John O'Melia:
If a customer is consistently driving value, then you're helping that dream to come true, you know that the likely of them being happy, being referenceable, renewing when the time comes, potentially looking to expand at the right time, is all those. So those leading indicators are really key for us. And I'm really trying to home in on those, and obsess about those, I think will do us more good than that retroactive look at the lagging indicators.
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:
Every metric has a story to tell, and to understand that story, you have to be able to read them. I'm Alon Waks, your host for this episode of Flourish CX.
Alon Waks:
We all know having a good MPS today doesn't guarantee one tomorrow, which is why John O'Melia, chief customer officer at Contentsquare says you need to pay close attention to what you're doing on a daily basis, that affects a customer's future success. As you listen to our conversation, ask yourself, are you mining your lagging indicators for all of their worth? And can you identify your company's leading indicators to help you stay ahead of the CX game?
Alon Waks:
First thing we do is, you know John, we did not spend five minutes going over your LinkedIn profile. We'll give you a few good seconds to tell us who would you be if you were not this customer focus executive?
John O'Melia:
That's a really good way to start. I think I try to bring together two of my passions in life. So I really enjoy coaching, mentoring people, and I see that as part of my job, and I've been a coach professionally, but I also coach youth soccer teams. I have a great passion for Liverpool Football Club, if you follow the English Premier League. So I'm a massive Liverpool fan. My dream job would be to replace Jürgen Klopp, hopefully in many, many years times, because hopefully Jürgen stays with us for a long, long time to come.
Alon Waks:
Well, first of all my friend, I think we can drop the podcast and just talk Liverpool all day, because I grew up in South Africa many, many moons ago, and decided Liverpool was my dream team.
John O'Melia:
Probably because of Bruce Grobbelaar who was the goal keeper back then. He was a great South African-
Alon Waks:
A Zimbabwean legend, of course, yeah. And he was amazing. So we talk about Liverpool, and I think we'll get back to that analogy all the time. But until then, we'll also talk about customers, because Liverpool also has fans who are their audience and customers.
Alon Waks:
The first thing is, sometimes your team annoys you, it's like, what are you doing? 7% conversion rate last season, why are you not scoring more goals? But the same thing we started to get annoyed is about customer experience. There must be something that gets you annoyed about customer experience, the people either focus on too much, or don't talk about. What would that be?
John O'Melia:
I was thinking about this. I'm a very easy going guy, but I think if I look at what annoys me professionally, is probably the meeting after the meeting. If you've got a big topic that you want to talk about, whether it's an internal topic or a topic with a customer, and you get all the right people and you have a Zoom or an in-person meeting, and you set the stage to really talk through the problem and you feel like everybody is on the same page, everybody has bought into moving in the same direction, and you leave thinking you have agreement on how to move forward. Only to find out weeks down the line that there was a meeting after the meeting, where people weren't really on the same page. And everything stalled, and people didn't really put on the table what was concerning them or worrying them, and you find yourself back at square one. That's probably my pet peeve.
Alon Waks:
Oh my God, that could be transferred into many things. Product, marketing, trust me. I think we'll circle back to that after the next topic, because it all comes back to I think ownership and accountability. So let me tell you why I'm asking that.
Alon Waks:
There's this notion that everything is owned by one head, one person, one [inaudible 00:04:14]. But for CX, sometimes it's a bit confusing. So let's go back to Liverpool or other sports, is customer experience a team sporting review or should it be owned by one organization, or is it a mix?
John O'Melia:
It's absolutely a team sport. I think you can have a chief customer officer or a customer success team that orchestrates the journey, or the experience. But that's going to be done in tandem with a whole company buying into a customer success vision. If the sales team mis-sell deals, if they don't set the right expectations upfront, that can be catastrophic. If the product team don't listen to customers and truly understand what's resonating with customers and what's not resonating, even back office functions like legal and finance, if they don't provide the right support at the right times, it can really impact that customer experience. So it is absolutely a team sport, and as much, if we go back to our Liverpool metaphor, as much Jürgen Klopp can set the mood for the organization, every part of the organization has got to play their part.
Alon Waks:
So tell me, the team sport thing, do you think it is something that people talk about but is it really coming down the top two, three, four priority, for example for marketing, they talk to the customer all the time. Product, got to be a UX customer friendly mentality to it. Is it about making it part of the MBOs, KPIs? Or what do you as the CCO do in order to facilitate this cross-functional focus on the customer?
John O'Melia:
I've been very lucky since I joined Contentsquare, where it really permeates the whole organization, and I think it was very fortunate that the CEO, the founder of the company, a guy called Jonathan Cherki, really built that in from the ground up. And there was a real strong passion for making sure customers are happy, that they're getting value day in and week in, week out, around our technology. And its really infused the DNA of the organization. So we don't have to set MBOs, we don't have to put it in goals, it's sort of expected, that's part of the culture that if you don't have a customer mindset, if you are not leaning into a customer situation when it warrants it, that's not the way we do things. And that's not always been the case when I've been at different organizations. So it's wonderful to see that here.
Alon Waks:
Writing your values as being customer centric or customer obsessed, but not preaching it and walking the whole line all the way from the CEO to even the person whose supporting a sale, all the way finance are collecting, that's not customer friendliness. You've got to be customer first, and I think that's great that you guys are doing that.
Alon Waks:
The one thing I always question is, it's not about your company, but in general is, is customer experience great when you throw bodies at the problem, like giving people three CSM, or 10 people to work with? Or is it about fit for purpose, sometimes it's just self service, out of others. How do you find the balance between the two? What's best for the customer, how do you go about that?
John O'Melia:
That part of our world is really evolving right now, and I've grown up in the enterprise space and the B2B space. And traditionally, we've always had a high touch model, and we cherish the fact that we have a high touch model. And we talk about ratios between customers and the number of customers per CSM, and its been very much trying to create this intimate relationship. And there is clearly a lot of value in this, certainly the right time and place for that.
John O'Melia:
But I think it's also very clear to me that a lot of the innovation that we're seeing in the customer success space is coming from that more commercial digital world that we talk about, where customers can't afford the high touch model, and they've got to service hundreds and thousands of customers with a much lower budget and a much more digital self service type experience. And I think you see a lot of the advancements come from that, a lot more webinars, much better understanding of what makes a good customer, what's a healthy customer, how do you measure healthy customer, the use of things like community.
John O'Melia:
So I think you're at this world where you have this enterprise high touch model, and then you have the commercial, sort of low touch model, with lots more technology. And I think what you're really starting to see now is companies looking at this saying, "I have to present a collection of offerings to my customers. And I've got to let them choose. And rather than me dictate that this is how I'm going to serve you, let customers have some choice."
John O'Melia:
I had a great situation a few weeks ago, I was talking to one of our new customers coming out of Q4, and I was talking to the chief digital officer, and I was telling him, "What a great program we have, and you're going to love this model. We'll do a bi-weekly check-in with your customer success manager, set up some time with you every two weeks, and schedule time with you. And then every quarter we do a quarterly business review and I'll join for that quarterly business review, and it will be my chance to touch base with you and check we're in the same place." And the chief digital officer started laughing and he said, "You know John, I have 20 vendors that are critical." He said, "If I do a bi-weekly meeting with 20 vendors, and I do QBRs with 20 vendors, I'll have no time to do any work." And he said, "I love the offering but let us shape this a little bit and there'll be times where we need to meet every two weeks, and there'll be times where we will meet for quarterly business reviews, but not all the time. And let us figure out a rhythm that works well for both of us."
John O'Melia:
And that really opened up my eyes to say, sometimes you can give a customer a little bit too much love in some ways, and stepping back and saying, "Okay, what's the right way of taking care of this customer? What does he really need and how do I best serve that need?"
Alon Waks:
I love it, I think this is a good topic to continue with because you want to find the balance between what the customer needs, and what the customer wants at the specific moment. What they need is probably to understand they're seeing value, so giving them the right analytics, the right report, there's no P0, P1, there's no big issues going on. And they know that you are there for them whenever they need you, but you're also being proactive to give them notification. I literally got a B2C example from two days ago, I'm in New York city, and I did Citi Bike, and one of the bikes I tried to take didn't come out of the docking station and like, all right, I'm not sure did it work, did not work, I got another bike and rode. An hour later they texted me saying, "Don't worry, we saw there was an issue, we made sure there's nothing in your charge, nothing again." So I don't need a day from now to remember that I need to call them just to make sure. They were proactive. And that's all it is.
Alon Waks:
If you understand for each customer that they have no time, but no time for your system, it doesn't mean they don't love, it means they will one time to go to the strategic advisor, trusted advisor to do things with you, and it's really is, I truly believe that the digital footprint of every customer is important letting them get things on their own, and we see this in [Zoomin 00:11:30] as well with all the content that we provide. But also it's being there for them, if you're not there for them, what do you think? That is probably the worst thing that can happen if you're not perceptive, correct?
John O'Melia:
Yeah. We traditionally come from an enterprise space, so our natural motion's been more of a high touch motion. And we try and focus on what we call the claw four. We try and develop the right strategic relationships with the customer, we understand who the right people are that we should be working with, and when we're afforded the opportunity, we work with that customer to develop a success plan, and really understand what does success mean for them? When they look at their investment in our technology, what was their dream? What was their aspiration? What value were they hoping to get from that investment?
John O'Melia:
And then we define key business objectives to support that success plan, and then drive the tactics with them to work towards those objectives. And as we look at more of a digital world, it's how do you align those types of best practices to a less touch model, but continue to provide great experience? And what we're finding is, if we obsess about usage of the technology, do we see users coming in on a regular basis? Is usage rising? Are we seeing the output we would expect and the value? And if that's happening, then we continue to nudge them along and we send them what we think are right webinars, and we keep in touch with them, but we're not overbearing.
John O'Melia:
But at the same time, if those signals point to a customer whose struggling, where we're not seeing the usage, where we're, number of users is falling, we don't see the value coming up. Then we try to regroup with that customer and get more into a high touch model, and talk through what's happening, and then we can adjust and course correct as we do that. It's nice to be able to bring those two worlds together and take some of the excellence that's come, like your bike example, that ability to spot something, that's probably giving your customer some concern, and clarifying it, taking that away. There's nothing worse than waking up at 3:00 o'clock in the morning wondering whether you're still being charged for a bike that you never actually got out of a rack.
Alon Waks:
Nightmares, it's crazy. The whole idea about having all the signals you can, product usage of course, one. Second one is, how are you versus your peer group of like the customer? Are you on your track to onboard or use the use cases that you need? Did you stop in the middle of implementation? Did some users that were active left, maybe they left the company, maybe not? It's having your pulse on your customers, of course is very important.
Alon Waks:
We believe very strongly that every piece of content you can, just like in marketing in my world, that you can understand more about the customer, and then drive their behavior and action for sales and for personalized digital outbound. And with customer experience and customer success, why not do the same thing? You even have more data points. You have product, [inaudible 00:14:33], you have content data point, community, it's so much. But that leads to obviously, that's great, you have all this amazing lake of data and content, but is there one measurement that you just off-the-shelf you said MPS, that tells you the pulse of your customer? Or do you have stir your own soup?
John O'Melia:
I'll share a couple of things with you, and I'll get around to your question in a second. But one thing that was interesting for us recently, as we were living in this enterprise high touch world, we had a health score that we would compute for every customer. But because we was in this high touch world, it was a nice to have piece of information. People would look at it, but they wouldn't necessarily act on it, because we were talking to the customer every couple of weeks, they take the mood from the customer conversations. And if there was frustration with the health score, it might sit there for a long time before it was brought to the table where there was some dissatisfaction. But the second we moved into this digital world where that health score was really going to dictate how you service those customers, people obsessed about that number in a completely different way, because that's your dashboard into that customer. And if that dashboard's wrong, then you're going to make wrong decisions and you're going to feel the effect over it. So it was interesting for me to see how quickly you went from something being a nice to have piece of information to the information that you was making decision on how I would change.
John O'Melia:
But in our world of customer success and customer experience, I think we all obsess over gross retention rates, net retention rates, MPS is obviously a big topic for everybody. And we have accept that when the outside world looks at us, the key metrics that they're going to ask. But one of the challenges I have with that, and I think many of us have is, those metrics are lagging indicators, they tell us how we was doing maybe a year ago or six months ago, but they can't predict the future. Just because you have good MPS today, or you have good gross retention, net retention today, doesn't mean you're going to have that tomorrow.
John O'Melia:
So we really try and look and say, what are the leading indicators? What are the things that we are doing today and tomorrow that are going to impact how happy that customer is, and whether that customer is going to be a future reference for us? Whether that customer is going to renew? Whether that customer has potential to expand? And really started to drill into things. How was implementation going? Are we having a smooth onboarding process? Did we hit our metrics that we set ourselves for boarding? Do we see the right usage patterns from our customer? Did we get the right number of logins? Did we have the right diversity of users? Do we have the right intensity of users? Are they using the technology for the amount of minutes per day we would expect for that type of feature? Because Contentsquare's focus is on really understanding what's happening with our customers websites, and really understand what's happening and why it's happening. We can convert that into value.
John O'Melia:
We can look at the problems that are experienced on a website and we surface insights so customers can make well informed decision in terms of the notifications they need to make to that website to provide a better experience. We can turn that into dollars. So we can get a realtime value that our customers are generating through the use of Contentsquare, and that's really cool because you can see if a customer is consistently driving value, then you're helping that dream to come true. You know that the likely of them being happy, being referenceable, renewing when the time comes, potentially looking to expand at the right time, is all those. So those leading indicators are really key for us, and I'm really trying to home in on those, and obsess about those, I think will do us more good than that retroactive look at the lagging indicators.
Alon Waks:
Yeah, for sure. I really second that. Leading indicators tell you what's going to happen, and how you can course correct. Lagging indicators tell you a lot of things for the feedback loop and insights about what to do with the next set of people in that situation. But if you just base yourself on lagging indicators, then of course you're not going to be able to correct in time. That's why you need to know everything they're doing from usage, onboarding, journey, time to value, time to health is very important of course, time to live. And of course, every touch of data like content pieces and others that they use, can tell you a different story. You guys are mostly digital.
Alon Waks:
Do you also look at customer effort score as part of the things that you track or anything around, are people doing things on their own? Or like self service success rate, [inaudible 00:19:31] as well?
John O'Melia:
We've got different aspects of the technology, we can look at particular zones on a website and look at zone analysis. We can do session replay, we can help people replay a problematic experience that a customer had on a website.
John O'Melia:
So as part of our usage metrics, we can really home in on what parts of the technology are resonating with different customers. And we may find that there's two or three features that customers are spending 90, 95% of their time interacting with those. And they're deriving a ton of value from that, and that's a wonderful thing and to be cherished. But maybe there's two or three pieces of key functionality that we have that they haven't really explored. And then we can really start to target those features to the right people and say, "Hey, we brought our AI powered insights, and we realized you haven't set this up, and you're not really using this. We have a webinar on Friday, we think this would be really useful for you, and we'd love for you to come and join us for that." And you can get really targeted then in terms of, okay, you've got a certain level of value, but can we take you to the next level? Can we drive you to features that might bring even more value to you?
Alon Waks:
Can you tell me a little bit about who helps with that? Is there like a customer experience CS-ops function? Is it rev-ops, is it under you? How do you like to do this?
John O'Melia:
We have a customer success team that we've established around the digital side, and that started out live when we first imagined that. We was looking at that as the lower customers in terms of spend with us, and providing a more cost effective way of taking care of those customers while providing a great experience. Whereas we've started on that journey and we've started to see how we can tailor some of those communications and programs, what we're starting to see is those programs can be equally as effective on some of our more strategic customers. And getting down to that level of granularity is important for our biggest customers, as it is for some our smaller customers. So we're starting to see this virtuous loop of we build something because of a necessity and then we realize that it has a ton of applicability for a wider group of customers, and drive it that way.
John O'Melia:
So now we're trying to pivot our strategy a little bit away from sort of high touch customers, low touch customers, to how do we provide different offerings and slice and dice the right offerings for the right customer, at the right time?
Alon Waks:
And using data of course, helps you understand a lot of that and you can cater to the people.
Alon Waks:
One of the things we do John is give you magic power on the show, which is something I do for people, it's just who I am. We're not going to make you part of the Liverpool squad, I cannot name you one of the coaches, unfortunately, not in this season. Maybe next season of Flourish [inaudible 00:22:27]. But one thing I can enable you is to give you this magic fairy dust, which enables you to tell any founder or any new CCO to the job, this is critical as a customer officer to do and to really make the customers happy.
John O'Melia:
When you're the CEO of a company or a founder, I think it's very easy to stand up at key meetings and hands calls and say, "We're customer success orientated and this is our rallying cry." And everybody does that, and it's expected. But I think the reality for organizations, it's what do you do in those tough moments that will decide whether you live and breath, I don't know. And I've seen in my past, and fortunately, we have a great CEO and founder here at Contentsquare. But I've seen in the past where you met situations where maybe there was some killer multimillion dollar deal on the table for the quarter, but it's not quite in your sweet spot. And you can potentially take the deal, but you're not going to make that customer happy. Or you're going to have to change your roadmap and take your eye off really what you declare to be your strategic objectives to do that. And you get into this temptation of, are you willing to walk away from a significant deal in order to do the right thing for you as a company and the right thing for the customer?
John O'Melia:
And I think those types of moments are when you really prove to yourself and to the organization whether you're truly customer centric. If you can turn around to a sales team and to a company and say, "You know what, I appreciate that opportunity, but it's not the right deal for us, and it's not the right deal for them. And we're prepared to walk about with it because it's so important for us to make sure that every customer that we have, has a great experience."
John O'Melia:
I think that's how you really, examples like that are, you really establish that DNA, and that's a really hard thing to do. It's much easier sometimes to grab the money and then worry about it afterwards. And so making the tough decisions is when your character is really determined.
Alon Waks:
I don't think it's very easy to go, especially when you're in the growth phase, to say no to a nice six digit plus deal, even though it might break your company, you can only do one or two of those in the beginning because you're going to do its own product tree and it's hard. It's hard, but if you're really loyal and you want to serve the big market and you're focused on your ICP, sometimes risks encourage payoff, right? Just like as we know, when you hire the right manager for the Liverpool team, and if you get the younger Luis Diaz and Salah's of the world, you can do so much more than buying the most expensive players, right John?
John O'Melia:
Yeah, absolutely. And you only have to look at Man United to see what happens if you make some bad decisions.
Alon Waks:
Yeah, you can't just buy everything. At the end of the day, you cannot buy your customers, you need to give them true authentic value and be there for them, as Liverpool has been for both of us for many years. John, I love the Liverpool example. Thank you so much for being on Flourish, we have learned lot, and all the best to Jürgen Klopp this season.
John O'Melia:
Thank you Alon, really enjoyed it.
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.
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