3 CEO Lessons in Scaling Enterprise CX with HubSpot's CEO and first Chief Customer Officer

Well, hello everyone. Welcome to 3 Lessons in Scaling Enterprise CX. And as you could see by that promo video, we are going to have a great conversation with Yamini Rangan, who is Chief Customer Officer of HubSpot. I'm your host, Ginger Conlon, Director of Thought Leadership at Genesys. So glad you're all here and welcome, Yamini.

Thank you so much, Ginger. It's a pleasure to connect with you again, and I'm looking forward to this conversation. All this love, and I think this is going to be great. Thank you for having me.

Absolutely, absolutely. So glad you're here. And I think, you know, let's just, let's just dive right into the first question, which is tell us about your role. Tell us, you're the first Chief Customer Officer that HubSpot has had. That's, that's an awesome opportunity. Tell us what, what you do on a day-to-day basis.

Oh yeah, absolutely. Uh, you know, just to step back, I think, uh, HubSpot is a CRM company, and we really focus on helping a lot of small, medium businesses grow better, as you just saw. And a few years ago, you know, we really looked at our ability to shape the customer's growth. And you have the funnel where you start with, you know, marketing and leads, and then you win, you know, customers versus what we think is the right way to Do business, which is around the flywheel. Put the customer at the center and you do everything possible to attract those customers, to engage those customers and delight those customers. And if you do, the flywheel spins. So that's kind of the premise of how we think about helping customers grow. And therefore we wanted to organize ourselves in that same way. So part of my role and the impetus for having a Chief Customer Officer at HubSpot thought was to bring together marketing, sales, customer success, and put all of these customer-facing teams around the vision of serving our customers and delivering delightful experience. So my job is really to enable our teams to think about delightful experiences at scale. And it's a fun job.

Love it. I, I love that. I think with the way that marketing, sales, and customer success are, the lines are being blurred across those disciplines today. A role like yours is so important and it's so strategic. And I just, when we met last time, we talked a little bit about one of the things that you said that I really loved was that making customer experience important to others is how you make your role more strategic. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Yeah, you know, think about, think about regular customer experience and how companies look at it. In B2C world, this just happens naturally. In, in business to consumers, you're meeting customers, you're interacting with customers on a day-to-day basis. They maybe walk into your store, they walk into your shop, and you understand their emotions. In Business to businesses, that doesn't quite happen. And so, you know, what I think of in my role is how do I keep that customer and the customer's experience front and center to everyone within the organization? And that's what we have like attempted to do. And it really comes down to how you set up the culture, how you enable the practices, and how you enable the disciplines of customer experience.

Absolutely. Well, I definitely want to dive into all of those areas. But first, let's just kind of take a look back at the past 15 months. I mean, as we all know, things have changed dramatically. Can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing in terms of how they've changed that impacts the customer experience?

Oh, absolutely, Ginger. I think the last 15 months, we've seen some profound transformations. In the way we work, in the way we live, in the way we think. And in fact, I think that the last 15 months is going to have just a huge impact in terms of human behavior, right? Think about our personal lives, the way we do grocery shopping, the way we actually access healthcare, the way we watch movies. All of this has changed. And, you know, I look at my personal life, I'm not going back to you know, go to a grocery store to actually step into a store. So it's completely changed the behavior. The same thing, that same profound transformation has actually happened in businesses as well. There is no more marketing, you know, in an event. It's all digital marketing. There's no more outbound sales. It's all digital sales. And there's no more customer experience that happens in multiple places. It's very digital. And so we've seen a kind of transformation and acceleration of customer experience being at the forefront of all of this. And our customers certainly think about this as digital first, not just being digital ready.

Yeah, that's such an interesting point of digital first versus digital ready because people People are definitely at different stages of maturity. So what does that look like long-term for you? What do you think will continue to change in the future?

Well, I think as we think about it, let's actually step back. Before we think about what does it change in the future, you also have to think about why are we where we are right now? We've certainly seen digital first, and we've certainly seen customer experience become really important. But I'd say that we were already prepping for it. And if I really take a step back and go back to the beginning of the 20th century, I think we've kind of gone through 4 ages, Ginger. The first age, beginning of the 20th century, was age of manufacturing. Think about back then, like, you know, the core competency was designing, was building, was manufacturing something. And companies who were really good at that, you know, were the kings at that time, kings and queens at that time. Then came the age of distribution, and was not a surprise that the next thing was age of distribution because globalization happened, and companies and countries gotten flattened, and supply chains gotten— got very flat. And therefore, the age of distribution brought in the core competency of dealing with your supply chain and being able to distribute. Then I would say in the '90s, we got to the age of information. And again, it's not a surprise that we got to the age of information because internet just started, and organizing, searching for content, and being able to access content and deliver content were the core competencies of the age, and the winners had those core competencies. So the reason I kind of walk through that is right now we are in the age of the customer. And in fact, it's been happening for the last 10 years. And what we saw in the last 15 months just accelerated that age of customer. And why is that important? The shift that has fundamentally taken place in the last 10 years is that buyers have much more power than sellers. Buyers have much more access to information than sellers. And I think about the transformation that's happened, like in 1997, I bought my first car. And Ginger, you can imagine what that was like to buy my first car back then. That was my first car. I had no idea how, you know, to buy a car, but I knew that most of my friends warned me that going into a car dealership is like pretty painful. So I did. I set aside a weekend, went to 3 different dealers, and didn't know what I was getting, but I kind of felt like, you know, I was getting scammed. And I walked out with a car which promptly in 2 years failed. So that was my first car buying experience. Come to how you buy cars right now, you as the buyer, you have access to all the information. You can look at makes, models, price, dealers. You can look at the ratings of all of those folks. And what does that do? When you walk into a dealership, you actually have way more information than who is at the dealership. And in fact, if you choose not to, you don't even need to go to a dealership. Carvana and like companies will ship you a car, have you test drive it, and send it back. That's the example of the transformation that has happened in the age of customer. And so, you know, where does this take us? In the future, companies that can actually master delivering that customer experience, they will win. That needs to become the core competencies as you think about how you compete in your industry in the next 10 to 20 years.

Yeah, yeah. So let's, let's dive a little bit more into that in terms of what you were saying before, and digital first, and how that's accelerated so much. What do you see in terms of, of, um, you know, the implications for the future of the customer experience?

That's a great question. You know, before we actually get to that, like, what is customer experience? You know, let's actually define customer experience. To me, customer experience is every interaction and the perception of that interaction that your customer has. It's not just, you know, customer support. It's not just one interaction. It's your website. It's the interaction your customer has with your product. It is the interaction that your customer has walking into a conference or actually going to a digital conference like this one, or with your support. So that is what customer experience actually means. And the implication is that as organizations, you gotta think about the core competencies. How do you actually deliver that type of a customer experience? That needs to be front and center in how you think about go-to-market and scaling go-to-market functions within the organization.

Yeah, I love the scaling part. And I know we're gonna talk a little bit about that as we go through this conversation. I just, I love the fact that, you know, that you're talking about how the customer experience is, is so broad, because a lot of people get caught up in it being, you know, the customer service channel or the marketing channel in terms of like the touchpoints. But it's so integrated. And I think that comes back to why it's so important for your role, the way your role is set up, and how strategic it is pulling all these pieces together. So, you know, talk a little bit more about the aspiration of delivering delightful customer experiences as the main part of your role and how that kind of gets out into your full organization.

Yeah, I mean, again, great question. This is the kind of what we spend days, weekends, nights thinking about, right? As I said, our definition of customer experience is the broadest sense. It's not just customer support, it's not just sales, it's the broader sense of every interaction your customer has with your company, and both from a product as well as people perspective. And the word delight is actually joy, right? Delight in the purest sense is joy. It's a smile that, you know, you get when you, you know, have that type of an interaction. A lot of times it is most more so in the consumer area not as much in the B2B space. And so for HubSpot, our focus is really helping millions of customers grow, and the way we do that is by delivering these kinds of delightful customer experiences. The way we think about that is it's part culture as well as discipline, and there is an art and a science to it, and happy to get into it, but that's how we define it.

Yeah, you know, I've had my own interactions with HubSpot over the years. And so, for example, I attended a HubSpot customer conference a few years back, and what really stood out to me, to your point about, you know, business and the business-to-business customer experience in some ways being different from, from business-to-consumer and the opportunities that you have It was such, um, like a human interaction, right? It's a customer— it's a business conference, but the layout was set up for people to really have fun and interact and learn from each other. And there were like fun things to do. There were sessions about personal growth that could support your business growth. It really struck me because so many conferences or, you know, here's some strategy stuff, here's a bunch of technology stuff, and, and good luck. This was like, you're a person and you need your, your strategy and your technology, but here's some stuff for you. Here's some stuff that's going to help you grow and help your business grow that we just, you know, we want to be generous and give you this extra information. And I really, I thought that was so important and, you know, valuable to the attendees.

I love— first of all, I love that you went to inbound, and I'm so glad that you had that experience. But, uh, you know, one of the reasons we can do that is how we orient the company and, you know, how we orient HubSpot. Certainly we start with solving for the customer. That's the big thing. But more importantly, that humanness that you talked about, it comes from setting and establishing some first principles. And for us One of those first principles is actually about that human who is the customer. And the first principle is build careers, not software. You know, we're in the business of, you know, producing software, right? But that's not what we care about. That's not what we orient the company. What we say is build careers, not just software. And when we do that, it orients our people to think about Whose career should we care about? The marketeer, the salesperson, the person that comes into inbound and wants to have an experience of growth. That's the person that we care about. And when we orient the company that way, then every interaction, every customer experience, you know, really brings that human factor to it.

Yeah, I love that. You know, one of the things that you had mentioned is that, you know, for you, delight is having a human element behind every engagement. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Yeah, I mean, think about the moments that you were delighted. What was the last time that you were actually delighted by any experience, Ginger?

Oh, actually kind of recently. There's some local businesses here that really go out of their way to create a delightful experience. You know, just to, to like welcome you and make you feel comfortable and make you feel like you're— some of the local restaurants make you feel like you're transported to somewhere else. So I'm lucky that I've had some really good experiences lately.

That's exactly right. So you know it, right? And I'll recall a recent delightful experience for me personally. During, you know, this pandemic, I actually ended up adopting two cats. And my kids wanted dogs. I didn't want to take care of the dogs, so we adopted cats, which I'm so happy. Now, the first thing that we did is like we ended up buying a whole bunch of food, and I ordered it through Chewy, this company. So Chewy actually sends me this 20-pound bag. My cats are so finicky, after one week they don't like it. So I'm calling them and I'm like, hey, I have a problem. I have this 20-pound bag, it's barely used, and now my cats don't like it. And immediately the response was Don't worry about it. Donate that food hopefully to some other friend that has cats and we'll send you two other foods that your cat can try. I literally almost was so delighted that I was about to cry because I'm like, I'm trying to do so many things and this was a delight moment. What does it do? Now I'm talking about Chewy and my experience and two, I donated the food to a friend that had cats and It was helpful. That is what a delightful moment is. It's the humanness. It's the way you treat customers. And so you take that in a B2B setting, and you take that from the perspective of a company that's trying to do that. We think about the human at the other end, especially in the last 15 months during the pandemic. At the beginning of the pandemic, we knew that we had to treat our customers with empathy and with that humanness. So in about 5 days, we made a whole bunch of company-defining changes. One of those changes was we created a huge pool for customer relief, and we gave one principle to all of our frontline teams, which is use good judgment for that huge customer relief fund. Now, we could have come up with rules, policies, guidance to really help with the discount, but we actually gave one simple policy, which is use good judgment. We said, help customers that need, you know, help during pandemic and show them that you care and that you actually empathize with where they are. And the stories that we got from the field, the stories that we got from our customers, the stories that we heard from our frontline were just incredibly moving. So that is the humanness behind a customer experience and delightful policy. And so one of the best learnings that I've had in the last 15 months has, especially in the area of customer experience, is like, treat people as humans. And you don't need to come up with policies, you don't need to come up with guidebooks and rules for how you engage with customers, but give solid first principles that your teams can go and execute.

I think that's so important because not only are you delivering a great customer experience, but you're creating a great employee experience as well, because you are showing a vote of confidence in your employees. Hopefully you've, you've trained them and then you, you say, okay, we, we think you're going to have good judgment, so go out, go out and use it.

Exactly, you got it.

Um, you— one of the things that you were talking about before about, um, really taking care of your customers in terms of who is that person and what role they have is One of the other things that, that HubSpot is known for in that regard is all of the free training content. Like, I've had— I've gone to marketing events, like local marketing events, and had someone say to someone else, oh, if you want to learn more about this, you should go— HubSpot has courses on their website. And, you know, that's— I think that's hugely valuable It's, it's not just courses about how to use HubSpot materials. It's courses, again, like the conference, to help them grow their career and their business. And so you're supporting your customers in multiple ways. Absolutely.

That's the whole concept of where— how we got started. You know, the concept of how we got started is that, you know, there was marketing and you typically see marketing is a phone call interrupting your dinner, you know, some email interrupting your train of thought or focused work. And we wanted to flip that and say, how do you add value before you actually, you know, ask for business, right? Like how do you fundamentally provide value for the customers that you begin to serve? And one of the first principles for that was, you know, the academy and the content and the training and the education. We wanna be, in the business of building careers, and the best way to do that is by providing the educational content necessary and providing the inspiration of how to get there. And so what you're hitting is really, again, a first principle, not tenet, for how HubSpot thinks about delivering great customer experiences.

So now, speaking about customers again, now you have achieved a milestone of 100,000 customers earlier this year. So we're here to talk about scaling CX. So that's, that's a milestone. You know, what is your approach to delivering that great customer experience that people can look at that scaled with your growth?

Yeah, that's a phenomenal question. And I would say that the way we think about it is there is art and there is science to scaling customer experience. The art part is culture. It's how do you set this culture of customer centricity and customer in thinking. What are the values and what are the practices that you need to embed deeply within the organization so it begins to become part of the DNA of the company? That's the art part. The science part, that is the discipline. It's the rigor. It's the order of operations. And actually, science part can be replicated from company to company to company. And there are parts of that discipline that we've really honed in and thought about in terms of getting to the scale. We can certainly get into both of those aspects.

Yeah, let's, let's talk a little bit more about art first. You know, maybe you can share a little bit of examples of how you get that embedded into your organization.

One of the first things I'll say is that customer centricity is not an initiative. It's not an annual goal. You cannot think of this as like one year I'm going to become customer-centric. It needs to be within the DNA of the company and how you just develop that being within an organization. So the culture and how you think about the values and practices are exceptionally important. From a value perspective, we have one value that you will hear if you go to our company, if you go to a digital event or any kind of, you know, interaction with the company, which is solve for the customer, SFTC. And that is the primary value that we define, you know, almost all of our customer orientation by. And solve for the customer is something that you'll hear as an employee on day 1, you will hear it day 10 in a meeting, you will hear day 100, you'll hear it year 10 in a company. So it doesn't, it doesn't quite go away. And so That's the value that we have. Now, equally important are the practices that support the cultural values. I'll give you a few examples. One of, you know, the practices that we have is we have customers in every key meeting within the organization. So typically, we'll have a quarterly company all-hands meeting. It starts with having a customer interview or a customer panel. We have board meetings every quarter. It starts with having customers embedded and so that our board of directors can hear directly from our customers. We have director plus meetings and those meetings start with customers. And in fact, my favorite meeting of the month, and I know we lived in a world full of meetings, is the customer first meeting that we have every single month. What we do, Ginger, is we bring a panel of customers typically around a difficult issue that they're facing. So this is not a think good, feel good meeting. It's actually a meeting where customers come and talk about a sharp, you know, edge that they're facing with HubSpot. And we all listen. And when I say we all listen, we get the top 40, 50 leaders within the organization across product, across customers, across company, and they all listen to these customers. And then the next part of the meeting is about 45 minutes of debrief with data. So we're combining the quantitative with the qualitative. We combine the human emotional side with the right brain side, and we listen to this and we now come out of those meetings with actionable tasks of how we would improve the customer experience. That's a very tangible way in which you create a practice that supports the culture and the value around solving for the customer.

That's excellent. So many, so many companies ask for input and then it just goes into a black hole.

Exactly right. The worst thing about, you know, asking for feedback is that if you don't actually circle back and share what you have done with that feedback, then it loses complete value, right? So, yeah, don't stop with asking feedback. Make sure that there is a feedback loop around feedback and make sure that you actually go and have very specific action items and tasks around that.

Yeah, yeah. Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, who wrote The One-to-One Future, they call that a learning relationship where you create a virtuous cycle of listening, learning, acting, and keep going versus what they called the goldfish principle, which is just circling around and like it's, it's always something new. It's so— the same thing is just new every time because you never remember it.

I really like that goldfish principle. I like that. I don't want that. Exactly.

Well, let's talk a little bit about the science now and the, the disciplines that make up— make that up for HubSpot.

Yeah, so science is discipline, it's rigor, it's a set of systematic initiatives that you can put in place. And for us, the way we break down science of customer experience is fourfold. First is aligned teams. So when I say aligned teams, and I'm gonna go through the four and I'll talk about all four. It's aligned teams, it's aligned strategy, it's aligned systems, and aligned incentives. So if we start with aligned teams, we started this whole discussion talking about the flywheel orientation at HubSpot. You gotta have the teams that are customer-facing—marketing, sales, customer success, support—all of these teams oriented in the same direction. And so for us, the first step was making sure that we bring all of these teams together and orient them around the customer. Now, I'm not saying that every company needs to do this. You can actually create an organizing function, an organizing group, or a cadence around when these executives and leaders actually need, that's totally fine. The second part of it is aligned strategy. One of the simplest tests that I have when I go into organizations is go to each of these customer-facing functions and ask them what their goal is. And when the goal turns out to be, I'm going to grow leads for marketing, I'm going to close so many deals, or I'm going to drive this metric, then we don't have the right strategy. The strategy does not include the word customer, then we don't have the right strategy. And so for us, the aligned strategy started with defining a winning aspiration across all of these customer-facing teams, which is driving delightful customer experiences at scale. And the second part of that orientation and strategy is to make sure that you provide first principles around customer in, not function out. What happens as companies grow and scale, you begin to fall into silos. You begin to fall into functional silos. That's not really going to help with the customer experience. And therefore, one of the guiding principles you provide is being customer-in. Think about it from the customer's perspective. So any strategy and any content that we actually review, we start with What does the customer experience based on the strategy? And so that orientation is important. The third is aligned systems. You can have the best intentions, you can have the best strategy, but if your systems do not provide the ability to adopt, adapt, and align, then you've missed the picture. And so for us, providing a single view of customer and ensuring that different parts of the customer journey are mapped well from a system perspective is important. Then the last one I'd say is align incentives. This is probably the most important thing. It really comes down to how do you drive the right behaviors across all of the things that you're applying to accomplish and comes from incentives. The simplest example for us is NPS, Net Promoter Score. Now, almost every organization, Ginger, that you talk to will have a Net Promoter Score. But one of the things that we did, which I think works really well, is have the product organization carry the NPS goal, the Net Promoter Score. What does that do? First of all, product organization obsesses about it. Like they care so deeply about NPS. Every week they send out an email about where the NPS is and what we're doing to improve it and where we need to continue to make tweaks. The second is that if it's not going the right direction, They're already on it. They're already looking at initiatives and improvements that they can make to the customer experience. And so not only the metric that you choose, but where you place that metric to align the incentives across teams is just exceptionally important. So those are the four disciplines, and we pay a lot of attention in terms of how we scale with each of those disciplines.

I love that. And I'm, I'm so happy. I can't say how happy I am that you have aligned incentives in there. Because, you know, I've been covering— previous to my role at Genesys, I was the editor-in-chief of several different industry publications. And it was a very common topic to have that why can't sales and marketing get along conversation. And the reason, one of the reasons, because there's multiple, but one of the reasons was that their incentives were not aligned. And there are ways to do that without, even though they have different goals and different kinds of goals. And so this is, this is awesome. I love that.

Yeah. I, I'm so glad, you know, without incentives, like human behavior cannot be shaped and it is about that. And I'm so glad it resonates with you.

Yeah, so how do you— how do you— to make sure that the NPS score aligns with the, the product team, do you ask the question in a specific way versus just, would you recommend HubSpot to, you know, a colleague? Like, is there a different way that you frame it, or—

so it starts with that question. NPS process is pretty simple, you know. Are you a promoter, are you passive, or you're a detractor? And that's the highest level. Now, we do break it down by each of the personas that we serve. So we may have a specific question for the sales persona that's leveraging HubSpot versus something else, but those, you know, get to be one level deeper. But the broadest level question for NPS remains the same. Are you going to be a promoter or detractor or passive? And then we kind of figure out why. There's a lot of qualitative aspects of If you are passive, then what would make you a promoter? If you are a detractor, what would make you a passive? And that helps us define the areas where we can continue to improve. Right, that's great.

So, okay, so we've got art and we've got science. Yep. What's the trick for balancing them? Because, you know, they, they should work together, but sometimes they may not.

That is absolutely right. The way we think about it is to not just care about the output, but you care about the input. And what I mean by that is the balance is quite tenuous, right? You can, you can go too far on the rigor side or too far on the culture side, and you've got to make sure that each of the systems that you put in place scales, and that comes down to having the right customer customer in metrics. A lot of times, especially in go-to-market organizations like ours, you start looking at leads, you start looking at deals closed or customers won, and you start looking at number of support tickets. Those again are very much functional. And one of the things that I would encourage people to think about is how do you really pick customer in metrics? You know, how many customers did you acquire this quarter? How are your customers using and activating with your software? How are they continuing to gain value? Do you see that value gain increase over a period of time? And so really kind of formulating a set of questions from a customer perspective and asking those questions of the teams will help you, you know, reach the right balance because then you can, you can see where you are in the journey of providing value to customers and what you need to continue to do.

Excellent. Well, I, what I'd like to do now is just stop sharing for a moment and, um, see what we've got going on in chat, because I know we've got some questions for you. Um, so one question we've got: love the idea of pairing NPS with the product organization. Any other unconventional wisdom about the customer experience that you feel strongly about?

Plenty. I'm glad that you like that. In every organization I would talk to, I would recommend the NPS. The other one I will tell you, this is like from 20 years of being in go-to-market organizations. And many of those 20 years, I've actually gone in and sat in support calls. First of all, if you're an executive key player, spend time with frontlines, right? And in those support calls, I'd sit there, listen, or look at the chat. Most of these support teams, they have, you know, policy books that go into the hundreds of pages. And I would say unconventional wisdom: get rid of all of those. Get rid of all your policy books, the rules, all of that, and build it down into the simplest first principles that you can provide for your customer-facing organization. For us, it's threefold. The first one is solve for the customer. That's the first principle. The second one is customer in versus function out. And the third principle is build careers, not just software. And honestly, you can get rid of all of the policies, the rules, the guidance that you can provide because that dehumanizes the customer on the other side. And that's my unconventional wisdom is just put away all of those and come back to first principles. That's the way to scale from a customer experience perspective.

Yeah, and I love that all three of those are so customer-centric from every different angle. Yep. So let's see what— this is a little long, so I'm going to read this next question. Let's see, how do you balance advocating for features that customers request with the bandwidth that your product team has?

Yeah, fantastic question. I— how do you balance? It really comes down to resources, right? And there's almost no organization that has unlimited resources that you can do every possible thing. I'd say two principles again. The first one is that you've got to have the product organization live and breathe what the customer faces, right? This is how we think about the customer-first meeting. This is how we think about NPS. It's the product organization's lifeblood in terms of serving the customers, and that helps. The second thing I'd say is really think about the higher-order bets that you can make within your organization. Every year, you can't have the organization try to do thousands of things, right? Even though you may have thousands of people within your teams, they gotta pick, and you have to be clear about maybe the top 5 to 7 bets that you're making across product, across go-to-market, across the company. And when you can articulate those higher-order bets, they become the guardrails for the prioritization. So now you have the product organization listen to your customers, but they also can balance that with a set of higher-order priorities for the entire organization. And that helps balance kind of outcomes and where they put their resources to play, right?

Yeah, makes so much sense. So I love this, this, this question: who should best drive this process? Um, you know, and I assume that that she's talking about just balancing the art and science and making all these customer experience things happen. So obviously in your case, it's you, but if someone doesn't have, the company doesn't have a chief customer officer, who owns the show?

I will say I don't own the show. I was pretty lucky in finding an organization that cares about this deeply. And just as I started by saying that, Customer centricity is not an initiative. This whole strategy is not a one-person task. And even if I come into this organization, the first thing that I do is to enroll as many of the key executives into this process as I possibly can. My job would be enrolling teams into the vision, not actually figuring out every single thing that I need to do from an art and the science and discipline perspective to do it. So if you're an executive, think about who you need to enroll in this customer-centric mindset. Go and enroll them. I'd start with product. In our— in my case, I was lucky I have a product organization that deeply cares. Then, you know, think about the folks within the company, whether it is your finance team that delivers certain things or your IT functions that deliver, you know, certain functions. Think about every one of those executives that need to be part of this journey and just go and enroll them within the journey. And then magic happens when you have product and people all aligned around the same thing, then magic happens.

Absolutely. And then everyone owns the customer experience.

Absolutely. Your job is to make sure that it's not just your job to think about customer experience. I love that.

I love that. Well, I've, I've got another question that I wanna throw at you. Any other misconceptions about scaling customer experience that you've come across?

I mean, a lot, you know. I, again, I go back to what is so natural in our consumer world that is not so natural in the business world, right? That is what I'm constantly thinking about. When you, you know, go into a, you know, store like Nordstrom and you get like an exciting exceptional customer experience, you know, what does it take for a business to offer something very similar? You know, what does it take for the first experience of trying your free product to bring delight? You gotta like obsess over it and you gotta think about every one of those interactions, you know, like a product bug, right? You know, think about a product bug when you uncover a product bug, You put a team, you go and fix it. It's the same thing with customer experience. If there is something that doesn't fit within the customer experience, treat that as a bug. Go figure out how you can like deal with that and go and solve it, right? And you know, do things that are unique to your culture, to your company, to your people. There's always, you know, conventional wisdom, and then there is wisdom that works for your company, and you're— you've got to have the judgment and the gut to be able to do things differently. Definitely.

Okay, so you and I are in an elevator. I have just gotten appointed Chief Customer Officer, and I have to figure this thing out and scale it in my company. And we've only got 5 floors. What is your piece of advice that you're going to give me in this elevator ride?

First of all, congratulations, you've landed the best job possible. You're just going to have incredible fun. And second, simplify. Simplify to scale. Do not complicate. Do not come up with rules, but, you know, think about 3 or 4 foundational principles that can simplify decision-making. And then we would get to our fifth floor, and I will see you rise up to become an incredible Chief Customer Officer. I love it because we are going to solve for the customer every time. Exactly. Exactly. SFTC.

Well, Yami, thank you so much. This has been fantastic. So much great advice. Thank you everyone for joining us. Enjoy the rest of the conference and the rest of your day.

Thank you so much. Such a pleasure and a delight talking to you, Ginger. Thanks everybody for listening in and watching. Bye-bye.