3 Secrets to Unlocking Revenue Through Customer Trust with GuideCX Founder and CEO Peter Ord

for joining us. Time is of the essence. I have a ton of material. This is a topic I'm super passionate about. But first and foremost, let me introduce myself. As Caitlin mentioned, founder and CEO of GuideCX. I started this company a little under 4 years ago. Father of 4 girls, so wish me luck. I'm still in the honeymoon stage. None are in their teenage years yet, but I just absolutely love being a girl dad. And I have a phenomenal wife. If any of you are thinking of starting a company, just know that having the right spouse is priority number one, and she definitely is. I've been working in SaaS for 20 years. They say the best products in the world are built off the founder's greatest frustrations, and that's definitely the case with GuideCX. Today we're here to talk about trust and how that accelerates revenue. I think in a market where products are becoming more and more commoditized, trust is becoming the most important currency with our customers. And so what does trust mean? Well, trust is essentially words, actions, emotions, and motives. We use these emotions and actions and words and motives to increase our our credibility to improve customer experience, but what does that really mean, right? Credibility, to me, that means, is the person qualified that I'm dealing with? Reliability, do they say what they, do they do what they say? Safety, do I feel safe opening up to them? Do you give your customers an avenue to give you feedback in a frictionless way? Focus, are they focused on their interests? Or my interests? You know, are they really focused on the win-win, or do they just want to do their job and they don't really care about what my customer experience looks like? And so there's not a more important time in our, in our lifespan where, where trust is, is more important. 80% of a company's future profits come from 20% of its, of its existing customers. That's a quote that's given by Gartner. They go on to say that customer retention is mission critical for successful growth. But what does that really mean, right? That people want to work with you and your company again if they trust you. Anxiety levels are reduced. Every department benefits from a happier customer when customers trust you. They don't question motives. And so Now the question becomes, if trust is the most important currency to your customer relationships, then how do you accelerate it? Well, one of my favorite examples in the space is a company called FedEx. I think you all understand and know that company. They entered a market back in the 1970s where there was essentially a monopoly, right? USPS owned the market. Frederick Wallis knew something that USPS didn't, and he entered that market knowing that he could conquer it because he understood that the information about the package is as important as the package itself. FedEx tapped into something that consumers were longing to, quote unquote, know. They wanted visibility into where their package was, into the things they bought. They saw their package as theirs, the consumers did, And FedEx understood that. They understood that consumers, when they purchase something, that they felt an ownership. And so FedEx had a stewardship to tell the consumer where their package was at all points during the process. And so I understand this to see that Frederick Wallace understood that customer experience was the primary differentiator. And that's why they became the first USA unicorn. And to me, when you boil down that process and when you look at all the other great examples in our industry of companies that offer great customer experiences, they care about speed and optimizing speed. They care about transparency, keeping customers on the same page, and they care about engagement, making customers a part of the process. The best companies in the world obsess over delivering their products and services quicker, more predictably, and that's because they want to be chosen over the alternative. And so when you look at the business-to-consumer landscape, there's some great examples of— I call them visibility rock stars. I had an interesting experience with DoorDash, which, by the way, congratulations on their IPO today. I saw an interview on CNBC with Tony this morning, and Just absolutely, you know, amazing story if you haven't listened to the How I Built This podcast with him and Guy Raz. But about a week ago, I ordered food on DoorDash, and, you know, the restaurant I ordered from was only about 10 minutes away, and my food was 30 minutes late. Now, if I wouldn't have had the visibility into where the driver was, what was happening with my food, I would have blew a lid. Now, typically I don't have a temper. I don't like to say I have a temper. Now, if you hurt one of my girls, one of my daughters, but maybe that'll come out, but I'm usually a pretty even-keeled guy. But 30 minutes late. Now, if I didn't have access to that app and understand that there is traffic, that, you know, DoorDash's app notified me that there was traffic and that's why the driver was late, that's why my food was cold. When the driver got here, I would have been less than impressed. I would have actually gone the extra mile and told my friends how horrible the experience was. I would have told them not to order from DoorDash because, you know, no one likes cold food. But DoorDash told me that there was traffic. They gave me insight. They gave me perspective. And that's why I continue to use DoorDash, right? Because I have visibility into the process. Now, I kind of moved this to the B2C space. How many times do we, or B2B space, how many times do we notify our customers when we're delivering our products and services that oftentimes can't be tracked 'cause they're not physical? How many times do we tell our customers that there's traffic, or do we help them understand and help them see into the process and know that, hey, it's because of this, this, and this that why we're late. Lots of times customers just want to be in the know. And even though I had a less than ideal experience with DoorDash, I still trust the company. Now, I can say that with Amazon. I could say that with FedEx, with pizza. I know when to leave my house, when my pizza is about ready to come out of the oven. And, you know, I get to the Pizza Hut right when the pizza is hot. I don't blow up Jeff Bezos because my package is late, because he tells me it's late. You know, the best companies in the world make it easy for me to do business with them, and I don't have to call them to get information. Now, when you— that's business to consumer. A lot of us have had customer experiences like that. And by the way, Harris Clark on our team, he's on chat right now, uh, feel free to chat in, and I'd be interested to know what businesses you've dealt with where you've had phenomenal customer experiences, uh, and, and if you have any questions along the way, he'll be on, on chat as well. Jumping into the B2B space, business to business. When you look at that, you know, basic average customer lifecycle, you know, we sell a product, good or service. Oftentimes there's a handoff where we're responsible to engage with the customer, set up the application, maybe there's a technical setup process, and then there's an account management experience. Now, I term the handoff process as the danger zone. I think this is where a lot of companies struggle to, you know, deliver the world, if you will. Oftentimes there's the common comment of, I sold the world but I delivered Delaware. No, no offense to anyone that lives in Delaware, but, uh, just a— just analogy for you. Uh, what are you doing in this danger zone to make your process transparent enough so your customer can see when there's traffic and they don't automatically assume the worst? This is what most people's danger zone looks like. It's a bunch of spreadsheets sent to the customer. It's an email with a litany of attachments. And oftentimes we win or lose the trust of the customer within our first few interactions with them. So handoffs can, can decrease transparency without the right tools. So look at DoorDash and how they invested to create an elegant customer experience. They invested millions of dollars to ensure this end-to-end process was seamless. Focus on investing dollars and money and getting the right tech stack in order, in order to improve that process, right? This handoff zone can be your differentiator. It can be the— I like to term it as the most important segment of the customer lifecycle. You win the renewal of the customer during this segment. So let's talk about modern kind of business-to-business handoff experience. So transparency increases trust and reduces anxiety. Think about that. I don't blow up Jeff Bezos, like I said earlier, because he tells me that my package was sent to California before it got into to my home state of Utah. It got rerouted by accident. I still trust the process. I still have insight. My anxiety levels are still low. But if I heard nothing, I would panic. And so transparency can eliminate those where are we at phone calls. It can eliminate your customers automatically assuming the absolute worst in you. And it'll substantially improve your customer experience, even if there are hiccups, even if there are speed bumps. So that's, that's number 1, engagement. Now, I realize there's a lot of text on this slide. We're short on time. And so know that you'll have access to this slide after this, after this presentation. But there's one statistic I want to focus on here. Now, this is real data from our own application. So we offer a transparent customer-facing portal that B2B companies use in order to help them track their products, goods, and services. With their customers. And one of the startling statistics that we've noticed in our data is when there's 5 individuals on the client side involved in a project, 91% of the time projects come on schedule, come in on schedule. Now, there's a lot of reasons for that. One of the reasons is when there's multiple people involved in the project experience, people aren't just accountable, accountable to their manager. People are accountable to their peers. People are accountable to their customers. And what that means for the project manager is they don't have to be the policeman. Right? Transparency is the ultimate policeman. Transparency lets everyone know that, hey, there's traffic in the data implementation process. And that's why we're late. Right? And so transparency gives understanding, right? It communicates a clear vision and keeps people up to date. It empowers your team to help and connect with your customers. So what's the impact? There's a good and there's a bad to this improving trust during this customer experience process. If you don't improve trust, and you don't, you know, focus on transparency, speed, and engagement, well, I like to say a bad implementation in this danger zone part of the customer experience is like an awkward haircut. It's hard to fix and impossible to get over. It takes a long time to win that trust back, even if you can win it back. So just like I said, the, the renewal is won or lost in the first 30 days of the customer experience. So focus on just optimizing that, making it frictionless, uh, engaging with the customer, offering a transparent experience. And, and what's going to happen is you're going to see reduced customer anxiety, you're going to see increased trust levels, you're going to be able to recognize revenue faster if you're recognizing revenue upon go-live. Of your product or service. Your churn is gonna be decreased. I mean, there's just so many positives here that create an exponential effect for your business in a positive way. So key takeaways. How do you unlock the revenue through customer trust by investing in your danger zone? Well, we talked about doing things quickly and predictably. Productize your experience. Make it so you can measure and optimize. People will want to work with you and your company again. Number 2, be transparent. Transparency increases trust and reduces anxiety. Number 3, be easy to work with. When you're easy to do business with, every department benefits from a happier customer. I would say, I would say it is absolutely draining to deal with customers we do not like, or the customers where they do not like us. It sucks the motivation, the energy levels, the efficiency out of any organization. It's a lot easier to like someone and admire them than it is to hate them and despise them. So if you want to get in touch with GuideCX or me, we can answer all your questions through and helping you hack this trust equation through better, better implementations, better onboarding process, better technical setup processes. My contact information is listed right here. I'm very active on LinkedIn as well. Feel free to @mention me on social media. We are just elated to be a part of the SaaS-ter experience. We invite you to be in our lounge, and we can get even in even more detailed conversations there. But if you have any quick questions, I invite you to use the chat. And I'm actually going to turn the time over to Harris to kind of notify me of any questions that might exist that are out there. And as you ask your questions, it'd be also interesting to know what state you guys are calling in from.

Right, we do have a few rolling in here, a bunch. So let me, let me sift through them. I tried to grab a few here. Thanks, thanks for that, Pete. So one question that came in, in a couple different ways, but I think to summarize it, how do you balance transparency and control in the process, right? I guess reading between the lines here, obviously you want to control the implementation process that you're giving, you know, how do you give the right level of transparency so you still feel like you have control?

Yeah, I'll compare it to a restaurant. You know, when I go— there's a restaurant here out in Utah, Café Rio. I stand in line, I see my food being prepared in front of me. Because I see that food, I'm going down kind of this assembly line of, do I want black beans or pinto? Do I want, you know, steak, chicken, or pork? Do I want— I see them preparing it, and that makes me trust the process even more. So I feel like our first reaction is to, you know, hide everything, right? That we don't want our customers to see us cooking. We don't want them tasting the food before it's prepared. And that, that is a business-to-business question. I fall on the, the spectrum of the more transparent you are, the more trust you can build with your customer, and the faster you can build that trust level with your customer. But the right tech stack is going to allow you to hide things you want to hide, to show things you want to show, and control the level of transparency that you want to offer to your customers during this most important critical part of the customer lifecycle, which is the implementation effort.

Yeah. Um, another question that came in is, uh, how do you, how do you create, uh, you talked about transparency and predictability. So, so how do you create that predictability and transparency when you have complexity on your side?

Yeah, so complexity is interesting. It oftentimes hampers your ability to do things faster. And the best companies in the world— I mentioned in my presentation briefly— but they productize their implementation experience. They make it as repetitive as possible. Now, not all companies can do this, but there are some portions of your process that you can always make repetitive. And when you make things repetitive, they become predictable. And, and they become measurable. And when they become measurable, you can optimize them. You cannot measure things, you cannot optimize things that cannot be measured. And so focus on, on— I mean, if you look at your process today, uh, think about what all customers have in common and identify the milestones during your process that can be the same. And once you do that, now you can measure the number of days each milestone takes. And if you have the right tech stack, speaking from our own standpoint, GuideCX, I can see, hey, across 200 implementations, when I tell the customer to do this and I enable them to self-serve through the process, they tell me they're confused just simply by saying they're stuck 66% of the time. So that means there's a bottleneck right there, and I need to look at that deliverable, that, that task, and identify how can I make that more simple. Do I need to break that into 3 tasks, into 1 task? Do I need to take that on the, on the my side? How do I hold the customer's hand a little better than I'm doing today?

Um, yeah, you brought up a great point about just investing in that, in, you know, kind of making something complex simple, like, like that delivery experience. Um, Dane reached out at you with a personal question. We'll take a little detour here, asking what was it like mentally to step into solving such a big problem like this, you know, coming from your past experience and then starting this business? What struggles did you have, you know, kind of transforming into the kind of person that could handle solving a big problem like this?

Uh, well, maybe I'll invite Dane into the lounge, uh, because that's a big problem, but I'll— or big question, I'll try to answer it in just 30 seconds here. When you're passionate about a solution, that means you've experienced the pain of that problem before. I can't— in my last career, we sold automotive CRM into car dealerships, and I can't tell you the number of times I got on the phone with a dealership owner and been MF'd because we were late on our implementation, and When we took a step back, 95% of the time it wasn't our fault, right? Their website provider didn't send us an inventory feed. Their internet manager didn't model out their process correctly. Um, there was just tons of moving parts in our implementation experience. And we had no elegant way to tell the dealership that, hey, these are— this was where the traffic was during the process. Uh, these are the individuals that kept us from being in on time. I, I If I was the bad guy, then automatically all their employees hated me. I wanted to create, you know, a scoreboard view to tell— give everyone transparency into who's responsible for what, and if everyone does their part, when are we going to get the product, good or service, that was purchased. So I can elaborate a lot more on that. And then feel free to email me too. I love— yeah, I love entrepreneurship, and I'm a firm believer that us entrepreneurs all have to stick together and help each other out.

All right, there are a bunch more flooding in, but to that point, I just want to remind everyone about the lounge. We'll be there from 10 AM Pacific to 2 PM Pacific. Okay, so I think we have time for a few more here. Another question is more specific to GuideCX software. Seems like it's a bit of a paradigm shift. What's the top resistance that you've seen when it comes to implementing GuideCX?

Yeah, I, so I'll give a quick example. Uh, one of our customers that caters to the health tech space, they have 180 checklist items that they need to complete in order to get their customers live. When we launched them on our product, they were used to doing all 180 things on their own side, right, and tracking them and What was happening is if there was an individual that was assigned one of the checklist items that was on vacation, everything paused and things just stopped because they were dependent on their people knowing and remembering to say, hey, when I'm done with this, I gotta notify Jody to do this. Now fast forward, you know, 6 months later, there's a paradigm shift that happens— often happens with our customers, and this happened with this health tech company. Where now out of those 180 checklist items, over 100 of them are now on the customer side. They threw over the fence because they figured out that their customers want to self-serve, and they do self-serve. And the result of that is a happier customer, a faster implementation, and a better engaged customer for the life— for the, for the long-term life cycle of the customer. So to answer your question, kind of recapping, customers often just try to duplicate their own process, all the things they're used to doing on their own, and then they figure out really fast that, hey, there's over half my process I could probably pass over the fence because of the tech platform that I now have that optimizes that ability to enable self-serve on my customer side.

Reading through some of these other ones, we got to give a shout out to Angie, who's in Sydney, Australia. It's 3:00 AM her time.

Cheers, cheers, Angie.

Pete, you actually lived in Australia for a little while.

I did, yeah, for a couple of months. Love it.

OK, there's another one that came through here. Oh, that's a good one. So we try to provide— Transparency, you know, use some other tools. And we find that often our customers, you know, either don't go to what we set up, you know, don't log into the tool or this or that. And so we still end up getting— you mentioned those where we at calls, you know, what's the recommendation there when you feel like you've set up a transparent system, but you know, you're not getting the engagement with it? That you want?

Yeah, one, I just focus on making it as frictionless as possible. You said one thing that we try to get our customers to log in. I think that's step one. It should be loginless. Our application doesn't require login. You should communicate to the customer on their preferred medium of communication, whether that be email, whether that be through a web portal that has a custom link. I don't have to log in to see where my package is at with Amazon. I just click on a tracking code and I see and I have insight right away. So I think that would be the low-hanging fruit. And there's other things, you know, creating a white-labeled experience so they aren't confused when they see— like, if I log in and I see another generic project management platform brand, automatically I as a customer, I think, well, I thought I bought this, but now I'm being invited to this product. So Creating a white-labeled experience. All the emails that, you know, send automatically out of your tech stack should be whitelisted to your own domain. Don't, don't confuse them with a hello@genericprojectmanagementtool.com. Visibility settings, if you want to be super basic with them, don't, don't, don't confuse them with the clutter, right? Show them the 10,000-foot view. In our application, there's tons of tons of settings that help you define visibility layer by customer and by user. So once again, I get super passionate about this, so we can take that conversation into the lounge too, and I'll also love to share some examples. Yeah, let's do it.

Let's head to the lounge. Thank you everyone. Sorry for the questions that we missed, but yeah, let's head over into the lounge and Yeah, thanks a lot for your time and for being up early in the morning with us here.

Yeah, Angie, great job. 3 AM, you get a big award. Send us your address and we'd love to send you some swag for being on the call. Thanks. Thank you everyone for being on the call. Appreciate it. We'll see you in the lounge. Have a good one.

Bye.