How data and technology fuel the customer experience and global expansion with Rivian’s Diane Lye

I don't think miserable people can create great customer experiences. I think people have come today to work every day feeling excited, happy, empowered. I think people need to know that if they've got something else going on in their lives, they need to attend to. It's okay to attend to it because you cannot create great customer experiences from a miserable team. You just can't. Hello and welcome back to Conversations with Zendesk, where we explore new technology and trends in customer experience. Each episode we speak with industry innovators and experts to hear their thoughts, unpack industry trends and discuss the most important ideas around CX. I'm your host, Nicole Sonders. Today's conversation is with Diane Leye, Chief Information Officer at Rivian. Diane holds a pivotal role in steering the technological advancements of the company. She orchestrates the digital transformation of Rivian's operations, driving innovation, ensuring the seamless integration of a technology across the organization. Her strategic vision and extensive expertise play a critical role in enhancing the customer experience, optimizing operations and advancing the development of cutting-edge solutions in the ever-evolving automotive technology landscape. Diane's profound understanding of technology and its integration within businesses is complemented by an impressive background. She is carved in the lustrous path in the tech and finance sectors, with pivotal roles at industry giants like Capital One, Bank of America and Amazon. She earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and her Bachelor of Science from the London School of Economics. I have to say, this conversation with Diane was really fantastic. I was inspired by the way she spoke about Rivian's vision for the future and how her work is heavily driven by her values. She leads with deep integrity and high emotional intelligence and shared some of her biggest lessons in leadership with us. She also told us a story about an excellent customer service experience she had and got into how she is thinking about helping Rivian to scale. Stay tuned for all that and more in this episode of Conversations with Zendask. Ready to take your customer experiences to the next level? Build lasting relationships, the Zendask's complete customer service solution so that you can exceed every customer's expectations. Sign up for a free trial at zendask.com. Diane Lai, welcome to Conversations with Zendask. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. We are so glad to have you. I would love it if you could just share a bit about your journey. You've had a stint at Amazon, you're at City, Bank of America, Capital One. How did you make the journey from those positions to your current role as CIO Rivian? Yes. This is not a career. Have you had been talking to me 20 years ago, 30 years ago? This is not a career I even imagined. I really didn't know very much at the beginning of my career, very much about technology and about technology careers. So, I've been incredibly fortunate. I've had some amazing, not just mentors, but actually advocates and supporters along the way who've been really important to me. I started out at the beginning of my career as a demographer and as a statistician doing a lot of work, analyzing large data sets. My first job after my PhD was in teaching at the University of Washington. I quickly figured out it wasn't for me. They quickly figured out I wasn't for them. It wasn't a good match. I was really very fortunate because that was a time in Seattle, Washington when the tech industry was just exploding and there were many, many different options. I did a bunch of all sorts of different things, but eventually took a job at Amazon. I got to spend that period of my career at Amazon during that period of just tremendous, tremendous growth. When companies are growing very fast, it creates incredible opportunities for learning and for doing new things and trying out new things. I started out doing data analysis and running a small data analysis team. Often being the person who complained that I didn't have the technology I needed and the data wasn't the way I needed it. Eventually, if you complain like that, long enough and loud enough, somebody says to you, "Well, if you think it's so easy, you do it." Literally, I got the chance to be part of what was Amazon's data warehouse team, data and analytics team, and eventually ended up leading that team. That was about the period of time when the very rapid growth of AWS was beginning to take off. I had an opportunity to be part of AWS's infrastructure team and learn about the physical infrastructure that underlies so much of what we do. I moved back to New York and ended up joining City where there were just phenomenally interesting data problems. At that time, the regulators were saying we need much, much more visibility into the activities of the capital markets business at City. It turned out that the data that the regulators wanted was actually the data that they needed to run the business better, to understand their customers better, to understand the nature of their business. I worked with phenomenal people again. I had some wonderful coaches and mentors there. Capital One was just a really exceptional, extraordinary place. It's a very analytically rigorous organization, much like Amazon in that regard. It's a very, very customer-centric organization. The founder of Capital One was often like, "Would you be proud of this if it was for your mother?" That's a really great, very powerful way to think about your products and your customers. I worked on the data and analytics platform for a while moving all of that into AWS. Then I was the CIO for Capital One's credit card business. When somebody called me to ask me about Rivian, I was like, "No, I don't think so. I'm quite happy doing what I'm doing." I tell you, you cannot get in one of our vehicles. You cannot see this product and not think you want to be part of it. This is a really extraordinary company that again is right at the beginning of its growth journey. For much of its history, it's been an R&D company. Now just in the last couple of years has moved into really manufacturing its scale and getting our products out to the public. We're right at the beginning of that. The opportunity here to do something that really is for the world, our atmosphere is being carbonized. The air that we breathe is being destroyed and to have an opportunity in a very small way to do something that changes that is huge for me. You've had just an absolutely amazing career path, a lot of really great experiences at different companies, being in technology, being in banking, but some common threads through all of that, it sounds like you're very attracted to organizations where there's a big alignment of your values. Why is it important to you? Life is short. We have an imperative, I think, to use our time very wisely and to use our time in a way where you're achieving something worthwhile, doing something that matters. I work hard and I work long hours and if I'm going to put that time in, time that I could be spending with my family, time that I could be spending on any number of other activities, it better be for something that's really meaningful for me. That's why being at companies that are really mission driven is extremely important to me and has become more and more important to me. Being values driven is such a satisfying thing and it's such an important thing. You said life is short, you should focus it on places where you feel like you're doing good in the world and where it's meaningful to you. You are really in the first CIO. Why did the company decide to create that role? Was there a tipping point where that became necessary? I don't think there was a tipping point. I think what this is really about is, as I said before, the maturation of the company and the logical evolution from a company where all the focus was on the R&D to develop these absolutely extraordinary products into building the discipline and the rigor that it takes to build one of those products flawlessly, day in, day out, several hundred a day and to deliver them to the customers and provide really extraordinary customer experiences. When you make that shift from being focused on R&D to being focused on large scale manufacturing, large scale customer service, large scale execution across many different disciplines, your financial processes, making sure that you're running the supply chain really effectively. When you start to do all of those different things, I think you start to realize that you need more coordination, you need a clearly defined strategy around your technology. You need to be able to think about what are the technology architectures that you pursue. If you think about technology architectures, these are the decisions that a one-way door was where if you make the wrong decision a couple of years from now, it's going to be really painful to go back and fix it. When you start thinking about scaling in all the ways and all the directions that RIVIAN is scaling, it becomes critical to build out a technology organization where you've got a defined strategy, where you've got leadership, where you're bringing in the right talent and so on. We pulled together teams that were distributed in different parts of the company that already existed and actually already had amazing people in those teams. We pulled those together to create the organization that I now lead so that we could really think about how all these pieces fit together to enable our grows, enable our scale. It makes a ton of sense and it is such an exciting time for the company. It's really neat to see it hitting one of those really big explosive growth points. In that role of CIO, what are your print mayors of focus? What are the big things that you're doing on a daily basis? We are doing a lot of big things. One of the areas of focus for me and it's been a new area for me because I've never worked in manufacturing before and that has just been really tremendously exciting for me to learn about is the technology that runs out factory. If you look on our website, there's a cool video of our factory in normal Illinois and we have an amazing team and incredible employees in normal Illinois that we're very, very proud of but we also have a lot of robots and those robots are run by software. They have to be told what to do and that's self-file. Execute at a very high level of performance, of availability, of reliability, the security of the software is extremely important and so on. That's been a big area of focus through this year and we'll continue to be a big area of focus for us is ensuring that the software that runs the factory is really modern and able to do everything we need. We also have a really challenging complex supply chain. You think about the number of parts that go into a vehicle that supply chain is extraordinarily complex and you have to be thinking about suppliers, not just your immediate supplier but what's going on three, four, five links in the chain back and so that's been another area of focus has been all of the software that manages our supply chain our inventory and so on and then we've been very, very focused on customer experience. We have a direct to consumer model. We would like our customers to be able to go to the website, configure their vehicle and buy their vehicle and make this as seamless as easy as simple as possible and offer customers, hey, here are the vehicles we've got in stock nearby for you and here are the vehicles that you can configure to your exact specification. It's a very complex product for somebody to buy online. There are a lot of choices customers make and there are a lot of ways they want to visualize those choices and understand what they're getting and when they're getting it. So we've been working a ton of customer experience and then a ton on all the things that go along with owning an electric vehicle. People are anxious about charging and even the largest charging networks in the country are still just a tiny fraction compared to the size of our network of gas stations. So that has to change and we have to create the software that enables seamless charging experiences for our customers. My partner was Seam in our vehicle software team. He's very focused on helping customers find where to charge and then there's all the servicing. A lot of our vehicle servicing can actually be handled either remotely via software or we can send out a river in service vehicle to service the vehicle wherever you are at your home. But we still need our service centers and building our software to really optimize that service center experience is again very important for us. I love that you brought up the direct to consumer model because I think that is one of the things that's more unique about Rivi and there's very few places you can just go on and order your car. I actually had a little fun with it. I went on the website and played with it and I was very impressed with the experience. Like you said, it's a complex purchasing decision to go through and look at all of those specs but it was a really seamless one too as I played around. I unfortunately couldn't click by this time around but I was sure tempted to and I also really appreciate what you shared about some of the different opportunities right around how do you help people connect with charging stations and that the customer experience isn't just about that purchasing experience but also the post sales part. There's software updates with these vehicles. How do you maintain them all of those pieces? Are there any key things that you have learned or great examples of how you're using technology to ensure those really great customer experiences? Look, the technology in our vehicles itself is so amazing that our customers, as I say the first time I got in one of those cars I was just blown away. I mean this is the next generation of what it's like to drive. The technology then that's all around it, the purchase process, the process of either picking up or having your vehicle delivered to you, the purchase of seeking service and so on, that has to be equally amazing. And I'll be honest, I think there are still places where we've got a way to go. One of the things we did this last year was we simplified the whole of the process for that actual purchase for the actual transaction. When you think about buying a car, there are all these extra steps involved. It's not just you write a check. Very often people are financing the vehicle and it's not just the payment, right? There's also the question of insurance. There's the question of registration and we had originally envisioned that as sort of this complicated step-by-step pipeline and he had to do the things just in the right order. And what we saw was that quite often our customers got stuck. They didn't have all the bits of paper that they needed to upload at the right time and so on. And so we re-sought that in a much more customer-oriented way, where the customers had a set of tasks, but rather than being like six and one by one, they could organize them in any way they wanted and they had a really material impact on the number of customers who could complete the purchase without needing to call us up and have we have the amazing guides who will help a customer through the process that many more customers were able to complete the process independently without a guide. There are lots of processes in our lives now that we expect to just be able to do ourselves that whatever time of the day or night in whatever location we happen to be, taking away that car purchase experience where you sit at a dealership and you wait around for hours and the bits of paper signing things and they go in the back for half an hour and then the kids start screaming and all of those things like taking all of that away and making this into a very customer-oriented, hey, here's the things you got to do. Do them in the ordinance convenient for you at the time that's convenient for you in the place that's convenient for you. That's the direction that we've been moving in. It's amazing how much complexity there is behind offering a really simple experience for people, isn't it? It's sort of the more streamlined and easy you want to make it on one side, the more refactors you have to think about and balance on the backside of all of that. Absolutely. So we've also talked a bit about how Revean is really growing and I understand that you're starting to expand and look at the global markets. How does that change your perspective, either on the processes that you're doing or the way that you think about your tech stack when you start looking beyond to broader markets and how to coordinate a global workforce behind all of that? This is still for us pretty early days. Our first step into global markets is that we do have some of the Amazon delivery vans in Europe now, which is very exciting. Of course, we have our R1s, our available in Canada. These are our very first little baby steps. Globalisation introduces tons and tons of additional complexity and additional considerations. There are different regulatory requirements in all of those in different locations. Even down to things like the sticker that is produced that goes on the vehicle when you purchase a vehicle, those stickers are different for different locations. We have in our vehicles a set of really advanced capabilities for assisting the driver in terms of all of our ADAS features. Those features all need to be language-localised if we're going to be in foreign countries. So if you just think about the user experience inside the vehicle which is driven by a large touch screen, that all now needs to be in other languages. Then there are many other examples around your financial systems and transactions in different geographies and moving transactions and moving inventory and moving material between different geographies and making sure you're capturing it accurately. There are considerations around security. There are considerations around customer privacy. Different countries have different laws and making sure that your systems are able to meet all of those requirements. Moving into additional markets is a very, very large body of work and it's something that at Rivion we have to be really, really thoughtful about to make sure that we can execute that work in a timely manner to keep up with the business but also in a way that doesn't create additional risk for the company. Absolutely. I know that we were just talking yesterday about some surveys that were done recently through Zendefs of IT leaders and security and data regulations are very top of mind so it's great that you're already looking into all of that. What are the opportunities that you are most excited about in that expansion and growth? What is most inspiring or energising about all of it? I think what's most inspiring and energising is essentially the opportunity to bring the products to additional markets and have a large or impact. I live in New York City and when I look out my window, there are delivery vans parked all up and down the street and most of them are traditional internal combustion engine vehicles and most of them are idling. Their engines are running and they are pumping pollution out into the air and the same would be true if I was sitting in London. There's just this massive massive opportunity to improve air quality in cities with our vans. One of the things that I think is potentially very interesting is the concept of bidirectional charging where the vehicle can actually provide energy to a home during a power outage. And in rural communities, that means instead of a diesel-powered generator. So again, there are lots of opportunities in that space. And I think as we start to think about it, you think about possibilities for the technology that's been created at Rivian, the really go beyond transportation. That's hugely exciting. Oh, I can't wait to hear more about that in the coming years. That is very exciting. So we've talked a lot about the technology side. Let's turn our attention to the human side of your role. Having led tech-centric teams across diverse industries. What are some of the big leadership lessons you've learned that are really crucial in driving technological innovation and adoption? One of the most important things to remember as a leader is that everything you do, every single day, every accomplishment, every system that you're building, every ticket that people are working on, everything that you do depends on the people that you have. And it depends on those people being just as excited and engaged about the product as I am. And so you have to create a workplace where people feel truly valued. You also have to create a team where people feel like there's growth and there's learning opportunities and there's development and that they can have a great career at that place. That means offering people training. It means offering people opportunities like I never worked in manufacturing before. I got that opportunity. I want to make sure that people in my team who have maybe worked on manufacturing systems but have never worked in a customer-facing system, I want to make sure they've got that opportunity. I want to make sure that people working in the financial systems who've maybe never worked in a manufacturing environment, that they've got that opportunity if they want it. A huge amount of leadership is about opportunities and creating opportunities for teams. You have to trust your team and trust that if you create the space for your team, they will come up with amazing solutions every single time. A lot of the role of the leader is like getting out of the way and getting obstacles out of the way so your team can get stuff done. That sounds like an amazing workplace culture and that is so important because you can't create great customer experiences if you're having great employee experiences. Misreduable people can create great customer experiences. I think people need to know that if they've got something else going on in their lives, they need to attend to it. You just can't. Thinking of great customer experiences. Are there any great examples of customer service or customer support experiences that you've had in your life that have inspired you or given you ideas in your current role? Well, the one I am always in awe of is an experience I have with the Disney company. A long time ago now when she was younger my daughter had a Minnie Mouse doll that she absolutely loved. Unfortunately, over time this Minnie Mouse doll got was a ballerina with a pink ballerina skirt and a little crown. Over time the Minnie Mouse doll got very, very worn out and so one day we went to the Disney store to try and get a new Minnie Mouse doll so that the original Minnie Mouse doll would have a sister and they would, you know, she would love the new Minnie Mouse doll. Unfortunately, Disney company had changed to the design of the Minnie Mouse doll. So although we did buy a new one that day, my daughter never loved her and in fact she referred to her as replacement Minnie. Oh no. So I wrote to Disney or I called up Disney. I can't remember which and said, you know, you wouldn't happen to have any of the old ones, would you? They said to me, oh, you know what, we replaced and we made these changes because they didn't wear very well. They wore out really fast and I was like, yep, my daughter's one. We got loved to death very quickly. And then like a year passed, a one day FedEx shows up on the doorstep with another Minnie, with the original Minnie and just a little note saying, hey, when you were looking for this and here's the Minnie. Now I was blown away because someone somewhere had been doing like an inventory check, a clean out and a found and old Minnie and they had been able to connect that to the fact that a customer somewhere else wanted the Minnie. Now that's an amazing thing. That is an extraordinary thing. When you think about both the data that enables that and the systems that enable that, when you think about the empowerment of the people working there who could just like, oh, look, here it is, put it together. So you've got to have a really empowered team. You've got to have really great data and you've got to have a culture that values the customer above or last. All three of those things came together to create a really magical moment. I think that moment when one of our customers gets their vehicle, I want that to be magical. And so everything that happens across a team, all the way from the people assembling the vehicle to the customer experience when they purchase it, the team that delivers the vehicle, that all has to come together to be magical. That is an amazing story. I can't even imagine how all of those dots got connected and how they followed through on that. That's wild, right? It's so impressive. That's really fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing that. Well, as our conversation comes to an end here, I'd love to just ask, what is top of mind for you heading into this next year? Do you have any big goals or objectives that you're really looking to accomplish? Oh, we have huge goals. First of all, in cybersecurity, unfortunately, we're really in a kind of arms race situation where there are bad people out there who are constantly ramping up their efforts and they're getting, unfortunately, they're not just bad, they're smart. And so they're getting smarter and smarter. So we have to continue to really up our game with cybersecurity. And when a supply chain is complex as ours, there are oftentimes smaller companies out there, maybe companies that are a little bit less tech savvy. And so one of the things we have to do is help those companies get good at cybersecurity as well. Cybersecurity is a big focus for us. Another big focus for us is continuing to improve the technology that enables our manufacturing, that enables the production of the factory and that enables our supply chain so that we can get better and better at monitoring and controlling that so that we can take cost out, which is important for our business, so that we can continue to improve the quality of our vehicles. So that's a very, very important body of work for us. We have got a lot of big ideas for how we want to improve our customer experiences across sales and across our service, seeing across the support we provide our customers. So we're really beginning to think about what is the next generation, what is the next step there? Look like. And then my team builds lots and lots of software and technology that is used internally inside Rivian by all of our different Rivian teams. And that's another really important group of customers for us and we need to make sure that we're continuing to improve that technology to make sure that it's always available, that they can do their work when they want to do their work and that the features and the functionality of the technology is really giving them what they need to be as efficient as possible. Like you said, big goals. That's really exciting. Alright, last question, if you could tell people one thing about Rivian, if they'd one take away, one thing that you want them to know about Rivian, what would that be? It would be the word forever. Forever, we get this one planet. We're committed to creating technology, to building vehicles that are for our children's, children's, children and on. This is forever because if we destroy the Earth's atmosphere, it's forever. And so we have to make sure that our planet is the place we can be forever. That's the mission that drives 15,000 Rivianites to come and work very, very hard every single day. And that's the thing I want people to know about Rivian. Thank you so much for your time, Dade. And I've really enjoyed our conversation. I encourage everyone to go check out Rivian. They are such cool vehicles. Their website is amazing. You're going to see if you like them for yourself. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening today. I really hope that you enjoyed it and that you join us for our next episode when I speak with Erica Tobak-Nix, a customer success manager from LinkedIn. We'll dig into what's top of mind for CSM's right now, how she's supporting her team, and best practices in the customer success space. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share with a friend or colleague, or you could write us a review on Apple podcasts. Thanks so much for listening and for being a part of our community. You can always join the conversation at zendes.com/community or connect with other zendesk users through our user group meetups. Find one for you at usergroups.zendesk.com. Until next time, I'm Nicole Saunders-Presentesk, the intelligent heart of customer experience. Build lasting relationships, the zendesk complete customer service solution so that you can exceed every customer's expectations. Sign up for a free trial at zendesk.com.