does that initial denominator deteriorate at each step of the process? Because by understanding that, it's that feedback loop that's telling you where to improve. Especially in self serve right where you don't have a customer.

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Dominic Constandi:

Maybe telling you along the way what sucks or what's great. It's that feedback loop from looking at how the data is evolving that's basically telling you where you need to improve. It's almost like the customer's telling you through their actions.

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Alon Waks:

I believe this is something extremely important. A lot of times you started talking about training maybe not being sexy or the number one KPI. It's just like you should invest in CX ops, CX analytics, just like sales analytics. Sales ops has been a defector thing. Then marketing ops. If you're not doing CX analytics and ops to understand the digital footprint, the patterns, the feedback group, the insights in order to optimize the process. When the self civic works, when does it not? What are the content and the product questions people are getting, where should you place them? Then it's going to be hard to actually understand data is a good start, insights is what really matters, right?

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Dominic Constandi:

A hundred percent. If I think about myself at the start of my career, I think one of the things that you learn as you mature as a business, as a professional in an individual sense is it's that learning and that ability to say, "Okay, data is one thing and I can have all this data." But it's my ability to draw the insights and the conclusion for it. To your point, one of the things that's I think really seem to be exploding these days in terms of the discipline and an area of value and investment is that at CX ops. That area of saying, "Okay, great, let me help you steer this business. Let me point you towards the areas that are more effective or less effective. Let me give you the visibility into whether it's through dash boarding or data warehousing. Let me give you visibility into the things that help you orchestrate."

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Dominic Constandi:

I will say that one of the things that was really, really astounding to me at ZoomInfo has just been our ability to take swaths of data and around our customers, and our own performance internally and mobilize that. Distill it into sort of insights and outcomes that help us make data driven decisions. This goes back to our original point of saying you have to focus on the experience and be customer centric, but you also have to be data driven in that end up.

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Alon Waks:

We talked about all the elements of this. The one thing we do to end the show is give you magical powers. Fairy Dust, The X, whatever you want, Superman, whatever. Your choice, your poison. If you had the power to go and advise many founders CEOs, what do they usually not know that you think they should know when going into like a real CX initiative?

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Dominic Constandi:

If you really want to run an effective CX organization, there is a healthy balance that exists across the various disciplines within any business. I think that there's the notion of a CMO, because marketing is a key vector through which you manage your brand, you manage your demand generation, yada yada yada. There's a whole host of things that marketing is just super empower important to do.

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Dominic Constandi:

Then you've got a CRO type scenario or a head of sales role. That's obvious. I think we all know what that's about, but I think that the healthy balance exists between those organizations as well as whether it's a chief customer officer or whatever you want to title that as candidly. It not apart from like external perception and potentially your own ego, but that notion of realizing that all of your go to market efforts and your retention efforts and the business you're trying to build. Having that nice, healthy interlock. I say tension because that tension helps keep everyone honest, makes everyone a little bit sharper. Because you don't over rotate in any particular direction.

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Dominic Constandi:

I think a lot of CEOs might look at their business and go, and again, I think it depends on the stage of the business. ZoomInfo is a 3000 person publicly traded company versus a 200 a person startup. It is different priorities, different goals at that stage. But the concept of saying that there is a CRO and all things roll there and then there's a marketing person. Then there's a product person. I think in a lot of cases, I see you might have the customer business rolling in into any of those other disciplines. I think that in my experience, I found that you lose out on that healthy tension.

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Dominic Constandi:

You lose out on that piece of accountability that exists in that [tetris 00:28:57] and in that structure. So you end up over rotating in a particular direction and ultimately like that customer piece or that voice of the customer kind of gets folded in and subsumed in something else. So when I think about my colleagues, I love working with all of them. The beauty of that relationship is that it's been set up in such a way that we all kind of have that interlock. That interlock makes us stronger, in our case, a go to market team.

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Dominic Constandi:

That's the thing I would probably say to CEOs and CLOs, is that remember that you can have those voices at the table and have their be that healthy tension and that neutral accountability to stay sharp and drive towards a common goal and not over rotate in a particular direction. I don't think there's any harm in that.

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Alon Waks:

Dominic, this has been stellar. Thank you so much. I think we agree on a lot of things around the world of CX and the flourish community has learned a lot from you joining the podcast. I really appreciate it.

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Dominic Constandi:

I really appreciate the time. As I said I am never the smartest person in any room I'm in. So anyone who wants to kind of fire up a discussion on stuff that I've talked about, I'm always happy to do it. There's a lot that we can all learn from each other. So thank you for facilitating and making our community better.

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Alon Waks:

Thank you for listening to this episode of Flourish CX. To learn more head over to zoomandsoftware.com/podcast, and follow along wherever you get your audio.

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