Culture Mechanics—No B.S. Tips To Creating a Winning Experience Culture

If a customer or a prospect or an employee is on this journey and you know that you're at one of those happy moments, which is, for example, like you said, the first day, you should be doing everything in your power to make sure that day moment touch point is maximized to its fullest extent. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Counter Experience podcast. And man, do we have a good episode for you. Today my co host and I dive into Culture Mechanics. Now, I know what you're thinking, but wait, Ian, the first episode was on Culture. How could we possibly do another episode already? Well, because it's important. Really, really important. And in this episode, we talk about the three pillars of culture mechanics. People, process, and product. The three Ps, if you will. So sit back, relax, and let's dive on in. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to another episode. As always, I'm your host, Ian, and I'm here with my commander of culture and co host, Carrie T. Self. Hello, Carrie.

I've been promoted to commander. I love it. I love it. Hello, everybody.

Get used to it. So today, guys, we have a really cool topic, and I think we're going to call it Culture Mechanics. And we're going to add a TM at the end of that thing. Why the tm? Because Carrie and I had a conversation and we're trying to figure out, like, what to call this concept. And I think, Kerry, you said something that was really interesting. It was like along the lines of let's go into the culture of Account Experience, but the mechanics. And in a classic marketing move, I totally jumped in and just flipped the script and called it Culture Mechanics, added a TM on it. But honestly, man, I think you deserve a lot of the credit here. So when I retire on a beach somewhere with my millions in royalties from CultureMechanics TM, I'll be sure to send you a holiday card.

Thank you. I look forward to a little byline, a little small print somewhere.

All right, man. So Culture Mechanics, what does that actually mean? Why is it important? And how can B2B companies leverage this concept to maximize retention impact on their experience program? We'll get to it all, but let's start with the framework, I think, right? So what actually makes up this Culture Mechanics concept at a high level?

You know, it's funny to oversimplify this, but to make it as simple as possible, I call it the three P's, right? The first one is people. The second one is the process, and the third one is the product. Let me explain those a little Bit real quickly with the people part, who is pretty obvious who's running the program. I'll give you a quick answer. It's everybody, but there's more to that. They need to understand who they are and what they're doing. Right? Right people in the right place. They need to know that they're the right people and they need to know if they're in the right place or not. As far as the process, this is the part where I think a lot of people get jammed up and it's. You have to have a very clear vision of when this happens. This is what we do, this is how we do it, this is who does it. So again, the process part is everyone has to be really clear on that. And then the third piece is the product component. What tools, what resources are you using? And I think this is where Ian's going to give a little bit of, you know, he's, he's going to call us out because we are a software company. Right, Ian?

That's right. Full disclosure. We are a software vendor. We have a software. I think you guys should know that by now. But that is, yeah, worth mentioning.

Yeah, most definitely. But having the right products there to be part of that mechanics. And what's really neat about the three Ps, they apply to everything. I know that you and I really are talking about account experience and how to create this, this unique B2B experience that holds on to customers and grows business. But the three Ps could really be applied to almost any program. Anything that you're doing. It's been kind of the secret sauce of my success and my failures in the past. When something has been missing or it's not been the right P. Let's say that has been the struggles.

Yeah. And I think I would love to get into some of specifically the failures. I don't know what it is about me. I'm sick like that. I like to learn from other people's failures. Not to like throw you under the bus, Kerry, but I think that's really interesting. Right? Like, what could you have done to make that failure a success? But maybe let's just dive into the buckets one at a time and, you know, when we get there, we get there. So people, what is it about people that companies, you know, trying to get this B2B experience program off the ground From a culture standpoint, what should they focus on? What's important?

Well, I'm going to put on my commander hat now. Right. I'll wear it everywhere. I think what a lot of people mistake. And what they forget is that people really is your culture. People are your culture. So I think that's an important thing to keep in mind here. And so where does it start? It starts, and I know everyone says this, but you have to practice it and believe it. It starts from the recruiting process. You know, when you're out there looking for people for your organization or you're even looking at the people in your organization. And I think I've said this to you numerous times before, Ian, in different venues, but you have to make sure you have the right people. So I think it does start there. So I'm not going to go too much in that. I think we've talked about that before and we're talking about culture. But once you have the right people, then you have to make sure they need to understand what their role is in your customer centric program. If you're going to be an AX expert, that's everybody. Everyone needs to know that they're involved in that. So who's involved? Everyone. And you have to make that very, very clear. I think a lot of companies make the big. And this is. If you want to talk about a fault, I know you'll get joy out of this. You know, some of them, some of the big potholes that I've fallen into in the past is trying to put all this on one person or just a couple of people. You know, assigning one person or one department to be responsible for your account experience is a formula for disaster. Everyone needs to know it's their responsibility.

I'm 100% on board with you on that one for sure. Because I've again, at my old banking days, we had a company that was completely built around this experience program. Right. Everything we did was based around this. One of our core values was create a remarkable experience. It was in the culture, it was the ethos of the company. And that's the only reason it worked. If it didn't, if it wasn't like that, I think it would have been a very difficult time for me specifically to get this program across the org and getting everybody bought on. So, all right, let's look at it from a champion standpoint. Kerry. So you're the, you're the champion of this program. Give me like the tactical ways that you can get everybody on board. Right. So I think you've done a couple things, even internally at CG that were really interesting, like focus groups and things like that. But walk me through, like day in the life. You're a program champion. Culture Mechanics. How do you get every person in that company on board with this thing?

So let's say you do fall into that category. If someone has just handed you this responsibility and it's not an all buy in yet. So some of the things. And I think you used a really good analogy or good example of something that we did. The focus group. You know, I'm a big believer. If you want people to buy into a program, into an idea or concept, get them involved in creating it. You pull from all different aspects of the organization. It can't be one person telling people what to do, because I'll let you on a secret. Your people are usually the formula for your success. You don't have to go out and spend tons of money on a lot of resources. A good place to start is just internally. There are some really great ideas just in your own employee base. They're doing it, so why wouldn't they be involved? It's also another way to overcome resistors. I always talk about resistors a lot. People that they might not be doing it intentionally. It might come from a fear place, they're uncertain. It could come from, well, we've always done it that way. Or we did that before and it didn't work. That's always my favorite. But how do you overcome those? Well, you invite them in and you say, okay, share those experiences. You said, we did this before. What did we do? Walk us through that. We don't want to repeat the same mistakes.

Right.

You've got these, you know, this archive of history living within your organization. Invite that in also, because you can speak to that as you roll your program forward and then you share that feedback constantly. So not only are you celebrating the focus group for their great ideas and showing them that it has an immediate impact, but then you're communicating that out to the rest of the group. This is what the focus group came up with. So you're adding strength to what your mission or what your assignment is and trying to get this program to be more spread out. And then I think there's this third component that kicks in. Now what you have is you have these without them even knowing. You have champions that are marching back to their departments and sharing that perspective. And they're even more proud of it because they were part of making that. So without even having to create a communication program. This focus group has been one great way to do that organically and naturally.

Yeah, and I think that's a really good point. I want to just maybe pause on for a second, which is you have to find ways to create these little mini advocates for your own program internally and spread it to their departments. If you are the person that goes. If you're the champion and you go from department to department and say, hey, this is what we're doing and this is why it's important, that's generally what most people try to do. And it doesn't really work that well because nobody likes being told what to do. Nobody likes being kind of told that, you know, what we were doing in the past is wrong, and this is the new way. Even if you have sound logic, even if everything you're saying makes complete business sense, you would be shocked by how many people resist that. What you need to do is two things you can do. Really focus on the emotional side, which is a better way to appeal to humans, to get them to do something that maybe they don't want to do. Get to their emotions. So, you know, the focus group, that's a great way to, like you said, get by and make people feel like they're involved. Involvement equals engagement. Right? And that's a key piece, too. Get more people involved, the engagement will come and it will spread. And in that focus group, you, like you said, you're creating those little mini champions, and they go back to their departments. And I think it's important, too, to mention that. Pick a couple per department. Right? It's not just necessarily one, but it's like, just enough to have that, like, threshold of adoption where, you know, and pick some. And I think another thing worth mentioning is, like, pick people that have influence too. Right? Potentially.

Wow. You and I were thinking the same exact thing, too, because I think the natural instinct is to pick your top performer or to pick the person who's, like, always been the whole. Who you deem as the leader or the best. And I think you used the right word. It's someone who has influence. And sometimes it's not the most obvious person. And sometimes people even scratch their head like, wow, why are they in that focus group? But it's because sometimes it's their behaviors or their input or what they do for the organization is so influential that it runs through that department and the organization. But maybe it's not the loudest person or the strongest person, and it might even be the person who's bought in. You know, it's nice to have someone in there who's argumentative or shows you the flaws because you can get those out of the way before you announce that on a big picture. But, yeah, that's a great point. Ian is really be strategic on who you select and put in there.

Yeah, but that lowers the barrier internally. Right. For this thing to spread. So if you have these other people doing the talking for you that already have their built in networks in their own departments, you're not going to be the quote unquote commander conqueror going over to each department saying this is the way it's going to be. You leverage the internal people that already have these existing relationships. The trust is there, there's no barrier against anything you're trying to do. So and I think that's a really good place from a mechanic standpoint on the people side to focus on is figure out ways to get those internal stakeholders. And this type of thing can work on a large scale too. Right. So like global companies, you pick a couple of these people per division, per location, whatever it may be. This, this can be applied across the board and scaled. And if there's one thing that C level people or management does not get in the way of, it's, it's kind of rallying around a cause that's important to the company. So I don't think you'll find resistance on these little focus groups or anything like that, as long as you're not taking a ton of time away from, from their day jobs. Is that accurate, Carrie?

Yeah, I think to get people involved first, everyone's busy, right. We're all taking more than we've ever have, so we have to make it bite sized for them and valuable to the person who's going to attend. But from an organizational perspective, to take 30 minutes to an hour, I mean, we do ours weekly now and it's a really good cadence. It's 30 minutes on a day that works for most people. It's not a pressure situation, but everyone shows up. But the organization now is tapped in like, all right, what happened? What came out of that? Even now when departments are brewing up ideas or like, hey, we want to try this, it's kind of like, well, why don't you bring that to the focus group and bring it up and see what their feedback is. So now they've become a valuable voice in the organization on top of that. So yeah, I don't think it's not a huge investment of time, money or resources, but the return on that is like a hundredfold.

I agree. Any other little tidbits from the mechanics standpoint on people before we move on to the next bucket process?

Yeah, you know, I think the only other thing is, and I think this leads into process nicely. I think it's important for everyone to understand what their specific role that goes beyond just being part of it. What does that look like? And I think we're going to pick this up in the process component of it. But you have to have a really good communication vehicle where people understand this is my part in this account experience, in this customer experience. So I think that's really key.

All right, so let's dive into process because I think you're right, it dovetails nicely. How do you manage a process across a large company, medium company for these experience programs when it comes to culture, mechanics? And how do you get that process rolled out to everybody and have everybody on the same page? And I think you said communication, which I think is a good part of it, but give us a little tidbits, a couple tidbits on that, specifically on process.

So, you know, when you look at process, I usually break it down into a couple other areas. The first one is the communication or we can exchange that for education. I think you need to have a pretty good system. How do you get people, new people into either the process, the program or the company? How do you get them onboarded? Quickly? Maybe quickly is not even the right word, but efficiently. You know, it's got to be where they feel comfortable, they feel like they can do it. So I think you have to start at the beginning. How do you onboard them and let them know what's going on? And how do you continually educate through changes, improving behaviors, start to identify, you know, these are ways you can, this is what we're learning as we move along. This is where your gaps are. So I think education is the very first key part of this process.

How do we actually get that education rolled out? So I know how we do it, so maybe we can use that as an example. But companies out there that are listening to this are probably like, yeah, great education, yeah, really good idea. But I also have 50 other things I have to get done today. And you know, we have a team on HR that onboards and you know, my job is to get them doing their job as quickly as possible. Why is education an important part of that process? And how do you companies do it at scale?

Alright, so let me oversimplify this. I think what's really, really important is as simple as it sounds, it's a checklist. It's something that all departments weigh in and say, look, if this person's going to work for this company, I think it's important that they know this aspect. This is how this department or this person brushes up against us or needs to know so you know something as simple. And I hate to say this, but even going back to basics of creating an Excel sheet and each department owns a cell and we check off as they learn it, you can get more sophisticated. There's some great tools out there, project management tools to use, getting into product a little bit here. So let me back up. I won't get too far ahead of myself, but I think it's really important that there's a centralized place where everyone gets that same first experience. I think most companies are proud of their culture and their history. They should get that up front, get bought into what they just joined, learn the team that they work with. So that should be on the list. Don't take it for granted that it's happening. Don't think someone new is coming in and sitting in a, in an office with 50 other people that immediately everyone's going to reach out to them and they're going to introduce themselves, put that on the list, make that something that has to happen. You know who's going to own that person for lunch? I know this sounds like really small things, but I almost feel as if the first day needs to be micromanaged in a way that there is. They're being taken care of. Because you'll never have anyone in your organization more bought in than than they were on day one. I'm sorry. You can give them all the raises, bonuses, accolades in the world. Day one is the day you'll have them the most bought in and excited. Then reality kicks in. And if that first day is tough, if it's difficult, you're in recovery mode for the rest of your experience with that employee.

That's a really good point. So I've always been a big believer as a marketer that you need to capitalize on the happy moments and what I mean by that in your customer journey, in your marketing collateral journey, whatever it is, life cycle. If a customer or a prospect or an employee is on this journey and you know that you're at one of those happy moments, which is, for example, like you said, the first day, you should be doing everything in your power to make sure that day moment touchpoint is maximized to its fullest extent. This episode of the Account Experience podcast is sponsored by CustomerGage, the leading B2B account experience software that ties revenue to your experience data in real time to help you make better account centric decisions that drive revenue growth. Quick question. What do you guys think is the number one reason B2B experience programs fail. Believe it or not, its lack of C Section C suite buy in CustomerGage's research with MIT, they've found the quickest way to align yourselves with the C suite is to actually align with what they care about most, which is revenue. That's why CustomerGage is literally built from the ground up to maximize and track the revenue contribution from your experience program in real time. Companies like dhl, Anheuser Busch, Heineken, yeah, we get a good amount of FreeBear1 login, Iron Mountain, H&R Block, SuperOffice and SugarCRM are already using Customer Gauge to maximize their growth by tying their programs to revenue. And with over $10 billion worth of account revenue actively being managed in Customer Gauge, yeah, that's billion. With a B, they're the leader in the space. But maybe even more interesting, they found that once you get alignment with that C suite, the needs of these B2B practitioners or the program champions are evolving too. In such a complex account environment, it can be really tough to measure and act on feedback quickly across multiple departments, divisions or even locations. Luckily, Customer Gauge has you covered there as well with account native features that easily help you not only measure the feedback for multiple stakeholders in an account, but act on that feedback in real time. Because at the end of the day, if you're not empowering your frontline staff, we with the right insights to address customer issues, you're going to be dealing with a churn issue. It's not a matter of if, it's really a matter of when. Customer Gauge helps you distribute this experience data across your entire organization, regardless of department, regardless of location, regardless of division, all in real time. No manual spreadsheets or a team of analysts are needed. CustomerGage's mission is to help B2B companies harness the power of account centric growth to drive meaningful change in their businesses. And that's a powerful thing. If you want to see Customer Gauge in action, go ahead and check out CustomerGage.com and get a demo of account experience today. You won't regret it. The pareto rule, right? 80% of the experience might be made by 20% of your actual touch points or their experiences. So if you can create that memorable moment, it will go a long way with, like you said, onboarding efficiently specifically for employees. But process two I think like you said, just making it a thing. A living breathing document. Whether it be in Excel or we use Confluence right To manage internal type of processes. Make it a living breathing document where everybody has to sign up, check in whatever it may be. I think that's, that's maximizing that happy moment for whatever the end user is, whether it be an employer, prospect or customer. I think that's an important piece to mention as well. Yeah.

And then what, what's included in that? Well, that's, that's for you to decide. You know, your department should all weigh in. This was important for me to know. They should know how to do this. But don't take for granted that anything that you know or new that they're just going to pick up automatically put it on the list, overpopulate those things that you want to do with them. And I think this, then naturally to that second step that I talk about is the measurement part. So we've got this education vehicle at the day, one that's going to live through the life of. I always talk about from hire to retire, you know, and how do we make sure that that person is constantly educated and taken care of and communicated to. So there's all different channels. But the next thing is, how do you measure that? You know, do you go back? Are there ways to measure that success? You know, we can go on the metrics forever. And I'm not going to make this a metrics call today or meeting today, but it is important to measure the level of knowledge, of engagement. What are the metrics that measure success for an employee? Is it the. Your NPS score? Is it an internal results, whatever it might be. But I think it's really important to measure that, whether it's an internal survey, whether it's even an assessment of some sort, to see whether or not to give you feedback.

Yeah, just to chime in here, I don't think Carrie will mention it, but we just launched a New Academy on CustomerGage.com and this is honestly one of the main reasons Kerry's been brought on board. Besides being a culture ambassador for the company, we invest heavily, heavily, heavily into education. And that doesn't mean just prospect education or customer education. That means internally educating our company around how we do things, why we do it, the way we do it, what our beliefs are, what our core values are. We have a onboarding document that is fully branded with culture, with education, mission values, diversity statements, whatever that is the first thing they see when they get that offer. And then you drop them in. You're pretty much the onboarding guru for employees, creating that employee experience. And you get them in that education portal. Especially now with all of the additional content it has, our ebooks, our blogs, our certifications, our courses, they Learn everything we're sending out to market because it's so important for our people to be the experts in what we're doing and what we're bringing to market. Maybe give us like and I don't want this to be an ad, so it's really not meant to be an ad but I think it's an important piece of that process is like we get them in our education platform and they, and they run, we expect them to complete. I think it's like 20 or 30 hours now of content. But.

All right, so this is the one part that's going to sound very ad driven. But again this goes back to the metric. I think pre us doing this, it was really organic. I don't know, we had a plan but it was more people meeting kind of self taught and guided. I think the ramp up time or the time it took for one of our gauges to be ready for that roar, that engagement was measured in months. Maybe that's not fair, but I think that's realistic. As a customer, I saw that working with you guys and I think now that we have a very tight program, we have all that content and we really make it important. As a week one experience. We're measuring it now almost in days, maybe weeks. We've been able to take what normally took a month or a couple of months to get someone comfortable and we've been able to boil that down to a week, week and a half so they can really jump in. I see it in sales. They're already on calls a week and a half in. Our customer success team is already owning accounts a couple of weeks in. This is, and again I need to say this, this is not a one person. Kerry was not the silver bullet. You know, Kerry just came in and said, wait a minute, let's have this in one place where we can put everybody and let's make it important. No, we don't postpone this until week two, three or four because we deem other things important. This is the foundation, the base. And so yeah, and I think that's at the heart of academy, right. We keep throwing away on this term return on investment. And if you're not investing in education, if you're not investing in giving people the right tools to be the best they can be, everything's going to take longer, everything's going to cost more and you're going to get less return on that investment down the road. It's just, it's the reality of it. And you know, I don't like to talk military but there's a reason why you go to boot camp. You know, it's to prepare these guys for what they're going to get into. It's the reason why, you know, we go off to college and schools and all these different things that we do. You know, I wouldn't let a doctor operate on me unless they had intense training, right? I don't want them experimenting on me. But I think it's the same. Same thing. You know, I get it. We're not curing cancer, but we are creating phenomenal processes. We are growing businesses. And I love what you talked about. We're creating happy moments in there. That's the measure of success, right? Can we do it? Make people happy?

And I think one point worth mentioning, guys, is like, bake it into your process. So if your company has an onboarding process, you want to create those champions immediately. You want to get this understanding of why this experience program is important to your company. Bake it into your process, your onboarding process, your training process, whether it's through Customer Gauge Academy or your own little program. Have a plan and capitalize on those happy moments. To Kerry's point, when people are first onboarding, they're absorbing everything. Get them excited about your experience program. Get them excited about, you know, the fact that you care about your customers and your accounts and that you're engaging with them and getting feedback with them. That's a. That's a really powerful moment for a new employee. It's like, wow, okay, so these guys care. This isn't just. We're not just here to make money. We're really invested in making our customers successful, in our accounts, successful and grow. I think that's a really powerful thing. So is that a good little bow tie and process? Carrie, do you have anything else to add to that?

The only thing I would wrap it up with, I think that's really key in that, is making sure you know what the support looks like in that, you know what happens when someone stumbles or is not performing? You know what, is there a mentor in place to help them through, or is there retraining or is there a program we can redirect and help out there so that your metrics and your measurement should be tied back to the right education and then the one that I love the most? And I'll tell you, a lot of people start off their culture with this, and they shouldn't. This should be the last piece you put in place. But the recognition, the reward, I think it's vital that you recognize people for what they do and you reward them for performing better. Those are two separate things. Recognition is great for tenure. Recognition is great for meeting expectations of your role of helping out your peers. These are all expectations you have that you set on day one and you keep talking about through your values and your in what makes up an employee. But then the reward comes in when they go above and beyond that, you know, do they hit sales targets? Do they make other people's jobs even easier by doing something extra? And I think these, a lot of people start with the reward and recognition out of the gate, they dangle the carrot. And I would say, you know, it's just not a good approach. It's got to be a healthy rewards and recognition if it's going to last. If you want long lasting behavior, because that's what we're talking about here. Yeah, I think that's really, really key and important in the mechanics of it is really have those components in place.

Give us a couple quick hits of how you've done the reward and recognition piece of previous roles.

I think I've said this to you before and I probably said on our first podcast, it's not about money. Everyone's gonna really cringe now and get really mad at me. Sorry, guys. But I think money is nice. It can be part of it. But I think giving people things that they can't give themselves is really important. I think recognition or their name out there. So something as simple as putting a picture on a wall or posting on digital signage so they know that you've been recognized. I've used point systems in the past where you can use points to buy things you wouldn't normally buy yourself. If I gave an employee, let's say $100, they're gonna pay their bills, they're going to buy groceries, it's going to get absorbed and disappear. If I give them 100 points worth of credit. Credit to buy a trip or to rent a movie that night or go to a concert that isn't again, that's capitalizing on something they would normally do for themselves. I think those are important. And I'm also a big swag guy. I know everyone kind of giggles at it, but, you know, pick stuff that you know your team will value. You know, right now, Ian's wearing a T shirt that I really want. And you know, it's, I love my swag. I love wearing my company because I'm proud of it. I get excited about that. So I want the cap, I want the shirt, I want the bag. These are the things I think people get really excited about, too. I said, I've seen more fights over pins than I have over checks. Because it's the small recognitions that you can't get, you can't replace. And those are unique pieces that no one else out there in the world is going to be able to walk around in one.

Yeah. I love it, man. And we'll get you a shirt, I promise.

Okay.

All right, so the last one, products. And again, I'm gonna lead off with, we are a software vendor, so we may talk about this a little bit, but again, and we can get into this, guys. But we may not be the right product for you guys or the right software for you guys. In fact, we tell people often that, you know what, you actually need this instead of us. So just a caveat, we are here to help, whether it be using customer gauge or not. So, Kerry, why don't you kick us off like products? What is it about culture, mechanics and products that will help grow an experience program?

Yeah, and I think you said this right. I think you have to have the right resources or products in place to make the first two Ps work. Right? You can have three people, you can have a great idea process and have it down on paper or in somewhere. But if you don't have the right products to deliver on that, you will struggle. Some companies are blessed. They have some internal resources that can bake up some really great solutions. And if you have the budget, you have the workforce for that, I applaud you. I always celebrate those type of companies. I'm envious sometimes of having all that at your fingertips. But you need to have the right products to deliver on this. So let's talk about onboarding. Let's say great people. Do you have a communication tool? I think you used Confluence. This is one of the tools that we use as kind of our intranet or our internal place to go to get documentation and links and important stuff. But do you have a centralized place where your team can go and grab information? And I'm going to tell you now, as much as I love solutions like Dropbox or Google Docs, those are all great things to store documents. It doesn't organize it in a way that communicates to your team. So you need to have that internal communication piece. Beyond that, I think there's a. I mean, I run down the list of different tools that we all need. You know, do you have a CRM? How do you manage your customer experience? You know, how does your sales team know who your leads are and who to follow up with and how does your customer success team know all the times you touch that particular client?

Right. Just to jump in here. So products are important. I completely agree. And I think the key that you said, Kerry, is like, using products to properly communicate. And I think that's a really good line in the sand for me specifically. And I don't know if anybody else feels the same way, but a good product will accomplish what you're buying it for, but also increase the understanding of why you're using the product internally. So for again, using us as an example, Customer Gauge, there are a lot of things that this product does that. When I look back at my old days as the CX manager at CIT Bank, I hacked together Salesforce. I hacked together Marketo Tableau to almost like stitch together an experience program where it worked, but I was actually spending more time trying to get it to work, then focusing on what I wanted to drive as a desired outcome. And that didn't go away. I thought it would. I thought I'd get it to a point, right? And you know what, it would just run itself. And then I could just focus on what I really wanted to do, which was, you know, optimize the program. And it never really went away, man. And I really want to point out that whether it be Customer Gauge, whether it be some other company like us, there is a value to a product that is built specifically for what you're trying to do. And that that is, again, it can be system agnostic, but there are, you know, softwares out there that if you're trying to make a B2B experience run properly, there are programs out there that can help you do that more efficiently and honestly help you focus on what really matters, which is at the ultimate, at the end of the day, is like, on your program, which if you're. If you're hacking it together, I'm telling you it's. It's going to be a continuous thing. Like, are you a software developer or are you ACX manager? And that's really where the line draws for me. And I learned that lesson pretty painfully at that role at CIT Bank. And that's when I was like, all right, I need to solve this. And again, back to my story. I wanted to build the product that solved it. And then I found you guys Customer Gauge in my backyard in Boston. And I talked to Adam, the CEO, and he hired me. But that was my goal. Like, this is crazy, all right? I want to focus on the program. I want to make that Program better. And ultimately there are products out there. So, Kerry, what's been your experience with this?

You just said something today. I'm a goosebump guy, and I just got him. But, you know, I found Customer Gauge quite the same way. And what you said was really, really important. People that own this program are responsible for it, right? Champions, chief, you know, customer officers, whatever title you want to throw on all of us that would do this, at the end of the day, we want to focus on the program and the people that make it great. We don't want to focus on does this information flow to one place or another. When you were talking about that, I just remember the nightmare pre customer Gauge as a customer, and I just remember downloading files and then running pivot tables and then thinking you had the perfect pivot table and you were all set to go. And then, what does this company think? Why would they open up three new locations? Because now my pivot table doesn't work and I have to go back and reinvent the wheel again or you change the name of something. And I spent more time working on the product side, piecing it together than I did on the people or the process. And if you have a good process, you can tweak it and. And it'll heal itself. If you have great people, they're going to feed, they're going to bring more great people in. We're going to make more great people. But if you have a bad product, you will spend all your time in product hell as far as I'm concerned. And Customer Gauge was just amazing because it brought me a lot of the solutions. And that was what I think. I even remember my first call when I reached out and I saw. You know, I went online, I found the website. I remember they wanted to do a demo. I said, sure, I'm all for a demo. And they're like, well, it can do this and this. No, no, no, no. I don't care about that. I need to know, will it calculate this? Do you have a report for this? I was much more tuned in because I already felt the pain and the suffering of having a bad product solution. So I was very geared towards it. And a lot of the yes boxes did get checked off. But I mean, that would be for any product, Ian. I mean, I'll turn this back on you and ask you this, but I mean, you know, you have the right product that if it went down or someone turned it off and no one missed it, it's probably not that great of a solution. Or if you Find yourself working on it too much or having to manage it too much, it's probably not the right solution. So what are some of the other tools? Let's step beyond Customer Gauge. What are some other tools that you think are vital? We can throw names or we could just talk about generic ones. I'm okay with that. But in the B2B world, what are some of the tools that you find vital?

Yeah, there's a bunch. I mean, I'm a marketer, so I have more products than I can honestly remember, I'm sure. But yeah, Salesforce CRM. So like Slack is another one. So we can go into a big rabbit hole there. But I think anything that is used to communicate, right? So if you have a experience program software, it's one thing to have it in there and get everybody in as a user, which we highly recommend. And it's again, doesn't matter if it's customer Gauge or a different solution should get people in there because the reporting on any solution out there is generally a lot more richer and it's more relevant. You can create dashboards that are specific. Some companies can create dashboards that are more specific to role like salespeople. CROs marketing can get a dashboard. CSM can get a dashboard. But what's really key too is piping that information to systems of records or areas that, you know, the company interacts with on a daily basis. So that's, that's the way I would view product. Figure out where everybody, the bulk of the company logs in every day. And if it's not your experience platform, then figure out a way to integrate some of that data into those systems. Ours just happens to be. Well, let me back up. We're in our system every day regardless of what it is. But Salesforce and Slack, I'd say, are in Confluence too. But Salesforce and Slack specifically are two systems that I just know gauges are in every day, all day long. So we focus on doing a couple cool things. Like we have a Slack integration that pipes in survey data and feedback directly into specific Slack channels. And we celebrate that like crazy. But we also troubleshoot from there too. So we see it come in Customer Engage, so the product people are all over it. And then the rest of the company sees it in Slack and we all log into CG and get more detailed feedback. Right. So it's kind of like that loop, but it really is a communication mechanism. It gets you that first little nugget of, hey, that's interesting. I think I should probably go log into this other system that has more detailed feedback. So let me pause there. But that's really what I see. The use of these systems working together is just creating that feedback loop and then allowing users to jump into the system that has the most relevant data at that point in time.

Yeah, you talked about data too. Like we're all using different data points to do what it is we do for our company. Some of it we're lucky when it overlaps. Right. The dollars at the bottom line, that's all of our numbers. Right. Revenue is important to us and that reoccurring revenue. But beyond that, we're using other data points that measure behaviors or interactions and engagement. And I think what's key is how can we get that data in a place where we can make really great decisions and be on the same page. I do like the fact that you brought up Slack. I know some people use some different tools that do the same thing, but just turning on different channels that put in alerts. It's really. Ironically, there's been this talk for years about technology separating people or putting distance between people. And I think we found this ecosystem of using technology to bring us together. You know, I think the test has been the last couple of months too. The Slack challenge. I feel like I know what sales is doing. I know what the customer success team is doing. Education's piped in there. So, you know, we talk about this integration or connectivity between the platforms and your product. I think that's really important. Also, them being able to communicate with one another adds value to that product solution.

But you said something interesting too. And getting the more detailed feedback in the holistic view I think is important as well. So like you said, we get that Slack notification, you log into. Again, we're using our system as a, as a lens here, but you log into CG and we have this account vitals view where it literally says, you know, you can see the Slack chat, you can see the website visit, you can see the support ticket all in one view and you can get that full view of that account, whether it be CG or some other company. That's important because it's not just about that one little notification, but like what's actually happening at the full account level. Like what. What's the real story here? That might be just the canary in the coal mine, but again, bringing it back to that holistic B2B experience program, what we call the account experience is so, so important because there is so much going on in these accounts, man. And you know this from being just A champion at your previous companies, that one thing can look really bad, but there might be 80 other things that are really good or vice versa. So you really have to look at all of these different data inputs to make sure you fully understand what is happening at that account. And that's maybe a good place to kick it back over to you and riff on that for like another two minutes. But then we should wrap up because I think it's getting to that time. But I love this topic and I've had a ton of fun talking to you about it. What does that holistic view to you mean from an experience standpoint?

Well, I think it's important who's looking at that holistic view and what decisions they need to make. If I was to sum this up as easily as possible, can I get the most full view of what's happening in the easiest way possible? Yeah, you know, and you know, I tell people, if whatever you're using, drop links in it, if, if you're getting an alert somewhere, make sure that a link drops in there with it so you can get over to that dashboard and get logged in quickly. You know, whatever makes it easier. Because at the end of the day, if we're asking people to have this holistic view of everything that's happening, can you get to the important deep dive details quickly? So that's really important. What is important to measure. Listen, if you have a data line or you have a data stream coming to you and you are doing nothing with it, if it is not adding value, if there's not a behavior attached to that drop it, it's noise. It's noise. We all have these extra data points. I think sometimes we throw them out there just to look fancier. Or it used to be important. Or, or you got to really say to yourself, is what I'm seeing on my timeline or my holistic view, is there value in all those different components? Am I going to do something if it changes from green to red, and if the answer is yes, it belongs there and then can I click into it and get to that more detailed report so I can understand it? I mean, you look at our world now, something as simple as bad lettuce completely rocked the restaurant world. But that data was already out there. People were already starting to report on that days and weeks ahead of it being a national event. And I use that as an analogy because we started getting alerts from different people that they thought there was an issue or whatever the case may be. And we were so far ahead of it because we had a holistic view and we saw the green turn red and we were able to click into that and zero that down. And this could make or break a company. These little triggers, these little data points are what adds up to the whole. Right?

That's right. And I love your framework of people process products, because if you work your way back. Right, just because we went product last, all right, you're using products to identify any potential issues at the account level. If you have the proper framework in place, from the people in the process standpoint, you know exactly what to do. Right. You can triage, you can follow up. You got your champions in every department. You could totally see how this mushrooms outward. And you have this just kick ass program set up where you, you know, you have your, your people just rocking and rolling. They know what to do. They have the process set up. The product is an element of that, but it really is all three of those pieces. It's a, it's a stool. Like, you get rid of one leg, it all kind of comes tumbling down. So. So thank you for that framework. I think it's extremely relevant, hopefully to our audience. I got a lot out of this talk. Kerry. Thanks again, man, as my little commander and culture over here. Really insightful. And this has been another episode of the Account Experience podcast. Make sure you guys subscribe, share it with friends. Hit us up if you have any questions or you want to be on the show. We'd love to have you.

Thank you, everybody.