The customer-first strategy: why it's crucial to your business

So we look at things like utilization and key adoption features that are going to unlock the highest value, where are those being used, where aren't those being used, and then things like integrations for us. It's important that our customers can act up, Zendask, if you're implementing it across 28 departments, that is awesome. Welcome back to Conversations with Zendask, where we explore how new trends and technology and customer experience are shaping the way that we connect with customers. Each week, we speak to customer experience innovators and experts to hear their thoughts and ideas on the future of CX. I'm your host, Nicole Saunders. This week, we're bringing you a very special episode that we recorded live at the Zendask Relate Conference in San Francisco back in May. We had an amazing mid-day panel during which we discussed what it means to be customer first and how to actually implement and operationalize the things required to make that concept a reality. Enjoy. 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. This time, I'm not leaving the stage. I am here to help facilitate the keynote panel, which I am so excited about. We're going to be talking about how to have a customer first strategy, and that is something that is so near and dear to my heart when I think about all of our users. And help me give a very warm welcome and round of applause to our guests. Let's welcome to the stage. Hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. So I have on stage with me two leaders from Zendask who are consistently championing our customers, SVP of customer advocacy Kate Kain, and our SVP of customer success, Teresa and Aynania. Go ahead and your maraudable applause. We're also fortunate today to be joined by three truly exceptional Zendask customers. First I'd like to welcome Danielle Evans, CIO of Honeywell Connect at Honeywell International. Then we have Billy Abrams, division president of the Distributed Products Division at Medline and Distribute. And last but certainly not least, we have Sarah Bernardi, CCO, that is Chief Customer Officer at xe.com, Rhea Money Transfer and Dan Delayon Payments. Now for the customers joining us here, one of the things that your businesses all have in common that I think is really interesting is how personal the things that you deal with are. We're talking about home security, medical treatment, financial safety, and really what is more significant to any of us than our homes, our health, and our finances. And so I love having you here for this discussion because I think it really calls out the importance and the gravity of what it is to have a customer first strategy and customer first mindset and really be thinking about the customer experiences that we're creating. You also all have different roles in your respective companies, so I think this is going to be a great conversation. So to get things started, our topic today is a customer first strategy. Let's talk a little bit about what it means to be customer first. I'd like to go down the line and have each of you share a few thoughts on that. So Kate will start with you. Yeah, thank you so much. I'm excited to go first because everyone will have to build on my answers so I'm going to try and knock it out. So what does it mean to be customer first? To me, that means that you put your customers at the center of your business, that your customers experience and their emotional attachment to your products become your company's purpose. And if that is how you approach it, I think you've arrived at customer first. Great. Teresa. Yeah, I think to add to that, we are looking at Zendesk at really connecting up all of the different groups, whether they're customer facing or not. We want them to feel their part in how to solve our customers problems, how to ensure they are getting huge value out of Zendesk. The benefit I always say, I love my job so much is we build great CX within our company to serve you and we help you do the same for your customers. So kind of we know your pain points, we know your challenges, we live it every day. And I think that really is putting the customer in the center. Great. Thank you. Danielle. Yeah, so I think building on that, I always say is vulnerable walking in the shoes of your customers and understanding the journey. And the reason I said it is you know you can walk in the shoes, you can go to a customer side, you can understand your customers, their problems, what they're trying to solve. That's the easy part, right? But the ability to take a step back and really listen in here, the customer on which you're doing well and taking what you're not doing well, which means that sometimes you've got to drop your ego, sometimes you got to really be able to listen, that's really putting the customer center first. And so I think you know from an IT perspective, we get hit with it all the time. We're the first to hear this tool sucks. But when you take a step back and look at it from a customer space, it's really vulnerable standing back and saying, I not only hear you, but I'm listening to what's working and what's not working and how I take that feed back in. Great. Billy. You guys all pretty much encapsulated perfectly. So I can say very little. I don't know what you're going to say. I think for us customer first is we'll do anything for a customer on any day. We build warehouses for customers because they want the products closer to where they want to be. We have empowered everybody in our organization to solve any problem that a customer raises. Whether the customer is right or wrong, it doesn't matter. We will fix it and hopefully we'll fix it in a way that won't come up again tomorrow. So that's what we're trying to do. Great. And it's hard to lead on from that. But what I would say is something my team asked me regularly is how do I translate strategy into action? So what does it mean to put a customer first? What do I do tomorrow differently? That means I'm putting the customer first. And we've coined the phrase that we want to move from being the expert to being our customer's expert. And to be your customer's expert, you have to have a relationship. You have to speak their language. You have to have trust. And that requires you to spend time with your customer as well. But it's that common language that you find. Because in our world, we're heavily regulated and we can't always say yes. And sometimes you're going to have a difficult conversation. And that's all right. But there's a way that you can do that. Great. Thank you. All of you. So it sounds like we have some really common themes, right? It's understanding our customers' needs, being empathetic to those needs. I love what you said about sort of dropping the ego, being vulnerable a little bit. Because it's true that sometimes we have to take a step back somewhat. We've always thought was the best thing to do and really listen to what our customers are telling us. So it sounds like we've got some agreement on that. So then I would like to move into thinking about why is it so important to be customer first. One of the things that we called out in Zendus 2023 CX Trends report is that customer expectations are changing a lot in the marketplace. They're really demanding a lot more of businesses these days. And so I think that there's a lot to unpack here about what's going on there, why that's happening and that kind of thing. So Billy, I would love to start with you here. You know, anyone that has experienced a health crisis, been in a hospital, many of the people here probably recognize the name Medline. You're a huge supplier of medical supplies. And while you're not necessarily supporting patients directly, the supplies that you put into those spaces are really having a huge impact on their lives. Obviously being in the medical space, you've experienced some changing markets in the past few years. So I'd love to have you talk a little bit about kind of what the impacts of COVID were and how your company adjusted to those market shifts. COVID was a challenge. I'm not sure it's totally over yet, but it's evolving and that's for sure. In our space, my mother now knows what an N95 respirator is and a surgical mask. And I never thought she would nor did I want her to. The goal for us is that our products are there exactly when you need them and hopefully you don't need them very often, right? To your comment about difficult conversations, I went through a three year period where nobody had as much as they wanted of anything. And so I think it's an interesting juxtaposition of customer first and not having enough. And we put ourselves in a situation of being incredibly transparent with customers, painfully transparent. We knew exactly where every product was when it was coming in, how much was available for our existing customers, who we had to say no to along the way. But we did not tell customers they would get something they didn't get, right? And it turns out, in my opinion, that if you're really brutally honest with your customers, they respect that. And that becomes part of the whole experience. So in a Zendesk world, bringing it back to Zendesk, I were here, we worked hard to make sure we gave our customer service reps, our sales reps, everybody in the organization as much information as they had about when something was going to come in or not and how much their customer could expect to receive on that day. And it turns out that if you can give good information, even if sometimes the information is, I don't know, it's actually pretty powerful. And I think we cemented long-term relationships because we were very candid customers. I love that. But I'm a huge fan of being transparent with customers and have also found that there's a great response. Sometimes even we do have to say something they don't want to hear if you're honest about it and direct with it. We interact with the largest health systems in the country. Some of you around here might be familiar with someone like Stanford. They don't like to hear no, right? Customers don't like to hear the word no. But if you give them enough feedback to say this is what you can expect, they too can plan around it. And that becomes valuable in toward the overall customer experience. Great. Thank you for sharing those thoughts. So Sarah, I imagine that there's been some similar kinds of impacts for you. You know, you live in a very complex world of global electronic money transfers. I'm sure that you deal with a lot of regulations and legal things and stuff like that. Tell us a little bit about how the markets have shifted in your space over the past few years and how you've responded to that. Yeah, well, not too dissimilar. This a supply and demand challenge. I suppose to give you a bit of context with the money transfer industry. There are 280 million migrants around the world that every week in some shape or form sent money back to loved ones back home to support them. And that money feels very essential needs like education, medical bills. So they're essential payments. And during COVID, we actually saw an incredible surge in demand in our world. And surges are great for the bottom line. Not so great for an operational function that's getting to grips with working from home as well. So as we dealt with that, like all of us have in some shape or form in Zendesk was a critical enabler for us through that period. The added challenge we had is we saw a radical shift in the way people were sending money. So previously with real money transfer, we had a largely cash in cash out customer experience. With COVID, those retail outlets that people used to go to to get that cash out were now closed. And so we saw radical adoption of mobile wallets, which is wonderful and we were able to integrate with those mobile wallets quite quickly. But there are literally thousands of different variations of mobile wallets out there, all of which have very different criteria, different regulatory controls. And so now you're dealing with an agent who's working from home, supporting a user that is adopting a new payment method while you get to grips with what the cash out payment method can handle. There's different limits, different regulatory controls. And we haven't solved this problem by any means. And that's why I was so excited about what I saw this morning giving our agents the ability to get real-time information, that is aesthetic, that can change daily based on currency limits et cetera, as their fingertips a lot quicker as part of our core strategy. Thanks. That does not make a lot of different things here just too, very quickly. You know, agility, I think, is a word that we've all heard a lot over the last few years in thinking about all of these pieces. Danielle, I want to open that question to you as well. Any big market shifts that you've seen or experienced with your business have really driven you to be focused on that customer experience? Yeah, I think just quickly, whenever we say, "Honeywell, everybody goes to the thermostat," right? And that's not really the business we have anymore. But when you think about software, to tell you what, COVID actually boosted that demand, right? Healthy buildings and the way people brought people into buildings and made sure people were safe with something that businesses started caring about a lot. And efficiencies became really, really important during that period. And so it helped our business be able to search a demand for software. Now that COVID has somewhat kind of stabilized, what we've seen is that there's a lot more software options for people to go to when they think about efficiencies. So what we blitz scaled in at 21-22 is not the same blitz scale that we see at 23, which means that 80% of our business, which is hardware, has that installed base. But the 20% which is my business, which is new incremental customers, you have to figure how you keep a software recurring customer, which is a very different customer journey or very different customer path than hardware. And so I think that change in dynamic has forced us to look inside and say, what does a software journey look like? How is a different from the rest of the way? Well, and how do we retain customers? And for us, retaining them became customer support, customer success, very, very quickly, which is something we didn't have. We had never really sat down and said, what does that look like? How do we enable it, et cetera? And so hence, the partnership with Zindas, hence, has really sent that up. And I know we're going to continue to talk about that. But the surge of this software business was great, but it also introduced now new capabilities. We needed to retain customers, reduce churn, and really be able to like deliver the experience for customers. Like I always tell my team, the interesting part is when you're growing a business, you don't get the luxury from a customer to say, oh, she's learning her business. We'll get some time to figure it out. Right? When Amazon doesn't deliver your package, they're like, Amazon, two days, I pay for that. So we're experiencing that same thing. We don't get the luxury of Honeywell started a software business. I'll give you five years to figure it out. The customer's like, I pay that bill. And I want to see this reporting success. So we start to see that for in-happen. And it's forced us to accelerate our customer success and customer support and experience our customers. Got it. Yeah, it is interesting to see how some of these big software things we all use. Amazon is an example that Billy brought up the other day as well. Hey, everybody expects you to deliver as quickly as Amazon. If you're doing something like that, you try to match those standards that are from an entirely different organization or industry. Theresa, I was hoping maybe you could help us zoom out sort of more broadly to general industry trends and help us understand this shift towards really being customer first and what's driving that right now. When I'm talking to customers, a lot of what I hear are just things in the vein of, we're seeing these macro headwinds, I know Tom called it the economy sucks. And I think it's a reality. And I think we know that we have to do more, which lasts, but not create such a really tough pressure on our employees and their floor works smarter. And I think what we're doing and thinking about the way we deliver CX is how do we think about where our human impact is going to be the greatest and really think about the design of that customer journey to basically make sure you have the right people on the right engagement with the customer, getting the right outcome. So efficiency is important digitization, leveraging automation and balancing that with the great customer outcome that you're measuring that you know is going to have a direct impact on your business growth. That's the one big thing. I'd say the second big thing just couples without the employee experience. I'm such a big believer that you cannot do great CX without great EX employee experience. And just amazing for ourselves, you know, we're Zendesk on Zendesk looking at all the opportunities to connect up the handoffs, the other teams needed. I just said before, they're all a part of that customer journey, right? So how do you make sure that it is all connected and when our agents are front-line, doing support, doing service, have needs in HR, legal, rev-ops, you name it, renewals, success, that it to the customer looks like one seamless experience. And then those employees feel they're reducing the friction, the manual effort, and they're feeling better about delivering a great customer experience. So I think EX equals CX is also a big same I'm saying. I love that. And I think that's so important. I suspect something that will come up a lot during this conversation is that when you're talking about the customer experience, you also have to talk about the employee experience because you're not going to improve a customer experience if your employees aren't happy delivering that experience. So I think we will dig into that a little bit more in a few minutes here. The other thing we talked about, Danielle, you raised the idea that there's a lot of new software out there. We're talking about how industries have shifted and things like that. Customers are also so much more ready to jump over to a competitor if they have a bad experience. That was another thing that we called out in the CX Trends report. And so it is really valuable to be thinking about these specific pieces and making sure that you are ready and you're spinning these things up very quickly. Kate, I wonder if you've got anything else that you would want to add to this idea of CX as a differentiator and how we're thinking about it at Zendesk before we move on to our next round of questions. Yeah, I think a lot of good points were already hit on the topic. Customer expectations are changing. And as CX leaders, we have to keep up with those expectations. And the whole company plays a role in it as Theresa mentioned. I mean, I'm thinking to Teresa's point about employee experience, about the agent experience and the role they play in the CX journey and how we can better empower our agents. All the AI discussion today has been so tremendous. I'm as a consumer like all of you of our own technology. And I'm thinking a lot about how AI can help on the agent experience side, how they can start to get the information they need more quickly so that they can better get customer responses out there. And so AI, I know it's the name of the game today, but that's a big focus area for me. And I think the market right now. Absolutely. So we've talked a bit about what it means to be customer first, why it's important to do that. Now, I think we're at the real potatoes of a conversation, which is how do you do that? How do you implement it and how do you operationalize it? So in this section, Danielle, I'd love to start with you because I know that you have influenced this idea of a customer first mindset on a company-wide level. And you've done a really big implementation across several organizations. Bye. I'd love to have you share a little bit about that, how you put those ideas into practice and as I understand it, how your concept of what it meant evolved throughout your implementation. - So I think the really great part about being a CIO is not only do you get to see the technology and how it evolves and what are people adopted, but you spend a lot of time buying software from vendors, right? So you get to see what an experience you actually feel. Hey, hey, you actually get to see what a bad experience is. And so one of the things that I've been able to do is like take a step back, look at how I've experienced that and then learn from that and say, how does my software company now deliver that experience to other customers? And so I think that has been a true learning to down to like, you know, how you think about touch points, all the way down to how you commercialize. Those have been some of the pieces. But for us, what we understood is, you know, I always tell people, it's very easy to put a system in place, but a system is nothing but an enablement of a process. Bad process, bad system, garbage in, garbage out, we can't have an entire conversation. But what we took a stance on was we were going to stand up, what we call a global design model, a GDM. And so one of the things that Honeywell is really good at is operationalizing process. And so we took the culture of what we knew. And we said, all right, in order to do this, we're going to standardize the process of customer experience, which means we're going to do a digital journey. We're going to understand all the touch points. And originally, when we did this, we just started with customer support and success. That's all we knew, right? We had a problem and we tried to go fix that problem. And so we said support and success was it. When we started talking to customers, we realized that's great. But you missed the five other steps before you got to support. That were really a problem. So we mapped out the journey. We understood the customer touch points. And we said here are the five touch points that are going to be a part of customer experience. And we standardized that across the entire work. We put a team in place and we said, this is going to be the process. And this is the global design of the process. Then we said, here is the tool. Everyone adopts the same tool. Because one of the things is we talk about how important data is, the only way to get really great data is to be converged on one single system to get it out. So that data can be the same, consistent and essentially lead to insights. So we stood up the same process. And then we said, we're all going to get on the Zindas. And we're all going to converge on it. And we understand what that means. And then the last thing we did was we standardized our KPIs. We knew we weren't going to be perfect on day one. This was not automated. This is literally manual itself. She's coming together. But we essentially said, we are all going to measure CX the exact same way. So that when we get in a room, it's not, well, that data is not right. And this is a company system. We are all looking at the same thing. And what that drove was a realistic conversation on maturity, where we were, something of our level one, initial reactive, literally down to the customer called whoever was the last person on site. That was the experience we had. And we moved the needle to like in a year. We'll be level three. It's OK not to be level five. So we took a maturity level. We measured everyone down to like ticket volume and the like the calls. C sat A sat. We started looking at the agent sat especially. Because to your point, my customers are not just who we sell to. My customers are also the agents. If they don't like the system, then they can't be productive to the customer. And so that now has allowed us to now be standardized, be centralized, and now be reporting and talking about everything in the exact same manner. So we can learn from each other and move from there. So we had to get really consistent, which was tough, but really get on the same page about how we looked at customer spares, how we defined it, how we measured it, and then how we standardized the implementation. Oh, really? Got it. Yeah, it sounds really important to get that coordination across all of those teams that we're working together. I imagine that that is a lot of effort to go through all of that. I love this because so many customers talk to us about helping them design out their touchpoint, engagement, the moments of truth with the customer along that journey. And there's a bit of intimidation that, oh my gosh, it is such a big effort. But it sounds like you really started with a pragmatic approach. Keep it simple. Just start with maybe success and support, but then build out from there. And it also sounds like from the data standpoint, you didn't wait for like perfect data. You worked with what you have, is that right? It is exactly right. And we also built a culture of we knew we weren't going to be great at first. Right. And I think you have to empower your teams to have that culture of if I'm not a five, I can still share it. Because if they don't build empowerment to share it, and you really don't learn what the experience, what their touchpoints are to look like. So we took a very packed minute approach and it's still a journey. It's like the MBA answer. You guys have an MBA something they say it depends. Whenever one asks me something like, it's a journey. We're still on that journey. We're not really there. And it's probably always a journey, right? Like we know these expectations and things are going to keep shifting. And we're all somewhere in that process. There's always somewhere you can improve and keep building on it. Now Billy, I know that you've also done a big implementation across. I think you told me 28th departments. Go on thing. That is huge. So talk to me a little bit about what were the shifts in your business that were driving the decision to make that happen. And you can speak a little bit to some of the similar things around like how you standardized and how you got that all rolled out. We've mentioned a lot of this already today. Customers' expectations have never been higher. They're increasing every single day. Reasonable or not. We also have someone who is perceived as a competitor that we all know in the room. Everyone looks at Amazon and says, man, they're good at the customer experience. And so we didn't judge ourselves on a one to five. We said, we as good as Amazon. That was our bar. They're not really in our business, so they're not actually a competitor. But we all interact with them every day. What we did, we started with the first basic test, which was, can we measure what we're doing? And the problem that we defined is people are asking us questions and they were not getting answers. Sorry, easy, right? We didn't know about Zendask right away. We used a product that our IS team was using for IS support. It was fast. That part was good. Fast to implement, but it was terrible. And the team came to us and said, we need better. We have to be able to do the things. And we sent them out on a mission to look at the landscape and see what was available. We landed on Zendask. And I'm not saying that just because I was here, they actually did do a survey. We did land on it on Zendask. They didn't pay me for that endorsement. The reality was Zendask was flexible. And we could adapt it to our business. We could integrate it into what we needed to do from our other systems. And we could start measuring with great precision how we were doing. The part of the business that I'm talking about right now, handles about 800,000 tickets a year. And we're not mentioning any of it. Now we measure all of it. And I can tell you how many tickets last one hour passed our service level expectations. And we are moving to where exactly we want to go. And it happened because we were able to rally around Zendask. And the some interesting outcomes, which you guys might like. I think the minute we installed Zendask, we picked up about 7% productivity enhancement. And that was just by making sure we were routing tickets efficiently. We then have enhanced dashboarding to the point where no one has to look up things the same over and over again. We actually created our custom dashboard so people could see everything they needed to do. And those dashboards probably picked up another 5% of productivity. And I can measure it because I know how many tickets people can do. A day I know how many people have to do 800,000 a year. Like it's we're in distribution business. All these things matter. And the interesting thing about it is on this journey, two things happen. One intentional and one unintentional. The intentional thing happened was our customers started seeing better results. So happy customers actually buy more products. It's good. And they stay. Also good. So those were our two objectives, which we knew we wanted to get to. The part that we did anticipate our employee experience. I'm glad you brought that up. The employee experience was massively improved. And it was improved because the tickets were being presented to them. Instead of them having to go hunt for them. And the information they needed to solve the problem was being presented to them. Instead of them having to jump out of the zendask and go into SAP and get a bunch of screens and come back. So by doing those two things, I'm not sure one is related to the other, but they marched in concert to the point that we had a better overall execution. And I still don't think we've gone far enough. And I think there's another probably 8% productivity improvement that's ahead of us. And that was even thinking about the stuff we heard this morning. It's going to be interesting to watch. Got it. So again, a lot of things are on standardization, aggregating data, making it available to internal teams, making sure everybody's enabled on the same processes and being held accountable to following them. That all sounds like really important pieces. Kate, I would love if you could share a little bit about how we are thinking about continuing down the journey of improving the customer experiences and the zendask and some of the things that we're focusing on within the career area. I love that all of us have referenced that it's a journey. And that's truly the case. We're all at various levels of maturity and some days we're more ahead and some days we're a little bit further back. And so for us in 2023 at zendask, one of the biggest areas of focus for us is expanding our customer listening. We need to better identify how customers are feeling at any given point in their journey, not just after a support interaction when we measure CSAT. And so we're expanding listening to be at all touch points. And then we're going to start to take that feedback and actually do something with it. An interesting stat from Gartner is that 90% of companies capture customer feedback, but only 10% do something about it. And only 5% actually tell their customers they're doing something about that. And so that's a powerful statistic and we want to differentiate there, right? We want to be able to take all of this rich information. Support gets all the information. Like if you know your support leader, go knock them on the shoulder because they know everything, right? We see where customers are happy, we see where customers are struggling, we need to bring that back into the business and then tell customers how we're doing that and the improvements we're making as a result of that. So that's a huge focus for us this year. Sarah, you and I talked a bit about having a closed loop feedback experience, just like Kate was just talking about, do you want to tell us a little bit more about how you're going about implementing that and bringing that to life at your organization? Yeah, sure. I feel very strongly. You've got to be in a position to respond to feedback before you ask for it. We spent quite a bit of time working out those workflows in the back office before we then started proactively pushing the CSAT and NPS. In my role, I'm very KPI driven and as a Chief Customer Office, we have the traditional KPI's of NPS and CSAT and I've got obviously the efficiency metrics that sit in a traditional context enter as well. But I wanted something that sat at a more overarching level and we came up with this concept of what we call the product contact rate. And what that is is essentially, we've always had a really healthy tension between customer support and product. But generally it comes down to, we tell them what our customers are saying and it all dies of very long and painful death in a backlog. And so what we've landed on and it's still relatively new for us. We haven't perfected it but I am seeing traction and I'm hopeful that we're heading in the right direction. This is concept of the product contact rate, which is a KPI we looked at. I share it, I own it as the executive in the business but I share it with my product team. And that is we look at the number of customer contacts in a given period relative to the number of transfers. And so we've got a percentage contact rate, so let's call it 10% of transfers required an interaction with a customer in a given period. And if my goal now is to reduce that number down, I have a clear target for that and I collaborate quite closely with products on that. But in doing that, I had to solve for this product backlog problem. And what we've done there, like all of you do quite regularly, is really got into the detail of understanding what our contact drivers are. So we use good categorizations and discuss really powerful here with tagging. Gives us all the insights but it's about taking those insights and creating some action from it, right? So a very good use case here. We've only had quite recently, as we couldn't understand why one of our really top contact drivers was a customer looking for assistance to cancel their transfer. To us, it is capability that we've had in our app and on the web for years. So why are customers choosing to call us for this? And there was a whole lot of hypothesis from the product team primarily around why customers wanted that human level of assurance beyond a click in the app. But actually, when we spend some time with our teams and we do this now, we look at a problem and we ask our teams to promote tickets that they've had or interactions that they've had. We use a tag for that. They know that we're doing a deep dive on cancellations as an example. And just for a week, they start using a tag that helps us collect these tickets. We then sit with product and we look at these tickets, we listen to the phone calls, we review the live chat interactions and we could see actually us here to the frontline team was guide the customer on how to cancel, don't cancel for them. And what we heard through those interactions with our customers weren't aware that they were able to cancel it in the app. And when we then used tools like log rocket to go and watch the session that the customer had gone through because we now had real use cases and we could identify the customer, we were able to see that they were getting as far as the edit button, but to them edit meant modify. And so they weren't clicking on edit because cancel sat behind edit. So we've just simply changed that button to say edit or cancel and we've reduced that contact driver by 35% in a week. I guess the point that I'm illustrating there is there's nothing rocket science there. It just took some practical application and it just shows you the power and how motivated your frontline teams are to help you solve those problems, give them a challenge, they'll surface that need for you quite quickly. I love that story and it's so interesting to me how you took data from a couple of different sources and put it together and then you were able to really clearly see like, oh, here's a very simple thing that we could change that would reduce a lot of our support cases and the challenges that are coming in. So moving into our last topic for this panel, we've talked a little bit about how important data and insights are to be able to provide a great customer experience. So let's impact what some of the data points are and then I'd love to talk about AI for a minute. Theresa, I know that you and I are both part of a big cross-functional team that is working on some of our customer first strategies at Zendesk. What are some of the data points that you're finding are the most valuable and important to informing that strategy? Yeah. I think data is critical. I do think sometimes data for the sake of data is a miss that because it has to be actionable. And I think some of the best data we're leveraging to try to contextualize the engagement, outreach and/or inbound conversations that our support teams have would be enveloped in some of the account health measures that we look at. When does a customer look like they are on a healthy track getting the full value of Zendesk kind of like a maturity curve? And where are they in that and how might we help them either get back on track or be able to get them further in that maturity to achieve the highest ROI? So account health metrics I think are super important. Every one of you would have different ways of measuring that. And I recommend best leading indicators not as much lagging indicators. So we look at things like utilization and key adoptions features that are going to unlock the highest value. Where are those being used? Where aren't those being used? And then things like integrations for us. It's important that our customers connect up Zendesk. If you're implementing it across 28 departments, that is awesome. And there are other customers that have us co-exist with other great technologies. Connecting them up is so important to improving that agent that employee experience because you put everything they need right at their fingertips. Absolutely. So I'd like to open that up to our customer guest panelists. Do you have key data points that you're looking at that are really informing that strategy or things where once you got your hands on it you're like, Bingo, there's the thing that I can really take action on. >> I'm going to set this in the room we were in earlier. The KPIs always revenue. And I think that's true. I think that's too easy sometimes because it hides all the things that you can do to actually impact your ability to get revenue. We have KPIs around how often we deliver on time and how often we deliver complete and how often we satisfy the needs of the customer. All those things lead to revenue. On the operation side we have KPIs like how many customers are asking how many questions very similar to what you were saying because you can actually try to impact how much work you're doing. And it also probably means that if six customers are calling you about something there's in my world 60 that are aggravated just in call. So if we can go across the metrics and use small nuggets here and there to sort of expand out and make strategic decisions on it, it's actually really powerful. But you do have to set it up the right way. You have to have the tags in place. You then have to use the tags that you put in place which puts you in a situation to go after really aggressive continuous improvement. And at the end of the day any metric you want to use, if you're not raising the bar on your metrics sort of every year, I promise you our competitors are coming after us. And so what we're trying to do is keep raising the bar so that we build a moat around our business to make it harder for our competitors come after us and know that we have absolutely best in class of those services that we offer. And that's what we're trying to do. If you don't measure it, you can never fix it. That is true. It's sort of the flip side of that coin if you get what you measure and if you don't measure you can't take action on any of it. And of course, you know, big key point of all this data getting collected is that then we're actioning on it. I think another big thing that came out of our CX Trends report was to understand that customers know and expect honestly that our companies are collecting a lot of information about them. And that's become something that's more comfortable for people when they know that we're putting that data to good use and we're creating a more personalized experience. Does anyone have an example of how you've taken some of that data to help personalize of an experience? Sarah. The company that I've made here is an observation I shared with some peers just a couple of weeks ago and that is we are all drowning in data. And it's all there. You saw some of the stats this morning on those slides like what Zendesk are using to power the AR machine, the 8 billion interactions sitting on the Zendesk platform alone just validates that point. And if you do have voice of the customer programs in your business, if they aren't already every week, like a development team, changing the way in which they work to surface that information, then they are stagnating because what I see too often with voice of the customer programs is there's this forum that gets hosted once a quarter or once a month and every functional lead is invited to participate and you get this regurgitated PowerPoint deck at you of all of these wonderful insights and an expectation that you're going to take this information back and do something with it. And we all know what happens when we go back to our desk, the inbox is waiting, the phone is ringing and nobody's held accountable to it. So the KPI that I talked about earlier I think is very important. The second point is really challenging your voice of the customer team or whoever your team might be and they could be your Zendesk team to get into the business and surface those insights. And so the way we're starting to do that is we've said we're not doing those readouts any more. We're not doing those presentations anymore, but if you are about to make a customer impacting decision in this business, you have to show evidence of voice of a customer data. So what that means is my voice of the customer team now are getting specific requests, help us understand cancellations. And we go and search for that data, we pull all the insights together, this is what customers love about cancellations. This is what they don't like. And both of those insights need to be shared in equal measure. If it's constantly about what you're not doing well, you don't create enough time for it, right? So keeping that conversation very focused on what to keep, but what to change, specific to that moment. I don't know. It's great. Danielle, any thoughts to add on this as we wiped down our time all the sudden? Yeah, I would. So I think the way that we looked at that is we broken it up into three different pieces. Like I said, it's the journey. We're not super mature. But the way that we look at it is, we look at adoption metrics. We look at operational metrics and then we look at value metrics. And I'll talk about value because that gets a little bit tougher, right? And so the first piece I think about is in adoption. And you say, like, how do you learn from it? We roll it out and we originally started looking at like, who's adopting it? Are our customers adopting or one day, like you said, 21 businesses, we got five business units, are those business units adopting it? And I think that has driven us to really great insights on when we deployed it well and when we have not deployed it well. And we've had to come back and partner with this index team on, hey, maybe we should migrate it this. Maybe we should look at this and really understand with the business where it could deploy better. I think operationally we look at the operational metrics because that gives us insight on product and how we better train the agent. And so when we originally started looking at it, we looked at like just number of tickets, time to resolve. But to your point, the benefit we got out of it is we have 100 year old contracts that are written. And some of these contracts are super complex down to like, if I send you this ticket, you must respond into seconds, you must do this by this minute, et cetera. And this was the first time we could actually be transparent to give the customer data because we don't have a way to really do it consistently. The other piece that we got to see was we added on the transactional surveys to this and our business was completely against this. They were like, we got enough data. We don't want to see a survey. But what it showed us was we had engineering teams that working on product that the business was never using, what the customer was never using. We had a button on the product that said feedback. And the customer was just clicking and clicking. And the team was like, well, they used this. And the survey showed us they thought it was a support button. And they were trying to get help. They never wanted to get feedback with the button. So we started learning like very simple. Little thing. Quick fixes. When we moved that, we changed that and the experience just became a whole lot better. And so we've used the operational metrics to know where we can train the agents differently. Because we had no deflections and we put KBAs in place to train them. And we learned how we can change the product, which was a tough conversation with our really passionate engineers. And then I think the last piece is value. One of the things that we get held accountable for is you invest the money. People want to see the ROI on it. And that's been a tough one to be able to say, doesn't this efficiently translate to less people? Doesn't this efficiently translate into productivity? And how do we measure that? And I won't say that we've completely figured out some definitely still shamelessly from these two people right now. But we're still trying to figure out how do we show value in the investment that we've done by the tool showing that value to what we've done. So that's the third piece that we're actually trying to figure out to get to a lot better. We should be able to help you with that. I won't sign up to everyone in this room. But we need to help you make that business guess. Yeah. So it sounds like our big takeaway today is user test what you name your buttons. No, it's really about making sure that you're enabling your teams to collect the right data and insights, have visibility into it, that you're standardizing your practices, and that you're putting all of that data to good use so that your customers feel seen, feel heard and feel understood. All right. We have to wrap up. But I would like to give you all one quick challenge. And let's go down the line one more time and each share one thing that you are really interested in with AI and how you think that might impact the customer experience. I think AI is going to help us make our existing agents better, faster, stronger, smarter. That's my goal. We present them more information. We help them escalate in. I'm not sure I'm ready for a virtual agent who's going to interact with our customer. My instinct is that's not going to work in our business. But I think the insights that you're bringing with AI give us the chance to be better customer service agents and provide a better customer experience. And I'm going to caveat it by saying I'm not really sure. I don't know whether it's really AI the way you think of AI. I don't know if it's generative AI, which I didn't know that term until about not one a half ago. Sorry. I'm from Chicago. Like we barely have the internet. So I don't know if it's going to be generative AI, but I do think that we can use smart, thoughtful guidance to make our agents smarter, more thoughtful and more relevant. And that's the journey to overuse a word that we use today. That's where I see it going. Got it. Anyone else want to jump in with a thought here? I shared Belize views. I was actually having a really interesting chat earlier with someone from Assembled and they were sharing with me a really interesting case study that they were using, which was AI but it was all about enabling the agent. And so as an example, how do you make the knowledge content that you've got come to life in a conversational context? I can see infinite use cases. I'm very cautious about their customer experience impact. And there's no better sandbox than the agent sandbox before you surf with something to your customer. So I'm on Belize train, though. Got it. I am aggressively on Belize train. I think one of the real inflection point and this thing is moving rapid. And I think it's going to be a real different shade of for companies. And so I definitely wanted to get the team into using it in a control method because I know all of our engineers are like, let's protect the brand a little bit. But to the agent experience, I think it's going to be amazing. I actually want to go in in a fashion that allows it to answer the customer. I think what our agents do is great, but also how do we know that it can't be better, you know, give it an opportunity to be better. And I spend a lot of time just playing around with you. I am continuously wowed about the answers I get back. And so I think in a control method, you should go all out and see what it has to do. But like I said, in a control method and then figure out where you go apply to across the org. Because if you don't do it, I agree. This is going to be one of those things that disrupts you or completely let your competitors get ahead of you. Got it. Such a good point. All right. Well, I think we are at time. But thank you all so much for joining me today. I think we can have this conversation probably for another three hours. This has been really pleasant. So Sarah, Billy, Danielle, Teresa, Kate, thanks so much. Thank you so much. Everybody, please help me give our guest a warm round of applause. Well, I learned so much from that conversation. And I hope that you did too. Join me again next week as I speak to Christina Ponceca, VP of Product at Zendesk, who's focusing on our AI features and functionality. I'm really looking forward to digging deep with Christina to learn how she's thinking about and approaching AI and the opportunities and challenges that she sees to implementing it for customer service. So be sure to subscribe to the podcast because you won't want to miss this one. Until then, I hope to see you around the Zendesk community. I'm Nicole Saunders for Zendesk, the intelligent heart of customer service. Ready to explore how AI can help your business provide richer customer experiences? Zendesk enables you instantly harness the power of AI to deliver scalable world-class customer experiences. In the era of intelligence, the X, Zendesk is here to help you find your way. Sign up for our free trial at zendesk.com