How SugarCRM is Using Account Experience to Build Customers for Life

Welcome to the Account Experience Podcast. I'm joined with my regular co host, Dave Barber. How are you doing, Dave?

Good afternoon, Adam. Not doing too badly, thank you. How are you?

I'm doing okay now.

We had to substitute somebody last week or the last. We had Camilla on board. Did you get a chance to listen to what she was doing?

I haven't had a chance to listen just yet. I was on holiday at my mom's house over in Cornwall in the uk. So, happy to be back on board.

This week we've got Chris Pennington who's the chief customer officer of Sugar CRM coming up. I'm really excited about this and Sugar's a great software company. It's been around for a long time and they've really made some strides recently. I know that their vision is about bringing in customer feedback into the software. So what are some of the things you're looking forward to asking Chris about?

Yeah, well, I think it's always fascinating, especially from our point of view, Talking to another SaaS provider, how they deal with how, you know, the people at the front line deal with, you know, comments and feedback around all parts of the organization, not just the parts that they can control when they're managing the relationship, but also I'm an account manager and I'm a CSM and I just got a zero because someone doesn't like the product. How can I change that? How am I not going to be afraid of those kind of feedback? So really interesting to dive in to see how they maintain the buy in for those kind of people as well.

Well, yeah, I'm also intrigued about that and I've also heard that they've got quite a high net promoter score for support and I'm hoping we can dig into that and get that from Chris because he's been a bit cagey about that but I know that he's quite.

I'm sure we'll get it out of him.

Well, looking forward to hearing about the challenges from Chris Bennington on that. We'll be back after this break with Chris Pennington. Hi and welcome to the Account Experience Podcast. I'm joined as ever by a special guest from the world of B2B customer experience. And today I'm really happy to welcome Chris Pennington who's the chief Customer officer of Sugar CRM. Now Sugar is really well known software company. It's been around for quite a few years and it's really in the business of helping marketing, sales and customer service teams achieve that. I don't know, high definition customer experience by providing a really great CRM platform. And recently it's won an award. It landed first place in the 2021 CRM Motion Footprint Award by Software Review. So maybe we can get Chris to talk about that. And Chris himself is really responsible for the Sugar customer journey. So I'm really excited to welcome him to the podcast and hear about the whole Sugar CRM program.

Welcome, Chris.

Well, thank you very much for having me, Adam. It's terrific to be here.

Maybe you can just start out by telling us a little bit about your role in Sugar and the impact that you're having with your program.

Yep, certainly happy to. So I'm very fortunate, Adam. I'm made to look good by an amazing team around me. I have responsibility globally for the customer experience for all Sugar customers. So we have a variety of customers, whether they are direct with us or through our partner channel. And my responsibility really extends to helping make sure that all of our customers get the most out of our software. And so a critical component of that is a feedback loop. And that feedback loop, Voice to Customer, is one vehicle in which we try and engage our customers to hear what they have to say. So it's one thing for me to set policy and standards and strategy about how we should help our customers, but it's always good to get that reinforced or tweaked by feedback from customers. And the Voice to Customer program really plays a central role in that.

That's quite a challenge that you've got there, isn't it? I mean, was it something that was easy to come by? You know, you say you got a great team around you, but you had the vision to do this.

I think the visions, I think and strategies are always best crafted in the rear view mirror. And there are certain aspects, I think, in, you know, you build up tenants or philosophies throughout your working career. And a lot of my philosophies have been grounded in the value based strategies. You know, you make the right decision for the right reasons, work hard and good things will flow from it. Now, there's obviously more to it than that. And, you know, if you look across, you know, if I look across the sort of span of my career, you know, started in the UK, worked for, you know, close to 25, 30 years in Australia, now for a number of years in the us you see common aspects in the challenges that customers face, whether in our industry implementing software. And it's always nice to work with customers across different industries. But there's a lot of commonality in what customers are trying to achieve. So, you know, you build up a, you know, a collection of philosophies and strategies, and you do your best to implement them. And, you know, for many customers, that works very well. There was always some that, you know, you're never going to get it right. But I think for, by and large, for the majority of customers, we do an excellent job, I think, in trying to help get them to achieve their objectives. That's what we're. That's what we're about, trying to make sure our customers, they're ultimately successful.

Why don't we drill down a little bit into what is a typical sugar CRM customer? Because I think that will help people understand some of the challenges that you're up against.

I don't know if you can. I've got a typical customer. If only were that easy. Adam look, our customer base spans from very small organizations, you know, with a handful of customers and users, right through to some of the largest organizations globally. You know, we have a number of Fortune 10 companies using our software across, across the globe. But really what our software is about is helping organizations, whether in sales, marketing, or service and delivery teams, help their customers. So that whole aspect of CRM or customer relationship management, our customer experience, marketing automation, that's the sort of things that we're helping our customers achieve their outcomes. And we certainly, from the standpoint of trying to make life easy for them, we want the platform to do the work for them. So often in our industry, people have been beholden to the technology. And we're a firm believer that as a software innovator ourselves, we should be building technology that helps the platform do the work for them, make life easier. And so across the board, whether it's a small organization, whether it's a large organization, whether it's in high tech or in banking or education, we have a very diverse customer base in terms of what industries they're working in and what geographies they're tackling. But ultimately it comes down to a common set of, you know, they're trying to drive a sales process, they're trying to market their products better or to try to service their customers. And so that, I suppose that horizontal element of function is a defining element in what we try and do, or even though we help a very diverse group of customers, I think that's a.

Really good way of thinking about it. You're helping them with their business, with their customers. So how are you supporting them with the experience? Chris, I want you to sort of get into a little bit about, about the program about how you really have this vision for the experience for a sugar customer.

We said about, it's funny, we're talking about the strategy. We set about devising a much broader customer experience strategy of which the voice of the customer is one component. And it was driven largely from the executive viewpoint that one of our major tenants, we have four major tenants, and one of them was generating customers for life. And this concept of how do you generate a customer for life? Is baked into pretty much most of our decision making across the board. So it starts from the CEO and executive team down, but it impacts all parts of our business, wherever you function in the organization. And so when we got to the voice of the customer program itself, we did formalize it quite significantly. We set about setting some program goals, we set about some objectives. So let me just rattle off what the goals are. So the first thing we wanted to do was build trust with our customers. We see trust as a fundamental component in what goes into building, you know, this concept of customers for life. The second thing we wanted to do is we wanted to gain insight and understanding about what they were expecting and what customers needs were. So one thing for us to assume we know what the customers need and then try and anticipate, but we want to get that validated. We certainly the third goal we had was we wanted to generate and acquire what we call customer advocates. So one of the things I've been very passionate about, particularly with programs like Net Promoter Scores, is the NPS says, would you recommend us? And I'm always trying to get to the next goal, which is, can you please recommend us? And so, you know, one of the goals for us is to generate those customer advocates. Obviously, we want to grow and retain our existing customers. Maintaining a relationship with existing customers is critical. Trying to help the health of our organization and the health of our community by servicing those customers. And lastly, one of the fifth goal for us of the program was really about empowering our own employees to think through a customer centric viewpoint. By having a feedback mechanism and then sharing that broadly throughout the whole organization. It reminds each individual employee at the end of the day that, oh yeah, we're here because of our customers and we're here to help service those customers to the best ability we can.

Just to take it back a couple of steps there, Chris, in terms of, with the NPS question, as you say, are you likely to recommend and you'd like to say, can you actually recommend, how are you, how are you bridging that gap? Because a lot of people happily Say I'll give a 9, I'll give a 10. In this hypothetical world, if I was talking with my friends about the CRM that I use, I'll happily recommend it. How do you actually then join those dots then, and actually get them to recommend? And then more importantly then how do you measure that and gauge the success of that as well?

Yeah, look, the voice of the customer is not a program that's run in isolation. I said it before. And another key aspect that we in the Customer Experience team drive is our online community. We call it Sugar Club and it's a forum in which we engage customers for their benefit in all manner of mechanisms to communicate so they can talk to fellow customers around the world, they can talk to sugar experts, they can get tips and tricks. And so we often link the two together. So the voice of the customer is a direct feedback mechanism. We're soliciting input. But our community, our Sugar Club, is a forum which we promote active exchange of ideas. So we try and tie the two things together. But I think beyond that, Dave, I mean, Adam, you mentioned it in the introduction. We were super proud to win the Emotional Footprint Award in 2021 coming first place. And that award is given based solely on user feedback and reviews. So there are, you know, obviously we want feedback through the voice the customer, but we also do encourage our customers to leave reviews online. G2 Crowd the emotional footprint with software reviews. And, you know, I think we do a fairly good job of encouraging our customers. Give us your feedback. You know, feedback's the breakfast of champions. And you know, you can't always get the right. I've said this many times, you have to be brave in this situation because you're not sure what you're going to get. We get all manner of feedback. Some are great, some are glowing, some is downright difficult to read sometimes, quite frankly. But all of it are nuggets of gold. It doesn't matter whether it's good, bad or indifferent, it's always very helpful.

I think it's a real. First of all, I love that phrase that feedback is the breakfast of champions. I'm definitely going to use that.

I can't claim that as my own, but I think.

But you know, ultimately, I mean, we're all in the software business here and Dave and I know that more than anything, you know, customers ask us something, sometimes impossible things to implement or very difficult. We always have to make difficult decisions about putting it in there. But I think your point about when there's a customer award and they're Looking for feedback. The fact that you are, how can I put it? You're aware, you're prepared for some of the things that can come along, but if you have that regular really in depth feedback program, you can weaponize your response to it and lance the boil. So I'm really mixing my metaphors here, you know, but, but also to try to answer some of those things ahead so you can just take them off the table. So I wonder, you know, what have you done to go back to your customers to talk to them about some of the feedback you collected?

Yeah, so it's funny, we. The feedback is shared both internally and externally and, you know, initially, obviously for every response we get, we go back to the individual that provide that feedback and close the loop, as it were, and have our account managers and customer success team speak with the individual customer. But we've started to go beyond that. We've realized that if one customer is asking or giving us feedback, it's quite likely they're representative of other people. You've all been in the room where one person asked a question, but actually 10 people were thinking it. I mentioned before about Sugar Club, our online community, and where it's appropriate. What we're doing is trying to take the answer and publicize that in a more wider forum. Now, not every question is appropriate for a wider forum, but wherever we can, we're increasingly trying to share that more broadly and that's been proven to be very helpful. We had questions about our pricing policy, we changed the policy, we published it back out on our online forum. That was a great example. I think the other thing that we do is we do share externally quite substantially. We also share a lot internally. So the feedback I used to get, I'm sure everyone does from time to time. You experience something and you get the survey coming in and occasionally I'd roll my eyes, they, oh, I can't be bothered to fill that in. Well, I can tell you, being on the other side of that, anybody that fills in feedback and leaves a comment in particular, it's pounced on and read by the senior executive team, by the customer success team. We have a dedicated voice to the customer team and I've changed my own view on the value of that. And I would encourage anybody listening when you get a survey, do fill it in, it is priceless how valuable that is to the people at the other end and what to do with that. So, yeah, I think one says we do share that information internally and externally, as you suggest, Adam. But yeah, I'm sure we Always do more there.

One thing you mentioned before, Chris, was around the initial fear sometimes that people have of direct feedback coming in and facing up to it. And you said there that you're sharing internally, externally was. Was there a few battles along the way to get to this very transparent point that you're at now?

Yeah, I think, I don't know if I call it a battle, but it's certainly, you know, I think internally we had to do promotion to explain why it was helpful. And look, it's a fairly easy argument to win. You know, like in any priorities in the business, you have to work out, you know, where do you focus your time? And senior executives, you know, divert the time from time to time. It was a fairly easy one to take to the business that, hey, we've got a raft of information from customers. Would you like to read and share it? But I think, you know, we had to fit that into other priorities in the business and work out where and you know, it's one of those things that we have as a standing item once, once a month for the executive team to review. But I think it did take some coordination day. We wasn't so much a battle, but it certainly had the position to explain. But the rewards came pretty quickly, you know, for each of the. One of the things we did was we, as I said, we actually formed a team around the voice of the customer program. So we have a couple of individuals that run the program, but we engage what we call ambassadors from each of the business units. So depending on where the feedback came, because it sometimes can be overwhelming for all the workers seem to sit on the shoulders of the customer success team and they're obviously interfacing with the customer. That's great. But we also wanted ambassadors from the product team, from the finance team, from the marketing team, from the delivery team to also read and action the feedback. So we've got this, I guess, cascading layers throughout the business of who engages with the feedback. And that was driven by one of our goals. We want to employees to be increasingly customer centric. And that I'm very proud of. I think that's something that has helped us, helped everyone in the business better understand why customer feedback is important.

I think that's great because I think in terms of like successful programs that we see or unsuccessful programs likewise as well. It's when sometimes it's all going down to the account managers and when you say, right, we're going to get direct feedback in account management, you have to take all of the heat from people that aren't happy with the product, all of the heat from people that aren't happy with finance, everything basically. And then you're going to struggle to get that buy in straight away, aren't you? So having all of your other departments involved with it and taking that on board, I think that must be really useful for getting that buy in and helping the account teams who are the face sometimes not just feel alone and having to deal with all the complaints.

Yeah, no, very true.

Chris, One of things, maybe you could just bring us back to the context in which your program runs in. Can you talk about the mechanics about how you do this transactionally or on a relationship basis?

We again have quite a multifaceted approach. So we got many thousands of customers and so we're very conscious that we want to overload either our customers or our team internally with how to handle it. So we do a combination of what we call transactional surveys. At a point in time, following a incident, let's say it's a support case or a new sale, we will dispatch a, what we call a transactional survey and then come back to that. We've had huge success in that regard. And then more recently we said, well, look, we don't just want to understand point surveys, we also want to get what we call a relationship survey, which we, you know, every six months we will ask a customer just how do you feel about this? So we divide our customer base into monthly cohorts and each month we request they fill in a survey. And so there's a combination of surveys going on at any one time, whether it's, you know, I finished a support call and what did you think of the agent or, or whether it's an account based experience, a relationship. And so we work through, I guess a fairly planned methodology and working through, make sure we survey everyone at least, hopefully at least twice a year we get a touch point from them that's really good.

And so does that allow you to get a good picture of your revenue base? By doing that you're able to make sure that you're covering companies from all the revenue groups.

Yeah, I think one of the things that we've really enjoyed actually working with customer gauge is actually having a focus on where does the revenue flow from customers. And you know, it's trivial to say with the largest customers pay the largest revenue focus on energy there. And of course that's in many cases there's some truth to that. But we're also perhaps looking at organizations which potential for growth, potential for increased revenue, you Know, we're in a SaaS software business and so our business relies obviously on securing new business in the door, new customers. But also a critical component is supporting existing customers, recurring customers. And so having, you know, survey information which, you know, gives us feedback but also ties it to where the revenue is flowing does help us give a, I think just another dimension on, you know, whether in the. How that, how that feedback is flows through the business.

Yeah, good point. I think that's really true because if you, and if you don't. This is my personal bug there. Because if you don't do that, it's very easy to get distracted by the customers that seem to shout the loudest. And I call this cognitive bias. But if you really, for me, it's the ones who are not shouting. When we have no engagement, that's what you really need to engage.

Yeah, we talk a lot about the ideal customer and sometimes some customers are very engaged and hands on, want to talk all the time. And some customers you never hear from and somewhere in between is probably the Goldilocks you don't want to have a customer you never hear from. But equally, if you get a customer that is dominating, you have to look at some of the reasons behind why are they so, you know, so engaged. One thing that you talked about was the transactional versus relationship survey. And one of the things that drew us to formalizing the Voice the customer program was we for many years had tremendous success with our transactional NPS surveys, unprecedented NPS scores. And it was, I think through that initial foray that sort of opened our eyes. We're actually sitting on a wealth of information which I don't think at the time we were really taking advantage of. And formalizing the program to include a relationship survey and broader feedback has really been beneficial. But it's that transactional survey that really kicked us off in the first place, which is probably not typical for most organizations. I'd say no.

It's a journey, I think.

Yeah.

And do you find you can track that transaction on it can help you to predict your relational score as well in terms of what's happening in the here and now versus what customers think twice a year when you survey them?

I'd like to say yes, Dave, but I think the reality is we've got more work to do there to tie that together. One of the things I think I said before, the feedback is like nuggets of gold. And I think there's still more work we could do to mine and analyze how that obviously impacts customer churn. Satisfaction, customer sentiment. So I think we've got the basis or the rudiments there, but I think we probably need to put more effort in David, for truly to get the most out of it.

Yeah, for sure. And do you think in terms of, you know, with running the program, do you think it's, you know, impacted one particular department in a very good way? Have customer success gone? Wow. I don't know how I did without this kind of before or indeed product and financing.

Great.

This is a chance for me to actually speak to customers and know what's going on. Have you ever noticed any particular place where it's had a great impact?

Yeah, I think across the board. I mean it's impacted all the business units. I think the one that's probably surprised me was finance. I don't think they initially thought, you know, that they would have an impact on end customers. But we do get comments back about how we engage on dire and mid level and that's not what you typically expect. So I think that was an unexpected and pleasant surprise. And it's nice to be able to go to the finance team, say, look, you know, what you do does benefit and impact our overall goals. Obviously the product team is a standout. You know, there's always feedback about what customers like and don't like about the product and what they'd like to see more of. Our support team, I mean, I champion this again and again. Our support MPS's unrealistically in the 90s. Don't know how we manage it. We know we start it when we.

Hold on a second, I just want you to repeat that again, Chris. I think that's pretty good. So your support MPS is where I.

Support NPSS in the 90s and I had to pinch myself several times and look at the data to double check. There's a story here it didn't start in the 90s, Adam. So we started our program probably eight or nine years ago. And when we first started we were getting scores in the 30s and the next year went to the 40s into the 50s. And each year we were able to increase it by a 10 point basis point. Now for the last three years we've been consistently hovering around the 90 mark. Sometimes it goes down to 88 and up to 92. And the reason we were able to do it, what drove us so much to looking at the voice to customer program is we didn't focus on the score, we focused on the behavior of the support reps in terms of support agents and it changed the way in which they engage with customers. And we saw that successively build. Now I've come into the organization, I've only been here for the last few years, so I can't really claim success for that from my predecessors. But what I could see was, and it did take years. It did actually. You know, it took perseverance and it took a collective belief, but you can see it, you know, and in the last few years since we've been engaged particularly with customer gays, we've seen a change in behavior from our customers and an upward trend. And so what I would say is that one of the byproducts for me of the feedback is it actually then shapes the behavior of our team, which then drives a better customer experience. So it is cyclical, if that makes sense.

No, I think that's really interesting because it's almost like you're driving the behavior of the organization from the bottom up by solving all of those support cases in a really excellent way. And I'm just going to remind anybody that's listening, to get an NPS in the 90s, almost everybody has to be a promoter. That means almost zero detractors, almost zero passives. You've got to get nine or tens on almost every survey. That's fantastic.

Yeah. So one of the things I do with that, I internally, I pull out, you know, 60 to 70% of the comments. I can't send them all to the whole company. It's just too many. So every month I, you know, take a selection of all the positive comments and I send an email internally called Spreading the Love. And there's positive vibes because there are, you know, specifically with relation to our customer support team. They do an exceptional job and it's often part of the business, which doesn't always get the recognition. But the customers love us and they tell us, and that is gold for us. It's great.

That's really terrific. I can really see how you change that. Okay, so that sounds great. What have the challenges been? I mean, you know, you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs, I'm guessing. So to get to that high school, what did you learn along the way and what were some of the blocks that you had?

Yeah, I think certainly, you know, we'd had tremendous success with our transactional NPSs and we thought, oh, well, we'll just start surveying relationship based questions and we'll be off and running to the races. And I think one of the things that I learned very quickly is that the response rate from customers and driving that Higher is still an area for us where we need to work a lot harder. And encouraging customers that please take two or three minutes out of your day, give us the feedback. Trying to encourage customers to take the time to fill it in remains, I think, a challenge. I think on the transactional side potentially is easier. Somebody's just had an interaction with the support rep, they solved a problem, they're feeling good, they're feeling this response. But to ask just out of the blue once every six months, hey, you know, I know you've got a busy day, but can you take time out and tell us how you feel about us? That's been a little bit more challenging than I would have anticipated. And so we've had to really embark on strategies to help customers recognize that, you know, we are in a partnership, we are on a two way street and called a conversation. If we're only ever talking at the customers, not talking with them, you're going to get a biased outcome. And so our challenge has always been trying to help customers understand that the more you can engage us, the more likely we're collectively going to get more out of this relationship. And that's been, I think, the biggest challenge that we've seen certainly in the last 12 to 18 months.

Is there communication that you're doing with customers outside of sending the survey to them to, to really get across that point, that it's worth that two or three minutes out of that day to take the survey?

Yeah, Dave, I think we could absolutely do more there. Obviously we have what we call our quarterly business reviews with various customers and we obviously do the marketing outreaches. I'm always lobbying the marketing team and they're always saying, look, we've got a lot of messages to send to our customers. And so you're always tempered with how there's so much you want to tell your customers and but you need to balance that with not overloading. So it's trying to pick the right time, the right message, the right medium, you know, and I think that's probably something we could do a better job of, I think.

Yeah, I think that's always the tricky thing.

Right.

I think once someone goes through the process with you and they leave a survey, they get a nice quick follow up from whoever it is, product or finance or indeed the csm and it's. And they see it's worthwhile, then great, they're in. Then they're going to answer your surveys in the future. But it's getting them to answer that first one and really experience that that's that that's the key challenge there, isn't it? To make sure they see the value before they actually answer the survey?

Yeah, we've done some things along the way. You know, with the Purview survey answer, we'll donate $5 to a charity and, you know, there's certain, you know, hooks there to try and help drive it. But you know, at the end of the day, what I'm really looking for is authentic, genuine feedback. I'd like to make sure our customers understand why it's important for them and for us to have this, I'm going to call it a dialogue, you know, a two way discussion. And that's, you know, that's across the bed at the moment. That's what we're determined to drive higher. So yeah, we'll keep soldering on.

Chris, I'd like to touch on some of the goals you have for the program. You said that you wanted to empower the employees with feedback. How are you able to do that? Are you doing that through your own software system, through Sugar or through other methods? And if and how does that land with them?

Yeah, certainly. I would recommend, obviously unselfishly, anybody that is running a voice to customer program to integrate it with the CRM. Thanks for the plug, Adam. But certainly if you are running a voice to customer program, if you can have that integrated into Sugar into a CRM solution, it actually gives people greater access throughout the whole organization. But one of the things I think we also did was we. So we appointed ambassadors within each business unit to take ownership. And it was quite previously we were sending information out and saying this is what the customers have told us. And we changed the dynamic after about six or eight months. We said it's just not working the way we want. So the content of the ambassador, they own that feedback for their department and it's their responsibility then to take that back to various people. And so we meet as a group regularly. And I think, you know, having this concept of joint ownership of the feedback has really opened people's eyes to what it means to be a participant in the feedback loop. And that's been really, really positive. But yes, certainly I have to say, in any industry, sharing data in a way that, you know, is straightforward and easy. I mean, we have a mantra of no blind spots, no busy work, no roadblocks. And that concept of having data from customers that accessible to the account managers or customer success in their CRM system really does help as well. When you're on the phone or emailing them or Trying to make people aware that customers feedback is important. We exist because of our customers.

And is that data shared right the way across the business? So an account manager in Seattle can see what's happening in Florida, for example.

Yeah, very much so. You know, we operate on a global basis, so we will share information in a variety of different ways. So it's wanting to have people go and look at it on our, you know, internal SharePoint site. Another point to have available on, you know, within the CRM system, obviously I do executive briefings and updates. You know, we use that opportunity in town halls or what have you to highlight that. And I think one of the, one of the points that I think is important is we have our CEO talking about it. You have myself as chief customer officer talking about it. So intrinsically, you know, employees understand, oh, yeah, perhaps this is important. And I think for us, I mean, we're a customer relationship management software vendor, so inevitably it runs through our veins that you know, customers, customer feedback, customer experiences, it's. It's a key part of who we are and what we do.

I think that's something. I've been very impressed with your organization because your vision of CRM is very much to take the internal part of the, you know, the, the customer, sorry, the internal facing data, but also to layer on these external data points. And I think too many organizations operate in silos and they never expose that customer experience data to the front line. And I think you've done a really good job of doing that. Chris?

No, thank you. Appreciate that. Adam and I believe in transparency and sharing. And, you know, it's very difficult. We all bring our own perspective to a situation, whether it's us as a vendor or our customers or our partners. And so if you can make information more readily available. And that's, you know, I plugged our community sugar club before, and I think that's a. There's a good aspect there that it's a forum where people can share and you get different perspectives and people say, oh, hadn't thought of it like that before. That's an interesting idea. And every time I talk to a customer and say, what is it you want? Most customers say, we want to know how other customers are engaged and how are they doing things. So, you know, the feedback loop for us is one mechanism where we can perhaps share that, you know, this is what we're learning from this customer. Have you seen similar things yourself?

I'd like to sort of draw the conversation to a close a little bit by thinking ahead. Chris. I was really stimulated to something you said earlier on, which is, you know, you want to acquire customers through advocacy. So with all of these nines and tens, you're getting all of these people saying, yeah, I likely to recommend that to a colleague. What are your plans to harvest that or to go forward?

I said previously that the voice the customer is part of a much broader initiative to generate customers for life. And a subcomponent of that is an initiative we've started called RavingFans. And the concept behind Raving fans is often as an organization, you look to your customers or the organization to be a reference. And we've identified that in addition to the company, there's often users within a business who love your product who are great advocates. So we want to give them a voice, we want to make them raving fans. So in addition to the company or the customer that might be a reference, we're also trying to encourage individuals to take up the banner. And so we have gamified it. The more they participate, we give them points, they can redeem those points for swag. We give them the opportunity to participate in customer events and conferences and we really want to give them a voice. So yeah, so it's, we've got a multi pronged strategy around building customers for life, of which the voice of the customer is one component that gives us that feedback. But it then it bleeds into other initiatives, should we say. And certainly customer advocacy is something that holy grail, I suppose in terms of referenceability or referrals. And so we're trying to really breathe life into that in a formalized way rather than just hoping it will happen.

Have you started to measure that at all?

But to measure, you know, we've got, in reality we've been crafting the idea and formulated it over the last six months. We started launching it more formally in the last two or three months. Check back with me in a year and I'll let you know.

Adam, I think it's really interesting, by the way, I don't think you're right. I think many companies struggle to measure it. We're not very good at measuring it perfectly either. But I think that we have somewhere between 15 and 20% of our business comes to us through referrals. So for us it's a huge thing. And I think this is really, this is the goal. I think if you are really a net promoter activated company that you can really start to make it that two way dialogue and say, well, what can we do to help you? Recommend us?

Yeah, totally. And we want to make it a two way street. You know, it's obviously we want people to advocate for us, but we're also happy to provide a platform that, you know, maybe highlights somebody and advances their career or helps them drive, you know, better outcomes for their customers. You know, we're in the customer game. And so it's not just, you know, we want to customers advocate for us. We want them to recognize the power of, you know, generating customers for life.

So let's try and close, Chris. But if you got three tips for people who might be starting this journey in the SaaS business for taking the customer experience.

Three tips. I have one tip that I was thinking of, but I'll repeat it three times. I think the tips I would say is the first one I would think of is persevere. So, so and recognize you're on a journey. So you'll send out the first survey and you may not get the responses you'd like or the response level you want to achieve. But, you know, what we've seen and demonstrated is that if you persevere with it, if you put energy into it, it does reap reward. It's a bit like climbing a mountain. You have to take serious steps, but you do climb and you do get rewarded at the end. So biggest tip I could say across the board, Adam, is persevere. The second one I think would be absolutely make sure it's a program that's understood throughout the whole organization. I think you mentioned before, Adam, sometimes the weight of it is carried by the customer success team. And one thing we recognize is that customer feedback is everybody's game, not just customer success. So irrespective of the team. And I think the third thing I would say is back to the customers. Close the loop quickly. If somebody gives you feedback, respond rapidly. Can't tell you how, you know, what a difference that's made. Both as a recipient myself when I filled in surveys, but also as an organization seeing the response from customers. So I guess those would be my three tips for you, Adam.

That is great. I'm writing those down. Chris, thank you so much for your tips and tricks and the story of your customer experience in SugarCRM. I've really learned a lot today. It's been a real pleasure to have you on board. Thanks a lot. And we look forward to hearing more from your program. Hey, Dave, how about that? Chris was really open about his program, wasn't he?

I'll tell you what, CRM is an interesting place.

I think so. Yeah. We've got a few CRM clients. It's really interesting to see that. You know, I love the fact that CRMs are now beginning to embrace the idea of bringing the customer experience into the software. Yeah.

I just love that it was also everyone's responsibility. It was. It's not just something that CSMs or account managers have to have to deal with these kind of comments or feedbacks finance are getting involved in closing the loop product teams closing the loop. I'll be sure to speak with our CFO tomorrow to make sure he starts closing the loop with our customers as well.

I really like the thing how transparent Chris was. And really that score of 90, I'm really, I'm going to get Chris to write about that because I'm convinced it's right because we can also, you know, help him audit that. But that is really impressive, the support as well.

So that's a score of 90 from people that have dialed into complaint.

Well, we know all about that. It's really hard. I think a couple of things about reflect his tips about, you know, persevering and just making sure that the program's understood. And what was the last one?

I think I'm just really, I mean, really interested to see how they get along with, you know, actually monetizing and measuring. They're promoters to say, you know, it's all very well. Someone saying I will recommend. Okay, have you recommended can we measure this? How much money are we making from this?

I think that's great. Let's follow up with Chris in six months and see how he's doing. Hey, Dave, thank you so much for being on the podcast today.

Thank you as always.

I know you struggle with a bit of a cold over there and catch me soon on our next guest is going to be from Rent a Kiln. So I'm really interested.