Experience MythBusters Pt 1 w/ Trishaala Chengappa, VP of Product @ CustomerGauge

If you have data in silos, you're not going to have that full 360 degree view of. Yes, we are calling our clients. Yes, there's support tickets. Yes, there's product emails or marketing emails that product engagement. They're coming to our events. So that entire view is really crucial, and data silos prevents that.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Account Experience podcast. And today we have part one of what we're calling Experience Mythbusters. In this episode, we're going to be tearing down two experience myths we hear from prospects all the time. Specifically, data should live with one department, and the second one being you need a dedicated, experienced team to run your program. We're even joined by our very own VP of product development at Customer Gauge, Trishala Chengapa, to help us bust these things. So get ready for part one and let's dive into. Dive on in. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode. I'm here as always with my co host, Carrie T. Self. Say hello, Carrie.

Hello, everybody.

And today we're really excited to announce our first guest, straight from Amsterdam, Netherlands, our very own VP of Product, Trishala Chingapa. How you doing today, Trish?

Fantastic. Thank you.

So it's great to have you here. Kerry, tell her what she's won.

One hour with us, unfortunately.

So, seriously, though, today we're gonna be busting some myths. You guys have maybe seen that show mythbusters, right?

Yes, one of my favorites.

Yeah, same. So in our conversations we've had with prospects over the years, I think there's. We've heard some crazy experience myths that I think are worth busting. And, Trish, we're hoping you could help us do that today. You ready for this?

Yes, I am. Let's go.

All right, cool. So the first one, Experience Data, should be owned by one department, like customer success. What do you think about that one?

I don't actually believe in that. I think data is something that should not be siloed. It should not live with one department, especially something as customer experience Data. There are lots of teams across the organization that play a really crucial part in retaining that customer. And I think an account team or a customer success team needs to have access across the board, and the same for all departments. I think marketing teams need to be able to know which customers they can leverage for referrals, and customer support teams need to be able to know which teams and which accounts are vital to the bottom line. So I think data should not be siloed, and it's something that has to in the business and has to be transparently available across all departments.

Yeah. And I know Kerry probably agrees with you on this one in a big way because he's lived it as a program manager. So Kerry, what are your thoughts on this one?

Yeah, you know, when we think about, we talk about this. Are you product centric? Are you customer centric? And it's ironic, we've got Trishon who oversees our product. Right. She's a superstar when it comes to that. But everything her team does is about the customer experience. I think that's why it's so important for this data to be shared across all platforms. And everyone has that. It helps with organizational buy in. It brings everyone to the table. But it feels like we're all moving in the same direction. If you think of data as that wind blowing in our sales, we're all kind of moving in the right direction and using it in the same way. So I think I 100% agree is a great way. Not only should it not be siloed, data is a great way to break down those silos.

Yeah. I think, Trish, why don't you just give your feedback here? Because I think you've purposely done a lot of work in the product side to break down those silos. So this is like one of the main reasons we're having you on, because I think you're an expert in this.

I think this was a key area that we did notice very clearly in the early stages that sometimes data stayed within a particular team or didn't really have account managers or account teams didn't have visibility across. And this was kind of our mission a couple of years ago when we started developing what we call as the account Vitals. It's the one way to kind of get data from different departments into one really visual view. We're all visual people and I think you can have lists and lists of information. You can read up tons of stuff in the CRM system. But there's one visual view that tells me across the board all the vital signals that are important for customer retention. And me being able to access that in real time whenever I want it. And across departments was really crucial for us. And that's what we've been championing throughout. It's a really powerful tool. It gives everybody access to seeing exactly the health of the customer.

So I think that's a key point to bring out of this conversation is that giving a holistic view that every department can get value out of. So like you mentioned, the Vitals product, which Again, ad for CG here, guys. But we have this product feature that literally pulls in a bunch of these different data sources like usage stats, website visits, support tickets, you name it, you can basically add it in. And what that does is it gives like your salesperson, for example, a clear view of the account health and kind of what they've been doing, how they've been engaging with the company. So if they are going into that account to sell, they can understand what's happened in the last 60, 90, 120 days and have a very clear view of everything that's happened at the account. Not just, hey, they got sent in a marketing email. It's literally everything that's happened at the account level. And that applies to customer success managers. Right? That applies to even the cfo, like our CFO Eric can jump in, they've got an account and see the revenue, see kind of, you know, all of these different types of things that would be super interesting. So there's pieces in there for every single department. And I think that's so important and so key to pull out.

Ian, if I can add to that, it's in addition to seeing what's happened, it's also being able to see what's not happening. And I think for us that's really key for senior teams to be able to understand what's not happening. Where's that white space and what do we need to do to fix that? Because there's a churn indicator. It's the not happening, it's the not getting in touch with customers, it's things falling through the cracks. And this view that we've been championing towards is giving that information. It's about how much activity do you have with your account and which accounts you're not having that activity that you should be doing. And that also comes back to why data shouldn't be siloed. Because if you have data in silos, you're not going to have that full 360 degree view of yes, we are calling our clients. Yes, there's support tickets, yes, there's product emails or marketing emails that product engagement, they're coming to our events. So that entire view is really crucial and data silos prevents that. And that's what we've been working to bring to the forefront.

Yeah, and we call that absence of signal, right, Kerry?

Yeah, and I really like the way Trish puts it too, because if you think about that, that account owner or customer success person who is in touch with the customer, they have an entire group of people behind Them, that's all of our departments. And you know, the way Trish describes it, I love it because that absence of signal is our way of saying, hey, is my department or my responsibility for the company being represented in this relationship? And it's a great way to visually see that. And when we see an absence of signal, you know, you're like, well, why aren't. Why aren't we doing this? Or why are we not engaged? What's going on here? And I think that's one way that we get very connected. It's one way we break through that silo effect, is that we're all feel like we're part of that conversation, that relationship, through that view.

Yeah, I agree. And it's so important too, to get everybody involved. And I think that's really. If I could boil it down, guys, it's not just this amazing feature, but it's really getting everybody from every department involved. And Carrie and I have talked about this in a previous episode where everybody needs to buy into this program or else it won't work. Right. So that's ultimately the tool is the enabler, but it's ultimately a ethos or a culture thing that needs to happen at your organization where you rally around this program, you rally around serving the customer, and then you take those tools to leverage them to give them the data at the right time in the right department to act on it. But I think it's important to state that you really do, to Kerry's point, need to make sure that everybody's on board and bought into this thing because the tool can only get you so far. I think Trish would probably admit that too. Right. Even as VP of product, maybe.

Yes. The feedback and the customer feedback should live in the business and the organization. The tool can get you that far. But it is the people and the culture that kind of closes that end gap.

So pivoting real quick. So we have this, the Vitals product. And I don't want to obviously stay on cg, but, like, what about, like other types of reporting, like, to get people involved in breaking down those silos? Is there anything that we do specifically or maybe other programs out there have set up that can help break down those silos? Like, tactically, how can we actually show companies how to get past breaking those silos at their organization?

And start by giving a few examples. And then I'm going to also get Carrie to share his views on this. So we've got a couple that we do. Of course, we've got feedback running on flat Screens across all offices or on our laptops, on our intranet. That brings the customer feedback right to all employees across the board. Because as Kerry said, everybody is responsible for customer retention. And I think that's a great way of doing that. There's nothing more real than a customer telling you what's working or what's not working. And then it really empowers everybody across the organization. It's good. So that is something that we do. We also push feedback straight into our communication channels internally. So we've got groups. If you use something like Slack, then you could have like a Slack group. So having feedback beamed right as soon as a customer says something into the group. So the product team, for example, has their own product group where we get product feedback straight in. Whether that comes from our relationship survey, whether that comes in from the product survey, anything said or marked about the product, we're alerted in real time. So we can actually close the loop with that customer within the 48 hours because that's our KPIs internally. But we use this to make sure that the data just doesn't reside with the customer success or the account management team, which was typically the case in the relationship survey. All of the teams that are relevant, the support teams, they get alerted. So we're all in the know when something comes back from a customer. And this really helps us in any of our Sprint planning dialogues or talks with our customers or customer success teams on what should we be focusing on prioritizing. We've got all of this wealth of information and we're all on the same page then, rather than in silos of what's important and what's not. Kerry, do you want to add something to that?

You took all the good ones.

I think that's the fun part about.

Being the product person, you know? Yeah. I think the big thing I would take away from yours and I can add to that is definitely having the ability to take the information out of one centralized or one platform and being able to use the word beam, which I'm going to start using now, beam it. Because it's really what we do. We get instant information into everyone's hands. You know, the Slack channels, emails, digital displays, all those are ways of getting that. Where I would come from is how you or what you show. I think sometimes people look at data differently. A CEO or a VP is looking at a global or more of a department impact, where someone who, like our customer success team director, might be looking more at how individuals are performing or might want an account view versus A individual customer success view. And I think this is where we add a lot of value because we have the ability to change that view and to slice that data up differently. So I don't think one way to show data is the answer. I mean, we prove that. I think we have the ability to show it in different ways and slice it up to be more impactful. So that would be the only thing really thing I would want to add on top of that is we've got some wonderful reports that can pull things like sentiment, revenue, user information into a platform and give someone a tool to make quick decisions. Because I think you're right. It's all about behavior change. It's all about making the smart strategic decision in the moment. So yeah, beam is my new word. I'm adding it to my vocabulary. Thank you.

I love beams. So just to go back to our previous episode, Kerry, we talked about all the issues that can come along with building your program internally. And the one, Trish, when you were giving that kind of overview of reporting and like beaming that information, all of these different departments and points in the business, it brought me back to the point where I was the one man shop with an analyst. Basically developing this program with Tableau and Marketo data wasn't in real time. It was a complex system. In order to get this data out, you had to do a ton of manual manipulation. If the CEO wanted like a different report, I knew it would take two to three days to get it, you know, delivered. But the real bummer about that program is that I couldn't do that. I couldn't beam this information out to everybody in the organization really that effectively. I had to manipulate it, snap it. We called it, I think snapshot decks where we literally would snapshot the data from Tableau, put it in a PowerPoint, send it out to all of these different departments, and it took manual effort. But I just want to harp on that one point, Trish, is that beaming that information to all these departments in real time, like you said, if you get feedback from a relationship survey, it gets tagged as product, gets piped to slack, gets piped into our CG instance. You guys are alerted, you know, to follow up within 48 hours. That is seems like such a simple thing to us. Right? But I think when you really uncover the complexity and the efficiencies that that can offer an organization that is not to be understated because I think it is really hard for a lot of companies to wrap their head around that. And good, good on you guys for having that system set up, it's a.

Really great way to make sure that everybody across all teams are really in the know. And we love it. I think we love it. Good or bad feedback? We love it because knowing the bad with the good is always good. It prevents you from being blindsided or when it's really too late. I think that's the part that we really value, having all of this information real time, at our fingertips. Whether we're logging into dashboards to see that or if we're getting it on our phones in terms of email alerts or slack messages or it's beamed on flat screens, having it at every touch means that we're always in the know. And it becomes less and less about being blindsided, because suddenly if my CEO walks up and says, what happened here? I'm not blindsided. And I think that's. That's really crucial. And even as a product person, we love looking at. At the activity timeline. We've got CRM activities. We've got business reviews. We've got survey feedback that comes in. We've also got login active. So it's a combination of information, but every one of these kind of tie in nicely to kind of help you understand whether that customer is at a churn risk or if everything's going as per plan. So I think that's what we really love about having access to data, but also making sure it's in the hands of everybody.

I love it. I think we've busted this myth. What do you guys think? I think that's. That's a pretty solid response to should it be in one department? Should it be spread across the org. I think we got it nailed. So you guys ready for this myth number two? Okay. You need a dedicated, experienced team to run your program, or you shouldn't do it at all. Carrie, program manager, previous companies, what are your thoughts on this one?

That is a true myth. Let's go with it. No, no. That was for all my champions out there trying to get a team. But the reality is, no, it's a nice to have. I mean, if you have more resources, if you're a large organization. But it's not a need to have. And even more to the myth, it shouldn't stop you from getting started. I think one of the things that people mistake when it comes to an account experience or customer experience program is this is not an extra thing to do. To hear Ian talk about how hard it was to get data out to when there was, you know, I need a report tomorrow. Well, it's going to take a couple of days or extra time to do if you don't have the right tool, yes, it's a lot of investment, invested time, but if you have a great tool, then it becomes a lot easier to do. And I think the myth here that needs to be busted is this is not an extra task or effort. This is not something you have to do. It's the way we do what we're currently doing. A good CX program should plug into what you're already doing and should give you new tools and new resources to be more effective and quicker at that. I would say without a good tool, you might get an email, you might get feedback. You got to read it, you got to go through it, you got to pull the team together, got to show it to them, you got to get input. There's all these extra steps when it's not a program in place or a tool to do it with and you getting back to the customer, you solving the problem starts to take a lot more time and effort. And what I would say is, no, you get started by making some decisions, having a good tool in place. So having a dedicated team is not important. I think one of the things that a lot of champions will understand when I say this. Most of us started doing it part time, meaning it wasn't in my title, it wasn't a full time job, but we definitely, as an organization knew it was a need. So we looked and scanned across and go, hey, Kerry, Kerry's good with people. Let's have him spearhead a couple of his ideas and answer that phone when it rings like, that's the job I want. But you got to start somewhere. And I think that speaks to, you know, we can't be waiting for this dedicated team or tool to be perfect, you know, but the team is the most important part. Get started. It takes one person a few minutes, a few hours a day to at least get started with this effort.

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, it's lack of C suite buy in. In Customer Gauge's research with mit, they 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 Customer Gauge is literally built for the the ground up to maximize and track the revenue contribution from your experience program in real time. Companies like dhl, Anheuser Busch, Heineken, uh, yeah, we get a good amount Of Free Bear OneLogin, IronMountain, 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 CustomerGage, 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 from 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 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. I love this because like on, on your side we have the people side and on Trish's side we have the product and the machine side. So. So Trish, what's your response to that? Like can you create efficiencies that reduce the the actual people load that might that a program might have? Like can a product make it so you can reduce the amount of people needed to run the program? What are your thoughts on that?

Yes, definitely. I think for us, what we strongly tell our customers is that a program like this needs to live in the business. It's a date and much to what Kerry said, it's your way of working customers and retention and making sure you're listening to what your customers are saying is your everyday kind of task. So it doesn't need a team outside of the main team or the main customer facing team to do this. It's not like an extra task there. It's something that lives in the business. Whether that's customer success, sales, any operational team product, for example, it has to live in the business and it has to be the way we do our work every single day. And what the tool does is make sure you can reach out to the right people. You can use revenue or monetization to slice that, to make sure you're focusing on customers that in different kinds of prioritization, whether that's your entire customer base, whether that's high revenue customers. The tool makes sure you've got the information in real time. So you're not waiting a bit like what you did Ian, a couple of days to know who I need to follow up with. It's all now. And what people need to do is make sure they can leverage that information and reach out to customers. Because for the last part, there's no substitute to the human touch.

I think going back to Kerry's point, like everybody starts part time. I think that's a really, really interesting point because I also started part time and I'm pretty sure I've talked to a bunch of champions over the years that have also part time. It's like we know this is important. I'm going to dedicate some of my time every week to start tackling this thing. But you're right, it takes a passionate person to start part time, get a scrappy team together. You know, if you are working at a large company, sometimes you do have the benefit of bringing on a tool like Customer Gauge and Trish's talents obviously as a product developer and you can kind of create those efficiencies right away. But a lot of the time, Carrie, we talked about this in the other episode. Like you don't necessarily have the luxury of onboarding just a kick ass Ferrari of a product and creating these efficiencies right away. So you do kind of have to start at the human level. But then if you can weave in the product, it really can start to come together pretty quickly. So I think thoughts are to pull these strands together. No, you don't need a dedicated team, you just need passion and you need to be scrappy at first. Depending on budget maybe.

Yeah. And it's funny because you know the one word that without even talking to other companies or sharing like this is what you should call it, the word champion keeps bubbling up. And I think as champion speaks to the passion Speaks to the vision, speaks to the energy and effort behind it. This is not a. This is. This is not a high reward position out of the gate. Because if you've identified that you need this, it's probably because there's a gap in what your team is doing. You're missing something. The organization is not performing at peak performance if this position's been identified. So you almost come in at the beginning as a troubleshooter and you're a fixer in a lot of ways. And you're training and you're working and you're developing. And as you fix something and you see a result of that, you get a little more time, you get another resource and you start to. But you definitely need someone who, for lack of a better word, is a facilitator for this. That champion who's going to rally behind that effort and almost to the point of pushing information in all directions to make sure people are listening and hear that and then starting to pull those together. I hate to go back to the siloing, but this person has to have the ability to punch through those silos and figure out, okay, team finance, what's important to you. That part I need to make sure I bake into this and I can get you stuff that's relevant to what you guys are trying to accomplish.

I think that's a really nice point, Kerry. Instead of having a dedicated team, you could also. What we've seen in terms of rollouts is to have champions in different departments that form that team. So you've got people in the business, operational people that are champions, that are passionate about customer feedback and making sure that we can improve from it and they can form your dedicated team.

I mean, without. Again, here's a selfless plug for myself and my relationship with customer gauge. I mean, it was the same way. I mean, I ran two programs and both times I had zero resources. I know we've talked about this, Ian, but where I got my investment, where I got that buy in from the organization was again, you said you used the word scrappy. That's what we were. We were a scrappy team. I took whatever was available. I didn't say no to anything that was offered. You know, but through time, we went from being the group that was kind of scrapping something together and putting out fires to the group that spoke first at meetings. We're the ones that run, ran our events. We were the ones that were present at every meeting because the voice of the customer became important. And that's the shift that was the Change. And we went from scrappy to being that Ferrari. You talk about when you're tired of driving around something that doesn't run real well, you start investing in something you like to be in. And I think that was a big one.

I think the two worlds combining again, like the people side getting things up and running and then bringing in the Trish side, which is the product. That's where the real world class, class magic can happen. And I think it's interesting too. One other point that came to mind, guys, when we're talking about this is like, it creates this interesting, almost like a problem that once you have, like, for example, the carry side and developing the program and then you add in the side of the product where the product starts to interact and you can kind of beam the information. All of these different departments, what actually ends up happening is these champions that we speak of get promoted and they get promoted again. And they work their way up the organization to the point where they kind of stop running the program and hand it off to somebody else. And then we're looking for like the next champion. Which is really interesting because I can't tell you how many times I've seen this happen at cg where our main champion that we onboarded the software with got promoted so many times that they just. They kind of stepped away from the program eventually into something bigger maybe or different. But account experience really does come into play because then you can again map where your champions are. Who's in every level of the organization, what are your champions in each department, and who is the next person we'd reach out to? If, for example, this person from this company got promoted to a different role because of the program success, who's the next person that we think will be the champion? Who did they deem the champion? Do we have feedback from them? Are they bought into the process? You can check that. We monitor all of that. So again, that's a really interesting point of like counter experience, combining the people side with the product side. So I think we've successfully busted this myth of no, you do not need a dedicated team like you said, Kerry, get started. Be scrappy about it. I think perfect world, sure. You would have taken a dedicated team, I'm sure, right?

Yeah. But would I have known what to do with it to begin with? Sometimes, Right? I think. I mean, I was running a program for a few years before I met Customer Gauge and it took off. I said this before, I think last week when we talked, it took off. When I finally got to Customer engage and got that product that allowed me to beam information, allowed me to be in real time. I don't know if I would have known what to do if I did have the dedicated team at the beginning. And I think part of that's that learning process, bringing all those different departments to the table.

And that concludes part one of our Experience mythbusters podcast. Thanks for listening and be sure to tune in next week for part two.

SA.