The CX Leader Podcast: "Culture Starts with You": Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Download the “The CX Leader Podcast: "Culture Starts with You" audio file directly.

The CX Leader Podcast: "Culture Starts with You": this wav audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Steve:
Sometimes you don't have to look far to find your company's future leaders.

Jeff:
I learned first and foremost that culture starts with you as the CEO or founder or founding team. People are going to follow you. They're probably not going to work any harder than you're working. First and foremost, I think it starts at the top in terms of setting the tone and setting an example,

Steve:
Growing your best performers to be the driving force of customer focused culture on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at Walkerinfo.com.

Steve:
Hello, everyone. I'm Steve Walker, host of The CX Leader Podcast And thank you for tuning in again this week. On The CX Leader Podcast, we explore the topics and themes to help leaders like you leverage all the benefits of your customer experience and help your customers and prospects want to do more business with you. Companies regularly hire experienced professionals from outside their organization, but they can't tell from a resume how good of a cultural fit the new leaders will be. And employees frequently find that to grow their skills, they need to go to another company, often leaving a company that is a good fit for them. So how can you solve both problems at once? Well, my guest on this episode is uniquely qualified to answer that question. Jeff Epstein is founder of Onboard.io, a company that creates software to organize, automate and manage client onboarding. And he's going to share with us how growing employees within a company can lead to a strong culture and ultimately a better customer experience. Jeff, thanks for being a guest on The CX Leader Podcast.

Jeff:
Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it.

Steve:
Yeah, it's my pleasure. You know, it's always fun. And one of the best things about this podcast is I get to meet interesting people that are doing interesting things out there in the customer experience world. But for the benefit of our listeners, just give me a little bit of your background. And then what led you to found your company and what problem were you trying to solve for?

Jeff:
Sure. And so my background have been a serial entrepreneur for quite a while, dating back to when I was an undergrad and eventually when I was in law school and realized I didn't want to practice law, I was fortunate enough to sell my first business to pay off my loans and start my last company called Embassador, which was a SaaS company. And ultimately, in order to be successful in the SaaS business, you need your customers to renew and be continuous customers. And so we we spent a lot of time with my leadership team and my board thinking about how we can lower churn and create a better customer experience. And in that problem resonated with me quite a bit. And as that company grew and as we became successful and sold the business, we realized that there were some software tools that were severely lacking in the customer onboarding space. And so that was, you know, as we laughed and decided, let's get the band back together. Well, Stephenson and I, who was the head of Ops and customer success at my last company, we decided someone needs to solve this problem in a better way for customer onboarding. And so that's how we started Onboard.io Just about about a year a year ago.

Steve:
Yeah, one year old. And congratulations on your not only this success, but on your previous successes to the world needs more serial entrepreneurs. I can assure you of that.

Jeff:
Thank you. Appreciate it.

Steve:
Well, you know, kind of the topic for us today is developing leadership. In your opinion, kind of what is the best way to drive a culture within an organization? What does that look like?

Jeff:
Yeah, and one of the big learnings for me as we grew my last company from just myself for the first couple of years, really into 250 people was realizing and understanding how you shape a culture and build it, build the company, obviously using it, having other people side-by-side with you to do that. And I learned to first and foremost, the culture starts with you as the CEO or founder or founding team. People are going to follow you. They're probably not going to work any harder than you're working or they're not going to do things drastically differently than the way that you do things. So first and foremost, I think it starts at the top in terms of setting the tone and setting an example, and that can be a positive or negative example. So I think you have to be really intentional and thoughtful as a leader in any capacity, but especially that a founder CEO.

Steve:
And, you know, as you start to scale, how do you take it from, you know, a few people to lots of people? And when you can't really maintain a relationship with every single individual, how do you build that into sort of the fabric of the organization?

Jeff:
Yeah, it's it's a great question. And I think it's certainly a challenge we get to when we were at 50 people. The good news was you could still sort of have a relationship or at least communicate with everybody on the individual level, not not necessarily daily, but certainly enough to hopefully resonate or at least to communicate a cultural value expectation across the board. But one of the things I think that worked quite well for us was allowing and really empowering everybody to be part of the process and ultimately creating a system of principles or values that is the expectation of how everyone inside the organization operates. And ideally, in our case, you know, one of our values was always customer obsessed. Right? I mean, I think it was really important. And I think in this day and age, customer experience, customer satisfaction, you really need that if you're going, I think, to be successful. It's a really great way to differentiate. So for us, it was revolving partially around the customer experience and making sure that we all rallied to to meet the requirements or demands of customers and make sure that we did everything we could. But I think it's allowing other everyone to get involved, as many people as you can to get involved. And that way you create something that isn't just driven top down, it's really something that's collaboratively brought from the bottom up.

Steve:
Yeah, I think particularly in in businesses where you have highly educated people like you would a software company or in my case, in a, you know, professional services company, you really do need to find a way to make sure that people feel like they're part of the decision making process. And you would as you said that I was thinking, you know, some of the things I think that we do now, you kind of have a take on who you think make the best employees, right?

Jeff:
Well, yeah. You know, I think, you know, one of the things that I realized was the folks that that are the ones that sort of grow up in the organization, they they can be really amazing employees inside of company. And I think everyone I think it's almost human nature to sort of think about, like the grass is always greener or to see both from an employee perspective, but also from a company perspective. You see someone who's maybe worked at a very large public company and think, oh, that that would be fantastic. Or or conversely, if you're only working at a 50 person company, may be excited to get an offer from a large multinational company. But from our experience, the folks that grew up and really were super successful and really learned, just like, you know, many, at least for me, really first time founders, you're learning on the job. And I think if you're willing to sort of admit your mistakes, but get up and, you know, learn and grow as you go, those folks tend to be really valuable parts of the organization for a lot of reasons. But they tend to have a ton of institutional knowledge. But they've also sort of maybe taken their lumps and and learned how to be how to, you know, level up themselves and their skills. And that's something that you really ideally probably want everybody to do.

Steve:
Yeah. When you're growing a business fast, I mean, sometimes you've got to go out to the marketplace and get some experience people. But, you know, there really is no replacement for the folks that kind of work from, you know, from day one to make it happen. Because as as you mentioned, you're figuring it out as you go and there's some great lessons to be had for those who figured out it. It kind of becomes part of the culture itself, really?

Jeff:
Absolutely. It's really one of the benefits of of growing quickly. Right. Is is allowing for the team to grow with the organization and to grow maybe even faster than they would normally. And it was something that, you know, as a small business, you have to create opportunities or create incentives for people to join you that hopefully if they if they're thinking about other options, that there are some benefits to joining a small, you know, potentially risky company. Right. Just from a financial perspective. So, you know, one of the upsides for employees should be their ability to grow into a role more quickly or to maybe earn, you know, equity and options that could become, you know, very valuable one day. And, you know, again, from from a leadership perspective, you know, you're making these promises. And in my opinion, you should uphold them and offer the opportunities to your team first and foremost. And there will always be gaps. And, you know, for example, we had to hire someone who was more senior with an H.R. function. Right, because no one was even close to being able to necessarily know the skills for that. But in a lot of cases, you can sort of grow, you know, a salesperson can become a sales leader, can become head of sales or something like that. I mean, it's certainly doable and especially if you help them and then sort of let them nurture the skills and make sure that everyone sort of working together to to accomplish those things.

Steve:
My guest on the podcast this week is Jeff Epstein. He's a serial entrepreneur and founder of the company Onboard.io, which creates software for managing customer implementation teams. And he's been giving us a great discussion about how to develop talent in your organization that's customer focused and really create a culture that allows people to grow and develop for the long term, which certainly applies to to many of our our businesses. So thinking a little bit longer term as you grow your business and as you are developing people for the long term, how do you make sure that you are considering the long term development and growth of the people? What were some of the things that that a successful organization would want to do in terms of growing people long term?

Jeff:
Sure. You know, one of the biggest skills is investing in in people. And, you know, I think that can manifest in in a bunch of ways. The probably the best way, though, is giving them empowering them to have opportunities, to make decisions and to even make mistakes, right, I mean, I think the expectation that people will be perfect doesn't make sense. It's probably not the best way to learn. You want people to grow. You want them to make mistakes in what we would or would. I would prefer folks to, you know, admit to me the sign of growth is admitting a mistake and sort of pushing past it. Right. It's not doubling down on an on a poor choice and sticking. You're putting your foot in. You're digging in your heels, et cetera. So so to me, those are signs of people that are willing to grow. Sort of a growth mindset, if you will, is making mistakes, getting through it and taking those lessons and sort of continuing to level up and move forward. And so from from what we saw, the folks that were willing to to learn on the job were willing to communicate and ask questions and sort of think through strategic decisions with with other folks who maybe have been there before. Those are the folks that tended to get where we wanted them to be more quickly rather than folks that were sort of didn't want and didn't want to admit it. They maybe made a poor choice or did something wrong and kind of try to cover up things versus saying, hey, you know, I think this wasn't the best move. The next time we'll do it differently. So that was a challenge to you. Obviously, you see all sides of that when you have a company. Of course. And, you know, I think the people that did did the best in that continued in the organization were the ones that we worked with collaboratively. And ultimately, you know, they were sort of honest and open about how they how they made decisions and learned from them.

Steve:
Yeah, there really is something to be learned from failure. And it's it takes kind of a special organization to allow people to be able to fail without fear of of repercussions. And I suppose, you know, we just want to have some guardrails around that so that the you know, the failure isn't catastrophic. But, you know, there's no lesson learned, like, you know, the one that you end up having to fix. Right.

Jeff:
Exactly. And one of the things that we would say is, you know, that the key learnings are you don't make the same mistake twice. And and also, we would say make better mistakes. Right. So ideally, if if you do deem something to be incorrect or failure, so to speak, at least it's a scenario where it was a thoughtful, intentional decision. Or in some cases it doesn't, you know, sometimes you don't need to overthink things. You just want to go and say, hey, I knew that this was this was risky, but I also knew that it was pretty reversible or practical pretty easily, assuming that we course correct that and we took the time to think about it. So, you know, those are those are generally, again, you know, you don't have a catastrophic failure. Those are those are painful and those are not. And those are learning opportunities. But those are sometimes not worth it. Not worth it. And I'm sure everyone's had their share of those. But for the most part, it's really thinking about a quick decision making, thinking and growing teams and helping grow individuals underneath them as well. So making sure that, you know, you're setting an example. And again, the example I think that works really well is being honest about decisions and learning from them versus trying to be super political or something like that where you don't want to look bad or things like I think that is ideally not in a small company. I think those things are really harmful for our culture.

Steve:
Yeah, they are. And, you know, just listening to talk, I wonder also what the implications are for that kind of environment in terms of how it might impact customers. Because you you know, you also you don't want to make mistakes that have a negative impact on the customer. But, you know, sometimes that's going to happen. And then how do you deal with that?

Jeff:
Yeah, that's a great point. And, you know, for the most part and I think I think many of these themes resonate with clients. And listen, customers are are people, too. So, you know you know, I don't know if customers expect perfection, but they don't expect you to argue with them or they don't expect you to tell them that they're doing something wrong. I think what works really well is, is having empathy, understanding that, you know, customers are just like, you know, your customer is just like you. They may be having a bad day. They may be having a bad moment. They may have something going on or they're distracted and ultimately they have a problem. You know, that's your problem. And what we used to say is, you know, when a customer when when the customer isn't happy, ultimately that's our problem. Right. Even if it's not even related to software that we're selling. Because ultimately, if there are not happy long enough, like things are going to change in their life, it could be they change. You change your software out for something else. It could be they change jobs in case. And in that case, we may also get changed out. So ultimately, we want to do the best that we can to make them happy and satisfied in general, but specifically when it's related to our product. But any complaints or concerns that they have? I mean, our goal is to make them look good in their. Position, and that requires sort of listening and admitting to your mistakes, right, or if there are any or even seeing things from their side, even if they're if they're potentially wrong. But I think having that empathy and in sort of being able to, you know, again, sort of admit that there may be more ways to think about something, allows for people to sort of connect at a level that usually is is beneficial for everybody.

Steve:
Yeah, actually, you're making me think I and I can't cite the the work, but there's some some really good academic research about service recovery and sort of the whole psychological effect that it has on deepening our relationship. You know, when you think about it, if you sort of disappoint a loved one or something like that and then you're able to reconcile and and stuff, it actually bonds you, you know, closer because you've you've both sort of experienced the pain and then you've also been able to work through that and then, you know, get back to another place. And that actually happens, I think, in business relationships, too. And not that we want to recommend that you should always, like, mess up. But when you do mess up and you deal with it appropriately, I think that can actually strengthen the relationship you have with your customers.

Jeff:
Definitely. And it's funny you mentioned that it was it's one of the few takeaways that I remember from business school was ah, it was, I think, like my freshman year, but it was a marketing professor said the best way to build loyalty is to sort of fix a mistake or fix a problem. And it's exactly like you said in in the beautiful thing is in a small business, you'll have plenty of opportunity. He's right. He's going to make mistakes, you know, 3 or 4 or 10 or 20 person company. You're not going to execute flawlessly. And so what you can do about it, though, is instead of and it's the same, I think it's the same theme. Instead of ignoring the mistake or if someone says, why is this broken, why isn't this working? You know, respond right away and say, shoot, that shouldn't be the case. We're on it. We're looking at it. Don't hide and wait until you have an answer two days later. And meanwhile, the person is terrified over the next 48 hours determining is this company even around? Is anyone care about us? Is anyone working on this problem? So those are the things we're even saying. Look, we're looking at it. It's sort of admitting you screwed up and in some ways. But that's the right thing to do. And, you know, most of the people what's nice is most people that that we worked with at my last company, now, we would automatically do that. We know the key is responding quickly, letting them know we're thinking about them and trying to figure out how we can solve it. And ultimately, then we'll go ahead and figure it out and then we'll let them know, hey, this was a mistake on our end. We won't let it happen again. Two weird things happened, and this is why it didn't work for you. But those those are important lessons. And like you said, those are building the bonds of really if you're a reliable partner for… and that applies to life. Right? I mean, if when things go bad and you just go silent, that's not a that's not a good rule, doesn't build relationships. Things happen, mistakes happen. And no one should expect it to be perfect. But the way that you respond organizationally but also individually, I think it makes a big difference long term.

Steve:
So with your advocacy for hiring people in and training them for the long term, because, you know, if somebody just really in their first job, you know, they may have all the technical skills, but they may not have some of the other skills that we might be looking for. What what are some of those things that you're you're looking for with your entry level folks?

Jeff:
Yeah. And this was, again, quite a learning experience. And in as an early stage entrepreneur, you know, one of the challenges is why would anyone even want to work with you like you have so little to offer other than, you know, maybe long term upside, but as you know, two or three person company. So I found in some of our early employees, we had someone from insurance and we had a teacher, folks that were looking for a change and maybe didn't think that they get an opportunity at a big company. Right. They didn't have the experience at a traditional company. We look for a resume. And so the great news about that is I think you have people that are willing to go above and beyond, willing to prove themselves. And that's really important. Some of the challenges may be that they don't have in this, I think applies to even folks that are new grads and just maybe not in a professional environment. They don't have some of the soft skills and things that we used to think about that that are really important in terms of working with customers is like how to write an email effectively, like how do you discuss, you know, how do you manage meetings? Not because we think there's only one way to do it, but taking the empathy, like we sort of mentioned earlier in like writing an email in a succinct, useful way, instead of writing ten paragraphs, like some people will think, oh, that's really nice. Ten paragraphs. And then the person there were. It's like, man, this is crazy, I can't read it, you know, so we would say things like imagine the email being on a cell phone, like it should be the size of a cell phone. Right. Like reading it in sort of one screen. And that's on every time. Right. But just thinking about how how people are busy and we're here to help them. We're not here to take up their time. Ideally, they're saving time. They're being more efficient by using our tools. And that's why people invest in technology. So I think things like that are things you always want to, again, make sure folks are thinking about it. And it goes along with really the way I think thinking about customer service and just making sure that, you know, you're providing an amazing experience for the people that you are working with and working for.

Steve:
Yeah, you know, one of the things I've always said in in kind of my career is I love people that worked in restaurants. Yeah. Because, you know, one of the things that they don't really teach in business school is how to take care of a customer. And, you know, most people who waited tables in a restaurant have figured out how to deal with customers. And it really is kind of the most important skill that we that we create in our business. And you've kind of given us a great breakdown of that whole phenomena. But that ultimately is really what we're here to do. You mentioned it several times. You know, we're here to help them. We're here to solve their problem. You know, they bought us because they thought we could help them do their business better or accomplish what they were trying to do. And so we ought to be really easy to get along with and really easy to work with, right?

Jeff:
Definitely.

Steve:
Jeff, we really haven't talked much about your company, but I know your software does some things that helps organizations be customer focused. So just tell us a little bit about Onboard.io And what it does for companies that deploy it.

Jeff:
Sure. And so the you know, the beauty of Onboard.io was we built it because we felt we weren't serving customers as well as we could have been when they were deploying our software. And so, you know, the key for implementing software technologies is really about creating a streamlined approach that's collaborative, that everybody can sort of work together. It tends to be especially with technology, someone's buying, someone's using, maybe someone's implementing, and those someones are usually all different people. And so not everyone's always on the same page. And it's important that you create a space and in our, you know, on board as a software space where everyone can sort of work together, see all the things that need to be done. It creates visibility. It creates therefore accountability. And ideally, your customers get launched more quickly, which makes them feel really great about their experience with you as the software provider or the service provider. So that is really the goal of Onboard is to create tools to create a better experience. And so we feel like, you know, personally, from a software perspective, the customer success world is really under loved and underserved. And I think we're seeing that change quite a bit. And, you know, in my opinion, that this next wave of of software tooling specifically, I think we will see a lot more customer success focused tools, because there's a there's, you know, tens of thousands of sales tools. There's tens of thousands of productivity engineering tools in the customer success realm is still relatively early. And so for us, we couldn't find a solution. We realized we were going back and forth over emails and documents and versions and nothing was very easy. And so on board makes that really easy for teams to work with their new customers to make sure that they're using the software, using using their service. All the things are done quickly so that they can actually get the value that they've sort of paid for what they're waiting for.

Steve:
Well, Jeff, we've reached that point in the The CX Leader Podcast where I always ask our guests to give our listeners some take home value. So I can't wait to hear this. But Jeff Epstein, what is your best tip that you can give to our listeners today on the podcast?

Jeff:
So the best tip. So I guess I'll give two our I'll give one and then the example. So I think the best tip is to you always think about the perspective of your customer. And what I mean by that, I think if we extrapolate, everybody's busy, everybody's doing a million things. So if you can write a quick, succinct, precise emails that fit on the size of a mobile device, then I think you're going to be in a really great position to get people excited and to communicate and stay engaged with you as you need to get information from them.

Steve:
Thanks. My guest on the podcast this week has been Jeff Epstein. He's the founder of Onboard.io, a company that creates software to organize, automate and manage client onboarding. Jeff, if anybody wanted to continue the conversation, how can they find you and how can they find Onboard.io?

Jeff:
Oh, awesome. Yeah. So we our website is Onboard.io. If they can find us on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, it's Onboard. I just no period in that case. But for a web for the URL it's www.onboard.io. I know for myself I'm on, I'm on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as well. So feel free to find me across any of those social channels as well.

Steve:
Great. Well, hey, thanks again for being a guest on the podcast. Enjoyed talking to you. And I learned some stuff today, so I appreciate that.

Jeff:
Thanks, Steve. I appreciate it as well.

Steve:
Hey, and if you want to talk about anything else you heard on this podcast or about how Walker can help your business customer experience, feel free to email me at a podcast@walkerinfo.com and be sure to check out our website, cxleaderpodcast.com, to subscribe to the show and find all of our previous episodes. They're organized by series and topics. You can sort and look for the topics that are the most important and most interesting to you. You can also drop us a note, let us know how we're doing or suggest a future podcast episode. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can read more about us at Walkerinfo.com. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again next time.

Sonix is the world’s most advanced automated transcription, translation, and subtitling platform. Fast, accurate, and affordable.

Automatically convert your wav files to text (txt file), Microsoft Word (docx file), and SubRip Subtitle (srt file) in minutes.

Sonix has many features that you’d love including upload many different filetypes, advanced search, transcribe multiple languages, powerful integrations and APIs, and easily transcribe your Zoom meetings. Try Sonix for free today.